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Jiamin Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Jiamin Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

SWRouter: Similarity-Contractive Window Routing for Multi-Turn Large Language Model Conversations

Large language models exhibit complementary strengths, motivating routing methods that dispatch each query to the most suitable model. Although existing routers are effective in single-turn settings, they do not directly transfer to multi-turn dialogue, where routing performance critically depends on how historical context is segmented, retained, and incorporated into the current prompt. This introduces two fundamental challenges: preventing information loss and information confusion during context construction, and evaluating routing quality without conflating model selection with prompt construction quality. In this paper, we propose SWRouter, a Similarity-Contractive Window Router for multi-turn large language model routing. SWRouter combines a similarity-based context segmentation mechanism for prompt construction with a dual-metric evaluation framework that decouples construction accuracy from router performance. Experiments on multi-turn dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that SWRouter consistently surpasses strong baselines, achieving a 16.26% improvement in evaluation accuracy over the best individual large language model and an additional 8.22% gain over the Conv-ID Context baseline. Our results highlight that multi-turn large language model routing requires a joint design of context construction and evaluation, rather than a direct extension of single-turn routing methods.

cs.CL

Budget-Aware LLM Discovery via Cost-Calibrated Frontier Utility

Large language models increasingly support scientific and algorithmic discovery through inference-time search over evaluated candidates. Existing adaptive discovery controllers assign credit based only on score progress, even though prompt length, retries, and guidance calls cause search actions to incur different token costs. We prove that cost-blind credit can forfeit all but a vanishing fraction of attainable quality as frontiers multiply and costs diverge. Under a fixed search-side token budget, the controller must decide which frontier is improving and whether its gain justifies the realized cost before the budget is exhausted. We introduce \textbf{CostAda}, a cost-calibrated adaptive controller built around \emph{cost-calibrated frontier utility}. The utility values frontier progress relative to realized action cost and conditions that credit on the remaining budget. CostAda uses this signal to control local exploration intensity, frontier allocation, and budgeted tactic intervention. Cost and remaining budget therefore shape the search rather than serving only as accounting variables or a stopping rule. CostAda reaches the strongest baseline's full-budget quality with at most half the budget on twelve of sixteen benchmark--backbone pairs while achieving the strongest mean final quality on all eight benchmarks under GLM-5 and GPT-5.4.

cs.LG

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.

cs.AI

DirectorBench: Diagnosing Long-Form Video Generation with Personalized Multi-Agent Evaluation

Long-form video generation is rapidly moving from short, single-scene synthesis toward minute-long, multi-shot creation with narrative structure, cinematic control, audio, and cross-modal synchronization. However, evaluating such videos remains challenging, since existing benchmarks largely focus on local visual quality, short-horizon temporal consistency, or generic prompt alignment, and provide limited diagnosis of workflow failures and user-dependent preferences. We introduce DirectorBench, a personalized multi-agent diagnostic benchmark for long-form video generation. DirectorBench evaluates generated videos with respect to 80 structured metadata entries, 7 user profiles, and 40 checkpoint criteria across 5 dimensions: script, visual, audio, cross-modal, and stability. Instead of reducing quality to a single aggregate score, DirectorBench localizes checkpoint-level bottlenecks and supports profile-aware evaluation. We evaluate 4 long-form video generation workflows, 6 base LLMs, and 7 user profiles. Across workflows, DirectorBench reveals a between-unit bottleneck: transition quality averages only 0.256 and reaches 0.356 for the best workflow, while prompt-level user demand fulfillment averages 0.71. We further conduct human evaluation with 14 annotators to validate the alignment between DirectorBench and human judgment. The results show that DirectorBench captures human-perceptible quality differences and reveals workflow- and profile-dependent failure modes that are hidden by aggregate scoring. These findings highlight the importance of diagnostic and profile-aware benchmarking for long-form video generation.

cs.CL

SEAL: Can Saturated Benchmarks Be Revived by LLM-as-a-Meta-Judge?

Widely used language-model benchmarks are increasingly saturated, with frontier systems often receiving near-tied scores that standard metrics cannot resolve. Rather than constructing harder alternatives, we ask whether existing tasks can be made informative again through improved evaluation over the same candidate outputs. Therefore, we present Seeded Elimination with Adaptive LLM-as-a-Meta-Judge, a self-improving evaluation protocol for extracting latent ranking signal from saturated benchmarks. SEAL seeds candidate outputs into a single elimination and evaluates each match with task-level principles plus self-improving checklist criteria. We evaluate SEAL on multiple saturated benchmarks covering code generation, mathematical reasoning, knowledge-intensive question answering, and tool-use agent task completion. Across these settings, SEAL improves the ranking-accuracy--latency trade-off over competing protocols, attaining 0.83--1.00 Spearman agreement with full pairwise judging and 4/4 top-1 agreement, while requiring only 11.89 calls per task compared with 28.00 for full pairwise evaluation.

cs.CL

Measuring Maximum Activations in Open Large Language Models

The dynamic range of activations is a first-order constraint for low-bit quantization, activation scaling, and stable LLM inference. Prior work characterized outlier features and massive activations on pre-2024 LLaMA-style models, and the downstream activation-quantization stack inherits that picture without revisiting it for the post-LLaMA open-model boom. We ask the deployment-oriented question: how large can activations get in modern open LLMs, and how does this magnitude vary across families, generations, and training stages? Under a unified pipeline (5,000-sample multi-domain corpus, family-specific tokenization, identical hooks across embeddings, hidden states, attention, MLP/MoE, SwiGLU gates, and final norm), we measure global and layerwise maxima on 27 checkpoints from 8 open families spanning dense, MoE, vision-language, intermediate-training, and instruction-tuned variants. We find that (i) global maxima span over nearly four orders of magnitude at comparable parameter counts, with Qwen3.5 and MoE checkpoints in the 10^2 to 10^3 range and Gemma3-27B-it reaching ~7 x 10^5; (ii) cross-family and cross-generation comparisons break simple monotonic scaling; and (iii) MoE checkpoints exhibit 14.0-23.4x lower peaks than matched-scale dense counterparts, while the residual stream carries the global maximum in 22/24 checkpoints. A lightweight INT-8 sanity check shows that measured maxima co-vary with low-bit reconstruction error via activation-scale selection. We conclude that maximum activation magnitude is a model property tied to family, architecture, and training stage - not a simple byproduct of size - and should be measured and reported alongside any open-weight release before low-bit deployment. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/clx1415926/Max_act_llm.

cs.CL

EndPrompt: Efficient Long-Context Extension via Terminal Anchoring

Extending the context window of large language models typically requires training on sequences at the target length, incurring quadratic memory and computational costs that make long-context adaptation expensive and difficult to reproduce. We propose EndPrompt, a method that achieves effective context extension using only short training sequences. The core insight is that exposing a model to long-range relative positional distances does not require constructing full-length inputs: we preserve the original short context as an intact first segment and append a brief terminal prompt as a second segment, assigning it positional indices near the target context length. This two-segment construction introduces both local and long-range relative distances within a short physical sequence while maintaining the semantic continuity of the training text--a property absent in chunk-based simulation approaches that split contiguous context. We provide a theoretical analysis grounded in Rotary Position Embedding and the Bernstein inequality, showing that position interpolation induces a rigorous smoothness constraint over the attention function, with shared Transformer parameters further suppressing unstable extrapolation to unobserved intermediate distances. Applied to LLaMA-family models extending the context window from 8K to 64K, EndPrompt achieves an average RULER score of 76.03 and the highest average on LongBench, surpassing LCEG (72.24), LongLoRA (72.95), and full-length fine-tuning (69.23) while requiring substantially less computation. These results demonstrate that long-context generalization can be induced from sparse positional supervision, challenging the prevailing assumption that dense long-sequence training is necessary for reliable context-window extension. The code is available at https://github.com/clx1415926/EndPrompt.

cs.CL

Beyong Tokens: Item-aware Attention for LLM-based Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained increasing attention in the field of recommendation. Existing LLM-based methods typically represent items as token sequences, and apply attention layers on these tokens to generate recommendations. However, by inheriting the standard attention mechanism, these methods focus on modeling token-level relations. This token-centric focus overlooks the item as the fundamental unit of recommendation, preventing existing methods from effectively capturing collaborative relations at the item level. In this work, we revisit the role of tokens in LLM-driven recommendation and categorize their relations into two types: (1) intra-item token relations, which present the content semantics of an item, e.g., name, color, and size; and (2) inter-item token relations, which encode collaborative relations across items. Building on these insights, we propose a novel framework with an item-aware attention mechanism (IAM) to enhance LLMs for recommendation. Specifically, IAM devises two complementary attention layers: (1) an intra-item attention layer, which restricts attention to tokens within the same item, modeling item content semantics; and (2) an inter-item attention layer, which attends exclusively to token relations across items, capturing item collaborative relations. Through this stacked design, IAM explicitly emphasizes items as the fundamental units in recommendation, enabling LLMs to effectively exploit item-level collaborative relations. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of IAM in enhancing LLMs for personalized recommendation.

cs.IR

Grounding Long-Context Reasoning with Contextual Normalization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become an essential approach for extending the reasoning and knowledge capacity of large language models (LLMs). While prior research has primarily focused on retrieval quality and prompting strategies, the influence of how the retrieved documents are framed, i.e., context format, remains underexplored. We show that seemingly superficial choices, such as delimiters or structural markers in key-value extraction, can induce substantial shifts in accuracy and stability, even when semantic content is identical. To systematically investigate this effect, we design controlled experiments that vary context density, delimiter styles, and positional placement, revealing the underlying factors that govern performance differences. Building on these insights, we introduce Contextual Normalization, a lightweight strategy that adaptively standardizes context representations before generation. Extensive experiments on both controlled and real-world RAG benchmarks across diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed strategy consistently improves robustness to order variation and strengthens long-context utilization. These findings underscore that reliable RAG depends not only on retrieving the right content, but also on how that content is presented, offering both new empirical evidence and a practical technique for better long-context reasoning.

cs.CL

Less Is More: Elevating RAG via Performance-Driven Context Compression

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the timeliness of knowledge updates and the factual accuracy of large language models. However, incorporating a large volume of retrieved documents significantly increases input length, leading to prohibitive computational costs. Existing compression approaches often compromise task performance, primarily due to their reliance on predefined heuristics. These heuristics fail to ensure that the compressed context is conducive to the generation tasks. To address these limitations, we propose CORE-RAG, a novel framework for context compression in RAG systems. CORE eliminates reliance on proxy heuristics through a performance-driven learning framework, which directy utilizes task performance as a feedback signal to iteratively refine the compressor policy. Prior to this optimization process, we incorporate a knowledge distillation phase to initialize the compressor with a robust policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach. At a high compression ratio of 3%, CORE not only avoids performance degradation but also improves the average Exact Match (EM) score by 3.3 points compared to using full documents. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziqiangcui/CORE-RAG-ICML26.

cs.CL

Towards AI Search Paradigm

In this paper, we introduce the AI Search Paradigm, a comprehensive blueprint for next-generation search systems capable of emulating human information processing and decision-making. The paradigm employs a modular architecture of four LLM-powered agents (Master, Planner, Executor and Writer) that dynamically adapt to the full spectrum of information needs, from simple factual queries to complex multi-stage reasoning tasks. These agents collaborate dynamically through coordinated workflows to evaluate query complexity, decompose problems into executable plans, and orchestrate tool usage, task execution, and content synthesis. We systematically present key methodologies for realizing this paradigm, including task planning and tool integration, execution strategies, aligned and robust retrieval-augmented generation, and efficient LLM inference, spanning both algorithmic techniques and infrastructure-level optimizations. By providing an in-depth guide to these foundational components, this work aims to inform the development of trustworthy, adaptive, and scalable AI search systems.

cs.CL

ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Party LLM Data Valuation

Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance, especially when working within a limited budget. In this work, we aim to offer a third-party data valuation approach that benefits both data providers and model developers. We introduce a linearized future influence kernel (LinFiK), which assesses the value of individual data samples in improving LLM performance during training. We further propose ALinFiK, a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK, enabling scalable data valuation. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that this approach surpasses existing baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, demonstrating significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase.

cs.LG

InstructOCR: Instruction Boosting Scene Text Spotting

In the field of scene text spotting, previous OCR methods primarily relied on image encoders and pre-trained text information, but they often overlooked the advantages of incorporating human language instructions. To address this gap, we propose InstructOCR, an innovative instruction-based scene text spotting model that leverages human language instructions to enhance the understanding of text within images. Our framework employs both text and image encoders during training and inference, along with instructions meticulously designed based on text attributes. This approach enables the model to interpret text more accurately and flexibly. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and we achieve state-of-the-art results on widely used benchmarks. Furthermore, the proposed framework can be seamlessly applied to scene text VQA tasks. By leveraging instruction strategies during pre-training, the performance on downstream VQA tasks can be significantly improved, with a 2.6% increase on the TextVQA dataset and a 2.1% increase on the ST-VQA dataset. These experimental results provide insights into the benefits of incorporating human language instructions for OCR-related tasks.

cs.CV

Symbolic Learning Enables Self-Evolving Agents

The AI community has been exploring a pathway to artificial general intelligence (AGI) by developing "language agents", which are complex large language models (LLMs) pipelines involving both prompting techniques and tool usage methods. While language agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for many real-world tasks, a fundamental limitation of current language agents research is that they are model-centric, or engineering-centric. That's to say, the progress on prompts, tools, and pipelines of language agents requires substantial manual engineering efforts from human experts rather than automatically learning from data. We believe the transition from model-centric, or engineering-centric, to data-centric, i.e., the ability of language agents to autonomously learn and evolve in environments, is the key for them to possibly achieve AGI. In this work, we introduce agent symbolic learning, a systematic framework that enables language agents to optimize themselves on their own in a data-centric way using symbolic optimizers. Specifically, we consider agents as symbolic networks where learnable weights are defined by prompts, tools, and the way they are stacked together. Agent symbolic learning is designed to optimize the symbolic network within language agents by mimicking two fundamental algorithms in connectionist learning: back-propagation and gradient descent. Instead of dealing with numeric weights, agent symbolic learning works with natural language simulacrums of weights, loss, and gradients. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on both standard benchmarks and complex real-world tasks and show that agent symbolic learning enables language agents to update themselves after being created and deployed in the wild, resulting in "self-evolving agents".

cs.CL

TIGER: Text-Instructed 3D Gaussian Retrieval and Coherent Editing

Editing objects within a scene is a critical functionality required across a broad spectrum of applications in computer vision and graphics. As 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) emerges as a frontier in scene representation, the effective modification of 3D Gaussian scenes has become increasingly vital. This process entails accurately retrieve the target objects and subsequently performing modifications based on instructions. Though available in pieces, existing techniques mainly embed sparse semantics into Gaussians for retrieval, and rely on an iterative dataset update paradigm for editing, leading to over-smoothing or inconsistency issues. To this end, this paper proposes a systematic approach, namely TIGER, for coherent text-instructed 3D Gaussian retrieval and editing. In contrast to the top-down language grounding approach for 3D Gaussians, we adopt a bottom-up language aggregation strategy to generate a denser language embedded 3D Gaussians that supports open-vocabulary retrieval. To overcome the over-smoothing and inconsistency issues in editing, we propose a Coherent Score Distillation (CSD) that aggregates a 2D image editing diffusion model and a multi-view diffusion model for score distillation, producing multi-view consistent editing with much finer details. In various experiments, we demonstrate that our TIGER is able to accomplish more consistent and realistic edits than prior work.

cs.CV

Development and Comprehensive Evaluation of TMR Sensor-Based Magnetrodes

Due to their compact size and exceptional sensitivity at room temperature, magnetoresistance (MR) sensors have garnered considerable interest in numerous fields, particularly in the detection of weak magnetic signals in biological systems. The magnetrodes, integrating MR sensors with needle-shaped Si-based substrates, are designed to be inserted into the brain for local magnetic field detection. Although recent research has predominantly focused on giant magnetoresistance (GMR) sensors, tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors exhibit significantly higher sensitivity. In this study, we introduce TMR-based magnetrodes featuring TMR sensors at both the tip and mid-section of the probe, enabling detection of local magnetic fields at varied spatial positions. To enhance detectivity, we have designed and fabricated magnetrodes with varied aspect ratios of the free layer, incorporating diverse junction shapes, quantities, and serial arrangements. Utilizing a custom-built magnetotransport and noise measurement system for characterization, our TMR-based magnetrode demonstrates a limit of detection (LOD) of 300pT/Hz1/2 at 1 kHz. This implies that neuronal spikes can be distinguished with minimal averaging, thereby facilitating the elucidation of their magnetic properties.

physics.app-ph

Weaver: Foundation Models for Creative Writing

This work introduces Weaver, our first family of large language models (LLMs) dedicated to content creation. Weaver is pre-trained on a carefully selected corpus that focuses on improving the writing capabilities of large language models. We then fine-tune Weaver for creative and professional writing purposes and align it to the preference of professional writers using a suit of novel methods for instruction data synthesis and LLM alignment, making it able to produce more human-like texts and follow more diverse instructions for content creation. The Weaver family consists of models of Weaver Mini (1.8B), Weaver Base (6B), Weaver Pro (14B), and Weaver Ultra (34B) sizes, suitable for different applications and can be dynamically dispatched by a routing agent according to query complexity to balance response quality and computation cost. Evaluation on a carefully curated benchmark for assessing the writing capabilities of LLMs shows Weaver models of all sizes outperform generalist LLMs several times larger than them. Notably, our most-capable Weaver Ultra model surpasses GPT-4, a state-of-the-art generalist LLM, on various writing scenarios, demonstrating the advantage of training specialized LLMs for writing purposes. Moreover, Weaver natively supports retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and function calling (tool usage). We present various use cases of these abilities for improving AI-assisted writing systems, including integration of external knowledge bases, tools, or APIs, and providing personalized writing assistance. Furthermore, we discuss and summarize a guideline and best practices for pre-training and fine-tuning domain-specific LLMs.

cs.CL

Explanations of Classifiers Enhance Medical Image Segmentation via End-to-end Pre-training

Medical image segmentation aims to identify and locate abnormal structures in medical images, such as chest radiographs, using deep neural networks. These networks require a large number of annotated images with fine-grained masks for the regions of interest, making pre-training strategies based on classification datasets essential for sample efficiency. Based on a large-scale medical image classification dataset, our work collects explanations from well-trained classifiers to generate pseudo labels of segmentation tasks. Specifically, we offer a case study on chest radiographs and train image classifiers on the CheXpert dataset to identify 14 pathological observations in radiology. We then use Integrated Gradients (IG) method to distill and boost the explanations obtained from the classifiers, generating massive diagnosis-oriented localization labels (DoLL). These DoLL-annotated images are used for pre-training the model before fine-tuning it for downstream segmentation tasks, including COVID-19 infectious areas, lungs, heart, and clavicles. Our method outperforms other baselines, showcasing significant advantages in model performance and training efficiency across various segmentation settings.

eess.IV