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Can Xie

Publications and source records attributed to Can Xie.

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EDGE: Experience-Distillation for Guided Exploration in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning with outcome-based objectives such as GRPO enables LLM-based agents to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, yet the reusable exploration patterns embedded in interaction trajectories are largely discarded after a single policy update. Existing experience-augmented approaches retrieve historical guidance at inference time, but they apply experiences without accounting for the policy's evolving capability and create persistent dependencies on external retrieval. We propose EDGE (Experience-Distillation for Guided Exploration), a framework that treats retrieved experiences as temporary training-time scaffolds and progressively internalizes their benefits into the parametric policy. Concretely, EDGE partitions each rollout group into experience-conditioned and experience-free trajectories to estimate and admit only positive marginal gains without extra sampling, then distills the induced behavior into the base policy via a reverse-KL objective on its own empirical support. A co-evolutionary experience bank further synthesizes guidance from emerging failure modes and prunes obsolete entries as the policy evolves. Across embodied, web, and search-based QA tasks, EDGE improves over strong RL baselines by up to 12.5 points and remains effective without inference-time scaffolds or a proprietary reflector. The code is available at https://github.com/xvolcano02/EDGE.

cs.CL

Fully analogue in-memory neural computing via quantum tunneling effect

Fully analogue neural computation requires hardware that can implement both linear and nonlinear transformations without digital assistance. While analogue in-memory computing efficiently realizes matrix-vector multiplication, the absence of learnable analogue nonlinearities remains a central bottleneck. Here we introduce KANalogue, a fully analogue realization of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) that instantiates univariate basis functions directly using negative-differential-resistance (NDR) devices. By mapping the intrinsic current-voltage characteristics of NDR devices to learnable coordinate-wise nonlinear functions, KANalogue embeds function approximation into device physics while preserving a fully analogue signal path. Using cold-metal tunnel diodes as a representative platform, we construct diverse nonlinear bases and combine them through crossbar-based analogue summation. Experiments on MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that KANalogue achieves competitive accuracy with substantially fewer parameters and higher crossbar node efficiency than analogue MLPs, while approaching the performance of digital KANs under strict hardware constraints. The framework is not limited to a specific device technology and naturally generalizes to a broad class of NDR devices. These results establish a device-grounded route toward scalable, energy-efficient, fully analogue neural networks.

cs.ET

Unlocking Exploration in RLVR: Uncertainty-aware Advantage Shaping for Deeper Reasoning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown significant promise for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, prevailing algorithms like GRPO broadcast a uniform advantage signal across all tokens in a sequence. This coarse-grained approach overlooks the pivotal role of uncertain, high-stakes decisions during reasoning, leading to inefficient exploration and the well-documented problem of entropy collapse. To address this, we introduce UnCertainty-aware Advantage Shaping (UCAS), a model-free method that refines credit assignment by leveraging the model's internal uncertainty signals. UCAS operates in two stages: it first modulates the response-level advantage using a logit-space self-confidence proxy, and then applies an asymmetric token-level penalty based on raw logit certainty. This dual mechanism encourages exploration of high-uncertainty paths that yield correct answers while penalizing overconfident yet erroneous reasoning, effectively balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Extensive experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that UCAS significantly outperforms strong RLVR baselines across multiple model scales, including 1.5B and 7B. Our analysis confirms that UCAS not only achieves higher rewards but also promotes greater reasoning diversity and successfully mitigates entropy collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/xvolcano02/UCAS.

cs.AI

Towards Scientific Intelligence: A Survey of LLM-based Scientific Agents

As scientific research becomes increasingly complex, innovative tools are needed to manage vast data, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, and accelerate discovery. Large language models (LLMs) are now evolving into LLM-based scientific agents that automate critical tasks ranging from hypothesis generation and experiment design to data analysis and simulation. Unlike general-purpose LLMs, these specialized agents integrate domain-specific knowledge, advanced tool sets, and robust validation mechanisms, enabling them to handle complex data types, ensure reproducibility, and drive scientific breakthroughs. This survey provides a focused review of the architectures, design, benchmarks, applications, and ethical considerations surrounding LLM-based scientific agents. We highlight why they differ from general agents and the ways in which they advance research across various scientific fields. By examining their development and challenges, this survey offers a comprehensive roadmap for researchers and practitioners to harness these agents for more efficient, reliable, and ethically sound scientific discovery.

cs.AI

Debiasing Multimodal Sarcasm Detection with Contrastive Learning

Despite commendable achievements made by existing work, prevailing multimodal sarcasm detection studies rely more on textual content over visual information. It unavoidably induces spurious correlations between textual words and labels, thereby significantly hindering the models' generalization capability. To address this problem, we define the task of out-of-distribution (OOD) multimodal sarcasm detection, which aims to evaluate models' generalizability when the word distribution is different in training and testing settings. Moreover, we propose a novel debiasing multimodal sarcasm detection framework with contrastive learning, which aims to mitigate the harmful effect of biased textual factors for robust OOD generalization. In particular, we first design counterfactual data augmentation to construct the positive samples with dissimilar word biases and negative samples with similar word biases. Subsequently, we devise an adapted debiasing contrastive learning mechanism to empower the model to learn robust task-relevant features and alleviate the adverse effect of biased words. Extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed framework.

cs.CL