Qiying Hu

Zikang Ding, Qiying Hu, Yi Zhang et al.

Inference-time steering is widely regarded as a lightweight and parameter-free mechanism for controlling large language model (LLM) behavior, and prior work has often suggested that simple activation-level interventions can reliably induce targeted behavioral changes. However, such conclusions are typically drawn under relatively relaxed evaluation settings that overlook deployment constraints, capability trade-offs, and real-world robustness. We therefore introduce \textbf{FaithSteer-BENCH}, a stress-testing benchmark that evaluates steering methods at a fixed deployment-style operating point through three gate-wise criteria: controllability, utility preservation, and robustness. Across multiple models and representative steering approaches, we uncover several systematic failure modes that are largely obscured under standard evaluation, including illusory controllability, measurable cognitive tax on unrelated capabilities, and substantial brittleness under mild instruction-level perturbations, role prompts, encoding transformations, and data scarcity. Gate-wise benchmark results show that existing methods do not necessarily provide reliable controllability in deployment-oriented practical settings. In addition, mechanism-level diagnostics indicate that many steering methods induce prompt-conditional alignment rather than stable latent directional shifts, further explaining their fragility under stress. FaithSteer-BENCH therefore provides a unified benchmark and a clearer analytical lens for future method design, reliability evaluation, and deployment-oriented research in steering.

Qiying Hu, Yingying Liang, Qianli Zhou et al.

Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) provides a powerful framework for modeling uncertainty and has been widely applied to multi-attribute classification tasks. However, traditional DST-based attribute fusion-based classifiers suffer from oversimplified membership function modeling and limited exploitation of the belief structure brought by basic probability assignment (BPA), reducing their effectiveness in complex real-world scenarios. This paper presents an enhanced attribute fusion-based classifier that addresses these limitations through two key innovations. First, we adopt a selective modeling strategy that utilizes both single Gaussian and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) for membership function construction, with model selection guided by cross-validation and a tailored evaluation metric. Second, we introduce a novel method to transform the possibility distribution into a BPA by combining simple BPAs derived from normalized possibility distributions, enabling a much richer and more flexible representation of uncertain information. Furthermore, we apply the belief structure-based BPA generation method to the evidential K-Nearest Neighbors (EKNN) classifier, enhancing its ability to incorporate uncertainty information into decision-making. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed attribute fusion-based classifier and the enhanced evidential K-Nearest Neighbors classifier in comparison with both evidential classifiers and conventional machine learning classifiers. The results demonstrate that the proposed classifier outperforms the best existing evidential classifier, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 4.86%, while maintaining low variance, thus confirming its superior effectiveness and robustness.

Qiying Hu, Linping Zhang, Xueqian Wang et al.

Deep learning (DL) methods are widely used to extract high-dimensional patterns from the sequence features of radar echo signals. However, conventional DL algorithms face challenges such as redundant feature segments, and constraints from restricted model sizes. To address these issues, we propose a framework that integrates feature preprocessing with large language models (LLMs). Our preprocessing module tokenizes radar sequence features, applies a patch selection algorithm to filter out uninformative segments, and projects the selected patches into embeddings compatible with the feature space of pre-trained LLMs. Leveraging these refined embeddings, we incorporate a pre-trained LLM, fine-tuning only the normalization layers to reduce training burdens while enhancing performance. Experiments on measured datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on supervised learning tests.

Junlong Ke, Qiying Hu, Shenghai Yuan et al.

Modern signal processing (SP) pipelines, whether model-based or data-driven, often constrained by complex and fragmented workflow, rely heavily on expert knowledge and manual engineering, and struggle with adaptability and generalization under limited data. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, broad general-purpose knowledge, in-context learning, and cross-modal transfer abilities, positioning them as powerful tools for automating and generalizing SP workflows. Motivated by these potentials, we introduce SignalLLM, the first general-purpose LLM-based agent framework for general SP tasks. Unlike prior LLM-based SP approaches that are limited to narrow applications or tricky prompting, SignalLLM introduces a principled, modular architecture. It decomposes high-level SP goals into structured subtasks via in-context learning and domain-specific retrieval, followed by hierarchical planning through adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and refinement; these subtasks are then executed through prompt-based reasoning, cross-modal reasoning, code synthesis, model invocation, or data-driven LLM-assisted modeling. Its generalizable design enables the flexible selection of problem solving strategies across different signal modalities, task types, and data conditions. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of SignalLLM through five representative tasks in communication and sensing, such as radar target detection, human activity recognition, and text compression. Experimental results show superior performance over traditional and existing LLM-based methods, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot settings.

Qiying Hu

Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated their capabilities in capturing universal knowledge, making them promising applications for radar signal processing. Nevertheless, directly fine-tuning PLMs on radar signals is both computationally expensive and prone to overfitting, particularly in low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) environments. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework for PLM-based marine radar target detection. First, we design a lightweight adaptation module, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning while preserving the pretrained model's general knowledge. Second, a novel preference-aware loss is developed to selectively optimize different feature patches based on their online evaluated learning values, guiding the model to concentrate on the most generalizable feature patterns during optimization. Extensive experiments on real-world marine radar datasets demonstrate that the proposed finetuning framework achieves an average performance improvement of 9.9% over the standard approach under low SCR conditions. Furthermore, the fine-tuned model, RadarPLM, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art detectors, particularly when training data are limited.