arXiv subjects

Yuting Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Yuting Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Antichiral hinge states in a higher-order photonic nodal ring semimetal

Antichiral states propagate in the same direction on opposite boundaries, defying the conventional constraint that boundary modes must cancel net chirality. Previously found antichiral states have been limited to first-order topological semimetals. However, antichiral hinge states, the antichiral counterpart of recently discovered higher-order chiral hinge states, remain elusive. Here, we report the observation of antichiral hinge states in a higher-order nodal-ring semimetal made of a three-dimensional gyromagnetic photonic crystal. Near-field scanning measurements reveal a pair of hinge states at two parallel one-dimensional boundaries propagating unidirectionally along the same direction, with robust transport against metallic scatterers. Their spatial positions can be reconfigured by adding or removing photonic layers. The additionally observed antichiral and drumhead surface states manifest a hierarchy of first- and second-order topological boundary states within a single photonic system. Our work extends antichiral states to higher-order topological semimetals and has potential applications in robust and reconfigurable photonic routing.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

Focused on the User, Overlooking the Risks: Security and Privacy Understandings, Practices and Challenges of Independent Chinese AI Agent Developers

The proliferation of AI agents empowers independent developers, defined as individual or small groups who self-initiate projects rather than fulfill client-based contracts, to create sophisticated autonomous systems, but also introduces novel security and privacy (S&P) challenges beyond traditional corporate structures. We conducted an interview study (N=28) with Chinese developers, whose extensive use of global LLM services offer valuable insights into this population. We investigate their understandings, practices and challenges of S&P challenges in their developed AI agent products. We revealed that independent developers frequently think and act from their users' perspective. They focused on user-facing safety risks such as harmful content while exhibiting low awareness of security vulnerabilities. Consequently, developers rely almost exclusively on ad-hoc, manually crafted safeguards and informal communication, with an absence of formal tools or processes for S&P practices. We found these actions are driven by various inhibitors, primarily a lack of formal training on S&P related skills, accessible security tools and actionable guidance from platforms. Our work contributed the first exploration of independent AI agent developers' S&P understanding, outlining opportunities for tailored security tooling.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Don't Guess, Just Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Referring Segmentation via Multi-turn Clarification

Referring segmentation aims to segment the target objects in images or videos based on the textual query. Despite remarkable progress over the past years, existing works always assume that the user-provided queries are already precise and clear. However, this assumption is impractical. In real-world scenarios, it is unrealistic to expect all users to thoroughly review their visual content and carefully ensure their queries are unique and unambiguous. When encountering such cases, existing segmentation models tend to arbitrarily guess the user preferences, often resulting in undesired outcomes. To address this limitation, we propose IC-Seg, a novel agentic framework that proactively clarifies user intent through multi-turn conversation before segmentation. To effectively incentivize this capability, we further introduce Hi-GRPO, a new hierarchical optimization strategy that injects dense and informative supervision signals at the trajectory, turn, and step levels. This strategy encourages efficient intent clarification, effectively eliminating redundant interactions and improving overall dialogue quality. For evaluation, we establish Ambi-RVOS, a referring video object segmentation benchmark with ambiguous user queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IC-Seg not only outperforms existing methods by a large margin in resolving ambiguous queries, but also maintains state-of-the-art performance on standard reasoning segmentation benchmarks. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/IC-Seg.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Knowledge-Data Dually Driven Paradigm for Accurate Landslide Susceptibility Prediction under Data-Scarce Conditions Using Geomorphic Priors and Tabular Foundation Model

Landslide susceptibility prediction is critical for geohazard risk assessment and mitigation. Conventional data-driven paradigm achieves high predictive accuracy but require sufficient conditioning factors and large-scale landslide inventories. However, in practical engineering applications across mountainous and plateau regions, data-scarce conditions are commonly observed, where such data requirements are rarely satisfied, rendering conventional data-driven paradigm inapplicable. To address this issue, we propose a knowledge-data dually driven paradigm for accurate landslide susceptibility prediction under data-scarce conditions. The essential idea behind the proposed novel paradigm is the integration of the geomorphic prior knowledge with scarce landslide data. To validate the proposed paradigm, we first applied it to a data-rich region in central Italy, where a conventional data-driven paradigm trained on the full dataset served as the baseline. By utilizing only 30% of the available landslide data, the proposed paradigm achieved comparable predictive accuracy to the baseline, demonstrating its effectiveness under data-scarce conditions. The paradigm was further evaluated in a genuinely data-scarce environment for application, the Qilian Permafrost Region of the Tibetan Plateau, where it also yielded reliable susceptibility predictions, confirming its applicability under data-scarce conditions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Seeing Isn't Orienting: A Cognitively Grounded Benchmark Reveals Systematic Orientation Failures in MLLMs Supplementary

Humans learn object orientation progressively, from recognizing which way an object faces, to mentally rotating it, to reasoning about orientations between objects. Current vision-language benchmarks largely conflate orientation with position and general scene understanding. We introduce Discriminative Orientation Reasoning Intelligence (DORI), a cognitively grounded hierarchical benchmark that makes object orientation the primary target. Inspired by stages of human orientation cognition, DORI decomposes orientation into four dimensions, each evaluated at coarse (categorical) and granular (metric) levels. Composed from 13,652 images across 14 sources, DORI provides 33,656 multiple-choice questions covering 67 object categories in real-world and synthetic settings. Its coarse-to-granular design isolates orientation from confounds such as object recognition difficulty, scene clutter, and linguistic ambiguity via bounding-box isolation, standardized spatial reference frames, and structured prompts. Evaluating 24 state-of-the-art vision-language models shows a clear pattern: models that perform well on general spatial benchmarks are near-random on object-centric orientation tasks. The best models reach only 54.2% on coarse and 45.0% on granular judgments, with largest failures on compound rotations and shifts in inter-object reference frames. Large coarse-to-granular gaps reveal reliance on categorical heuristics rather than geometric reasoning, a limitation hidden by existing benchmarks. These results identify orientation understanding as an unsolved challenge for multimodal systems, with implications for robotic manipulation, 3D scene reconstruction, and human-AI interaction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Scoping Review and Guidelines on Privacy Policy's Visualization from an HCI Perspective

Privacy Policies are a cornerstone of informed consent, yet a persistent gap exists between their legal intent and practical efficacy. Despite decades of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research proposing various visualizations, user comprehension remains low, and designs rarely see widespread adoption. To understand this landscape and chart a path forward, we synthesized 65 top-tier papers using a framework adapted from the user-centered design lifecycle. Our analysis presented findings of the field's evolution across four dimensions: (1) the trade-off between information load and decision efficacy, which demonstrates a shift from augmenting disclosures to prioritizing information condensation and cognitive load management to counter the inefficacy of comprehensive texts, (2) the co-evolutionary dynamic of design and automation, revealing that complex design ambitions such as context-awareness drove the need for advanced NLP, while recent LLM breakthroughs are enabling the semantic interpretation required to realize those designs, (3) the tension between generality and specificity, highlighting the divergence between standardized, cross-platform solutions and the increasing necessity for specialized, context-aware interaction patterns in IoT and immersive environments, and (4) balancing stakeholder opinions, which shows that visualization efficacy is constrained by the complex interplay of regulatory mandates, developer capabilities and provider incentives. We conclude by outlining four critical challenges for future research.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Connectivity of $p$-subgroup posets with irreducible characters

Let $G$ be a finite group. For a prime $p$ and an integer $e \geq 0$, we denote by $\Gamma_{p,e}(G)$ the set of all pairs $(H, \varphi)$, where $H$ is a $p$-subgroup of $G$ of order greater than $p^e$ and $\varphi$ is a complex irreducible character of $H$. In this paper, we investigate the connected components of the poset $\Gamma_{p,e}(G)$. For the case $e = 0$, we prove that $\Gamma_{p,0}(G)$ is disconnected if and only if either $G$ has a strongly $p$-embedded subgroup, or every Sylow $p$-subgroup of $G$ contains a unique subgroup of order $p$. Furthermore, for $e = 1$ and $G$ a $p$-group, we show that the number of connected components of $\Gamma_{p,1}(G)$ equals the order of the intersection of all subgroups of $G$ of order $p^2$.

math.GR↗

arXiv2025

Vortex: Hosting ML Inference and Knowledge Retrieval Services With Tight Latency and Throughput Requirements

There is growing interest in deploying ML inference and knowledge retrieval as services that could support both interactive queries by end users and more demanding request flows that arise from AIs integrated into a end-user applications and deployed as agents. Our central premise is that these latter cases will bring service level latency objectives (SLOs). Existing ML serving platforms use batching to optimize for high throughput, exposing them to unpredictable tail latencies. Vortex enables an SLO-first approach. For identical tasks, Vortex's pipelines achieve significantly lower and more stable latencies than TorchServe and Ray Serve over a wide range of workloads, often enabling a given SLO target at more than twice the request rate. When RDMA is available, the Vortex advantage is even more significant.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

First GNSS-deployed optical clock for local time scale upgrade

Precise time scale is the universal base for all measurements. Here we report the deployment of a compact and transportable optical clock to a timekeeping institution and steering an active hydrogen maser to generate an optical time scale, realizing the upgrade of the local time scale in the Global Navigation Satellite System. The optical clock was transported over 1200 km by express delivery and resume work as normal promptly, and its extremely high uptime of 93.6% in the half-year enabled us to precisely correct the frequency drift of hydrogen maser, ultimately achieving an unprecedented monthly instability of 4E-17. This steering experiment with a deployable optical clock marks a significant advancement, demonstrating that a timing accuracy below 100 ps per month can be achieved feasibly in various timekeeping institutions where hydrogen masers are typically employed as the primary contributor to timekeeping. In the future, mobile optical time scale based on such transportable optical clock can be deployed flexibly and rapidly, which is particularly important in scenarios lacking International Atomic Time reference.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2025

Simple and Robust Forecasting of Spatiotemporally Correlated Small Earth Data with A Tabular Foundation Model

Small Earth data are geoscience observations with limited short-term monitoring variability, providing sparse but meaningful measurements, typically exhibiting spatiotemporal correlations. Spatiotemporal forecasting on such data is crucial for understanding geoscientific processes despite their small scale. However, conventional deep learning models for spatiotemporal forecasting requires task-specific training for different scenarios. Foundation models do not need task-specific training, but they often exhibit forecasting bias toward the global mean of the pretraining distribution. Here we propose a simple and robust approach for spatiotemporally correlated small Earth data forecasting. The essential idea is to characterize and quantify spatiotemporal patterns of small Earth data and then utilize tabular foundation models for accurate forecasting across different scenarios. Comparative results across three typical scenarios demonstrate that our forecasting approach achieves superior accuracy compared to the graph deep learning model (T-GCN) and tabular foundation model (TabPFN) in the majority of instances, exhibiting stronger robustness.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Robust AI-ECG for Predicting Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction in Pediatric Congenital Heart Disease

Artificial intelligence-enhanced electrocardiogram (AI-ECG) has shown promise as an inexpensive, ubiquitous, and non-invasive screening tool to detect left ventricular systolic dysfunction in pediatric congenital heart disease. However, current approaches rely heavily on large-scale labeled datasets, which poses a major obstacle to the democratization of AI in hospitals where only limited pediatric ECG data are available. In this work, we propose a robust training framework to improve AI-ECG performance under low-resource conditions. Specifically, we introduce an on-manifold adversarial perturbation strategy for pediatric ECGs to generate synthetic noise samples that better reflect real-world signal variations. Building on this, we develop an uncertainty-aware adversarial training algorithm that is architecture-agnostic and enhances model robustness. Evaluation on the real-world pediatric dataset demonstrates that our method enables low-cost and reliable detection of left ventricular systolic dysfunction, highlighting its potential for deployment in resource-limited clinical settings.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

Conflect: Designing Reflective Thinking-Based Contextual Privacy Policy for Mobile Applications

Privacy policies are lengthy and complex, leading to user neglect. While contextual privacy policies (CPPs) present information at the point of risk, they may lack engagement and disrupt tasks. We propose Conflect, an interactive CPP for mobile apps, guided by a reflective thinking framework. Through three workshops with experienced designers and researchers, we constructed the design space of reflective thinking-based CPP design, and identified the disconnect between context and action as the most critical problem. Based on participants' feedback, we designed Conflect to use sidebar alerts, allowing users to reflect on contextualized risks and fostering their control. Our system contextually detects privacy risks, extracts policy segments, and automatically generates risk descriptions with 94.0% policy extraction accuracy on CPP4APP dataset and a 4.35s latency. A user study (N=28) demonstrated that Conflect improves user understanding, trust, and satisfaction while lowering cognitive load compared to CPPs, privacy policies and privacy labels.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

PrivWeb: Unobtrusive and Content-aware Privacy Protection For Web Agents

While web agents gained popularity by automating web interactions, their requirement for interface access introduces significant privacy risks that are understudied, particularly from users' perspective. Through a formative study (N=15), we found users frequently misunderstand agents' data practices, and desired unobtrusive, transparent data management. To achieve this, we designed and implemented PrivWeb, a trusted add-on on web agents that utilizes a localized LLM to anonymize private information on interfaces according to user preferences. It features privacy categorization schema and adaptive notifications that selectively pauses tasks for user control over information collection for highly sensitive information, while offering non-disruptive options for less sensitive information, minimizing human oversight. The user study (N=14) across travel, information retrieval, shopping, and entertainment tasks compared PrivWeb with baselines without notification and without control for private information access, where PrivWeb reduced perceived privacy risks with no associated increase in cognitive effort, and resulted in higher overall satisfaction.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Non-Hermitian topological electric circuits with projective symmetry

Non-Hermitian topological insulators have attracted considerable attention due to their distinctive energy band characteristics and promising applications. Here, we systematically investigate non-Hermitian M\"obius insulators and graphene-like topological semimetals from the projected symmetry and realize their corresponding topological phenomena in an electric circuit-based framework. By introducing a nonreciprocal hopping term consisting of negative impedance converters into a two-dimensional electric circuit, we establish an experimental platform that effectively demonstrates that introducing non-Hermitian terms significantly enhances the energy localization of topological edge states, which originate from the non-Hermitian skin effect. Furthermore, a thorough comparison of experimental measurements with numerical simulations validates the robustness and reliability of our electric circuit structure. This work not only reveals the physical properties of non-Hermitian topological materials but also provides valuable theoretical and experimental guidance for the implementation of topological circuits and the design of radiofrequency devices in the future.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2025

FEAST: A Flexible Mealtime-Assistance System Towards In-the-Wild Personalization

Physical caregiving robots hold promise for improving the quality of life of millions worldwide who require assistance with feeding. However, in-home meal assistance remains challenging due to the diversity of activities (e.g., eating, drinking, mouth wiping), contexts (e.g., socializing, watching TV), food items, and user preferences that arise during deployment. In this work, we propose FEAST, a flexible mealtime-assistance system that can be personalized in-the-wild to meet the unique needs of individual care recipients. Developed in collaboration with two community researchers and informed by a formative study with a diverse group of care recipients, our system is guided by three key tenets for in-the-wild personalization: adaptability, transparency, and safety. FEAST embodies these principles through: (i) modular hardware that enables switching between assisted feeding, drinking, and mouth-wiping, (ii) diverse interaction methods, including a web interface, head gestures, and physical buttons, to accommodate diverse functional abilities and preferences, and (iii) parameterized behavior trees that can be safely and transparently adapted using a large language model. We evaluate our system based on the personalization requirements identified in our formative study, demonstrating that FEAST offers a wide range of transparent and safe adaptations and outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline limited to fixed customizations. To demonstrate real-world applicability, we conduct an in-home user study with two care recipients (who are community researchers), feeding them three meals each across three diverse scenarios. We further assess FEAST's ecological validity by evaluating with an Occupational Therapist previously unfamiliar with the system. In all cases, users successfully personalize FEAST to meet their individual needs and preferences. Website: https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/feast

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Long-RVOS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-term Referring Video Object Segmentation

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to identify, track and segment the objects in a video based on language descriptions, which has received great attention in recent years. However, existing datasets remain focus on short video clips within several seconds, with salient objects visible in most frames. To advance the task towards more practical scenarios, we introduce \textbf{Long-RVOS}, a large-scale benchmark for long-term referring video object segmentation. Long-RVOS contains 2,000+ videos of an average duration exceeding 60 seconds, covering a variety of objects that undergo occlusion, disappearance-reappearance and shot changing. The objects are manually annotated with three different types of descriptions to individually evaluate the understanding of static attributes, motion patterns and spatiotemporal relationships. Moreover, unlike previous benchmarks that rely solely on the per-frame spatial evaluation, we introduce two new metrics to assess the temporal and spatiotemporal consistency. We benchmark 6 state-of-the-art methods on Long-RVOS. The results show that current approaches struggle severely with the long-video challenges. To address this, we further propose ReferMo, a promising baseline method that integrates motion information to expand the temporal receptive field, and employs a local-to-global architecture to capture both short-term dynamics and long-term dependencies. Despite simplicity, ReferMo achieves significant improvements over current methods in long-term scenarios. We hope that Long-RVOS and our baseline can drive future RVOS research towards tackling more realistic and long-form videos.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

PVUW 2025 Challenge Report: Advances in Pixel-level Understanding of Complex Videos in the Wild

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the 4th Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild (PVUW) Challenge, held in conjunction with CVPR 2025. It summarizes the challenge outcomes, participating methodologies, and future research directions. The challenge features two tracks: MOSE, which focuses on complex scene video object segmentation, and MeViS, which targets motion-guided, language-based video segmentation. Both tracks introduce new, more challenging datasets designed to better reflect real-world scenarios. Through detailed evaluation and analysis, the challenge offers valuable insights into the current state-of-the-art and emerging trends in complex video segmentation. More information can be found on the workshop website: https://pvuw.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

FVOS for MOSE Track of 4th PVUW Challenge: 3rd Place Solution

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is one of the most fundamental and challenging tasks in computer vision and has a wide range of applications. Most existing methods rely on spatiotemporal memory networks to extract frame-level features and have achieved promising results on commonly used datasets. However, these methods often struggle in more complex real-world scenarios. This paper addresses this issue, aiming to achieve accurate segmentation of video objects in challenging scenes. We propose fine-tuning VOS (FVOS), optimizing existing methods for specific datasets through tailored training. Additionally, we introduce a morphological post-processing strategy to address the issue of excessively large gaps between adjacent objects in single-model predictions. Finally, we apply a voting-based fusion method on multi-scale segmentation results to generate the final output. Our approach achieves J&F scores of 76.81% and 83.92% during the validation and testing stages, respectively, securing third place overall in the MOSE Track of the 4th PVUW challenge 2025.

cs.CV↗