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Hong Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Hong Liu.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

A Multi-Agent Generative AI Framework for IC Module-Level Verification Automation

As large language models demonstrate enormous potential in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), generative AI-assisted chip design is attracting widespread attention from academia and industry. Although these technologies have made preliminary progress in tasks such as code generation, their application in chip verification -- a critical bottleneck in the chip development cycle -- remains at an exploratory stage. This paper proposes an innovative Multi-Agent Verification Framework (MAVF) aimed at addressing the limitations of current single-LLM approaches in complex verification tasks. Our framework builds an automated transformation system from design specifications to testbench through the collaborative work of multiple specialized agents, including specification parsing, verification strategy generation, and code implementation. Through verification experiments on multiple chip modules of varying complexity, results show that MAVF significantly outperforms traditional manual methods and single-dialogue generative AI approaches in verification document parsing and generation, as well as automated testbench generation. This research opens new directions for exploring generative AI applications in verification automation, potentially providing effective approaches to solving the most challenging bottleneck issues in chip design.

cs.AR↗

Uncertainty-Aware Testing-Time Optimization for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Although data-driven methods have achieved success in 3D human pose estimation, they often suffer from domain gaps and exhibit limited generalization. In contrast, optimization-based methods excel in fine-tuning for specific cases but are generally inferior to data-driven methods in overall performance. We observe that previous optimization-based methods commonly rely on a projection constraint, which only ensures alignment in 2D space, potentially leading to the overfitting problem. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware testing-time Optimization (UAO) framework, which keeps the prior information of the pre-trained model and alleviates the overfitting problem using the uncertainty of joints. Specifically, during the training phase, we design an effective 2D-to-3D network for estimating the corresponding 3D pose while quantifying the uncertainty of each 3D joint. For optimization during testing, the proposed optimization framework freezes the pre-trained model and optimizes only a latent state. Projection loss is then employed to ensure the generated poses are well aligned in 2D space for high-quality optimization. Furthermore, we utilize the uncertainty of each joint to determine how much each joint is allowed for optimization. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework are validated through extensive experiments on challenging datasets: Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and 3DPW. Notably, our approach outperforms the previous best result by a large margin of 5.5\% on Human3.6M. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xiu-cs/UAO-Pose3D}{https://github.com/xiu-cs/UAO-Pose3D}.

cs.CV↗

ABQ-LLM: Arbitrary-Bit Quantized Inference Acceleration for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing tasks. However, their practical application is constrained by substantial memory and computational demands. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is considered an effective method to accelerate LLM inference. Despite its growing popularity in LLM model compression, PTQ deployment faces two major challenges. First, low-bit quantization leads to performance degradation. Second, restricted by the limited integer computing unit type on GPUs, quantized matrix operations with different precisions cannot be effectively accelerated. To address these issues, we introduce a novel arbitrary-bit quantization algorithm and inference framework, ABQ-LLM. It achieves superior performance across various quantization settings and enables efficient arbitrary-precision quantized inference on the GPU. ABQ-LLM introduces several key innovations: (1) a distribution correction method for transformer blocks to mitigate distribution differences caused by full quantization of weights and activations, improving performance at low bit-widths. (2) the bit balance strategy to counteract performance degradation from asymmetric distribution issues at very low bit-widths (e.g., 2-bit). (3) an innovative quantization acceleration framework that reconstructs the quantization matrix multiplication of arbitrary precision combinations based on BTC (Binary TensorCore) equivalents, gets rid of the limitations of INT4/INT8 computing units. ABQ-LLM can convert each component bit width gain into actual acceleration gain, maximizing performance under mixed precision(e.g., W6A6, W2A8). Based on W2*A8 quantization configuration on LLaMA-7B model, it achieved a WikiText2 perplexity of 7.59 (2.17$\downarrow $ vs 9.76 in AffineQuant). Compared to SmoothQuant, we realized 1.6$\times$ acceleration improvement and 2.7$\times$ memory compression gain.

cs.LG↗

QuMATL: Query-based Multi-annotator Tendency Learning

Different annotators often assign different labels to the same sample due to backgrounds or preferences, and such labeling patterns are referred to as tendency. In multi-annotator scenarios, we introduce a novel task called Multi-annotator Tendency Learning (MATL), which aims to capture each annotator tendency. Unlike traditional tasks that prioritize consensus-oriented learning, which averages out annotator differences and leads to tendency information loss, MATL emphasizes learning each annotator tendency, better preserves tendency information. To this end, we propose an efficient baseline method, Query-based Multi-annotator Tendency Learning (QuMATL), which uses lightweight query to represent each annotator for tendency modeling. It saves the costs of building separate conventional models for each annotator, leverages shared learnable queries to capture inter-annotator correlations as an additional hidden supervisory signal to enhance modeling performance. Meanwhile, we provide a new metric, Difference of Inter-annotator Consistency (DIC), to evaluate how effectively models preserve annotators tendency information. Additionally, we contribute two large-scale datasets, STREET and AMER, providing averages of 4300 and 3118 per-annotator labels, respectively. Extensive experiments verified the effectiveness of our QuMATL.

cs.MM↗

Positive effects and mechanisms of simulated lunar low-magnetic environment on earthworm-improved lunar soil simulant as a cultivation substrate

With the advancement of crewed deep-space missions, Bioregenerative Life Support Systems (BLSS) for lunar bases face stresses from lunar environmental factors. While microgravity and radiation are well-studied, the low-magnetic field's effects remain unclear. Earthworms ("soil scavengers") improve lunar soil simulant and degrade plant waste, as shown in our prior studies. We tested earthworms in lunar soil simulant mixed with organic waste (from "Lunar Palace 365" experiment) under three magnetic conditions: lunar-low, Earth, and high. Stronger fields increased earthworm oxidative stress (MDA) and impaired neurotransmitters. Weaker fields enhanced substrate cultivability: neutralized pH, increased nutrients, humus, and wheat seedling rate. Microbial analyses showed: (1) Higher fungal Shannon index under high fields indicated impaired digestion; (2) More positive correlations in gut networks suggested slower microbial cooperation (e.g., lignocellulose degradation); (3) Reduced Network Size, Path Length and Modularity confirmed disrupted interactions. This disproves lunar low-magnetic stress on earthworm-soil-waste systems, aiding deep-space BLSS research.

physics.geo-ph↗

Significance of secondary baroclinic hydrodynamic instability on mixing enhancement in shock-bubble interaction

Different strength of hydrodynamic instability can be induced by the variations in the initial diffusion of shock bubble interaction (SBI), while the influence of hydrodynamic instability on variable-density mixing in SBI remains unclear. The present study aims to investigate the hydrodynamic instability of SBI through high-resolution numerical simulations. To isolate each factor within this instability, a circulation control method is employed to ensure consistent Reynolds number Re and Peclect number Pe. An examination of the morphology of the bubbles and vorticity dynamics reveals that the hydrodynamic instability can be characterized by positive circulation. Through vorticity budget analysis, the positive circulation is dominated by the baroclinic torque. Therefore, the identified hydrodynamic instability is labeled as secondary baroclinic hydrodynamic instability (SBHI). Based on the dimensional analysis of vorticity transport equation, a new dimensionless parameter, the secondary baroclinic vorticity (SBV) number, is proposed to characterize the strength of SBHI. Regarding mixing characteristics, cases with stronger SBHI exhibit higher mixing rates. Indicated by the temporal-averaged mixing rate with different SBV numbers, a scaling behavior is revealed: the mixing rate is increased proportionally to the square of SBV numbers. It is widely recognized that unstable flow can also be induced by a high Reynolds number Re. The distinction and connection of SBHI and high Re unstable flow are further studied. The scaling behavior of the mixing rate in SBHI shows distinct from the Reynolds number Re scaling: the mixing can hardly be altered effectively in the limit of large Re, the mechanisms of which are inherently different with respect to the stretch term, closely relating to the principal strain and the alignment angle between the scalar gradient and the principal strain axis.

physics.flu-dyn↗

Leveraging Large Language Models for Spontaneous Speech-Based Suicide Risk Detection

Early identification of suicide risk is crucial for preventing suicidal behaviors. As a result, the identification and study of patterns and markers related to suicide risk have become a key focus of current research. In this paper, we present the results of our work in the 1st SpeechWellness Challenge (SW1), which aims to explore speech as a non-invasive and easily accessible mental health indicator for identifying adolescents at risk of suicide.Our approach leverages large language model (LLM) as the primary tool for feature extraction, alongside conventional acoustic and semantic features. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 74\% on the test set, ranking first in the SW1 challenge. These findings demonstrate the potential of LLM-based methods for analyzing speech in the context of suicide risk assessment.

cs.SD↗

Deep Multi-Manifold Transformation Based Multivariate Time Series Fault Detection

Unsupervised fault detection in multivariate time series plays a vital role in ensuring the stable operation of complex systems. Traditional methods often assume that normal data follow a single Gaussian distribution and identify anomalies as deviations from this distribution. {\color{black} However, this simplified assumption fails to capture the diversity and structural complexity of real-world time series, which can lead to misjudgments and reduced detection performance in practical applications. To address this issue, we propose a new method that combines a neighborhood-driven data augmentation strategy with a multi-manifold representation learning framework.} By incorporating information from local neighborhoods, the augmentation module can simulate contextual variations of normal data, enhancing the model's adaptability to distributional changes. In addition, we design a structure-aware feature learning approach that encourages natural clustering of similar patterns in the feature space while maintaining sufficient distinction between different operational states. Extensive experiments on several public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in terms of both accuracy and robustness, showing strong potential for generalization and real-world deployment.

cs.LG↗

MoCa: Modality-aware Continual Pre-training Makes Better Bidirectional Multimodal Embeddings

Multimodal embedding models, built upon causal Vision Language Models (VLMs), have shown promise in various tasks. However, current approaches face three key limitations: the use of causal attention in VLM backbones is suboptimal for embedding tasks; scalability issues due to reliance on high-quality labeled paired data for contrastive learning; and limited diversity in training objectives and data. To address these issues, we propose MoCa, a two-stage framework for transforming pre-trained VLMs into effective bidirectional multimodal embedding models. The first stage, Modality-aware Continual Pre-training, introduces a joint reconstruction objective that simultaneously denoises interleaved text and image inputs, enhancing bidirectional context-aware reasoning. The second stage, Heterogeneous Contrastive Fine-tuning, leverages diverse, semantically rich multimodal data beyond simple image-caption pairs to enhance generalization and alignment. Our method addresses the stated limitations by introducing bidirectional attention through continual pre-training, scaling effectively with massive unlabeled datasets via joint reconstruction objectives, and utilizing diverse multimodal data for enhanced representation robustness. Experiments demonstrate that MoCa consistently improves performance across MMEB and ViDoRe-v2 benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art results, and exhibits strong scalability with both model size and training data on MMEB.

cs.CV↗

Refine Medical Diagnosis Using Generation Augmented Retrieval and Clinical Practice Guidelines

Current medical language models, adapted from large language models (LLMs), typically predict ICD code-based diagnosis from electronic health records (EHRs) because these labels are readily available. However, ICD codes do not capture the nuanced, context-rich reasoning clinicians use for diagnosis. Clinicians synthesize diverse patient data and reference clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) to make evidence-based decisions. This misalignment limits the clinical utility of existing models. We introduce GARMLE-G, a Generation-Augmented Retrieval framework that grounds medical language model outputs in authoritative CPGs. Unlike conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation based approaches, GARMLE-G enables hallucination-free outputs by directly retrieving authoritative guideline content without relying on model-generated text. It (1) integrates LLM predictions with EHR data to create semantically rich queries, (2) retrieves relevant CPG knowledge snippets via embedding similarity, and (3) fuses guideline content with model output to generate clinically aligned recommendations. A prototype system for hypertension diagnosis was developed and evaluated on multiple metrics, demonstrating superior retrieval precision, semantic relevance, and clinical guideline adherence compared to RAG-based baselines, while maintaining a lightweight architecture suitable for localized healthcare deployment. This work provides a scalable, low-cost, and hallucination-free method for grounding medical language models in evidence-based clinical practice, with strong potential for broader clinical deployment.

cs.CL↗

Giant orbital Hall effect due to the bulk states of 3D topological insulators

The highly efficient torques generated by 3D topological insulators make them a favourable platform for faster and more efficient magnetic memory devices. Recently, research into harnessing orbital angular momentum in orbital torques has received significant attention. Here we study the orbital Hall effect in topological insulators. We find that the bulk states give rise to a sizeable orbital Hall effect that is up to 3 orders of magnitude larger than the spin Hall effect in topological insulators. This is partially because the orbital angular momentum that each conduction electron carries is up to an order of magnitude larger than the $\hbar/2$ carried by its spin. Our results imply that the large torques measured in topological insulator/ferromagnet devices can be further enhanced through careful engineering of the heterostructure to optimise orbital-to-spin conversion.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

DCIRNet: Depth Completion with Iterative Refinement for Dexterous Grasping of Transparent and Reflective Objects

Transparent and reflective objects in everyday environments pose significant challenges for depth sensors due to their unique visual properties, such as specular reflections and light transmission. These characteristics often lead to incomplete or inaccurate depth estimation, which severely impacts downstream geometry-based vision tasks, including object recognition, scene reconstruction, and robotic manipulation. To address the issue of missing depth information in transparent and reflective objects, we propose DCIRNet, a novel multimodal depth completion network that effectively integrates RGB images and depth maps to enhance depth estimation quality. Our approach incorporates an innovative multimodal feature fusion module designed to extract complementary information between RGB images and incomplete depth maps. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-stage supervision and depth refinement strategy that progressively improves depth completion and effectively mitigates the issue of blurred object boundaries. We integrate our depth completion model into dexterous grasping frameworks and achieve a $44\%$ improvement in the grasp success rate for transparent and reflective objects. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets, where DCIRNet demonstrates superior performance. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach and confirm its strong generalization capability across various transparent and reflective objects.

cs.RO↗

Induced rational exponents and bipartite subgraphs in $K_{s, s}$-free graphs

In this paper, we study a general phenomenon that many extremal results for bipartite graphs can be transferred to the induced setting when the host graph is $K_{s, s}$-free. As manifestations of this phenomenon, we prove that every rational $\frac{a}{b} \in (1, 2), \, a, b \in \mathbb{N}_+$, can be achieved as Turán exponent of a family of at most $2^a$ induced forbidden bipartite graphs, extending a result of Bukh and Conlon [JEMS 2018]. Our forbidden family is a subfamily of theirs which is substantially smaller. A key ingredient, which is yet another instance of this phenomenon, is supersaturation results for induced trees and cycles in $K_{s, s}$-free graphs. We also provide new evidence to a recent conjecture of Hunter, Milojević, Sudakov, and Tomon [JCTB 2025] by proving optimal bounds for the maximum size of $K_{s, s}$-free graphs without an induced copy of theta graphs or prism graphs, whose Turán exponents were determined by Conlon [BLMS 2019] and by Gao, Janzer, Liu, and Xu [IJM 2025+].

math.CO↗

GraphGPT: Generative Pre-trained Graph Eulerian Transformer

We introduceGraphGPT, a novel self-supervised generative pre-trained model for graph learning based on the Graph Eulerian Transformer (GET). First, we propose GET, which combines a standard transformer encoder or decoder architecture with an innovative graph-to-sequence transformation method. This method converts graphs or sampled subgraphs into sequences of tokens representing nodes, edges, and attributes in a reversible manner using Eulerian paths. We pre-train GET using either of the two self-supervised tasks: next-token prediction (NTP) and scheduled masked-token prediction (SMTP). The pre-trained model is then fine-tuned for downstream tasks such as graph-, edge-, and node-level prediction. Despite its simplicity, GraphGPT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing state-of-the-art methods on multiple large-scale Open Graph Benchmark (OGB) datasets. It demonstrates exceptional results on the molecular property prediction dataset PCQM4Mv2 and the protein-protein interaction dataset ogbl-ppa. Notably, generative pre-training enables scaling GraphGPT to 2 billion parameters while maintaining performance gains - a breakthrough that overcomes the scalability limitations of traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and prior graph transformers (GTs). To advance research in graph foundation models and facilitate scientific discovery in chemistry, materials science, and related fields, we will release the source code (https://github.com/alibaba/graph-gpt) and pre-trained checkpoints.

cs.LG↗

Diffusion as Reasoning: Enhancing Object Navigation via Diffusion Model Conditioned on LLM-based Object-Room Knowledge

The Object Navigation (ObjectNav) task aims to guide an agent to locate target objects in unseen environments using partial observations. Prior approaches have employed location prediction paradigms to achieve long-term goal reasoning, yet these methods often struggle to effectively integrate contextual relation reasoning. Alternatively, map completion-based paradigms predict long-term goals by generating semantic maps of unexplored areas. However, existing methods in this category fail to fully leverage known environmental information, resulting in suboptimal map quality that requires further improvement. In this work, we propose a novel approach to enhancing the ObjectNav task, by training a diffusion model to learn the statistical distribution patterns of objects in semantic maps, and using the map of the explored regions during navigation as the condition to generate the map of the unknown regions, thereby realizing the long-term goal reasoning of the target object, i.e., diffusion as reasoning (DAR). Meanwhile, we propose the Room Guidance method, which leverages commonsense knowledge derived from large language models (LLMs) to guide the diffusion model in generating room-aware object distributions. Based on the generated map in the unknown region, the agent sets the predicted location of the target as the goal and moves towards it. Experiments on Gibson and MP3D show the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV↗

Direct Joule-Heated Non-Equilibrium Synthesis Enables High Performing Thermoelectrics

High-throughput synthesis of bulk inorganic materials is crucial for accelerating functional materials discovery but is hindered by slow, energy-intensive solid-state methods. We introduce Direct Joule-Heated Synthesis (DJS), a rapid, single-step and scalable solid-state synthesis technique achieving a $10^5$-fold speedup and 20,000x energy efficiency improvement over conventional synthesis. DJS enables the synthesis of dense, bulk chalcogenides ($\mathrm{Bi_{0.5}Sb_{1.5}Te_3}$, $\mathrm{AgSbTe_2}$), achieving a zT of 2.3 at 573 K in optimally Cd/Se co-doped $\mathrm{AgSbTe_2}$, one of the highest for polycrystalline materials at this temperature. DJS enables optimal co-doping and rapid, non-equilibrium solidification, producing lamellar microstructures, interfacial regions, and cation-ordered nanodomains that scatter all-scale phonons, achieving ultralow lattice thermal conductivity (~0.2 $W m^{-1} K^{-1}$ at 573 K). DJS establishes a new benchmark for scalable and fast synthesis, accelerating functional material discovery.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

3D Skeleton-Based Action Recognition: A Review

With the inherent advantages of skeleton representation, 3D skeleton-based action recognition has become a prominent topic in the field of computer vision. However, previous reviews have predominantly adopted a model-oriented perspective, often neglecting the fundamental steps involved in skeleton-based action recognition. This oversight tends to ignore key components of skeleton-based action recognition beyond model design and has hindered deeper, more intrinsic understanding of the task. To bridge this gap, our review aims to address these limitations by presenting a comprehensive, task-oriented framework for understanding skeleton-based action recognition. We begin by decomposing the task into a series of sub-tasks, placing particular emphasis on preprocessing steps such as modality derivation and data augmentation. The subsequent discussion delves into critical sub-tasks, including feature extraction and spatio-temporal modeling techniques. Beyond foundational action recognition networks, recently advanced frameworks such as hybrid architectures, Mamba models, large language models (LLMs), and generative models have also been highlighted. Finally, a comprehensive overview of public 3D skeleton datasets is presented, accompanied by an analysis of state-of-the-art algorithms evaluated on these benchmarks. By integrating task-oriented discussions, comprehensive examinations of sub-tasks, and an emphasis on the latest advancements, our review provides a fundamental and accessible structured roadmap for understanding and advancing the field of 3D skeleton-based action recognition.

cs.CV↗

HTMNet: A Hybrid Network with Transformer-Mamba Bottleneck Multimodal Fusion for Transparent and Reflective Objects Depth Completion

Transparent and reflective objects pose significant challenges for depth sensors, resulting in incomplete depth information that adversely affects downstream robotic perception and manipulation tasks. To address this issue, we propose HTMNet, a novel hybrid model integrating Transformer, CNN, and Mamba architectures. The encoder is based on a dual-branch CNN-Transformer framework, the bottleneck fusion module adopts a Transformer-Mamba architecture, and the decoder is built upon a multi-scale fusion module. We introduce a novel multimodal fusion module grounded in self-attention mechanisms and state space models, marking the first application of the Mamba architecture in the field of transparent object depth completion and revealing its promising potential. Additionally, we design an innovative multi-scale fusion module for the decoder that combines channel attention, spatial attention, and multi-scale feature extraction techniques to effectively integrate multi-scale features through a down-fusion strategy. Extensive evaluations on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art(SOTA) performance, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CV↗