Cheng Huang

Tianxin Chen, Wenbo Jiang, Hongqiao Chen et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models are widely adopted for their strong generative capabilities, yet remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing attacks typically rely on fixed textual triggers and single-entity backdoor targets, making them highly susceptible to enumeration-based input defenses and attention-consistency detection. In this work, we propose Semantic-level Backdoor Attack (SemBD), which introduces representation-level triggers based on continuous semantic regions rather than discrete textual patterns. SemBD implants such semantic backdoors by distillation-based editing of the key and value projection matrices in cross-attention layers, enabling semantically equivalent but textually diverse prompts to activate the backdoor. To further enhance stealthiness, SemBD incorporates a semantic regularization to prevent unintended activation under incomplete semantics, as well as multi-entity backdoor targets that avoid highly consistent cross-attention patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SemBD achieves a 100% attack success rate while maintaining strong robustness against state-of-the-art input-level defenses. Our code is available at https://github.com/DPAS-Lab/SemBD/.

Kaixuan Zhang, Yunfan Cui, Shuhao Zhang et al.

The rapid expansion of Transformer-based large language models has dramatically increased the need for high-performance GPUs. As a result, there is growing demand for fast, accurate, and widely generalizable GPU performance models to support next-generation hardware selection and system-level exploration. However, current data-driven methods are limited, exhibiting poor generalization across hardware and inadequate modeling of complex production-level kernels common in modern inference stacks. To address these issues, we present PipeWeave, a unified GPU modeling framework. This approach first employs an analytical model to quantify a given kernel's demands on the GPU's heterogeneous instruction pipelines. These analytical features are then fed into a machine learning (ML) model to capture complex cross-pipeline interactions and resource dependencies, enabling high-fidelity performance prediction. Our evaluation across 11 GPU types from four generations of major architectures on two widely-used serving systems demonstrates that PipeWeave delivers high fidelity and strong generalizability. It achieves accurate predictions, with only 6.1% average error at the kernel level and 8.5% for end-to-end inference -- reducing the error of state-of-the-art methods by 6.7x and 4.4x, respectively. We also demonstrate PipeWeave's value "beyond simulation" by utilizing its performance ceiling to diagnose implementation shortcomings and guide the optimization of a production fused MoE Triton kernel, achieving up to 1.7x speedup. Code is available https://github.com/zksainx/pipeweave.

Jiayang Xu, Cheng Huang, Karthik Duraisamy

A multi-fidelity framework is established and demonstrated for prediction of combustion instabilities in rocket engines. The major idea is to adapt appropriate fidelity modeling approaches for different components in a rocket engine to ensure accurate and efficient predictions. Specifically, the proposed framework integrates projection-based Reduced Order Models (ROMs) that are developed using bases generated on truncated domain simulations. The ROM training is performed on truncated domains, and thus does not require full order model solutions on the full rocket geometry, thus demonstrating the potential to greatly reduce training cost. Geometry-specific training is replaced by the response generated by perturbing the characteristics at the boundary of the truncated domain. This training method is shown to enhance predictive capabilities and robustness of the resulting ROMs, including at conditions outside the training range. Numerical tests are conducted on a quasi-1D model of a single-element rocket combustor and the present framework is compared to traditional ROM development approaches.

Amirpasha Hedayat, Ali Mohaghegh, Laura Balzano et al.

Reduced-order models (ROMs) can accelerate high-dimensional dynamical simulations, but their accuracy often deteriorates when online dynamics leave the regime represented by offline training data. We develop a projection-based adaptive ROM framework based on incremental singular value decomposition (iSVD), in which occasional full-order operator evaluations provide correction snapshots for online basis updates. The intrusive ROMs considered here are fully parameterized by the basis, so each update naturally propagates to reduced operators and hyper-reduction machinery. Through its evolving singular structure, iSVD retains an encoded history of the observed dynamics and is history-aware in this sense. We study the method on three nonlinear problems of increasing complexity: the one-dimensional viscous Burgers equation, the Sod shock tube, and a stiff one-dimensional ten-species rotating detonation engine (RDE). The Burgers problem is used to analyze the method and compare iSVD with alternative basis adaptation rules, showing that history-aware updates outperform instantaneous updates and that iSVD gives the strongest overall performance. The Sod and RDE cases demonstrate that these advantages persist in more challenging compressible-flow settings. For the RDE problem, the iSVD adaptive ROM improves upon the current state-of-the-art Direct adaptive ROM baseline in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. A cost analysis shows that the dominant online cost comes from interacting with the full-order model to obtain correction snapshots, while the iSVD update itself is negligible. These results identify iSVD as an effective mechanism for online learning of reduced subspaces and suggest a path toward ROMs that remain predictive over horizons several orders of magnitude longer than their initial training window.

Jingxi Qiu, Zeyu Han, Cheng Huang

Evidence absence is not evidence insufficiency, but fact verification benchmarks can make them observationally similar. The Not Enough Information (NEI) label is often operationalized through different evidence conditions, and that choice silently determines what a verifier learns and what its score can hide. We introduce NEI-CAP, a construction-aware diagnostic protocol for insufficient-evidence evaluation. Each NEI example carries the construction family that produced it; NEI-CAP audits shortcut cues, validates hard cases through human adjudication, and tests whether competence transfers across constructions. We instantiate the protocol in SciFact-style scientific verification, with FEVER and HoVer as bounded external controls. Across these settings, NEI competence does not transfer reliably: models trained on shortcut-prone constructions fail to recognize semantically related insufficient evidence, and mixed-construction training narrows but does not close the gap. Fixed-claim diagnostics further show that the evidence condition shifts confidence in the reference Support/Refute label, not only NEI recall, so an aggregate NEI score can hide which problem a model has actually solved.

Kaixuan Zhang, Chutong Ding, Shiyou Qian et al.

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made GPU inference efficiency an increasingly critical system concern. The runtime of LLM workloads is largely dominated by tile-based kernels, particularly General Matrix Multiplications (GEMMs). Although these kernels are highly optimized, their performance remains sensitive to a large space of runtime parameters, such as tile sizes and pipeline stages. The interaction between these parameters and hardware resources leads to a non-convex optimization landscape. Existing approaches to parameter configuration -- including search-based auto-tuning, heuristic rules, and learned cost models -- face a fundamental trade-off between performance optimality and runtime efficiency. In this paper, we present WaveTune, a wave-aware framework for runtime kernel auto-tuning. First, we introduce a unified mapping method to handle input diversity and decompose the configuration space to manage high dimensionality. Second, we develop an analytical wave-aware bilinear model that accurately predicts kernel latency. Third, we design a sparse sampling scheme based on wave structures and a lightweight dual-table retrieval mechanism to minimize runtime overhead. As a result, WaveTune enables precise and efficient runtime configuration for GPU kernels. Across three representative kernels and five GPU architectures, WaveTune consistently achieves near-optimal kernel performance, delivering up to 1.83x kernel-level speedup and up to 1.33x end-to-end TTFT reduction, while reducing runtime decision overhead by five orders of magnitude compared to exhaustive search. These results demonstrate that WaveTune effectively eliminates the traditional trade-off between configuration latency and execution optimality, providing a practical and robust solution for high-performance LLM inference.

Yutong Liu, Feng Xiao, Ziyue Zhang et al.

Multi-level Tibetan spelling correction addresses errors at both the character and syllable levels within a unified model. Existing methods focus mainly on single-level correction and lack effective integration of both levels. Moreover, there are no open-source datasets or augmentation methods tailored for this task in Tibetan. To tackle this, we propose a data augmentation approach using unlabeled text to generate multi-level corruptions, and introduce TiSpell, a semi-masked model capable of correcting both character- and syllable-level errors. Although syllable-level correction is more challenging due to its reliance on global context, our semi-masked strategy simplifies this process. We synthesize nine types of corruptions on clean sentences to create a robust training set. Experiments on both simulated and real-world data demonstrate that TiSpell, trained on our dataset, outperforms baseline models and matches the performance of state-of-the-art approaches, confirming its effectiveness.

Yutong Liu, Ziyue Zhang, Ban Ma-bao et al.

Tibetan is a low-resource language with minimal parallel speech corpora spanning its three major dialects-Ü-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham-limiting progress in speech modeling. To address this issue, we propose FMSD-TTS, a few-shot, multi-speaker, multi-dialect text-to-speech framework that synthesizes parallel dialectal speech from limited reference audio and explicit dialect labels. Our method features a novel speaker-dialect fusion module and a Dialect-Specialized Dynamic Routing Network (DSDR-Net) to capture fine-grained acoustic and linguistic variations across dialects while preserving speaker identity. Extensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that FMSD-TTS significantly outperforms baselines in both dialectal expressiveness and speaker similarity. We further validate the quality and utility of the synthesized speech through a challenging speech-to-speech dialect conversion task. Our contributions include: (1) a novel few-shot TTS system tailored for Tibetan multi-dialect speech synthesis, (2) the public release of a large-scale synthetic Tibetan speech corpus generated by FMSD-TTS, and (3) an open-source evaluation toolkit for standardized assessment of speaker similarity, dialect consistency, and audio quality.

Cheng Huang, Fan Gao, Yutong Liu et al.

Advancement of large language models (LLMs) has brought transformative capabilities to NLP, but such progress remains unevenly distributed, especially for low-resource and culturally rich languages like Tibetan. In this paper, we present TIB-STC, the first large-scale, expert-curated, and multi-domain dataset specifically designed to support the development and evaluation of LLMs for the Tibetan language. Spanning over 11 billion tokens across literature, religion, medicine, law, and daily communication, TIB-STC preserves traditional grammar and stylistic richness. To validate its utility, we train a reference model, Sun-Shine, on TIB-STC through a three-stage pipeline involving pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization. Evaluation on TLUE Benchmark for Tibetan-specific tasks, including Ti-MMLU and Ti-SafetyBench, demonstrates the TIB-STC's effectiveness in enabling robust instruction-following and culturally aligned generation. We release TIB-STC to advance research in low-resource language modeling and promote inclusivity in multilingual NLP. All data are available: https://github.com/Vicentvankor/sun-shine.

Junhao Shen, Mohammad Ausaf Ali Haqqani, Beichen Hu et al.

Due to the rapid growth of scientific publications, identifying all related reference articles in the literature has become increasingly challenging yet highly demanding. Existing methods primarily assess candidate publications from a static perspective, focusing on the content of articles and their structural information, such as citation relationships. There is a lack of research regarding how to account for the evolving impact among papers on their embeddings. Toward this goal, this paper introduces a temporal dimension to paper recommendation strategies. The core idea is to continuously update a paper's embedding when new citation relationships appear, enhancing its relevance for future recommendations. Whenever a citation relationship is added to the literature upon the publication of a paper, the embeddings of the two related papers are updated through a Temporal Graph Neural Network (TGN). A learnable memory update module based on a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is utilized to study the evolution of the embedding of a paper in order to predict its reference impact in a future timestamp. Such a TGN-based model learns a pattern of how people's views of the paper may evolve, aiming to guide paper recommendations more precisely. Extensive experiments on an open citation network dataset, including 313,278 articles from https://paperswithcode.com/about PaperWithCode, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Fan Gao, Cheng Huang, Nyima Tashi et al.

To address the severe data scarcity in Tibetan, a low-resource language spoken by over six million people, we introduce TIBSTC-CoT, the large-scale, multi-domain Tibetan dataset automatically constructed via chain-of-thought prompting with large language models (LLMs). TIBSTC-CoT establishes a scalable and reproducible framework for dataset creation in low-resource settings, covering diverse domains and reasoning patterns essential for language understanding and generation. Building on this dataset, we develop the Sunshine-thinking LLM family, a series of Tibetan-centric LLMs equipped with chain-of-thought capabilities. Trained entirely on TIBSTC-CoT, Sunshine-thinking has demonstrated strong reasoning and generation performance, comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) multilingual LLMs. Our work marks a significant step toward inclusive AI by enabling high-quality Tibetan language processing through both resource creation and model innovation. All data are available: https://github.com/Vicentvankor/sun-shine.

Cheng Huang, Weizheng Xie, Tsengdar Lee et al.

Glaucoma is a complex group of eye diseases marked by optic nerve damage, commonly linked to elevated intraocular pressure and biomarkers like retinal nerve fiber layer thickness. Understanding how these biomarkers interact is crucial for unraveling glaucoma's underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we propose GlaLSTM, a novel concurrent LSTM stream framework for glaucoma detection, leveraging latent biomarker relationships. Unlike traditional CNN-based models that primarily detect glaucoma from images, GlaLSTM provides deeper interpretability, revealing the key contributing factors and enhancing model transparency. This approach not only improves detection accuracy but also empowers clinicians with actionable insights, facilitating more informed decision-making. Experimental evaluations confirm that GlaLSTM surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its potential for both advanced biomarker analysis and reliable glaucoma detection.

Kangyang Luo, Shuzheng Si, Yuzhuo Bai et al.

In the era of large language models (LLMs), supervised neural methods remain the state-of-the-art (SOTA) for Coreference Resolution. Yet, their full potential is underexplored, particularly in incremental clustering, which faces the critical challenge of balancing efficiency with performance for long texts. To address the limitation, we propose \textbf{MEIC-DT}, a novel dual-threshold, memory-efficient incremental clustering approach based on a lightweight Transformer. MEIC-DT features a dual-threshold constraint mechanism designed to precisely control the Transformer's input scale within a predefined memory budget. This mechanism incorporates a Statistics-Aware Eviction Strategy (\textbf{SAES}), which utilizes distinct statistical profiles from the training and inference phases for intelligent cache management. Furthermore, we introduce an Internal Regularization Policy (\textbf{IRP}) that strategically condenses clusters by selecting the most representative mentions, thereby preserving semantic integrity. Extensive experiments on common benchmarks demonstrate that MEIC-DT achieves highly competitive coreference performance under stringent memory constraints.

Jiaren Peng, Zeqin Li, Chang You et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created new opportunities for Automated Penetration Testing (AutoPT), spawning numerous frameworks aimed at achieving end-to-end autonomous attacks. However, despite the proliferation of related studies, existing research generally lacks systematic architectural analysis and large-scale empirical comparisons under a unified benchmark. Therefore, this paper presents the first Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) focusing on the architectural design and comprehensive empirical evaluation of current LLM-based AutoPT frameworks. At systematization level, we comprehensively review existing framework designs across six dimensions: agent architecture, agent plan, agent memory, agent execution, external knowledge, and benchmarks. At empirical level, we conduct large-scale experiments on 13 representative open-source AutoPT frameworks and 2 baseline frameworks utilizing a unified benchmark. The experiments consumed over 10 billion tokens in total and generated more than 1,500 execution logs, which were manually reviewed and analyzed over four months by a panel of more than 15 researchers with expertise in cybersecurity. By investigating the latest progress in this rapidly developing field, we provide researchers with a structured taxonomy to understand existing LLM-based AutoPT frameworks and a large-scale empirical benchmark, along with promising directions for future research.

Jiaren Peng, Hongda Sun, Xuan Tian et al.

The automation of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) relies heavily on Named Entity Recognition (NER) to extract critical entities from unstructured text. Currently, Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily address this task through retrieval-based In-Context Learning (ICL). This paper analyzes this mainstream paradigm, revealing a fundamental flaw: its success stems not from global semantic similarity but largely from the incidental overlap of entity types within retrieved examples. This exposes the limitations of relying on unreliable implicit induction. To address this, we propose TTPrompt, a framework shifting from implicit induction to explicit instruction. TTPrompt maps the core concepts of CTI's Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) into an instruction hierarchy: formulating task definitions as Tactics, guiding strategies as Techniques, and annotation guidelines as Procedures. Furthermore, to handle the adaptability challenge of static guidelines, we introduce Feedback-driven Instruction Refinement (FIR). FIR enables LLMs to self-refine guidelines by learning from errors on minimal labeled data, adapting to distinct annotation dialects. Experiments on five CTI NER benchmarks demonstrate that TTPrompt consistently surpasses retrieval-based baselines. Notably, with refinement on just 1% of training data, it rivals models fine-tuned on the full dataset. For instance, on LADDER, its Micro F1 of 71.96% approaches the fine-tuned baseline, and on the complex CTINexus, its Macro F1 exceeds the fine-tuned ACLM model by 10.91%.

Cheng Huang, Weizheng Xie, Fan Gao et al.

Structural changes in retinal blood vessels are critical biomarkers for the onset and progression of glaucoma and other ocular diseases. However, current vessel segmentation approaches largely rely on supervised learning and extensive manual annotations, which are costly, error-prone, and difficult to obtain in optical coherence tomography angiography. Here we present BioVessel-Net, an unsupervised generative framework that integrates vessel biostatistics with adversarial refinement and a radius-guided segmentation strategy. Unlike pixel-based methods, BioVessel-Net directly models vascular structures with biostatistical coherence, achieving accurate and explainable vessel extraction without labeled data or high-performance computing. To support training and evaluation, we introduce RetinaMix, a new benchmark dataset of 2D and 3D OCTA images with high-resolution vessel details from diverse populations. Experimental results demonstrate that BioVessel-Net achieves near-perfect segmentation accuracy across RetinaMix and existing datasets, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised methods. Together, BioVessel-Net and RetinaMix provide a label-free, computationally efficient, and clinically interpretable solution for retinal vessel analysis, with broad potential for glaucoma monitoring, blood flow modeling, and progression prediction. Code and dataset are available: https://github.com/VikiXie/SatMar8.

Cheng Huang, Hui Zhou, Chunyang Ye et al.

The code clone detection method based on semantic similarity has important value in software engineering tasks (e.g., software evolution, software reuse). Traditional code clone detection technologies pay more attention to the similarity of code at the syntax level, and less attention to the semantic similarity of the code. As a result, candidate codes similar in semantics are ignored. To address this issue, we propose a code clone detection method based on semantic similarity. By treating code as a series of interdependent events that occur continuously, we design a model namely EDAM to encode code semantic information based on event embedding and event dependency. The EDAM model uses the event embedding method to model the execution characteristics of program statements and the data dependence information between all statements. In this way, we can embed the program semantic information into a vector and use the vector to detect codes similar in semantics. Experimental results show that the performance of our EDAM model is superior to state of-the-art open source models for code clone detection.

Wenbin Wei, Ruixiang Gao, Suyuan Yao et al.

Real-world digital Parkinson's disease assessment faces challenges such as heterogeneous modalities, cross-device bias, and incomplete labeling. Existing methods often focus on average predictive performance, lacking the reliability mechanisms needed for retrospective reliability-aware assessment - namely, determining when the model is reliable, when to reject an assessment, when to retest, and from which symptom dimensions the predictions are based. This paper proposes SGC-RML, which maps speech, gait, wearable motion, mobility tasks, and clinical variables to a shared 8-dimensional symptom node space (7 clinical symptom nodes and 1 reliability_state auxiliary node), unifying motor and non-motor representations through a symptom atlas. By jointly introducing uncertainty estimation, conformal calibration, and selective decision routing, the model can not only predict symptoms and severity but also reject assessments or suggest retests when evidence is insufficient. We validate this framework on five real-world PD datasets, covering classification, regression, event detection, and longitudinal severity prediction. Experiments show that SGC-RML achieves an MAE of 4.579 / R^2 of 0.772 on PPMI, an AUC of 0.953 on mPower, and an AUC of 0.825 on PADS. Under leak-free temporal anchoring, as few as 5 subject-specific anchors transform UCI from an essentially non-predictive subject-independent setting (motor MAE 8.38, CCC 0.02) into a calibrated longitudinal assessment (motor MAE 3.24, CCC 0.756) with split-conformal coverage held at the 0.80 target. Under the Daphnet LOSO protocol, it achieves an F1 of 0.803 / AUC of 0.872. These results demonstrate that SGC-RML provides a unified paradigm for accurate, calibrated, auditable, and symptom-interpretable retrospective longitudinal assessment of PD under incomplete multimodal conditions.

Jingxi Qiu, Zeyu Han, Cheng Huang

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer. We frame this gap as evidence sufficiency verification for selective RAG answering: given a question, a candidate answer, and retrieved evidence, predict whether the evidence supports, refutes, or is insufficient, and abstain unless support is established. We present SURE-RAG, a transparent aggregation protocol built on the observation that evidence sufficiency is a set-level property: missing hops and unresolved conflicts cannot be detected by independent passage scoring. A shared pair-level claim-evidence verifier produces local relation distributions, which SURE-RAG aggregates into interpretable answer-level signals -- coverage, relation strength, disagreement, conflict, and retrieval uncertainty -- yielding a three-way decision and an auditable selective score. We evaluate on HotpotQA-RAG v3, a controlled multi-hop benchmark, under an artifact-aware protocol (shortcut baselines, counterfactual swaps, no-oracle checks, GPT-4o audits). Calibrated SURE-RAG reaches 0.9075 Macro-F1 (0.8951 +/- 0.0069), substantially above DeBERTa mean-pooling (0.6516) and a GPT-4o judge (0.7284), while matching a strong but opaque concat cross-encoder (0.8888 +/- 0.0109) with full auditability. Risk at 30% coverage drops from 0.2588 to 0.1642, a 37% reduction in unsafe answers. To deliberately probe the task boundary, we further contrast SURE-RAG with GPT-4o on HaluBench unsafe detection: the ranking reverses (0.3343 vs 0.7389 unsafe-F1), establishing that controlled sufficiency verification and natural hallucination detection are distinct problems.

Cheng Huang, Shoudong Han, Mengyu He et al.

Accurate data association is crucial in reducing confusion, such as ID switches and assignment errors, in multi-object tracking (MOT). However, existing advanced methods often overlook the diversity among trajectories and the ambiguity and conflicts present in motion and appearance cues, leading to confusion among detections, trajectories, and associations when performing simple global data association. To address this issue, we propose a simple, versatile, and highly interpretable data association approach called Decomposed Data Association (DDA). DDA decomposes the traditional association problem into multiple sub-problems using a series of non-learning-based modules and selectively addresses the confusion in each sub-problem by incorporating targeted exploitation of new cues. Additionally, we introduce Occlusion-aware Non-Maximum Suppression (ONMS) to retain more occluded detections, thereby increasing opportunities for association with trajectories and indirectly reducing the confusion caused by missed detections. Finally, based on DDA and ONMS, we design a powerful multi-object tracker named DeconfuseTrack, specifically focused on resolving confusion in MOT. Extensive experiments conducted on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets demonstrate that our proposed DDA and ONMS significantly enhance the performance of several popular trackers. Moreover, DeconfuseTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MOT17 and MOT20 test sets, significantly outperforms the baseline tracker ByteTrack in metrics such as HOTA, IDF1, AssA. This validates that our tracking design effectively reduces confusion caused by simple global association.

Fan Gao, Cheng Huang, Nyima Tashi et al.

Large language models have made tremendous progress in recent years, but low-resource languages, like Tibetan, remain significantly underrepresented in their evaluation. Despite Tibetan being spoken by over seven million people, it has largely been neglected in the development and assessment of large language models. To address this gap, we present a \textbf{T}ibetan \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{U}nderstanding \textbf{E}valuation Benchmark, \textbf{TLUE}, the first large-scale benchmark for measuring the proficiency of LLMs in the Tibetan language. \textbf{TLUE} comprises two major components: a comprehensive multi-task understanding benchmark spanning 5 domains and 67 subdomains, and a safety benchmark encompassing 7 subdomains. Then, we evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art large language models. Experimental results demonstrate that most large language models perform below the random baseline, highlighting the considerable challenges they face in Tibetan language processing. \textbf{TLUE} provides a crucial foundation for advancing future research in Tibetan language understanding and highlights the importance of promoting greater inclusivity in the development of large language models.

Yuchen Fan, Kaiyan Zhang, Heng Zhou et al. · pku, tsinghua

We investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to serve as efficient simulators for agentic search tasks in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby reducing dependence on costly interactions with external search engines. To this end, we first quantify the intrinsic search capability of LLMs via structured prompting and repeated sampling, which we term Self-Search. Our results reveal that LLMs exhibit strong scaling behavior with respect to the inference budget, achieving high pass@k on question-answering benchmarks, including the challenging BrowseComp task. Building on these observations, we introduce Self-Search RL (SSRL), which enhances LLMs' Self-Search capability through format-based and rule-based rewards. SSRL enables models to iteratively refine their knowledge utilization internally, without requiring access to external tools. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that SSRL-trained policy models provide a cost-effective and stable environment for search-driven RL training, reducing reliance on external search engines and facilitating robust sim-to-real transfer. We draw the following conclusions: 1) LLMs possess world knowledge that can be effectively elicited to achieve high performance; 2) SSRL demonstrates the potential of leveraging internal knowledge to reduce hallucination; 3) SSRL-trained models integrate seamlessly with external search engines without additional effort. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs to support more scalable RL agent training.

Cheng Huang, Weizheng Xie, Tsengdar J. Lee et al.

Structural changes in main retinal blood vessels serve as critical biomarkers for the onset and progression of glaucoma. Identifying these vessels is vital for vascular modeling yet highly challenging. This paper proposes X-GAN, a generative AI-powered unsupervised segmentation model designed for extracting main blood vessels from Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) images. The process begins with the Space Colonization Algorithm (SCA) to rapidly generate a skeleton of vessels, featuring their radii. By synergistically integrating the generative adversarial network (GAN) with biostatistical modeling of vessel radii, X-GAN enables a fast reconstruction of both 2D and 3D representations of the vessels. Based on this reconstruction, X-GAN achieves nearly 100\% segmentation accuracy without relying on labeled data or high-performance computing resources. Experimental results confirm X-GAN's superiority in evaluating main vessel segmentation compared to existing deep learning models.

Cheng Huang, Weizheng Xie, Karanjit Kooner et al.

Early and accurate detection of glaucoma is critical to prevent irreversible vision loss. However, existing methods often rely on unimodal data and lack interpretability, limiting their clinical utility. In this paper, we present GlaBoost, a multimodal gradient boosting framework that integrates structured clinical features, fundus image embeddings, and expert-curated textual descriptions for glaucoma risk prediction. GlaBoost extracts high-level visual representations from retinal fundus photographs using a pretrained convolutional encoder and encodes free-text neuroretinal rim assessments using a transformer-based language model. These heterogeneous signals, combined with manually assessed risk scores and quantitative ophthalmic indicators, are fused into a unified feature space for classification via an enhanced XGBoost model. Experiments conducted on a real-world annotated dataset demonstrate that GlaBoost significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving a validation accuracy of 98.71%. Feature importance analysis reveals clinically consistent patterns, with cup-to-disc ratio, rim pallor, and specific textual embeddings contributing most to model decisions. GlaBoost offers a transparent and scalable solution for interpretable glaucoma diagnosis and can be extended to other ophthalmic disorders.

Zhiqiang Li, Haiyong Bao, Menghong Guan et al.

Despite federated learning (FL)'s potential in collaborative learning, its performance has deteriorated due to the data heterogeneity of distributed users. Recently, clustered federated learning (CFL) has emerged to address this challenge by partitioning users into clusters according to their similarity. However, CFL faces difficulties in training when users are unwilling to share their cluster identities due to privacy concerns. To address these issues, we present an innovative Efficient and Robust Secure Aggregation scheme for CFL, dubbed EBS-CFL. The proposed EBS-CFL supports effectively training CFL while maintaining users' cluster identity confidentially. Moreover, it detects potential poisonous attacks without compromising individual client gradients by discarding negatively correlated gradients and aggregating positively correlated ones using a weighted approach. The server also authenticates correct gradient encoding by clients. EBS-CFL has high efficiency with client-side overhead O(ml + m^2) for communication and O(m^2l) for computation, where m is the number of cluster identities, and l is the gradient size. When m = 1, EBS-CFL's computational efficiency of client is at least O(log n) times better than comparison schemes, where n is the number of clients.In addition, we validate the scheme through extensive experiments. Finally, we theoretically prove the scheme's security.

Jiahao Li, Xinhong Chen, Zhengmin Jiang et al.

Despite remarkable advances in image-driven stereo matching over the past decade, Synthetic-to-Realistic Zero-Shot (Syn-to-Real) generalization remains an open challenge. This suboptimal generalization performance mainly stems from cross-domain shifts and ill-posed ambiguities inherent in image textures, particularly in occluded, textureless, repetitive, and non-Lambertian (specular/transparent) regions. To improve Syn-to-Real generalization, we propose GREATEN, a framework that incorporates surface normals as domain-invariant, object-intrinsic, and discriminative geometric cues to compensate for the limitations of image textures. The proposed framework consists of three key components. First, a Gated Contextual-Geometric Fusion (GCGF) module adaptively suppresses unreliable contextual cues in image features and fuses the filtered image features with normal-driven geometric features to construct domain-invariant and discriminative contextual-geometric representations. Second, a Specular-Transparent Augmentation (STA) strategy improves the robustness of GCGF against misleading visual cues in non-Lambertian regions. Third, sparse attention designs preserve the fine-grained global feature extraction capability of GREAT-Stereo for handling occlusion and texture-related ambiguities while substantially reducing computational overhead, including Sparse Spatial (SSA), Sparse Dual-Matching (SDMA), and Simple Volume (SVA) attentions. Trained exclusively on synthetic data such as SceneFlow, GREATEN-IGEV achieves outstanding Syn-to-Real performance. Specifically, it reduces errors by 30% on ETH3D, 8.5% on the non-Lambertian Booster, and 14.1% on KITTI-2015, compared to FoundationStereo, Monster-Stereo, and DEFOM-Stereo, respectively. In addition, GREATEN-IGEV runs 19.2% faster than GREAT-IGEV and supports high-resolution (3K) inference on Middlebury with disparity ranges up to 768.

Cheng Gao, Cheng Huang, Kangyang Luo et al.

Enabling large language models (LLMs) to appropriately abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge is crucial for mitigating hallucinations. While existing reinforcement learning methods foster autonomous abstention, they often compromise answer accuracy because their static reward mechanisms, agnostic to models' knowledge boundaries, drive models toward excessive caution. In this work, we propose KARL, a novel framework that continuously aligns an LLM's abstention behavior with its evolving knowledge boundary. KARL introduces two core innovations: a Knowledge-Boundary-Aware Reward that performs online knowledge boundary estimation using within-group response statistics, dynamically rewarding correct answers or guided abstention; and a Two-Stage RL Training Strategy that first explores the knowledge boundary and bypasses the "abstention trap", and subsequently converts incorrect answers beyond the knowledge boundary into abstentions without sacrificing accuracy. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that KARL achieves a superior accuracy-hallucination trade-off, effectively suppressing hallucinations while maintaining high accuracy across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios.

Yutong Liu, Ziyue Zhang, Ban Ma-bao et al.

Tibetan is a low-resource language with limited parallel speech corpora spanning its three major dialects (Ü-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham), limiting progress in speech modeling. To address this issue, we propose TMD-TTS, a unified Tibetan multi-dialect text-to-speech (TTS) framework that synthesizes parallel dialectal speech from explicit dialect labels. Our method features a dialect fusion module and a Dialect-Specialized Dynamic Routing Network (DSDR-Net) to capture fine-grained acoustic and linguistic variations across dialects. Extensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that TMD-TTS significantly outperforms baselines in dialectal expressiveness. We further validate the quality and utility of the synthesized speech through a challenging Speech-to-Speech Dialect Conversion (S2SDC) task.

Yutong Liu, Ziyue Zhang, Cheng Huang et al.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems remain prone to errors that affect downstream applications. In this paper, we propose LIR-ASR, a heuristic optimized iterative correction framework using LLMs, inspired by human auditory perception. LIR-ASR applies a "Listening-Imagining-Refining" strategy, generating phonetic variants and refining them in context. A heuristic optimization with finite state machine (FSM) is introduced to prevent the correction process from being trapped in local optima and rule-based constraints help maintain semantic fidelity. Experiments on both English and Chinese ASR outputs show that LIR-ASR achieves average reductions in CER/WER of up to 1.5 percentage points compared to baselines, demonstrating substantial accuracy gains in transcription.

Cheng Huang, Pan Mu, Cong Bai et al.

Precipitation from tropical cyclones (TCs) can cause disasters such as flooding, mudslides, and landslides. Predicting such precipitation in advance is crucial, giving people time to prepare and defend against these precipitation-induced disasters. Developing deep learning (DL) rainfall prediction methods offers a new way to predict potential disasters. However, one problem is that most existing methods suffer from cumulative errors and lack physical consistency. Second, these methods overlook the importance of meteorological factors in TC rainfall and their integration with the numerical weather prediction (NWP) model. Therefore, we propose Tropical Cyclone Precipitation Diffusion (TCP-Diffusion), a multi-modal model for global tropical cyclone precipitation forecasting. It forecasts TC rainfall around the TC center for the next 12 hours at 3 hourly resolution based on past rainfall observations and multi-modal environmental variables. Adjacent residual prediction (ARP) changes the training target from the absolute rainfall value to the rainfall trend and gives our model the ability of rainfall change awareness, reducing cumulative errors and ensuring physical consistency. Considering the influence of TC-related meteorological factors and the useful information from NWP model forecasts, we propose a multi-model framework with specialized encoders to extract richer information from environmental variables and results provided by NWP models. The results of extensive experiments show that our method outperforms other DL methods and the NWP method from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Bing Li, Dong Zhang, Cheng Huang et al.

Camera with a fisheye or ultra-wide lens covers a wide field of view that cannot be modeled by the perspective projection. Serious fisheye lens distortion in the peripheral region of the image leads to degraded performance of the existing head pose estimation models trained on undistorted images. This paper presents a new approach for head pose estimation that uses the knowledge of head location in the image to reduce the negative effect of fisheye distortion. We develop an end-to-end convolutional neural network to estimate the head pose with the multi-task learning of head pose and head location. Our proposed network estimates the head pose directly from the fisheye image without the operation of rectification or calibration. We also created a fisheye-distorted version of the three popular head pose estimation datasets, BIWI, 300W-LP, and AFLW2000 for our experiments. Experiments results show that our network remarkably improves the accuracy of head pose estimation compared with other state-of-the-art one-stage and two-stage methods.

Wenbin Wei, Suyuan Yao, Cheng Huang et al.

Glaucoma is a top cause of irreversible blindness globally, making early detection and longitudinal follow-up pivotal to preventing permanent vision loss. Current screening and progression assessment, however, rely on single tests or loosely linked examinations, introducing subjectivity and fragmented care. Limited access to high-quality imaging tools and specialist expertise further compromises consistency and equity in real-world use. To address these gaps, we developed Fair-Eye Net, a fair, reliable multimodal AI system closing the clinical loop from glaucoma screening to follow-up and risk alerting. It integrates fundus photos, OCT structural metrics, VF functional indices, and demographic factors via a dual-stream heterogeneous fusion architecture, with an uncertainty-aware hierarchical gating strategy for selective prediction and safe referral. A fairness constraint reduces missed diagnoses in disadvantaged subgroups. Experimental results show it achieved an AUC of 0.912 (96.7% specificity), cut racial false-negativity disparity by 73.4% (12.31% to 3.28%), maintained stable cross-domain performance, and enabled 3-12 months of early risk alerts (92% sensitivity, 88% specificity). Unlike post hoc fairness adjustments, Fair-Eye Net optimizes fairness as a primary goal with clinical reliability via multitask learning, offering a reproducible path for clinical translation and large-scale deployment to advance global eye health equity.

Cheng Huang, Nyima Tashi, Fan Gao et al.

Tibetan, one of the major low-resource languages in Asia, presents unique linguistic and sociocultural characteristics that pose both challenges and opportunities for AI research. Despite increasing interest in developing AI systems for underrepresented languages, Tibetan has received limited attention due to a lack of accessible data resources, standardized benchmarks, and dedicated tools. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the current state of Tibetan AI in the AI domain, covering textual and speech data resources, NLP tasks, machine translation, speech recognition, and recent developments in LLMs. We systematically categorize existing datasets and tools, evaluate methods used across different tasks, and compare performance where possible. We also identify persistent bottlenecks such as data sparsity, orthographic variation, and the lack of unified evaluation metrics. Additionally, we discuss the potential of cross-lingual transfer, multi-modal learning, and community-driven resource creation. This survey aims to serve as a foundational reference for future work on Tibetan AI research and encourages collaborative efforts to build an inclusive and sustainable AI ecosystem for low-resource languages.

Zihan Liu, Jiayi Wen, Junru Wu et al.

In this paper, we introduce PrivDFS, a distributed feature-sharing framework for input-private inference in image classification. A single holistic intermediate representation in split inference gives diffusion-based Data Reconstruction Attacks (DRAs) sufficient signal to reconstruct the input with high fidelity. PrivDFS restructures this vulnerability by fragmenting the representation and processing the fragments independently across a majority-honest set of servers. As a result, each branch observes only an incomplete and reconstruction-insufficient view of the input. To realize this, PrivDFS employs learnable binary masks that partition the intermediate representation into sparse and largely non-overlapping feature shares, each processed by a separate server, while a lightweight fusion module aggregates their predictions on the client. This design preserves full task accuracy when all branches are combined, yet sharply limits the reconstructive power available to any individual server. PrivDFS applies seamlessly to both ResNet-based CNNs and Vision Transformers. Across CIFAR-10/100, CelebA, and ImageNet-1K, PrivDFS induces a pronounced collapse in DRA performance, e.g., on CIFAR-10, PSNR drops from 23.25 -> 12.72 and SSIM from 0.963 -> 0.260, while maintaining accuracy within 1% of non-private split inference. These results establish structural feature partitioning as a practical and architecture-agnostic approach to reducing reconstructive leakage in cloud-based vision inference.

Jiayi Wen, Tianxin Chen, Zhirun Zheng et al.

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by converting raw text into structured knowledge graphs, improving both accuracy and explainability. However, GraphRAG relies on LLMs to extract knowledge from raw text during graph construction, and this process can be maliciously manipulated to implant misleading information. Targeting this attack surface, we propose two knowledge poisoning attacks (KPAs) and demonstrate that modifying only a few words in the source text can significantly change the constructed graph, poison the GraphRAG, and severely mislead downstream reasoning. The first attack, named Targeted KPA (TKPA), utilizes graph-theoretic analysis to locate vulnerable nodes in the generated graphs and rewrites the corresponding narratives with LLMs, achieving precise control over specific question-answering (QA) outcomes with a success rate of 93.1\%, while keeping the poisoned text fluent and natural. The second attack, named Universal KPA (UKPA), exploits linguistic cues such as pronouns and dependency relations to disrupt the structural integrity of the generated graph by altering globally influential words. With fewer than 0.05\% of full text modified, the QA accuracy collapses from 95\% to 50\%. Furthermore, experiments show that state-of-the-art defense methods fail to detect these attacks, highlighting that securing GraphRAG pipelines against knowledge poisoning remains largely unexplored.

Zhixin Geng, Xu Fan, Xiqiao Lu et al.

Air pollution has emerged as a major public health challenge in megacities. Numerical simulations and single-site machine learning approaches have been widely applied in air quality forecasting tasks. However, these methods face multiple limitations, including high computational costs, low operational efficiency, and limited integration with observational data. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is an urgent need to develop a low-cost, efficient air quality forecasting model for smart urban management. An air quality forecasting model, named FuXi-Air, has been constructed in this study based on multimodal data fusion to support high-precision air quality forecasting and operated in typical megacities. The model integrates meteorological forecasts, emission inventories, and pollutant monitoring data under the guidance of air pollution mechanism. By combining an autoregressive prediction framework with a frame interpolation strategy, the model successfully completes 72-hour forecasts for six major air pollutants at an hourly resolution across multiple monitoring sites within 25-30 seconds. In terms of both computational efficiency and forecasting accuracy, it outperforms the mainstream numerical air quality models in operational forecasting work. Ablation experiments concerning key influencing factors show that although meteorological data contribute more to model accuracy than emission inventories do, the integration of multimodal data significantly improves forecasting precision and ensures that reliable predictions are obtained under differing pollution mechanisms across megacities. This study provides both a technical reference and a practical example for applying multimodal data-driven models to air quality forecasting and offers new insights into building hybrid forecasting systems to support air pollution risk warning in smart city management.

Ji Guo, Xiaolei Wen, Wenbo Jiang et al.

With the widespread application of super-resolution (SR) in various fields, researchers have begun to investigate its security. Previous studies have demonstrated that SR models can also be subjected to backdoor attacks through data poisoning, affecting downstream tasks. A backdoor SR model generates an attacker-predefined target image when given a triggered image while producing a normal high-resolution (HR) output for clean images. However, prior backdoor attacks on SR models have primarily focused on the stealthiness of poisoned low-resolution (LR) images while ignoring the stealthiness of poisoned HR images, making it easy for users to detect anomalous data. To address this problem, we propose BadSR, which improves the stealthiness of poisoned HR images. The key idea of BadSR is to approximate the clean HR image and the pre-defined target image in the feature space while ensuring that modifications to the clean HR image remain within a constrained range. The poisoned HR images generated by BadSR can be integrated with existing triggers. To further improve the effectiveness of BadSR, we design an adversarially optimized trigger and a backdoor gradient-driven poisoned sample selection method based on a genetic algorithm. The experimental results show that BadSR achieves a high attack success rate in various models and data sets, significantly affecting downstream tasks.

Hai Lin, Cheng Huang, Zhihong Chen

Reinforcement learning tasks in real-world scenarios often involve large, high-dimensional action spaces, leading to challenges such as convergence difficulties, instability, and high computational complexity. It is widely acknowledged that traditional value-based reinforcement learning algorithms struggle to address these issues effectively. A prevalent approach involves generating independent sub-actions within each dimension of the action space. However, this method introduces bias, hindering the learning of optimal policies. In this paper, we propose an advantage-based optimization method and an algorithm named Advantage Branching Dueling Q-network (ABQ). ABQ incorporates a baseline mechanism to tune the action value of each dimension, leveraging the advantage relationship across different sub-actions. With this approach, the learned policy can be optimized for each dimension. Empirical results demonstrate that ABQ outperforms BDQ, achieving 3%, 171%, and 84% more cumulative rewards in HalfCheetah, Ant, and Humanoid environments, respectively. Furthermore, ABQ exhibits competitive performance when compared against two continuous action benchmark algorithms, DDPG and TD3.

Renee Swischuk, Boris Kramer, Cheng Huang et al.

This paper presents a physics-based data-driven method to learn predictive reduced-order models (ROMs) from high-fidelity simulations, and illustrates it in the challenging context of a single-injector combustion process. The method combines the perspectives of model reduction and machine learning. Model reduction brings in the physics of the problem, constraining the ROM predictions to lie on a subspace defined by the governing equations. This is achieved by defining the ROM in proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) coordinates, which embed the rich physics information contained in solution snapshots of a high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. The machine learning perspective brings the flexibility to use transformed physical variables to define the POD basis. This is in contrast to traditional model reduction approaches that are constrained to use the physical variables of the high-fidelity code. Combining the two perspectives, the approach identifies a set of transformed physical variables that expose quadratic structure in the combustion governing equations and learns a quadratic ROM from transformed snapshot data. This learning does not require access to the high-fidelity model implementation. Numerical experiments show that the ROM accurately predicts temperature, pressure, velocity, species concentrations, and the limit-cycle amplitude, with speedups of more than five orders of magnitude over high-fidelity models. Our ROM simulation is shown to be predictive 200% past the training interval. Moreover, ROM-predicted pressure traces accurately match the phase of the pressure signal and yield good approximations of the limit-cycle amplitude.

Yunyou Huang, Nana Wang, Wanling Gao et al.

Accurate day-ahead individual residential load forecasting is of great importance to various applications of smart grid on day-ahead market. Deep learning, as a powerful machine learning technology, has shown great advantages and promising application in load forecasting tasks. However, deep learning is a computationally-hungry method, and requires high costs (e.g., time, energy and CO2 emission) to train a deep learning model, which aggravates the energy crisis and incurs a substantial burden to the environment. As a consequence, the deep learning methods are difficult to be popularized and applied in the real smart grid environment. In this paper, we propose a low training cost model based on convolutional neural network, namely LoadCNN, for next-day load forecasting of individual resident with reduced training cost. The experiments show that the training time of LoadCNN is only approximately 1/54 of the one of other state-of-the-art models, and energy consumption and CO2 emissions are only approximate 1/45 of those of other state-of-the-art models based on the same indicators. Meanwhile, the prediction accuracy of our model is equal to that of current state-of-the-art models, making LoadCNN the first load forecasting model simultaneously achieving high prediction accuracy and low training costs. LoadCNN is an efficient green model that is able to be quickly, cost-effectively and environmentally-friendly deployed in a realistic smart grid environment.

Cheng Huang, Xiaoming Huo

Distributed statistical inference has recently attracted enormous attention. Many existing work focuses on the averaging estimator. We propose a one-step approach to enhance a simple-averaging based distributed estimator. We derive the corresponding asymptotic properties of the newly proposed estimator. We find that the proposed one-step estimator enjoys the same asymptotic properties as the centralized estimator. The proposed one-step approach merely requires one additional round of communication in relative to the averaging estimator; so the extra communication burden is insignificant. In finite sample cases, numerical examples show that the proposed estimator outperforms the simple averaging estimator with a large margin in terms of the mean squared errors. A potential application of the one-step approach is that one can use multiple machines to speed up large scale statistical inference with little compromise in the quality of estimators. The proposed method becomes more valuable when data can only be available at distributed machines with limited communication bandwidth.