Haipeng Zhang

Yixi Zhou, Fan Zhang, Yu Chen et al.

Financial question answering (QA) over long corporate filings requires evidence to satisfy strict constraints on entities, financial metrics, fiscal periods, and numeric values. However, existing LLM-based rerankers primarily optimize semantic relevance, leading to unstable rankings and opaque decisions on long documents. We propose FinCards, a structured reranking framework that reframes financial evidence selection as constraint satisfaction under a finance-aware schema. FinCards represents filing chunks and questions using aligned schema fields (entities, metrics, periods, and numeric spans), enabling deterministic field-level matching. Evidence is selected via a multi-stage tournament reranking with stability-aware aggregation, producing auditable decision traces. Across two corporate filing QA benchmarks, FinCards substantially improves early-rank retrieval over both lexical and LLM-based reranking baselines, while reducing ranking variance, without requiring model fine-tuning or unpredictable inference budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/XanderZhou2022/FINCARDS.

Yixi Zhou, Fan Zhang, Zhiqiao Guo et al.

Despite strong performance on Text-to-SQL benchmarks, it remains unclear whether LLM-generated SQL programs are structurally reliable. In this work, we investigate the structural behavior of LLM-generated SQL queries and introduce SQLStructEval, a framework for analyzing program structures through canonical abstract syntax tree (AST) representations. Our experiments on the Spider benchmark show that modern LLMs often produce structurally diverse queries for the same input, even when execution results are correct, and that such variance is frequently triggered by surface-level input changes such as paraphrases or schema presentation. We further show that generating queries in a structured space via a compile-style pipeline can improve both execution accuracy and structural consistency. These findings suggest that structural reliability is a critical yet overlooked dimension for evaluating LLM-based program generation systems. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StructEval-2435.

Ziyue Li, Kan Ren, Xinyang Jiang et al.

Fine-tuning pretrained models is a common practice in domain generalization (DG) tasks. However, fine-tuning is usually computationally expensive due to the ever-growing size of pretrained models. More importantly, it may cause over-fitting on source domain and compromise their generalization ability as shown in recent works. Generally, pretrained models possess some level of generalization ability and can achieve decent performance regarding specific domains and samples. However, the generalization performance of pretrained models could vary significantly over different test domains even samples, which raises challenges for us to best leverage pretrained models in DG tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel domain generalization paradigm to better leverage various pretrained models, named specialized ensemble learning for domain generalization (SEDGE). It first trains a linear label space adapter upon fixed pretrained models, which transforms the outputs of the pretrained model to the label space of the target domain. Then, an ensemble network aware of model specialty is proposed to dynamically dispatch proper pretrained models to predict each test sample. Experimental studies on several benchmarks show that SEDGE achieves significant performance improvements comparing to strong baselines including state-of-the-art method in DG tasks and reduces the trainable parameters by ~99% and the training time by ~99.5%.

Zihao Pan, Kai Peng, Shuai Ling et al.

Achieving gender equality is an important pillar for humankind's sustainable future. Pioneering data-driven gender bias research is based on large-scale public records such as scientific papers, patents, and company registrations, covering female researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs, and so on. Since gender information is often missing in relevant datasets, studies rely on tools to infer genders from names. However, available open-sourced Chinese gender-guessing tools are not yet suitable for scientific purposes, which may be partially responsible for female Chinese being underrepresented in mainstream gender bias research and affect their universality. Specifically, these tools focus on character-level information while overlooking the fact that the combinations of Chinese characters in multi-character names, as well as the components and pronunciations of characters, convey important messages. As a first effort, we design a Chinese Heterogeneous Graph Attention (CHGAT) model to capture the heterogeneity in component relationships and incorporate the pronunciations of characters. Our model largely surpasses current tools and also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm. Last but not least, the most popular Chinese name-gender dataset is single-character based with far less female coverage from an unreliable source, naturally hindering relevant studies. We open-source a more balanced multi-character dataset from an official source together with our code, hoping to help future research promoting gender equality.

Jiaqi Liang, Yue Chen, Qize Yu et al.

Furniture assembly is a crucial yet challenging task for robots, requiring precise dual-arm coordination where one arm manipulates parts while the other provides collaborative support and stabilization. To accomplish this task more effectively, robots need to actively adapt support strategies throughout the long-horizon assembly process, while also generalizing across diverse part geometries. We propose A3D, a framework which learns adaptive affordances to identify optimal support and stabilization locations on furniture parts. The method employs dense point-level geometric representations to model part interaction patterns, enabling generalization across varied geometries. To handle evolving assembly states, we introduce an adaptive module that uses interaction feedback to dynamically adjust support strategies during assembly based on previous interactions. We establish a simulation environment featuring 50 diverse parts across 8 furniture types, designed for dual-arm collaboration evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generalizes effectively to diverse part geometries and furniture categories in both simulation and real-world settings.

Hongyuan Tao, Ying Zhang, Zhenhao Tang et al.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in function-level code generation, yet repository-level software engineering tasks remain challenging. Current solutions predominantly rely on proprietary LLM agents, which introduce unpredictability and limit accessibility, raising concerns about data privacy and model customization. This paper investigates whether open-source LLMs can effectively address repository-level tasks without requiring agent-based approaches. We demonstrate this is possible by enabling LLMs to comprehend functions and files within codebases through their semantic information and structural dependencies. To this end, we introduce Code Graph Models (CGMs), which integrate repository code graph structures into the LLM's attention mechanism and map node attributes to the LLM's input space using a specialized adapter. When combined with an agentless graph RAG framework, our approach achieves a 43.00% resolution rate on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark using the open-source Qwen2.5-72B model. This performance ranks first among open weight models, second among methods with open-source systems, and eighth overall, surpassing the previous best open-source model-based method by 12.33%.

Kai Peng, Ying Zhang, Shuai Ling et al.

Celebrities' whereabouts are of pervasive importance. For instance, where politicians go, how often they visit, and who they meet, come with profound geopolitical and economic implications. Although news articles contain travel information of celebrities, it is not possible to perform large-scale and network-wise analysis due to the lack of automatic itinerary detection tools. To design such tools, we have to overcome difficulties from the heterogeneity among news articles: 1)One single article can be noisy, with irrelevant people and locations, especially when the articles are long. 2)Though it may be helpful if we consider multiple articles together to determine a particular trip, the key semantics are still scattered across different articles intertwined with various noises, making it hard to aggregate them effectively. 3)Over 20% of the articles refer to the celebrities' trips indirectly, instead of using the exact celebrity names or location names, leading to large portions of trips escaping regular detecting algorithms. We model text content across articles related to each candidate location as a graph to better associate essential information and cancel out the noises. Besides, we design a special pooling layer based on attention mechanism and node similarity, reducing irrelevant information from longer articles. To make up the missing information resulted from indirect mentions, we construct knowledge sub-graphs for named entities (person, organization, facility, etc.). Specifically, we dynamically update embeddings of event entities like the G7 summit from news descriptions since the properties (date and location) of the event change each time, which is not captured by the pre-trained event representations. The proposed CeleTrip jointly trains these modules, which outperforms all baseline models and achieves 82.53% in the F1 metric.

Xiaocong Du, Haipeng Zhang

Achieving gender equality is a pivotal factor in realizing the UN's Global Goals for Sustainable Development. Gender bias studies work towards this and rely on name-based gender inference tools to assign individual gender labels when gender information is unavailable. However, these tools often inaccurately predict gender for Chinese Pinyin names, leading to potential bias in such studies. With the growing participation of Chinese in international activities, this situation is becoming more severe. Specifically, current tools focus on pronunciation (Pinyin) information, neglecting the fact that the latent connections between Pinyin and Chinese characters (Hanzi) behind convey critical information. As a first effort, we formulate the Pinyin name-gender guessing problem and design a Multi-Task Learning Network assisted by Knowledge Distillation that enables the Pinyin embeddings in the model to possess semantic features of Chinese characters and to learn gender information from Chinese character names. Our open-sourced method surpasses commercial name-gender guessing tools by 9.70\% to 20.08\% relatively, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Xingcheng Xu, Zihao Pan, Haipeng Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable proficiency on solving diverse problems. However, their generalization ability is not always satisfying and the generalization problem is common for generative transformer models in general. Researchers take basic mathematical tasks like n-digit addition or multiplication as important perspectives for investigating their generalization behaviors. It is observed that when training models on n-digit operations (e.g., additions) in which both input operands are n-digit in length, models generalize successfully on unseen n-digit inputs (in-distribution (ID) generalization), but fail miserably on longer, unseen cases (out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization). We bring this unexplained performance drop into attention and ask whether there is systematic OOD generalization. Towards understanding LLMs, we train various smaller language models which may share the same underlying mechanism. We discover that the strong ID generalization stems from structured representations, while behind the unsatisfying OOD performance, the models still exhibit clear learned algebraic structures. Specifically, these models map unseen OOD inputs to outputs with learned equivalence relations in the ID domain, which we call the equivalence generalization. These findings deepen our knowledge regarding the generalizability of generative models including LLMs, and provide insights into potential avenues for improvement.

Zhongyang Liu, Haoyu Pei, Xiangyi Xiao et al.

Due to the high value and high failure rate of startups, predicting their success has become a critical challenge across interdisciplinary research. Existing approaches typically model success prediction from the perspective of a single decision-maker, overlooking the collective dynamics of investor groups that dominate real-world venture capital (VC) decisions. In this paper, we propose SimVC-CAS, a novel collective agent system that simulates VC decision-making as a multi-agent interaction process. By designing role-playing agents and a GNN-based supervised interaction module, we reformulate startup financing prediction as a group decision-making task, capturing both enterprise fundamentals and the behavioral dynamics of potential investor networks. Each agent embodies an investor with unique traits and preferences, enabling heterogeneous evaluation and realistic information exchange through a graph-structured co-investment network. Using real-world data from PitchBook and under strict data leakage controls, we show that SimVC-CAS significantly improves predictive accuracy while providing interpretable, multiperspective reasoning, for example, approximately 25% relative improvement with respect to average precision@10. SimVC-CAS also sheds light on other complex group decision scenarios.

Haoyu Pei, Zhongyang Liu, Xiangyi Xiao et al.

Most venture capital (VC) investments fail, while a few deliver outsized returns. Accurately predicting startup success requires synthesizing complex relational evidence, including company disclosures, investor track records, and investment network structures, through explicit reasoning to form coherent, interpretable investment theses. Traditional machine learning and graph neural networks both lack this reasoning capability. Large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning but face a modality mismatch with graphs. Recent graph-LLM methods target in-graph tasks where answers lie within the graph, whereas VC prediction is off-graph: the target exists outside the network. The core challenge is selecting graph paths that maximize predictor performance on an external objective while enabling step-by-step reasoning. We present MIRAGE-VC, a multi-perspective retrieval-augmented generation framework that addresses two obstacles: path explosion (thousands of candidate paths overwhelm LLM context) and heterogeneous evidence fusion (different startups need different analytical emphasis). Our information-gain-driven path retriever iteratively selects high-value neighbors, distilling investment networks into compact chains for explicit reasoning. A multi-agent architecture integrates three evidence streams via a learnable gating mechanism based on company attributes. Under strict anti-leakage controls, MIRAGE-VC achieves +5.0% F1 and +16.6% PrecisionAt5, and sheds light on other off-graph prediction tasks such as recommendation and risk assessment. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MIRAGE-VC-323F.

Xiaocong Du, Haoyu Pei, Haipeng Zhang

Classical Chinese poetry is a vital and enduring part of Chinese literature, conveying profound emotional resonance. Existing studies analyze sentiment based on textual meanings, overlooking the unique rhythmic and visual features inherent in poetry,especially since it is often recited and accompanied by Chinese paintings. In this work, we propose a dialect-enhanced multimodal framework for classical Chinese poetry sentiment analysis. We extract sentence-level audio features from the poetry and incorporate audio from multiple dialects,which may retain regional ancient Chinese phonetic features, enriching the phonetic representation. Additionally, we generate sentence-level visual features, and the multimodal features are fused with textual features enhanced by LLM translation through multimodal contrastive representation learning. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets, achieving at least 2.51% improvement in accuracy and 1.63% in macro F1. We open-source the code to facilitate research in this area and provide insights for general multimodal Chinese representation.

Zhaoru Ke, Hang Yu, Jianguo Li et al.

Current directed graph embedding methods build upon undirected techniques but often inadequately capture directed edge information, leading to challenges such as: (1) Suboptimal representations for nodes with low in/out-degrees, due to the insufficient neighbor interactions; (2) Limited inductive ability for representing new nodes post-training; (3) Narrow generalizability, as training is overly coupled with specific tasks. In response, we propose DUPLEX, an inductive framework for complex embeddings of directed graphs. It (1) leverages Hermitian adjacency matrix decomposition for comprehensive neighbor integration, (2) employs a dual GAT encoder for directional neighbor modeling, and (3) features two parameter-free decoders to decouple training from particular tasks. DUPLEX outperforms state-of-the-art models, especially for nodes with sparse connectivity, and demonstrates robust inductive capability and adaptability across various tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/alipay/DUPLEX.

Xin Wang, Haipeng Zhang, Mang Li et al.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables fine-grained visual search by combining a reference image with a textual modification. While supervised CIR methods achieve high accuracy, their reliance on costly triplet annotations motivates zero-shot solutions. The core challenge in zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) stems from a fundamental dilemma: existing text-centric or diffusion-based approaches struggle to effectively bridge the vision-language modality gap. To address this, we propose Fusion-Diff, a novel generative editing framework with high effectiveness and data efficiency designed for multimodal alignment. First, it introduces a multimodal fusion feature editing strategy within a joint vision-language (VL) space, substantially narrowing the modality gap. Second, to maximize data efficiency, the framework incorporates a lightweight Control-Adapter, enabling state-of-the-art performance through fine-tuning on only a limited-scale synthetic dataset of 200K samples. Extensive experiments on standard CIR benchmarks (CIRR, FashionIQ, and CIRCO) demonstrate that Fusion-Diff significantly outperforms prior zero-shot approaches. We further enhance the interpretability of our model by visualizing the fused multimodal representations.

Ying Zhang, Hang Yu, Haipeng Zhang et al.

Text-rich graphs, which integrate complex structural dependencies with abundant textual information, are ubiquitous yet remain challenging for existing learning paradigms. Conventional methods and even LLM-hybrids compress rich text into static embeddings or summaries before structural reasoning, creating an information bottleneck and detaching updates from the raw content. We argue that in text-rich graphs, the text is not merely a node attribute but the primary medium through which structural relationships are manifested. We introduce RAMP, a Raw-text Anchored Message Passing approach that moves beyond using LLMs as mere feature extractors and instead recasts the LLM itself as a graph-native aggregation operator. RAMP exploits the text-rich nature of the graph via a novel dual-representation scheme: it anchors inference on each node's raw text during each iteration while propagating dynamically optimized messages from neighbors. It further handles both discriminative and generative tasks under a single unified generative formulation. Extensive experiments show that RAMP effectively bridges the gap between graph propagation and deep text reasoning, achieving competitive performance and offering new insights into the role of LLMs as graph kernels for general-purpose graph learning.

Xingcheng Xu, Zibo Zhao, Haipeng Zhang et al.

Transformer-based models excel in various tasks but their generalization capabilities, especially in arithmetic reasoning, remain incompletely understood. Arithmetic tasks provide a controlled framework to explore these capabilities, yet performance anomalies persist, such as inconsistent effectiveness in multiplication and erratic generalization in modular addition (e.g., modulo 100 vs. 101). This paper develops a unified theoretical framework for understanding the generalization behaviors of transformers in arithmetic tasks, focusing on length generalization. Through detailed analysis of addition, multiplication, and modular operations, we reveal that translation invariance in addition aligns with relative positional encoding for robust generalization, while base mismatch in modular operations disrupts this alignment. Experiments across GPT-family models validate our framework, confirming its ability to predict generalization behaviors. Our work highlights the importance of task structure and training data distribution for achieving data-efficient and structure-aware training, providing a systematic approach to understanding of length generalization in transformers.

Zhenyu Yang, Haiming Zhu, Rihui Zhang et al.

Background: Deep learning has significantly advanced medical image analysis, with Vision Transformers (ViTs) offering a powerful alternative to convolutional models by modeling long-range dependencies through self-attention. However, ViTs are inherently data-intensive and lack domain-specific inductive biases, limiting their applicability in medical imaging. In contrast, radiomics provides interpretable, handcrafted descriptors of tissue heterogeneity but suffers from limited scalability and integration into end-to-end learning frameworks. In this work, we propose the Radiomics-Embedded Vision Transformer (RE-ViT) that combines radiomic features with data-driven visual embeddings within a ViT backbone. Purpose: To develop a hybrid RE-ViT framework that integrates radiomics and patch-wise ViT embeddings through early fusion, enhancing robustness and performance in medical image classification. Methods: Following the standard ViT pipeline, images were divided into patches. For each patch, handcrafted radiomic features were extracted and fused with linearly projected pixel embeddings. The fused representations were normalized, positionally encoded, and passed to the ViT encoder. A learnable [CLS] token aggregated patch-level information for classification. We evaluated RE-ViT on three public datasets (including BUSI, ChestXray2017, and Retinal OCT) using accuracy, macro AUC, sensitivity, and specificity. RE-ViT was benchmarked against CNN-based (VGG-16, ResNet) and hybrid (TransMed) models. Results: RE-ViT achieved state-of-the-art results: on BUSI, AUC=0.950+/-0.011; on ChestXray2017, AUC=0.989+/-0.004; on Retinal OCT, AUC=0.986+/-0.001, which outperforms other comparison models. Conclusions: The RE-ViT framework effectively integrates radiomics with ViT architectures, demonstrating improved performance and generalizability across multimodal medical image classification tasks.

Yao Zhao, Haipeng Zhang, Shiwei Lyu et al.

Uplift modeling is widely used in performance marketing to estimate effects of promotion campaigns (e.g., increase of customer retention rate). Since it is impossible to observe outcomes of a recipient in treatment (e.g., receiving a certain promotion) and control (e.g., without promotion) groups simultaneously (i.e., counter-factual), uplift models are mainly trained on instances of treatment and control groups separately to form two models respectively, and uplifts are predicted by the difference of predictions from these two models (i.e., two-model method). When responses are noisy and the treatment effect is fractional, induced individual uplift predictions will be inaccurate, resulting in targeting undesirable customers. Though it is impossible to obtain the ideal ground-truth individual uplifts, known as Individual Treatment Effects (ITEs), alternatively, an average uplift of a group of users, called Average Treatment Effect (ATE), can be observed from experimental deliveries. Upon this, similar to Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) in which each training sample is a bag of instances, our framework sums up individual user uplift predictions for each bag of users as its bag-wise ATE prediction, and regularizes it to its ATE label, thus learning more accurate individual uplifts. Additionally, to amplify the fractional treatment effect, bags are composed of instances with adjacent individual uplift predictions, instead of random instances. Experiments conducted on two datasets show the effectiveness and universality of the proposed framework.

Laixin Xie, Ying Zhang, Xiyuan Wang et al.

Influence Maximization (IM) in temporal graphs focuses on identifying influential "seeds" that are pivotal for maximizing network expansion. We advocate defining these seeds through Influence Propagation Paths (IPPs), which is essential for scaling up the network. Our focus lies in efficiently labeling IPPs and accurately predicting these seeds, while addressing the often-overlooked cold-start issue prevalent in temporal networks. Our strategy introduces a motif-based labeling method and a tensorized Temporal Graph Network (TGN) tailored for multi-relational temporal graphs, bolstering prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. Moreover, we augment cold-start nodes with new neighbors from historical data sharing similar IPPs. The recommendation system within an online team-based gaming environment presents subtle impact on the social network, forming multi-relational (i.e., weak and strong) temporal graphs for our empirical IM study. We conduct offline experiments to assess prediction accuracy and model training efficiency, complemented by online A/B testing to validate practical network growth and the effectiveness in addressing the cold-start issue.

Zibo Zhao, Yuanting Zha, Haipeng Zhang et al.

Self-reflection capabilities emerge in Large Language Models after RL post-training, with multi-turn RL achieving substantial gains over SFT counterparts. Yet the mechanism of how a unified optimization objective gives rise to functionally distinct capabilities of generating solutions and evaluating when to revise them remains opaque. To address this question, we introduce the Gradient Attribution Property to characterize how reward gradients distribute across policy components, formalized through the Two-Stage Decision-Sampling (DS) Hypothesis, which decomposes the policy into sampling ($π_{sample}$) for generation and decision ($π_{d}$) for verification. We prove that surrogate rewards exhibit Balanced Gradient Attribution, while SFT and KL penalties exhibit Unbalanced Gradient Attribution, with length-weighting creating asymmetric regularization that constrains $π_{sample}$ while leaving $π_{d}$ under-optimized, providing an theoretical explanation of why RL succeeds where SFT fails. We also empirically validate our theoretical predictions on arithmetic reasoning demonstrates that RL's superior generalization stems primarily from improved decision-making ($π_{d}$) rather than sampling capabilities, providing a first-principles mechanistic explanation for self-correction in thinking models.

Xiaofeng Li, Xiangyi Xiao, Xiaocong Du et al.

Urban economic vitality is a crucial indicator of a city's long-term growth potential, comprising key metrics such as the annual number of new companies and the population employed. However, modeling urban economic vitality remains challenging. This study develops ECO-GROW, a multi-graph framework modeling China's inter-city networks (2005-2021) to generate urban embeddings that model urban economic vitality. Traditional approaches relying on static city-level aggregates fail to capture a fundamental dynamic: the developmental trajectory of one city today may mirror that of its structurally similar counterparts tomorrow. ECO-GROW overcomes this limitation by integrating industrial linkages, POI similarities, migration similarities and temporal network evolution over 15 years. The framework combines a Dynamic Top-K GCN to adaptively select influential inter-city connections and an adaptive Graph Scorer mechanism to dynamically weight cross-regional impacts. Additionally, the model incorporates a link prediction task based on Barabasi Proximity, optimizing the graph representation. Experimental results demonstrate ECO-GROW's superior accuracy in predicting entrepreneurial activities and employment trends compared to conventional models. By open-sourcing our code, we enable government agencies and public sector organizations to leverage big data analytics for evidence-based urban planning, economic policy formulation, and resource allocation decisions that benefit society at large.

Ziwei Deng, Mian Deng, Chenjing Liang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored across a range of reasoning tasks. However, LLMs sometimes struggle with reasoning tasks under uncertainty that are relatively easy for humans, such as planning actions in stochastic environments. The adoption of LLMs for reasoning is impeded by uncertainty challenges, such as LLM uncertainty and environmental uncertainty. LLM uncertainty arises from the stochastic sampling process inherent to LLMs. Most LLM-based Decision-Making (LDM) approaches address LLM uncertainty through multiple reasoning chains or search trees. However, these approaches overlook environmental uncertainty, which leads to poor performance in environments with stochastic state transitions. Some recent LDM approaches deal with uncertainty by forecasting the probability of unknown variables. However, they are not designed for multi-step reasoning tasks that require interaction with the environment. To address uncertainty in LLM decision-making, we introduce PlanU, an LLM-based planning method that captures uncertainty within Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). PlanU models the return of each node in the MCTS as a quantile distribution, which uses a set of quantiles to represent the return distribution. To balance exploration and exploitation during tree search, PlanU introduces an Upper Confidence Bounds with Curiosity (UCC) score which estimates the uncertainty of MCTS nodes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PlanU in LLM-based reasoning tasks under uncertainty.

Haolin Li, Haipeng Zhang, Mang Li et al.

As large language models (LLMs) rapidly advance, performance on high-resource languages (e.g., English, Chinese) is nearing saturation, yet remains substantially lower for low-resource languages (e.g., Urdu, Thai) due to limited training data, machine-translation noise, and unstable cross-lingual alignment. We introduce LiRA (Linguistic Robust Anchoring for Large Language Models), a training framework that robustly improves cross-lingual representations under low-resource conditions while jointly strengthening retrieval and reasoning. LiRA comprises two modules: (i) Arca (Anchored Representation Composition Architecture), which anchors low-resource languages to an English semantic space via anchor-based alignment and multi-agent collaborative encoding, preserving geometric stability in a shared embedding space; and (ii) LaSR (Language-coupled Semantic Reasoner), which adds a language-aware lightweight reasoning head with consistency regularization on top of Arca's multilingual representations, unifying the training objective to enhance cross-lingual understanding, retrieval, and reasoning robustness. We further construct and release a multilingual product retrieval dataset covering five Southeast Asian and two South Asian languages. Experiments across low-resource benchmarks (cross-lingual retrieval, semantic similarity, and reasoning) show consistent gains and robustness under few-shot and noise-amplified settings; ablations validate the contribution of both Arca and LaSR. Code will be released on GitHub and the dataset on Hugging Face.

Yubin Kim, Hyewon Jeong, Chanwoo Park et al.

Large language models (LLMs) deployed as agents introduce significant safety risks in clinical settings due to their potential for error and single points of failure. We introduce Tiered Agentic Oversight (TAO), a hierarchical multi-agent system that enhances AI safety through layered, automated supervision. Inspired by clinical hierarchies (e.g., nurse-physician-specialist) in hospital, TAO routes tasks to specialized agents based on complexity, creating a robust safety framework through automated inter- and intra-tier communication and role-playing. Crucially, this hierarchical structure functions as an effective error-correction mechanism, absorbing up to 24% of individual agent errors before they can compound. Our experiments reveal TAO outperforms single-agent and other multi-agent systems on 4 out of 5 healthcare safety benchmarks, with up to an 8.2% improvement. Ablation studies confirm key design principles of the system: (i) its adaptive architecture is over 3% safer than static, single-tier configurations, and (ii) its lower tiers are indispensable, as their removal causes the most significant degradation in overall safety. Finally, we validated the system's synergy with human doctors in a user study where a physician, acting as the highest tier agent, provided corrective feedback that improved medical triage accuracy from 40% to 60%. Project Page: https://tiered-agentic-oversight.github.io/

Kaihao Guo, Tianpei Jiang, Haipeng Zhang

Event extraction is a classic task in natural language processing with wide use in handling large amount of yet rapidly growing financial, legal, medical, and government documents which often contain multiple events with their elements scattered and mixed across the documents, making the problem much more difficult. Though the underlying relations between event elements to be extracted provide helpful contextual information, they are somehow overlooked in prior studies. We showcase the enhancement to this task brought by utilizing the knowledge graph that captures entity relations and their attributes. We propose a first event extraction framework that embeds a knowledge graph through a Graph Neural Network and integrates the embedding with regular features, all at document-level. Specifically, for extracting events from Chinese financial announcements, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 5.3% in F1-score.

Shiwei Lyu, Shuai Ling, Kaihao Guo et al.

Predicting the start-ups that will eventually succeed is essentially important for the venture capital business and worldwide policy makers, especially at an early stage such that rewards can possibly be exponential. Though various empirical studies and data-driven modeling work have been done, the predictive power of the complex networks of stakeholders including venture capital investors, start-ups, and start-ups' managing members has not been thoroughly explored. We design an incremental representation learning mechanism and a sequential learning model, utilizing the network structure together with the rich attributes of the nodes. In general, our method achieves the state-of-the-art prediction performance on a comprehensive dataset of global venture capital investments and surpasses human investors by large margins. Specifically, it excels at predicting the outcomes for start-ups in industries such as healthcare and IT. Meanwhile, we shed light on impacts on start-up success from observable factors including gender, education, and networking, which can be of value for practitioners as well as policy makers when they screen ventures of high growth potentials.

Haoqi Yuan, Ruihai Wu, Andrew Zhao et al.

Learning an accurate model of the environment is essential for model-based control tasks. Existing methods in robotic visuomotor control usually learn from data with heavily labelled actions, object entities or locations, which can be demanding in many cases. To cope with this limitation, we propose a method, dubbed DMotion, that trains a forward model from video data only, via disentangling the motion of controllable agent to model the transition dynamics. An object extractor and an interaction learner are trained in an end-to-end manner without supervision. The agent's motions are explicitly represented using spatial transformation matrices containing physical meanings. In the experiments, DMotion achieves superior performance on learning an accurate forward model in a Grid World environment, as well as a more realistic robot control environment in simulation. With the accurate learned forward models, we further demonstrate their usage in model predictive control as an effective approach for robotic manipulations.

Haipeng Zhang, Zhong Cao, Ziang Yan et al.

For visual object recognition tasks, the illumination variations can cause distinct changes in object appearance and thus confuse the deep neural network based recognition models. Especially for some rare illumination conditions, collecting sufficient training samples could be time-consuming and expensive. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a novel neural network architecture called Separating-Illumination Network (Sill-Net). Sill-Net learns to separate illumination features from images, and then during training we augment training samples with these separated illumination features in the feature space. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in several object classification benchmarks.

Yixin Liu, Haipeng Zhang, Tao Feng

In order to protect the security of network data, a high speed chip module for encrypting and decrypting of network data packet is designed. The chip module is oriented for internet information security SOC (System on Chip) design. During the design process, AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and 3DES (Data Encryption Standard) encryption algorithm are adopted to protect the security of network data. The following points are focused: (1) The SOC (System on Chip) design methodology based on IP (Intellectual Property) core is used. AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and 3DES (Data Encryption Standard) IP (Intellectual Property) cores are embedded in the chip module, peripheral control sub-modules are designed to control the encryption-decryption module, which is capable of shortening the design period of the chip module. (2) The implementation of encryption-decryption with hardware was presented, which improves the safety of data through the encryption-decryption chip and reduce the load of CPU. (3) In our hardware solution, two AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) cores are used to work in parallel, which improves the speed of the encryption module. Moreover, the key length of AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption algorithm is designed with three optional configurations at 128 bits, 256 bits and 192 bits respectively and six optional encryption algorithm modes: CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) mode, ECB (Electronic Code Book) mode, GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) mode, XTS(cipherteXT Stealing) mode, CTR (CounTeR) mode and 3DES respectively, which adds the flexibility to its applications.