Qiwei Ye

Songyang Liu, Chaozhuo Li, Chenxu Wang et al.

OpenClaw has rapidly established itself as a leading open-source autonomous agent runtime, offering powerful capabilities including tool integration, local file access, and shell command execution. However, these broad operational privileges introduce critical security vulnerabilities, transforming model errors into tangible system-level threats such as sensitive data leakage, privilege escalation, and malicious third-party skill execution. Existing security measures for the OpenClaw ecosystem remain highly fragmented, addressing only isolated stages of the agent lifecycle rather than providing holistic protection. To bridge this gap, we present ClawKeeper, a real-time security framework that integrates multi-dimensional protection mechanisms across three complementary architectural layers. (1) \textbf{Skill-based protection} operates at the instruction level, injecting structured security policies directly into the agent context to enforce environment-specific constraints and cross-platform boundaries. (2) \textbf{Plugin-based protection} serves as an internal runtime enforcer, providing configuration hardening, proactive threat detection, and continuous behavioral monitoring throughout the execution pipeline. (3) \textbf{Watcher-based protection} introduces a novel, decoupled system-level security middleware that continuously verifies agent state evolution. It enables real-time execution intervention without coupling to the agent's internal logic, supporting operations such as halting high-risk actions or enforcing human confirmation. We argue that this Watcher paradigm holds strong potential to serve as a foundational building block for securing next-generation autonomous agent systems. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ClawKeeper across diverse threat scenarios. We release our code.

Yuyan Ni, Shikun Feng, Xin Hong et al.

Deep learning methods have been considered promising for accelerating molecular screening in drug discovery and material design. Due to the limited availability of labelled data, various self-supervised molecular pre-training methods have been presented. While many existing methods utilize common pre-training tasks in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), they often overlook the fundamental physical principles governing molecules. In contrast, applying denoising in pre-training can be interpreted as an equivalent force learning, but the limited noise distribution introduces bias into the molecular distribution. To address this issue, we introduce a molecular pre-training framework called fractional denoising (Frad), which decouples noise design from the constraints imposed by force learning equivalence. In this way, the noise becomes customizable, allowing for incorporating chemical priors to significantly improve molecular distribution modeling. Experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing state-of-the-art results across force prediction, quantum chemical properties, and binding affinity tasks. The refined noise design enhances force accuracy and sampling coverage, which contribute to the creation of physically consistent molecular representations, ultimately leading to superior predictive performance.

Peitian Zhang, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao et al.

Long context compression is a critical research problem due to its significance in reducing the high computational and memory costs associated with LLMs. In this paper, we propose Activation Beacon, a plug-in module for transformer-based LLMs that targets effective, efficient, and flexible compression of long contexts. To achieve this, our method introduces the following technical designs. 1) We directly compress the activations (i.e. keys and values at every layer), rather than leveraging soft prompts to relay information (which constitute a major bottleneck to encapsulate the complex information within long contexts). 2) We tailor the compression workflow, where each fine-grained input unit is progressively compressed, enabling high-quality compression and efficient computation during both training and inference. 3) We train the model through compression-based auto-regression, making full use of plain texts and instructional data to optimize the model's compression performance. 4) During training, we randomly sample a compression ratio at each step, teaching the model to support a wide range of compression configurations. Extensive evaluations are conducted on various long-context tasks whose lengths (e.g., 128K) may far exceed the maximum training length (20K), such as document understanding, few-shot learning, and Needle-in-a-Haystack. Whilst existing methods struggle to handle these challenging tasks, Activation Beacon maintains a comparable performance to the uncompressed baseline across various scenarios, achieving a 2x acceleration in inference time and an 8x reduction of memory costs for KV cache. Our data, model, and code have been released at \url{https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/}.

Peitian Zhang, Ninglu Shao, Zheng Liu et al.

We extend the context length of Llama-3-8B-Instruct from 8K to 80K via QLoRA fine-tuning. The entire training cycle is super efficient, which takes 8 hours on one 8xA800 (80G) GPU machine. The resulted model exhibits superior performances across a broad range of evaluation tasks, such as NIHS, topic retrieval, and long-context language understanding; meanwhile, it also well preserves the original capability over short contexts. The dramatic context extension is mainly attributed to merely 3.5K synthetic training samples generated by GPT-4 , which indicates the LLMs' inherent (yet largely underestimated) potential to extend its original context length. In fact, the context length could be extended far beyond 80K with more computation resources. Therefore, the team will publicly release the entire resources (including data, model, data generation pipeline, training code) so as to facilitate the future research from the community: \url{https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding}.

Sicheng Dai, Kai Chen, Hongwang Xiao et al.

Recent self-supervised pre-training methods for electroencephalogram (EEG) have shown promising results. However, the pre-trained models typically require full fine-tuning on each downstream task individually to achieve good performance. In practical applications involving multiple tasks, utilizing a separate model for each task is not ideal regarding computational and spatial cost. In this study, we go one step further and explore the simultaneous adaptation of a pre-trained model to multiple different tasks. The EEG signals exhibit significant heterogeneity due to their collection from various subjects using diverse devices and experimental setups, resulting in potential conflicts among different tasks that impede joint optimization. To tackle this challenge, we propose MTEEG, a multi-task EEG analysis framework which incorporates task-specific low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules to disentangle the parameter space and alleviate task conflicts. To investigate the trade-off between task specification and interaction, we propose three variants of MTEEG that integrate the LoRA modules in different ways and evaluate them on six downstream tasks, demonstrating that MTEEG can surpass state-of-the-art single-task methods on the majority of metrics. MTEEG shows the potential of multi-task EEG analysis and promotes the development of general-purpose brain-computer interfaces in the future.

Chenxu Wang, Chaozhuo Li, Songyang Liu et al.

The emergence of multi-agent systems built from large language models (LLMs) offers a promising paradigm for scalable collective intelligence and self-evolution. Ideally, such systems would achieve continuous self-improvement in a fully closed loop while maintaining robust safety alignment--a combination we term the self-evolution trilemma. However, we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that an agent society satisfying continuous self-evolution, complete isolation, and safety invariance is impossible. Drawing on an information-theoretic framework, we formalize safety as the divergence degree from anthropic value distributions. We theoretically demonstrate that isolated self-evolution induces statistical blind spots, leading to the irreversible degradation of the system's safety alignment. Empirical and qualitative results from an open-ended agent community (Moltbook) and two closed self-evolving systems reveal phenomena that align with our theoretical prediction of inevitable safety erosion. We further propose several solution directions to alleviate the identified safety concern. Our work establishes a fundamental limit on the self-evolving AI societies and shifts the discourse from symptom-driven safety patches to a principled understanding of intrinsic dynamical risks, highlighting the need for external oversight or novel safety-preserving mechanisms.

Xiaozhe Zhang, Chaozhuo Li, Hui Liu et al.

Large language models remain vulnerable to adversarial prompts that elicit harmful outputs. Existing safety paradigms typically couple red-teaming and post-training in a closed, policy-centric loop, causing attack discovery to suffer from rapid saturation and limiting the exposure of novel failure modes, while leaving defenses inefficient, rigid, and difficult to transfer across victim models. To this end, we propose EvoSafety, an LLM safety framework built around persistent, inspectable, and reusable external structures. For red teaming, EvoSafety equips the attack policy with an adversarial skill library, enabling continued vulnerability probing through simple library expansion after saturation, while supporting the evolution of adversarial vectors. For defense learning, EvoSafety replaces model-specific safety fine-tuning with a lightweight auxiliary defense model augmented with memory retrieval. This enables efficient, transferable, and model-agnostic safety improvements, while allowing robustness to be enhanced solely through memory updates. With a single training procedure, the defense policy can operate in both Steer and Guard modes: the former activates the victim model's intrinsic defense mechanisms, while the latter directly filters harmful inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of EvoSafety: in Guard mode, it achieves a 99.61% defense success rate, outperforming Qwen3Guard-8B by 14.13% with only 37.5% of its parameters, while preserving reasoning performance on benign queries. Warning: This paper contains potentially harmful text.

Hanzhe Hu, Fangyun Wei, Han Hu et al.

Due to the limited and even imbalanced data, semi-supervised semantic segmentation tends to have poor performance on some certain categories, e.g., tailed categories in Cityscapes dataset which exhibits a long-tailed label distribution. Existing approaches almost all neglect this problem, and treat categories equally. Some popular approaches such as consistency regularization or pseudo-labeling may even harm the learning of under-performing categories, that the predictions or pseudo labels of these categories could be too inaccurate to guide the learning on the unlabeled data. In this paper, we look into this problem, and propose a novel framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation, named adaptive equalization learning (AEL). AEL adaptively balances the training of well and badly performed categories, with a confidence bank to dynamically track category-wise performance during training. The confidence bank is leveraged as an indicator to tilt training towards under-performing categories, instantiated in three strategies: 1) adaptive Copy-Paste and CutMix data augmentation approaches which give more chance for under-performing categories to be copied or cut; 2) an adaptive data sampling approach to encourage pixels from under-performing category to be sampled; 3) a simple yet effective re-weighting method to alleviate the training noise raised by pseudo-labeling. Experimentally, AEL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the Cityscapes and Pascal VOC benchmarks under various data partition protocols. Code is available at https://github.com/hzhupku/SemiSeg-AEL

Sicheng Dai, Hongwang Xiao, Shan Yu et al.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have become a popular medium for decoding visual information due to their cost-effectiveness and high temporal resolution. However, current approaches face significant challenges in bridging the modality gap between EEG and image data. These methods typically rely on complex adaptation processes involving multiple stages, making it hard to maintain consistency and manage compounding errors. Furthermore, the computational overhead imposed by large-scale diffusion models limit their practicality in real-world brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. In this work, we present AVDE, a lightweight and efficient framework for visual decoding from EEG signals. First, we leverage LaBraM, a pre-trained EEG model, and fine-tune it via contrastive learning to align EEG and image representations. Second, we adopt an autoregressive generative framework based on a "next-scale prediction" strategy: images are encoded into multi-scale token maps using a pre-trained VQ-VAE, and a transformer is trained to autoregressively predict finer-scale tokens starting from EEG embeddings as the coarsest representation. This design enables coherent generation while preserving a direct connection between the input EEG signals and the reconstructed images. Experiments on two datasets show that AVDE outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both image retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while using only 10% of the parameters. In addition, visualization of intermediate outputs shows that the generative process of AVDE reflects the hierarchical nature of human visual perception. These results highlight the potential of autoregressive models as efficient and interpretable tools for practical BCI applications.

Yuancheng Sun, Yuxuan Ren, Zhaoming Chen et al.

Accurate exploration of protein conformational ensembles is essential for uncovering function but remains hard because molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations suffer from high computational costs and energy-barrier trapping. This paper presents Energy Preference Optimization (EPO), an online refinement algorithm that turns a pretrained protein ensemble generator into an energy-aware sampler without extra MD trajectories. Specifically, EPO leverages stochastic differential equation sampling to explore the conformational landscape and incorporates a novel energy-ranking mechanism based on list-wise preference optimization. Crucially, EPO introduces a practical upper bound to efficiently approximate the intractable probability of long sampling trajectories in continuous-time generative models, making it easily adaptable to existing pretrained generators. On Tetrapeptides, ATLAS, and Fast-Folding benchmarks, EPO successfully generates diverse and physically realistic ensembles, establishing a new state-of-the-art in nine evaluation metrics. These results demonstrate that energy-only preference signals can efficiently steer generative models toward thermodynamically consistent conformational ensembles, providing an alternative to long MD simulations and widening the applicability of learned potentials in structural biology and drug discovery.

Kai Yang, Jan Ackermann, Zhenyu He et al. · pku

As transformer-based language models are trained on increasingly large datasets and with vast numbers of parameters, finding more efficient alternatives to the standard Transformer has become very valuable. While many efficient Transformers and Transformer alternatives have been proposed, none provide theoretical guarantees that they are a suitable replacement for the standard Transformer. This makes it challenging to identify when to use a specific model and what directions to prioritize for further investigation. In this paper, we aim to understand the capabilities and limitations of efficient Transformers, specifically the Sparse Transformer and the Linear Transformer. We focus on their reasoning capability as exhibited by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts and follow previous works to model them as Dynamic Programming (DP) problems. Our results show that while these models are expressive enough to solve general DP tasks, contrary to expectations, they require a model size that scales with the problem size. Nonetheless, we identify a class of DP problems for which these models can be more efficient than the standard Transformer. We confirm our theoretical results through experiments on representative DP tasks, adding to the understanding of efficient Transformers' practical strengths and weaknesses.

Xu Han, Yuancheng Sun, Kai Chen et al.

Coarse-grained(CG) molecular dynamics simulations offer computational efficiency for exploring protein conformational ensembles and thermodynamic properties. Though coarse representations enable large-scale simulations across extended temporal and spatial ranges, the sacrifice of atomic-level details limits their utility in tasks such as ligand docking and protein-protein interaction prediction. Backmapping, the process of reconstructing all-atom structures from coarse-grained representations, is crucial for recovering these fine details. While recent machine learning methods have made strides in protein structure generation, challenges persist in reconstructing diverse atomistic conformations that maintain geometric accuracy and chemical validity. In this paper, we present Latent Diffusion Backmapping (LDB), a novel approach leveraging denoising diffusion within latent space to address these challenges. By combining discrete latent encoding with diffusion, LDB bypasses the need for equivariant and internal coordinate manipulation, significantly simplifying the training and sampling processes as well as facilitating better and wider exploration in configuration space. We evaluate LDB's state-of-the-art performance on three distinct protein datasets, demonstrating its ability to efficiently reconstruct structures with high structural accuracy and chemical validity. Moreover, LDB shows exceptional versatility in capturing diverse protein ensembles, highlighting its capability to explore intricate conformational spaces. Our results position LDB as a powerful and scalable approach for backmapping, effectively bridging the gap between CG simulations and atomic-level analyses in computational biology.

Jingcheng Yu, Mingliang Zeng, Qiwei Ye

Developing models capable of complex, multi-step reasoning is a central goal in artificial intelligence. While representing problems as graphs is a powerful approach, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are fundamentally constrained by their message-passing mechanism, which imposes a local bottleneck that limits global, holistic reasoning. We argue that dynamic programming (DP), which solves problems by iteratively refining a global state, offers a more powerful and suitable learning paradigm. We introduce FloydNet, a new architecture that embodies this principle. In contrast to local message passing, FloydNet maintains a global, all-pairs relationship tensor and learns a generalized DP operator to progressively refine it. This enables the model to develop a task-specific relational calculus, providing a principled framework for capturing long-range dependencies. Theoretically, we prove that FloydNet achieves 3-WL (2-FWL) expressive power, and its generalized form aligns with the k-FWL hierarchy. FloydNet demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across challenging domains: it achieves near-perfect scores (often >99\%) on the CLRS-30 algorithmic benchmark, finds exact optimal solutions for the general Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) at rates significantly exceeding strong heuristics, and empirically matches the 3-WL test on the BREC benchmark. Our results establish this learned, DP-style refinement as a powerful and practical alternative to message passing for high-level graph reasoning.

Zhaoqun Li, Jingcheng Yu, Qiwei Ye

Deep learning has made significant progress in protein structure prediction, advancing the development of computational biology. However, despite the high accuracy achieved in predicting single-chain structures, a significant number of large homo-oligomeric assemblies exhibit internal symmetry, posing a major challenge in structure determination. The performances of existing deep learning methods are limited since the symmetrical protein assembly usually has a long sequence, making structural computation infeasible. In addition, multiple identical subunits in symmetrical protein complex cause the issue of supervision ambiguity in label assignment, requiring a consistent structure modeling for the training. To tackle these problems, we propose a protein folding framework called SGNet to model protein-protein interactions in symmetrical assemblies. SGNet conducts feature extraction on a single subunit and generates the whole assembly using our proposed symmetry module, which largely mitigates computational problems caused by sequence length. Thanks to the elaborate design of modeling symmetry consistently, we can model all global symmetry types in quaternary protein structure prediction. Extensive experimental results on a benchmark of symmetrical protein complexes further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Bohang Zhang, Jingchu Gai, Yiheng Du et al.

Designing expressive Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is a fundamental topic in the graph learning community. So far, GNN expressiveness has been primarily assessed via the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) hierarchy. However, such an expressivity measure has notable limitations: it is inherently coarse, qualitative, and may not well reflect practical requirements (e.g., the ability to encode substructures). In this paper, we introduce a unified framework for quantitatively studying the expressiveness of GNN architectures, addressing all the above limitations. Specifically, we identify a fundamental expressivity measure termed homomorphism expressivity, which quantifies the ability of GNN models to count graphs under homomorphism. Homomorphism expressivity offers a complete and practical assessment tool: the completeness enables direct expressivity comparisons between GNN models, while the practicality allows for understanding concrete GNN abilities such as subgraph counting. By examining four classes of prominent GNNs as case studies, we derive simple, unified, and elegant descriptions of their homomorphism expressivity for both invariant and equivariant settings. Our results provide novel insights into a series of previous work, unify the landscape of different subareas in the community, and settle several open questions. Empirically, extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world tasks verify our theory, showing that the practical performance of GNN models aligns well with the proposed metric.

Tianhao Zhang, Yueheng Li, Shuai Li et al.

In this paper, the circle formation control problem is addressed for a group of cooperative underactuated fish-like robots involving unknown nonlinear dynamics and disturbances. Based on the reinforcement learning and cognitive consistency theory, we propose a decentralized controller without the knowledge of the dynamics of the fish-like robots. The proposed controller can be transferred from simulation to reality. It is only trained in our established simulation environment, and the trained controller can be deployed to real robots without any manual tuning. Simulation results confirm that the proposed model-free robust formation control method is scalable with respect to the group size of the robots and outperforms other representative RL algorithms. Several experiments in the real world verify the effectiveness of our RL-based approach for circle formation control.

Yuxuan Song, Qiwei Ye, Minkai Xu et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown great promise in modeling high dimensional data. The learning objective of GANs usually minimizes some measure discrepancy, \textit{e.g.}, $f$-divergence~($f$-GANs) or Integral Probability Metric~(Wasserstein GANs). With $f$-divergence as the objective function, the discriminator essentially estimates the density ratio, and the estimated ratio proves useful in further improving the sample quality of the generator. However, how to leverage the information contained in the discriminator of Wasserstein GANs (WGAN) is less explored. In this paper, we introduce the Discriminator Contrastive Divergence, which is well motivated by the property of WGAN's discriminator and the relationship between WGAN and energy-based model. Compared to standard GANs, where the generator is directly utilized to obtain new samples, our method proposes a semi-amortized generation procedure where the samples are produced with the generator's output as an initial state. Then several steps of Langevin dynamics are conducted using the gradient of the discriminator. We demonstrate the benefits of significant improved generation on both synthetic data and several real-world image generation benchmarks.

Junjie Li, Sotetsu Koyamada, Qiwei Ye et al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved great success in many domains, and game AI is widely regarded as its beachhead since the dawn of AI. In recent years, studies on game AI have gradually evolved from relatively simple environments (e.g., perfect-information games such as Go, chess, shogi or two-player imperfect-information games such as heads-up Texas hold'em) to more complex ones (e.g., multi-player imperfect-information games such as multi-player Texas hold'em and StartCraft II). Mahjong is a popular multi-player imperfect-information game worldwide but very challenging for AI research due to its complex playing/scoring rules and rich hidden information. We design an AI for Mahjong, named Suphx, based on deep reinforcement learning with some newly introduced techniques including global reward prediction, oracle guiding, and run-time policy adaptation. Suphx has demonstrated stronger performance than most top human players in terms of stable rank and is rated above 99.99% of all the officially ranked human players in the Tenhou platform. This is the first time that a computer program outperforms most top human players in Mahjong.

Yufei Wang, Qiwei Ye, Tie-Yan Liu

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the exponentially discounted sum of future rewards. One key insight is that there could be many feasible ways to define the form of the return function (and thus the value), from which the same optimal policy can be derived, yet these different forms might render dramatically different speeds of learning this policy. In this paper, we research how to modify the form of the return function to enhance the learning towards the optimal policy. We propose to use a general mathematical form for return function, and employ meta-learning to learn the optimal return function in an end-to-end manner. We test our methods on a specially designed maze environment and several Atari games, and our experimental results clearly indicate the advantages of automatically learning optimal return functions in reinforcement learning.

Ruihan Yang, Qiwei Ye, Tie-Yan Liu

A fundamental issue in reinforcement learning algorithms is the balance between exploration of the environment and exploitation of information already obtained by the agent. Especially, exploration has played a critical role for both efficiency and efficacy of the learning process. However, Existing works for exploration involve task-agnostic design, that is performing well in one environment, but be ill-suited to another. To the purpose of learning an effective and efficient exploration policy in an automated manner. We formalized a feasible metric for measuring the utility of exploration based on counterfactual ideology. Based on that, We proposed an end-to-end algorithm to learn exploration policy by meta-learning. We demonstrate that our method achieves good results compared to previous works in the high-dimensional control tasks in MuJoCo simulator.

Qi Meng, Guolin Ke, Taifeng Wang et al.

Decision tree (and its extensions such as Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and Random Forest) is a widely used machine learning algorithm, due to its practical effectiveness and model interpretability. With the emergence of big data, there is an increasing need to parallelize the training process of decision tree. However, most existing attempts along this line suffer from high communication costs. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called \emph{Parallel Voting Decision Tree (PV-Tree)}, to tackle this challenge. After partitioning the training data onto a number of (e.g., $M$) machines, this algorithm performs both local voting and global voting in each iteration. For local voting, the top-$k$ attributes are selected from each machine according to its local data. Then, globally top-$2k$ attributes are determined by a majority voting among these local candidates. Finally, the full-grained histograms of the globally top-$2k$ attributes are collected from local machines in order to identify the best (most informative) attribute and its split point. PV-Tree can achieve a very low communication cost (independent of the total number of attributes) and thus can scale out very well. Furthermore, theoretical analysis shows that this algorithm can learn a near optimal decision tree, since it can find the best attribute with a large probability. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that PV-Tree significantly outperforms the existing parallel decision tree algorithms in the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.