arXiv subjects

Chaoli Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Chaoli Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Mutual Debiasing via Dual-Seed Comparison for Probabilistic Sampling in Large Language Models

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in reasoning and decision-making, high-fidelity probabilistic sampling remains a persistent challenge. When generating random variables, LLMs consistently exhibit systematic biases that warp the target probability distributions. Current approaches often rely on a single, self-generated seed, which inherits model-specific biases. To overcome this vulnerability, we introduce Dual-Seed Comparison (DSC), a transparent, tool-free protocol that utilizes two independent LLM-generated seeds to neutralize bias. DSC compares the character-level ordinal values of the two seeds to construct a bit sequence, converts and normalizes this sequence into a pseudo-uniform variate, and then maps the variate to the target distribution through the inverse cumulative distribution function (CDF). Empirical results show that DSC substantially outperforms existing methods across 96\% of evaluated settings. Beyond direct sampling, task-adapted variants based on the DSC comparison operator improve distributional control in MCQ generation and attribute-constrained text-to-image prompting.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

From Memorization to Creation: Evaluating the Cognitive Depth of LLM-Generated Educational Questions

While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied. This work evaluates six widely-used LLMs through a Bloom's Taxonomy lens, focusing on their capacity to transcend rote memorization and achieve cognitive leaps. Using a hybrid human--AI evaluation protocol, we generate and analyze 20{,}700 questions across computer science, K--12 math, and social-science domains. Key contributions include: (1) a fine-grained prompting strategy that reduces question repetitiveness by 24.45\% for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and increases the proportion of higher-order cognitive level outputs by 11.53\% for InternLM3-8B-Instruct; (2) quantitative metrics for cognitive shift intensity (CogShift) and category drift, revealing InternLM3's superior performance in multi-level transitions; (3) an interpretability analysis revealing metric-level correlations that enhance the transparency of Chain-of-Thought prompting. Our findings highlight the importance of cognitive-aware prompt design and provide benchmarks for deploying LLMs in personalized learning systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

TTF: A Trapezoidal Temporal Fusion Framework for LTV Forecasting in Douyin

In the user growth scenario, Internet companies invest heavily in paid acquisition channels to acquire new users. But sustainable growth depends on acquired users' generating lifetime value (LTV) exceeding customer acquisition cost (CAC). In order to maximize LTV/CAC ratio, it is crucial to predict channel-level LTV in an early stage for further optimization of budget allocation. The LTV forecasting problem is significantly different from traditional time series forecasting problems, and there are three main challenges. Firstly, it is an unaligned multi-time series forecasting problem that each channel has a number of LTV series of different activation dates. Secondly, to predict in the early stage, it faces the imbalanced short-input long-output (SILO) challenge. Moreover, compared with the commonly used time series datasets, the real LTV series are volatile and non-stationary, with more frequent fluctuations and higher variance. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Trapezoidal Temporal Fusion (TTF) to address the above challenges. We introduce a trapezoidal multi-time series module to deal with data unalignment and SILO challenges, and output accurate predictions with a multi-tower structure called MT-FusionNet. The framework has been deployed to the online system for Douyin. Compared to the previously deployed online model, MAPEp decreased by 4.3%, and MAPEa decreased by 3.2%, where MAPEp denotes the point-wise MAPE of the LTV curve and MAPEa denotes the MAPE of the aggregated LTV.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

WDformer: A Wavelet-based Differential Transformer Model for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting has various applications, such as meteorological rainfall prediction, traffic flow analysis, financial forecasting, and operational load monitoring for various systems. Due to the sparsity of time series data, relying solely on time-domain or frequency-domain modeling limits the model's ability to fully leverage multi-domain information. Moreover, when applied to time series forecasting tasks, traditional attention mechanisms tend to over-focus on irrelevant historical information, which may introduce noise into the prediction process, leading to biased results. We proposed WDformer, a wavelet-based differential Transformer model. This study employs the wavelet transform to conduct a multi-resolution analysis of time series data. By leveraging the advantages of joint representation in the time-frequency domain, it accurately extracts the key information components that reflect the essential characteristics of the data. Furthermore, we apply attention mechanisms on inverted dimensions, allowing the attention mechanism to capture relationships between multiple variables. When performing attention calculations, we introduced the differential attention mechanism, which computes the attention score by taking the difference between two separate softmax attention matrices. This approach enables the model to focus more on important information and reduce noise. WDformer has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple challenging real-world datasets, demonstrating its accuracy and effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaowangbc/WDformer.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating the Logical Reasoning Abilities of Large Reasoning Models

Large reasoning models, often post-trained on long chain-of-thought (long CoT) data with reinforcement learning, achieve state-of-the-art performance on mathematical, coding, and domain-specific reasoning benchmarks. However, their logical reasoning capabilities - fundamental to human cognition and independent of domain knowledge - remain understudied. To address this gap, we introduce LogiEval, a holistic benchmark for evaluating logical reasoning in large reasoning models. LogiEval spans diverse reasoning types (deductive, inductive, analogical, and abductive) and task formats (e.g., logical sequence, argument analysis), sourced from high-quality human examinations (e.g., LSAT, GMAT). Our experiments demonstrate that modern reasoning models excel at 4-choice argument analysis problems and analogical reasoning, surpassing human performance, yet exhibit uneven capabilities across reasoning types and formats, highlighting limitations in their generalization. Our analysis reveals that human performance does not mirror model failure distributions. To foster further research, we curate LogiEval-Hard, a challenging subset identified through a novel screening paradigm where small-model failures (Qwen3-30B-A3B) reliably predict difficulties for larger models. Modern models show striking, consistent failures on LogiEval-Hard. This demonstrates that fundamental reasoning bottlenecks persist across model scales, and establishes LogiEval-Hard as both a diagnostic tool and a rigorous testbed for advancing logical reasoning in LLMs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Logical Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey

With the emergence of advanced reasoning models like OpenAI o3 and DeepSeek-R1, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. However, their ability to perform rigorous logical reasoning remains an open question. This survey synthesizes recent advancements in logical reasoning within LLMs, a critical area of AI research. It outlines the scope of logical reasoning in LLMs, its theoretical foundations, and the benchmarks used to evaluate reasoning proficiency. We analyze existing capabilities across different reasoning paradigms - deductive, inductive, abductive, and analogical - and assess strategies to enhance reasoning performance, including data-centric tuning, reinforcement learning, decoding strategies, and neuro-symbolic approaches. The review concludes with future directions, emphasizing the need for further exploration to strengthen logical reasoning in AI systems.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Time Series Analysis for Education: Methods, Applications, and Future Directions

Recent advancements in the collection and analysis of sequential educational data have brought time series analysis to a pivotal position in educational research, highlighting its essential role in facilitating data-driven decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive summaries that consolidate these advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a comprehensive review of time series analysis techniques specifically within the educational context. We begin by exploring the landscape of educational data analytics, categorizing various data sources and types relevant to education. We then review four prominent time series methods-forecasting, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection-illustrating their specific application points in educational settings. Subsequently, we present a range of educational scenarios and applications, focusing on how these methods are employed to address diverse educational tasks, which highlights the practical integration of multiple time series methods to solve complex educational problems. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on future directions, including personalized learning analytics, multimodal data fusion, and the role of large language models (LLMs) in educational time series. The contributions of this paper include a detailed taxonomy of educational data, a synthesis of time series techniques with specific educational applications, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging trends and future research opportunities in educational analysis. The related papers and resources are available and regularly updated at the project page.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

The measurement of the splashback radius of dark matter halo

In the hierarchical evolution framework of cosmology, larger halos grow through matter accretion and halo mergers. To clarify the halo evolution, we need to define the halo mass and radius physically. However, the pseudo-evolution problem makes the process difficult. Thus, we aim to measure the splashback radius, a physically defined halo radius for a large number of halos with various mass and redshift, and to determine the most important parameters to affect it. We use the typical definition of splashback radius (Rsp) as the radius with the steepest radial density profile. In this work, we measure Rsp of dark matter halos within the mass of 1e13-3e15Msun and redshifts spanning 0.08-0.65. This is the measurement of the Rsp in the largest range of halo mass and redshift. Using the shear catalog of the DECaLS DR8, we investigate Rsp of halos associated with galaxies and galaxy clusters identified in the various catalogs. Our finding reveals a trend wherein massive halos demonstrate a larger Rsp, and the normalized splashback radius (Rsp/R200m) shows a U-shaped mass evolution. The upturn in these relations mainly comes from the contribution of massive halos with low redshifts. We further find Rsp increases with the peak height, while Rsp/R200m has a negative relation with the peak height. We also find the Rsp >~R200m for most halos, indicating their low accretion rates. Our result is consistent with previous literature across a wide range of mass, redshift, and peak height, as well as the simulation work from More et al. (2015).

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

The XMM-SERVS X-ray eXtended Galaxy Cluster (XVXGC) catalog

To explain the well-known tension between cosmological parameter constraints obtained from the primary CMB and those drawn from galaxy cluster samples, we propose a possible explanation for the incompleteness of detected clusters are higher than estimated. We aim to search for galaxy groups and clusters with particularly extended surface brightness distributions by creating a new X-ray-selected catalog of extended galaxy clusters from the XMM-SERVS data, based on a dedicated source detection and characterization algorithm that is optimized for extended sources. Our state-of-the-art algorithm is composed of wavelet filtering, source detection, and characterization. We make a visual inspection of the optical image, and spatial distribution of galaxies within the same redshift layer to confirm the existence of clusters and estimate the cluster redshift with the spectroscopic and photometric redshifts of galaxies. The growth curve analysis is used to characterize the detections. We report a catalog of extended X-ray galaxy clusters detected from the XMM-SERVS data, named the XMM- SERVS X-ray eXtended Galaxy Cluster (XVXGC) catalog. It includes 141 cluster candidates. Specifically, there are 52 clusters previously identified as clusters with the intra-cluster medium (ICM) emission (class 3), 37 ones previously known as optical or infrared clusters but detected as X-ray clusters for the first time (class 2), and 52 identified as clusters for the first time (class 1). Compared with the class3 sample, the 'class1+2' sample is systematically fainter, and exhibits a flatter surface brightness profile. The median flux in [0.1-2.4]keV band for 'class1+2' and class3 sample is 2.336e-14 and 3.163e-14erg/s/cm2, respectively. The median slope of surface brightness profile are 0.502 and 0.577 for the 'class1+2' and class 3 samples, respectively.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

A Survey on Diffusion Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data

Diffusion models have been widely used in time series and spatio-temporal data, enhancing generative, inferential, and downstream capabilities. These models are applied across diverse fields such as healthcare, recommendation, climate, energy, audio, and traffic. By separating applications for time series and spatio-temporal data, we offer a structured perspective on model category, task type, data modality, and practical application domain. This study aims to provide a solid foundation for researchers and practitioners, inspiring future innovations that tackle traditional challenges and foster novel solutions in diffusion model-based data mining tasks and applications. For more detailed information, we have open-sourced a repository at https://github.com/yyysjz1997/Awesome-TimeSeries-SpatioTemporal-Diffusion-Model.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Logic Agent: Enhancing Validity with Logic Rule Invocation

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a pivotal technique for augmenting the inferential capabilities of language models during reasoning tasks. Despite its advancements, CoT often grapples with challenges in validating reasoning validity and ensuring informativeness. Addressing these limitations, this paper introduces the Logic Agent (LA), an agent-based framework aimed at enhancing the validity of reasoning processes in Large Language Models (LLMs) through strategic logic rule invocation. Unlike conventional approaches, LA transforms LLMs into logic agents that dynamically apply propositional logic rules, initiating the reasoning process by converting natural language inputs into structured logic forms. The logic agent leverages a comprehensive set of predefined functions to systematically navigate the reasoning process. This methodology not only promotes the structured and coherent generation of reasoning constructs but also significantly improves their interpretability and logical coherence. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate LA's capacity to scale effectively across various model sizes, markedly improving the precision of complex reasoning across diverse tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Analysis: Taxonomy, Progress, and Prospects

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently achieved impressive performance on various time series tasks. The most prominent advantage of SSL is that it reduces the dependence on labeled data. Based on the pre-training and fine-tuning strategy, even a small amount of labeled data can achieve high performance. Compared with many published self-supervised surveys on computer vision and natural language processing, a comprehensive survey for time series SSL is still missing. To fill this gap, we review current state-of-the-art SSL methods for time series data in this article. To this end, we first comprehensively review existing surveys related to SSL and time series, and then provide a new taxonomy of existing time series SSL methods by summarizing them from three perspectives: generative-based, contrastive-based, and adversarial-based. These methods are further divided into ten subcategories with detailed reviews and discussions about their key intuitions, main frameworks, advantages and disadvantages. To facilitate the experiments and validation of time series SSL methods, we also summarize datasets commonly used in time series forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, and clustering tasks. Finally, we present the future directions of SSL for time series analysis.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Large Language Models for Education: A Survey and Outlook

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought in a new era of possibilities in the realm of education. This survey paper summarizes the various technologies of LLMs in educational settings from multifaceted perspectives, encompassing student and teacher assistance, adaptive learning, and commercial tools. We systematically review the technological advancements in each perspective, organize related datasets and benchmarks, and identify the risks and challenges associated with deploying LLMs in education. Furthermore, we outline future research opportunities, highlighting the potential promising directions. Our survey aims to provide a comprehensive technological picture for educators, researchers, and policymakers to harness the power of LLMs to revolutionize educational practices and foster a more effective personalized learning environment.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Bringing Generative AI to Adaptive Learning in Education

The recent surge in generative AI technologies, such as large language models and diffusion models, has boosted the development of AI applications in various domains, including science, finance, and education. Concurrently, adaptive learning, a concept that has gained substantial interest in the educational sphere, has proven its efficacy in enhancing students' learning efficiency. In this position paper, we aim to shed light on the intersectional studies of these two methods, which combine generative AI with adaptive learning concepts. By presenting discussions about the benefits, challenges, and potentials in this field, we argue that this union will contribute significantly to the development of the next-stage learning format in education.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

LogiCoT: Logical Chain-of-Thought Instruction-Tuning

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) demonstrates impressive chain-of-thought reasoning ability. Recent work on self-instruction tuning, such as Alpaca, has focused on enhancing the general proficiency of models. These instructions enable the model to achieve performance comparable to GPT-3.5 on general tasks like open-domain text generation and paraphrasing. However, they fall short of helping the model handle complex reasoning tasks. To bridge the gap, this paper presents LogiCoT, a new instruction-tuning dataset for Logical Chain-of-Thought reasoning with GPT-4. We elaborate on the process of harvesting instructions for prompting GPT-4 to generate chain-of-thought rationales. LogiCoT serves as an instruction set for teaching models of logical reasoning and elicits general reasoning skills.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Large Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data: A Survey and Outlook

Temporal data, including time series and spatio-temporal data, are pervasive in real-world applications. Generated in massive volumes by physical and virtual sensors, they record dynamic system behaviors and enable a wide range of downstream tasks. Effectively analyzing such data is crucial to unlocking their rich information content. Recent advances in large language models and other foundation models have accelerated their use in time series and spatio-temporal data mining. These approaches not only improve pattern recognition and reasoning across diverse domains but also support progress toward artificial general intelligence that can understand and process temporal data. In this survey, we present a comprehensive, up-to-date review of large models tailored or adapted for time series and spatio-temporal data along four dimensions: data types, model categories, model scopes, and application areas/tasks. We organize existing work into two main groups: large models for time series analysis (LM4TS) and for spatio-temporal data mining (LM4STD), and further distinguish general-purpose from domain-specific models. We also curate related resources, including datasets, model implementations, and tools, organized by major application areas. Overall, this survey consolidates recent advances and highlights foundations, applications, resources, and open research opportunities in large model-centric temporal data analysis.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

DCdetector: Dual Attention Contrastive Representation Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is critical for a wide range of applications. It aims to identify deviant samples from the normal sample distribution in time series. The most fundamental challenge for this task is to learn a representation map that enables effective discrimination of anomalies. Reconstruction-based methods still dominate, but the representation learning with anomalies might hurt the performance with its large abnormal loss. On the other hand, contrastive learning aims to find a representation that can clearly distinguish any instance from the others, which can bring a more natural and promising representation for time series anomaly detection. In this paper, we propose DCdetector, a multi-scale dual attention contrastive representation learning model. DCdetector utilizes a novel dual attention asymmetric design to create the permutated environment and pure contrastive loss to guide the learning process, thus learning a permutation invariant representation with superior discrimination abilities. Extensive experiments show that DCdetector achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple time series anomaly detection benchmark datasets. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/DAMO-DI-ML/KDD2023-DCdetector.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Bridging AI and Energy Forecasting: An Autonomous Workflow with Customized Toolkit

Energy forecasting is crucial for the power grid, but fundamentally different from general time series analysis: it highly relies on covariates like meteorological factors, and its goals must align with actual power grid operations, such as risk assessment and system reliability. In order to bridge the huge gap between advanced machine learning forecasting models and actual power grid demand, this paper proposes an autonomous forecasting workflow based on LLMs. As a virtual analyst, the agent replaces tedious manual adjustments by autonomously analyzing data features, dynamically orchestrating optimal forecasting pipelines, and generating actionable analysis reports for decision-makers. The carefully arranged pipeline directly addresses the demand of the power grid through probabilistic forecasting for uncertainty quantification. Furthermore, the framework acts as an automated testbed, enabling seamless A/B testing of specific algorithmic plugins across various architectures to evaluate their empirical effectiveness. As the foundation of the algorithm, the underlying toolkit integrates 31 advanced temporal architectures and 6 customized exogenous modules, resulting in 146 highly configurable variants. In addition, to provide experience references for the agents, we established a large-scale benchmark on 21 energy datasets and released new high-quality renewable energy datasets with meteorological factors.

cs.LG↗