arXiv subjects

Chuyuan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Chuyuan Zhang.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TACO: Tool-Augmented Credit Optimization for Agentic Tool Use

Agentic multimodal models perform diverse operations on an image via code and reason over the returned view, an effective paradigm for fine-grained visual question answering. However, code operations can be useful, redundant, or misleading. Outcome-only rewards cannot precisely distinguish these cases, and existing process rewards either fail to attribute final correctness to individual tool calls, or require an external judge model. To address this, we introduce Tool-Augmented Credit Optimization (TACO), a GRPO variant for code-tool agents built on two coupled advantage channels. The first, Differential Answer-Probe Reward (DAPR), is a self-supervised, judge-free tool-contribution advantage that credits each tool call by its own effect on answering correctly. Probe tokens inserted into the model's reasoning elicit its predictions with and without the tool, and the difference in outcome reward is taken as the call's value: positive for a useful call, negative for a misleading one, and zero for one that changes nothing. This reuses the existing answer checker with no auxiliary judge, and, being a difference rather than an absolute probe score, is naturally robust to probe-hacking. The second is the outcome advantage from the final answer, distributed by Outcome-Gated Advantage Routing (OGAR): a parameter-free rule that, conditioned on the call's outcome, delivers this credit only to the responsible segments, suppressing wasted tool calls without any cost term. We train TACO through a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline. Extensive experiments across perception, reasoning, and general multimodal benchmarks show that it yields consistent accuracy gains and learns to invoke its tools only when they help.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

The Interstellar Scintillation of the Radio-Loud Magnetar XTE J1810-197

We present a comprehensive interstellar scintillation (ISS) study of the radio-loud magnetar XTE~J1810$-$197, based on six years of multi-frequency monitoring (2018$-$2024) with the Shanghai Tian Ma Radio Telescope (TMRT) at 7.0, 8.6, and 14.0~GHz. The scintillation parameters--decorrelation bandwidth $Δν_{\rm d}$, decorrelation time $Δτ_{\rm d}$, and drift rate $dt/dν$--are fully characterized. Our measured $Δτ_{\rm d}$ implies $Δτ_{\rm d} < 4$~s at 575-725~MHz under a Kolmogorov spectrum, which is shorter than the magnetar's 5.54~s spin period. This result naturally explains the previously reported absence of pulse-to-pulse coherence at these frequencies. Kinematic modeling locates the dominant scattering screen at $1.6\pm0.1$~kpc away from the Earth, within the Sagittarius Arm. The screen coincides with the HII region JCMTSE~J180921.2$-$201932 and is unrelated to the magnetar's 2018 outburst suggested by earlier studies. A scintillation arc detected at 14.0~GHz represents the highest-frequency arc observed to date. The asymmetry of arcs is linearly correlated with a dispersion-measure gradient across the screen ($r = 0.959$, $p < 10^{-8}$). We also measure its refractive scintillation timescale, which is only $1.21\pm0.19$~d. Clear DISS at 14~GHz effectively resolves the debate over a possible strong-to-weak scattering transition at this frequency. These results extend the ISS characterization of magnetars to previously unexplored frequencies and provide a precise probe of the ionized interstellar medium in the Sagittarius Arm.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2026

Does the radio-active phase of XTE~J1810$-$197 recur following the same evolutionary pattern?

Magnetars are the most strongly magnetized compact objects known in the Universe and are regarded as one of the primary engines powering a variety of enigmatic, high-energy transients. However, our understanding of magnetars remains highly limited, constrained by observational sample size and radiative variability. XTE~J1810$-$197, which re-entered a radio-active phase in 2018, is one of only six known radio-pulsating magnetars. Leveraging the distinctive capability for simultaneous dual-frequency observations, we utilized the Shanghai Tianma Radio Telescope (TMRT) to monitor this magnetar continuously at both 2.25 and 8.60~GHz, capturing its entire evolution from radio activation to quenching. This enabled precise characterization of the evolution in its integrated profile, spin frequency, flux density, and spectral index ($α$, defined by $S \propto f^α$). The first time derivative of its spin frequency $\dotν$ passed through four distinct phases -- rapid decrease, violent oscillation, steady decline, and stable recovery -- before returning to its pre-outburst value concomitant with the cessation of radio emission. Remarkably, both the amplitudes and the characteristic time-scales of these $\dotν$ variations match those observed during the previous outburst that began in 2003, providing the first demonstration that post-outburst rotational evolution and radiative behavior in a magnetar are repeatable. A twisted-magnetosphere model can qualitatively account for this repeatability as well as for the progressive narrowing and abrupt disappearance of the radio pulse radiation, thereby receiving strong observational support.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

Pandora's Box or Aladdin's Lamp: A Comprehensive Analysis Revealing the Role of RAG Noise in Large Language Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a crucial method for addressing hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). While recent research has extended RAG models to complex noisy scenarios, these explorations often confine themselves to limited noise types and presuppose that noise is inherently detrimental to LLMs, potentially deviating from real-world retrieval environments and restricting practical applicability. In this paper, we define seven distinct noise types from a linguistic perspective and establish a Noise RAG Benchmark (NoiserBench), a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing multiple datasets and reasoning tasks. Through empirical evaluation of eight representative LLMs with diverse architectures and scales, we reveal that these noises can be further categorized into two practical groups: noise that is beneficial to LLMs (aka beneficial noise) and noise that is harmful to LLMs (aka harmful noise). While harmful noise generally impairs performance, beneficial noise may enhance several aspects of model capabilities and overall performance. Our analysis offers insights for developing more robust, adaptable RAG solutions and mitigating hallucinations across diverse retrieval scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/NoiserBench.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Fewer-token Neural Speech Codec with Time-invariant Codes

Language model based text-to-speech (TTS) models, like VALL-E, have gained attention for their outstanding in-context learning capability in zero-shot scenarios. Neural speech codec is a critical component of these models, which can convert speech into discrete token representations. However, excessive token sequences from the codec may negatively affect prediction accuracy and restrict the progression of Language model based TTS models. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel neural speech codec with time-invariant codes named TiCodec. By encoding and quantizing time-invariant information into a separate code, TiCodec can reduce the amount of frame-level information that needs encoding, effectively decreasing the number of tokens as codes of speech. Furthermore, this paper introduces a time-invariant encoding consistency loss to enhance the consistency of time-invariant code within an utterance and force it to capture more global information, which can benefit the zero-shot TTS task. Experimental results demonstrate that TiCodec can not only enhance the quality of reconstruction speech with fewer tokens but also increase the similarity and naturalness, as well as reduce the word error rate of the synthesized speech by the TTS model.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

What to Remember: Self-Adaptive Continual Learning for Audio Deepfake Detection

The rapid evolution of speech synthesis and voice conversion has raised substantial concerns due to the potential misuse of such technology, prompting a pressing need for effective audio deepfake detection mechanisms. Existing detection models have shown remarkable success in discriminating known deepfake audio, but struggle when encountering new attack types. To address this challenge, one of the emergent effective approaches is continual learning. In this paper, we propose a continual learning approach called Radian Weight Modification (RWM) for audio deepfake detection. The fundamental concept underlying RWM involves categorizing all classes into two groups: those with compact feature distributions across tasks, such as genuine audio, and those with more spread-out distributions, like various types of fake audio. These distinctions are quantified by means of the in-class cosine distance, which subsequently serves as the basis for RWM to introduce a trainable gradient modification direction for distinct data types. Experimental evaluations against mainstream continual learning methods reveal the superiority of RWM in terms of knowledge acquisition and mitigating forgetting in audio deepfake detection. Furthermore, RWM's applicability extends beyond audio deepfake detection, demonstrating its potential significance in diverse machine learning domains such as image recognition.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

Do You Remember? Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting for Fake Audio Detection

Current fake audio detection algorithms have achieved promising performances on most datasets. However, their performance may be significantly degraded when dealing with audio of a different dataset. The orthogonal weight modification to overcome catastrophic forgetting does not consider the similarity of genuine audio across different datasets. To overcome this limitation, we propose a continual learning algorithm for fake audio detection to overcome catastrophic forgetting, called Regularized Adaptive Weight Modification (RAWM). When fine-tuning a detection network, our approach adaptively computes the direction of weight modification according to the ratio of genuine utterances and fake utterances. The adaptive modification direction ensures the network can effectively detect fake audio on the new dataset while preserving its knowledge of old model, thus mitigating catastrophic forgetting. In addition, genuine audio collected from quite different acoustic conditions may skew their feature distribution, so we introduce a regularization constraint to force the network to remember the old distribution in this regard. Our method can easily be generalized to related fields, like speech emotion recognition. We also evaluate our approach across multiple datasets and obtain a significant performance improvement on cross-dataset experiments.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

Detection of Cross-Dataset Fake Audio Based on Prosodic and Pronunciation Features

Existing fake audio detection systems perform well in in-domain testing, but still face many challenges in out-of-domain testing. This is due to the mismatch between the training and test data, as well as the poor generalizability of features extracted from limited views. To address this, we propose multi-view features for fake audio detection, which aim to capture more generalized features from prosodic, pronunciation, and wav2vec dimensions. Specifically, the phoneme duration features are extracted from a pre-trained model based on a large amount of speech data. For the pronunciation features, a Conformer-based phoneme recognition model is first trained, keeping the acoustic encoder part as a deeply embedded feature extractor. Furthermore, the prosodic and pronunciation features are fused with wav2vec features based on an attention mechanism to improve the generalization of fake audio detection models. Results show that the proposed approach achieves significant performance gains in several cross-dataset experiments.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

TO-Rawnet: Improving RawNet with TCN and Orthogonal Regularization for Fake Audio Detection

Current fake audio detection relies on hand-crafted features, which lose information during extraction. To overcome this, recent studies use direct feature extraction from raw audio signals. For example, RawNet is one of the representative works in end-to-end fake audio detection. However, existing work on RawNet does not optimize the parameters of the Sinc-conv during training, which limited its performance. In this paper, we propose to incorporate orthogonal convolution into RawNet, which reduces the correlation between filters when optimizing the parameters of Sinc-conv, thus improving discriminability. Additionally, we introduce temporal convolutional networks (TCN) to capture long-term dependencies in speech signals. Experiments on the ASVspoof 2019 show that the Our TO-RawNet system can relatively reduce EER by 66.09\% on logical access scenario compared with the RawNet, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting fake audio attacks.

cs.SD↗