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Haoran Li

Publications and source records attributed to Haoran Li.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Can LLMs Time Travel? Enhancing Temporal Consistency in Legal Agentic Search through Reinforcement Learning

While large language models (LLMs) augmented with agentic search capabilities show promise for legal reasoning, they overlook a fundamental constraint that applicable law must match the temporal context of each case, as retroactive application of statutes violates core legal principles and leads to erroneous conclusions. Our observations reveal that current legal LLMs suffer from temporal bias anchored to their training cutoff, while search agents rarely incorporate temporal constraints into queries, and that web search alone cannot provide the precise statute and precedent citations that legal reasoning demands. To address these challenges, we propose LegalSearch-R1, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that pairs local statute RAG for precise article matching with online web search for broader legal knowledge, trained on temporally-indexed data spanning multiple amendment periods to enforce temporal consistency. Extensive experiments on our benchmark covering 13 legal tasks demonstrate that our 7B-parameter agent outperforms state-of-the-art deep research frameworks and specialized legal LLMs by 12.9% to 29.8%, surpasses baselines by 57.7% to 80.3% on temporal consistency, and exhibits robust out-of-domain generalization. The code and data are available at https://github.com/AlexFanw/LegalSearch-R1.

cs.CL↗

Fingerprint Analysis for Climate Change Detection and Attribution under a Latent Factor Model

Detection and attribution (D\&A) analyses provide a statistical framework for quantifying the contribution of external forcings to observed climate change. Optimal fingerprinting, the primary approach for D\&A, is formulated as an errors-in-variables regression with a high-dimensional covariance structure. Reliable inference is challenging because covariance matrices must be estimated from a limited number of control simulations, and climate models may exhibit variability patterns that differ from those of the observed climate system. We develop a spiked optimal fingerprinting framework that exploits the spiked structure of dominant climate variability modes while providing stable covariance estimation in high-dimensional settings. The proposed method develops bias-corrected spiked covariance estimation for constructing adaptive weight matrices and incorporates variability inflation adjustments to account for model--observation differences in internal variability. We further develop a valid uncertainty quantification procedure for the scaling factor estimators and a residual consistency test for assessing model adequacy. Numerical studies demonstrate improved estimation accuracy and uncertainty quantification compared with existing practical approaches. Applied to annual mean near-surface temperature data, the proposed framework produces shorter and better-calibrated confidence intervals and leads to different detection and attribution conclusions in several regions, providing new insights into the interpretation of climate attribution results.

stat.ME↗

Towards Multi-modal Multi-turn Safety: From Agentic Interaction to Strategic Alignment

Despite remarkable capability in multi-modal understanding, deploying Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in open-ended conversational scenarios introduces safety risks that remain poorly addressed by existing alignment methods. Unlike simple malicious visual question and answer (VQA) pairs , multi-turn interactions enable adversaries to incrementally reconstruct harmful intent across dialogues, progressively bypassing safety constraints in ways that are difficult to detect at any individual turn. Meanwhile, conventional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches are unsuitable for this situation: designed primarily for VQA tasks, they neither capture cross-turn risk dynamics nor scale efficiently without costly manual preference annotation. To close this gap, we introduce \textbf{MINT-Safe}, an open-source visual multi-turn training dataset comprising 11,270 multi-image dialogues and 500 refusal VQA pairs, constructed via multi-agent interaction with text-to-image (T2I) tool-call augmentation. Building on MINT-Safe, we propose \textbf{TAD-Align}, a dialogue safety alignment framework centered on a turn-aware dual-objective reward function. Rather than treating all dialogue turns uniformly, TAD-Align leverages rollout-based safety score variance to dynamically identify turns where the model exhibits inconsistent safety behavior, and adaptively up-weights these turns during optimization. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-7B demonstrate reductions of over 10\% in Attack Success Rate (ASR), alongside improvements of at least 8\% in harmlessness and 13\% in helpfulness on multi-modal multi-turn safety benchmarks, while preserving general model capabilities.

cs.CL↗

SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision

Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures. Existing self-evolving methods refine skills using accumulated trajectories. However, they struggle in cold-start settings, where only an initial, imperfect skill is available. Consequently, skill construction defaults to expert authoring or one-shot LLM generation. Expert-authored skills are costly and may not align with how LLM agents actually execute tasks, while one-shot generated skills can be syntactically well formed yet behaviorally weak. To bridge this gap, we propose SkillRevise, an execution-grounded framework designed to iteratively refine these initial skills. SkillRevise diagnoses skill defects from execution evidence, retrieves relevant repair principles from a general memory, and applies execution-anchored edits. By re-executing candidates and measuring empirical utility, it retains the best observed skill within the revision budget. Evaluated across three main benchmarks, two domain-specific studies, and six LLMs, SkillRevise substantially outperforms one-shot baselines, improving the base agent's success rate on SkillsBench from 36.05% to 61.63%. Furthermore, the revised skills transfer across both executors and task environments, suggesting that SkillRevise captures reusable procedural knowledge beyond any single executor. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/skillrevise.

cs.AI↗

Building Pretraining Data for World Models: An Unreal Engine-Based Pipeline for Action-Conditioned Video Generation

Action-conditioned video models require large-scale visual data paired with control signals that are temporally aligned with the resulting scene transitions. Such supervision is difficult to obtain from ordinary real-world video because the actions that caused each visual change are typically unknown. We present a large-scale synthetic data production pipeline built on Unreal Engine for generating action-conditioned, multi-view video. To accommodate the different execution requirements of real-time physics and high-quality offline rendering, the pipeline executes trajectory generation and final rendering in two stages: Stage I runs real physics in PIE and records per-frame character states, control inputs, and camera states into an intermediate trajectory representation; Stage II replays those trajectories in a new engine process and renders them offline with Movie Render Queue (MRQ). Around this core, we develop a distributed production system with cache-aware task partitioning, node-local slot scheduling, automated scene screening, aesthetic and luminance filtering, partial-output recovery, asynchronous upload, and continuous cluster health monitoring. The production cluster contains 25 servers with eight NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs per server. From 2,384 asset packs, 429 levels were retained for production together with a pool of 40 humanoid characters. The pipeline has produced 2,691 hours of 1080p video and 6,076 hours of 720p video. We describe the system architecture, the implementation decisions that emerged from production failures, and the limitations of using perceptual quality proxies for world-model data curation. The pipeline described in this report constitutes the Unreal Engine synthetic-data production component used in EchoWM.

cs.CV↗

GIFT: Guided Intermediate Feature Training via Action-Oriented Structural Supervision for Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language pre-training and predictive world modeling provide robot policies with rich semantic and dynamic visual features, but their native action and visual-prediction objectives may omit critical physical and task structure while retaining control-irrelevant visual redundancy. We call this mismatch between visual richness and control utility the action-sufficiency gap. We investigate whether this gap can be bridged by guiding intermediate features to preserve three control-relevant structure in robotic manipulation: geometry governing motion feasibility, affordance encoding instruction-relevant entities, and goals grounding instructions in task-relevant regions. To this end, we present GIFT (Guided Intermediate Feature Training), an architecture-flexible framework for learning intermediate features that translates these structures into training-time constraints through geometry alignment, affordance prediction, and goal-region reconstruction. We instantiate GIFT in a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy, a direct-action World-Action Model (WAM), and an inverse-dynamics WAM while retaining each model's action formulation. Under zero-shot transfer to LIBERO-Plus, GIFT-VLA, GIFT-WAM-Fast, and GIFT-WAM-IDM outperform StarVLA-OFT, Fast-WAM, and Fast-WAM-IDM by 4.6, 12.6, and 5.2 points, reaching 79.6%, 72.6%, and 87.8%, respectively. On RoboCasa, the three GIFT variants reach 61.4%, 83.6%, and 82.3%, outperforming their counterparts by 12.6, 9.0, and 8.4 points, respectively. Together, these results establish learning functionally structured intermediate features as a reusable principle across model-specific action formulations, with especially large gains on articulated-object tasks and high-precision real-world manipulation under unseen visual and spatial perturbations. Project page: https://openphoenix-team.github.io/GIFT-pages.

cs.RO↗

Isolation as a First-Class Principle for LLM-Agent System Safety: Concepts, Taxonomy, Challenges and Future Directions

The capability of LLM agents to function as the ``brain'' of a system fundamentally expands the scope of analysis beyond a standalone model. Consequently, safety is no longer only about input--output content alignment. It also concerns system behavior and real-world execution outcomes. However, the current literature is fragmented across attack types, applications, and benchmarks. This makes it hard to explain why failures such as prompt injection, tool misuse, and memory poisoning often share the same structural cause, and how they spread through an agent workflow. In this survey, we treat isolation as a first-class principle for LLM-agent system safety. By isolation, we refer to the separation of user inputs, tool access, execution channels, inter-agent communication, and environment-originated context. We organize the literature with a boundary-centric taxonomy of five boundaries: user-agent, agent-tool, agent-execution, agent-agent, and system-environment. This view helps identify where the loss of isolation first occurs, how compromise propagates across boundaries, and which defenses are most relevant at each interface. We also summarize cross-boundary failure paths, discuss open challenges, and outline a research agenda for isolation-by-construction in future agent systems.

cs.AI↗

Adaptable High-Dimensional Change Point Detection via Ridge Regularization

We study the problem of detecting multiple change points in the mean vectors of an independent sequence of high-dimensional observations. Targeting at detecting dense alternatives in the regime where the dimension is comparable to the sample size, we propose a family of ridge-regularized CUSUM statistics built upon the adaptable ridge-regularized Hotelling's $T^2$ test of Li et al. (Ann. Statist. 48 (2020) 1815--1847). Ridge regularization provides stable covariance normalization while allowing the tests to adapt to the underlying population covariance structure. To accommodate multiple change points without prior knowledge of their number or locations, we scan over a multi-scale collection of adjacent segments. We further enhance adaptability by aggregating information across a collection of ridge regularization parameters through the maximum of the corresponding test statistics. Under mild conditions, we establish the limiting distributions of the proposed statistics under the null hypothesis and a class of local alternatives. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate their finite-sample performance.

stat.ME↗

GSPR: Aligning LLM Safeguards as Generalizable Safety Policy Reasoners

As large language models (LLMs) are integrated into numerous applications, LLMs' safety becomes critical for both application developers and intended users. Currently, great efforts have been made to develop safety benchmarks with fine-grained taxonomies. However, these benchmarks' taxonomies are disparate with different safety policies. Thus, existing safeguards trained on these benchmarks are either coarse-grained to only distinguish between "safe'' and "unsafe,'' or constrained by the specified narrow risk taxonomies. To leverage these fine-grained safety policies across multiple safety taxonomies, we propose GSPR, a Generalizable Safety Policy Reasoner to identify unsafe inputs and outputs with violated safety taxonomies and concise explanations. Unlike prior safeguards which only cover a fixed set of risk factors, GSPR incentivizes its reasoning capability with varied safety taxonomies through reinforcement learning. Our GSPR can be trained across multiple safety benchmarks with distinct taxonomies and naturally exhibits powerful generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments to show that GSPR significantly improves existing safety guardrails' reasoning capabilities for both safety and category prediction tasks. Moreover, GSPR also achieves the least inference token costs with explanations.

cs.CR↗

Legal Rule Induction: Towards Generalizable Principle Discovery from Analogous Judicial Precedents

Legal rules encompass not only codified statutes but also implicit adjudicatory principles derived from precedents that contain discretionary norms, social morality, and policy. While computational legal research has advanced in applying established rules to cases, inducing legal rules from judicial decisions remains understudied across jurisdictions. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers unprecedented potential to automate the extraction of such latent principles, yet progress is stymied by the absence of formal task definitions and benchmarks. To address this gap, we formalize Legal Rule Induction (LRI) as the task of deriving concise, generalizable doctrinal rules from analogous precedents, distilling their shared preconditions, normative behaviors, and legal consequences. We further propose a reproducible pipeline for LRI dataset construction and, instantiating it on Chinese law as a representative jurisdiction, introduce the first LRI benchmark comprising 5,121 case sets (38,088 court cases) for model tuning and 216 expert-annotated gold test sets. Experimental results reveal that: 1) State-of-the-art LLMs struggle with over-generalization and hallucination; 2) Training on our dataset markedly enhances LLMs capabilities in capturing nuanced rule patterns across similar cases.

cs.CL↗

Maximizing Mutual Information Between Prompt and Response Improves LLM Performance With No Additional Data

While post-training has successfully improved large language models (LLMs) across a variety of domains, these gains heavily rely on human-labeled data or external verifiers. Existing data has already been exploited, and new data is expensive to collect. Moreover, true intelligence goes far beyond verifiable tasks. Therefore, we need self-improvement frameworks that are less dependent on external signals and more broadly applicable to both verifiable and non-verifiable domains. We propose **Mutual Information Preference Optimization (MIPO)**, a contrastive data augmentation method that constructs preference pairs by generating a positive response conditioning on the correct prompt, and a negative response by conditioning on a random, unrelated prompt. We show that using Direct Preference Optimization to learn from this paired data maximizes pointwise mutual information *under the base LLM* between prompts and model responses. Experiments with with 1-7B parameter Llama and Qwen instruct models show that MIPO achieves 3-16% gains (and 51% increase for Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct) on personalization compared to prompting baselines. Surprisingly, MIPO can also be useful in verifiable domains, such as math and multiple-choice question answering, yielding 1-20% gains *without any additional data or external supervision*. These results suggest a promising direction for self-improvement using intrinsic signals derived from contrastive data pairs.

cs.LG↗

Long-Horizon Audio-Visual Generation for Persistent Stories and Interactive Worlds

Video generation is progressing beyond isolated clips toward long-form narratives and interactive worlds, requiring models to preserve identities, follow user controls, and remain stable over extended rollouts. We present JoyAI-Echo-1.5, a unified audio-visual generation system with two purpose-built variants. The long-video variant introduces composable cross-shot memory that aggregates visual evidence across multiple prior shots and speaker cues derived from speech-filtered full-shot audio, enabling persistent character appearance and voice identity across flexible combinations of text, image, and memory conditioning. The world-model variant converts heterogeneous navigation inputs into calibrated metric 6-DoF camera trajectories and injects them through a geometry-aware conditioning pathway, enabling controller-agnostic interaction across flexible viewpoints. To support efficient long-horizon generation, we transform a bidirectional audio-visual backbone into a causal few-step generator using progressive teacher forcing and short- and long-horizon Self-Gradient Forcing on self-generated rollouts. Experiments demonstrate strong performance in both settings. JoyAI-Echo-1.5 achieves improvements over existing long-video baselines in cross-shot consistency, visual quality, text alignment, and speech fidelity. Its world-model variant ranks first on WBench, with an average score of 81.7, and achieves leading visual quality and long-horizon persistence on SANA-WM-Bench. Together, these results indicate that memory, geometric control, and rollout-aware training provide a practical foundation for generating coherent stories and continuously evolving interactive worlds. Project page: https://echo-team-joy-future-academy-jd.github.io/Echo-1.5-Page/.

cs.CV↗

EchoWM: Open and Enterable Omnimodal World Models

We present EchoWM, an omnimodal world model for enterable generative media that responds to continuous navigation while jointly generating 720p video, environmental sound, music and speech. We organize interaction around camera intent: in first-person scenes, it specifies observer motion, while in third-person scenes, camera--character dynamics are learned from data without view-specific controllers. Discrete commands and continuous poses are mapped to a shared metric-scale relative 6-DoF trajectory, with dataset-level calibration preserving motion magnitude across heterogeneous data. To jointly learn audio-visual generation and trajectory control, we construct a complementary data engine and adopt progressive training followed by autoregressive post-training for long-horizon generation. Extensive evaluations show that \model achieves strong trajectory following and high visual quality on public world-model benchmarks, supporting both first- and third-person interaction across varied subjects, and maintaining synchronized environmental sound and speech over long-horizon generation.

cs.CV↗

Fuzzy-MoE: Interpretable Regime-Conditioned Expert Routing for Non-Stationary Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

In non-stationary multivariate time series, different variables and samples often exhibit heterogeneous latent dynamic states, while existing deep forecasting models usually compress them into a unified end-to-end mapping, leading to suboptimal modeling of time-varying dynamics and limited interpretability regarding which forecasting mechanism is activated under different latent states. To overcome these limitations, we reformulate time series forecasting as a unified framework of latent temporal state identification and interpretable expert routing, and propose Fuzzy-MoE, a fuzzy logic-based dynamic Mixture-of-Experts model. Fuzzy-MoE consists of multiple parallel expert mapping networks and a dual-view fuzzy router. By jointly exploiting local convolutional dynamics and global segmented statistics, the router infers latent temporal states and computes expert activation strengths through learnable Gaussian membership functions, enabling explicit IF-THEN rule-based expert selection. This fine-grained routing strategy allows different variables within the same sequence to activate different experts, effectively capturing heterogeneous temporal dynamics while improving model interpretability. Experimental results on multiple public time series benchmark datasets show that Fuzzy-MoE significantly outperforms mainstream forecasting methods in forecasting accuracy. Moreover, fuzzy memberships and rule activations provide interpretable routing diagnostics, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework in both forecasting performance and mechanism transparency. Unlike traditional MoE models that use black-box routing, Fuzzy-MoE`s routing is based on clear, interpretable fuzzy rules. This makes the expert selection transparent and traceable.

cs.LG↗

Core-KAN: Continuous Vision Kernels with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Conventional convolutional kernels are typically defined on fixed discrete grids, limiting their ability to accommodate heterogeneous local structures. Existing adaptive operators improve flexibility but often couple geometric scale variation with content-dependent filtering, while incurring high computational cost from per-location kernel generation. To decouple geometric scale adaptation from content-dependent filtering while avoiding expensive per-location kernel generation, we propose Continuous Relative-scale KAN (Core-KAN), a relative-scale-conditioned continuous convolution operator. Core-KAN maps input features into a compact latent basis space and uses a lightweight scale controller to predict local scales relative to an exponential moving average reference. A KAN-based generator represents depth-wise kernel bases as continuous coordinate functions, allowing the operator to synthesize spatial filters at arbitrary resolutions rather than being confined to a fixed lattice. Instead of synthesizing independent kernels at every location, it constructs a compact bank of scale-conditioned kernel responses and interpolates them according to the predicted local scale map. An independent mixing controller further combines the interpolated basis responses based on local content, explicitly decoupling geometric scale adaptation from content-dependent filtering. Together with lightweight pointwise projections, this design forms a low-rank dynamic convolution that scales efficiently with kernel size and integrates readily into hierarchical vision backbones. Experiments across three representative vision tasks show Core-KAN consistently outperforms strong convolutional and dynamic-kernel baselines with only marginal parameter and computational overhead, offering an efficient, general framework for continuous, scale-adaptive convolution.

cs.CV↗

HyperANFIS: Enhancing Rule Representation and Interpretability in Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Systems via Hyperbolic Geometry

The adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is an interpretable reasoning framework capable of generating explicit IF-THEN fuzzy rules, making it suitable for tasks requiring transparent reasoning. However, existing ANFIS models generally construct rule antecedents and perform inference in Euclidean space, limiting their representational capacity and predictive performance. To address this issue, we propose Hyperbolic ANFIS (HyperANFIS), a hyperbolic extension of ANFIS. HyperANFIS preserves the fuzzy semantics and core architecture of conventional ANFIS while performing rule-prototype learning, rule activation, and consequent aggregation in hyperbolic space. It also retains the ability to generate interpretable IF-THEN rules. By exploiting the representational properties of hyperbolic geometry, HyperANFIS strengthens the fuzzy inference process, thereby improving predictive accuracy, inter-rule collaboration, and the credibility of its interpretable rules. Experimental results show that HyperANFIS consistently outperforms the standard ANFIS baseline and various ANFIS variants across all datasets, while also generating higher-quality fuzzy rules.

cs.AI↗

HYDRA: Hyperbolic Dynamic Representation Architecture for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) enhance nonlinear function approximation by replacing scalar weights with learnable univariate functions. However, assigning an independent function to every connection results in substantial parameter redundancy, limiting their scalability and efficiency. To reduce this redundancy, we introduce \textbf{HY}perbolic \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{A}rchitecture (HYDRA), a parameter-efficient hyperbolic extension of KAN that combines spline-based functional learning with representations in the Poincaré ball. HYDRA maps vector-valued inputs into a bounded hyperbolic latent space, performs KAN-style updates in tangent space, and employs a low-rank prototype block to share functional transformations across hidden dimensions. The resulting hyperbolic representations provide a structured radial coordinate for interpretation, while radius control improves training stability by preventing boundary saturation. Extensive experiments across eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that HYDRA consistently achieves competitive or superior predictive performance while improving parameter efficiency and representation interpretability.

cs.LG↗

Adaptable Fingerprinting with Nonlinear Shrinkage for Climate Change Detection and Attribution under Variance Heterogeneity

Detection and attribution of climate change relies on fingerprinting--a linear errors-in-variables regression framework in which both predictors and responses exhibit internal variability governed by a proportional covariance structure, subject to a variability inflation factor. Accurate estimation of the scaling factors (regression coefficients) depends on inferring the precision matrix of the regression errors from limited climate model control runs. In high-dimensional settings, existing approaches often overlook the variance inflation of the predictors and suffer from imprecise precision matrix estimates, yielding biased estimators, underestimated uncertainties, and confidence intervals with poor coverage. We propose a nonlinear, rotation-invariant shrinkage framework for estimating the precision matrix that restores the asymptotic optimality of the total least squares estimator in high-dimensional regimes. Our procedure jointly estimates the scaling factors and the variability inflation factor, thereby correcting estimation bias, and incorporates consistent variance estimators to enable valid uncertainty quantification. We also develop a residual consistency test to assess model adequacy. Numerical studies demonstrate precise estimation, improved confidence interval coverage, and higher efficiency. Applied to annual mean near-surface air temperature data from 1951--2020, our method produces narrower and more reliable confidence intervals, yielding refined attribution results.

stat.ME↗