arXiv subjects

Feng Gu

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Gu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ChainSpace: A Chained-Reasoning Paradigm for Spatial Intelligence

Spatial intelligence requires foundation models to maintain coherent spatial state across interactions with the physical world. However, existing data-centric approaches typically treat spatial reasoning as independent question-answer instances, enabling shortcut-based answering and providing limited supervision for persistent spatial understanding. To address this, we introduce ChainSpace, a chained-reasoning paradigm that structures spatial reasoning as a state-preserving multi-round process. In this paradigm, spatial questions are organized into logically constrained and jointly consistent chains, where later questions depend on spatial constraints established in earlier rounds. Following this principle, we instantiate ChainSpace-Bench, a manually annotated real-world multi-round benchmark with a Chain-Aware Metric, and ChainSpace-Pipeline, a simulator-based chain-structured supervision generation framework for spatial intelligence training. Experiments show that ChainSpace-Bench exposes chain-level failures that are not captured by isolated question accuracy. Additionally, with a relatively small amount of simulator-generated chained data, models trained by ChainSpace-Pipeline achieve the best performance among open-source models on ChainSpace-Bench and transfer competitively to multiple external spatial intelligence benchmarks. These results establish ChainSpace as an effective paradigm for more faithful evaluation and more data-efficient learning of spatial intelligence.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Principal specializations of Grothendieck polynomials

Motivated by Stanley's ``Schubert shenanigans'' paper, commendable attempts have been made to understand the principal specializations of Schubert or Grothendieck polynomials. In this paper, we prove that when a permutation $w$ does not contain the $1423$ pattern, the principal specialization of the corresponding $\beta$-Grothendieck polynomial can be expressed nonnegatively in terms of the occurrences of patterns in $w$. Using an inverse conservation principle, we further obtain the nonnegativity expansion for permutations avoiding the $1342$ pattern. Our results partially resolve conjectures raised respectively by Gao (independently observed by Gaetz), Me\'sz\'aros--Tanjaya, and Dennin. The proofs are achieved based upon a reduction algorithm performing on the classic pipe dream model of $\beta$-Grothendieck polynomials.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

From Indiscriminate to Targeted: Functionally Critical Signal-Driven Assertion Generation using LLMs for Efficient RTL Verification

Functional verification has become the most time-consuming phase in IC development, and Assertion-Based Verification (ABV) is key to reducing debugging time. However, existing LLM-based assertion generation methods typically pursue indiscriminate verification, aiming for maximal coverage without considering signal criticality, whereas industrial practice demands maximizing coverage with minimal verification cost. Consequently, identifying signals that have the greatest impact on design functionality and error propagation-enabling a shift from indiscriminate to targeted verification-remains a key challenge. To address this, we propose AgileAssert, a key signal-driven assertion generation framework that constructs RTL semantic graphs and identifies the top-K critical signals via a hybrid scoring and selection mechanism, followed by structure-aware RTL slicing to provide the LLM with precise targets and contextual information, thereby guiding LLMs to generate tightly constrained targeted assertions for efficient verification. Evaluated on block- and CPU-level designs, with an average 66.68% reduction in assertions, our approach outperforms three existing SOTA methods, and significantly improving coverage metrics while reducing input token consumption by 64%. In mutation testing, when our approach surpasses existing methods in error detection rate, the average number of assertions used decreases by 72.74%.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

Marco DeepResearch: Unlocking Efficient Deep Research Agents via Verification-Centric Design

Deep research agents autonomously conduct open-ended investigations, integrating complex information retrieval with multi-step reasoning across diverse sources to solve real-world problems. To sustain this capability on long-horizon tasks, reliable verification is critical during both training and inference. A major bottleneck in existing paradigms stems from the lack of explicit verification mechanisms in QA data synthesis, trajectory construction, and test-time scaling. Errors introduced at each stage propagate downstream and degrade the overall agent performance. To address this, we present Marco DeepResearch, a deep research agent optimized with a verification-centric framework design at three levels: \textbf{(1)~QA Data Synthesis:} We introduce verification mechanisms to graph-based and agent-based QA synthesis to control question difficulty while ensuring answers are unique and correct; \textbf{(2)~Trajectory Construction:} We design a verification-driven trajectory synthesis method that injects explicit verification patterns into training trajectories; and \textbf{(3)~Test-time scaling:} We use Marco DeepResearch itself as a verifier at inference time and effectively improve performance on challenging questions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Marco DeepResearch agent significantly outperforms 8B-scale deep research agents on most challenging benchmarks, such as BrowseComp and BrowseComp-ZH. Crucially, under a maximum budget of 600 tool calls, Marco DeepResearch even surpasses or approaches several 30B-scale agents, like Tongyi DeepResearch-30B.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MindWatcher: Toward Smarter Multimodal Tool-Integrated Reasoning

Traditional workflow-based agents exhibit limited intelligence when addressing real-world problems requiring tool invocation. Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) agents capable of autonomous reasoning and tool invocation are rapidly emerging as a powerful approach for complex decision-making tasks involving multi-step interactions with external environments. In this work, we introduce MindWatcher, a TIR agent integrating interleaved thinking and multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. MindWatcher can autonomously decide whether and how to invoke diverse tools and coordinate their use, without relying on human prompts or workflows. The interleaved thinking paradigm enables the model to switch between thinking and tool calling at any intermediate stage, while its multimodal CoT capability allows manipulation of images during reasoning to yield more precise search results. We implement automated data auditing and evaluation pipelines, complemented by manually curated high-quality datasets for training, and we construct a benchmark, called MindWatcher-Evaluate Bench (MWE-Bench), to evaluate its performance. MindWatcher is equipped with a comprehensive suite of auxiliary reasoning tools, enabling it to address broad-domain multimodal problems. A large-scale, high-quality local image retrieval database, covering eight categories including cars, animals, and plants, endows model with robust object recognition despite its small size. Finally, we design a more efficient training infrastructure for MindWatcher, enhancing training speed and hardware utilization. Experiments not only demonstrate that MindWatcher matches or exceeds the performance of larger or more recent models through superior tool invocation, but also uncover critical insights for agent training, such as the genetic inheritance phenomenon in agentic RL.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

MindGPT-4ov: An Enhanced MLLM via a Multi-Stage Post-Training Paradigm

We present MindGPT-4ov, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that introduces a general post-training paradigm spanning data production, model training, and efficient deployment. It achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks at low cost, effectively enhancing the foundational capabilities of MLLMs and the generalization ability. Focusing on data construction, supervised fine-tuning strategies, and multimodal reinforcement learning methods, this work proposes three key innovations: (1) An information density-based data generation scheme, integrated with a dual-dimensional tree-structured label system, enabling automated generation of high-quality cross-domain data. (2) A collaborative curriculum supervised fine-tuning approach that balances the injection of domain-specific knowledge with the preservation of general capabilities. (3) A hybrid reinforcement learning paradigm that enhances reasoning ability while simultaneously addressing multi-objective optimization such as diversity exploration, maintenance of multimodal perception, and response conciseness. Moreover, we implement a series of infrastructure optimizations, such as 5D parallel training, operator optimization, and inference quantization to enhance training and inference efficiency while reducing the cost of domain adaptation. Experimental results demonstrate that the MindGPT-4ov model outperforms state-of-the-art models on benchmarks such as MMBench, MMStar, MathVision, and MathVista. In addition, MindGPT-4ov also demonstrates superior user experience in vertical domain tasks, enabling a seamless transition from academic research to industrial deployment. MindGPT-4ov provides a general post-training paradigm applicable to a wide range of MLLMs. The model weights, datasets, and code for the Qwen3-VL-based variants will be recently open-sourced to support the community's development of MLLMs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Observation of counterion binding in the inner Helmholtz layer at the ionic surfactant-water interface

Understanding specific ion adsorption within the inner Helmholtz layer remains central to electrochemistry yet experimentally elusive. Here we directly quantify counterion adsorption and extract the associated thermodynamic parameters within the inner Helmholtz layer using phase-sensitive sum-frequency vibrational spectroscopy (PS-SFVS). Using sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) as a model ionic surfactant, we determine the Na+ and DS- surface densities by simultaneously analyzing interfacial free OH response and the diffuse-layer SF signal, from which the adsorption thermodynamic parameters are derived. We then construct an adsorption phase diagram that maps the evolution of Na+ and DS- species in the compact layer as functions of bulk NaCl and SDS concentrations, revealing a continuous increase in surface ion pairing. The DS-: Na+ pairing ratio gradually decreases with increasing NaCl and approaches 2.8 at the supersaturation state prior to surface nucleation. These results establish PS-SFVS as a quantitative probe of ion-headgroup correlations in charged interfaces and reveal the thermodynamic mechanism underlying counterion-mediated interfacial ordering, with broad implications for electrolyte design, biomembrane stability, and soft-matter assembly.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

ERASER: Efficient RTL FAult Simulation Framework with Trimmed Execution Redundancy

As intelligent computing devices increasingly integrate into human life, ensuring the functional safety of the corresponding electronic chips becomes more critical. A key metric for functional safety is achieving a sufficient fault coverage. To meet this requirement, extensive time-consuming fault simulation of the RTL code is necessary during the chip design phase.The main overhead in RTL fault simulation comes from simulating behavioral nodes (always blocks). Due to the limited fault propagation capacity, fault simulation results often match the good simulation results for many behavioral nodes. A key strategy for accelerating RTL fault simulation is the identification and elimination of redundant simulations. Existing methods detect redundant executions by examining whether the fault inputs to each RTL node are consistent with the good inputs. However, we observe that this input comparison mechanism overlooks a significant amount of implicit redundant execution: although the fault inputs differ from the good inputs, the node's execution results remain unchanged. Our experiments reveal that this overlooked redundant execution constitutes nearly half of the total execution overhead of behavioral nodes, becoming a significant bottleneck in current RTL fault simulation. The underlying reason for this overlooked redundancy is that, in these cases, the true execution paths within the behavioral nodes are not affected by the changes in input values. In this work, we propose a behavior-level redundancy detection algorithm that focuses on the true execution paths. Building on the elimination of redundant executions, we further developed an efficient RTL fault simulation framework, Eraser.Experimental results show that compared to commercial tools, under the same fault coverage, our framework achieves a 3.9 $\times$ improvement in simulation performance on average.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

Large Language Models Are Effective Human Annotation Assistants, But Not Good Independent Annotators

Event annotation is important for identifying market changes, monitoring breaking news, and understanding sociological trends. Although expert annotators set the gold standards, human coding is expensive and inefficient. Unlike information extraction experiments that focus on single contexts, we evaluate a holistic workflow that removes irrelevant documents, merges documents about the same event, and annotates the events. Although LLM-based automated annotations are better than traditional TF-IDF-based methods or Event Set Curation, they are still not reliable annotators compared to human experts. However, adding LLMs to assist experts for Event Set Curation can reduce the time and mental effort required for Variable Annotation. When using LLMs to extract event variables to assist expert annotators, they agree more with the extracted variables than fully automated LLMs for annotation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Quality-Driven Curation of Remote Sensing Vision-Language Data via Learned Scoring Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated great potential in interpreting remote sensing (RS) images through language-guided semantic. However, the effectiveness of these VLMs critically depends on high-quality image-text training data that captures rich semantic relationships between visual content and language descriptions. Unlike natural images, RS lacks large-scale interleaved image-text pairs from web data, making data collection challenging. While current approaches rely primarily on rule-based methods or flagship VLMs for data synthesis, a systematic framework for automated quality assessment of such synthetically generated RS vision-language data is notably absent. To fill this gap, we propose a novel score model trained on large-scale RS vision-language preference data for automated quality assessment. Our empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuning CLIP or advanced VLMs (e.g., Qwen2-VL) with the top 30% of data ranked by our score model achieves superior accuracy compared to both full-data fine-tuning and CLIP-score-based ranking approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate applications of our scoring model for reinforcement learning (RL) training and best-of-N (BoN) test-time scaling, enabling significant improvements in VLM performance for RS tasks. Our code, model, and dataset are publicly available

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Should I Trust You? Detecting Deception in Negotiations using Counterfactual RL

An increasingly common socio-technical problem is people being taken in by offers that sound ``too good to be true'', where persuasion and trust shape decision-making. This paper investigates how \abr{ai} can help detect these deceptive scenarios. We analyze how humans strategically deceive each other in \textit{Diplomacy}, a board game that requires both natural language communication and strategic reasoning. This requires extracting logical forms of proposed agreements in player communications and computing the relative rewards of the proposal using agents' value functions. Combined with text-based features, this can improve our deception detection. Our method detects human deception with a high precision when compared to a Large Language Model approach that flags many true messages as deceptive. Future human-\abr{ai} interaction tools can build on our methods for deception detection by triggering \textit{friction} to give users a chance of interrogating suspicious proposals.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Personalized Help for Optimizing Low-Skilled Users' Strategy

AIs can beat humans in game environments; however, how helpful those agents are to human remains understudied. We augment CICERO, a natural language agent that demonstrates superhuman performance in Diplomacy, to generate both move and message advice based on player intentions. A dozen Diplomacy games with novice and experienced players, with varying advice settings, show that some of the generated advice is beneficial. It helps novices compete with experienced players and in some instances even surpass them. The mere presence of advice can be advantageous, even if players do not follow it.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

LHRS-Bot-Nova: Improved Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Interpretation

Automatically and rapidly understanding Earth's surface is fundamental to our grasp of the living environment and informed decision-making. This underscores the need for a unified system with comprehensive capabilities in analyzing Earth's surface to address a wide range of human needs. The emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has great potential in boosting the efficiency and convenience of intelligent Earth observation. These models can engage in human-like conversations, serve as unified platforms for understanding images, follow diverse instructions, and provide insightful feedbacks. In this study, we introduce LHRS-Bot-Nova, an MLLM specialized in understanding remote sensing (RS) images, designed to expertly perform a wide range of RS understanding tasks aligned with human instructions. LHRS-Bot-Nova features an enhanced vision encoder and a novel bridge layer, enabling efficient visual compression and better language-vision alignment. To further enhance RS-oriented vision-language alignment, we propose a large-scale RS image-caption dataset, generated through feature-guided image recaptioning. Additionally, we introduce an instruction dataset specifically designed to improve spatial recognition abilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of LHRS-Bot-Nova across various RS image understanding tasks. We also evaluate different MLLM performances in complex RS perception and instruction following using a complicated multi-choice question evaluation benchmark, providing a reliable guide for future model selection and improvement. Data, code, and models will be available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/LHRS-Bot.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Reverse Question Answering: Can an LLM Write a Question so Hard (or Bad) that it Can't Answer?

Question answering (QA), giving correct answers to questions, is a popular task, but we test reverse question answering (RQA): for an input answer, give a question with that answer. Past work tests QA and RQA separately, but we test them jointly, comparing their difficulty, aiding benchmark design, and checking reasoning consistency. We run 16 LLMs on QA and RQA with trivia questions/answers, revealing: 1) Versus QA, LLMs are much less accurate in RQA for numerical answers, but slightly more accurate in RQA for textual answers; 2) LLMs often answer their own invalid questions from RQA accurately in QA, so RQA errors are not from knowledge gaps alone; 3) RQA errors correlate with question difficulty and inversely correlate with answer frequencies in the Dolma corpus; and 4) LLMs struggle to provide valid multi-hop questions. By finding question and answer types that lead to RQA errors, we suggest improvements for LLM reasoning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

More Victories, Less Cooperation: Assessing Cicero's Diplomacy Play

The boardgame Diplomacy is a challenging setting for communicative and cooperative artificial intelligence. The most prominent communicative Diplomacy AI, Cicero, has excellent strategic abilities, exceeding human players. However, the best Diplomacy players master communication, not just tactics, which is why the game has received attention as an AI challenge. This work seeks to understand the degree to which Cicero succeeds at communication. First, we annotate in-game communication with abstract meaning representation to separate in-game tactics from general language. Second, we run two dozen games with humans and Cicero, totaling over 200 human-player hours of competition. While AI can consistently outplay human players, AI-Human communication is still limited because of AI's difficulty with deception and persuasion. This shows that Cicero relies on strategy and has not yet reached the full promise of communicative and cooperative AI.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

A Neighbor-Searching Discrepancy-based Drift Detection Scheme for Learning Evolving Data

Uncertain changes in data streams present challenges for machine learning models to dynamically adapt and uphold performance in real-time. Particularly, classification boundary change, also known as real concept drift, is the major cause of classification performance deterioration. However, accurately detecting real concept drift remains challenging because the theoretical foundations of existing drift detection methods - two-sample distribution tests and monitoring classification error rate, both suffer from inherent limitations such as the inability to distinguish virtual drift (changes not affecting the classification boundary, will introduce unnecessary model maintenance), limited statistical power, or high computational cost. Furthermore, no existing detection method can provide information on the trend of the drift, which could be invaluable for model maintenance. This work presents a novel real concept drift detection method based on Neighbor-Searching Discrepancy, a new statistic that measures the classification boundary difference between two samples. The proposed method is able to detect real concept drift with high accuracy while ignoring virtual drift. It can also indicate the direction of the classification boundary change by identifying the invasion or retreat of a certain class, which is also an indicator of separability change between classes. A comprehensive evaluation of 11 experiments is conducted, including empirical verification of the proposed theory using artificial datasets, and experimental comparisons with commonly used drift handling methods on real-world datasets. The results show that the proposed theory is robust against a range of distributions and dimensions, and the drift detection method outperforms state-of-the-art alternative methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

LHRS-Bot: Empowering Remote Sensing with VGI-Enhanced Large Multimodal Language Model

The revolutionary capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have paved the way for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and fostered diverse applications across various specialized domains. In the remote sensing (RS) field, however, the diverse geographical landscapes and varied objects in RS imagery are not adequately considered in recent MLLM endeavors. To bridge this gap, we construct a large-scale RS image-text dataset, LHRS-Align, and an informative RS-specific instruction dataset, LHRS-Instruct, leveraging the extensive volunteered geographic information (VGI) and globally available RS images. Building on this foundation, we introduce LHRS-Bot, an MLLM tailored for RS image understanding through a novel multi-level vision-language alignment strategy and a curriculum learning method. Additionally, we introduce LHRS-Bench, a benchmark for thoroughly evaluating MLLMs' abilities in RS image understanding. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LHRS-Bot exhibits a profound understanding of RS images and the ability to perform nuanced reasoning within the RS domain.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Robust Control of An Aerial Manipulator Based on A Variable Inertia Parameters Model

Aerial manipulator, which is composed of an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and a multi-link manipulator and can perform aerial manipulation, has shown great potential of applications. However, dynamic coupling between the UAV and the manipulator makes it difficult to control the aerial manipulator with high performance. In this paper, system modeling and control problem of the aerial manipulator are studied. Firstly, an UAV dynamic model is proposed with consideration of the dynamic coupling from an attached manipulator, which is treated as disturbance for the UAV. In the dynamic model, the disturbance is affected by the variable inertia parameters of the aerial manipulator system. Then, based on the proposed dynamic model, a disturbance compensation robust $H_{\infty}$ controller is designed to stabilize flight of the UAV while the manipulator is in operation. Finally, experiments are conducted and the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed control scheme.

cs.RO↗