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Hao Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Liu.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

UniVoice: A Unified Model for Speech and Singing Voice Generation

Text-to-speech (TTS) and singing voice synthesis (SVS) both aim to generate human vocal audio from symbolic inputs, but they impose different requirements on the generation process. Speech generation relies on flexible, language-driven prosody, whereas singing generation requires explicit melody control and accurate rhythmic alignment. This mismatch makes it challenging to train a single model that can generate both natural speech and controllable singing, since melody-related conditions should strongly constrain singing but should not restrict speech prosody. We present UniVoice, a unified speech and singing voice generation framework based on conditional flow matching. Instead of using a single undifferentiated conditioning representation, UniVoice factorizes the condition into content, melody, and timbre, which are encoded by modality-appropriate encoders and consumed by a shared Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbone. For singing, the melody condition is represented by MIDI note sequences; for speech, it is replaced with a learned null melody token, allowing the model to infer prosody from linguistic and acoustic context. This design preserves explicit melody control for singing while avoiding the need to impose melody constraints on speech. We further analyze the null melody token as an approximation to melody marginalization in the conditional flow. Trained on 30k hours of speech and 35k hours of singing data, UniVoice achieves a speech PER of 5.26\%, comparable to dedicated TTS systems such as F5-TTS (5.21\%) and CosyVoice3 (5.30\%). On singing generation, UniVoice achieves a PER of 16.22\%, outperforming the unified baseline Vevo1.5 (24.72\%).

cs.SD↗

EvoDS: Self-Evolving Autonomous Data Science Agent with Skill Learning and Context Management

Recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) agents has enabled promising advances in automated data science. However, existing approaches remain fundamentally limited by their static action sets and lack of principled long-horizon context management, hindering their ability to accumulate reusable experience across tasks and operate reliably in multi-stage, iterative data science pipelines. To address these challenges, we introduce EvoDS, a self-evolving autonomous data science agent that learns to expand its skills and adaptively managing long-term context through agentic reinforcement learning. Specifically, EvoDS introduces two key strategies: (1) Autonomous Skill Acquisition (ASA) mechanism, which enables agents to synthesize, validate, and reuse executable skills; and (2) Adaptive Context Compression (ACC) strategy, which treats context management as a learned control problem rather than passive truncation. These strategies are orchestrated within a two-stage multi-agent training scheme, enabling EvoDS to autonomously improve over time. Theoretically, we prove that EvoDS's hierarchical design reduces tool-selection error, and its optimization objective aligns with an information bottleneck principle, ensuring efficient context use. Empirically, EvoDS outperforms state-of-the-art open-source data science agents by an average of 28.9% across four diverse benchmarks while eliminating out-of-token failures. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/EvoDS.

cs.AI↗

TrafficClaw: A Generalizable LLM Agent in the Unified Physical Environment for Urban Traffic Control

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown strong capabilities in long-horizon reasoning, tool use, and decision-making in digital environments, yet extending them to physically grounded systems remains challenging. Unlike web, code, or game environments, where objectives are often weakly coupled, physical systems evolve through tightly coupled dynamics in which local interventions propagate across interacting subsystems over time. Urban traffic control exemplifies this challenge, as traffic signals, freeways, public transit, and taxi systems continuously interact through shared spatial infrastructure and temporal mobility demand. Existing optimization, reinforcement learning (RL), and LLM-based approaches are largely designed for isolated subsystems, limiting coordinated reasoning and system-level optimization. We propose TrafficClaw, a LLM-based generalizable traffic control agent for physical urban systems. TrafficClaw operates within a unified traffic environment that exposes coupled urban dynamics and feedback, performs executable spatiotemporal reasoning with persistent memory for long-horizon adaptation, and leverages multi-stage agentic RL for coordinated system-level optimization. Experiments across three metropolitan regions and six traffic-control tasks demonstrate strong generalization, robustness, and cross-subsystem coordination. Our project is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/TrafficClaw.

cs.AI↗

Spatio-Temporal Reconnection for Multi-Robot Networks using Adaptive Prescribed-Time CBFs

In multi-robot systems, maintaining persistent communication graph connectivity is often overly restrictive, especially when robots have limited communication ranges but operate in large environments. Instead, allowing robots to temporarily disconnect and later reconnect is often more desirable for efficient task execution while still ensuring timely information sharing across the team. In this paper, we propose an adaptive prescribed-time control barrier function (adaptive PT-CBF) framework that enables robots to temporarily disconnect and re-enter the communication range within an adjustable and feasible prescribed time. Moreover, we introduce a reconnection triggering mechanism that jointly considers task execution and reconnection urgency, thereby providing a principled way to decide when reconnection should occur. Theoretical analysis justifies convergence to the satisfying reconnection within a prescribed finite time. Experimental results validate the performance of our proposed adaptive PT-CBF with improved task efficiency and satisfying reconnections.

cs.RO↗

DS-Lighting: Making Agent Harnesses Explicit for Data-Science Automation

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise for automating data-science workflows, yet their end-to-end performance depends critically on the agent harness that represents tasks, manages execution state, constrains output artifacts, and provides evaluation feedback. Existing data-science agents often leave this harness implicit, making results difficult to reproduce, compare, and attribute across heterogeneous tasks. We introduce DS-Lighting, a unified harness toolkit that makes harness design explicit for data-science automation. DS-Lighting decomposes the harness into four reusable layers: data, workflow, execution, and evaluation, and represents diverse agents as executable operator programs that support both predefined pipelines and adaptive search. We further integrate multiple open-source data-science benchmarks into an MLE-Bench-style task format, enabling controlled comparison under a shared task interface, sandboxed runtime, and metric protocol. Experiments across agents, harnesses, models, and ablations show that explicit harness design improves reproducibility, comparability, and reliability, while reducing avoidable system-level failures in end-to-end data-science workflows. Our code is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/dslighting

cs.AI↗

OmniHuman: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Human-Centric Video Generation

Recent advancements in audio-video joint generation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in content creation. However, generating high-fidelity human-centric videos in complex, real-world physical scenes remains a significant challenge. We identify that the root cause lies in the structural deficiencies of existing datasets across three dimensions: limited global scene and camera diversity, sparse interaction modeling (both person-person and person-object), and insufficient individual attribute alignment. To bridge these gaps, we present OmniHuman, a large-scale, multi-scene dataset designed for fine-grained human modeling. OmniHuman provides a hierarchical annotation covering video-level scenes, frame-level interactions, and individual-level attributes. To facilitate this, we develop a fully automated pipeline for high-quality data collection and multi-modal annotation. Complementary to the dataset, we establish the OmniHuman Benchmark (OHBench), a three-level evaluation system that provides a scientific diagnosis for human-centric audio-video synthesis. Crucially, OHBench introduces metrics that are highly consistent with human perception, filling the gaps in existing benchmarks by providing a comprehensive diagnosis across global scenes, relational interactions, and individual attributes.

cs.CV↗

ClimAgent: LLM as Agents for Autonomous Open-ended Climate Science Analysis

Climate research is pivotal for mitigating global environmental crises, yet the accelerating volume of multi-scale datasets and the complexity of analytical tools have created significant bottlenecks, constraining scientific discovery to fragmented and labor-intensive workflows. While the emergence Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a transformative paradigm to scale scientific expertise, existing explorations remain largely confined to simple Question-Answering (Q&A) tasks. These approaches often oversimplify real-world challenges, neglecting the intricate physical constraints and the data-driven nature required in professional climate science.To bridge this gap, we introduce ClimAgent, a general-purpose autonomous framework designed to execute a wide spectrum of research tasks across diverse climate sub-fields. By integrating a unified tool-use environment with rigorous reasoning protocols, ClimAgent transcends simple retrieval to perform end-to-end modeling and analysis. To foster systematic evaluation, we propose ClimaBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for real-world climate discovery. It encompasses challenging problems spanning 5 distinct task categories derived from professional scenarios between 2000 and 2025. Experiments on ClimaBench demonstrate that ClimAgent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 40.21% improvement over original LLM solutions in solution rigorousness and practicality. Our code are available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/ClimAgent.

cs.AI↗

Electronic Nematicity Revealed by Polarized Ultrafast Spectroscopy in Bilayer La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$

We report a polarized ultrafast pump-probe study of the normal-state electronic dynamics in bilayer La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ and trilayer La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$ single crystals at ambient pressure. While both nickelates exhibit density-wave (DW) transitions accompanied by the opening of a quasiparticle relaxation bottleneck, their electronic responses display strikingly different symmetry properties. La4Ni3O10 maintains an isotropic optical response across the entire temperature range. In contrast, La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ exhibits a pronounced twofold ($C_2$) anisotropy in its lowtemperature electronic dynamics. This electronic nematicity, evident in both the relaxation dynamics and the polarization-dependent effective bottleneck energy scales, is strongly modified below 115 K, suggesting coupling or competition with a secondary DW-like instability reported by complementary probes. The presence of macroscopic electronic anisotropy in the bilayer system, and its absence in the trilayer system, suggests a possible relation between electronic nematic correlations and the superconducting normal state in a$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ that deserves further exploration.

cond-mat.str-el↗

HRBench: Benchmarking and Understanding Thinking-Mode Switch Strategies in Hybrid-Reasoning LLMs

Hybrid-reasoning large language models (LLMs) expose explicit controls over reasoning effort, allowing users or systems to trade off answer quality against inference cost. However, existing methods for adaptive thinking-mode selection are typically evaluated under different models, datasets, and implementation assumptions, making it difficult to compare their practical behavior. We introduce HRBench, a unified evaluation framework for studying thinking-mode switching in hybrid-reasoning LLMs. HRBench organizes the design space along two axes: three switching strategy families, prompt-based selection, external routing, and speculative execution, and four training regimes, training-free, SFT, offline and online RL, yielding 12 controlled evaluation settings. We evaluate these settings across 6 LLMs, from Qwen3.5-2B to Kimi-K2.5-1.1T, and 5 reasoning benchmarks covering mathematics, science, and code, while reimplementing 12+ representative prior methods within the same pipeline. Our analysis characterizes how different switching strategies occupy distinct effectiveness-efficiency trade-off regions: prompt-based methods often provide favorable token-accuracy trade-offs, routing methods offer more stable cost reduction, and speculative methods tend to improve accuracy at higher token cost. We further find that training affects strategies differently, and that the preferred strategy varies with model scale and task domain. HRBench provides reference implementations and a unified evaluation platform to support more controlled research on efficient reasoning in hybrid-reasoning LLMs. Our data, code and repository are available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/HRBench.

cs.AI↗

Neural Scaling Laws of Deep ReLU and Deep Operator Network: A Theoretical Study

Neural scaling laws play a pivotal role in the performance of deep neural networks and have been observed in a wide range of tasks. However, a complete theoretical framework for understanding these scaling laws remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we explore the neural scaling laws for deep operator networks, which involve learning mappings between function spaces, with a focus on the Chen and Chen style architecture. These approaches, which include the popular Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), approximate the output functions using a linear combination of learnable basis functions and coefficients that depend on the input functions. We establish a theoretical framework to quantify the neural scaling laws by analyzing its approximation and generalization errors. We articulate the relationship between the approximation and generalization errors of deep operator networks and key factors such as network model size and training data size. Moreover, we address cases where input functions exhibit low-dimensional structures, allowing us to derive tighter error bounds. These results also hold for deep ReLU networks and other similar structures. Our results offer a partial explanation of the neural scaling laws in operator learning and provide a theoretical foundation for their applications.

cs.LG↗

Are LLMs Socially Adaptive? Contrasting Belief Evolution in Large Language Models and Humans

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly engage in complex social interactions, ensuring that their behaviors align with human ethical principles and intentions, known as value alignment, has become a critical scientific challenge. Existing benchmarks often rely on static assessments and fail to capture the longitudinal dynamics of decision-making or the latent cognitive processes driving agent behavior. In this work, we propose FairMindSim, a realistic simulation benchmark rooted in social psychology that evaluates alignment through continuous economic games. To move beyond black-box observations, we introduce the Belief-Reward Alignment Behavior Evolution Model (BREM), a probabilistic framework that formalizes decision-making as a dynamic trade-off between maximizing extrinsic rewards and upholding intrinsic beliefs. We conducted a large-scale comparative study involving 1,017 human participants and ten LLMs, including GPT-5 and Gemini-3-Pro. Our experimental results reveal a capability linked non linear empirical trend in the Third Party Punishment (TPP) game. Mid capability models exhibit rigid and algorithmic aggression that is characterized by over punishment, while frontier models show a convergence of restraint and a shift toward human like leniency as reasoning capabilities scale. Furthermore, using BREM, we decompose agents longitudinal decision dynamics and find that more advanced models better balance conflicting objectives by reducing belief action inconsistency. Our contributions provide a standardized protocol for psychological stress testing and an interpretable mechanism for analyzing the longitudinal evolution of AI alignment in controlled social dilemma settings.

cs.CE↗

LiPUP-MA: A Residential Experience-centric Multi-Agent Framework for Living-in-the-loop Participatory Urban Planning

Participatory Urban Planning (PUP) is increasingly supported by LLM-based agents, yet existing methods largely rely on static preference elicitation and one-shot stakeholder discussions, overlooking the cyclical nature of real-world planning, where residential life, experience collection, and plan adjustment continually interact. We propose Living-in-the-loop Participatory Urban Planning (LiPUP), a closed-loop paradigm that alternates between simulated residential living and experience-driven plan revision, while posing two key challenges: grounding scattered living experience in concrete urban contexts and translating subjective feedback into spatially coherent planning actions. To instantiate LiPUP, we introduce LiPUP-MA, an LLM-based multi-agent framework that constructs a Plan-centric Graph-based Experience Bank to organize urban-grounded residential feedback from living simulation and equips a Spatially-constrained Skill-augmented Planner agent to revise plans by harmonizing experiential, visual, and geospatial evidence. Experiments show that LiPUP-MA consistently outperforms baselines on both conventional static planning metrics and living-based metrics, while iterative LiPUP cycles further improve plan quality.

cs.AI↗

AstroMind: A High-Fidelity Benchmark for Spacecraft Behavior Reasoning Based on Large Language Models

Understanding why a spacecraft maneuvers -- rather than simply that it did -- is an increasingly important problem for space domain awareness as Earth orbits grow crowded and contested. Current analysis pipelines are built for detection: they are good at picking up that something happened, less good at reasoning about what it means. AstroMind is a physics-grounded benchmark designed to close that gap. It draws on high-fidelity astrodynamics simulations and real observational constraints, converting them into verifiable reasoning problems across three task types: intent inference, maneuver parameter estimation, and threat assessment. Each scenario includes realistic sensing noise and multi-source textual intelligence at varying reliability levels. Evaluation metrics capture both semantic correctness and quantitative consistency under physical constraints. Benchmarking a suite of open-weight models shows no single model dominates every axis: Qwen3 (32B) leads on intent inference accuracy; QwQ (32B) leads on threat assessment and achieves the lowest median relative error on parsed items; GPT-OSS (20B) produces the strongest judged reasoning quality and extracts the most scalar values for parameter estimation (136 of 241 parsed items). Training data composition and reasoning style matter as much as model size. Structured reasoning prompts help consistently across tested 8B models, with larger gains for those that can already track physical constraints. AstroMind gives the field a shared test for a problem where getting the physics right and reading the tactical situation correctly are both required -- neither is sufficient on its own.

cs.CL↗

Coulomb bridge mechanism for peripheral polarization of weakly bound projectiles

We identify the matrix elements that carry peripheral polarization of weakly bound projectiles through the Feshbach dynamical polarization potential (DPP) within the continuum-discretized coupled-channels (CDCC) framework. Splitting the two P-Q bridge couplings into nuclear and Coulomb parts, while keeping a single Q-space propagator common to every term, decomposes the DPP into a nuclear, a Coulomb, and an interference component, $ΔU_{\rm DPP}=ΔU_N+ΔU_C+ΔU_{NC}$. Applied to $d+{}^{58}$Ni, ${}^{6}$Li$+{}^{208}$Pb, ${}^{11}$Be$+{}^{64}$Zn, and ${}^{8}$B$+{}^{64}$Zn, the decomposition reveals a controlled hierarchy: a nuclear bridge in the light system, a mixed bridge with strong destructive interference in the heavy stable case, and a Coulomb-dominated bridge in both halo systems, with the proton halo showing constructive nuclear-Coulomb interference. For the halo reactions, peripheral partial waves ($L\gtrsim 35$) satisfy $σ_R^L\simeqσ_{\rm DPP}^L\simeqσ_{\rm BU}^L$, with the high-$L$ DPP tail dominated by $σ_C^L$. Two diagnostic calculations isolate the responsible matrix elements: removing the off-diagonal Coulomb propagation inside Q leaves the pattern essentially intact, whereas removing the Coulomb part of the P-Q bridge collapses both DPP-induced absorption and breakup. The peripheral polarization of halo reactions is therefore a Coulomb-bridge effect, and the high-$L$ elastic-breakup yield serves as its observable signature.

nucl-th↗

Experimental Advances on Light Baryon Spectroscopy at BESIII Experiment

The BESIII experiment is currently the world's only electron-positron collider operating in the tau-charm physical energy region. Since starting data taking in 2009, BESIII has accumulated the world's largest data set in the center-of-mass energy range of 1.84-4.95 GeV, including approximately 10 billion $J/ψ$ events and 3 billion $ψ(3686)$ events, together with extensive data on open-charm hadron pair production near threshold regions. These unique datasets, characterized by high statistics and low background, provide unprecedented experimental conditions for studying light baryon spectroscopy. This article systematically reviews the progress made by BESIII in baryon spectroscopy, with a focus on recent breakthrough achievements, including the discovery of excited nucleon states, $Λ$ hyperon states, $Σ$ hyperon states, $Ξ$ hyperon states and $Ω^{-}$ hyperon states. These results expand the spectrum of baryon excited states and provide crucial experimental support for understanding non-perturbative QCD and resolving the ``missing baryon resonances'' problem.

hep-ex↗

ECHO: Efficient Chest X-ray Report Generation with One-step Block Diffusion

Chest X-ray report generation (CXR-RG) has the potential to substantially alleviate radiologists' workload. However, conventional autoregressive vision--language models (VLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to sequential token decoding. Diffusion-based models offer a promising alternative through parallel generation, but they still require multiple denoising iterations. Compressing multi-step denoising to a single step could further reduce latency, but often degrades textual coherence due to the mean-field bias introduced by token-factorized denoisers. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ECHO}, an efficient diffusion-based VLM (dVLM) for chest X-ray report generation. ECHO enables stable one-step-per-block inference via a novel Direct Conditional Distillation (DCD) framework, which mitigates the mean-field limitation by constructing unfactorized supervision from on-policy diffusion trajectories to encode joint token dependencies. In addition, we introduce a Response-Asymmetric Diffusion (RAD) training strategy that further improves training efficiency while maintaining model effectiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ECHO surpasses state-of-the-art autoregressive methods, improving RaTE and SemScore by \textbf{64.33\%} and \textbf{60.58\%} respectively, while achieving up to \textbf{$8\times$} inference speedup with negligible degradation in clinical accuracy.

cs.LG↗

LLM-Oriented Information Retrieval: A Denoising-First Perspective

Modern information retrieval (IR) is no longer consumed primarily by humans but increasingly by large language models (LLMs) via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic search. Unlike human users, LLMs are constrained by limited attention budgets and are uniquely vulnerable to noise; misleading or irrelevant information is no longer just a nuisance, but a direct cause of hallucinations and reasoning failures. In this perspective paper, we argue that denoising-maximizing usable evidence density and verifiability within a context window-is becoming the primary bottleneck across the full information access pipeline. We conceptualize this paradigm shift through a four-stage framework of IR challenges: from inaccessible to undiscoverable, to misaligned, and finally to unverifiable. Furthermore, we provide a pipeline-organized taxonomy of signal-to-noise optimization techniques, spanning indexing, retrieval, context engineering, verification, and agentic workflow. We also present research works on information denoising in domains that rely heavily on retrieval such as lifelong assistant, coding agent, deep research, and multimodal understanding.

cs.IR↗

CAMPA: Efficient and Aligned Multimodal Graph Learning via Decoupled Propagation and Aggregation

Multimodal Graph Neural Networks (MGNNs) have shown strong potential for learning from multimodal attributed graphs, yet most existing approaches rely on tightly coupled architectures that suffer from prohibitive computational overhead. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical analysis showing that decoupled MGNNs are substantially more efficient and scalable for large-scale graph learning. However, we identify a critical bottleneck in existing decoupled pipelines, namely modal conflict, which arises in both the propagation and aggregation stages. Specifically, independent multi-hop diffusion causes cross-modal semantic divergence during propagation, while naive fusion fails to align multi-hop feature trajectories during aggregation, jointly limiting effective representation learning. To address this challenge, we propose CAMPA, a Cross-modal Aligned Multimodal Propagation & Aggregation framework for decoupled multimodal graph learning. Concretely, CAMPA introduces a two-stage alignment mechanism: (1) cross-modal aligned propagation, which injects cross-modal similarity priors into message passing to preserve semantic consistency without additional parameter overhead; (2) trajectory aligned aggregation, which leverages trajectory-level self-attention and cross-attention to capture and align long-range dependencies across modalities and hops. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets and tasks demonstrate that CAMPA consistently outperforms strong coupled and decoupled baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of the decoupled paradigm.

cs.AI↗