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Bo Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Bo Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Calibration of Large Model Quantization based on HiFloat4 Format

Quantization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important for reducing the computational costs and resource requirements for practical deployment. Growing interest in this area has motivated the community to move beyond 8-bit quantization towards 4-bit precision, leading to the development of customized 4-bit formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4. Recently, HiFloat4 (HiF4) has emerged as a competitive alternative which adopts a Block Floating-Point (BFP) format with a three-level scaling hierarchy, thereby achieving a significantly larger dynamic range. While quantization can substantially reduce memory usage and accelerate inference, it frequently introduces accuracy degradation. Calibration is therefore essential for narrowing the performance gap between low-precision quantized models and their full-precision counterparts. Nevertheless, existing calibration methods are mainly designed and validated using integer-precision formats, such as INT4, lacking support for HiF4 due to its hierarchical BFP structure. In this paper, we investigate three calibration approaches, namely HiGPTQ, HiAutoRound, and HiFlatQuant, to further enhance model quantization based on the HiF4 format. Extensive experiment s demonstrate that all three proposed approaches improve inference accuracy compared with direct HiF4 conversion, reducing the gap between HiF4 and BF16 to less than 1% and outperforming the state-of-the-art NVFP4 format across various models and downstream tasks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Trial-and-Error: A Geospatial-Guided Active Reasoning Framework for Robust Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires UAVs to locate language-specified goals in large-scale urban environments, where objects often appear small and visually ambiguous from high-altitude viewpoints. Existing methods largely follow a reactive paradigm common in indoor VLN, repeatedly updating navigation states from local observations while underutilizing the geospatial structure that remains stable during navigation. As a result, visually similar distractors can cause a reactive goal search to repeatedly reinforce locally plausible goal hypotheses based on passively accumulated evidence, leading to unreliable localization. To address this, we propose GeoReasoner, a robust framework that shifts the paradigm of Aerial VLN from reactive trial-and-error to geospatial-guided active reasoning. Specifically, GeoReasoner first performs pre-search geospatial reasoning to derive region-level priors and constrain the goal hypothesis space. Building on these, it further conducts hypothesis-driven exploration to actively acquire discriminative evidence and refine competing goal hypotheses. Finally, consistency-aware goal verification adversarially assesses complementary evidence sources before stopping, hence reducing premature or erroneous goal confirmations. Experiments on the real-world CityNav benchmark demonstrate that GeoReasoner sets a new SOTA among zero-shot Aerial VLN methods while competing favorably with supervised approaches.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Tan's Contact for Trapped Spin-Orbit-Coupled Fermi Gases at Finite Temperature

Tan's contact, bridging microscopic features of many-body quantum systems to two-body contact interactions, is pivotal in the description of quantum gases. However, past studies of Tan's contact of the spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases have been exclusively discussed at zero temperature. The thermal effects on that, which cannot be neglected in most experimental conditions, has not been explored so far. Here, through a path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) study, we show that thermal effects fundamentally alter the scaling relation between spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and Tan's contact. The linear scaling of Tan's contact with respect to the strength of SOC found at zero temperature is drastically undermined by the thermal effects. And a new mechanism based on the competition between the mean occupancy and the energy-reweighted occupancy of the opposite spin fermion pairs within the interaction range has been unveiled, which radically changes the above linear scaling to a non-monotonic dependence. Our work should be useful for future experiments to explore the preternatural thermal effects on Tan's contact of the strongly interacting spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gas.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Trajectory Statistics: Community-Consistent Human Mobility Generation via Evolving User-Location Graphs

Human mobility data are fundamental to Web-based location services and broader urban applications, and mobility generation provides synthetic trajectories when real data are costly or inaccessible. Although recent mobility generators have incorporated collective mobility patterns, they primarily focus on individual trajectories and aggregate population dynamics, leaving evolving community structures formed by user-location interactions insufficiently modeled. In this paper, we study community-consistent human mobility generation. To this end, we formulate mobility generation as the generation of dynamic user-location graphs to model community structures and propose MOTION, a Multi-agent framework for cOmmuniTy-consIstent human mObility geNeration. MOTION consists of user agents, location agents, and a global manager agent. MOTION first detects coherent communities from historical mobility using the Leiden algorithm and extracts community-conditioned interaction priors to guide the generation process. Guided by these priors, the user agents plan mobility, search destination candidates, and infer user movements from the individual view. In parallel, selectively activated location agents infer likely user arrivals from the community view. The manager coordinates both views, diagnoses interactions causing deviations, and attributes targeted reflection signals to revise user decisions, location attraction, and source-user selection. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MOTION outperforms baselines by at least 4.05% across reported metrics of individual trajectories, population and flow distributions, and community and graph structures. Further analyses confirm its robustness, privacy preservation, and downstream utility. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MOTION-04C4.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

ACARE: Agent-Context-Aware Reranker for Iterative Search

In agentic search, a document can match an agent-generated sub-query without helping answer the user's original question. Conventional rerankers score documents against the sub-query alone, overlooking the broader task and the agent's reasoning. We introduce the Agent-Context-Aware Reranker (ACARe), a compact 4B LLM trained to rerank documents using this context when available. Across multiple benchmarks and agent families, ACARe improves retrieval quality over its base reranker while reducing search effort. These benefits extend to answer generation: ACARe improves accuracy and reduces searches over no reranking, while matching or exceeding the base reranker's mean accuracy with more precise evidence. It also helps smaller agents narrow the retrieval-quality gap to larger agents, showing how better retrieval tools can make smaller agents more effective. The model, training data, and code will be released soon.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Physics-constrained graph closures and working-point conditioning for a fast surrogate of linac beam dynamics

When a graph neural network estimates a physical quantity, its frame, edge direction, aggregation and feature normalization decide which laws it can break, and wrong choices leave systematic errors the loss never registers. We build a linac beam-dynamics surrogate on this observation. Space charge, short-range wakefields and coherent synchrotron radiation enter as bounded closures on analytic kernels; the graphs carry a frame and a direction dictated by the interaction; and their symmetry makes the net space-charge self-force vanish for any weights. Verified without training, with randomized weights, the invariants break by five to eight orders of magnitude once the responsible feature is inverted. Per-working-point models constrained by the rms envelope equation are distilled into one model conditioned on 15 machine settings. On the 18.4~m L0+L1 section of the Shanghai soft x-ray free-electron laser linac, this model predicts the transverse beam envelope at 50 unseen settings to about $7\%$, together with the centroid trajectory and emittance, in 0.38~s on a single Quadro RTX 6000 GPU. Training is instead dominated by a normalization choice, a data-derived output range for the beam size: at all 16 working points it lowers the starting error 2.2- to 8.5-fold and fixes the convergence speed. The remaining accuracy differences between hybrid and data-driven architectures vary with the working point and with the density of observation. The held-out error scales roughly as $N^{-0.6}$ with the corpus size $N$. Whether the physics pays off where collective effects are strong, as in a magnetic bunch compressor, is in the next phase of our study.

physics.acc-ph↗
arXiv2026

RetiJev: Fast and Source-Grounded Ophthalmic Decision Models

Ophthalmic clinical decision support requires fast, accurate, and privacy-preserving inference, yet autoregressive large language models (LLMs) incur substantial latency and computational overhead for decisions among predefined actions. We therefore investigate a decision-oriented alternative to generative reasoning. Specifically, we first introduce RetiJev-Data, a source-grounded ophthalmology corpus comprising 78,158 clinical-decision and diagnosis questions derived from articles in PubMed Central and a MeSH vocabulary covering 531 eye diseases, and 50,074 guideline-grading questions spanning 11 grading systems, along with a 24,662-question evaluation benchmark. Based on this, we develop RetiJev, a family of 0.8B-9B decision models that directly score candidate answers without autoregressive decoding. Across all model sizes, RetiJev outperforms both a 27B LLM and the commercial Jev 1.13 decision model on guideline grading by 10.4-23.0 points. RetiJev-9B further achieves the highest accuracy on clinical decisions, improving over both baselines by 5.4-6.5 points while matching them on diagnosis. It answers a case in 158 ms on one GPU, 3.5x faster than LLM generation and 470x faster than reasoning. Models are released at https://github.com/Awenbocc/RetiJev.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Exposing Noise-Deficiency Signatures of Deep Learning-Based False Data Injection Attacks Through AC State Estimation

Deep learning (DL)-based false data injection (FDI) attacks can resemble normal measurements and evade both conventional bad data detection (BDD) and measurement-space data-driven detectors. This paper identifies a previously overlooked signature of such attacks in state-estimation (SE) residual space. The residuals of reconstruction-based DL attacks exhibit deficient stochastic variation, manifested as abnormally small residual energy and reduced directional dispersion. We establish the conditions under which this signature emerges and explain why the attacks carrying it can evade conventional BDD. We show that SE can reveal residual-space differences obscured by operating-state variation in measurement space. We then explain the origin of the signature through the noise-suppression mechanism of DL attack generation. A generator can learn the reproducible structure of historical measurements but cannot reproduce stochastic measurement components that are unpredictable from its input. This signature enables label-free detection using a simple two-sided test on the conventional BDD statistic, while the full residual vector can also be exploited when labeled attack samples are available. Experiments on the IEEE 14-bus and 118-bus AC systems show that the label-free test detects up to 99% of three representative DL attacks at a false-alarm rate comparable to that of BDD, which detects at most 5%. Ablation studies further examine the effects of residual representation, decision rule, and measurement-noise magnitude and distribution.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2026

Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?

GPT-6-Astra demonstrates a level of competence in robotic manipulation and navigation that challenges the conventional paradigm of building specialized models for individual tasks and embodiments. In this report, we ask not only how capable GPT-6-Astra is, but what its capabilities imply for the field. First, we probe the limits of standalone GPT-6-Astra. We conduct a large-scale evaluation across 12 representative benchmarks spanning tabletop manipulation, humanoids, mobile platforms, and dexterous hands. Under a unified protocol that allows in-context learning (ICL) from training-set demonstrations and substantially increases the number of execution steps, GPT-6-Astra achieves unprecedented performance (Fig. 1). Future research may focus on improving 1) the generality of ICL 2) cost and execution time, 3) physical-state verification, 4) recovery from irreversible failures, and 5) long-horizon preservation of progress. Second, we study the agentic harness for embodied control. We identify that close-loop coordination between a high-level "System 2" reasoner (i.e., GPT-6-Astra) and a low-level "System 1" controller (e.g., π0.5) is costly but effective. Third, we examine GPT-6-Astra on real-world deployment. Our experiments on 8 robot configurations reveal substantial gaps: 1) robot demonstrations required for ICL are expensive to collect, and 2) it is implausible to trade longer execution for higher success rates with physical constraints. Fourth, we envision the next generation of embodied benchmarks. We develop a prototype that 1) derives tasks from real-world needs, 2) provides no in-domain demonstrations, and 3) judges agents on a world clock that keeps running while they deliberate. Taken together, our results suggest that GPT-6-Astra has largely crossed the threshold of embodied competence, but not yet that of practical embodied intelligence.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Routing Policy Optimization for Online Diffusion Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning can align visual generators with reward signals beyond their pretraining objectives, but existing score-function methods typically introduce stochasticity by perturbing the reverse denoising trajectory, leading to costly rollout-based optimization. We instead ask whether stochastic exploration can be introduced inside the generator while preserving its original sampler. Routing Policy Optimization (RPO) answers this question by turning attention routing into a stochastic exploration action. At a few selected denoising levels, each query block keeps its own block and samples further key blocks in proportion to the generator's native attention mass, or keeps dense attention. The sampled route perturbs the velocity of that transition, and a Gaussian likelihood around the dense velocity scores the perturbation with a score-function objective. RPO further uses a controlled two-rollout estimator: two rollouts share the same prompt, initial latent, routed denoising levels, and dense anchor layers, differing only in their sampled attention routes. Their reward difference provides an advantage signal for the routed transitions. Because the likelihood differentiates the dense velocity itself, the learned updates remain effective after routing is removed. At inference, RPO restores dense attention and retains the original deterministic sampler. Experiments on text-to-image and text-to-video generation show that RPO improves generation quality while achieving nearly 4x higher training efficiency than Flow-GRPO-style methods. Please see our project page at https://velox-world.com/rpo for visual results.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

AlphaDiana: A Measurement System for Agents in Verifiable Reasoning Tasks

Agents pair reasoning models with harnesses that organize model calls, execute tools, load skill instructions, and retain history in memory. Understanding agent performance requires linking execution conditions to outcomes, behavior, and resource use. We introduce AlphaDiana, a measurement system with modular interfaces for datasets, agents, environments, and scorers. It preserves harness-native control loops while controlling file reuse and memory retention separately. AlphaDiana supports macro analyses of complete agents and micro interventions on agent components such as tools, skills, and memory under matched conditions. We study three open-source models and three open-source harnesses on five answer-based benchmarks, with two models also tested on two interactive benchmarks. We find that harnesses do not consistently improve the accuracy of reasoning: gains on questions unsolved by the model alone can be outweighed by losses on questions it answers correctly without tools. This inconsistency extends to component interventions: neither skill guidance nor retained history reliably improves accuracy. Behavior and output-token use must be assessed with correctness: low token entropy can accompany wrong answers, and less output per execution can mean more output tokens per correct answer when accuracy falls. AlphaDiana links answer correctness and execution status to traces and resource records for comparing agents and diagnosing failures under shared task and resource policies.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

PPGFlowECG: Latent Rectified Flow with Cross-Modal Encoding for PPG-Guided ECG Generation and Cardiovascular Disease Detection

Electrocardiography (ECG) is the clinical gold standard for cardiovascular disease (CVD) assessment, yet continuous monitoring is constrained by the need for dedicated hardware and trained personnel. Photoplethysmography (PPG) is ubiquitous in wearable devices and readily scalable, but it lacks electrophysiological specificity, limiting diagnostic reliability. While generative methods aim to translate PPG into clinically useful ECG signals, existing approaches are limited by the misalignment of physiological semantics in generative models and the complexity of modeling in high-dimensional signals. To address these limitations, we propose PPGFlowECG, a two-stage framework that aligns PPG and ECG in a shared latent space using the CardioAlign Encoder and then synthesizes ECGs with latent rectified flow. We further provide a formal analysis of this coupling, showing that the CardioAlign Encoder is necessary to guarantee stable and semantically consistent ECG synthesis under our formulation. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate improved synthesis fidelity and downstream diagnostic utility. These results indicate that PPGFlowECG supports scalable, wearable-first CVD screening when standard ECG acquisition is unavailable.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

DMAD: Distribution Matching as Adversarial Distillation for Fast Visual Generation

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) trains a few-step student from the difference between separately estimated target and student scores, so it must keep an auxiliary diffusion model fitted to the student's evolving distribution at extra memory and computation cost. We introduce DMAD, Distribution Matching as Adversarial Distillation, which recasts distribution matching as classification and learns the required log-density ratios directly. Two discriminator heads on a shared backbone distinguish real data and teacher samples from the student's, and linear losses on their logits train the student without auxiliary score fitting. We prove that at the discriminator optimum these losses recover the distribution-matching gradient underlying DMD, through the classical identity linking discriminator logits to log-density ratios. We further introduce gap-based reweighting, which adapts teacher supervision across noise levels from the real-data head's empirical logit gap between real and teacher samples. DMAD reaches a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) of 1.04 with one-step generation on ImageNet-64x64, 14.47 with four-step SDXL on COCO-10K, and a VBench total score of 85.15 with four-step Wan2.1-T2V-14B, the best values among the compared few-step methods and the multi-step teachers. On MiniMax-H3-33B, our four-step student achieves overall human preference rates of 79.1% over DMD2 and 84.6% over rCM for joint audio-video generation, excluding ties. Our code, models and demos are available at https://yzmblog.github.io/projects/DMAD.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Into the Unknown: Benchmarking AI agents on open scientific research problems

Can AI agents carry out research on open scientific problems? We introduce Into the Unknown, a benchmark that provides an agent with a science paper along with a research direction to pursue and tasks it to write a follow-up paper. We work with scientists at US Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, who each contribute an unpublished follow-up direction from their own work together with the necessary conditions a submission must meet. While assessing the quality of a follow-up paper is challenging in general, using these conditions to form a rubric makes evaluation more tractable for research problems that have no reference answer. We have nine frontier agents write 15 follow-ups each, spanning quantum computing, plasma physics, computational chemistry, materials science, and scientific machine learning domains. None of the 135 submissions satisfies all the conditions, and 114 fail our integrity check, most often because the paper claims work that was never done or reports numbers that contradict the recorded evidence. Overall, agents readily produce papers that look like follow-ups, but none meets the standard of the domain scientist, leaving substantial headroom. Our code and data are publicly available.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Leveraging Arbitrary Data Sources for AI-Generated Image Detection Without Sacrificing Generalization

The accelerating advancement of generative models has introduced new challenges for detecting AI-generated images, especially in real-world scenarios where novel generation techniques emerge rapidly. Existing learning paradigms are likely to make classifiers data-dependent, resulting in narrow decision margins and, consequently, limited generalization ability to unseen generative models. We observe that both real and generated images intend to form clustered low-dimensional manifolds within high-level feature spaces extracted by pre-trained visual encoders. Building on this observation, we propose a single-class attribution modeling framework that first amplifies the intrinsic differences between real and generated images by constructing a compact attribution space from any single-class training set, either composed of real images or generated ones, and then establishes a more stable decision boundary upon the enlarged separation. This process enhances class distinction and mitigates the reliance on generator-specific artifacts, thereby improving cross-model generalization. Extensive experiments show that our method generalizes well across various unseen generative models, outperforming existing detectors by as much as 7.21% in accuracy and 7.20% in cross-model generalization.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Evolving in Thought Space: Training a Small Model at Test Time Unlocks Better Discoveries

Open-ended scientific discovery often requires repeatedly proposing and evaluating candidate solutions. LLM-based systems can support this process by generating and refining executable solutions from verifier feedback. Methods such as TTT-Discover use test-time training (TTT) to update the solution-generating LLM from verifier feedback, adapting its generation policy to improve subsequent proposals on the target problem. However, this becomes expensive when reliable execution requires a large model, since training must maintain gradients, optimizer states, and policy statistics while repeatedly generating long, structured outputs. It also complicates credit assignment: outcome-level verifier feedback must jointly evaluate the high-level strategy and its low-level implementation. In this work, we introduce Guidance-TTT, which separates these roles. A compact guidance model is trained at test time to propose high-level strategic changes, while a frozen execution model implements them as complete executable solutions. At each step, the system selects a promising previously discovered solution, proposes a change, executes and verifies it, and updates only the guidance model using an adaptive group-relative RL objective. This concentrates test-time learning on short strategic decisions while retaining the implementation capability of a substantially stronger model without adapting it. Without web access, Guidance-TTT produces strong solutions across four distinct domains: combinatorial optimization (Polyomino Packing), heuristic programming (AHC058), machine learning (Lasso), and GPU kernel optimization (TriMul). Across these tasks, it outperforms the best solutions reported in prior work while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art results on public online leaderboards. Code is available at https://github.com/Human-Agent-Society/reef/tree/guidance-ttt-support.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Phase transitions and quasinormal modes of Euler-Heisenberg-dilaton AdS black holes

In this paper, we study phase transitions and scalar quasinormal modes(QNMs) of magnetically charged Euler--Heisenberg-dilaton AdS black holes in the extended phase space. We classify the horizon structures for all three signs of the EH coupling and derive the extended first law when the pressure and coupling are varied. For negative coupling, the physical branch exhibits a Van der Waals-like small/large black-hole transition. Using the improved asymptotic iteration method, we find two separated QNM trajectories below the critical pressure, whereas they merge into one continuous curve at the critical point. The GHS limit and the positive couplings considered here do not produce a finite-radius critical point.

hep-th↗