Ke Cheng, Xin Xu, Zhichao Chen, Yixiao Chen, Lei Xin, Jianbo Zhao, Fanhu Zeng, Yue Liu 等 10 位作者
Induction circuits retrieve a value by matching a query to information carried from the token before that value. How this address forms, incorporates context, and supports sequential retrieval remains less clear. We use hybrid language models as a tractable testbed and identify the historical source key as a common causal interface between local preparation and global retrieval. Probes and restoration interventions connect this interface across controlled models, pretrained recurrent and sliding-window hybrids, and released language models. We organize the analysis by address context radius and sequential retrieval depth. First, shared local parameters couple predecessor Carrying to recurrent state processing; separating these demands or biasing initialization promotes address formation. Second, adapting input representations extends an established literal circuit to category matching, making semantically compatible records active competitors. Earlier context resolves this competition through the source key, with a sharp visibility boundary in a controlled single-read model and compositional relays across local layers. Third, fixed relations support memorization shortcuts, whereas sequential generalization requires learning an output-to-query bridge between retrievals. Controlled state-tracking and compositional in-context tasks demonstrate this requirement across stacked stages, looped recurrence, and intermediate-token generation. Together, these results connect circuit formation, contextual disambiguation, and sequential use through a shared retrieval interface. Code is available at https://github.com/ckpassenger/bind-match-copy.
What Should Data Teach? Moving Bottlenecks Across Circuit, Store, and Use
Yixiao Chen, Ke Cheng, Yue Liu, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang
AI 速览：作者提出一种“电路视角”的数据诊断原则，将语言模型训练中的瓶颈分为计算形成、内容可用与路径选择三类，并报告相应数据干预在350M模型实验中的效果。
What should data teach a language model at a particular point in training? A circuit view reveals three distinct bottlenecks: forming a computation, making its required content available, and selecting among available routes. A shared diagnosis-to-data principle connects them: localize the missing operation, preserve its causal relation, vary shortcut-bearing context, and re-audit the residual. Formation-sensitive selection and prerequisite ordering accelerate a binding-matching-transport path; a brief early prefix from the same training multiset retains a validation advantage through 100B tokens. Availability counterfactuals then distinguish writing content from invoking available memory, while paired supervision and context-opportunity ranking improve matched route decisions and long-context answer likelihood. A continuous 350M-model experiment connects the three interventions on the same facts: early circuit training improves subsequent learning, and the complete sequence outperforms stage-replacement controls on facts withheld from Use teaching. Independent query surfaces and opposed-source decisions expose conditional arbitration as the remaining frontier. Together, these results show why a change in the limiting operation calls for a change in supervision, not merely a new ranking of difficult examples.
Cross-modal retrieval (CMR) aims to bridge the semantic gaps between modalities by learning shared representations. Unfortunately, due to the dynamism and inconsistencies in real-world data acquisition, multimodal datasets frequently encounter severe modality incompleteness. Existing incomplete CMR methods adhere to a label-driven paradigm, relying heavily on categorical annotations as the semantic benchmark. However, label noise is difficult to avoid and often coexists with modality incompleteness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel semantic prior-guided framework for incomplete cross-modal retrieval with noisy labels, termed SPIRN. Specifically, SPIRN uses fixed semantic priors as a consistent reference for robust representation learning, noisy-label handling, and missing-modality completion. Based on this reference, Semantic Priors Guidance (SPG) establishes a stable category-level semantic space, Quality-aware Robust Learning (QRL) dynamically evaluates sample quality to distinguish clean samples from noisy ones and handles noise via reverse learning, Prior-guided Global Label Calibration (PGLC) rectifies corrupted annotations for refined supervision, and Confidence-driven Selective Imputation (CSI) recovers missing modalities from a cross-modal memory bank while filtering unreliable imputations with an increasing threshold. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework to jointly tackle the dual challenges of modality incompleteness and label noise in the CMR community. Extensive experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPIRN outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods in various scenarios involving both missing modalities and noisy labels.
The Delaunay triangulation is a classical geometric structure on a finite set of points in the plane. Its stretch factor is the largest ratio of the shortest-path distance along its edges to the Euclidean distance between the same two points. Determining the worst-case stretch factor of planar Delaunay triangulations is a long-standing open problem. We prove a uniform upper bound of 1.5949, improving the previous bound of 1.998 and narrowing the gap to the best known lower bound of 1.5932 from 0.4048 to less than 0.0017, nearly pinpointing the worst-case stretch factor. A central difficulty is that the line segment between two points may cross arbitrarily many triangles. Our progress accounting framework addresses this by converting the global bound into a family of local inequalities, each involving only a fixed number of real parameters regardless of the number of triangles crossed. Two further geometric lemmas make computer-assisted verification tractable: the pencil lemma decomposes each local transition into two geometrically independent stages, reducing verification over infinitely many possible next disks to a single differential condition; and the corner lemmas handle degenerate boundary cases where direct verification would fail. With these reductions, the proof ends with a finite verification of an explicit potential in exact rational arithmetic and outward-rounded interval arithmetic. Numerous geometric network constructions use the Delaunay stretch factor as a black box, so the tighter bound directly improves stretch-factor guarantees for a range of downstream applications, including bounded-degree plane spanners and low-weight spanners.
Fair clustering aims to prevent algorithmic bias against protected groups. We study Euclidean fair $k$-means, in which the proportion of each protected group in every cluster lies between prescribed lower and upper bounds. Because these constraints violate the nearest-center assignment property, center selection is coupled with point assignment. We introduce the drift-regularized relaxation, a new convex relaxation solved by a modified Frank-Wolfe method with linear-programming iterations, whose optimality condition controls the cost of converting its solution into $k$ fair clusters. Combined with any $ρ$-approximation algorithm for weighted $k$-means, the relaxation yields an exactly fair fractional solution of cost at most $2ρ+1+ε$ times the fractional optimum, improving the previous ratio $1+4ρ+ε$. In fixed dimension, this improves the best known ratio from $5+O(ε)$ to $3+O(ε)$. The fractional solution can be rounded to an integral one without changing the centers or increasing the cost, at a bounded additive violation of the fairness bounds. We also show that a $(3-δ)$-approximation is NP-hard for every fixed $δ>0$, even on the line with fractional assignments, so $3$ is the exact approximation threshold for fractional fair $k$-means in fixed dimension. The same guarantees hold for $k$-sparse Wasserstein barycenters, a special case of fractional fair $k$-means. More generally, they hold whenever every cluster must satisfy given homogeneous linear inequalities in the fractions of its points, such as a bound on the ratio between two groups or on the average of a numerical attribute in every cluster.
In many applications of $k$-median and $k$-means, including load balancing and redistricting, each center can serve only a bounded number of clients. This leads to capacitated clustering, in which a client may be forced to use a distant center because all nearby ones are full. This loss of locality defeats the techniques behind approximation schemes, and no constant-factor approximation is known in general metrics even for capacitated $k$-median. A long line of work therefore opens $K=k+\lfloorεk\rfloor$ centers for a fixed $ε\in(0,1]$, while respecting the capacities exactly. We give a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm for uniform soft capacities in low dimension, that is, when the clients or the center locations have bounded doubling dimension. With $K$ centers, its ratio is $3-2ε$ for $k$-median and $9-8ε$ for $k$-means, or $5-4ε$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Apart from $k$-median in the plane, these are the first polynomial-time ratios bounded by a constant independent of $ε$; previously, the best ratio was $O(ε^{-2}\log(1/ε))$, even for $k$-median. We also obtain ratios that stay bounded as $ε\to0$ for non-uniform and hard capacities in low dimension, and ratios polylogarithmic in $1/ε$ in general metrics. Our approach starts from a simple structural observation: a near-optimal uncapacitated solution can be split into fewer than $2k$ capacity-respecting blocks, so $2k$ centers already suffice, one per block. Our main tool, the rescue lemma, shows that once every block that sends clients to a center of the optimal solution is rescued (given a private center), that center can be closed, so each extra center effectively rescues about two blocks. This lets $\lfloorεk\rfloor$ extra centers rescue nearly an $ε$-fraction of the blocks, yielding the linear dependence on $ε$ in our ratios.
Xin Xu, Ke Cheng, Hao Wang, Yangru Huang, Yanghao Xiao, Zhichao Chen, Zhisheng Zhong, Xun Liu 等 14 位作者
Improving an agent through successive revisions requires balancing exploration and evaluation under a limited budget. A narrow search can miss useful sequences of edits, while fully evaluating every intermediate version often exhausts the budget before those sequences yield a verified improvement. Inspired by the draft--verify principle of speculative decoding, we propose Speculative Recursive Self-Improvement (SpecRSI), a two-level framework coupling inner-loop agent search with outer-loop improver learning. SpecRSI drafts successors before their predecessors are fully evaluated, while adopting only fully evaluated, admissible versions. In the inner loop, Verification-Aware Tree Search (VATS) allocates the budget between further edits and outstanding checks using the predicted verified return of a continuation. In the outer loop, Group Verification Optimization (GVO) updates the improver from completed searches while keeping the real evaluator fixed. We evaluate SpecRSI on scientific optimization (including active queue management (AQM) for network infrastructure), coding, and general agent-system benchmarks. Under matched evaluation-call budgets, SpecRSI improves scientific terminal gain over Janus by 60.0%--96.3% and area under the budget curve by 32.1%--91.6%, while achieving higher means across all 50 scientific backbone--task pairs and outperforming MetaRSI-v1 by 1.30--2.70 percentage points (pp) in system score across twenty backbones. On instance-level comparisons, it further improves PyBaMM terminal gain by 142.6% and SWE-Pro success by 6.0 pp at 7.0% and 9.2% lower token cost, respectively. These results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Recommender systems (RecSys) have been widely applied to various applications, including E-commerce, finance, healthcare, social media and have become increasingly influential in shaping user behavior and decision-making, highlighting their growing impact in various domains. However, recent studies have shown that RecSys are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether user interaction record was used to train a target model or not. MIAs on RecSys models can directly lead to a privacy breach. For example, via identifying the fact that a purchase record that has been used to train a RecSys associated with a specific user, an attacker can infer that user's special quirks. In recent years, MIAs have been shown to be effective on other ML tasks, e.g., classification models and natural language processing. However, traditional MIAs are ill-suited for RecSys due to the unseen posterior probability. Although MIAs on RecSys form a newly emerging and rapidly growing research area, there has been no systematic survey on this topic yet. In this article, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on RecSys MIAs. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in RecSys MIAs, exploring the design principles, challenges, attack and defense associated with this emerging field. We provide a unified taxonomy that categorizes different RecSys MIAs based on their characterizations and discuss their pros and cons. Based on the limitations and gaps identified in this survey, we point out several promising future research directions to inspire the researchers who wish to follow this area. This survey not only serves as a reference for the research community but also provides a clear description for researchers outside this research domain.
Hong Lin, Zhongle Xie, Lidan Shou, Ke Chen, Gang Chen
Customizing Pretrained Models (PMs) for downstream tasks demands task-specific data, which burgeoning Web3 applications provide abundantly. Blockchain-powered federated learning (BCFL) offers a secure and privacy-preserving paradigm to customize PMs among self-interested and untrusted Web3 participants. Yet, existing BCFL algorithms face severe efficiency and scalability challenges when applied to large PMs, due to their substantial computational and memory requirements and the hardware constraints of many participants. This paper introduces DICE, a novel BCFL algorithm that addresses the efficiency and scalability challenges of customizing large PMs in Web3 via two sets of synergistic techniques: (i) a dynamic progressive learning scheme and a model slice verification scheme to enable a wider range of honest participants, including those unable to deploy the full model, to engage in customizing PMs, while preserving model utility; (ii) a tree-structured committee consensus protocol and an efficiency-driven incentive scheme to address the dominant bottleneck that hinders existing BCFL algorithms from scaling to a larger number of data holders for customizing data-hungry large PMs, while maintaining security. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results on customizing vision and language PMs demonstrate DICE's efficiency, effectiveness, and security.
William Chen, Prem Seetharaman, Ke Chen, Oriol Nieto, Kevin Duarte, Siddharth Srinivasan Iyer, Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Zhiwen Cao 等 13 位作者
Multimedia editing requires generative models to interpret complex, compositional instructions and modify only the desired elements across modalities, a capability largely beyond existing systems. Current approaches are typically limited to simple, single-attribute edits within one modality, since diverse, high-quality editing pairs are hard to obtain, especially for cross-modal tasks where aligned audiovisual (AV) data is scarce. We present CrossEdit, a unified omni-modal editing model for images, audio, and video that performs AV movie scene edits zero-shot through cross-modal transfer. Our key observation is that complex instruction-following, once learned in any modality, generalizes to others. We exploit the additive nature of acoustic signals to procedurally generate large-scale audio editing pairs with compositional instructions, and show that fine-tuning on this synthetic data and self-supervised AV masked reconstruction, alongside a targeted set of curated cross-modal tasks, induces instruction-following that transfers zero-shot to unseen modality and instruction combinations. To evaluate this capability, we release CrossEditBench, a human-annotated benchmark of AV edits on movie scenes, and propose AV-FES, a metric that jointly scores instruction following and consistency. We show that our proposed techniques improve performance on zero-shot AV movie scene editing, while maintaining or improving performance on lip-synced speech editing and standard image, video, and audio editing benchmarks. Demos are available at https://wanchichen.github.io/crossedit/.
Xinyue Jiang, Tong Li, Shiceng Zhang, Ke Chen, Zhu Xiao
Channel state information (CSI) prediction forecasts future channel states from historical observations, supporting transceiver design and resource allocation with reduced measurement overhead. However, existing deep learning predictors mainly encode channel knowledge in model parameters, which can limit their ability to represent diverse patterns of channel dynamics across scenes. In this paper, we propose RAG-CSI, a retrieval-enhanced Transformer framework that augments prediction with relevant historical channel knowledge. Specifically, we construct a global--local CSI knowledge store containing representative observations across scenes and historical observations from the current serving scene. We further develop joint state--dynamics retrieval (JSDR), which jointly characterizes channel states, phase dynamics, and amplitude dynamics to retrieve relevant CSI sequences. A Transformer predictor then uses cross-attention to fuse the retrieved knowledge with the current CSI history and predict future CSI with limited additional model parameters. Experiments on a multi-scene CSI dataset show overall improvements exceeding 10\% across all five evaluation metrics over the best baseline for each metric, including a 15.42\% reduction in normalized mean squared error.
Swapnil Bhosale, Prem Seetharaman, Ke Chen, Haonan Chen, Justin Salamon, Zeyu Jin
Real-world audio applications require precise, queryable representations grounded in physical time. Yet modern Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) increasingly favor conversational generation, producing free-form descriptions that conflate acoustic perception with higher-level reasoning and lack precise temporal grounding. We introduce TAC2, a foundation model that casts timestamped audio captioning as composable functions to construct granular, speaker-attributed acoustic timelines directly from in-the-wild audio. To avoid prohibitively expensive manual annotation, we programmatically fuse complementary predictions from specialized weak teachers through time-registered IoU matching. We model the resulting multi-granularity schema of timestamped events, speaker turns, and fine-grained speech attributes using an Instruction-Input-Output (IIO) completion format, in which each task is a function of the audio, an instruction, and an optional input. A single call decodes the full description autonomously, while composing calls lets earlier outputs or external priors, such as a reference transcript, condition later ones. We further extend TAC2 with expressive speech attributes to obtain TAC2-S, using parameter-efficient specialists to elicit latent paralinguistic capabilities from the pre-trained backbone and distill them into a unified model. We validate the resulting representation in two complementary settings. Paired with frozen text-only LLMs, it yields strong spoken audio understanding across diverse reasoning backends, demonstrating the utility of decoupling fine-grained acoustic perception from downstream reasoning. Used as paired supervision for text-to-audio generation, it supports semantically and temporally grounded reconstruction, together with explicit zero-shot control over event timing, speaker attributes, and word-level emphasis.
Disease diagnosis is a key application of large language model (LLM) agents in healthcare. However, existing medical agents are primarily trained and evaluated with static question-answering data, providing limited opportunities to learn active information acquisition, examination decision-making, and dynamic clinical interaction. To address this limitation, we present ClinVerse, an interactive, real-data-grounded multi-agent environment designed for training and evaluating medical diagnostic agents. Built on ClinPatient, a scalable dataset comprising 150k diagnostic cases derived from real-world electronic health records, ClinVerse supports coordinated interactions among six specialized clinical roles. Specifically, a doctor agent starts from an initial patient complaint, progressively gathers clinical evidence through patient interviews and examination requests, and ultimately produces a diagnosis. For each interaction trajectory, a rule-based scoring framework quantifies information acquisition, examination ordering, and diagnostic accuracy. These trajectory-level scores serve as reward signals for agent training while also enabling scalable evaluation. In experiments, we evaluate various general-purpose and medical-domain models and show that nine self-evolution methods across three categories consistently improve agents' diagnostic capabilities within ClinVerse. We further analyze the interplay among model capability, environment feedback, and self-evolution methods.
Yuzhe Zhang Beijing University of Technology, Xianwei Xue, Xingyong Wu, Mengke Chen Baidu, Chen Liu Baidu, Xinran He, Run Shao, Feiran Liu College of Computer Science 等 11 位作者
Autonomous GUI agents based on vision-language models (VLMs) often assume deterministic environment responses, generating actions without verifying whether previous operations succeeded. In real-world settings with network latency, rendering delays, and system interruptions, this assumption leads to undetected action failures, repetitive ineffective behaviors, and catastrophic error accumulation. Moreover, learning robust recovery strategies is challenging due to the high cost of online interaction and the lack of real-time feedback in offline datasets.We propose VeriGUI (Verification-driven GUI Agent), which explicitly models action outcomes and recovery under noisy environments. VeriGUI introduces a Thinking–Verification–Action–Expectation (TVAE) framework to detect failures and guide corrective reasoning, and a two-stage training pipeline that combines Robust SFT with synthetic failure trajectories and GRPO with asymmetric verification rewards. We further construct a Robustness Benchmark based on AndroidControl to evaluate failure recognition and correction. Experiments show that VeriGUI significantly reduces failure loops and improves recovery success while maintaining competitive standard task performance.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Bowen Zeng, Feiyang Ren, Jun Zhang Qwen, Xiaoling Gu Hangzhou Dianzi University, Ke Chen Zhejiang University, Lidan Shou Zhejiang University, Huan Li Zhejiang University
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced unified reasoning over text, images, and videos, but their inference is hindered by the rapid growth of key–value (KV) caches. Each visual input expands into thousands of tokens, causing caches to scale linearly with context length and remain resident in GPU memory throughout decoding, which leads to prohibitive memory overhead and latency even on high-end GPUs. A common solution is to compress caches under a fixed allocated budget at different granularities: token-level uniformly discards less important tokens, layer-level varies retention across layers, and head-level redistributes budgets across heads. Yet these approaches stop at allocation and overlook the heterogeneous behaviors of attention heads that require distinct compression strategies. We propose HybridKV, a hybrid KV cache compression framework that integrates complementary strategies in three stages: heads are first classified into static or dynamic types using text-centric attention; then a top-down budget allocation scheme hierarchically assigns KV budgets; finally, static heads are compressed by text-prior pruning and dynamic heads by chunk-wise retrieval. Experiments on 11 multimodal benchmarks with Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that HybridKV reduces KV cache memory by up to 7.9\times and achieves 1.52\times faster decoding, with almost no performance drop or even higher relative to the full-cache MLLM.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表