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Feng Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Chen.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Parametric inference for the discretely observed multivariate Hawkes process using particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo

The multivariate Hawkes process (MHP) is a useful statistical model for analysing multidimensional event time sequences that exhibit self-excitation and cross-excitation. When the MHP is monitored discretely, only the total number of events for each dimension in disjoint time intervals is observed. The likelihood function relative to this data is intractable, so traditional inference techniques are not available. To address this, we design an unbiased estimate of the intractable likelihood function using sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) based on a representation of the unobserved event times as latent variables in a state-space model. The unbiasedness of the SMC estimate allows for its use in place of the true likelihood in a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, enabling the construction of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sample from the posterior distribution over the parameters of the MHP. Using simulated data, we assess the performance of our method and demonstrate that it outperforms existing approaches in terms of mean squared error and computational efficiency. Terrorist activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2018 to 2021 is analysed based on daily count data to examine the dynamics of terrorism in the region.

stat.ME↗

Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal Test-Time Intervention

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet underexplored phenomenon: reasoning uncertainty is highly localized-only a small subset of high-entropy tokens dominantly affects output correctness. Motivated by this, we propose Minimal Test-Time Intervention (MTI), a training-free framework that enhances reasoning accuracy and stability with minimal overhead. MTI includes: (i) Selective CFG intervention, applying classifier-free guidance only at uncertain positions; and (ii) Lightweight negative-prompt guidance, reusing the main model's KV cache to approximate unconditional decoding efficiently. MTI yields consistent gains across general, coding, and STEM tasks-e.g., +9.28% average improvement on six benchmarks for DeepSeek-R1-7B and +11.25% on AIME2024 using Ling-mini-2.0-while remaining highly efficient.

cs.CL↗

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

cs.LG↗

Quantifying and Optimizing Simplicity via Polynomial Representations

Deep networks often exhibit a preference for "simple" solutions, and such a simplicity bias is widely believed to play a key role in generalization. Yet a broadly applicable, quantitative measure of simplicity remains elusive. We introduce polynomial representations as a distribution-aware, low-dimensional surrogate for neural functions: we approximate a network's predictive behavior along data-dependent interpolation paths using orthogonal polynomial bases, yielding a compact functional representation. We show that the effective degree of this representation serves as a practical simplicity metric that is predictive of generalization across tasks and architectures, and consistently outperforms existing generalization proxies such as sharpness. Finally, polynomial representations naturally yield a differentiable simplicity regularizer, which consistently improves generalization in image and text classification, fine-tuning contrastive vision-language models, and reinforcement learning.

cs.AI↗

Recent Advances in Multi-modal 3D Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey and Evaluation

Multi-modal 3D Intelligence has gained considerable attention due to its wide applications in autonomous driving and world simulation, etc. Compared to conventional single-modal 3D understanding, introducing an additional modality not only elevates the richness and precision of scene interpretation but also provides a foundation for higher-level physical world interaction. This becomes especially crucial in varied and challenging environments where solely relying on 3D data might be inadequate. While there has been a surge in the development of multi-modal 3D methods over the past six years, especially those integrating multi-camera images (3D+2D) and textual descriptions (3D+language), a comprehensive and in-depth review is notably absent. In this paper, we present a systematic survey of recent progress to bridge this gap. We begin by briefly summarizing the unique challenges among various 3D multi-modal tasks. After that, we present a novel taxonomy that delivers a thorough categorization of existing methods according to modalities and tasks, exploring their respective strengths and limitations. Furthermore, comparative results of recent approaches on several benchmark datasets, together with insightful analysis, are offered. Finally, we discuss the unresolved issues and provide several potential avenues for future research.

cs.CV↗

PathAR: Structure-First Autoregressive Synthesis of Multimodal Pathology Images

Data scarcity in multimodal pathology motivates unified generative models that synthesize modality-specific appearance while preserving anatomically coherent structure. Although modalities differ in appearance statistics, morphological structures such as cellular topology and tissue boundaries are largely preserved across acquisition protocols. However, existing methods often model these factors within a homogeneous token stream, implicitly coupling structure with appearance and weakening structural controllability under modality shifts. To address this, we propose pathology Autorgressive modeling (PathAR), a structure-first autoregressive synthesis framework that explicitly factorizes structure and appearance for modality-label-conditioned pathology generation.PathAR employs a dual vector quantization (Dual-VQ) tokenizer to decompose samples into mask-grounded structure and appearance tokens, and an interleaved autoregressive (IAR) transformer with asymmetric attention visibility to enforce structure-to-appearance dependence. PathAR stabilizes morphology under heterogeneous modality-specific appearances and enables spatially aligned image--mask pair generation. Extensive experiments show that PathAR improves structural consistency and modality fidelity over baselines, maintains sample diversity, supports downstream segmentation in data-scarce regimes, and demonstrates extensibility to finer-grained intra-modality organ-label variation.

cs.CV↗

FinGuard: Detecting Financial Regulatory Non-Compliance in LLM Interactions

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in financial services, a single non-compliant interaction can expose institutions to regulatory penalties and direct consumer harm. Existing guard models are built around general harm taxonomies and overlook violations grounded in specific financial regulations. We address this gap with a regulation-driven pipeline that operates directly on regulatory documents, inducing a financial compliance risk taxonomy and synthesizing grounded training data without any predefined violation categories. Instantiating the pipeline on Chinese financial regulations, we release \textbf{FinGuard-Bench}, to our knowledge the first benchmark for financial regulatory compliance detection, with expert-annotated labels at both the query and response levels. We further train \textbf{FinGuard}, a financial compliance detection model built on Qwen3-8B and trained on the regulation-grounded data via supervised fine-tuning and self-play reinforcement learning. On FinGuard-Bench, FinGuard substantially outperforms all baselines, including dedicated guard models and much larger general-purpose LLMs such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and GPT-5.1. Furthermore, FinGuard also preserves general safety capabilities and adapts to unseen institution-specific policies using policy documents alone. We will publicly release the code, prompts, and resources used in this work on GitHub.

cs.CL↗

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on CFMME: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Multimodal Evaluation Dataset

The emergence of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has substantially expanded model capabilities beyond text-only understanding, enabling unified inference across both visual and textual modalities and supporting a broader range of real-world applications. To comprehensively evaluate the perception, understanding, reasoning, and cognition capabilities of LVLMs throughout the entire financial business workflow in Chinese contexts, we introduce CFMME, a novel Chinese financial multimodal evaluation benchmark. CFMME comprises 6,052 instances spanning from fundamental academic knowledge to complex real-world applications, covering eight primary financial image modalities and four core multimodal tasks. On CFMME, we conduct a thorough evaluation of representative LVLMs. The results show that the state-of-the-art model attains an overall accuracy of 66.11\% on the question answering task and an average score of 77.18 on the detection, recognition, and information extraction tasks, indicating substantial room for improvement in current LVLMs. In addition, we conduct detailed analyses of error causes, cross-modal capabilities, and multi-orientation settings, yielding valuable insights for future research. We hope that CFMME will spur further progress in LVLMs, especially by improving their performance on multiple multimodal tasks in the financial domain.

cs.CV↗

Semantic-Enriched Latent Visual Reasoning

Multimodal latent-space reasoning aims to replace explicit thinking with images by performing visual reasoning directly in a compact latent space. However, existing approaches largely rely on visual supervision and produce latent representations that lack sufficient semantic richness, limiting their ability to support diverse region-level reasoning tasks. In this work, we introduce Semantic-Enriched Latent Visual Reasoning (SLVR), a two-stage learning framework that enriches latent representations with attribute-level visual semantics and aligns them with diverse reasoning objectives. In the first stage, SLVR learns semantically enriched region-centric latents under fine-grained attribute supervision. In the second stage, we design Multi-query Group Relative Policy Optimization (M-GRPO) to align latent representations across multiple queries grounded in the same region. To support this framework, we construct SLV-Set, comprising approximately 400K region-level attribute annotations and 800K multi-query question answering samples, and introduce SV-QA, a benchmark that evaluates latent reasoning under semantic variation. Experiments demonstrate that SLVR improves the robustness and semantic consistency of latent visual reasoning compared to existing baselines.

cs.CV↗

ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversations

Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little support for systematic skill improvement. We propose ESC-Skills, a skill-centric framework that discovers and self-evolves executable emotional support skills. We first model localized support interactions as Intervention Units (IUs), which capture state--action--outcome dynamics between seeker states, support interventions, and post-response emotional changes. Based on IUs extracted from both successful and failed ESC dialogues, we construct the ESC-Skills Bank, a repository of executable emotional support skills containing intervention guidance, applicability conditions, expected outcomes, and potential risks. To further improve robustness, we introduce a multi-profile self-evolutionary refinement framework in which an ESC agent interacts with diverse simulated seeker profiles under SAGE evaluation. The resulting interaction traces are analyzed to identify missing skills, unsafe interventions, and profile-specific failure patterns, which are then used to refine the Skills Bank through simulation-based verification. Experimental results demonstrate that ESC-Skills improves both response-level quality and dialogue-level emotional outcomes while providing more interpretable and controllable support behaviors. We will release the code, prompts, and ESC-Skills Bank at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

cs.CL↗

Automated Detection and Classification of Delusion-related Content in Naturalistic Audio Diaries Using Multi-Agent Language Models

Speech monologues recorded in naturalistic settings provide opportunities to characterize mental illness phenomenology and detect symptom exacerbation. Large language models (LLMs) offer new possibilities for automating this process, as they require annotated data primarily for evaluation rather than training. In this paper, we present a novel automated, multi-agent LLM pipeline for the fine-grained, multi-label extraction of language suggestive of delusional beliefs, associated affective responses, and behavioral responses from transcripts of naturalistic audio diaries collected from people with moderate persecutory ideation. Evaluating an ensemble of three foundation models, we demonstrate that detailed diagnostic prompt instructions successfully reduce false positives for delusional theme classification, but also constrain the interpretation of affective or behavioral responses. Furthermore, comparing multi-agent adjudication frameworks shows that complex conversational debate between agents diminishes accuracy on clinically ambiguous text by inducing premature consensus. Instead, majority voting establishes robust performance (Micro F1 of 0.872 and 0.779 for delusion detection and classification respectively). This work provides a validated and scalable pipeline for the automated detection and characterization of content suggesting delusional beliefs in naturalistic speech.

cs.AI↗

DeFacto: Counterfactual Thinking with Images for Enforcing Evidence-Grounded and Faithful Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal language models (MLLMs) have made thinking with images a dominant paradigm for multimodal reasoning. However, existing methods still fail to ensure evidence-answer consistency, where correct answers must be supported by correct visual evidence. To address this issue, we propose DeFacto, a counterfactual reasoning framework that explicitly aligns visual evidence with final answers. Our approach integrates three complementary training paradigms: positive, counterfactual, and random-masking. We further develop a language-guided evidence construction pipeline that automatically localizes question-relevant regions and generates counterfactual variants, resulting in DeFacto-100K. Building on this dataset, we train MLLMs with GRPO-based reinforcement learning and design three complementary rewards to promote correct answering, structured reasoning, and consistent evidence selection. Moreover, we introduce DeFacto-1.5K, a human-annotated benchmark for systematically evaluating evidence-grounded consistency beyond answer accuracy. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that DeFacto substantially improves both answer accuracy and evidence-answer consistency over strong baselines.

cs.AI↗

Anatomy of Agentic Memory: Taxonomy and Empirical Analysis of Evaluation and System Limitations

Agentic memory systems enable large language model (LLM) agents to maintain state across long interactions, supporting long-horizon reasoning and personalization beyond fixed context windows. Despite rapid architectural development, the empirical foundations of these systems remain fragile: existing benchmarks are often underscaled, evaluation metrics are misaligned with semantic utility, performance varies significantly across backbone models, and system-level costs are frequently overlooked. This survey presents a structured analysis of agentic memory from both architectural and system perspectives. We first introduce a concise taxonomy of MAG systems based on four memory structures. Then, we analyze key pain points limiting current systems, including benchmark saturation effects, metric validity and judge sensitivity, backbone-dependent accuracy, and the latency and throughput overhead introduced by memory maintenance. By connecting the memory structure to empirical limitations, this survey clarifies why current agentic memory systems often underperform their theoretical promise and outlines directions for more reliable evaluation and scalable system design.

cs.CL↗

DeTrack: A Benchmark and Altitude-Aware Dual World Model for Drone-embodied Tracking

Aerial object tracking has broad applications in public safety, emergency rescue, wildlife monitoring, and related fields. However, existing aerial tracking benchmarks are mainly based on passive 2D video sequences captured from fixed camera locations or predefined flight paths, where drones are treated as passive cameras rather than embodied agents that actively perceive, interact, and control their motion in dynamic 3D scenes. In this paper, we define a new drone-embodied tracking task, termed DeTrack, which requires a drone to track a target in interactive 3D environments using online egocentric observations and active flight control in a closed loop. We build a large-scale benchmark containing 11,368 target trajectories across diverse scenes, rendering conditions, semantic regions, and moving distractors, together with evaluation metrics for target visibility, tracking accuracy, and trajectory success. We further propose AaDWorlds, an altitude-aware dual world model framework for drone-embodied tracking. AaDWorlds consists of an altitude-aware perception module and dual world models that imagine future states under both high- and low-altitude regimes. By combining pseudo altitude-aware observations and imagined future states, AaDWorlds alleviates the intrinsic altitude-mediated contradiction between target visibility and flight safety. Experiments on the DeTrack benchmark demonstrate that AaDWorlds improves closed-loop tracking performance across all evaluation metrics.

cs.CV↗

SocialLM: Social Signal Processing of Patient-Provider Communication using LLMs and Contextual Aggregation

Effective patient-provider communication is difficult to assess at scale. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) can track 20 social behaviors from clinical transcripts without fine-tuning. Across three model families and multiple prompting strategies, LLMs reliably detect social signals, though performance varies by patient race and visit segment. To address this variability under query-only API constraints, we introduce an agreement-weighted ensemble using group-level agreement patterns. This approach improves both accuracy and stability over the best individual model, demonstrating a practical pathway for scalable social signal tracking in clinical conversations.

cs.CL↗

Burst-Mode Ultrafast Laser Welding of Sapphire and Invar Alloy Across Large Interfacial Gaps up to 10 $μ$m

Achieving reliable joining between transparent materials and metals under non-optical-contact conditions remains challenging due to limited energy coupling and uncontrolled interfacial reaction across $μ$m-scale gaps. Burst-mode ultrafast lasers provide a potential solution for large-gap welding through temporally distributed energy deposition. However, the underlying interaction mechanisms and achievable joining limits remain unclear. In this study, burst-mode ultrafast laser welding of sapphire to Invar alloy was investigated under controlled interfacial gaps from 3 to 10 $μ$m. Cross-sectional microscopy, elemental mapping, white-light interferometry, and shear testing were employed to analyze joint morphology, elemental distribution, fracture behavior, and mechanical performance.After optimization of the processing parameters for burst-mode ultrafast laser welding, the interfacial morphological evolution and joint strength under different gap conditions were systematically investigated. At a 3 $μ$m gap, cyclic thermal stresses induced by burst pulses generate transverse micro-crack networks in sapphire, accompanied by a reduction in joint strength with increasing sub-pulse numbers. Notably, at a 10 $μ$m gap, where single-pulse welding fails, burst-mode ultrafast laser welding enables interfacial bridging with a maximum shear strength of 6.3 MPa, representing the highest level among published studies.These results indicate a gap-dependent evolution in burst-mode welding behavior governed by crack formation and energy accumulation. This study provides an important theoretical basis and practical guidance for achieving high-performance joining of dissimilar materials under large gap conditions.

physics.optics↗

Data-driven Radiative Magnetohydrodynamics Simulations with the MURaM Code: Coronal Heating and Dynamics in an Emerging Active Region

We present the application of the data-driven branch of the MURaM code, which follows the evolution of the active region 11640 over 4 days starting from 2012 December 30 at 12:00 UT and reproduces many key coronal extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) emission features seen in remote sensing observations. Radiative magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations that account for sophisticated energy transport processes, such as those in the real corona, have been extended with the ability to use observations as time-dependent boundaries such that the models follow the evolution of actual active regions. This opens the possibility of a one-to-one model of a target region over an extensive time period. We use a hybrid strategy that combines fast-evolving idealized zero-$β$ models that capture the evolution of the large-scale active region magnetic field over a long time period and sophisticated radiative MHD models for a shorter time period of interest. The synthesized EUV images illustrate the formation of coronal loops that connect the two sunspots or fan out to the domain boundary. The model reveals in three-dimensional space fine structure in the coronal heating and plasma properties, which are usually concealed behind the EUV observables. The volumetric heating rate in bright coronal loops is proportional to $\mathbf{B}^{2}$. The emission-measure-weighted line-of-sight velocity, which represents the Doppler shift of a spectral line forming in a certain temperature range, reveals vigorous dynamics in plasma at different temperatures and ubiquitous MHD waves, as expected in the real solar corona.

astro-ph.SR↗

LEAD: Length-Efficient Adaptive and Dynamic Reasoning for Large Language Models

Large reasoning models, such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, tend to become increasingly verbose as their reasoning capabilities improve. These inflated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories often exceed what the underlying problems require, wasting compute, latency, and context budgets. While introducing length-based efficiency rewards during reinforcement learning offers a natural remedy, existing methods struggle with two fundamental challenges: the optimal balance between correctness and efficiency is non-stationary throughout training, and intrinsic reasoning budgets vary drastically across problems. Relying on static reward weights and global length constraints inevitably forces a compromise between degraded accuracy and unrealized compression. To overcome these limitations, we propose LEAD (Length-Efficient Adaptive and Dynamic reasoning), a method that replaces static heuristics with online, self-adaptive mechanisms. LEAD dynamically calibrates the correctness-efficiency trade-off at each step using a Potential-Scaled Instability, directing optimization capacity to the most informative learning signal. Furthermore, it estimates an adaptive per-problem target length online based on the model's own correct rollouts, applying a symmetric efficiency reward that penalizes both overthinking and over-compression. Evaluated on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, LEAD achieves the highest accuracy and Accuracy-Efficiency Score among RL-trained efficient-reasoning methods while producing substantially shorter outputs than the base model.

cs.LG↗