arXiv subjects

Chen Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Chen Ma.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

CreaMem: A Scene-Aware Memory Architecture for Personalized Agents

Long-term memory is a core capability for personalized LLM agents. To support it, existing memory systems organize information using various criteria such as topic segments or summary hierarchies. However, we identify two major limitations in these designs. First, they lack scene awareness: memories from unrelated life scenes share the same retrieval space, which inflates the search space and introduces cross-scene interference. Second, they encode each memory from a single perspective, making it difficult to retrieve complementary views of the same event. In this paper, we propose the CreaMem architecture, which enables scene-aware memory organization by partitioning memory into several Life Scene Memories to reduce cross-scene interference at retrieval. To go beyond the single perspective and achieve cross-memory synergy, entries are dual-coded from both episodic and trait-based perspectives within each memory. We further devise a permemory balanced sampling strategy at retrieval time. Extensive experiments on two long-term memory benchmarks show that CreaMem improves QA accuracy across all evaluation metrics, with particularly large gains on multi-hop reasoning performance, validating scene-aware partitioning and cross-memory synergy. To enhance reproducibility, we release our code in a public GitHub repository.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Reaching the thermodynamic limit of wicking on textured surfaces

Wicking in a capillary tube could happen as long as the liquid contact angle is smaller than 90 degree, making it possible for weak hydrophilic liquids to spontaneously invade the tube. For textured surfaces, energy minimization argument predicts the same. However, wicking of weak hydrophilic liquids on textured surfaces has not been possible due to energy barriers induced by the textures. We demonstrate how these barriers could be avoided by adjusting the shape and arrangement of the pillars, thus the wettability required for wicking reaches the theoretical limit. An unprecedented wicking contact angle of 82 degree is reported. More surprisingly, wicking coefficients of such surfaces can be larger than that of rectangular grooves at the same porosity. These findings may significantly advance biomedical and thermal management technologies.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2026

AdaMTP: An Adaptive Training Paradigm for Multi-Token Prediction

Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) has emerged as an effective paradigm that augments a shared Large Language Model backbone with auxiliary heads, training the model to predict several future tokens in parallel to enrich its supervision signal and accelerate inference. However, existing training frameworks adopt a rigid, fixed-length prediction horizon, disregarding the highly non-uniform information density of natural language and code. Forcing the auxiliary heads to predict across high-entropy semantic boundaries injects noisy, conflicting training signals; because these heads share the backbone's latent representations, the resulting gradients backpropagate and interfere with the model's core capabilities. We propose AdaMTP, an adaptive training paradigm that dynamically aligns the prediction horizon with the intrinsic predictability of the sequence. At its core, an entropy-based segmentation algorithm leverages the base model to detect sudden surges in uncertainty as semantic boundaries, partitioning sequences into variable-length groups. Each token is assigned an adaptive prediction depth, and a dynamically masked MTP objective suppresses the loss for predictions that cross these boundaries, attenuating the noisy gradients that degrade the backbone. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general benchmarks on three backbones (Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B, Gemma-3-12B), AdaMTP consistently outperforms standard MTP in both task performance and inference speedup.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Budget-Aware LLM Discovery via Cost-Calibrated Frontier Utility

Large language models increasingly support scientific and algorithmic discovery through inference-time search over evaluated candidates. Existing adaptive discovery controllers assign credit based only on score progress, even though prompt length, retries, and guidance calls cause search actions to incur different token costs. We prove that cost-blind credit can forfeit all but a vanishing fraction of attainable quality as frontiers multiply and costs diverge. Under a fixed search-side token budget, the controller must decide which frontier is improving and whether its gain justifies the realized cost before the budget is exhausted. We introduce \textbf{CostAda}, a cost-calibrated adaptive controller built around \emph{cost-calibrated frontier utility}. The utility values frontier progress relative to realized action cost and conditions that credit on the remaining budget. CostAda uses this signal to control local exploration intensity, frontier allocation, and budgeted tactic intervention. Cost and remaining budget therefore shape the search rather than serving only as accounting variables or a stopping rule. CostAda reaches the strongest baseline's full-budget quality with at most half the budget on twelve of sixteen benchmark--backbone pairs while achieving the strongest mean final quality on all eight benchmarks under GLM-5 and GPT-5.4.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Before Thinking, Learn to Decide: Proactive Routing for Efficient Visual Reasoning

Large multimodal models have achieved strong reasoning on complex visual tasks, but their inference efficiency is often restricted by long chains of thought. A promising solution is to pair a small draft model with a large target model, enabling cooperative inference employing a routing signal that adaptively routes queries to either the draft or target model based on their difficulties for optimal efficiency and accuracy. Yet, the remaining bottleneck is to establish a reliable query difficulty signal under multimodal settings. Existing approaches designed for language models either rely on post-hoc token probabilities, which fall short in multimodal scenarios, or depend on supervised fine-tuning, which is a data-sensitive strategy. Both paradigms perform routing only after a complete output, and ignore whether the target model can actually solve the routed instances. To address this, we propose PRP, a Proactive Routing Paradigm that enables early decision-making by jointly evaluating the competence of both the draft and target models. Our Draft Rating Learning (DRL) equips the draft model with an internal confidence estimator, while Joint Rating Learning (JRL) predicts how well the target model can handle a given query, thereby prioritizing the allocation of samples it excels at rather than the hardest ones. These ratings enable fine-grained, instance-level \textbf{Proactive Routing} and substantially accelerate inference without compromising overall performance. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks validate our effectiveness and efficiency.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

JuZhou 1.0 Technical Report: The First Edge-Native Text-to-Image Foundation Model Trained Entirely on China-Developed AI Accelerators

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models typically require substantial computational resources and cloud infrastructure, posing significant challenges for edge deployment in terms of latency, cost, and user privacy. We present JuZhou 1.0, an ultra-lightweight T2I foundation model designed for fully offline, on-device execution. JuZhou 1.0 achieves its efficiency through four key designs: (1) a compact image-generation backbone consisting of a 0.385B-parameter denoising U-Net and a 1.90M-parameter distilled decoder, totaling approximately 0.387B parameters; (2) Rectified Flow training combined with DMD2 distillation, reducing inference to 4 sampling steps; (3) Chinese semantic alignment trained on 9M curated image-text pairs, enabling direct Chinese prompting without external translation at inference time; and (4) a training and distillation pipeline completed on domestically developed Sugon K100 AI accelerators without relying on NVIDIA GPUs for training or distillation. Despite its compact scale, the 28-step base model of JuZhou 1.0 achieves an overall GenEval score of 0.69, outperforming published baselines including SDXL (2.6B, 0.55), SD3-Medium (2B, 0.62), and IF-XL (4.3B, 0.61). We further validate the full poetry-to-image pipeline on Android and the core CLIP-U-Net-VAE generation branch on iOS. On a smartphone powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform, the 4-step U-Net denoising branch runs in approximately 1.6 seconds, while the full Android poetry-to-image pipeline takes 4.5 seconds with on-device prompt refinement on Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. These results position JuZhou 1.0 as a practical approach to mobile text-to-image generation and provide a concrete reference for Chinese-native generation, domestic-compute training, and fully offline on-device deployment after one-time installation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LLM-as-a-Judge for Reliable and Explainable Offline Evaluation in Top-K Recommendation

Recommendation evaluation plays a crucial role in guiding the refinement and deployment of recommender systems. Most existing trials rely on offline evaluation using Top-K metrics computed over holdout user behaviors. However, we identify two fundamental limitations that undermine their ability to deliver reliable and explainable evaluations. Regarding reliability, offline evaluation treats observed user feedback as a proxy of true preferences and enforces rigid ID matching between the proxy and recommendation. In practice, feedback collections are inherently shaped by incomplete and biased item exposure, leading to distorted and unreliable assessments. Regarding explainability, Top-K metrics only establish numerical scores without offering meaningful insights to support them, thereby reinforcing the black-box nature of offline evaluation. In this paper, we propose a reliable and explainable LLM-as-a-Judge framework for offline recommendation evaluation. To enhance reliability, we introduce a semantic proxy from user textual behaviors to represent their true preferences. This proxy allows for more flexible matching between preferences and recommendations in the semantic space, rather than depending on the holdout feedback. To ensure explainability, the LLM Judge adopts a reasoning-then-scoring process to generate relevance judgments along with explicit rationale. Finally, we aggregate the individual scores into global Top-K metrics to quantify overall recommendation quality, and provide justification for each preference hit or miss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LLM Judge achieves solid reliability, explainability, and robustness in evaluation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

DataMagic: Transforming Tabular Data into Data Insight Video

Data videos integrate dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations to communicate data insights as temporal narratives, making them an effective medium for improving data consumption efficiency in the data management lifecycle. However, producing high-quality data videos requires expertise spanning data analysis, narrative design, and video production. Existing approaches fall short: static visualization tools (e.g., BI dashboards) lack narrative logic and animation; authoring tools require users to pre-prepare visualizations rather than working from raw data; pixel-level video generation models cannot guarantee data fidelity or provenance. We demonstrate DataMagic, an end-to-end interactive system that transforms raw tabular data and natural language queries into narrative data-insight videos. To ensure data fidelity, DataMagic introduces the declarative specification DVSpec, which binds visual and animation elements to underlying data fields through data-driven semantic references. To address the combinatorial explosion of the design space, DataMagic adopts a Generate-then-Orchestrate multi-agent architecture that generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. Leveraging DVSpec's decoupling of logic and rendering, the system further supports three interaction modes and structured provenance-based data Q&A, transforming one-way videos into explorable interactive data interfaces. Evaluation on 109 real-world samples validates the effectiveness of the DataMagic. Homepage: https://datamagic-home.github.io/

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

DirectorBench: Diagnosing Long-Form Video Generation with Personalized Multi-Agent Evaluation

Long-form video generation is rapidly moving from short, single-scene synthesis toward minute-long, multi-shot creation with narrative structure, cinematic control, audio, and cross-modal synchronization. However, evaluating such videos remains challenging, since existing benchmarks largely focus on local visual quality, short-horizon temporal consistency, or generic prompt alignment, and provide limited diagnosis of workflow failures and user-dependent preferences. We introduce DirectorBench, a personalized multi-agent diagnostic benchmark for long-form video generation. DirectorBench evaluates generated videos with respect to 80 structured metadata entries, 7 user profiles, and 40 checkpoint criteria across 5 dimensions: script, visual, audio, cross-modal, and stability. Instead of reducing quality to a single aggregate score, DirectorBench localizes checkpoint-level bottlenecks and supports profile-aware evaluation. We evaluate 4 long-form video generation workflows, 6 base LLMs, and 7 user profiles. Across workflows, DirectorBench reveals a between-unit bottleneck: transition quality averages only 0.256 and reaches 0.356 for the best workflow, while prompt-level user demand fulfillment averages 0.71. We further conduct human evaluation with 14 annotators to validate the alignment between DirectorBench and human judgment. The results show that DirectorBench captures human-perceptible quality differences and reveals workflow- and profile-dependent failure modes that are hidden by aggregate scoring. These findings highlight the importance of diagnostic and profile-aware benchmarking for long-form video generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

SEAL: Can Saturated Benchmarks Be Revived by LLM-as-a-Meta-Judge?

Widely used language-model benchmarks are increasingly saturated, with frontier systems often receiving near-tied scores that standard metrics cannot resolve. Rather than constructing harder alternatives, we ask whether existing tasks can be made informative again through improved evaluation over the same candidate outputs. Therefore, we present Seeded Elimination with Adaptive LLM-as-a-Meta-Judge, a self-improving evaluation protocol for extracting latent ranking signal from saturated benchmarks. SEAL seeds candidate outputs into a single elimination and evaluates each match with task-level principles plus self-improving checklist criteria. We evaluate SEAL on multiple saturated benchmarks covering code generation, mathematical reasoning, knowledge-intensive question answering, and tool-use agent task completion. Across these settings, SEAL improves the ranking-accuracy--latency trade-off over competing protocols, attaining 0.83--1.00 Spearman agreement with full pairwise judging and 4/4 top-1 agreement, while requiring only 11.89 calls per task compared with 28.00 for full pairwise evaluation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Looking Farther with Confidence: Uncertainty-Guided Future Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation effectively models dynamic user interests but continues to face challenges related to data sparsity. While self-supervised learning has alleviated this issue to some extent, most existing methods focus exclusively on immediate next-item prediction during training, thereby neglecting the rich information embedded in longer-term future interactions. Although a few studies have explored the utilization of future data, existing attempts typically apply future supervision signals with uniform intensity across all samples, which may lead to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose an adaptive future learning framework, UFRec, which encourages the model to look further ahead when it is confident in the current state, while focusing on the immediate task when it is uncertain. Specifically, UFRec incorporates an Uncertainty-Guided Future Supervision module that dynamically modulates the weight of multi-step future supervision based on the model's confidence in the primary next-item prediction task. Furthermore, we complement step-wise future supervision with a Future-Aware Contrastive Learning module that treats the future trajectory as a holistic entity. Notably, both auxiliary modules are utilized exclusively during training and incur no inference overhead. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by effectively leveraging future data.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Foundation Protocol: A Coordination Layer for Agentic Society

Autonomous agents are moving from tools into a layer of social infrastructure: they browse, purchase, deploy software, manage systems, and increasingly interact with one another. As these systems scale, the bottleneck shifts away from raw model capability toward coordination. Agents need to form reliable relationships, organize multi-agent work, exchange value, support an AI economy, and stay safe and accountable under real-world oversight. This paper introduces the Foundation Protocol (FP), a graph-first coordination layer for an emerging human-AI society. FP unifies heterogeneous entities, including agents, tools, resources, humans, institutions, and organizations, and supports native multi-party organization and event-based collaboration. It also provides economic primitives for metering, receipts, and settlement, and treats policy, provenance, and audit as first-class concerns. FP is designed to wrap and bridge existing protocols rather than replace them, enabling incremental adoption while reducing integration and governance overhead. The aim is to keep autonomous agency composable while keeping accountability non-negotiable, so that coordination itself can become shared infrastructure for a human-AI society that is open, pluralistic, and governable.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

PSD: Pushing the Pareto Frontier of Diffusion LLMs via Parallel Speculative Decoding

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences. Although dLLMs can predict all masked positions in parallel within each step, the large number of denoising iterations still makes inference expensive. This cost can be reduced spatially by unmasking multiple tokens per step, or temporally by collapsing multiple denoising steps into one verification call. We propose Parallel Speculative Decoding (PSD), a training-free framework that jointly improves inference along both axes. Using the confidence scores from a single forward pass, PSD selects positions to unmask via a configurable, adaptive unmasking policy and constructs multi-depth speculative drafts without extra model calls. A final batched verification pass then applies hierarchical acceptance, keeping the deepest draft that remains consistent with the updated predictions. Experiments on three dLLMs across reasoning and code generation tasks show that PSD achieves favorable trade-offs between inference efficiency and generation quality, reaching up to $5.5\times$ tokens per forward pass with accuracy comparable to greedy decoding.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

DepthPilot: From Controllability to Interpretability in Colonoscopy Video Generation

Controllable medical video generation has achieved remarkable progress, but it still lacks interpretability, which requires the alignment of generated contents with physical priors and faithful clinical manifestations. To push the boundaries from mere controllability to interpretability, we propose DepthPilot, the first interpretable framework for colonoscopy video generation. This work takes a step toward trustworthy generation through two synergistic paradigms. To achieve explicit geometric grounding, DepthPilot devises a prior distribution alignment strategy, injecting depth constraints into the diffusion backbone via parameter-efficient fine-tuning to ensure anatomical fidelity. To enhance intrinsic nonlinear modeling under these geometric constraints, DepthPilot employs an adaptive spline denoising module, replacing fixed linear weights with learnable spline functions to capture complex spatio-temporal dynamics. Extensive evaluations across three public datasets and in-house clinical data confirm DepthPilot's robust ability to produce physically consistent videos. It achieves FID scores below 15 across all benchmarks and ranks first in clinician assessments, bridging the gap between "visually realistic" and "clinically interpretable". Moreover, DepthPilot-generated videos are expected to enable reliable 3D reconstruction, facilitating surgical navigation and blind region identification, and serve as a foundation toward the colorectal world model.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Mean first passage time and the Kramers escape rate of phase transitions for the Bardeen-AdS-class black hole

In this study, by utilizing the constructed generalized free energy alongside the Mean First-Passage Time and the Kramers escape rate from stochastic dynamics, we have obtained a comprehensive landscape of the phase transitions for the Bardeen-AdS-class black hole. This black hole model admits two distinct categories of solutions. Type I black holes feature a regular black hole solution, and Type II black holes possess a vacuum state solution. In the phase transition between the small black hole and the large black hole for Type I, the process may pass through a stable, metastable, or unstable regular black hole as an intermediate state. In contrast, for Type II black holes, the phase transition occurs exclusively between the vacuum state and the small black hole, and the transition process does not involve any regular black hole intermediate states.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

From Coarse to Fine: Self-Adaptive Hierarchical Planning for LLM Agents

Large language model-based agents have recently emerged as powerful approaches for solving dynamic and multi-step tasks. Most existing agents employ planning mechanisms to guide long-term actions in dynamic environments. However, current planning approaches face a fundamental limitation that they operate at a fixed granularity level. Specifically, they either provide excessive detail for simple tasks or insufficient detail for complex ones, failing to achieve an optimal balance between simplicity and complexity. Drawing inspiration from the principle of \textit{progressive refinement} in cognitive science, we propose \textbf{AdaPlan-H}, a self-adaptive hierarchical planning mechanism that mimics human planning strategies. Our method initiates with a coarse-grained macro plan and progressively refines it based on task complexity. It generates self-adaptive hierarchical plans tailored to the varying difficulty levels of different tasks, which can be optimized by imitation learning and capability enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves task execution success rates while mitigating overplanning at the planning level, providing a flexible and efficient solution for multi-step complex decision-making tasks. To contribute to the community, our code and data will be made publicly available at https://github.com/import-myself/AHP.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Defining Robust Ultrasound Quality Metrics via an Ultrasound Foundation Model

Clinicians lack a principled framework to quantify diagnostic utility in ultrasound reconstructions. Existing standards like PSNR and VGG-LPIPS are inadequate, failing to account for modality-specific physics or the structural nuances of acoustic imaging. We close this gap with a TinyUSFM-based evaluation framework featuring two distinct metrics: TinyUSFM-uLPIPS, a full-reference perceptual distance based on multi-layer token relations, and TinyUSFM-NRQ, a deployable no-reference quality score utilizing clean-manifold modeling and worst-region aggregation to detect localized harmful artifacts. We demonstrate that the presented metrics have four unique advantages: 1) Task-linked quality, where TinyUSFM-uLPIPS achieves superior calibration with semantic task damage, accurately reflecting Dice-score drops in segmentation where VGG-based metrics fail; 2) Cross-organ comparability, maintaining stable scoring scales and consistent severity rankings across diverse anatomical sites and domain-shifted data; 3) PSNR-consistent sensitivity, with TinyUSFM-NRQ providing a reliable quality score without ground-truth images that remains consistent with traditional fidelity benchmarks (i.e. PSNR); and 4) Clinical utility, improving the prediction of expert preference from 47.2$\%$ to 72.8$\%$ accuracy and producing super-resolution reconstructions preferred by sonographers. By integrating these advantages into a unified assessment and optimization loop, this work establishes a modality-aligned standard that finally bridges the gap between algorithmic performance and diagnostic utility. Our code is available at https://github.com/sextant-fable/US-Metrics.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Unified Ultrasound Intelligence Toward an End-to-End Agentic System

Clinical ultrasound analysis demands models that generalize across heterogeneous organs, views, and devices, while supporting interpretable workflow-level analysis. Existing methods often rely on task-wise adaptation, and joint learning may be unstable due to cross-task interference, making it hard to deliver workflow-level outputs in practice. To address these challenges, we present USTri, a tri-stage ultrasound intelligence pipeline for unified multi-organ, multi-task analysis. Stage I trains a universal generalist USGen on different domains to learn broad, transferable priors that are robust to device and protocol variability. To better handle domain shifts and reach task-aligned performance while preserving ultrasound shared knowledge, Stage II builds USpec by keeping USGen frozen and finetuning dataset-specific heads. Stage III introduces USAgent, which mimics clinician workflows by orchestrating USpec specialists for multi-step inference and deterministic structured reports. On the FMC\_UIA validation set, our model achieves the best overall performance across 4 task types and 27 datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, qualitative results show that USAgent produces clinically structured reports with high accuracy and interpretability. Our study suggests a scalable path to ultrasound intelligence that generalizes across heterogeneous ultrasound tasks and supports consistent end-to-end clinical workflows. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/MacDunno/USTri.

cs.CV↗