arXiv subjects

Bo Jiang

Publications and source records attributed to Bo Jiang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Empowering Multi-Robot Cooperation via Sequential World Models

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in robotics due to its high sample efficiency and planning capability. However, extending MBRL to physical multi-robot cooperation remains challenging due to the complexity of joint dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose the Sequential World Model (SeqWM), a novel framework that integrates the sequential paradigm into multi-robot MBRL. SeqWM employs independent, autoregressive agent-wise world models to represent joint dynamics, where each agent generates its future trajectory and plans its actions based on the predictions of its predecessors. This design lowers modeling complexity and enables the emergence of advanced cooperative behaviors through explicit intention sharing. Experiments on Bi-DexHands and Multi-Quadruped demonstrate that SeqWM outperforms existing state-of-the-art model-based and model-free baselines in both overall performance and sample efficiency, while exhibiting advanced cooperative behaviors such as predictive adaptation, temporal alignment, and role division. Furthermore, SeqWM has been successfully deployed on physical quadruped robots, validating its effectiveness in real-world multi-robot systems. Demos and code are available at: https://github.com/zhaozijie2022/seqwm

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

SLOW: Strategic Logical-inference Open Workspace for Cognitive Adaptation in AI Tutoring

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable fluency in educational dialogues, most generative tutors primarily operate through intuitive, single-pass generation. This reliance on fast thinking precludes a dedicated reasoning workspace, forcing multiple diagnostic and strategic signals to be processed in a conflated manner. As a result, learner cognitive diagnosis, affective perception, and pedagogical decision-making become tightly entangled, which limits the tutoring system's capacity for deliberate instructional adaptation. We propose SLOW, a theory-informed tutoring framework that supports deliberate learner-state reasoning within a transparent decision workspace. Inspired by dual-process accounts of human tutoring, SLOW explicitly separates learner-state inference from instructional action selection. The framework integrates causal evidence parsing from learner language, fuzzy cognitive diagnosis with counterfactual stability analysis, and prospective affective reasoning to anticipate how instructional choices may influence learners' emotional trajectories. These signals are jointly considered to guide pedagogically and affectively aligned tutoring strategies. Evaluation using hybrid human-AI judgments demonstrates significant improvements in personalization, emotional sensitivity, and clarity. Ablation studies further confirm the necessity of each module, showcasing how SLOW enables interpretable and reliable intelligent tutoring through a visualized decision-making process. This work advances the interpretability and educational validity of LLM-based adaptive instruction.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

KVSculpt: KV Cache Compression as Distillation

KV cache compression is critical for efficient long-context LLM inference. Approaches that reduce the per-pair footprint -- quantization and low-rank decomposition -- are orthogonal to those that reduce the sequence length of the cache. Along the sequence-length dimension, existing methods range from pure eviction -- selecting which KV pairs to keep -- to merging, which combines similar pairs into fewer ones. Both remain anchored to the original cache entries. We propose KVSculpt, which moves to the other end of this spectrum: instead of selecting or combining original pairs, we optimize a smaller set of unconstrained KV pairs in continuous embedding space to preserve each layer's attention behavior. Keys are optimized via L-BFGS and values are solved in closed form via least squares, alternating every few steps. On top of this, we introduce adaptive budget allocation, which uses a cheap pilot compression run to redistribute the compression budget across layers and KV heads based on per-component difficulty. On Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct with 2048-token contexts, KVSculpt reduces KL divergence by 3.5-4.1x compared to Select+Fit -- attention-score eviction with least-squares value fitting -- across compression ratios r in {0.3, 0.5, 0.7}. Adaptive allocation provides an additional 1.3x KL reduction at no extra inference cost. Analysis reveals that compression difficulty is highly non-uniform: per-layer pilot MSE varies by up to 100x across layers, and the two KV heads within a single layer can differ by up to 467x -- demonstrating that fine-grained budget allocation is essential.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

DiscoUQ: Structured Disagreement Analysis for Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agent Ensembles

Multi-agent LLM systems, where multiple prompted instances of a language model independently answer questions, are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks. However, existing methods for quantifying the uncertainty of their collective outputs rely on shallow voting statistics that discard the rich semantic information in agents' reasoning. We introduce DiscoUQ, a framework that extracts and leverages the structure of inter-agent disagreement -- both linguistic properties (evidence overlap, argument strength, divergence depth) and embedding geometry (cluster distances, dispersion, cohesion) -- to produce well-calibrated confidence estimates. We propose three methods of increasing complexity: DiscoUQ-LLM (logistic regression on LLM-extracted structure features), DiscoUQ-Embed (logistic regression on embedding geometry), and DiscoUQ-Learn (a neural network combining all features). Evaluated on four diverse benchmarks (StrategyQA, MMLU, TruthfulQA, ARC-Challenge) with a 5-agent system using Qwen3.5-27B, DiscoUQ-LLM achieves an average AUROC of 0.802, outperforming the best baseline (LLM Aggregator, 0.791) while being substantially better calibrated (ECE 0.036 vs. 0.098). The learned features generalize across benchmarks with near-zero performance degradation and provide the largest improvements where they are most needed: in the ambiguous "weak disagreement" tier where simple vote counting fails.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Disentangle-then-Align: Non-Iterative Hybrid Multimodal Image Registration via Cross-Scale Feature Disentanglement

Multimodal image registration is a fundamental task and a prerequisite for downstream cross-modal analysis. Despite recent progress in shared feature extraction and multi-scale architectures, two key limitations remain. First, some methods use disentanglement to learn shared features but mainly regularize the shared part, allowing modality-private cues to leak into the shared space. Second, most multi-scale frameworks support only a single transformation type, limiting their applicability when global misalignment and local deformation coexist. To address these issues, we formulate hybrid multimodal registration as jointly learning a stable shared feature space and a unified hybrid transformation. Based on this view, we propose HRNet, a Hybrid Registration Network that couples representation disentanglement with hybrid parameter prediction. A shared backbone with Modality-Specific Batch Normalization (MSBN) extracts multi-scale features, while a Cross-scale Disentanglement and Adaptive Projection (CDAP) module suppresses modality-private cues and projects shared features into a stable subspace for matching. Built on this shared space, a Hybrid Parameter Prediction Module (HPPM) performs non-iterative coarse-to-fine estimation of global rigid parameters and deformation fields, which are fused into a coherent deformation field. Extensive experiments on four multimodal datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on rigid and non-rigid registration tasks. The code is available at the project website.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

HindSight: Evaluating LLM-Generated Research Ideas via Future Impact

Evaluating AI-generated research ideas typically relies on LLM judges or human panels -- both subjective and disconnected from actual research impact. We introduce HindSight, a time-split evaluation framework that measures idea quality by matching generated ideas against real future publications and scoring them by citation impact and venue acceptance. Using a temporal cutoff~$T$, we restrict an idea generation system to pre-$T$ literature, then evaluate its outputs against papers published in the subsequent 30 months. Experiments across 10 AI/ML research topics reveal a striking disconnect: LLM-as-Judge finds no significant difference between retrieval-augmented and vanilla idea generation ($p{=}0.584$), while HindSight shows the retrieval-augmented system produces 2.5$\times$ higher-scoring ideas ($p{<}0.001$). Moreover, HindSight scores are \emph{negatively} correlated with LLM-judged novelty ($ρ{=}{-}0.29$, $p{<}0.01$), suggesting that LLMs systematically overvalue novel-sounding ideas that never materialize in real research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

On decomposability and subdifferential of the tensor nuclear norm

We study the decomposability and the subdifferential of the tensor nuclear norm. Both concepts are well understood and widely applied in matrices but remain unclear for higher-order tensors. We show that the tensor nuclear norm admits a full decomposability over specific subspaces and determine the largest possible subspaces that allow the full decomposability. We derive novel inclusions of the subdifferential of the tensor nuclear norm and study its subgradients in a variety of subspaces of interest. All the results hold for tensors of an arbitrary order. As an immediate application, we establish the statistical performance of the tensor robust principal component analysis, the first such result for tensors of an arbitrary order.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Thinking in Graphs with CoMAP: A Shared Visual Workspace for Designing Project-Based Learning

Designing project-based learning (PBL) demands managing highly interdependent components, a task that both traditional linear tools and purely conversational AI struggle with. Traditional tools fail to capture the non-linear nature of creative design, while conversational systems lack the persistent, shared context necessary for reflective collaboration. Grounded in theories of distributed cognition, we introduce CoMAP, a system that embodies a graph-based collaboration paradigm. By providing a shared visual workspace with dual-modality AI support, CoMAP transforms the human-AI relationship from a prompt-and-response loop into a transparent and equitable partnership. Our study with 30 educators shows CoMAP significantly improves teachers' design expression, divergent thinking, and iterative practice compared to a dialogue-only baseline. These findings demonstrate how a nonlinear, artifact-centric approach can foster trust, reduce cognitive load, and \textcolor{fix}{support} educators to take control of their creative process. Our contributions are available at: https://comap2025.github.io/.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Senna-2: Aligning VLM and End-to-End Driving Policy for Consistent Decision Making and Planning

Vision-language models (VLMs) enhance the planning capability of end-to-end (E2E) driving policy by leveraging high-level semantic reasoning. However, existing approaches often overlook the dual-system consistency between VLM's high-level decision and E2E's low-level planning. As a result, the generated trajectories may misalign with the intended driving decisions, leading to weakened top-down guidance and decision-following ability of the system. To address this issue, we propose Senna-2, an advanced VLM-E2E driving policy that explicitly aligns the two systems for consistent decision-making and planning. Our method follows a consistency-oriented three-stage training paradigm. In the first stage, we conduct driving pre-training to achieve preliminary decision-making and planning, with a decision adapter transmitting VLM decisions to E2E policy in the form of implicit embeddings. In the second stage, we align the VLM and the E2E policy in an open-loop setting. In the third stage, we perform closed-loop alignment via bottom-up Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in 3DGS environments to reinforce the safety and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Senna-2 achieves superior dual-system consistency (19.3% F1 score improvement) and significantly enhances driving safety in both open-loop (5.7% FDE reduction) and closed-loop settings (30.6% AF-CR reduction).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ProvAgent: Threat Detection Based on Identity-Behavior Binding and Multi-Agent Collaborative Attack Investigation

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose critical challenges to modern cybersecurity due to their multi-stage and stealthy nature. While provenance-based detection approaches show promise in capturing causal attack semantics, current threat provenance practices face two paradoxical issues: (1) expert skepticism, where human analysts doubt the capability of traditional detection models to identify complex attacks; and (2) expert dependence, as analysts cannot manually process large-scale raw logs to detect threats without these models. Consequently, collaboration between humans and traditional models remains the prevailing paradigm. However, this renders investigation quality contingent upon human expertise and frequently results in alert fatigue. To address these challenges, we present ProvAgent, a framework that evolves the threat provenance paradigm from human-model collaboration to a novel collaboration between multi-agent systems and traditional models. ProvAgent leverages the speed and cost-efficiency of traditional models for initial anomaly screening over large-scale logs. By enforcing fine-grained identity-behavior consistency via graph contrastive learning, it profiles entities based on specific attributes to generate high-fidelity alerts. With these alerts serving as investigation entry points, ProvAgent achieves in-depth autonomous investigation through a hypothesis-verification multi-agent framework. Evaluations with real-world datasets demonstrate that ProvAgent outperforms six state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines in anomaly detection. Through automated investigation, ProvAgent reconstructs near-complete attack processes at a minimum cost of \$0.06 per day.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

One Model Is Enough: Native Retrieval Embeddings from LLM Agent Hidden States

LLM agents that retrieve external knowledge typically generate a search query as text, then run a separate embedding model to encode it into a vector. This two-model pipeline adds infrastructure complexity and latency, yet is redundant: the LLM already encodes the full conversational context in its hidden states. We propose equipping LLM agents with native retrieval capability by adding a lightweight projection head that maps hidden states directly into the embedding space, eliminating the need for a separate embedding model. Trained with a combination of alignment, contrastive, and rank distillation losses, our method retains 97\% of baseline retrieval quality while enabling the LLM agent to search with its own representations. Experiments on the QReCC conversational search benchmark show competitive Recall@10 and MRR@10 compared to the standard generate-then-encode pipeline, with systematic ablations confirming the contribution of each loss component.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

KCoEvo: A Knowledge Graph Augmented Framework for Evolutionary Code Generation

Code evolution is inevitable in modern software development. Changes to third-party APIs frequently break existing code and complicate maintenance, posing practical challenges for developers. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in code generation, they struggle to reason without a structured representation of these evolving relationships, often leading them to produce outdated APIs or invalid outputs. In this work, we propose a knowledge graph-augmented framework that decomposes the migration task into two synergistic stages: evolution path retrieval and path-informed code generation. Our approach constructs static and dynamic API graphs to model intra-version structures and cross-version transitions, enabling structured reasoning over API evolution. Both modules are trained with synthetic supervision automatically derived from real-world API diffs, ensuring scalability and minimal human effort. Extensive experiments across single-package and multi-package benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly improves migration accuracy, controllability, and execution success over standard LLM baselines. The source code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/kangjz1203/KCoEvo.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

DistillGuard: Evaluating Defenses Against LLM Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation from proprietary LLM APIs poses a growing threat to model providers, yet defenses against this attack remain fragmented and unevaluated. We present DistillGuard, a framework for systematically evaluating output-level defenses against LLM knowledge distillation. We introduce a taxonomy of three defense categories -- output perturbation, data poisoning, and information throttling -- and evaluate nine defense configurations using a standardized pipeline with Qwen3-14B as teacher and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct as student across three benchmarks (MATH-500, HumanEval+, MT-Bench). Our results reveal that, in a same-family distillation setting against a naive attacker, most output-level defenses are surprisingly ineffective: paraphrasing-based perturbation barely degrades distilled student quality, and data poisoning primarily impairs conversational fluency while leaving task-specific capabilities intact. Only chain-of-thought removal substantially impairs mathematical reasoning (31.4\% vs.\ 67.8\% baseline), though code generation remains unaffected. These findings demonstrate that the effectiveness of distillation defenses is highly task-dependent and that current output-level approaches are insufficient to broadly prevent knowledge theft.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

New Results on the Polyak Stepsize: Tight Convergence Analysis and Universal Function Classes

In this paper, we revisit a classical adaptive stepsize strategy for gradient descent: the Polyak stepsize (PolyakGD), originally proposed in Polyak (1969). We study the convergence behavior of PolyakGD from two perspectives: tight worst-case analysis and universality across function classes. As our first main result, we establish the tightness of the known convergence rates of PolyakGD by explicitly constructing worst-case functions. In particular, we show that the $O((1-\frac{1}κ)^K)$ rate for smooth strongly convex functions and the $O(1/K)$ rate for smooth convex functions are both tight. Moreover, we theoretically show that PolyakGD automatically exploits floating-point errors to escape the worst-case behavior. Our second main result provides new convergence guarantees for PolyakGD under both Hölder smoothness and Hölder growth conditions. These findings show that the Polyak stepsize is universal, automatically adapting to various function classes without requiring prior knowledge of problem parameters.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Scores: Explainable Intelligent Assessment Strengthens Pre-service Teachers' Assessment Literacy

Assessment literacy (AL) is essential for personalized education, yet difficult to cultivate in pre-service teachers. Conventional teacher preparation programs focus on theoretical knowledge, while digital assessment tools commonly provide opaque scores or parameters. These limitations hinder reflection and transfer, leaving AL underdeveloped. We propose XIA, an eXplainable Intelligent Assessment platform that extends statistics-informed support with visualized cognitive diagnostic reasoning, including contrastive and counterfactual explanations. In a pre-post controlled study with 21 pre-service teachers, we combined quantitative tasks and questionnaires with qualitative interviews. The findings offer preliminary evidence that XIA supported reflection, self-regulation, and assessment awareness, and helped reduce assessment errors. Interviews further showed a shift from score-based judgments toward evidence-based reasoning. This work contributes insights into the design of intelligent assessment tools, showing how explanatory scaffolding can bridge assessment theory and classroom practice and support the cultivation of AL in teacher education.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

R2GenCSR: Mining Contextual and Residual Information for LLMs-based Radiology Report Generation

Inspired by the tremendous success of Large Language Models (LLMs), existing Radiology report generation methods attempt to leverage large models to achieve better performance. They usually adopt a Transformer to extract the visual features of a given X-ray image, and then, feed them into the LLM for text generation. How to extract more effective information for the LLMs to help them improve final results is an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Additionally, the use of visual Transformer models also brings high computational complexity. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel context-guided efficient radiology report generation framework. Specifically, we introduce the Mamba as the vision backbone with linear complexity, and the performance obtained is comparable to that of the strong Transformer model. More importantly, we perform context retrieval from the training set for samples within each mini-batch during the training phase, utilizing both positively and negatively related samples to enhance feature representation and discriminative learning. Subsequently, we feed the vision tokens, context information, and prompt statements to invoke the LLM for generating high-quality medical reports. Extensive experiments on three X-ray report generation datasets (i.e., IU X-Ray, MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert Plus) fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed model. The source code is available at https://github.com/Event-AHU/Medical_Image_Analysis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

EPRBench: A High-Quality Benchmark Dataset for Event Stream Based Visual Place Recognition

Event stream-based Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is an emerging research direction that offers a compelling solution to the instability of conventional visible-light cameras under challenging conditions such as low illumination, overexposure, and high-speed motion. Recognizing the current scarcity of dedicated datasets in this domain, we introduce EPRBench, a high-quality benchmark specifically designed for event stream-based VPR. EPRBench comprises 10K event sequences and 65K event frames, collected using both handheld and vehicle-mounted setups to comprehensively capture real-world challenges across diverse viewpoints, weather conditions, and lighting scenarios. To support semantic-aware and language-integrated VPR research, we provide LLM-generated scene descriptions, subsequently refined through human annotation, establishing a solid foundation for integrating LLMs into event-based perception pipelines. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we implement and benchmark 15 state-of-the-art VPR algorithms on EPRBench, offering a strong baseline for future algorithmic comparisons. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-modal fusion paradigm for VPR: leveraging LLMs to generate textual scene descriptions from raw event streams, which then guide spatially attentive token selection, cross-modal feature fusion, and multi-scale representation learning. This framework not only achieves highly accurate place recognition but also produces interpretable reasoning processes alongside its predictions, significantly enhancing model transparency and explainability. The dataset and source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Neuromorphic_ReID

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Riemannian Alternating Descent Ascent Algorithmic Framework for Nonconvex-Linear Minimax Problems on Riemannian Manifolds

In this paper, we consider a class of nonconvex-linear minimax problems on Riemannian manifolds, which find wide applications in machine learning and signal processing. For solving this class of problems, we develop a flexible Riemannian alternating descent ascent (RADA) algorithmic framework. Within this framework, we propose two easy-to-implement yet efficient algorithms that alternately perform one or multiple projected/Riemannian gradient descent steps and a proximal gradient ascent step at each iteration. We show that the proposed RADA algorithmic framework can find both an $\varepsilon$-Riemannian-game-stationary point and an $\varepsilon$-Riemannian-optimization-stationary point within $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ iterations, achieving the best-known iteration complexity. We also reveal intriguing similarities and differences between the algorithms developed within our proposed framework and existing algorithms, thus providing important insights into the improved efficiency of the former. Lastly, we present numerical results on sparse principal component analysis (PCA), fair PCA, and sparse spectral clustering to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithms.

math.OC↗