Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Jie Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Jie Cao.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Regulating Anatomy-Aware Rewards via Trajectory-Integral Feedback for Volumetric Computed Tomography Analysis

Medical vision-language models (VLMs) have rapidly advanced as general-purpose multimodal assistants, yet their deployment in 3D Computed Tomography (CT) analysis remains constrained by a persistent mismatch between optimization objectives and clinical rigor. Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms still rely on lexical proxy signals that induce ``\textit{Evaluation Hallucinations}'', where models optimize linguistic fluency rather than factual clinical correctness, leading to diagnostically critical errors. To bridge this gap, we introduce the \textbf{Clinical Abnormality Benchmarking Substrate (CABS)}, a structured system that decomposes radiology reports into verifiable clinical semantic units. Using CABS, we identify a ``\textit{Mechanistic Divergence}'' in standard RL, where surface-similarity rewards drive policy gradients to bypass medical facts. We therefore propose \textbf{Trajectory-Integral Feedback GRPO (TIF-GRPO)}, a novel framework integrating control-theoretic principles into policy optimization. By formulating clinical reasoning as a pseudo-temporal trajectory for anomaly discovery, TIF-GRPO regulates anatomy-aware rewards via an integral feedback loop that penalizes persistent omissions as cumulative state errors and suppresses hallucinations as excessive control effort. Experiments on 3D CT benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances abnormality detection and clinical faithfulness, establishing a new paradigm for fine-grained regulation in medical VLMs. Our project is available at \href{https://github.com/ZJU4HealthCare/TIF-GRPO}{GitHub}.

cs.CV↗

HydroAgent: Closing the Gap Between Frontier LLMs and Human Experts in Hydrologic Model Calibration via Simulator-Grounded RL

Calibrating distributed hydrologic models is a critical bottleneck across operational water resources management - streamflow prediction, reservoir operation, drought monitoring, infrastructure design, and flood forecasting all depend on it. Each basin demands an expert to translate hydrograph signatures into adjustments of a high-dimensional parameter vector, and the resulting workflow does not transfer between watersheds. We ask: can frontier large language model (LLM) agents replace the human hydrologic modeler, and if not, what would it take? We benchmark nine frontier LLM agents - Claude Opus 4.6/4.7, Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5/5.4/5.4-pro, and Gemini 2.5-pro/3.1-pro/3-flash - on the operational CREST distributed hydrologic model used by the U.S. National Weather Service for flash-flood forecasting. Best-of-twenty-rounds Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) across four held-out gauges spanning 329-40,792 km2 ranges from -0.16 (GPT-5.4) to 0.75 (Sonnet 4.6); the ceiling reproduces across all three vendors and capability tiers, with the strongest models concentrating in the 0.65-0.75 band, and no model reaches the human-expert reference except Opus-4.7 on one gauge. We argue this gap is not a parameter-count problem but a domain-grounding problem. We then propose HYDROAGENT, fine-tuning open-weight Qwen3-4B with supervised fine-tuning on 2,576 expert calibration trajectories and Group-Relative Policy Optimization using NSE as a verifiable reward from online CREST simulations - reinforcement learning with simulation feedback (RLSF). For Earth system science, a small domain-tuned policy with simulator-in-the-loop RL is a more compute-efficient and physically faithful path than scaling generic frontier models, and the multi-modal richness of Earth data - remote sensing, in-situ time series, and forecaster narrative - makes domain agents a leveraged direction for AI in physical science.

cs.LG↗

From AI-Generated Content to Agentic Action: Security and Safety Threats in Generative AI

Generative AI systems are increasingly used not only to produce content but also to retrieve data, invoke tools, and execute actions. This work examines the security and safety implications of that shift across content-level, model-level, and agentic threats. We analyze how attacker access requirements, system autonomy, and the scope of potential harm change as models move from generating artifacts to executing operations through tool chains and external APIs. We then assess technical countermeasures including detection, watermarking, alignment, and emerging agentic safeguards, and show that several depend on forms of institutional coordination that current governance arrangements do not yet provide. Across the cases examined, capability deployment and attack-surface expansion repeatedly outpace defensive responses as systems move from generating content to executing real-world actions.

cs.CR↗

ResRL: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Negative Sample Projection Residual Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) but usually exhibits limited generation diversity due to the over-incentivization of positive rewards. Although methods like Negative Sample Reinforcement (NSR) mitigate this issue by upweighting penalty from negative samples, they may suppress the semantic distributions shared between positive and negative responses. To boost reasoning ability without losing diversity, this paper proposes negative sample projection Residual Reinforcement Learning (ResRL) that decouples similar semantic distributions among positive and negative responses. We theoretically link Lazy Likelihood Displacement (LLD) to negative-positive head-gradient interference and derive a single-forward proxy that upper-bounds representation alignment to guide conservative advantage reweighting. ResRL then projects negative-token hidden representations onto an SVD-based low-rank positive subspace and uses projection residuals to modulate negative gradients, improving reasoning while preserving diversity and outperforming strong baselines on average across twelve benchmarks spanning Mathematics, Code, Agent Tasks, and Function Calling. Notably, ResRL surpasses NSR on mathematical reasoning by 9.4\% in Avg@16 and 7.0\% in Pass@128. Code is available at https://github.com/1229095296/ResRL.git.

cs.LG↗

HalluClear: Diagnosing, Evaluating and Mitigating Hallucinations in GUI Agents

While progress in GUI agents has been largely driven by industrial-scale training, ungrounded hallucinations often trigger cascading failures in real-world deployments.Unlike general VLM domains, the GUI agent field lacks a hallucination-focused suite for fine-grained diagnosis, reliable evaluation, and targeted mitigation.To bridge this gap, we introduce HalluClear, a comprehensive suite for hallucination mitigation in GUI agents as a complement to computation-intensive scaling. HalluClear comprises: (1) a GUI-specific hallucination taxonomy derived from empirical failure analysis; (2) a calibrated three-stage evaluation workflow which enhances VLM-as-a-judge reliability via expert-annotated benchmarking and ensemble credibility estimation; and (3) a mitigation scheme based on closed-loop structured reasoning, enabling lightweight continual post-training with cold-start initialization for both generalist and GUI-specialist agents. Experiments across representative agents and public benchmarks demonstrate that post-training on only 9K samples within our suite can significantly reduce hallucinations, thereby improving grounding and action fidelity, offering a compute-efficient pathway to robust GUI automation.

cs.AI↗

Assessing the Impact and Underlying Pathways of Sequenced AI feedback on Student Learning

Feedback is essential for learning, but its effectiveness relies heavily on how well it engages students in the educational process. Generative AI offers novel opportunities to efficiently produce rich, formative feedback, ranging from direct explanations to incrementally sequenced scaffolding designed to promote learner autonomy. Despite these capabilities, it is still unclear whether sequenced (layered) AI feedback -- which provides encouragement and hints before revealing the correct answer -- genuinely enhances engagement and learning outcomes. To investigate this, we randomly assigned 199 participants to receive either sequenced or non-sequenced AI-generated feedback. We evaluated its impact on learning performance, cognitive and behavioral engagement, and affective perceptions to understand how these factors mediate overall learning outcomes. Results show that sequenced feedback elicited slightly higher behavioral engagement and, as anticipated, was perceived as more encouraging and supportive of student independence. Concurrently, however, it induced a higher level of mental effort. Mediation analyses identified a positive affective pathway driven by perceived encouragement, which was completely counteracted by a negative behavioral pathway associated with the average number of tasks requiring three or more submissions; the cognitive pathway (mental effort) remained non-significant. Overall, sequenced feedback led to significantly poorer learning outcomes when compared to direct, non-sequenced feedback. These findings highlight a crucial trade-off: although sequenced AI scaffolding boosts engagement and positive user perceptions, it can have a detrimental effect on actual learning performance. By integrating analyses of outcomes, perceptions, and underlying mechanisms, this study provides nuanced insights for designing automated, AI-driven feedback systems.

cs.HC↗

Developing Authentic Simulated Learners for Mathematics Teacher Learning: Insights from Three Approaches with Large Language Models

Large Language Model (LLM) simulations, where LLMs act as students with varying approaches to learning tasks, can support teachers' noticing of student thinking. However, simulations using zero- or few-shot prompting often yield inauthentic knowledge and language, directing teachers to unrealistic reasoning. We evaluate three approaches (Fine-tuning, Multi-agent, and Direct Preference Optimization; DPO) to improve the authenticity and pedagogical utility of simulated students. All approaches improve cognitive and linguistic authenticity, compared with few-shot prompts. Interviews with elementary mathematics pre-service teachers and researchers (\textit{n} = 8) reveal distinct pedagogical affordances. The fine-tuned model produces realistic, brief responses but limits opportunities to extend students' thinking. Meanwhile, the multi-agent and DPO approaches generate explicit reasoning behind student strategies. We discuss implications for designing LLM simulations that balance authenticity with instructional utility for teacher learning.

cs.HC↗

Decoding Student Dialogue: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison and Bias Analysis of Large Language Models as Annotation Tools

Educational dialogue is critical for decoding student learning processes, yet manual annotation remains time-consuming. This study evaluates the efficacy of GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 using three prompting strategies (few-shot, single-agent, and multi-agent reflection) across diverse subjects, educational levels, and four coding dimensions. Results indicate that while multi-agent prompting achieved the highest accuracy, the results did not reach statistical significance. Accuracy proved highly context-dependent, with significantly higher performance in K-12 datasets compared to university-level data, alongside disciplinary variations within the same educational level. Performance peaked in the affective dimension but remained lowest in the cognitive dimension. Furthermore, analysis revealed four bias patterns: (1) Gemini-3 exhibited a consistent optimistic bias in the affective dimension across all subjects; (2) the cognitive dimension displayed domain-specific directional bias, characterized by systematic underestimation in Mathematics versus overestimation in Psychology; (3) both models are more prone to overestimation than underestimation within the meta-cognitive dimension; and (4) behavioral categories such as question, negotiation, and statements were frequently misclassified. These results underscore the need for context-sensitive deployment and targeted mitigation of directional biases in automated annotation.

cs.HC↗

Toward Robust Semantic Communications: Proactive Importance-Ordered Restructuring for Enhanced Unequal Error Protection

Semantic communications (SemCom) is a promising task-oriented paradigm in which semantic features exhibit non-uniform importance. Consequently, unequal error protection (UEP), which allocates resources based on semantic importance, plays a pivotal role in maximizing system utility. However, most existing schemes adopt passive importance evaluation, which neither proactively reshapes the importance distribution nor explores its impact on UEP performance. In this paper, we propose a novel importance-ordered semantic feature restructuring (ISFR) scheme that proactively enforces a descending importance hierarchy and jointly optimizes multi-dimensional resources to improve system utility. Specifically, modules with decreasing retention probabilities and increasing distortion levels are employed, which drive the model to concentrate key semantics into front-end features and thus strengthen importance differentiation. Moreover, a joint optimization problem that jointly optimizes channel matching, feature selection, modulation schemes, and power allocation is formulated to minimize the importance-weighted total semantic distortion. To solve this non-convex problem, a hierarchical decoupling strategy is proposed, which decomposes it into four tractable subproblems. This approach leverages the ordered prior to drastically prune the search space for feature selection and modulation, while integrating greedy-based channel matching and convex power allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ISFR scheme outperforms traditional uniform importance-based schemes under harsh channel conditions and limited resources, validating the significant robustness improvement enabled by the concentration of key semantic information.

eess.SP↗

Secure and Robust Watermarking for AI-generated Images: A Comprehensive Survey

The rapid progress of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has enabled the effortless synthesis of high-quality visual content, while simultaneously raising pressing concerns about intellectual property protection, authenticity, and accountability. Among various countermeasures, watermarking has emerged as a fundamental mechanism for tracing provenance, distinguishing AI-generated images from natural content, and supporting trustworthy digital ecosystems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of AI-generated image watermarking, systematically reviewing the field from five perspectives: (1) the formalization and fundamental components of image watermarking systems; (2) existing watermarking methodologies and their comparative characteristics; (3) evaluation metrics in terms of visual fidelity, embedding capacity, and detectability; (4) known vulnerabilities under malicious attacks and recent advances in secure and robust watermarking designs; and (5) open challenges, emerging trends, and future research directions. The survey seeks to offer researchers a holistic understanding of watermarking technologies for AI-generated images and to facilitate their continued advancement toward secure and responsible AI-generated content practices.

cs.CR↗

How GenAI Mentor Configurations Shape Early Collaborative Dynamics: A Classroom Comparison of Individual and Shared Agents

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly embedded in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), yet little empirical research has unpacked how different configurations of AI participation reshape collaborative processes. This study investigates how GenAI configuration shapes collaborative regulation in authentic classroom settings. Two eighth-grade classes engaged in small-group creative problem-solving under two conditions: a shared-AI configuration, in which each group interacted with a single AI mentor, and an individual-AI configuration, in which each student accessed a personal AI instance. Using multi-layer discourse coding combined with lag sequential analysis (LSA) and ordered network analysis (ONA), we examined interaction distribution, AI-student coupling, shared regulation processes, and teacher orchestration. Results reveal distinct regulatory dynamics across configurations. Shared AI access promoted convergence-oriented collaboration, with stronger alignment of shared regulatory states and more coordinated group-level reasoning. In contrast, individual AI access distributed support across learners, producing more exploratory and evaluative cycles but also more fragmented interaction patterns, accompanied by increased teacher intervention to manage divergence. These findings suggest that AI configuration functions as a structural design variable that reorganizes the regulatory ecology of classroom collaboration.

cs.HC↗

The optimal hypercontractive constants for $\mathbb{Z}_3$ and biased Bernoulli random variables

We resolve a folklore problem of determining the optimal hypercontractive constants $r_{p,q}(\mathbb{Z}_3)$ for the cyclic group $\mathbb{Z}_3$ for all $1 < p < q < \infty$. More precisely, we have \[ r_{p,q}(\mathbb{Z}_3) = \frac{(1 + 2x)(1 - y)}{(1 + 2y)(1 - x)}, \] where $(x,y)$ is the unique solution in the open unit square $(0,1)\times (0,1)$ to the system of equations \begin{align*} \left\{ \begin{aligned} &\frac{1}{1+2x}\Big(\frac{1+2x^p}{3}\Big)^{\frac{1}{p}}=\frac{1}{1+2y}\Big(\frac{1+2y^q}{3}\Big)^{\frac{1}{q}},\\ &\frac{(1-x)(1-x^{p-1})}{1+2x^p}=\frac{(1-y)(1-y^{q-1})}{1+2y^q}. \end{aligned} \right. \end{align*} Consequently, for rational $p, q\in \mathbb{Q}$, the constants $r_{p,q}(\mathbb{Z}_3)$ are algebraic numbers which generally admit no radical expressions, since their often rather complicated minimal polynomials may have non-solvable Galois groups. Our formalism relies on a key observation: the existence of nontrivial critical extremizers. This approach can also be adapted to resolve a long-standing open problem -- determining all optimal $(p,q)$-hypercontractive constants for biased Bernoulli random variables, which are closely related to noise operators. Several noteworthy phenomena emerge from numerical simulations: the monotonicity of the hypercontractive constants in the parameters, and the appearance of intriguing limit shapes. These phenomena merit further investigation.

math.FA↗

MarkSweep: A No-box Removal Attack on AI-Generated Image Watermarking via Noise Intensification and Frequency-aware Denoising

AI watermarking embeds invisible signals within images to provide provenance information and identify content as AI-generated. In this paper, we introduce MarkSweep, a novel watermark removal attack that effectively erases the embedded watermarks from AI-generated images without degrading visual quality. MarkSweep first amplifies watermark noise in high-frequency regions via edge-aware Gaussian perturbations and injects it into clean images for training a denoising network. This network then integrates two modules, the learnable frequency decomposition module and the frequency-aware fusion module, to suppress amplified noise and eliminate watermark traces. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that invisible watermarks are highly vulnerable to MarkSweep, which effectively removes embedded watermarks, reducing the bit accuracy of HiDDeN and Stable Signature watermarking schemes to below 67%, while preserving perceptual quality of AI-generated images.

cs.CR↗

ResT: Reshaping Token-Level Policy Gradients for Tool-Use Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) transcend passive generation and act as goal-directed agents by invoking external tools. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled framework for optimizing these emergent tool-use policies, yet the prevailing paradigm relies exclusively on sparse outcome rewards and lacks consideration of the particularity of tool-use tasks, inflating policy-gradient variance and resulting in inefficient training. To better understand and address these challenges, we first establish a theoretical link between policy entropy and training stability of tool-use tasks, which reveals that structured, low-entropy tokens are primary determinants of rewards. Motivated by this insight, we propose \textbf{Res}haped \textbf{T}oken-level policy gradients (\textbf{ResT}) for tool-use tasks. ResT reshapes the policy gradient through entropy-informed token reweighting, progressively upweighting reasoning tokens as training proceeds. This entropy-aware scheme enables a smooth shift from structural correctness to semantic reasoning and stabilizes convergence in multi-turn tool-use tasks. Evaluation on BFCL and API-Bank shows that ResT achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming prior methods by up to $8.76\%$. When fine-tuned on a 4B base LLM, ResT further surpasses GPT-4o by $4.11\%$ on single-turn tasks and $1.50\%$ on multi-turn base tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/1229095296/ResT_Tool_use_LLM.git.

cs.CL↗

Modeling Endogenous Logic: Causal Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Model for Explainable Multi-Behavior Recommendation

Existing multi-behavior recommendations tend to prioritize performance at the expense of explainability, while current explainable methods suffer from limited generalizability due to their reliance on external information. Neuro-Symbolic integration offers a promising avenue for explainability by combining neural networks with symbolic logic rule reasoning. Concurrently, we posit that user behavior chains inherently embody an endogenous logic suitable for explicit reasoning. However, these observational multiple behaviors are plagued by confounders, causing models to learn spurious correlations. By incorporating causal inference into this Neuro-Symbolic framework, we propose a novel Causal Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning model for Explainable Multi-Behavior Recommendation (CNRE). CNRE operationalizes the endogenous logic by simulating a human-like decision-making process. Specifically, CNRE first employs hierarchical preference propagation to capture heterogeneous cross-behavior dependencies. Subsequently, it models the endogenous logic rule implicit in the user's behavior chain based on preference strength, and adaptively dispatches to the corresponding neural-logic reasoning path (e.g., conjunction, disjunction). This process generates an explainable causal mediator that approximates an ideal state isolated from confounding effects. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate CNRE's significant superiority over state-of-the-art baselines, offering multi-level explainability from model design and decision process to recommendation results.

cs.AI↗

CtrlCoT: Dual-Granularity Chain-of-Thought Compression for Controllable Reasoning

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning but incurs high latency and memory cost due to verbose traces, motivating CoT compression with preserved correctness. Existing methods either shorten CoTs at the semantic level, which is often conservative, or prune tokens aggressively, which can miss task-critical cues and degrade accuracy. Moreover, combining the two is non-trivial due to sequential dependency, task-agnostic pruning, and distribution mismatch. We propose \textbf{CtrlCoT}, a dual-granularity CoT compression framework that harmonizes semantic abstraction and token-level pruning through three components: Hierarchical Reasoning Abstraction produces CoTs at multiple semantic granularities; Logic-Preserving Distillation trains a logic-aware pruner to retain indispensable reasoning cues (e.g., numbers and operators) across pruning ratios; and Distribution-Alignment Generation aligns compressed traces with fluent inference-time reasoning styles to avoid fragmentation. On MATH-500 with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, CtrlCoT uses 30.7\% fewer tokens while achieving 7.6 percentage points higher than the strongest baseline, demonstrating more efficient and reliable reasoning. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/fanzhenxuan/Ctrl-CoT.

cs.AI↗

Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese

Ancient people translated classical Chinese into Japanese using a system of annotations placed around characters. We abstract this process as sequence tagging tasks and fit them into modern language technologies. The research on this annotation and translation system faces a low resource problem. We alleviate this problem by introducing an LLM-based annotation pipeline and constructing a new dataset from digitized open-source translation data. We show that in the low-resource setting, introducing auxiliary Chinese NLP tasks enhances the training of sequence tagging tasks. We also evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on this task. While they achieve high scores on direct machine translation, our method could serve as a supplement to LLMs to improve the quality of character's annotation.

cs.CL↗

LLM-based Multimodal Feedback Produces Equivalent Learning and Better Student Perceptions than Educator Feedback

Providing timely, targeted, and multimodal feedback helps students quickly correct errors, build deep understanding and stay motivated, yet making it at scale remains a challenge. This study introduces a real-time AI-facilitated multimodal feedback system that integrates structured textual explanations with dynamic multimedia resources, including the retrieved most relevant slide page references and streaming AI audio narration. In an online crowdsourcing experiment, we compared this system against fixed business-as-usual feedback by educators across three dimensions: (1) learning effectiveness, (2) learner engagement, (3) perceived feedback quality and value. Results showed that AI multimodal feedback achieved learning gains equivalent to original educator feedback while significantly outperforming it on perceived clarity, specificity, conciseness, motivation, satisfaction, and reducing cognitive load, with comparable correctness, trust, and acceptance. Process logs revealed distinct engagement patterns: for multiple-choice questions, educator feedback encouraged more submissions; for open-ended questions, AI-facilitated targeted suggestions lowered revision barriers and promoted iterative improvement. These findings highlight the potential of AI multimodal feedback to provide scalable, real-time, and context-aware support that both reduces instructor workload and enhances student experience.

cs.HC↗