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Bing Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Bing Zhao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

SWE-Test: Benchmarking LLM Vulnerability Discovery via Input Prediction

Vulnerability discovery is becoming an important ability of large language model (LLM) agents: agents that silently miss real defects leave critical software exposed. Rigorously measuring this ability is therefore urgent, but existing benchmarks are gameable through data contamination, score recall against an unknowable vulnerability set, often rely on synthetic bugs, and report a single end-to-end verdict that cannot localize where an agent fails. Vulnerability discovery is a composite ability: an agent must comprehend source code, infer input constraints, construct inputs, execute them, and iteratively correct from feedback. We recast its measurement as an input-prediction task with a closed, deterministic ground truth: using coverage-guided fuzzing, we mine deep target branches in real-world C/C++ programs and ask an agent to predict an input that drives execution to a given branch. This decomposes discovery into three task modes over 22 real-world C/C++ programs spanning 15 domains. Open-loop and Feedback-enabled share 60 fixed-target task instances across 16 of these codebases (13 domains), testing input construction without and with a distance oracle to isolate code comprehension from feedback-driven correction. Online Arena instead removes the predefined target and scores path exploration by coverage gain on a separate, partially overlapping pool of 11 programs; agents collectively confirmed 13 distinct bugs across six programs. Evaluating 15 default-effort model-scaffold configurations, the best reaches only 55.0% pass rate in the Feedback-enabled mode, and the mean across seven paired Claude Code configurations is 36.4% with feedback versus 19.3% without. Decomposing failures, we find constraint inference, not navigation, is the dominant bottleneck. We release SWE-Test with a turnkey evaluation environment.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

The Illusion of $\textit{What If}$: Evaluating the Breakdown of Counterfactual Reasoning in LLMs

Counterfactual reasoning requires models to reason beyond the observed world and explain how altered conditions propagate through downstream consequences. Existing benchmarks largely target bounded settings with fixed variables or single gold outcomes, overlooking open-domain scenarios requiring causal-process evaluation. To this end, we present $\textbf{WhatIfBench}$, a diagnostic benchmark for open-domain, open-form, long-horizon counterfactual causal reasoning, containing 220 what-if questions across STEM, HSS, and Hybrid scenarios. To evaluate free-form responses, we further propose $\textbf{PRISM}$, which first converts each natural-language explanation into a Response-Derived Semantic Causal Graph of events, states, and mechanisms. On top of this graph, PRISM then jointly applies a Process Metric assessing graph-level causal validity and a Rubric Metric assessing answer-level explanatory adequacy. Evaluating six frontier LLMs with this framework, we find that WhatIfBench remains far from saturated: even the strongest model reaches only a 64.62% final score. Further analysis reveals persistent causal gaps, premise drift, and topology fragmentation, suggesting that fluent counterfactual narratives often mask fragile causal processes. The benchmark, code, and evaluation scripts are available at $\href{https://github.com/zju-gt/WhatIfBench}{WhatIfBench}$.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

RubricRM: Generative Reward Modeling via Dynamic Rubrics for Image Generation and Editing

Reward models play an essential role in aligning visual generative models, yet most existing visual reward models use a single scalar score or rely on fixed criteria that cannot adapt to different instructions. This limits both interpretability and task sensitivity, especially for text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing, where different inputs require different evaluation dimensions. We propose RubricRM, a pairwise generative reward modeling framework that first produces an input-specific rubric with evaluation dimensions, weights, and scoring criteria, and then applies the rubric to score candidate images. We train dedicated RubricRM models for text-to-image generation and image editing using a two-stage training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning teaches the model the rubric-based scoring paradigm, while GRPO further improves scoring through fine-grained dimension-level rewards. Experiments on multiple generation and editing benchmarks show that RubricRM outperforms existing specialized reward models and remains competitive with strong proprietary MLLM judges despite using smaller backbones. Our models, data, and code are available at https://github.com/zijiankan/RubricRM.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

OmniJudge or OmniBias? Diagnosing Multimodal Judges through Balanced, Decoupled Lenses

Multimodal understanding models that can jointly judge text-to-image (T2I), text-to-video (T2V) and text-to-speech (TTS) generation are increasingly used as "OmniJudges" for evaluation and automatic annotation. How reliably they understand what they score remains unclear, since existing benchmarks and training data tend to overemphasize positive examples and to conflate distinct failure modes, so a judge may score well without recognizing failures while its capability gaps stay hidden. Motivated by this, we introduce D3-Omni, a balanced and decoupled benchmark for diagnosing fine-grained multimodal understanding, covering 53 orthogonal binary dimensions (17/22/14) and 10,671 samples (3,526/1,998/5,147) across the three tasks. Rather than re-generating outputs, which may leak information across dimensions, we fix verified fully positive seeds and derive negatives through controlled prompt rewriting and atomic, dimension-isolating perturbations. The resulting D3 design is Dual-balanced, which helps alleviate negative-sample scarcity and per-dimension label imbalance; Decoupled, so that each error is attributable to a single capability; and Dynamic, steering construction toward under-represented regions of the label distribution as generative models improve.The suite reaches near 1:1 per-dimension parity and a uniform distribution over all total-score levels. Under this balanced view, even strong OmniJudges tend to struggle on modality-related dimensions, to confirm satisfied requirements far more reliably than they detect violated ones, and to treat nominally distinct attributes as largely a single decision, suggesting that aggregate accuracy may hide systematic blind spots that a balanced and decoupled lens can help expose and, in turn, address.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Science Edge Evaluation: SEE the Missing Step Toward Real Scientific Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in scientific discovery, yet it remains unclear whether they can support complex real laboratory science. Here we introduce Science Edge Evaluation (SEE), a multimodal benchmark of expert-curated questions grounded in peer-reviewed literature and experimental practice in chemistry, biology, and materials science. Evaluation of 19 multimodal large language models (MLLMs) shows that even the best-performing model reaches only 48.7% accuracy. Moreover, general-purpose models outperform science-specialized models on average. In the visual-agent evaluation, the use of tools increases the best accuracy to 52.7%. Tool use can expand the information available to models, but more information does not necessarily lead to reliable scientific reasoning. The key challenge is whether models can manage tool-derived information within the boundaries of the original experimental evidence. Together, these findings reveal that current MLLMs still cannot reliably make justified and evidence-bounded inferences from experimental results, which is an essential capability in real scientific discovery. Bridging this gap requires MLLMs to transition from explaining established scientific concepts to deriving novel and evidence-based insights from experimental data.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Right Answer, Wrong Method: Shortcut Hacking Misleads the Evaluation of LLM Reasoning on Frontier Science Benchmarks

Scientific reasoning benchmarks typically evaluate large language models (LLMs) using final-answer accuracy. However, a correct answer does not necessarily demonstrate the reasoning capability targeted by the problem. We identify Solution Hacking, a failure mode in which an LLM reaches the correct answer through invalid shortcuts, such as numerical search, enumeration, guessing, or answer-first verification, without providing a valid task-targeted derivation. We systematically analyze this phenomenon across difficulty levels, scientific domains, and frontier models. Solution hacking increases sharply with benchmark difficulty, from 2.2\% on common problems to 28.3\% on Olympiad-level problems and 37.4\% on HLE. Moreover, 8.2\%-44.1\% of answers credited as correct across frontier models are identified as hacked solutions. We further develop expert-inspired anti-hacking strategies, including an automatic judge and a test-time instruction. The results show that suppressing shortcut behavior substantially reduces reported accuracy while having a smaller effect on correct and non-hacked accuracy. These findings reveal that answer-only evaluation can overestimate the scientific reasoning capabilities of frontier LLMs.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver

Large language model (LLM) agents may recover from a failure within an episode or after a retry, yet the same execution failure can recur in later tasks because post-episode feedback rarely revises the persistent harness that guides future interactions. Static harnesses improve reliability through fixed tools, context, memory, and workflow structures, but remain unchanged after deployment. We propose $\textbf{Living-Harness}$, a self-evolving agent harness that converts each completed trajectory and its evaluator signals into posterior evidence for bounded harness updates. Guided by a domain-level $\textbf{Evolution-SOP}$ ($\textbf{S}$tandard $\textbf{O}$perating $\textbf{P}$rocedure), Living-Harness extracts an episode abstraction and structured update evidence, and writes two complementary forms of procedural knowledge: episodic memory that records trigger conditions, failure patterns, and recovery actions, and a state graph that records state nodes, repair edges, and transition rules. The updated harness state is retrieved to guide future interactions, while tools and base context remain frozen, allowing procedural repairs to accumulate across evolution cycles. On eight interactive environments derived from $\tau^2$-Bench and MultiWOZ-2.4, Living-Harness improves average Pass@1 over the strongest interactive baseline by 10.07 and 9.91 percentage points, respectively, and supports retrieval-only reuse of the evolved harness state across model backbones. Our code will be made publicly available soon at https://github.com/anotherbricki/Living-Harness.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

FilmBench: A Film-Grade Benchmark for Cinematic Video Generation

Progress in video generation keeps narrowing the visual gap between AI-generated and professionally produced footage, yet most benchmarks still draw prompts from web sources or LLM templates and score them with untrained, generic multimodal models. More fundamentally, their evaluation taxonomies remain rudimentary (overall visual quality, coarse text alignment and temporal smoothness) rather than the professional Cinematic Language criteria by which films are actually made and judged, so they assess basic video plausibility rather than film-grade craft. We introduce FilmBench, a text-to-video (T2V) and reference-to-video (R2V) benchmark grounded in the professional Cinematic Language of the film- academy tradition and co-developed with directors and faculty from the Beijing Film Academy and the Hujing Digital Media & Entertainment Group film studio. It rests on three choices. First, prompts are reverse-engineered from clips of award-winning films spanning 20 cinematic genres and chosen by professional directors, so every prompt is anchored to a verified live-action reference; the prompts follow real shot lists, and most script multiple shots (1,056 of the 1,169 prompts are multi-shot), unlike prior single-clip benchmarks. Second, evaluation follows a three-level Cinematic taxonomy of 3 axes, 12 components and 35 (T2V) +3 (R2V-only) sub-metrics. Third, we develop an in-house expert-grade automatic evaluation agent and open-source its core suite of Cinematic Language operators (FilmOps). Benchmarking leading video generation models (9 for T2V, 7 for R2V), the evaluator reproduces the human model ranking at model-level Spearman \r{ho} = 0.95 (T2V) and 0.96 (R2V). Scores fall well below prior web-style benchmarks, with two consistent gaps in dynamic aesthetics and a marked single- to multi-shot performance drop that widens for weaker models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Are the Financial Reasoning from LLMs Credible? A Real World Test over Long-Horizon Statements

Do Large Language Models (LLMs) possess genuine structural reasoning, or merely rely on surface-level pattern matching? The financial domain, demanding numerical precision and multi-step logic over long contexts, is an ideal testbed. Existing benchmarks fail to capture real-world industrial complexity, predominantly relying on multiple-choice questions or single-hop QA over cropped tables while ignoring intricate cross-statement dynamics and temporal de-cumulation. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinIndices, a large-scale benchmark evaluating data-processing fidelity over uncropped financial statements (up to 32K tokens). Utilizing an automated synthesis pipeline with adversarial traps, FinIndices encompasses Single-Index computation and Table-Index tabulation to test complex domain, temporal, and caliber reasoning. Our evaluation reveals two severe LLM vulnerabilities. First, a "Knowledge Bottleneck": despite memorizing formulas during pre-training, models demonstrate fragile pattern matching. Removing explicit formula hints causes performance to collapse (e.g., Gemini-3.1-Pro drops from 70.70% to 38.22% on table tasks), exposing fatal flaws in temporal de-cumulation and stock-flow caliber mismatch. Second, a "Structural Bottleneck": the intense cognitive load of generating multi-metric, multi-period tables actively drains reasoning capacity. Under structural pressure, LLMs that flawlessly execute isolated derivations regress to shallow heuristics, such as fetching incorrect adjacent columns or substituting deep accounting adjustments with lazy literal arithmetic. Finally, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) yields substantial zero-hint gains (+8.54% Single, +3.82% Table), validating that structured logic can be partially restored via data-centric alignment.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Before the Action: Benchmarking LLMs on Prospective Hypothesis Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) excel at answering pre-specified questions, yet their ability to navigate the open-ended, pre-conclusion stage of discovery remains largely unmeasured. We introduce Prospective Hypothesis Discovery (PHD), which asks models to autonomously construct grounded, discriminative, and testable hypothesis spaces from inconclusive evidence, including anomalous observations and fragmented records, to guide subsequent investigation. To evaluate this capability, we introduce HypoArena, comprising HypoData, a benchmark of 988 cases across six scientific and analytical domains, and HypoEval, an evaluation framework for open-ended hypothesis sets. To construct HypoData at scale, we propose Retrospective Context Regression, a Forge--Audit pipeline that reconstructs pre-conclusion contexts from completed expert documents by removing explicit conclusions, target hypotheses, and retrospective causal attributions while preserving the factual substrate. Because PHD admits multiple valid outputs, HypoEval combines bidirectional pairwise judgments with Bradley--Terry--Davidson aggregation for ranking and six-dimensional rubric scoring for diagnosis. Experiments on 15 frontier LLMs reveal clear capability stratification and model-dependent effects of structured analytical skills, with gains for several lower-performing models on HypoArena but regressions for other systems, including a top-performing model. Compared with absolute rubric scoring, arena evaluation resolves finer-grained differences among models, with aggregated rankings showing strong agreement with human experts and an independent judge. Together, these results support treating PHD as a distinct target for evaluating how LLMs formulate investigative directions when final conclusions are withheld. Our code and data are publicly available at github.com/SKYLENAGE-AI/HypoArena and github.com/SKYLENAGE-AI/HypoArena.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Effect of pressure on the magnetic properties of (Co$_{0.5}$Fe$_{0.5}$)$_5$GeTe$_2$

Cobalt-doped Fe$_5$GeTe$_2$ possesses a rich magnetic phase diagram as a function of Co concentration. The nature of magnetic order in (Co$_{0.5}$Fe$_{0.5}$)$_5$GeTe$_2$ is especially interesting, as it has been shown to exhibit ferromagnetic order, A-type antiferromagnetic (AFM) order, or potentially both at the same time. Here we present magnetoresistance measurements on antiferromagnetic (Co$_{0.5}$Fe$_{0.5}$)$_5$GeTe$_2$ at a series of pressures and extract the anisotropy and interlayer exchange fields using the two-sublattice model. We show a 50 % increase of the interlayer exchange at 2 GPa, highlighting the sensitivity of magnetic properties to interlayer distance. In addition, we find that the sharp hysteretic transitions observed within the AFM state can be qualitatively described by a linear chain model, which suggests an even-odd effect as a function of layer number instead of a coexisting ferromagnetic phase.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2026

Discovering Millions of Interpretable Features with Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for decomposing superposed language model representations into sparse and interpretable features. However, training SAEs is computationally expensive, and available open-source SAE models remain limited. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Qwen3-Instruct SAE}, a comprehensive suite of SAEs trained on the Qwen3 instruction-tuned model family, covering Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-8B. For Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B, we train layer-wise SAEs at three key activation sites: residual streams, MLP outputs, and attention outputs. For Qwen3-8B, we train SAEs on a subset of residual stream layers. We systematically evaluate these SAEs using both activation-level reconstruction metrics and model-level recovery metrics, revealing distinct sparsity--fidelity trade-offs across layers and components. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of Qwen3-Instruct SAE through a refusal-steering case study, showing that selected SAE features can causally steer instruction-tuned Qwen3 models toward refusal behavior. Our release provides a practical resource for studying sparse representations, feature-level mechanisms, and behavioral interventions in instruction-tuned language models

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

DLawBench: Evaluating LLMs Through Multi-Turn Legal Consultation

Lawyer-client consultation is a critical starting point for legal services. Effective legal assistance hinges on eliciting sufficient and truthful information from clients in order to devise strategies that best protect their interests. This task requires Large Language Models (LLMs) not only to perform robust legal reasoning, but also to strategically elicit material facts through multi-turn interactions and effectively guide clients with diverse personalities. Yet existing legal benchmarks overlook this interactive capability. To fill this gap, we introduce DLawBench, a diagnostic benchmark for real-world legal consultation. Drawing on realistic client behavior, we characterize lawyer-client interactions into four types: Cooperative, Dependent, Withdrawn, and Adversarial. Using dialogues grounded in real cases, DLawBench evaluates whether LLMs can effectively conduct legal consultation under realistic conditions. DLawBench comprises 461 cases from Chinese and U.S. law, 5,532 paired fact entries, 3,411 inquiry rubrics, and 3,348 issue-resolution rubrics, and evaluates 26 representative LLMs. Systematic experiments show substantial headroom: the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 0.562 on consultation-grounded legal reasoning. More importantly, DLawBench exposes both sycophancy in legal consultation and a paradox: models perform worse when clients need guidance most.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Socratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent Skills

LLM-driven software engineering agents have become a central testbed for real-world language-model capability, yet their training remains limited by the availability of high-quality SWE tasks. Existing synthetic data methods typically create tasks through fixed mutation or bug-injection procedures, making the resulting distributions largely independent of the agent's own weaknesses and training progress. We introduce Socratic-SWE, a closed-loop self-evolution framework that reuses the agent's historical solving traces as a source of training signal. Rather than treating traces only as evidence for reward computation, Socratic-SWE distills them into structured agent skills that summarize recurring failures and effective repair patterns. These skills then guide the generation of targeted repair tasks in real repositories. Candidate tasks are checked through execution-based validation and scored with a solver-gradient alignment reward, so that the retained tasks are both verifiable and useful for improving the Solver. The updated Solver produces new traces, enabling the task curriculum to adapt over successive rounds. Across SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Lite, SWE-bench Pro, and Terminal-Bench 2.0, Socratic-SWE consistently improves over self-evolving baselines under the same compute budget, reaching 50.40% on SWE-bench Verified after three iterations. These results suggest that solving traces can serve as a scalable substrate for self-evolving SWE agents.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

BilliardPhys-Bench: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning and Visual Dynamics of Multimodal LLMs

Current multimodal models handle static image recognition well, but intuitive physical reasoning remains a weakness. Predicting how objects will move and interact from a single image is still difficult for these systems. We present BilliardPhys-Bench, a benchmark for physical reasoning in synthetic billiards environments. Its procedural engine generates randomized scenarios with friction and elastic collisions. The benchmark tests three abilities: (1) predicting ball-to-ball collisions, (2) reasoning about wall bounces, and (3) estimating final ball positions after motion stops. We evaluate recent MLLMs from the GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Qwen families. Performance drops as simulation time increases and scene geometry grows more complex. We also observe a consistent failure mode we call "stasis bias": when the correct physical outcome is harder to infer, models tend to predict no interaction. These findings show where current MLLMs break down on visual dynamics and point toward the need for better physical inductive biases in multimodal architectures.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

CrystalXRD-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for XRD Peak Indexing Across Diverse Crystalline Materials

Miller-index identification from powder XRD patterns requires capabilities untested by existing multimodal benchmarks: the model must read a narrow peak location from a rendered scientific curve and then connect that observation to multi-step crystallographic reasoning. We introduce CrystalXRD-Bench, a 250-sample benchmark built from 10 public crystallographic databases for a single task: recover the full set of HKLs contributing to the highest-intensity peak in an XRD pattern. Each sample pairs the rendered XRD image with the source CIF text and chemical formula, so visual extraction errors and reasoning errors can be examined side by side. We evaluate seven vision-language models. The best Jaccard score is 0.5888 (GPT-5.4) with an exact-match rate of 37.6%, yet six of seven models remain below Jaccard 0.50; the task is far from solved. Error patterns vary systematically: double-peak cases are especially brittle, recall-heavy models gain coverage by over-predicting HKLs, and access to CIF text does not close the gap in crystallographic calculation. Alongside model rankings, the benchmark identifies the conditions under which current VLMs fail on quantitative scientific figures. All data and evaluation code will be publicly available.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Qwen-Image-Bench: From Generation to Creation in Text-to-Image Evaluation

Text-to-Image generation has evolved from basic image synthesis into a frequently used core capability in professional creative workflows, where simple text-image alignment can no longer satisfy users' pressing demands for faithful real-world reconstruction and genuine creative expression. Existing benchmarks, however, remain anchored in these foundational criteria and do not yet capture the nuanced capabilities that matter in authentic artistic practice, making it difficult to reliably distinguish state-of-the-art T2I models. To address the gap, we introduce Qwen-Image-Bench, a creator-centric benchmark co-designed with professional artists and grounded in real-world creation scenarios. Qwen-Image-Bench enriches conventional evaluation with two application-driven dimensions: Real-world Fidelity and Creative Generation. Drawing on the staged reasoning inherent in professional artistic workflows, we organize these five pillars into a top-down hierarchical taxonomy that further decomposes into 23 second-level sub-capabilities and 56 third-level verifiable rubrics. To ensure broad coverage, we curate 1000 stratified prompts with each prompt jointly exercising more than four fine-grained facets across multiple pillars. We train a unified judge model Q-Judger based on Qwen3.6-27B, supervised by 80 professional annotators from global art academies under blind labeling and triple-review protocols, that scores every image across all 56 verifiable facets, producing fine-grained, rubric-grounded, and fully attributable diagnostics rather than a single opaque score. Empirically, Qwen-Image-Bench reliably distinguishes leading T2I models, achieving the greatest separation on the two application-driven dimensions of Real-world Fidelity and Creative Generation where existing benchmarks provide little insight, while also providing a trustworthy optimization signal for production-level T2I development.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Qwen-Image-2.0 Technical Report

We present Qwen-Image-2.0, an omni-capable image generation foundation model that unifies high-fidelity generation and precise image editing within a single framework. Despite recent progress, existing models still struggle with ultra-long text rendering, multilingual typography, high-resolution photorealism, robust instruction following, and efficient deployment, especially in text-rich and compositionally complex scenarios. Qwen-Image-2.0 addresses these challenges by coupling Qwen3-VL as the condition encoder with a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for joint condition-target modeling, supported by large-scale data curation and a customized multi-stage training pipeline. This enables strong multimodal understanding while preserving flexible generation and editing capabilities. The model supports instructions of up to 1K tokens for generating text-rich content such as slides, posters, infographics, and comics, while significantly improving multilingual text fidelity and typography. It also enhances photorealistic generation with richer details, more realistic textures, and coherent lighting, and follows complex prompts more reliably across diverse styles. Extensive human evaluations show that Qwen-Image-2.0 substantially outperforms previous Qwen-Image models in both generation and editing, marking a step toward more general, reliable, and practical image generation foundation models.

cs.CV↗