arXiv subjects

Cong Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Cong Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

See the Change, Keep the Flow: Unsupervised Action Segmentation via Spectral-Temporal Representation Learning

Unsupervised action segmentation aims to discover latent action categories and their temporal organization without action annotations. Optimal transport-based methods provide structured frame-to-action assignments, however, their pseudo-label quality is fundamentally conditioned on the representation space used to construct the transport cost. We argue that reliable OT pseudo-labeling requires a representation geometry that is simultaneously sensitive to discriminative action changes and coherent along local temporal progressions. Based on this insight, we propose SpecT-OT, a spectral-temporal representation learning framework built upon an unbalanced optimal transport pseudo-labeling concept. SpecT-OT introduces a Spectral Reparameterization Projector (SRP), which parameterizes projector weights with fixed Fourier bases and learnable coefficients to improve the modeling of rapidly varying discriminative features, and Temporal Affinity Regularization (TAR), which imposes distance-aware, label-free constraints on pairwise frame affinities to stabilize local temporal structure. The two components jointly produce more discriminative and temporally stable transport costs, yielding more reliable pseudo-labels for iterative representation learning. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate strong performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. SpecT-OT achieves the best results on 13 of 15 metrics, including 4.1-point MoF and 7.4-point F1 gains over the baseline on Breakfast and Desktop Assembly, respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Just Noticeable Difference Modeling for Token Compression in Vision-Language-Action Models

Token compression has become a key technique for reducing the inference cost of large foundation models, with approaches such as token pruning and KV-cache reuse widely adopted in vision-language models and recently explored for embodied agents. In embodied agents, tokens not only support perception and semantic understanding but also directly affect latency-sensitive closed-loop robot action prediction. Existing schemes typically guide compression using redundancy or importance cues, such as visual similarity, attention scores, and saliency. However, these cues only indirectly measure the key factor for safe compression: how much a token can change before causing an unacceptable deviation in downstream actions. This receiver-dependent tolerance is closely related to the principle of just noticeable difference (JND). Classical JND characterizes signal tolerance in the human visual system, while machine-oriented JND extends this concept to downstream machine responses. Building on this progression, we introduce Action-JND, which extends JND modeling to embodied perception by defining noticeability through the language-conditioned action response of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy in closed-loop control. A token change is considered admissible only when the induced action deviation remains within a tolerated margin. To realize this concept, we develop a lightweight token-wise JND estimator in deep visual-feature space to predict the maximum tolerable perturbation while preserving policy responses. The resulting action-tolerance score serves as a plug-and-play criterion for VLA compression paradigms, including stale-KV reuse and token pruning, prioritizing action-tolerant tokens for compression. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark with OpenVLA and OpenVLA-OFT demonstrate that Action-JND consistently improves compression reliability, especially under aggressive compression ratios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Minkowski-core black hole with cosmological constant and electric charge

Within a covariant effective Hamiltonian framework, we employ an inverse construction to derive the gravitational Hamiltonian constraint for a Minkowski-core regular black hole without invoking exotic matter. We then extend the constraint by coupling it to a spherically reduced Maxwell field and including a cosmological constant. The resulting charged anti-de Sitter (AdS) and de Sitter (dS) solution is gauge independent and reduces to the Reissner--Nordstr\"om--AdS (RN-AdS) black hole when the regularization parameter vanishes. Electric charge and a cosmological constant preserve the Minkowski core: the metric approaches the Minkowski geometry at the center, the Kretschmann scalar vanishes there, and the spacetime exhibits a multi-horizon structure. Focusing on AdS backgrounds, we investigate the black hole thermodynamics. For a regularization parameter below a critical value, the model exhibits a phase transition with consistent signatures across these thermodynamic quantities, demonstrating that Minkowski-core regularization can preserve center regularity while modifying the AdS thermodynamic phase structure relative to the RN-AdS benchmark.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

The interface of intonation and lexical tone: Boundary phenomena in Mandarin varieties

This chapter explores the intricate interplay between intonation and tone in Mandarin Chinese varieties, focusing on f0, the primary acoustic cue for both intonation and tone. The main empirical base is intonation boundary phenomena, where intonation and tone intersect and influence each other in conveying a range of sentence-level linguistic functions -- such as question vs. statement -- and a rich array of speakers' attitudinal information. Theoretical models and emerging techniques are also discussed to account for the observed interactions of tonal aspects and boundary phenomena to convey multiple levels of communicative meanings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MemHarness: Memory Is Reconstructed, Not Replayed

Retrieving past experiences has become a common strategy to enhance large language model agents. However, most existing memory-augmented agents treat retrieved experiences as static records to be replayed verbatim, injecting them into the context regardless of whether they align with the agent's current situation. This ``replay'' paradigm ignores the gap between the abstract, general nature of stored experience and the concrete, ever-changing states encountered at decision time, frequently causing negative transfer. In contrast, humans rarely recall past experiences verbatim; instead, they reorganize and adapt retrieved memories to fit the present context. Inspired by this, we propose MemHarness, a framework that equips LLM agents to actively harness and reconstruct past experiences based on the present context. At each decision step, a unified policy model critiques and reconstructs the retrieved experience conditioned on the current state, producing context-grounded guidance before acting. This reconstructive ability emerges naturally through end-to-end training with GRPO. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that MemHarness substantially outperforms pure RL and static memory-augmented baselines, demonstrating strong robustness in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that this reconstruction objective not only prevents negative transfer but also serves as latent guidance during training, fundamentally improving the agent's intrinsic reasoning capabilities.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

A Bayesian predictive framework for adaptive interim-analysis timing with robust borrowing in confirmatory trials

Confirmatory phase III trials require rigorous evidence, yet for first-in-class (FIC) therapies they must often be designed when same-mechanism evidence is scarce. This uncertainty motivates planned interim analyses and makes phase II data from the same therapy a relevant source of prior evidence. However, both borrowing and repeated interim analyses must be calibrated to control the overall type I error rate. Because borrowing changes the evidence available at interim analyses relative to a non-borrowing group sequential design (GSD), it also raises the question of whether interim analysis timing should be prospectively adapted to the borrowing-adjusted evidence base. We propose a prespecified adaptive interim-timing framework based on Bayesian information borrowing and Bayesian predictive probability $B^2$-FIC. The borrowing model is calibrated against phase II--phase III discrepancy scenarios to control overall type I error rate. At the first interim analysis (IA1), the calibrated model combines phase II information with accumulating phase III data to update the posterior. Bayesian predictive probabilities from this posterior select the earliest information fraction for the second interim analysis (IA2) that meets the efficacy criterion. In simulations, $B^2$-FIC maintained empirical type I error and improved interim power across different scenarios. Predictive probabilities derived from phase II and phase III IA1 data selected earlier IA2 than GSD when evidence was favorable. Two oncology case studies illustrate the framework. Overall, $B^2$-FIC provides a calibrated framework for adapting interim timing to borrowing-adjusted evidence, an emerging design problem in confirmatory trials.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

A Preliminary Study on Explaining Risk of Code Changes using LLM-Based Prediction Models

Predictions by machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models are often received skeptically unless they are paired with intelligible explanations. In the context of just-in-time defect prediction, highlighting small portions of a software change (diff) -- beyond rule-based lints -- where risk may be concentrated has not yet been extensively investigated. In this work, we leverage attention weights from an LLM-based Diff Risk Score (DRS) model to highlight parts of a diff that the model focuses on when predicting risk. We aggregate token-level attention into interpretable code units (lines, hunks, and files), and present the top-K units to developers as a lightweight form of guidance during code review. We evaluate our approach using expert-labeled changes that have caused real outages. Results show that the highlighted snippets cover expert-labeled outage-causing change lines 53.85% of the time when highlighting the top-2 hunks, while requiring developers to review 26.28% of the changed lines on average. Because attention is produced during standard model inference, the approach is scalable for large development workflows and can be surfaced in the code review UI with low additional latency.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Fuzzy PSI from Symmetric Primitives with Exact Logarithmic Dependence on Distance Threshold

Previous FPSI works have demonstrated a linear scaling with the distance threshold $\delta$, while some recent works have achieved a poly-logarithmic dependence on $\delta$. However, these protocols either support only the $L_\infty$ distance, or they support general $L_{p\in[1,\infty]}$ distances but rely on expensive additive homomorphic encryption (AHE). Achieving exact logarithmic dependence on $\delta$ for general $L_{p\in[1,\infty]}$ distances without relying on costly AHE would constitute a theoretical breakthrough in optimal threshold scaling and a practical advance toward scalable FPSI applications. In this work, we present new FPSI protocols for $L_{p\in[1,\infty]}$ distances that are entirely built from oblivious transfer (OT) and symmetric-key primitives. We propose FPSI protocols based on both the apart and the separate assumptions, which are applicable to low- and high-dimensional settings, respectively. Our constructions achieve strictly logarithmic complexity in $\delta$, which is optimal in the sense that distinguishing all values in an interval of length $O(\delta)$ necessarily requires $\Omega(\log \delta)$ bits of information. Our core idea is to perform fuzzy matching via prefix representation and interactively determine the correct prefix using equality conditions. To this end, we propose a suite of new components that can be implemented efficiently using only OT and symmetric-key operations. We implement our FPSI protocols and compare them with the state-of-the-art FPSI protocols for $L_{p\in[1,\infty]}$ distance. Experiments show that our protocols outperform the prior state-of-the-art by up to $43.7\times$ in runtime and $31.3\times$ in communication.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Intelligent Domain Adaptation for Power System Transient Stability Assessment Under Varying Operating Scenarios

While deep learning-based transient stability assessment (TSA) approaches have exhibited great potential in power system stability monitoring, they are prone to undergo performance degradation in practical contexts with frequent variations of operating conditions. To address this issue, this work develops an adaptive TSA framework via domain adaptation-enabled deep transfer learning. First, for the sake of capturing the primary transient stability characteristics, a robust metric, i.e., heterogeneous hybrid distribution metric (HHDM), is designed through mathematical means to effectively handle multi-scale Gaussian and long-tail distributions of transient responsive data and to precisely quantify the intrinsic distributional discrepancies between the source and target domains corresponding to different operating scenarios. With the help of the HHDM, a Bayesian theory-based dual-distribution domain adaptation method is constructed, aligning not only marginal probability distributions between domains but also the distributions of sub-domain categories. Such alignments enable fine-grained transient stability feature transfer, helping significantly improve the adaptability of a well-trained TSA model to target domains. Furthermore, a multilayer sparse regularization algorithm is introduced to mitigate feature volatility caused by variations in operating scenarios, thereby enhancing the model's generalization in the presence of unforeseen scenarios. Numerical tests on three test systems illustrate that, compared with conventional methods, the proposed framework improves online TSA accuracy by 0.5% to 5% in a cost-effective manner, with the learning cost for TSA model update largely reduced.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Impedance Modeling and Stability Analysis of Droop-Controlled Inverter Under Unbalanced Power Grid Operating Conditions

With the growing integration of renewable energy sources into power grids, the risks of oscillation caused by interactions between grid-tied inverters and the grids are becoming increasingly prominent. Although existing studies have made significant progress in inverter modeling and oscillatory stability analysis, most of them do not sufficiently consider complex mirror frequency coupling effects (MFCE) under unbalanced operating conditions, leading to unreliable models and erroneous stability analysis results. To address this inadequacy, this work develops a novel sequence impedance modeling scheme that can be widely applied to unbalanced operating conditions. In particular, taking a representative type of grid-forming inverter for instance, i.e., droop-controlled inverter (DCI), a single-input single-output sequence impedance modeling method based on harmonic linearization (HL) is proposed to comprehensively model both a given DCI and the connected grid. By accounting for multi-frequency interactions within the DCI, this method captures MFCE and unbalanced factors, leading to a more accurate impedance model. Further, the dominant factors influencing system stability are identified with a combination of normalized sensitivity analysis and proportional weighting. Finally, the detailed impacts of these dominant factors on system stability margin under three typical unbalanced operating conditions are analyzed through the Bode criterion. The effectiveness and reliability of the whole scheme proposed in this work are validated on the constructed grid-connected droop-controlled experimental platform.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Synthetic Heterogeneous-Effects LASSO: A Fixed-effects Estimation Approach for High-dimensional Mixed-effects Models

This paper studies variable selection and post-selection inference for high-dimensional clustered data using marginal-model-based procedures. We show that, when covariates are heterogeneously distributed across clusters, marginal-model LASSO may use them as sparse proxies for latent cluster effects, shifting the estimation target away from the structural fixed effects and inducing false selections. To address this problem, we propose Synthetic Heterogeneous-Effects LASSO (SHEL), a fixed-effects penalized framework that incorporates cluster-level synthetic approximations to the latent heterogeneity. We establish theoretical properties of SHEL in high-dimensional settings and develop procedures for valid post-selection inference. The finite sample performance of the proposed method is investigated through extensive simulation studies. A longitudinal bulk RNA-seq dataset of enriched blood neutrophils from hospitalized COVID-19 patients is analyzed to demonstrate the method in a real application.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

A Workflow for Evaluating Regional Treatment Effect Heterogeneity in Multi-Regional Clinical Trials

Multi-regional clinical trials (MRCTs) enable efficient global drug development by assessing treatment effects across regions within a single protocol. While powered for overall efficacy, MRCTs are typically not designed to provide confirmatory evidence on regional differences, making an assessment of observed regional heterogeneity largely exploratory and susceptible to sampling variability. Despite this challenge, understanding regional heterogeneity remains important for interpretation and regulatory decision-making. This paper proposes a structured, question-driven framework to guide exploratory assessments of regional heterogeneity in MRCTs. We formulate four key questions to clarify the objectives of such analyses and propose a set of statistical methods to address them. Simulation studies evaluate performance under scenarios with no heterogeneity and heterogeneity driven by observed or unobserved treatment effect modifiers, illustrating how a structured approach can support transparent and cautious interpretation.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Re-acceleration of Energetic Ions via Small-Scale Reconnection in Magnetic Fusion Plasmas

We report the first observation on the EXL-50U spherical torus that energetic particles injected by neutral beam injection (NBI) can be stably accelerated to significantly higher energies - reaching up to 2.5 times the injection energy, occurring without significant large-scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) bursts. Simulations based on EXL-50U parameters indicate that small-scale magnetic reconnection, mediated by multiple magnetic islands, fails to accelerate bulk thermal ions but efficiently energizes seed fast ions. Unlike global MHD events, such small-scale reconnection is ubiquitous in magnetic confinement devices and does not degrade core confinement. This mechanism offers a novel and potentially universal channel for auxiliary ion heating in future fusion reactors.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2026

CAGS: Color-Adaptive Volumetric Video Streaming with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting

Volumetric video (VV) streaming enables real-time, immersive access to remote 3D environments, powering telepresence, ecological monitoring, and robotic teleoperation. These applications turn VV streaming into a real-time interface to remote physical environments, imposing new system-level demands for photorealistic scene representation, low-latency interaction, and robust performance under heterogeneous networks. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely used for real-time photorealistic rendering, offering superior visual quality and rendering performance, but it faces challenges due to bandwidth consumption. Furthermore, as the foundation of adaptive VV streaming, existing Levels of Detail (LoD) methods based on density are not well-suited to Gaussian representations, leading to visible gaps and severe quality degradation. Recent studies have also explored attribute compression techniques to reduce bandwidth consumption. Our preliminary studies reveal that aggressive attribute compression primarily causes color distortion, which can be effectively corrected in the rendered image using a reference image. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel Color-Adaptive scheme for adaptive VV streaming that uses vector quantization (VQ) to establish LoDs and correct color distortions with low-resolution reference images. We further present CAGS, an adaptive VV streaming system compatible with diverse Gaussian representations, which integrates the Color-Adaptive scheme by rendering reference images on the streaming server and performing color restoration on the client. Extensive experiments on our prototype system demonstrate that CAGS outperforms the existing adaptive streaming systems in PSNR by 5$\sim$20 dB under fluctuating bandwidth, operates significantly faster than existing scalable Gaussian compression methods, and generalizes across different Gaussian representations.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

MesonGS++: Post-training Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting with Hyperparameter Searching

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves high-quality novel view synthesis with real-time rendering, but its storage cost remains prohibitive for practical deployment. Existing post-training compression methods still rely on many coupled hyperparameters across pruning, transformation, quantization, and entropy coding, making it difficult to control the final compressed size and fully exploit the rate-distortion trade-off. We propose MesonGS++, a size-aware post-training codec for 3D Gaussian compression. On the codec side, MesonGS++ combines joint importance-based pruning, octree geometry coding, attribute transformation, selective vector quantization for higher-degree spherical harmonics, and group-wise mixed-precision quantization with entropy coding. On the configuration side, it treats the reserve ratio and bit-width allocation as the dominant rate-distortion knobs and jointly optimizes them under a target storage budget via discrete sampling and 0--1 integer linear programming. We further propose a linear size estimator and a CUDA parallel quantization operator to accelerate the hyperparameter searching process. Extensive experiments show that MesonGS++ achieves over 34$\times$ compression while preserving rendering fidelity, outperforming state-of-the-art post-training methods and accurately meeting target size budgets. Remarkably, without any training, MesonGS++ can even surpass the PSNR of vanilla 3DGS at a 20$\times$ compression rate on the Stump scene. Our code is available at https://github.com/mmlab-sigs/mesongs_plus

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Spatial-Temporal Graph Learning-Enabled Short-Term Voltage Stability Assessment against Time-Varying Topological Conditions

The emerging deep learning (DL) technology has recently exhibited great potential in data-driven short-term voltage stability (SVS) assessment of complex power grids. However, without sufficient attention to the time-varying topological structures of today's power grids, the majority of existing DL-based SVS assessment schemes could experience severe performance degradation in practice. To address this drawback, this paper proposes an adaptive spatial-temporal graph learning-enabled SVS assessment approach that can adapt well to various topological changes. First, considering the time-varying topological conditions of a given power grid, an adaptive graph representation matrix is automatically learned to effectively capture the complicated spatial correlations between individual buses within the grid. Then, to help better capture regional SVS features for subsequent learning processes, the adaptive graph representation matrix is properly adjusted by introducing a spatial attention mechanism. Further, with post-fault system trajectory data linked together via attention-based graph representation, a residual spatiotemporal graph convolutional network is carefully built with Optuna-based optimization to deeply mine system-wide spatiotemporal features and thus achieve structure-adaptive SVS assessment. Numerical test results on two representative sub-systems of a realistic provincial power grid in South China demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach under various changing topological conditions.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

ST-Prune: Training-Free Spatio-Temporal Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become central to autonomous driving systems, yet their deployment is severely bottlenecked by the massive computational overhead of multi-view camera and multi-frame video input. Existing token pruning methods, primarily designed for single-image inputs, treat each frame or view in isolation and thus fail to exploit the inherent spatio-temporal redundancies in driving scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose ST-Prune, a training-free, plug-and-play framework comprising two complementary modules: Motion-aware Temporal Pruning (MTP) and Ring-view Spatial Pruning (RSP). MTP addresses temporal redundancy by encoding motion volatility and temporal recency as soft constraints within the diversity selection objective, prioritizing dynamic trajectories and current-frame content over static historical background. RSP further resolves spatial redundancy by exploiting the ring-view camera geometry to penalize bilateral cross-view similarity, eliminating duplicate projections and residual background that temporal pruning alone cannot suppress. These two modules together constitute a complete spatio-temporal pruning process, preserving key scene information under strict compression. Validated across four benchmarks spanning perception, prediction, and planning, ST-Prune establishes new state-of-the-art for training-free token pruning. Notably, even at 90\% token reduction, ST-Prune achieves near-lossless performance with certain metrics surpassing the full-model baseline, while maintaining inference speeds comparable to existing pruning approaches.

cs.CV↗