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Hang Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Hang Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Unifying and Beyond the Theory of Pervasive Capability Degradation in LLM Post-training SFT from Feature Interference

Pervasive Capability Degradation (PCD) refers to the phenomenon in which supervised fine-tuning (SFT), while adapting a large language model (LLM) to a target task, often erodes the general capabilities acquired during pre-training. Prevailing explanations attribute PCD to macroscopic distribution shift and therefore lack microscopic manipulability, leaving existing mitigation methods without a complete theoretical foundation. In this paper, we first develop a bottom-up geometric theory of PCD grounded in feature interference under superposition: narrow-domain SFT data disrupt the almost-orthogonal feature structure formed during pre-training, and the resulting interference drives activations across decision hyperplanes in the output Laguerre-Voronoi geometry, flipping predictions on general tasks. This theory unifies existing methods into six paradigms and reveals both the source of their efficacy and their theoretical limits. We then prove that cross-entropy under one-hot supervision cannot resolve PCD on its own, and accordingly propose the AEGIS loss, which directly constrains the drift of activation margins along all competing token directions, thereby decoupling interference suppression from task adaptation. Across 3 model families and 14 SFT tasks, AEGIS outperforms representative methods of every paradigm on target tasks and pervasive capabilities simultaneously, at only about 1.3 times the computational cost of standard SFT. Its generality, scalability, and mechanistic interpretability offer a new perspective on fully resolving PCD.

cs.LG↗

RMS-AQA: A Two-Stage Spatial Audio Question Answering Benchmark for Real-World Domestic Environments

Embodied assistants in domestic environments must infer what happened, where and when it occurred, and how to respond. To address this, we introduce RMS-AQA, a spatial audio question answering (SAQA) benchmark for real-world domestic environments. The benchmark features a two-stage question-answering (QA) format to comprehensively assess the ability of audio-language models (ALMs) to first ground audible sound events and subsequently perform complex spatio-temporal reasoning based on that grounding. To maximize acoustic realism, our dataset combines authentic real-world first-order Ambisonics (FOA) recordings with high-fidelity synthetic data generated using measured room impulse responses (RIRs). Furthermore, we provide a lightweight spatial plug-in that injects FOA-format data into frozen audio-language backbones. Experimental results reveal that the primary challenges stem from concurrent sources, far distance, and sim-to-real domain gap between RIR-synthesized and authentic recordings.

cs.SD↗

Spark-Audio 1.0 Technical Report

This paper introduces Spark-Audio 1.0, a speech foundation model trained on domestically produced computing infrastructure. The model accepts text and speech inputs and generates text outputs. It supports multilingual (99 languages) and multi-dialect (202 dialects) speech recognition, speech translation, audio perception and understanding, and both text- and speech-based dialogue, marking a shift from merely ``hearing clearly'' to genuinely ``understanding'' speech. Architecturally, Spark-Audio 1.0 couples a 0.65B-parameter dense audio encoder with a 30B-A3B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model (LLM). The audio encoder is pretrained with representation-enhanced BEST-RQ and then refined through multi-task supervised training. The audio--LLM is trained through staged pretraining, followed by post-training that combines supervised fine-tuning with on-policy distillation. In total, the model is trained on 13 million hours of audio data together with large-scale text data. We evaluate Spark-Audio 1.0 on mainstream audio and text benchmarks, as well as on in-house test sets drawn from real-world application scenarios. Despite using substantially less audio training data than Qwen3.5-Omni-Flash, Spark-Audio 1.0 achieves comparable performance on most audio and text tasks, outperforms it in multilingual speech recognition, spoken dialogue, and real-world application scenarios, and approaches the performance of larger closed-source models. Nevertheless, there remains room for improvement in instruction following and complex audio reasoning. Finally, the successful training of Spark-Audio 1.0 on domestic hardware, including Huawei Ascend 910B and Hygon BW1000 chips, demonstrates the feasibility of a domestic technical pathway for building speech foundation models.

eess.AS↗

Multi-bit Ferroelectric-NAND for High-throughput Massive Database Search

The growing demand for large-scale database search in data-intensive applications, ranging from proteomics to autonomous systems, has exposed fundamental limitations in von Neumann architectures due to memory bandwidth and energy constraints. Hyperdimensional (HD) computing offers a robust and parallelizable framework for such tasks, but its practical implementation remains challenged by high memory demands. Ultra-high-density, energy-efficient ferroelectric NAND (FE-NAND) memory provides a potential solution by enabling in-situ computation. We fabricate quad-level FE-NAND strings with wide memory windows, disturb resilience, and robust retention. Using these planar FE-NAND strings as building blocks, we experimentally demonstrate in-situ multi-level cell (MLC) dot product operations at the single-cell level and, using experimentally calibrated physics-based simulations, demonstrate Hamming similarity calculations between reference and query hypervectors (HV). This platform leverages the inherent error tolerance of HD computing to achieve >90% search accuracy even at high logic levels (TLC, QLC). When benchmarked on Open Modification Search (OMS) tasks in proteomics with TB-scale datasets, our system shows nearly 1,000x speedup and over 10,000x energy efficiency improvement compared to incumbent solutions. These results establish FE-NAND as a viable in-storage compute architecture for large-scale, high-dimensional data processing.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Extrinsic upper bounds for the harmonic mean of eigenvalues in curved manifolds

Let $M$ be an $m (\ge2)$-dimensional closed orientable submanifold in a Riemannian manifold of sectional curvature bounded above by $δ$. We obtain the extrinsic upper bounds of the harmonic mean of the first $m$ nonzero eigenvalues of the Laplacian on $M$, which extend the previous related results for the first nonzero eigenvalues.

math.DG↗

Beyond Static Interpretability: Anticipating Post-SFT Mechanisms from Pre-SFT Parameters for Better Tuning

Mechanistic Localization bridges mechanistic interpretability and post-training optimization by isolating critical parameters via interpretative approaches and then guiding parameter-efficient Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in a ``locating-then-tuning'' paradigm. However, due to the retrospective nature of mechanistic interpretability, directly interpreting pre-SFT models introduces misleading conclusions. Specifically for novel tasks, initially identified neurons differ drastically from those governing the final model, introducing biases that actively disrupt SFT. To address this, we propose a forward-looking localization framework that accurately estimates the post-SFT interpretability state using only pre-SFT parameters and the target dataset. Theoretically, we model SFT as a continuous parameter evolution, leveraging Taylor expansion to rigorously bridge the post-tuning mechanistic objective with the pre-SFT model's dynamic gradients. Practically, we design dual-granularity (neuron- and component-level) localization pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only provides superior SFT guidance but also exhibits robust performance and temporal scalability across increasing model sizes. This work transcends the fundamental limitation of traditional interpretability-its inability to identify task-critical mechanisms before they are trained-pioneering a predictive frontier that unites mechanistic interpretability with targeted optimization.

cs.LG↗

An automatic-differentiation framework for time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography inversion of hydrologic dynamics

Time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography (TL-ERT) provides spatially distributed information on subsurface hydrologic changes. However, inversion of long monitoring sequences is computationally demanding. Modifying the data misfit, regularization, model parameterization, or petrophysical transformation may also require new gradient derivations and separate implementations. Here, we present AD-TLERT, a unified, GPU-accelerated framework for time-lapse ERT inversion based on automatic differentiation. The framework integrates model parameterization, differentiable petrophysical transformations, forward modeling, data misfit, regularization and auxiliary constraints into a single computational chain. Alternative inversion formulations can therefore reuse the same PDE derivative implementation without re-deriving the complete ERT sensitivity for each case. Comparisons with pyGIMLi showed close agreement in the forward responses, gradients, and recovered resistivity models. Under the tested configuration, AD-TLERT achieved an approximately 51-fold speedup. Synthetic experiments showed that inversion choices affect the amplitude, geometry, and temporal behavior of recovered anomalies. By propagating gradients through the embedded petrophysical relationship, AD-TLERT enabled direct water-content inversion and yielded more accurate estimates than post-inversion conversion for the tested model. A field application further demonstrated how ERT, temperature, and soil-moisture observations can be combined to image snowmelt-driven hillslope wetting. AD-TLERT provides an efficient and flexible framework for time-lapse ERT inversion and hydrologic interpretation.

cs.LG↗

UBG-Net: An Uncertainty-aware Bayesian Gating Network for Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Audio-Visual speech recognition systems often degrade in real-world scenarios due to signal corruption and distribution shifts. To address this, we propose a unified uncertainty-modeling framework, namely the uncertainty-aware Bayesian gating network (UBG-Net). UBG-Net features a Modality Uncertainty-aware Bayesian Fusion (MUBF) mechanism that injects signal-level aleatoric uncertainty into a Bayesian network to model epistemic uncertainty, thereby ensuring robust fusion of pre-trained backbone features. For inference, we introduce Distribution Uncertainty-aware Hierarchical Voting (DUHV) to select transcripts from Monte Carlo samples, prioritizing frequency and using inference scores in case of a tie. Experiments on the AVCocktail and LRS2 datasets demonstrate the overall superiority of UBG-Net compared to SOTA baselines. Ablation studies confirm that MUBF and DUHV effectively filter noise, enhancing fusion and decoding robustness.

eess.AS↗

DSH-Bench: A Difficulty- and Scenario-Aware Benchmark with Hierarchical Subject Taxonomy for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Significant progress has been achieved in subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) generation, which aims to synthesize new images depicting target subjects according to user instructions. However, evaluating these models remains a significant challenge. Existing benchmarks exhibit critical limitations: 1) insufficient diversity and comprehensiveness in subject images, 2) inadequate granularity in assessing model performance across different subject difficulty levels and prompt scenarios, and 3) a profound lack of actionable insights and diagnostic guidance for subsequent model refinement. To address these limitations, we propose DSH-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that enables systematic multi-perspective analysis of subject-driven T2I models through four principal innovations: 1) a hierarchical taxonomy sampling mechanism ensuring comprehensive subject representation across 58 fine-grained categories, 2) an innovative classification scheme categorizing both subject difficulty level and prompt scenario for granular capability assessment, 3) a novel Subject Identity Consistency Score (SICS) metric demonstrating a 9.4\% higher correlation with human evaluation compared to existing measures in quantifying subject preservation, and 4) a comprehensive set of diagnostic insights derived from the benchmark, offering critical guidance for optimizing future model training paradigms and data construction strategies. Through an extensive empirical evaluation of 19 leading models, DSH-Bench uncovers previously obscured limitations in current approaches, establishing concrete directions for future research and development.

cs.CV↗

Mind-Omni: A Unified Multi-Task Framework for Brain-Vision-Language Modeling via Discrete Diffusion

Modeling the interplay between external stimuli and internal neural representations is a pivotal research area for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). A major limitation of prior work is the prevailing paradigm of specialized, single-task models, which curtails versatility and neglects inter-task synergies. To address this, we propose Mind-Omni, the first versatile framework that unifies seven distinct encoding and decoding tasks through a discrete diffusion paradigm. At its core is a novel Brain Tokenizer that transforms heterogeneous, continuous brain signals into standardized, discrete tokens. This enables direct, token-level interactions for mutual understanding and generation between any two or more modalities within a shared semantic space. To unlock advanced reasoning capabilities, we further curate a specialized Brain Question Answering (BQA) instruction-tuning dataset. Our model not only establishes a new state-of-the-art among multi-task unified frameworks but also provides strong evidence for multi-task synergy. By demonstrating performance competitive with, and at times superior to, larger specialized models, our work offers a powerful new paradigm for neural modeling and paves the way for foundation models of neural activity. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ReedOnePeck/Mind-Omni.

cs.AI↗

Navigating by Old Maps: The Pitfalls of Static Mechanistic Localization in LLM Post-Training

The "Locate-then-Update" paradigm has become a predominant approach in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), identifying critical components via mechanistic interpretability for targeted parameter updates. However, this paradigm rests on a fundamental yet unverified assumption: can mechanisms derived from current static parameters reliably guide future dynamic parameter updates? To investigate this, we systematically track the structural evolution of Transformer circuits throughout the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process, revealing the underlying dynamics of task mechanisms. We introduce three novel metrics-Circuit Distance, Circuit Stability, and Circuit Conflict-to analyze circuit evolution across three dimensions: neural migration, semantic stability, and cross-task interference. Our empirical results reveal that circuits inherently exhibit "Free Evolution" during parameter updates. Consequently, static mechanisms extracted from current states inevitably suffer from temporal latency, making them fundamentally inadequate for guiding future states. Moreover, by deconstructing the "illusion of effectiveness" in existing methods, this work underscores the necessity of "foresight" in mechanistic localization and proposes a predictive framework for future research.

cs.CL↗

Payne-Philippin's overdetermined problems on compact surfaces

We investigate the overdetermined problem given by \begin{equation*} Δu=0 \text{ in } Ω,\quad \frac{\partial u}{\partialν} =σ_1 u \text{ on } \partial Ω, \quad |\nabla u|=\text{constant on } \partial Ω, \end{equation*} where $Ω$ is a connected compact Riemannian surface with smooth boundary $\partial Ω$, and $σ_1$ is the first nonzero Steklov eigenvalue of $Ω$. We prove that this overdetermined problem admits a nontrivial solution if and only if $Ω$ is $σ$-homothetic to either the flat unit disk or a flat cylinder $[-T,T]\times S^1$ for some $T\ge T_1$. This gives a complete answer to the question raised by Payne and Philippin in [Z. Angew. Math. Phys. 42(6), 864-873, 1991] for $σ=σ_1$ and arbitrary surfaces. In particular, we completely characterize compact domains in 2-dimensional space forms for which the overdetermined problem is solvable.

math.DG↗

Disentangling to Re-couple: Resolving the Similarity-Controllability Paradox in Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Subject-Driven Text-to-Image (T2I) Generation aims to preserve a subject's identity while editing its context based on a text prompt. A core challenge in this task is the "similarity-controllability paradox", where enhancing textual control often degrades the subject's fidelity, and vice-versa. We argue this paradox stems from the ambiguous role of text prompts, which are often tasked with describing both the subject and the desired modifications, leading to conflicting signals for the model. To resolve this, we propose DisCo, a novel framework that first Disntangles and then re-Couples visual and textual information. First, our textual-visual decoupling module isolates the sources of information: subject identity is extracted exclusively from the reference image with the entity word of the subject, while the text prompt is simplified to contain only the modification command, where the subject refers to general pronouns, eliminating descriptive ambiguity. However, this strict separation can lead to unnatural compositions between the subject and its contexts. We address this by designing a dedicated reward signal and using reinforcement learning to seamlessly recouple the visually-defined subject and the textually-generated context. Our approach effectively resolves the paradox, enabling simultaneous high-fidelity subject preservation and precise textual control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing highly realistic and coherent images.

cs.CV↗

The USTC-NERCSLIP Systems for the CHiME-9 MCoRec Challenge

This report details our submission to the CHiME-9 MCoRec Challenge on recognizing and clustering multiple concurrent natural conversations within indoor social settings. Unlike conventional meetings centered on a single shared topic, this scenario contains multiple parallel dialogues--up to eight speakers across up to four simultaneous conversations--with a speech overlap rate exceeding 90%. To tackle this, we propose a multimodal cascaded system that leverages per-speaker visual streams extracted from synchronized 360 degree video together with single-channel audio. Our system improves three components of the pipeline by leveraging enhanced audio-visual pretrained models: Active Speaker Detection (ASD), Audio-Visual Target Speech Extraction (AVTSE), and Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR). The AVSR module further incorporates Whisper and LLM techniques to boost transcription accuracy. Our best single cascaded system achieves a Speaker Word Error Rate (WER) of 32.44% on the development set. By further applying ROVER to fuse outputs from diverse front-end and back-end variants, we reduce Speaker WER to 31.40%. Notably, our LLM-based zero-shot conversational clustering achieves a speaker clustering F1 score of 1.0, yielding a final Joint ASR-Clustering Error Rate (JACER) of 15.70%.

eess.AS↗

Large Language Model Agent in Financial Trading: A Survey

Trading is a highly competitive task that requires a combination of strategy, knowledge, and psychological fortitude. With the recent success of large language models(LLMs), it is appealing to apply the emerging intelligence of LLM agents in this competitive arena and understanding if they can outperform professional traders. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the current research on using LLMs as agents in financial trading. We summarize the common architecture used in the agent, the data inputs, and the performance of LLM trading agents in backtesting as well as the challenges presented in these research. This survey aims to provide insights into the current state of LLM-based financial trading agents and outline future research directions in this field.

q-fin.TR↗

Individualized Federated Learning for Traffic Prediction with Error Driven Aggregation

Low-latency traffic prediction is vital for smart city traffic management. Federated Learning has emerged as a promising technique for Traffic Prediction (FLTP), offering several advantages such as privacy preservation, reduced communication overhead, improved prediction accuracy, and enhanced adaptability to changing traffic conditions. However, majority of the current FLTP frameworks lack a real-time model updating scheme, which hinders their ability to continuously incorporate new incoming traffic data and adapt effectively to the changing dynamics of traffic trends. Another concern with the existing FLTP frameworks is their reliance on the conventional FL model aggregation method, which involves assigning an identical model (i.e., the global model) to all traffic monitoring devices to predict their individual local traffic trends, thereby neglecting the non-IID characteristics of traffic data collected in different locations. Building upon these findings and harnessing insights from reinforcement learning, we propose NeighborFL, an individualized real-time federated learning scheme that introduces a haversine distance-based and error-driven, personalized local models grouping heuristic from the perspective of each individual traffic node. This approach allows NeighborFL to create location-aware and tailored prediction models for each client while fostering collaborative learning. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of NeighborFL, offering improved real-time prediction accuracy over three baseline models, with one experimental setting showing a 16.9% reduction in MSE value compared to a naive FL setting.

cs.LG↗

Conformal and extrinsic upper bounds for the harmonic mean of Neumann and Steklov eigenvalues

Let $M$ be an $m$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifold with boundary. We obtain the upper bound of the harmonic mean of the first $m$ nonzero Neumann eigenvalues and Steklov eigenvalues involving the conformal volume and relative conformal volume, respectively. We also give an optimal sharp extrinsic upper bound for closed submanifolds in space forms. These extend the previous related results for the first nonzero eigenvalues.

math.DG↗

Broken intrinsic symmetry induced magnon-magnon coupling in synthetic ferrimagnets

Synthetic antiferromagnets offer rich magnon energy spectra in which optical and acoustic magnon branches can hybridize. Here, we demonstrate a broken intrinsic symmetry induced coupling of acoustic and optical magnons in a synthetic ferrimagnet consisting of two dissimilar antiferromagnetically interacting ferromagnetic metals. Two distinct magnon modes hybridize at degeneracy points, as indicated by an avoided level-crossing. The avoided level-crossing gap depends on the interlayer exchange interaction between the magnetic layers, which can be controlled by adjusting the non-magnetic interlayer thickness. A large avoided level crossing gap of 3.9 GHz is revealed, exceeding the coupling strength that is typically found in other magnonic hybrid systems based on a coupling of magnons with photons or magnons with phonons.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗