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Chen Lyu

Publications and source records attributed to Chen Lyu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Inferring 1-Minimal Trigger Configurations for Assessing Linux Kernel CVE Triggerability

Vendors assessing Linux kernel CVEs need to know whether a bug is triggerable under production-tailored configurations, not merely whether a version is affected, yet upstream reproducers and vulnerability databases rarely provide configuration-level context. We study minimal trigger-configuration inference: given a CVE entry and a target kernel version (optionally a baseline .config), we synthesize a Kconfig-satisfiable option set that remains effective after make olddefconfig and, when a reproducer is available, still triggers under a specified evaluation protocol; we then prune it to a 1-minimal (subset-minimal) boundary for evaluation. Our framework FCC links vulnerability cues to build-system symbols, completes implicit prerequisites under olddefconfig feedback to avoid silent rollback, and performs runtime-validated minimization guided by dependency topology. We evaluate on KernJC and KernelCTF, totaling 88 CVEs across multiple kernel versions. On the 88-CVE set, FCC improves the post-make olddefconfig configuration success rate from 62.5% (55/88) to 96.6% (85/88) over an olddef-only injection baseline; on the KernJC set, FCC reduces the average candidate set size by 78.7% compared to KernJC (Avg. 14.72 vs. 69.00 options per CVE). A stage-wise analysis of time and token costs shows that Stage I dominates overhead, while CVE-focused evidence selection substantially reduces this cost. By returning an effective and auditable 1-minimal configuration boundary, FCC helps vendors scope triggerability against their deployment configurations with a clear, tool-supported decision line.

cs.CR

ConVAWG: A Retrieval-Grounded Framework for Controlled Synthetic Dialogue Generation in Violence Against Women and Girls

Synthetic dialogue generation offers a way to study conversational dynamics in sensitive domains where real data are difficult to access, release, or annotate. The underlying abuse may occur online or offline: threats and coercion can appear directly in messages, while behaviours such as surveillance, isolation, stalking, and physical violence may be planned, disclosed, or referred to conversationally. Privacy and legal constraints make it difficult the release of large-scale real conversation datasets; existing work has mostly focused on sentence-level toxicity of online abuses, leaving a gap in modelling abuse as a relational and temporally unfolding phenomenon. In this work, we focus on modelling Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) scenarios as multi-turn dialogues. We introduce ConVAWG, a retrieval-grounded framework for generating CPS-aligned synthetic VAWG chat dialogues. ConVAWG builds scenarios from persona seeds, demographic patterns reported by the UK Office for National Statistics, official crime definitions, and retrieved Domestic Homicide Review cases; converts them into hierarchical event timelines; generates multi-scene role-play dialogues; and applies targeted activation-steered toxicity control to appropriate utterances. We release over 6,000 multi-turn dialogue events across 200 scenarios with rich scenario-, event-, and turn-level metadata. Extensive human evaluation, LLM-as-Judge assessment, ablations, and downstream tasks show strong dialogue quality and domain fidelity.

cs.CL

TOFD: Target-Oriented Feature Decoupling against Poisoning Attacks in Split Federated Learning

Split Federated Learning (SFL) facilitates privacy-preserving collaborative training with reduced client-side overhead. However, its split architecture introduces unique attack surfaces, rendering it vulnerable to diverse poisoning attacks. Most existing defenses fail to exploit the split paradigm, limiting their ability to detect and contain malicious behaviors at an early stage. To bridge this gap, we propose Target-Oriented Feature Decoupling (TOFD), a unified framework that jointly enables proactive detection and robust optimization against a wide range of poisoning attacks. TOFD operates in three stages: (1) Target Inference, which identifies potential attack targets by refining class-wise safe zones via class-specific Margin Perturbation (MP); (2) Sample Purification, which adaptively filters poisoned smashed data using thresholds calibrated through cross-class min-max normalization of MP; and (3) Decoupling Optimization, which leverages an adversarial guidance model to capture attack-induced patterns and decouple their influence during optimization, thereby suppressing residual adversarial effects. We provide theoretical guarantees for the convergence of TOFD. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that TOFD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art defenses under diverse attack scenarios, achieving superior robustness with low computational overhead suitable for practical deployment.

cs.LG

AuditCoder: Responsibility-Preserving Task Graphs for Auditable Code Generation and Bounded Repair

Code generators return programs, but typically do not preserve the construction record needed to connect a failure to the decision that produced the affected code or to delimit a justified repair. We present AuditCoder, which treats the program and an auditable construction trace as joint outputs. Before code generation, a contract-annotated task graph assigns stable responsibility identities that remain attached to each commitment, its owned implementation, provenance, validation evidence, and intervention history. When validation fails, a conservative locator maps heterogeneous evidence to a node or dependency branch---or abstains---and bounded repair regenerates only that region while reusing the frozen complement. On APPS, \method{} reaches $82.5$--$83.0\%$ \texttt{pass@1}, recovering much of the loss caused by unrepaired graph decomposition but trailing AgentCoder by $7.5$--$8.5$ points. On ClassEval, it reaches $75.0$--$82.0\%$, outperforming CoT + retry while remaining below AgentCoder. A separate audit of 200 APPS records yields $0.9725$ task-macro decision--code trace coverage; the locator identifies an evidence-supported node or branch for 26 of 60 failures, and 17 of those localized repairs pass. For tasks with stable, locally testable boundaries, the graph functions not only as a decomposition structure but also as a persistent index for validation and repair.

cs.SE

SkelDPO: A Skeleton-Guided Direct Preference Optimization Framework for Efficient Code Generation

With the remarkable progress of Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) in achieving semantic correctness, execution efficiency has become an increasingly important dimension for evaluating their practical utility. However, existing approaches typically treat full programs as a single optimization target during training, without explicitly modeling the structural factors that influence efficiency. As a result, although these models can generate semantically correct code, they fail to learn, at a fine-grained level, the underlying skeleton features that lead to efficient implementations. To address this limitation, we propose SkelDPO (Skeleton-Guided Direct Preference Optimization), a skeleton-guided preference optimization framework that systematically enhances the efficiency of code generation. SkelDPO first identifies efficient and inefficient implementations from the code dataset and, through comparative analysis, locates their efficiency-prone and inefficiency-prone points, forming alignment signals between efficiency and inefficiency skeletons. During training, a joint code and skeleton preference loss is introduced, enabling the model to learn semantic correctness while reinforcing its understanding of efficiency-critical components in code. Results show that SkelDPO consistently surpasses existing methods: compared with SOTA method that relies solely on efficient and inefficient code preference optimization, it improves Pass@1, Beyond@1, and Effi@1 by 3-6%, 3-7%, and 2-5%, with greater improvements observed on complex tasks. Overall, SkelDPO provides a new perspective on skeleton-level efficiency alignment, breaking the limitation of conventional preference optimization that relies solely on correctness or efficiency pairs. All datasets and source code are publicly available at: https://github.com/icpcSkelDPO/SkelDPO.

cs.SE

Chiseling Out Efficiency: Structured Skeleton Supervision for Efficient Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating syntactically correct and functionally complete programs, greatly streamlining software development. However, recent studies reveal that these programs typically execute substantially slower than human-optimized counterparts. Existing approaches to bridging this efficiency gap typically involve either iteratively optimizing code after generation or fine-tuning models on corpora of efficient code. Yet, these methods expose the model to efficiency signals only by mimicking complete, optimized solutions, without explicitly encoding the structural code patterns essential for achieving high runtime performance. Addressing this gap presents two core challenges: (1) extracting and representing latent, efficiency-oriented structural patterns embedded within complex syntax and control flows, and (2) effectively learning these patterns without destabilizing the semantic training of LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we propose EffiSkel, an efficiency skeleton-guided framework that explicitly extracts and learns efficiency skeletons-abstract, reusable structural patterns underpinning efficient code-by leveraging three complementary strategies. These skeletons are integrated into a multi-task learning regime that jointly optimizes code generation and skeleton prediction. Experiments across multiple programming languages and benchmarks demonstrate that EffiSkel significantly enhances both functional correctness and efficiency, resulting on Mercury with DeepSeek-Coder (7B) a +11.11% (vs. EffiCoder) and +3.71% (vs. CodeDPO) higher Efficiency Ratio (ER), and a +0.36 (vs. EffiCoder) and +0.22 (vs. CodeDPO) increase in Average Speedup (AS). These results highlight the effectiveness of explicitly modeling efficiency skeletons in improving the runtime performance of code generated by LLMs.

cs.SE

BESplit: Bias-Compensated Split Federated Learning with Evidential Aggregation

Split Federated Learning (SFL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative training by partitioning models between clients and a server. However, under non-IID data distributions, SFL often suffers from biased optimization and unstable convergence, while existing solutions largely adapt techniques from conventional federated learning. In this work, we observe that the split architecture of SFL inherently alters how client information is represented and coordinated, opening opportunities for bias compensation beyond parameter-level aggregation. Based on this insight, we propose BESplit, an architecture-aware framework that exploits the intrinsic structure of SFL to mitigate non-IID effects. First, to prevent biased local data from dominating global updates, we introduce Evidential Aggregation (EA) to perform fine-grained reweighting of client contributions based on evidential uncertainty. Second, to further reduce distributional skew, we develop Bias-Compensated Collaboration (BCC) to align split-layer representations by pairing complementary clients. Finally, Dual-Teacher Distillation (DTD) is incorporated to synchronize knowledge between decoupled client and server models, enabling independent local inference. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that BESplit consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, convergence stability, and computational efficiency under diverse non-IID settings.

cs.LG

BD-Merging: Bias-Aware Dynamic Model Merging with Evidence-Guided Contrastive Learning

Model Merging (MM) has emerged as a scalable paradigm for multi-task learning (MTL), enabling multiple task-specific models to be integrated without revisiting the original training data. Despite recent progress, the reliability of MM under test-time distribution shift remains insufficiently understood. Most existing MM methods typically assume that test data are clean and distributionally aligned with both the training and auxiliary sources. However, this assumption rarely holds in practice, often resulting in biased predictions with degraded generalization. To address this issue, we present BD-Merging, a bias-aware unsupervised model merging framework that explicitly models uncertainty to achieve adaptive reliability under distribution shift. First, BD-Merging introduces a joint evidential head that learns uncertainty over a unified label space, capturing cross-task semantic dependencies in MM. Second, building upon this evidential foundation, we propose an Adjacency Discrepancy Score (ADS) that quantifies evidential alignment among neighboring samples. Third, guided by ADS, a discrepancy-aware contrastive learning mechanism refines the merged representation by aligning consistent samples and separating conflicting ones. Combined with general unsupervised learning, this process trains a debiased router that adaptively allocates task-specific or layer-specific weights on a per-sample basis, effectively mitigating the adverse effects of distribution shift. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that BD-Merging achieves superior effectiveness and robustness compared to state-of-the-art MM baselines.

cs.LG

HealSplit: Towards Self-Healing through Adversarial Distillation in Split Federated Learning

Split Federated Learning (SFL) is an emerging paradigm for privacy-preserving distributed learning. However, it remains vulnerable to sophisticated data poisoning attacks targeting local features, labels, smashed data, and model weights. Existing defenses, primarily adapted from traditional Federated Learning (FL), are less effective under SFL due to limited access to complete model updates. This paper presents HealSplit, the first unified defense framework tailored for SFL, offering end-to-end detection and recovery against five sophisticated types of poisoning attacks. HealSplit comprises three key components: (1) a topology-aware detection module that constructs graphs over smashed data to identify poisoned samples via topological anomaly scoring (TAS); (2) a generative recovery pipeline that synthesizes semantically consistent substitutes for detected anomalies, validated by a consistency validation student; and (3) an adversarial multi-teacher distillation framework trains the student using semantic supervision from a Vanilla Teacher and anomaly-aware signals from an Anomaly-Influence Debiasing (AD) Teacher, guided by the alignment between topological and gradient-based interaction matrices. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that HealSplit consistently outperforms ten state-of-the-art defenses, achieving superior robustness and defense effectiveness across diverse attack scenarios.

cs.LG

Defense against Unauthorized Distillation in Image Restoration via Feature Space Perturbation

Knowledge distillation (KD) attacks pose a significant threat to deep model intellectual property by enabling adversaries to train student networks using a teacher model's outputs. While recent defenses in image classification have successfully disrupted KD by perturbing output probabilities, extending these methods to image restoration is difficult. Unlike classification, restoration is a generative task with continuous, high-dimensional outputs that depend on spatial coherence and fine details. Minor perturbations are often insufficient, as students can still learn the underlying mapping.To address this, we propose Adaptive Singular Value Perturbation (ASVP), a runtime defense tailored for image restoration models. ASVP operates on internal feature maps of the teacher using singular value decomposition (SVD). It amplifies the topk singular values to inject structured, high-frequency perturbations, disrupting the alignment needed for distillation. This hinders student learning while preserving the teacher's output quality.We evaluate ASVP across five image restoration tasks: super-resolution, low-light enhancement, underwater enhancement, dehazing, and deraining. Experiments show ASVP reduces student PSNR by up to 4 dB and SSIM by 60-75%, with negligible impact on the teacher's performance. Compared to prior methods, ASVP offers a stronger and more consistent defense.Our approach provides a practical solution to protect open-source restoration models from unauthorized knowledge distillation.

cs.CV

SemGuard: Real-Time Semantic Evaluator for Correcting LLM-Generated Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) can translate natural language requirements into code, yet empirical analyses of representative models reveal that semantic errors-programs that compile but behave incorrectly-constitute the majority of observed faults (e.g., >60% on DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B and QwenCoder-7B). Post-hoc repair pipelines detect such faults only after execution, incurring latency, relying on incomplete test suites, and often mis-localizing the defect. Since semantic drift originates in the autoregressive decoding process, intervening while the code is being generated is a direct way to stop error propagation. Constrained-decoding approaches such as ROCODE attempt this, but still wait until the entire program runs to obtain feedback and use entropy heuristics that do not truly capture semantics. A more effective solution must inject semantic signals-early and precisely-into the decoding process.We present SemGuard, a semantic-evaluator-driven framework that performs real-time, line-level semantic supervision. To train the evaluator, we build SemDiff, the first dataset with fine-grained annotations that mark the exact line where a correct and an incorrect implementation diverge. The evaluator, once embedded in the LLM's decoder, flags deviations on partial code, rolls back to the faulty line, and guides regeneration-without executing the program or requiring test cases. Across four benchmarks, SemGuard consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. It lowers the semantic error rate by 19.86% on SemDiff relative to ROCODE, and lifts Pass@1 by 48.92% on the real-world LiveCodeBench with CodeLlama-7B. Similar gains hold for StarCoder2-7B on MBPP and for DeepSeekCoder-6.7B on the Java benchmark SemDiff-Java, demonstrating model- and language-agnostic effectiveness.

cs.SE

Foggy Crowd Counting: Combining Physical Priors and KAN-Graph

Aiming at the key challenges of crowd counting in foggy environments, such as long-range target blurring, local feature degradation, and image contrast attenuation, this paper proposes a crowd-counting method with a physical a priori of atmospheric scattering, which improves crowd counting accuracy under complex meteorological conditions through the synergistic optimization of the physical mechanism and data-driven.Specifically, first, the method introduces a differentiable atmospheric scattering model and employs transmittance dynamic estimation and scattering parameter adaptive calibration techniques to accurately quantify the nonlinear attenuation laws of haze on targets with different depths of field.Secondly, the MSA-KAN was designed based on the Kolmogorov-Arnold Representation Theorem to construct a learnable edge activation function. By integrating a multi-layer progressive architecture with adaptive skip connections, it significantly enhances the model's nonlinear representation capability in feature-degraded regions, effectively suppressing feature confusion under fog interference.Finally, we further propose a weather-aware GCN that dynamically constructs spatial adjacency matrices using deep features extracted by MSA-KAN. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a 12.2\%-27.5\% reduction in MAE metrics compared to mainstream algorithms in dense fog scenarios.

cs.CV

VAMamba: An Efficient Visual Adaptive Mamba for Image Restoration

Recent Mamba-based image restoration methods have achieved promising results but remain limited by fixed scanning patterns and inefficient feature utilization. Conventional Mamba architectures rely on predetermined paths that cannot adapt to diverse degradations, constraining both restoration performance and computational efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose VAMamba, a Visual Adaptive Mamba framework with two key innovations. First, QCLAM(Queue-basedCacheLow-rankAdaptiveMemory)enhancesfeaturelearningthrougha FIFO cache that stores historical representations. Similarity between current LoRA-adapted and cached features guides intelligent fusion, enabling dynamic reuse while effectively controlling memorygrowth.Second, GPS-SS2D(GreedyPathScanSS2D)introducesadaptive scanning. A Vision Transformer generates score maps to estimate pixel importance, and a greedy strategy de termines optimal forward and backward scanning paths. These learned trajectories replace rigid patterns, enabling SS2D to perform targeted feature extraction. The integration of QCLAM and GPS-SS2D allows VAMamba to adaptively focus on degraded regions while maintaining high computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across diverse restoration tasks demonstrate that VAMamba consistently outperforms existing approaches in both restoration quality and efficiency, establishing new benchmarks for adaptive image restoration. Our code is available at https://github.com/WaterHQH/VAMamba.

cs.CV

Hazy Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction via Physical Priors and Graph-Mamba

To address the issues of physical information degradation and ineffective pedestrian interaction modeling in pedestrian trajectory prediction under hazy weather conditions, we propose a deep learning model that combines physical priors of atmospheric scattering with topological modeling of pedestrian relationships. Specifically, we first construct a differentiable atmospheric scattering model that decouples haze concentration from light degradation through a network with physical parameter estimation, enabling the learning of haze-mitigated feature representations. Second, we design an adaptive scanning state space model for feature extraction. Our adaptive Mamba variant achieves a 78% inference speed increase over native Mamba while preserving long-range dependency modeling. Finally, to efficiently model pedestrian relationships, we develop a heterogeneous graph attention network, using graph matrices to model multi-granularity interactions between pedestrians and groups, combined with a spatio-temporal fusion module to capture the collaborative evolution patterns of pedestrian movements. Furthermore, we constructed a new pedestrian trajectory prediction dataset based on ETH/UCY to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experiments show that our method reduces the minADE / minFDE metrics by 37.2% and 41.5%, respectively, compared to the SOTA models in dense haze scenarios (visibility < 30m), providing a new modeling paradigm for reliable perception in intelligent transportation systems in adverse environments.

cs.CV

Ensembling Large Language Models for Code Vulnerability Detection: An Empirical Evaluation

Code vulnerability detection is crucial for ensuring the security and reliability of modern software systems. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in this domain. However, notable discrepancies in detection results often arise when analyzing identical code segments across different training stages of the same model or among architecturally distinct LLMs. While such inconsistencies may compromise detection stability, they also highlight a key opportunity: the latent complementarity among models can be harnessed through ensemble learning to create more robust vulnerability detection systems. In this study, we explore the potential of ensemble learning to enhance the performance of LLMs in source code vulnerability detection. We conduct comprehensive experiments involving five LLMs (i.e., DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B, CodeLlama-7B, CodeLlama-13B, CodeQwen1.5-7B, and StarCoder2-15B), using three ensemble strategies (i.e., Bagging, Boosting, and Stacking). These experiments are carried out across three widely adopted datasets (i.e., Devign, ReVeal, and BigVul). Inspired by Mixture of Experts (MoE) techniques, we further propose Dynamic Gated Stacking (DGS), a Stacking variant tailored for vulnerability detection. Our results demonstrate that ensemble approaches can significantly improve detection performance, with Boosting excelling in scenarios involving imbalanced datasets. Moreover, DGS consistently outperforms traditional Stacking, particularly in handling class imbalance and multi-class classification tasks. These findings offer valuable insights into building more reliable and effective LLM-based vulnerability detection systems through ensemble learning.

cs.SE

AdaQual-Diff: Diffusion-Based Image Restoration via Adaptive Quality Prompting

Restoring images afflicted by complex real-world degradations remains challenging, as conventional methods often fail to adapt to the unique mixture and severity of artifacts present. This stems from a reliance on indirect cues which poorly capture the true perceptual quality deficit. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce AdaQual-Diff, a diffusion-based framework that integrates perceptual quality assessment directly into the generative restoration process. Our approach establishes a mathematical relationship between regional quality scores from DeQAScore and optimal guidance complexity, implemented through an Adaptive Quality Prompting mechanism. This mechanism systematically modulates prompt structure according to measured degradation severity: regions with lower perceptual quality receive computationally intensive, structurally complex prompts with precise restoration directives, while higher quality regions receive minimal prompts focused on preservation rather than intervention. The technical core of our method lies in the dynamic allocation of computational resources proportional to degradation severity, creating a spatially-varying guidance field that directs the diffusion process with mathematical precision. By combining this quality-guided approach with content-specific conditioning, our framework achieves fine-grained control over regional restoration intensity without requiring additional parameters or inference iterations. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaQual-Diff achieves visually superior restorations across diverse synthetic and real-world datasets.

cs.CV

SafeSpeech: A Comprehensive and Interactive Tool for Analysing Sexist and Abusive Language in Conversations

Detecting toxic language including sexism, harassment and abusive behaviour, remains a critical challenge, particularly in its subtle and context-dependent forms. Existing approaches largely focus on isolated message-level classification, overlooking toxicity that emerges across conversational contexts. To promote and enable future research in this direction, we introduce SafeSpeech, a comprehensive platform for toxic content detection and analysis that bridges message-level and conversation-level insights. The platform integrates fine-tuned classifiers and large language models (LLMs) to enable multi-granularity detection, toxic-aware conversation summarization, and persona profiling. SafeSpeech also incorporates explainability mechanisms, such as perplexity gain analysis, to highlight the linguistic elements driving predictions. Evaluations on benchmark datasets, including EDOS, OffensEval, and HatEval, demonstrate the reproduction of state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, including fine-grained sexism detection.

cs.CL

Society of Medical Simplifiers

Medical text simplification is crucial for making complex biomedical literature more accessible to non-experts. Traditional methods struggle with the specialized terms and jargon of medical texts, lacking the flexibility to adapt the simplification process dynamically. In contrast, recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present unique opportunities by offering enhanced control over text simplification through iterative refinement and collaboration between specialized agents. In this work, we introduce the Society of Medical Simplifiers, a novel LLM-based framework inspired by the "Society of Mind" (SOM) philosophy. Our approach leverages the strengths of LLMs by assigning five distinct roles, i.e., Layperson, Simplifier, Medical Expert, Language Clarifier, and Redundancy Checker, organized into interaction loops. This structure allows the agents to progressively improve text simplification while maintaining the complexity and accuracy of the original content. Evaluations on the Cochrane text simplification dataset demonstrate that our framework is on par with or outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior readability and content preservation through controlled simplification processes.

cs.CL