arXiv subjects

Hao Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Ma.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

COPO: Consistency-Aware Policy Optimization

Reinforcement learning has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex problem-solving tasks. Recently, the introduction of DeepSeek R1 has inspired a surge of interest in leveraging rule-based rewards as a low-cost alternative for computing advantage functions and guiding policy optimization. However, a common challenge observed across many replication and extension efforts is that when multiple sampled responses under a single prompt converge to identical outcomes, whether correct or incorrect, the group-based advantage degenerates to zero. This leads to vanishing gradients and renders the corresponding samples ineffective for learning, ultimately limiting training efficiency and downstream performance. To address this issue, we propose a consistency-aware policy optimization framework that introduces a structured global reward based on outcome consistency, the global loss based on it ensures that, even when model outputs show high intra-group consistency, the training process still receives meaningful learning signals, which encourages the generation of correct and self-consistent reasoning paths from a global perspective. Furthermore, we incorporate an entropy-based soft blending mechanism that adaptively balances local advantage estimation with global optimization, enabling dynamic transitions between exploration and convergence throughout training. Our method introduces several key innovations in both reward design and optimization strategy. We validate its effectiveness through substantial performance gains on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, highlighting the proposed framework's robustness and general applicability. Code of this work has been released at https://github.com/hijih/copo-code.git.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Three-dimensional position reconstruction of orthogonal-strip planar high-purity germanium detectors using maximum likelihood estimation

Orthogonal-strip planar high-purity germanium (HPGe) detectors can reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) positions of photon interactions through analysis of parameters extracted from multiple charge signals. The conventional method independently reconstructs positions in each dimension using amplitude-based parameters, leading to noise sensitivity and systematic biases. In this study, we propose a multi-parameter-joint reconstruction method based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) which establishes a mapping between pulse shape parameters and corresponding 3D positions. To mitigate the effects of electronic noise, we employ integral-based parameters. The reconstruction performance was evaluated using pulse shape simulations. For 100 keV photons under 1 keV root-mean-square (RMS) electronic noise, the maximum Z reconstruction bias was reduced from 0.4 mm to 0.02 mm in the central region and from 2 mm to 0.15 mm near the electrodes. The maximum reconstruction bias in the X/Y directions was reduced from 0.4 mm to 0.016 mm. Furthermore, the use of integral-based parameters mitigated the rapid degradation of resolution under high-noise conditions. The achieved position resolution ranged from 0.07 mm to 0.16 mm in the Z directions and from 0.07 mm to 0.44 mm in the X/Y direction. This method offers a promising approach to 3D position reconstruction with HPGe detectors for applications such as medical imaging and gamma-ray astronomy.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Reward Hacking: Causal Rewards for Large Language Model Alignment

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in performing complex tasks. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been effective in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is susceptible to spurious correlations in reward modeling. Consequently, it often introduces biases-such as length bias, sycophancy, conceptual bias, and discrimination-that hinder the model's ability to capture true causal relationships. To address this, we propose a novel causal reward modeling approach that integrates causality to mitigate these spurious correlations. Our method enforces counterfactual invariance, ensuring reward predictions remain consistent when irrelevant variables are altered. Through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that our approach mitigates various types of spurious correlations effectively, resulting in more reliable and fair alignment of LLMs with human preferences. As a drop-in enhancement to the existing RLHF workflow, our causal reward modeling provides a practical way to improve the trustworthiness and fairness of LLM finetuning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Intelligibility for Generative Target Speech Extraction via Joint Optimization with Target Speaker ASR

Target speech extraction (TSE) isolates the speech of a specific speaker from a multi-talker overlapped speech mixture. Most existing TSE models rely on discriminative methods, typically predicting a time-frequency spectrogram mask for the target speech. However, imperfections in these masks often result in over-/under-suppression of target/non-target speech, degrading perceptual quality. Generative methods, by contrast, re-synthesize target speech based on the mixture and target speaker cues, achieving superior perceptual quality. Nevertheless, these methods often overlook speech intelligibility, leading to alterations or loss of semantic content in the re-synthesized speech. Inspired by the Whisper model's success in target speaker ASR, we propose a generative TSE framework based on the pre-trained Whisper model to address the above issues. This framework integrates semantic modeling with flow-based acoustic modeling to achieve both high intelligibility and perceptual quality. Results from multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing generative and discriminative baselines. We present speech samples on https://aisaka0v0.github.io/GenerativeTSE_demo/.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Constraint-Aware Diffusion Guidance for Robotics: Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Autonomous Racing

Diffusion models hold great potential in robotics due to their ability to capture complex, high-dimensional data distributions. However, their lack of constraint-awareness limits their deployment in safety-critical applications. We propose Constraint-Aware Diffusion Guidance (CoDiG), a data-efficient and general-purpose framework that integrates barrier functions into the denoising process, guiding diffusion sampling toward constraint-satisfying outputs. CoDiG enables constraint satisfaction even with limited training data and generalizes across tasks. We evaluate our framework in the challenging setting of miniature autonomous racing, where real-time obstacle avoidance is essential. Real-world experiments show that CoDiG generates safe outputs efficiently under dynamic conditions, highlighting its potential for broader robotic applications. A demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/KNYsTdtdxOU.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Learning Auxiliary Tasks Improves Reference-Free Hallucination Detection in Open-Domain Long-Form Generation

Hallucination, the generation of factually incorrect information, remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), especially in open-domain long-form generation. Existing approaches for detecting hallucination in long-form tasks either focus on limited domains or rely heavily on external fact-checking tools, which may not always be available. In this work, we systematically investigate reference-free hallucination detection in open-domain long-form responses. Our findings reveal that internal states (e.g., model's output probability and entropy) alone are insufficient for reliably (i.e., better than random guessing) distinguishing between factual and hallucinated content. To enhance detection, we explore various existing approaches, including prompting-based methods, probing, and fine-tuning, with fine-tuning proving the most effective. To further improve the accuracy, we introduce a new paradigm, named RATE-FT, that augments fine-tuning with an auxiliary task for the model to jointly learn with the main task of hallucination detection. With extensive experiments and analysis using a variety of model families & datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method, e.g., +3% over general fine-tuning methods on LongFact.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ALOHA: Empowering Multilingual Agent for University Orientation with Hierarchical Retrieval

The rise of Large Language Models~(LLMs) revolutionizes information retrieval, allowing users to obtain required answers through complex instructions within conversations. However, publicly available services remain inadequate in addressing the needs of faculty and students to search campus-specific information. It is primarily due to the LLM's lack of domain-specific knowledge and the limitation of search engines in supporting multilingual and timely scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ALOHA, a multilingual agent enhanced by hierarchical retrieval for university orientation. We also integrate external APIs into the front-end interface to provide interactive service. The human evaluation and case study show our proposed system has strong capabilities to yield correct, timely, and user-friendly responses to the queries in multiple languages, surpassing commercial chatbots and search engines. The system has been deployed and has provided service for more than 12,000 people.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Sloshing suppression with a controlled elastic baffle via deep reinforcement learning and SPH simulation

This study employed smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) as the numerical environment, integrated with deep reinforcement learning (DRL) real-time control algorithms to optimize the sloshing suppression in a tank with a centrally positioned vertical elastic baffle. Compared to rigid baffle movement and active strain control methods, the active-controlled movable elastic baffle, which remains undeformed at its base, achieved the best performance with an 81.63% reduction in mean free surface amplitude. A cosine-based expert policy derived from DRL data is also extracted, resulting in a comparable 76.86% reduction in a three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulation. Energy analyses showed that elastic baffle motion effectively decreased system energy by performing negative work on the fluid, reducing kinetic and potential energy. The DRL-based and expert policies also demonstrated robust performance across varying excitation frequencies and water depths. Specifically, rigid baffles proved more effective at frequencies below the system's first natural frequency, while elastic baffles exhibited superior performance at higher frequencies. Changes in water depth minimally affected the effectiveness of control policies, though they significantly influenced elastic baffle deformation behavior. Overall, the sloshing suppression efficiency consistently ranged between 70% and 80%, confirming DRL-informed control methods' versatility and effectiveness under diverse operating conditions.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2025

Preference Optimization with Multi-Sample Comparisons

Recent advancements in generative models, particularly large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models, have been driven by extensive pretraining on large datasets followed by post-training. However, current post-training methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct alignment from preference methods (DAP) primarily utilize single-sample comparisons. These approaches often fail to capture critical characteristics such as generative diversity and bias, which are more accurately assessed through multiple samples. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel approach that extends post-training to include multi-sample comparisons. To achieve this, we propose Multi-sample Direct Preference Optimization (mDPO) and Multi-sample Identity Preference Optimization (mIPO). These methods improve traditional DAP methods by focusing on group-wise characteristics. Empirically, we demonstrate that multi-sample comparison is more effective in optimizing collective characteristics~(e.g., diversity and bias) for generative models than single-sample comparison. Additionally, our findings suggest that multi-sample comparisons provide a more robust optimization framework, particularly for dataset with label noise.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

The effect of Carrier Doping and Thickness on the Electronic Structures of La$3$Ni$2$O$7$ Thin Films

Recently, the superconductivity of bilayer nickelate La3Ni2O7 has been observed in the thin film at ambient pressure, facilitated by epitaxial strain. Here, we investigate the effects of film thickness and carrier doping on the electronic structure of La3Ni2O7 thin films with thickness of 0.5-3 unit cells (UC) using first-principles calculations. At an optimal doping concentration of 0.4 holes per formula unit for 2UC film, the Ni-"d" _("z" ^"2" ) interlayer bonding state metallizes, leading to the formation of γ pockets at the Fermi surface, which quantitatively matches the experimental results of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). These findings provide theoretical support for recent experimental observations of ambient-pressure superconductivity in La3Ni2O7 thin films and highlight the crucial role of film thickness and carrier doping in modulating electronic properties.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2025

CLAPSep: Leveraging Contrastive Pre-trained Model for Multi-Modal Query-Conditioned Target Sound Extraction

Universal sound separation (USS) aims to extract arbitrary types of sounds from real-world recordings. This can be achieved by language-queried target sound extraction (TSE), which typically consists of two components: a query network that converts user queries into conditional embeddings, and a separation network that extracts the target sound accordingly. Existing methods commonly train models from scratch. As a consequence, substantial data and computational resources are required to make the randomly initialized model comprehend sound events and perform separation accordingly. In this paper, we propose to integrate pre-trained models into TSE models to address the above issue. To be specific, we tailor and adapt the powerful contrastive language-audio pre-trained model (CLAP) for USS, denoted as CLAPSep. CLAPSep also accepts flexible user inputs, taking both positive and negative user prompts of uni- and/or multi-modalities for target sound extraction. These key features of CLAPSep can not only enhance the extraction performance but also improve the versatility of its application. We provide extensive experiments on 5 diverse datasets to demonstrate the superior performance and zero- and few-shot generalizability of our proposed CLAPSep with fast training convergence, surpassing previous methods by a significant margin. Full codes and some audio examples are released for reproduction and evaluation.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Language-Queried Target Sound Extraction Without Parallel Training Data

Language-queried target sound extraction (TSE) aims to extract specific sounds from mixtures based on language queries. Traditional fully-supervised training schemes require extensively annotated parallel audio-text data, which are labor-intensive. We introduce a parallel-data-free training scheme, requiring only unlabelled audio clips for TSE model training by utilizing the contrastive language-audio pre-trained model (CLAP). In a vanilla parallel-data-free training stage, target audio is encoded using the pre-trained CLAP audio encoder to form a condition embedding, while during testing, user language queries are encoded by CLAP text encoder as the condition embedding. This vanilla approach assumes perfect alignment between text and audio embeddings, which is unrealistic. Two major challenges arise from training-testing mismatch: the persistent modality gap between text and audio and the risk of overfitting due to the exposure of rich acoustic details in target audio embedding during training. To address this, we propose a retrieval-augmented strategy. Specifically, we create an embedding cache using audio captions generated by a large language model (LLM). During training, target audio embeddings retrieve text embeddings from this cache to use as condition embeddings, ensuring consistent modalities between training and testing and eliminating information leakage. Extensive experiment results show that our retrieval-augmented approach achieves consistent and notable performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art with better generalizability.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Stochastic Trajectory Prediction under Unstructured Constraints

Trajectory prediction facilitates effective planning and decision-making, while constrained trajectory prediction integrates regulation into prediction. Recent advances in constrained trajectory prediction focus on structured constraints by constructing optimization objectives. However, handling unstructured constraints is challenging due to the lack of differentiable formal definitions. To address this, we propose a novel method for constrained trajectory prediction using a conditional generative paradigm, named Controllable Trajectory Diffusion (CTD). The key idea is that any trajectory corresponds to a degree of conformity to a constraint. By quantifying this degree and treating it as a condition, a model can implicitly learn to predict trajectories under unstructured constraints. CTD employs a pre-trained scoring model to predict the degree of conformity (i.e., a score), and uses this score as a condition for a conditional diffusion model to generate trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate that CTD achieves high accuracy on the ETH/UCY and SDD benchmarks. Qualitative analysis confirms that CTD ensures adherence to unstructured constraints and can predict trajectories that satisfy combinatorial constraints.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Pseudo-Knowledge Graph: Meta-Path Guided Retrieval and In-Graph Text for RAG-Equipped LLM

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing. However, these models face challenges in retrieving precise information from vast datasets. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) was developed to combining LLMs with external information retrieval systems to enhance the accuracy and context of responses. Despite improvements, RAG still struggles with comprehensive retrieval in high-volume, low-information-density databases and lacks relational awareness, leading to fragmented answers. To address this, this paper introduces the Pseudo-Knowledge Graph (PKG) framework, designed to overcome these limitations by integrating Meta-path Retrieval, In-graph Text and Vector Retrieval into LLMs. By preserving natural language text and leveraging various retrieval techniques, the PKG offers a richer knowledge representation and improves accuracy in information retrieval. Extensive evaluations using Open Compass and MultiHop-RAG benchmarks demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in managing large volumes of data and complex relationships.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Coevolving with the Other You: Fine-Tuning LLM with Sequential Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a pivotal technique for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. However, prevailing RL fine-tuning methods predominantly rely on PPO and its variants. Though these algorithms are effective in general RL settings, they often exhibit suboptimal performance and vulnerability to distribution collapse when applied to the fine-tuning of LLMs. In this paper, we propose CORY, extending the RL fine-tuning of LLMs to a sequential cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning framework, to leverage the inherent coevolution and emergent capabilities of multi-agent systems. In CORY, the LLM to be fine-tuned is initially duplicated into two autonomous agents: a pioneer and an observer. The pioneer generates responses based on queries, while the observer generates responses using both the queries and the pioneer's responses. The two agents are trained together. During training, the agents exchange roles periodically, fostering cooperation and coevolution between them. Experiments evaluate CORY's performance by fine-tuning GPT-2 and Llama-2 under subjective and objective reward functions on the IMDB Review and GSM8K datasets, respectively. Results show that CORY outperforms PPO in terms of policy optimality, resistance to distribution collapse, and training robustness, thereby underscoring its potential as a superior methodology for refining LLMs in real-world applications.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Causal Mean Field Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Scalability remains a challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning and is currently under active research. A framework named mean-field reinforcement learning (MFRL) could alleviate the scalability problem by employing the Mean Field Theory to turn a many-agent problem into a two-agent problem. However, this framework lacks the ability to identify essential interactions under nonstationary environments. Causality contains relatively invariant mechanisms behind interactions, though environments are nonstationary. Therefore, we propose an algorithm called causal mean-field Q-learning (CMFQ) to address the scalability problem. CMFQ is ever more robust toward the change of the number of agents though inheriting the compressed representation of MFRL's action-state space. Firstly, we model the causality behind the decision-making process of MFRL into a structural causal model (SCM). Then the essential degree of each interaction is quantified via intervening on the SCM. Furthermore, we design the causality-aware compact representation for behavioral information of agents as the weighted sum of all behavioral information according to their causal effects. We test CMFQ in a mixed cooperative-competitive game and a cooperative game. The result shows that our method has excellent scalability performance in both training in environments containing a large number of agents and testing in environments containing much more agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Vision-Based Generic Potential Function for Policy Alignment in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Guiding the policy of multi-agent reinforcement learning to align with human common sense is a difficult problem, largely due to the complexity of modeling common sense as a reward, especially in complex and long-horizon multi-agent tasks. Recent works have shown the effectiveness of reward shaping, such as potential-based rewards, to enhance policy alignment. The existing works, however, primarily rely on experts to design rule-based rewards, which are often labor-intensive and lack a high-level semantic understanding of common sense. To solve this problem, we propose a hierarchical vision-based reward shaping method. At the bottom layer, a visual-language model (VLM) serves as a generic potential function, guiding the policy to align with human common sense through its intrinsic semantic understanding. To help the policy adapts to uncertainty and changes in long-horizon tasks, the top layer features an adaptive skill selection module based on a visual large language model (vLLM). The module uses instructions, video replays, and training records to dynamically select suitable potential function from a pre-designed pool. Besides, our method is theoretically proven to preserve the optimal policy. Extensive experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment demonstrate that our method not only achieves a higher win rate but also effectively aligns the policy with human common sense.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Think Smarter not Harder: Adaptive Reasoning with Inference Aware Optimization

Solving mathematics problems has been an intriguing capability of large language models, and many efforts have been made to improve reasoning by extending reasoning length, such as through self-correction and extensive long chain-of-thoughts. While promising in problem-solving, advanced long reasoning chain models exhibit an undesired single-modal behavior, where trivial questions require unnecessarily tedious long chains of thought. In this work, we propose a way to allow models to be aware of inference budgets by formulating it as utility maximization with respect to an inference budget constraint, hence naming our algorithm Inference Budget-Constrained Policy Optimization (IBPO). In a nutshell, models fine-tuned through IBPO learn to ``understand'' the difficulty of queries and allocate inference budgets to harder ones. With different inference budgets, our best models are able to have a $4.14$\% and $5.74$\% absolute improvement ($8.08$\% and $11.2$\% relative improvement) on MATH500 using $2.16$x and $4.32$x inference budgets respectively, relative to LLaMA3.1 8B Instruct. These improvements are approximately $2$x those of self-consistency under the same budgets.

cs.AI↗