Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Yifei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yifei Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Classification of crescent configurations

Let $n$ points be in crescent configuration in $\mathbb{R}^d$ if they lie in general position in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and determine $n-1$ distinct distances, such that for every $1 \leq i \leq n-1$ there is a distance that occurs exactly $i$ times. For the planar problem, Erdős conjectured that there exists $N$ such that no crescent configuration exists on $n$ points whenever $n\geq N$. In the same paper, he also gave constructions for $n$ up to 8, with $n=5$ due to Pomerance and $n=7,8$ due to Palásti, but nothing is yet known for $n \geq 9$. Most recently, Burt et al. proved that a crescent configuration on $n$ points exists in $\mathbb{R}^{n-2}$ for $n \geq 3$. In this paper, we classify planar crescent configurations by their complete distance-equality patterns, up to relabeling the vertices. We restrict attention to the strict distance classes defined below. There are three such classes on four vertices, all of which admit planar crescent realizations. On five vertices, there are $49$ strict classes, exactly $31$ of which admit planar crescent realizations. On six vertices, there are $6837$ strict classes, exactly six of which admit planar crescent realizations. The classification combines finite enumeration with exact algebraic verification of realizations and nonexistence. The distance-geometric criteria also apply in higher dimensions.

math.CO↗
arXiv2026

Strong yet Controllable LLM Abstention without Learning to Abstain

Large language models (LLMs) can reduce hallucination by abstaining from questions they would likely get wrong. Abstention can be implemented outside the model (selective answering) using a confidence threshold that controls the answer rate (coverage), or learned inside it (abstention training), which can perform better but fixes coverage once trained. To compare the two, we match their coverage and decompose risk (error rate) into answering ability and distinguishing ability, i.e., how well the model answers and how accurately it abstains, respectively. The decomposition shows that abstention training performs better mainly by answering better: with strong confidence estimators, the two have nearly equal distinguishing ability. This motivates Train for Accuracy, then Post-hoc Select (TAPS), a modular approach that keeps coverage controllable, needs only standard post-training and an off-the-shelf confidence estimator, and benefits from advances in either component. Across three LLMs and three factual QA benchmarks, TAPS with a probing-based confidence estimator attains 1.5--9.4 percentage points lower mean risk than three representative abstention training methods at matched coverage. Within TAPS, accuracy training often weakens the model's own confidence signals, yet refitting the estimator largely preserves distinguishing ability. Together, these results establish TAPS as a strong yet controllable baseline and raise the bar for future abstention training: sacrificing control over coverage should yield gains beyond what can be achieved by optimizing answering and abstaining separately.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Semiparametric inference for a Target Outcome Leveraging Heterogeneous External Summaries of Auxiliary Outcomes

The integration of external information can substantially improve the efficiency of statistical inference in an internal study, but is often complicated by between-study heterogeneity. Additional challenges arise when external studies examine auxiliary outcomes rather than on the target outcomes and provide only summary statistics. To address these challenges, we propose a semiparametric framework that incorporates external summary statistics into the internal analysis via the generalized method of moments. To accommodate between-study heterogeneity, the external summaries are formulated within a random-effects model centered on the internal parameter estimates and subsequently embedded into the internal estimating equations. We establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator. While uncertainty from the first-stage estimation vanishes as the number of external studies increases, it remains non-negligible where the number of external studies is moderate. In this setting, we show that a hybrid bootstrap procedure correctly propagates this uncertainty and consistently estimates the asymptotic covariance of the proposed estimator, thereby ensuring valid inference. We further derive theoretical efficiency bounds and demonstrate robust finite-sample performance through simulation studies. In an application to colorectal cancer tumor sequencing data, we show that integrating external information of auxiliary outcomes reveals molecular subtype-specific etiologic associations that would not be detected using the internal data alone.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2026

QUEST: Training Frontier Deep Research Agents with Fully Synthetic Tasks

Deep research agents extend the role of search engines from retrieving keyword-matched pages to synthesizing knowledge, fundamentally changing how humans interact with information. However, frontier systems remain proprietary, while existing open agents often generalize poorly across different task types, leaving unclear how to train a broadly capable deep research agent. We release QUEST, a family of open models (ranging from 2B to 35B) that serve as general-purpose deep research agents designed to handle a wide range of long-horizon search tasks, with strong capabilities in fact seeking, citation grounding, and report synthesis. To build QUEST, we propose an effective training recipe combining mid-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Central to this recipe is a curated data synthesis pipeline based on unified rubric trees, which applies to different task types and enables synthesizing training data with verifiable rewards without human annotation. In addition, QUEST incorporates a built-in context management mechanism that enables effective long-horizon reasoning and knowledge synthesis. Using only 8K synthesized tasks, QUEST approaches or even surpasses frontier closed-source agents across eight deep research benchmarks spanning diverse task types, and achieves the best overall performance among recent open-weight agents. We released everything: models, data, and training scripts.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Solvent: Long-Horizon Reasoning for Multi-Step Retrosynthesis

Multi-step retrosynthesis requires recursively transforming a target molecule through successive reaction steps into purchasable building blocks, and recent work has begun to draw on large language model (LLM) reasoning to tackle the task. In its latest evolution, LLM reasoning has entered the long-horizon regime: models pursue objectives across interdependent steps, interact with environments, and adapt to feedback. This shift has markedly advanced LLM capabilities, as illustrated by breakthroughs in AI-driven mathematical research. At this frontier, we introduce Solvent, an 8B LLM that successfully extends long-horizon reasoning to multi-step retrosynthesis. Through a two-round post-training curriculum, Solvent learns to interleave iterative synthesis planning, external availability verification, and adaptive route revision. Experiments show that, following a $2.1\times$ performance boost from RL, Solvent scores 61.86% across four benchmarks, surpassing mid-scale language models and prior search-based retrosynthesis systems, and rivaling frontier trillion-parameter LLMs.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

When Is a Memory Safe Enough to Act On? Action-Conditioned Verification for Long-Lived Agents

Long-lived agents act on memory carried across sessions, and many of their actions are irreversible, so a stale memory can turn directly into harm. Existing work improves the memory itself --- retrieving, refreshing, or reconciling entries --- yet whether an entry must be re-checked before acting is not a property of the entry: the same remembered address can be used unchecked for a routine shipment but should be re-confirmed before a valuable one. We therefore study \emph{action-conditioned memory verification}: given a candidate action, decide which of its memory premises to re-verify and when to proceed or abstain, balancing execution risk, abstention, and verification cost. We formulate this as a sequential stopping problem, in which a verification is worth its cost only if it can change what the agent does next; under suitable verifier reliability and cost conditions, increasing action consequence can move the same memory through proceed, verify, and direct-abstention regimes. Building on this formulation, \textsc{AMV-Guard} is a practical verification gate that extracts the premises a candidate action rests on, calibrates beliefs about whether they are wrong, and selects checks by bounded value of information (VOI). On ToolSandbox, relative to a static policy given the same inputs, it lowers mean verification cost by 33.9\% while keeping 100\% safe-proceed recall and 0\% Gate harmful, and raises Proceed coverage from 38.83\% to 44.17\%; in a gate-core transfer to AppWorld, which carries over the stopping/VOI core but not the full structured pipeline, it lowers verification cost by 21.3\% at a small cost in safe-proceed recall and task success. These results suggest that verification effort should be set by what an agent is about to do, not only by how reliable a memory appears.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

MCSplat: Multi-View Photometric and Geometric Consistent Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting for Driving Scenes

Driving-scene reconstruction via feed-forward Gaussian splatting from sparse multi-view images remains challenging due to two factors. First, cross-camera photometric inconsistency, caused by variations in exposure, ISP, and illumination, can be incorrectly absorbed into Gaussian geometry. Second, unreliable local geometric supervision arises from normal-based constraints near depth discontinuities. To address these issues, we present \textbf{MCSplat}, a multi-view consistent feed-forward Gaussian splatting framework for driving scenes. MCSplat constructs a canonical appearance space from depth-guided multi-camera correspondences to decouple geometry learning from camera-specific appearance. A multi-scale Bilateral Grid Transformer restores raw camera appearance from canonical renderings, enabling photometric supervision without contaminating Gaussian geometry. To improve local geometric reliability, we estimate Fisher-information-based uncertainty from photometric sensitivity and use it to adaptively weight surface-oriented self-supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved reconstruction quality and generalization across driving datasets. Geometry-oriented evaluations further reveal enhanced cross-view depth consistency and local surface-normal agreement, while qualitative results show fewer geometric artifacts and more coherent structures across overlapping views.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Seeing Through Sparse Signals: CS-Enhanced Sensing With QoS Guarantees for 6G ISAC

In integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, communication and sensing share time-frequency resources, creating a fundamental trade-off between communication quality of service (QoS) and quality of sensing (QoSe). Reusing 5G new radio (NR) reference signals (RSs) enables standard-compliant sensing, but their inherent sparsity leads to undersampled channels and strong sidelobes that degrade weak-target detection. Compressed sensing (CS) can mitigate these effects, yet existing methods either overlook communication QoS constraints or rely on reconstruction algorithms that are step-size-sensitive or employ global thresholding, leading to weak-target masking in multi-target scenarios. The multi-target detection problem, therefore, requires a joint design of resource scheduling and CS-based reconstruction. In this work, we investigate the impact of two scheduling schemes, namely QoS-guaranteed scheduling and proportional-fairness (PF)-based scheduling, on the sensing-communication trade-off. To further enhance sensing performance, we employ a 2D max-median complex approximate message passing (2D-mmCAMP) algorithm that performs adaptive row- and column-wise thresholding to suppress sidelobes while preserving weak-target responses in multi-target scenarios. Simulations demonstrate an improvement of >= 16% in weak-target detection over baseline reconstruction algorithms while meeting downlink (DL) QoS constraints, validating the effectiveness of the proposed NR-compliant ISAC scheme.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Magna: simulating magic state factories as cheaply as Clifford circuits

Classical simulation of magic state factories, including distillation, cultivation, and code switching, is challenging because of their substantial non-Clifford content. We introduce $\texttt{magna}$ (magic-state-factory assessment via global network algebra), a classical simulator that simulates such protocols as cheaply as Clifford circuits. $\texttt{magna}$ expresses the figures of merit of a protocol, namely the acceptance rate and the fidelity of the accepted states, as tensor networks, which it reduces globally by exploiting a structural correspondence with transversal gates on quantum codes. $\texttt{magna}$ further supports feedforward conditioned on arbitrary functions of mid-circuit measurement outcomes, including decoder outputs. We simulate Bravyi--Haah distillation with up to 100 output magic states at a cost that does not grow exponentially in the number of outputs, and achieve state-of-the-art sampling times for distance-5 magic state cultivation on both color codes and RP$^2$ surface codes. Finally, we validate nonlinear feedforward on a logical-level distillation protocol with 15 rounds of decoder-dependent feedforward. $\texttt{magna}$ aims to contribute to the key infrastructure for the large-scale evaluation and optimization of magic state factories.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

MemoryVLN: From Ego-Aware Memory Representation to Cross-Context Memory Reuse in Vision-Language Navigation

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown strong potential for embodied vision-language navigation (VLN), yet their performance degrades on long-horizon trajectories due to context-length limits, redundant historical observations, and unstable spatial alignment across time. These issues make it difficult to both compress long navigation histories and reliably reuse past spatial experience. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MemoryVLN}, a unified memory-driven navigation system built around memory construction and management. During memory construction, \emph{Long Sequence Compression} employs forgetting-curve-inspired temporal sampling to preserve dense recent evidence and sparse yet representative distant observations under a limited token budget. \emph{Ego-Aware Memory Representation} further integrates 2D semantic tokens, 3D geometric tokens, and 6D agent poses, allowing each memory to encode both what was observed and where it was observed. During memory management, \emph{Hierarchical Memory Bank} maintains in-episode and context-level memories through cross-context warm-start and confidence-controlled write-back. \emph{Memory Enhancement} then retrieves the Top-$K$ relevant memories according to the current navigation state and fuses them with the current visual tokens. Together, these mechanisms transform raw navigation history into compact, spatially grounded, selectively retrievable, and reusable navigation experience. Extensive experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin (i.e., 2\% and 6.5\% in successful rate).

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Interactive Navigation Beyond Reachability: Benchmark and Agentic Framework

Existing embodied navigation tasks commonly assume that traversability and object states remain fixed during an episode. Yet reaching a goal may require opening a door to access a room and then opening a container to reveal a hidden target. We formulate interactive navigation beyond reachability, unifying channel-induced changes in spatial connectivity, container-induced changes in target visibility, and their sequential dependencies. We introduce MultINav-Bench, a 3K-episode ObjectGoal benchmark in MolmoSpaces spanning channel, container, and mixed tasks, with interaction-necessity annotations covering required and unnecessary episodes. Its data generation pipeline automates task construction across multiple task types. The evaluation protocol separately measures navigation success, interaction effectiveness, and cost. We further propose MultINav-Agent, a three-stage agentic framework built on a persistent, state-conditioned interaction graph. Semantic interactive perception grounds entities and interaction states; a vision-language model selects task-relevant actions based on expected changes in connectivity and target observability; and post-interaction verification updates the graph to guide subsequent navigation, exploration, or interaction. Experiments on MultINav-Bench show that MultINav-Agent consistently outperforms adapted baselines across channel, container, and mixed tasks.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

EgoProbe: Benchmarking Long-Range and Exact Memory in Streaming Egocentric Videos

Egocentric video provides a continuous first-person record of everyday activities, making it a natural foundation for wearable AI assistants. Unlike offline video understanding, streaming systems must process observations as they arrive, while queries may refer to experiences from the distant past. Recent work has begun to explore whether information can be recalled across long temporal gaps. Yet remembering how far is only part of the challenge: recurring objects, actions, and locations also require models to remember exactly which detail belongs to which event. We introduce EgoProbe, a benchmark that evaluates streaming egocentric memory along these two complementary dimensions: long-range retention, i.e., how far, and event-specific recall under interference, i.e., how exact. Built on long-form egocentric videos, EgoProbe uses an event-grounded data engine to extend recall intervals, identify related events, and construct event-grounded distractors, followed by human verification. It contains two subsets: EgoProbe-Base, which evaluates long-range recall without intervening related events, and EgoProbe-Echo, which challenges models with similar intervening events and event-grounded distractors. EgoProbe-Echo adopts coarse-to-fine multi-turn probing: the first turn evaluates coarse-grained event recall, while the second tests whether the model can retrieve the target-specific detail associated with the designated event. Extensive evaluation across diverse models reveals substantial limitations in long-range recall, with further challenges in recovering target-event details among related experiences. Even when models correctly answer coarse-grained questions, they often fail to recall the specific details of the designated event. EgoProbe exposes this underexplored failure mode and provides a testbed for advancing long-range and exact memory in streaming egocentric video understanding.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Cross-Modality Controlled Molecule Generation with Diffusion Language Model

The increasing variety of molecular data creates a need for generative models that can flexibly incorporate heterogeneous constraints across modalities. However, existing SMILES-based diffusion models are typically designed for a fixed conditioning modality, and introducing new constraints often requires retraining the model. To address this limitation, we propose Cross-Modality Controlled Molecule Generation with Diffusion Language Model (CMCM-DLM), a modular framework that extends a pre-trained diffusion model to support heterogeneous molecular constraints without retraining the backbone. We demonstrate CMCM-DLM using two complementary modalities: molecular structure and chemical properties. Specifically, a Structure Control Module (SCM) guides early diffusion steps to establish the molecular scaffold, while a Property Control Module (PCM) subsequently steers generation toward target chemical properties. This staged design enables flexible integration of different molecular constraints within a unified generative framework. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate effective cross-modal controllability and strong adaptability, highlighting the potential of CMCM-DLM for heterogeneous molecular data modeling and data-driven drug discovery.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Atomic Motion Coordinate for Language-Steerable and Force-Responsive Manipulation

Can changing only the language instruction redirect a VLA policy's end effector, or does the visually driven motion prior dominate? We present Atomic Motion Coordinate, a geometry-grounded coordinate for steerable and force-responsive manipulation. Each arm owns thirteen signed translation, rotation, and hold atoms grounded from text and forward kinematics with vision withheld, and the coordinate is injected into every action-expert block via weighted codebook alignment. Contact history modulates the same coordinate through a bounded spherical residual that is recomputed from a fixed nominal latent to regenerate only the unexecuted horizon suffix. Across 7,520 offline horizon interventions, opposite-atom separation reaches 92.5/83.1% (single/dual) versus 39.1/24.0% for LA4VLA-style. Across 50 real-robot trials per task, AMC raises OOD fruit progress from 60.5% to 87.8%; force adaptation raises Plug/Vase from 59.0/71.5% to 78.5/75.2%.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

OpticalRec: Unified Optical Vision-Language Representation for Multimodal Recommendation

Recent advances in vision-language modeling have substantially improved multimodal encoding, retrieval and reasoning. Yet for multimodal recommendation, encoding rich item vision-language semantic interactions remains a long-standing bottleneck, which hampers accurate item representation learning and user-item matching. Mainstream approaches primarily adopt independent encoding of vision and language modality followed by rigid late fusion such as concatenation, inherently omitting native vision-language interactions and introducing cross-modal semantic distortion. To address this challenge, we propose OpticalRec, the first visual-space unified encoding paradigm for multimodal collaborative filtering, a fundamental recommendation setting. Instead of isolated modality-specific encoding, OpticalRec renders item textual metadata as visual glyphs, enabling native image-text interaction within the visual encoder - the perceptual encoding level. The resulting representations are further processed by the language decoder - the semantic encoding level, allowing OpticalRec to exploit the dual-attention mechanism of modern vision-language models that previous encoding methods omitted. OpticalRec's efficacy is theoretically supported by mutual information analysis and empirically demonstrated through superior performance across strong baselines and benchmarks. As a plug-and-play module, OpticalRec (1) introduces minimal cost, (2) is robust against rendered text font, color and layout, etc., and (3) integrates seamlessly into existing multimodal collaborative filtering models.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Learning While Inferring: Local and Parallel Learning for Edge SNNs across Sensing Modalities

Edge intelligence requires models to sense continuously in real time and to keep adapting on-device, all under tight compute, energy, and memory budgets. Although spiking neural networks (SNNs) enable efficient event-driven inference, standard surrogate-gradient backpropagation (BP) serializes updates and blocks ongoing inference. We investigate Bidirectional Spike-Based Distillation (BSD) as an on-device learning principle that lets edge SNNs learn while inferring. BSD couples a stimulus-driven forward network with an independent target-driven reverse network and aligns their intermediate representations through local objectives. Because the two pathways have disjoint computation graphs until alignment, forward inference, reverse inference, and stage-wise updates can run concurrently. On 25 benchmarks spanning the five sensing modalities of SOUL, BSD stays within 3.8 percentage points of matched BP baselines on average, while only its forward branch is needed at deployment. The learned representations also transfer well to few-shot class-incremental learning without replaying past data. By removing the dense floating-point backward chain, BSD reduces the projected training latency to $0.72\times$ and the estimated training energy to $0.36\times$ that of BP.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

Trusted Weights, Treacherous Optimizations? Optimization-Triggered Backdoor Attacks on LLMs

Inference optimization aims to minimize the latency and resource consumption of LLM inference while preserving output quality, making large-scale deployment practical and cost-effective. However, optimized execution can introduce small numerical inconsistencies from the original model. We reveal that this inconsistency not only causes the model's outputs to diverge, but more critically can introduce hidden backdoors. The backdoor remains dormant under standard unoptimized execution and is activated only when inference optimization is enabled, allowing it to evade existing backdoor detection pipelines. We first introduce the Input-Specific Optimization Backdoor (ISOB) to demonstrate that optimization-induced differences can cause wrong predictions. However, ISOB remains input-specific and cannot establish a universal optimization-triggered backdoor. To overcome this limitation, we design the Universal Optimization Backdoor (UOB). The backdoored model stays benign under unoptimized execution but activates when inference optimization is enabled. We conduct extensive experiments across seven mainstream open-source LLMs, four tasks, and three optimization backends. UOB reaches up to 100\% attack success while largely preserving clean accuracy. To mitigate this vulnerability, we design three defense methods that reduce the backdoor ASR to at most 0.02 while preserving clean accuracy. These results reveal inference optimization as a new LLM security attack surface and motivate defenses against test-deployment disagreement.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Visualizing Distribution Coverage in Generative Diffusion Models

Diffusion distillation is widely adopted to accelerate sampling, and the resulting few-step models are broadly believed to match or even surpass their multi-step teachers in generation. However, standard evaluations such as GenEval2 typically draw only one sample per prompt, so improved scores may fail to reveal losses in distribution coverage. We therefore revisit whether distilled models truly match their teachers beyond single-draw performance using \textbf{pass@$\mathbf{k}$}, which measures the probability that at least one of $k$ independent samples satisfies a quality criterion. At $k{=}1$, pass@$k$ reduces to standard single-draw evaluation. As $k$ grows, the curve reveals whether additional draws find genuinely different successes or merely revisit the same modes, directly exposing how broadly a model covers the space of valid outputs. We first show that classifier-free guidance (CFG), whose quality--coverage tradeoff is well established, is the clearest case: higher guidance improves pass@$1$, but its advantage shrinks and reverses at larger $k$. Applying pass@$k$ to few-step distilled models, we find the same tradeoff splits along training objectives: distribution-matching objectives concentrate the student's output distribution, boosting early-hit rates while eroding large-budget coverage, whereas consistency and trajectory-based objectives better preserve the teacher's coverage even at large $k$. We further show that this tradeoff extends to few-step causal video generation. Our findings reveal a previously overlooked cost of diffusion distillation: across both image and video generation, the choice of training objective fundamentally determines whether a few-step model inherits its teacher's distribution coverage or trades it away for single-draw quality.

cs.LG↗