Xuanxi Zhang, Kevin S. Cheng, Weizhou Wang, Aaron R. Dinner, Jonathan Weare
Diffusion models are often inaccurate in critical, data-sparse regions of the target distribution. Sampling from restrained distributions, biased distributions used in classical enhanced sampling to concentrate data near chosen configurations, can control where training data are collected but biases the learned distribution. We establish that this bias cancels exactly when forward noising from restrained data is conditioned on the restrained configuration at an appropriately chosen intermediate time. This allows a pretrained model fine-tuned on restrained data to achieve high accuracy in any chosen region of the target distribution, regardless of its probability, using standard denoising or flow matching objectives without importance weights. When no target data are available, Gibbs sampling enables inference from a model trained exclusively on restrained data.
The emergence of programmable switches has brought in-network computing (INC) into the spotlight in recent years. By offloading computation directly onto the data transmission process, INC improves network utilization, reduces latency to sub-RTT levels, saves link bandwidth, and maintains throughput. However, INC disrupts the transparency of traditional networks, forcing developers to consider network exceptions like packet loss and out-of-order. If not properly handled, these exceptions can lead to violations of application properties, such as cache consistency and lock exclusion. Usual testing cannot exhaustively cover these exceptions, raising doubts about the correctness of INC systems and hindering their deployment in the industry. This paper presents VeriNC, the first general-purpose tool for verifying INC systems. VeriNC provides a high-level specification language and saves developers 67.2% lines of code on average. To help better understand the behavior of the system, VeriNC offers configurable network environments. VeriNC enables developers to express INC-specific correctness properties. VeriNC translates developer-specified systems into state transition representations, performs model checking to detect potential design risks, and reports violation traces to developers. We propose optimizations for INC-specific scenarios to address the challenge of state space explosion. We modeled INC systems across four application domains and identified design risks with VeriNC in seconds. VeriNC has also been adopted to guide the design of a new INC protocol. Based on our verification experience, we summarize lessons that help develop a correct INC protocol. We further reproduce them in real systems to confirm the validity of our verification result.
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) in scientific research aims to improve agents' research capabilities through their own experimental experience. Scientific agent swarms can combine evidence and implementations from different research directions to guide their agents' subsequent experiments. However, poor experimental results can leave unclear whether to revise a hypothesis or its implementation, while overall program scores can hide components useful to other agents. To address these challenges, we introduce SwarmRSI, a framework that evolves scientific agent swarms for recursive self-improvement. We devise Feedback-Guided Swarm Mutation to refine hypotheses and their implementations using experimental feedback from other agents. We also propose Complementary Swarm Recombination to reuse retained hypotheses and complementary program components across agents, allowing partial results to support new research. Recursive Swarm Evolution integrates both mechanisms into a feedback loop, using new experimental evidence to guide subsequent research. Experiments on OpenProblems, NatureBench and MLE-Bench Lite demonstrate SwarmRSI's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Further evaluations show that accumulated research experience improves performance on held-out tasks. Biologists also reproduce its programs for follow-up biological analyses.
Yingshu Li, Shaoyang Zhou, Zhanyu Wang, Yunyi Liu, Xinyu Liang, Xi Zhang, Lingqiao Liu, Lei Wang 等 9 位作者
Clinical evidence is inherently relational: medical images are interpreted with prior studies, cross-modal examinations, reports, and localized findings, and retrieving relevant evidence is therefore central to clinical interpretation. Recent foundation models increasingly encode these heterogeneous sources into shared embedding spaces, yet existing embedding evaluation often focuses on isolated matches, leaving unclear whether current models retrieve relevant evidence across changes in modality, appearance, and granularity. We introduce MedHEB, a unified benchmark with 107 retrieval tasks from 54 datasets, including both in-distribution and held-out-source evaluation, across three axes: evidence form (2D images, 3D volumes, text), pairing type (image--image, image--text, text--text, and modality-bridging visual matching), and relevance granularity (global, question-conditioned, region-level). Under a single ranking protocol, MedHEB varies clinically relevant evidence definitions to test whether embedding proximity remains meaningful across heterogeneous evidence, including modality-bridging visual retrieval and region-level text-to-region retrieval. Across representative models, performance is uneven across retrieval families: models strong on conventional image--text or text--text retrieval are less reliable on modality-bridging and region-level tasks. Current embedding spaces capture some clinical relationships well but do not yet provide balanced retrieval across heterogeneous evidence. We further provide MedEmb, an MLLM-based reference embedding model trained on the MedHEB ID split, as a reproducible baseline for unified 2D--3D--text medical retrieval. We release MedHEB with preprocessing scripts, evaluation code, access manifests, and MedEmb to support research on clinically meaningful medical embeddings.
Zixi Zhang, Jiayi Nie, Haoran Wu, Yujie Yan, Yann Herklotz, Rika Antonova, Robert Mullins, Yiren Zhao 等 10 位作者
Efficient GPU kernels are typically low-level and hardware-specific, and LLM agents can now generate them faster than experts can verify. Existing approaches rely on testing, which provides evidence but not a guarantee of correctness. We introduce LARK, an agentic framework that automatically and formally verifies GPU kernels against their PyTorch reference implementations. LARK proves equivalence in functional and memory behavior under exact arithmetic and establishes a new trust boundary: human effort is only needed to verify operator-level Lean semantics ahead of kernel generation time, instead of checking every single line of generated code. LARK formalizes the GPU machine model and the semantics of each operation in Lean 4 once per target language, and the Lean 4 semantics of any incoming kernel is derived from these pre-built definitions. LLM agents then automate the proof in two steps. First, an agent decomposes the whole kernel semantics into smaller segments and Lean 4 verifies this segmentation, which addresses the intractability of proving equivalence for large kernels directly. Second, agents write Lean proofs that each kernel segment matches its high-level PyTorch counterpart. Together, the two steps give whole-program equivalence. We demonstrate that LARK can be used 1) to ensure correctness in existing code-generation agents and 2) to automatically verify human-written kernel libraries. On the KernelCraft GPU tasks, combined with a simple ReAct agent, LARK enables GLM 5.3 to fully verify 10 of 12 Level-1 kernels and Opus 5.5 all 5 Level-2 kernels. Moreover, over 10 production kernels randomly sampled from popular open-source LLM serving frameworks, LARK verifies 9 and identifies a new data race bug in the tenth. We believe LARK represents a significant step toward verifiable code generation in the agentic era.
Haoran Bu, Yiting Shen, Litian Zhang, Ruihan Hu, Xi Zhang
LLM-based agents now share experiences on social platforms and remember new preferences to enhance their performance. However, existing memory systems contain a vulnerability in role-to-principal attribution that attackers can exploit. We identify Role Grounding Misattribution, in which an attacker-designed interaction causes the victim agent to incorrectly record a preference from the attacker as a preference of the victim's user. Specifically, we are the first to formalize Role Grounding Attack (RGA), an attack model that exploits this vulnerability through nested conversation structures. In the memory formation stage, an experience-sharing post quoting a conversation between the attacker agent and its user is published, which explicitly identifies its publisher. The inner conversation expresses preferences from the user of the attacker agent. When the victim agent remembers preferences from this nested structure, its memory loses the context binding and grounds the attacker's preference to the victim's user instead. In the memory retrieval stage, the misattributed preference persists and influences the victim agent's decisions when it encounters relevant scenarios. We instantiate RGA as tool selection manipulation and privacy leakage. Tool selection manipulation causes a tool-call preference to be misattributed to the victim's user, steering the victim toward an attacker-controlled tool. Privacy leakage extends this by misattributing both a tool-call preference and a task-requirement preference to the victim's user. The victim selects the attacker's tool, then includes sensitive information in tool arguments to satisfy the task requirement. We evaluate RGA across five mainstream memory systems and six language models. Tool manipulation and privacy leakage both achieve high attack success rates. These results call for stronger role grounding.
Guo Ye, Zexi Zhang, Xu Zhao, Shang Wu, Haoran Lu, Shihan Lu, Han Liu
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents.
Xiangyu Liu, Zeting Yan, Zhitong Yin, Boyang Li, Xi Zhang
Background and Objective: Predicting regional blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity from EEG provides a computational approach to studying electrophysiological-hemodynamic associations. However, changes in input representation, readout architecture, and ensembling can obscure the source of a prediction gain. We investigate the contribution of target-relative spectral estimation under matched readout conditions. Methods: MEL converts each preceding 16-second EEG history into calibrated lag-channel-frequency measurements. Four equal-dimensional representations are compared using matched Ridge and multilayer perceptron (MLP) readouts. The retrospective analysis includes 29 resting-state scans from 22 participants, participant-paired uncertainty estimates, aggregation and correspondence controls, leave-one-participant-out regression, and refitted models on an external Oddball cohort. Results: Morlet-Ridge achieved a mean scan-wise correlation of 0.508 across six regional targets and the global signal, compared with 0.432 for canonical Fourier features. The participant-paired mean difference was 0.069 (95% bootstrap confidence interval, 0.037-0.101), with improvements in 19 of 22 participants. The Morlet MLP prediction ensemble reached 0.491. Shared coordinate permutations preserved prediction after refitting, whereas sample-wise permutations degraded it. Canonical Fourier regression reached 0.377 under participant exclusion; external unseen-participant correlation was 0.026. Conclusions: Spectral estimation materially affected regional BOLD prediction without requiring additional nonlinear readout capacity. MEL provides an explicit measurement interface for controlled comparisons, but weak external results constrain its generalizability. Confirmation requires untouched participant-separated data and split-aware preprocessing.
Jinyu Zhang, Lijun Han, Feng Jian, Lingxi Zhang, Hesheng Wang
In mobile robot shared control, effectively understanding human motion intention is critical for seamless human-robot collaboration. This paper presents a novel shared control framework featuring planning-level intention prediction. A path replanning algorithm is designed to adjust the robot's desired trajectory according to inferred human intentions. To represent future motion intentions, we introduce the concept of an intention domain, which serves as a constraint for path replanning. The intention-domain prediction and path replanning problems are jointly formulated as a Markov Decision Process and solved through deep reinforcement learning. In addition, a Voronoi-based human trajectory generation algorithm is developed, allowing the model to be trained entirely in simulation without human participation or demonstration data. Extensive simulations and real-world user studies demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces operator workload and enhances safety, without compromising task efficiency compared with existing assistive teleoperation approaches.
Rui Pu, Chaozhuo Li Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Rui Ha Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Litian Zhang Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, Lirong Qiu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xi Zhang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks is essential for their safe and reliable deployment. Existing defenses often rely on shallow pattern matching, which struggles to generalize to novel and unseen attack strategies. To address this challenge, we propose the Cognitive-Driven Defense (CDD) framework, which targets the underlying structure of jailbreak prompts by applying meta-operations, defined as basic manipulations that conceal harmful intent. CDD emulates human cognitive reasoning through a structured reasoning chain. It begins with a global perception of the prompt and follows with a localized analysis to uncover hidden manipulations. By applying supervised fine-tuning on this structured chain, the model learns to identify and reason about known manipulation patterns. To enhance generalization to unseen threats, an entropy-guided reinforcement learning algorithm (EG-GRPO) is introduced to encourage exploration of new types and variants of meta-operations. Experiments demonstrate that CDD can achieve state-of-the-art defense performance and exhibit strong generalization to unseen jailbreak attacks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Fei Zhang, Zhe Zhao, HaiBin Wen, Tianshuo Wei, Zaixi Zhang Princeton University, Chao Yang Shanghai Jiaotong University, Ye Wei City University of Hong Kong
The rapid advance of automatic survey generation (ASG) has created a critical evaluation challenge. Existing evaluation methods suffer from both cognitive dimensional simplification and methodological unreliability, primarily due to the over-reliance on the ”LLM-as-a-Judge” approach. To bridge this gap, we establish Bloom-Eval, a six-tiered benchmark based on Bloom’s Taxonomy that reliably evaluates ASG systems by prioritizing deterministic algorithms and introducing our GRADE approach for abstract abilities. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale, cross-disciplinary dataset of over 3,000 high-quality papers. Our empirical study on this benchmark reveals that while leading ASG systems are proficient format organizers, they remain unqualified knowledge integrators. This work aims to redefine ASG evaluation standards, shifting the research focus from the formal mimicry of surface structure to the cognitive deepening of intellectual content. Our method provides the ASG field with a systematic, reproducible, and theoretically grounded benchmark to guide future research.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhengyi Zhao The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shubo Zhang, Zezhong Wang, Yuxi Zhang, Huimin Wang Jarvis Research Center, Tencent YouTu Lab, Yutian Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Binyang Li 等 10 位作者
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing access to external knowledge. However, current research primarily focuses on retrieval quality, often overlooking the critical ”integration bottleneck”: even when relevant documents are retrieved, LLMs frequently fail to utilize them effectively due to conflicts with their internal parametric knowledge. In this paper, we argue that implicitly resolving this conflict in a single generation pass is suboptimal. We introduce GuarantRAG, a framework that explicitly decouples reasoning from evidence integration. First, we generate an ”Inner-Answer” based solely on parametric knowledge to capture the model’s reasoning flow. Second, to guarantee faithful evidence extraction, we generate a ”Refer-Answer” using a novel Contrastive DPO objective. This objective treats the parametric Inner-Answer as a negative constraint and the retrieved documents as positive ground truth, forcing the model to suppress internal hallucinations in favor of external evidence during this phase. Finally, rather than naive concatenation or using the DPO trained model directly, we propose a joint decoding mechanism that dynamically fuses the logical coherence of the Inner-Answer with the factual precision of the Refer-Answer at the token level. Experiments on five QA benchmarks demonstrate that GuarantRAG improves accuracy by up to 12.1% and reduces hallucinations by 16.3% compared to standard and dynamic RAG baselines.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Guoxi Zhang, Jiawei Chen, Tianzhuo Yang, Jiaming Ji, Yaodong Yang Peking University, Juntao Dai Peking University
Large language models (LLMs) are shaping global values, yet they frequently exhibit a pronounced WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultural bias, marginalizing diverse viewpoints and posing challenges for reconciling diverse populations with varying cultural backgrounds and value systems. In this work, we move beyond simple alignment methods to propose a new paradigm for cross-cultural fairness. We introduce a Nash Consensus Negotiation framework under the formulation of cross-cultural consensus as a Nash Equilibrium. Each LLM iteratively proposes and refines natural-language guidelines, guided by a utility function balancing self-consistency with mutual acceptance, while penalizing redundancy. The process expands the proposal space and converges to a consensus, yielding fair and interpretable consensus outcomes. We evaluate our framework against baselines using quantitative metrics, qualitative analysis, and large-scale human studies. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generates higher-quality and more balanced consensus, effectively mitigating assimilation toward WEIRD values. Furthermore, we finetune diverse LLM architectures with negotiation data via preference optimization and supervised reasoning, reducing cultural distances by up to 95.53%. Overall, our work offers a systematic path to mitigate cultural bias in LLMs by guiding them toward self-consistency, mutually-acceptable equilibria.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zixi Zhang, Zhiwen Mo, Yiren Zhao Imperial College London, Robert D. Mullins
Agentic LLM inference with long contexts is increasingly limited by memory bandwidth rather than compute. In this setting, SwiGLU MLP blocks, whose large weights exceed cache capacity, become a major yet under-optimized bottleneck in the Transformer architecture. We propose DeepFusionKernel, a deeply fused kernel that cuts HBM traffic and boosts cache reuse, delivering up to 13.2% speedup on H100 and 9.7% on A100 over SGLang. Integrated with SGLang and paired with a kernel scheduler, DeepFusionKernel ensures consistent accelerations across generation lengths, while remaining adaptable to diverse models, inference configurations, and hardware platforms.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表