arXiv subjects

Hongliang Tian

Publications and source records attributed to Hongliang Tian.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Search for High-Frequency Gravitational Waves via Geomagnetic Conversion with Radio Telescopes

The detection of high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs) above 10 kHz provides a crucial probe of exotic astrophysical phenomena and new physics. We report the first search for HFGWs via their conversion to electromagnetic radiation through the inverse Gertsenshtein effect in Earth's magnetic field, utilizing radio telescopes including the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Since no statistically significant signal is observed, we obtain new upper limits on the characteristic strain across the 1 GHz -- 1 THz band, with the most stringent constraint reaching $h_c \lesssim 10^{-18}$, improving upon existing bounds by up to three orders of magnitude. These results significantly advance the exploration of uncharted parameter space for exotic gravitational-wave sources, paving the way for future discoveries with next-generation facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

Empowering Autonomous Debugging Agents with Efficient Dynamic Analysis

Autonomous agents for automated program repair represent a promising frontier in software engineering, yet their effectiveness is often hindered by reliance on post-mortem, coarse-grained execution feedback. While integrating traditional interactive debuggers seems a natural solution, their low-level, line-by-line interaction paradigm turns out to be cost-inefficient for LLM-based agents, leading to exhausted budgets and unproductive loops. To mitigate this, we introduce Agent-centric Debugging Interface (ADI), a novel agent-centric debugging interface designed for cost-efficient, end-to-end autonomous interaction. Specifically, Agent-centric Debugging Interface realizes a function-level interaction paradigm, powered by our Frame Lifetime Trace, a comprehensive data structure encapsulating a function's stateful execution trace, and a set of high-level navigational commands. Our extensive evaluation on the SWE-bench benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of ADI. By simply equipping a basic agent with ADI, it successfully resolves 63.8\% of the tasks on the SWE-bench Verified set, even slightly outperforming the highly optimized and high-investment Claude-Tools agent, at an average cost of USD 1.28 per task with Claude-Sonnet-3.7. Furthermore, we demonstrate ADI's generality by integrating it as a plug-and-play component into existing SOTA agents, delivering consistent gains ranging from 6.2\% to 18.5\% on the resolved tasks. These results indicate that Agent-centric Debugging Interface can provide a general and efficient enhancement for existing autonomous agents.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Annotating and Auditing the Safety Properties of Unsafe Rust

In Rust, unsafe code is the sole source of potential undefined behaviors. To avoid misuse, Rust developers should clarify the safety properties for each unsafe API. However, the community currently lacks a key standard for safety documentation: existing safety comments in the source code and safety documentation can be ad hoc and incomplete. This paper presents a tag-centric methodology for auditing the consistency and completeness of safety documentation. We first derive a taxonomy of Safety Tags to formalize natural-language requirements. Second, because API soundness frequently relies on struct invariants, we propose a set of empirical rules to systematically audit the structural consistency of safety documentation. We implemented this methodology in safety-tool, a static linter that automatically enforces structural consistency between local safety annotations and callee requirements. Our approach was applied to the Rust standard library, fixing documentation issues on 27 APIs with 61 safety tags and identifying safety tags that are applicable to 96.1% of the public unsafe APIs in libstd. Furthermore, we have formalized the tagging idea through a Rust RFC to the wider community. We believe that the approach establishes a standardized practice of safety documentation and helps significantly reduce safety perils.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2026

Evaluating and Improving Automated Repository-Level Rust Issue Resolution with LLM-based Agents

The Rust programming language presents a steep learning curve and significant coding challenges, making the automation of issue resolution essential for its broader adoption. Recently, LLM-powered code agents have shown remarkable success in resolving complex software engineering tasks, yet their application to Rust has been limited by the absence of a large-scale, repository-level benchmark. To bridge this gap, we introduce Rust-SWE-bench, a benchmark comprising 500 real-world, repository-level software engineering tasks from 34 diverse and popular Rust repositories. We then perform a comprehensive study on Rust-SWE-bench with four representative agents and four state-of-the-art LLMs to establish a foundational understanding of their capabilities and limitations in the Rust ecosystem. Our extensive study reveals that while ReAct-style agents are promising, i.e., resolving up to 21.2% of issues, they are limited by two primary challenges: comprehending repository-wide code structure and complying with Rust's strict type and trait semantics. We also find that issue reproduction is rather critical for task resolution. Inspired by these findings, we propose RUSTFORGER, a novel agentic approach that integrates an automated test environment setup with a Rust metaprogramming-driven dynamic tracing strategy to facilitate reliable issue reproduction and dynamic analysis. The evaluation shows that RUSTFORGER using Claude-Sonnet-3.7 significantly outperforms all baselines, resolving 28.6% of tasks on Rust-SWE-bench, i.e., a 34.9% improvement over the strongest baseline, and, in aggregate, uniquely solves 46 tasks that no other agent could solve across all adopted advanced LLMs.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Hummingbird: SLO-Oriented GPU Preemption at Microsecond-scale

Existing GPU-sharing techniques, including spatial and temporal sharing, aim to improve utilization but face challenges in simultaneously ensuring SLO adherence and maximizing efficiency due to the lack of fine-grained task scheduling on closed-source GPUs. This paper presents Hummingbird, an SLO-oriented GPU scheduling system that overcomes these challenges by enabling microsecond-scale preemption on closed-source GPUs while effectively harvesting idle GPU time slices. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse GPU architectures reveal that Hummingbird improves the SLO attainment of high-priority tasks by 9.7x and 3.5x compared to the state-of-the-art spatial and temporal-sharing approaches. When compared to executing exclusively, the SLO attainment of the high-priority task, collocating with low-priority tasks on Hummingbird, only drops by less than 1%. Meanwhile, the throughput of the low-priority task outperforms the state-of-the-art temporal-sharing approaches by 2.4x. Hummingbird demonstrates significant effectiveness in ensuring the SLO while enhancing GPU utilization.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Search for Ultralight Dark Matter with Quantum Magnetometry in the Earth's Cavity

Ultralight dark matter candidates, such as axions and dark photons, are leading dark matter candidates. They may couple feebly to photons, sourcing oscillating electromagnetic signals in the Earth's conducting cavity formed between the ground and the ionosphere, providing detectable magnetic field signatures at wavelengths above the Earth's size. We carry out a project aiming to search for new physics using an unshielded high-sensitivity atomic magnetometer, termed the Geomagnetic Probe for nEw physiCS (GPEX). In this work, we report our first search for axion and dark photon dark matter, conducted in the desert of XiaoDushan in Gansu Province, China. Analysis of the collection of one-hour data shows no robust evidence for axion- or dark photon-induced magnetic signals. Correspondingly, we set the constraints on the axion-photon coupling with $g_{aγγ} < 7\times10^{-10}\, \mathrm{GeV^{-1}}$ and the dark photon kinetic-mixing parameter $ε< 2\times10^{-6}$ in the mass range $3.5 \times 10^{-16}\, \mathrm{eV} \sim 1.8 \times 10^{-14}\, \mathrm{eV}$. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using ground-based quantum magnetic sensors for ultralight dark matter searches. Future networks of such detectors operating over extended periods could improve the sensitivity by about three orders of magnitude.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Asterinas: A Linux ABI-Compatible, Rust-Based Framekernel OS with a Small and Sound TCB

How can one build a feature-rich, general-purpose, Rust-based operating system (OS) with a minimal and sound Trusted Computing Base (TCB) for memory safety? Existing Rust-based OSes fall short due to their improper use of unsafe Rust in kernel development. To address this challenge, we propose a novel OS architecture called framekernel that realizes Rust's full potential to achieve intra-kernel privilege separation, ensuring TCB minimality and soundness. We present OSTD, a streamlined framework for safe Rust OS development, and Asterinas, a Linux ABI-compatible framekernel OS implemented entirely in safe Rust using OSTD. Supporting over 210 Linux system calls, Asterinas delivers performance on par with Linux, while maintaining a minimized, memory-safety TCB of only about 14.0% of the codebase. These results underscore the practicality and benefits of the framekernel architecture in building safe and efficient OSes.

cs.OS↗

arXiv2025

Probing Millicharged Dark Matter with Magnetometer Coupled to Circuit

We present a novel approach to detect millicharged dark matter (mDM) by using a high-sensitivity magnetometer coupled with the resonant and broadband readout circuits. In the external magnetic field, the interaction between mDM and the photon field introduces an effective current corresponding to the mDMs annihilation into photons that produces a faint oscillating magnetic field signal, with a frequency uniquely determined by twice the mDM mass. By calculating the expected signal for two experimental configurations -- toroidal and solenoidal magnetic fields -- we show the potential to explore the uncharted regions of mDM parameter space. Our analysis establishes unprecedented constraints on the mDM coupling constant across the mass range $1\times 10^{-12}~\mathrm{eV}$ to $6 \times 10^{-8}~\mathrm{eV}$, surpassing existing experimental limits by more than ten orders of magnitude.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

rCanary: Detecting Memory Leaks Across Semi-automated Memory Management Boundary in Rust

Rust is an effective system programming language that guarantees memory safety via compile-time verifications. It employs a novel ownership-based resource management model to facilitate automated deallocation. This model is anticipated to eliminate memory leaks. However, we observed that user intervention drives it into semi-automated memory management and makes it error-prone to cause leaks. In contrast to violating memory-safety guarantees restricted by the unsafe keyword, the boundary of leaking memory is implicit, and the compiler would not emit any warnings for developers. In this paper, we present rCanary, a static, non-intrusive, and fully automated model checker to detect leaks across the semiautomated boundary. We design an encoder to abstract data with heap allocation and formalize a refined leak-free memory model based on boolean satisfiability. It can generate SMT-Lib2 format constraints for Rust MIR and is implemented as a Cargo component. We evaluate rCanary by using flawed package benchmarks collected from the pull requests of open-source Rust projects. The results indicate that it is possible to recall all these defects with acceptable false positives. We further apply our tool to more than 1,200 real-world crates from crates.io and GitHub, identifying 19 crates having memory leaks. Our analyzer is also efficient, that costs 8.4 seconds per package.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

Occlum: Secure and Efficient Multitasking Inside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enables user-level code to create private memory regions called enclaves, whose code and data are protected by the CPU from software and hardware attacks outside the enclaves. Recent work introduces library operating systems (LibOSes) to SGX so that legacy applications can run inside enclaves with few or even no modifications. As virtually any non-trivial application demands multiple processes, it is essential for LibOSes to support multitasking. However, none of the existing SGX LibOSes support multitasking both securely and efficiently. This paper presents Occlum, a system that enables secure and efficient multitasking on SGX. We implement the LibOS processes as SFI-Isolated Processes (SIPs). SFI is a software instrumentation technique for sandboxing untrusted modules (called domains). We design a novel SFI scheme named MPX-based, Multi-Domain SFI (MMDSFI) and leverage MMDSFI to enforce the isolation of SIPs. We also design an independent verifier to ensure the security guarantees of MMDSFI. With SIPs safely sharing the single address space of an enclave, the LibOS can implement multitasking efficiently. The Occlum LibOS outperforms the state-of-the-art SGX LibOS on multitasking-heavy workloads by up to 6,600X on micro-benchmarks and up to 500X on application benchmarks.

cs.OS↗