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Jie Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Jie Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Mindscape-Aware Retrieval Augmented Generation for Improved Long Context Understanding

Humans understand long and complex texts by relying on a holistic semantic representation of the content. This global view helps organize prior knowledge, interpret new information, and integrate evidence dispersed across a document, as revealed by the Mindscape-Aware Capability of humans in psychology. Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems lack such guidance and therefore struggle with long-context tasks. In this paper, we propose Mindscape-Aware RAG (MiA-RAG), the first framework to formulate mindscape-aware retrieval and generation as a unified conditioning paradigm for LLM-based RAG. MiA-RAG builds a mindscape through hierarchical summarization and conditions both retrieval and generation on this global semantic representation. This enables the retriever to form enriched query embeddings and the generator to reason over retrieved evidence within a coherent global context. We evaluate MiA-RAG across diverse long-context and bilingual benchmarks for evidence-based understanding and global sense-making. It consistently surpasses baselines, and further analysis shows that it aligns local details with a coherent global representation, enabling more human-like long-context retrieval and reasoning.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Identity-Consistent Multi-Pose Generation of Contactless Fingerprints

Contactless fingerprint recognition has gained increasing attention due to its advantages in hygiene and acquisition flexibility. However, the absence of physical contact constraints introduces severe nonlinear geometric distortions caused by free finger poses in 3D space, resulting in a substantial cross-modal domain gap between contactless and conventional contact-based fingerprints. Existing solutions largely rely on explicit geometric correction or image enhancement, which are fragile under extreme pose variations. In this paper, we propose Identity-Consistent Multi-Pose Generation of Contactless Fingerprints (IMPOSE), a physics-inspired framework that synthesizes identity-preserving, multi-pose contactless fingerprint samples to empower recognition models. IMPOSE consists of three stages: (1) rolled fingerprint identity generation via latent diffusion with discrete codebook representations, (2) cross-modal translation from rolled to contactless modality guided by Sauvola-based local adaptive binarization as an identity anchor, and (3) physics-based multi-pose simulation through 3D finger model texture mapping and projection. The generated samples maintain strict identity consistency at the ridge topology level and spatial alignment with standard fingerprint coordinate space. Extensive experiments on the UWA and PolyU CL2CB databases demonstrate that fine-tuning fixed-length dense descriptors (FDD) with IMPOSE-synthesized data achieves state-of-the-art cross-modal matching, reducing EER to 8.74% on UWA and 2.26% on PolyU CL2CB. Synthetic data also yields consistent gains across mainstream representations including DeepPrint and AFRNet, and the hybrid strategy combining synthetic and real data achieves the best overall results. The code and generated samples are available at https://github.com/Yu-Yy/IMPOSE.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Think Less, Locally: Local Preference Learning for Reasoning Compression

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance on challenging tasks, but their long chain-of-thought often incurs substantial inference costs by continuing to deliberate after sufficient information has been obtained. Existing reasoning compression methods primarily operate on reasoning trajectories, paying less attention to the local decision of whether further reasoning is necessary given the current state. We propose LoCo, a local preference learning method for reasoning compression. LoCo detects candidate overthinking states from the model's own traces, freezes the corresponding reasoning prefixes, regenerates shorter verified continuations from the same states, and trains on the resulting state-conditioned preference pairs with DPO. This formulation teaches the model when to continue reasoning and when to conclude, rather than simply encouraging shorter trajectories overall. We construct training data entirely from self-generated mathematical traces and evaluate LoCo on five mathematical and three code generation benchmarks. LoCo reduces completion length by 41.7\%--45.4\% on mathematics and 23.4\%--36.3\% on code, while maintaining or improving accuracy and achieving the best AUC across all code benchmarks. LoCo consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off on mathematics and transfers effectively to code generation despite math-only training, demonstrating the cross-domain generality of local preference learning for reasoning compression. The code and model will be publicly released at https://github.com/MuyaoYuan/LoCo.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Remembering Is Not Enough: Refining Memories and Learning When to Use Them in Multi-Agent Systems

Memory helps LLM-based multi-agent systems reuse experience, but stored advice can be flawed or applied in the wrong situation. Team-level success or failure alone cannot reliably show whether a memory needs correction or should not have been used. We propose DiscernMem, a training-free framework that improves both memory quality and memory use. To improve quality, Defect-Aware Memory Refinement (DMR) compares team executions with a single memory and with no memory, diagnoses rule defects, and tests repairs on current and earlier tasks to guard against losing previously useful behavior. To guide appropriate use, Boundary-Learning Meta-Memory (BLM) records each memory's past uses and effects, learning when its owner role should apply or avoid it based on task context and incoming messages. Together, these components help teams correct flawed experience while retaining useful rules that were applied incorrectly. Experiments with Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 on four benchmarks show that DiscernMem achieves the highest average score on AutoGen, CAMEL, and MacNet, exceeding the strongest reported baselines by 0.51-4.32 points. It leads on code generation and symbolic planning across all three systems, including a PDDL score of 37.71 versus 28.48 on CAMEL.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Quantitative Rigidity of Ricci Nonnegative Manifolds via the Regular Green Constant

For a Ricci non-negative non-parabolic manifold $(M^{n\ge3},g)$, assuming the minimal normalized Green function admits the asymptotic expansion $G=r^{2-n}+H_p+O_1(r)$, we prove the scaling invariant defect $H_pR^{n-2}$ controls the geometry of the geodesic ball quantitatively, $\frac{1}{R}d_{GH}(B_p(R),B_0^{\mathbb{R}^n}(R))\le C_n \left(H_p R^{n-2}\right)^{\frac{1}{88(n+1)(4n+1)}}$.

math.DG↗
arXiv2026

SemaPLC: A Project-Grounded, Verification-Gated Agent Harness for PLC Code Generation

In industrial practice, AI-generated programmable logic controller (PLC) code must integrate with existing projects and implement the required behavior across scan cycles. Compilation alone does not establish runtime behavior, and subsequent edits can invalidate earlier verification results. We present SemaPLC, a project-grounded, verification-gated agent harness for PLC code generation. The harness combines project context and reusable PLC skills with specification review, compilation, and live-runtime validation. Its completion gate requires recorded checks to meet acceptance criteria for the current implementation. Edits invalidate previous verdicts, and failed checks guide bounded repair. We evaluate SemaPLC on 117 independent-POU tasks and 65 project-context tasks across seven language-model backbones. SemaPLC outperforms the evaluated baselines on both metrics for every backbone. Its mean verified-pass rate and dynamic score reach 72.6% and 52.2, exceeding the strongest baseline means by 8.7% points and 20.8 points, respectively. Verification-layer and failure analyses reveal how build recovery and output observability affect end-to-end results and identify behavioral errors that remain after compilation. We apply the harness in KUKA's iiQworks product environment for PLC development and discuss engineering lessons for its industrial integration and deployment. The industrial use indicates the agent assistance substantially improves PLC development efficiency by 45%.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

MLEvolve: A Self-Evolving Framework for Automated Machine Learning Algorithm Discovery

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to long-horizon tasks such as scientific discovery and machine learning engineering (MLE), where sustained self-evolution becomes a key capability. However, existing MLE agents suffer from isolated exploration, inefficient experience reuse, and lack of hierarchical control, which together hinder long-horizon optimization. We present MLEvolve, an LLM-based self-evolving multi-agent framework for end-to-end machine learning algorithm discovery. By extending tree search to Progressive MCGS, MLEvolve enables cross-branch information flow through graph-based reference edges and gradually shifts the search from broad exploration to focused exploitation with an entropy-inspired progressive schedule. To allow the agent to evolve with accumulated experience, we introduce Retrospective Memory, which combines a cold-start domain knowledge base with a dynamic global memory for task-specific experience retrieval and reuse. For stable long-horizon iteration, we further decouple strategic planning from code generation with adaptive coding modes. Evaluation on MLE-Bench shows that MLEvolve achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple dimensions including average medal rate and valid submission rate under a 12-hour budget (half the standard runtime). Moreover, MLEvolve also outperforms specialized algorithm discovery methods including AlphaEvolve on mathematical algorithm optimization tasks, demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/InternScience/MLEvolve.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

MENTOR: A Metacognition-Driven Self-Evolution Framework for Uncovering and Mitigating Implicit Domain Risks in LLMs

Ensuring the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for real-world deployment. However, current safety measures often fail to address implicit, domain-specific risks. To investigate this gap, we introduce a dataset of 3,000 annotated queries spanning education, finance, and management. Evaluations across 14 leading LLMs reveal a concerning vulnerability: an average jailbreak success rate of 57.8\%. In response, we propose MENTOR, a metacognition-driven self-evolution framework. MENTOR performs metacognitive self-assessment, using strategies such as perspective-taking and consequential reasoning to uncover latent model misalignments. MENTOR couples single-pass rule-guided inference for routine requests with a selectively invoked metacognitive evolution cycle that revises residual unsafe responses, distills successful corrections into a dynamic rule graph, and compiles validated rules into activation-level steering signals for future inference. Experiments demonstrate that MENTOR substantially reduces attack success rates across all tested domains and outperforms existing safety alignment methods. The code and dataset for MENTOR are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MENTOR-Evo.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Sage-A1.5: From Long-Horizon Execution to Scientific Exploration with Capability Composition

In this report, we introduce Sage-A1.5, a 35B Mixture-of-Experts agentic model that builds on A1 to advance long-horizon problem solving through adaptive capability composition. Compared with A1, Sage-A1.5 learns not only to solve individual tasks, but also to organize work and revise its approach during execution. Sage-A1.5 highlights three improvements: agentic orchestration, verification, and open scientific discovery. First, agentic orchestration extends single-agent execution through task delegation and parallel collaboration among subagents with isolated contexts, enabling complex tasks to be decomposed and addressed concurrently and supporting efficient execution while reducing interference across concurrent subagents. Second, agentic verification strengthens long-horizon reliability through progress checking, evidence validation, and reflective strategy revision, allowing the agent to recognize unproductive search paths and pursue alternative approaches. Third, open scientific discovery extends agentic capabilities beyond answering predefined questions to conducting exploratory research, connecting scientific inquiry with interactive analysis and inspectable research artifacts. We showcase these capabilities through complicated agentic tasks and multidisciplinary scientific applications. Besides, we hope Sage-A1.5 provides the community with an accessible foundation for open scientific discovery, offering a practical path from long-horizon task execution to collaborative, verifiable, and inspectable scientific exploration.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

State World Models: Execute the Rules, Generate the Pixels

Existing world models can generate action-conditioned video from a single image. Many focus on camera movement, allowing users to explore the generated scene. However, navigation alone does not ensure that an action follows persistent rules when its outcome depends on state that is invisible in the current frame. We present Stateful Harness, a framework that separates world evolution from video rendering to support stateful and rule-governed interaction. It maintains an evolving world state under specified rules, renders each resulting event with a frozen video model, and uses the generated clip to update the world state for the next turn. At each turn, the harness resolves the action selected by the user and compiles the resulting event into an instruction, while a preview clip from an editable 3D scene provides spatial and camera guidance. To evaluate rule compliance, we build WorldState-Bench, a benchmark of 50 counterfactual twin pairs that share an initial frame and action but differ in hidden state and required outcome. Under rule-only prompting, the best of the 11 evaluated video backends produces the required endings for both cases in 32% of pairs. For MiniMax-H3, specifying the required endings raises this rate from 32% to 64%, while the full harness reaches 92% with the same frozen model. These results support separating rule execution from video rendering for world interactions with hidden state.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

MMATR-X: High-Resolution Optical-SAR Joint Pretraining via Conditioned Alignment and Degraded-Target Prediction

Joint optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) pretraining seeks cross-modal gains over representations learned from either modality alone. This is challenging because the modalities share only partial information, and their correspondence varies across pairs with scene context, acquisition timing, sensor configuration, and spatial resolution. In particular, finer resolution exposes more detailed modality-specific optical appearance and SAR backscatter, further complicating cross-modal supervision. Existing methods encourage cross-modal agreement through representation alignment or cross-modal prediction. Under simplified models of partial, pair-dependent correspondence, we show why a fixed alignment relation can be insufficient and characterize prediction ambiguity arising from target variation unresolved by the source representation. These analyses motivate CoDe-MAE, a masked-autoencoding framework for high-resolution optical-SAR joint pretraining. Its Conditioned Contrastive Learning (CCL) aligns cross-attention-conditioned representations, while Cross-modal Degraded-Target Prediction (CDP) predicts transformed targets to balance conditional predictability and retained supervision. We curate OSPretrain-1M, a 1M-sample optical-SAR corpus, and use CoDe-MAE to pretrain MMATR-X, which achieves leading transfer performance across optical-only, SAR-only, and dual-modal tasks. Controlled experiments on remote-sensing optical-SAR, optical-DEM, and indoor RGB-depth pairs further support these design principles across heterogeneous modality pairs. Code: \url{https://github.com/scenarri/MMATR-X}.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

PLANE: Plug-and-Play Fine-Grained Visual Experts for Hallucination Mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) commonly suffer from hallucinations, which appear as fabricating non-existent objects or outputting incorrect attributes and spatial relationships in images. Previous works empirically indicate that CLIP-style vision encoders tend to focus on primary objects while ignoring image details, which is one of the causes of hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose plug-and-play fine-grained visual experts (PLANE) comprising two components: LoRA visual experts operating on CLIP for multi-aspect image encoding, and an instruction-aware gate network for adaptive image feature fusion. During training, we construct a fine-grained image-caption pairs dataset, where images are described from three aspects: objects, attributes, and relations between objects. Image-caption pairs from different aspects are used to train the three fine-grained LoRA experts respectively. Aiming at comprehensively evaluate our method's capabilities, we manually annotate a fine-grained hallucination evaluation benchmark for LVLMs which is GPT4-independent during evaluation phase (GIFT). We conduct experiments both on popular hallucination evaluation benchmarks and GIFT. The results show that our method effectively reduces hallucinations across models of different types and sizes while introducing minimal inference latency. Compared to advanced baselines, our model also demonstrates superior performance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

F2F-AP: Flow-to-Future Asynchronous Policy for Real-time Dynamic Manipulation

Asynchronous inference has emerged as a prevalent paradigm in robotic manipulation, achieving significant progress in ensuring trajectory smoothness and efficiency. However, a systemic challenge remains unresolved, as inherent latency causes generated actions to inevitably lag behind the real-time environment. This issue is particularly exacerbated in dynamic scenarios, where such temporal misalignment severely compromises the policy's ability to interpret and react to rapidly evolving surroundings. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages predicted object flow to synthesize future observations, incorporating a flow-based contrastive learning objective to align the visual feature representations of predicted observations with ground-truth future states. Empowered by this anticipated visual context, our asynchronous policy gains the capacity for proactive planning and motion, enabling it to explicitly compensate for latency and robustly execute manipulation tasks involving actively moving objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances responsiveness and success rates in complex dynamic manipulation tasks.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

WorkRover: Scaling Long-Horizon Cowork Agent Training Via Recursive Environment Evolution

Scaling interactive environments is important for training long-horizon agents through reinforcement learning. These environments often require further testing and refinement after initial generation, and correcting defects in a task may also require updating its work context and verifier. However, existing construction pipelines offer limited support for such iterative refinement while keeping these components aligned. We introduce WorkRover, a framework for training long-horizon cowork agents through recursive environment evolution. Its harness-driven synthesis enables construction agents to jointly build and validate semantically aligned work contexts, executable tasks, and evidence-grounded verifiers, adapting their actions to workspace state and execution feedback rather than following a fixed construction workflow. To support environment evolution, we introduce Factorial Compatibility Replay (FCR), which uses rollout feedback to evaluate combinations of component revisions through dependency-closed replay and selects the smallest validated repair among tested candidates while preserving task requirements and evaluation constraints. To provide finer-grained training signals, we propose Verifier-to-Turn Credit Assignment (VTCA), which augments trajectory-level GRPO advantages with signals from deterministic workspace-progress checks and assigns a bounded share of positive-progress credit to prerequisite turns using recorded tool-output and artifact dependencies. Using WorkRover, we post-train Qwen3.5-35B-A3B to obtain WorkRover-35B-A3B and evaluate it on several cowork-agent benchmarks. Its reported scores exceed those of Qwen3.5-35B-A3B by 26.27 percentage points on JobBench, 29.32 percentage points on OfficeQA Pro, and 413.25 Elo points on GDPval v2. These results suggest that WorkRover offers a promising foundation for scalable training of long-horizon cowork agents.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

TextualRL: Textual Reinforcement Learning for Context Management

LLM agents can adapt to task feedback by revising the textual context that guides their behavior, without changing their model parameters. However, turning execution rewards into reusable context updates is challenging: individual trajectories offer limited comparative evidence about what to change, while task-specific fixes may overgeneralize when incorporated into a shared context. We introduce TextualRL, a gradient-free reinforcement learning framework that treats a group of rollouts from the same task under the same context, rather than an isolated trajectory, as the unit of policy critique. Groupwise Policy Critique contrasts successful and failed rollouts within a task; when outcomes are uniform, it draws on cross-task evidence to identify behaviors worth preserving or formulate repair hypotheses. Cross-Group Policy Update reviews the resulting proposals against evidence pooled across groups, including observations that yield no proposed edit, to refine their content and applicability. Reviewed proposals form a bounded textual patch, with adoption of the candidate context determined by held-out validation rewards. Together, these components establish a reward-driven policy optimization loop in which multiple attempts jointly inform reusable context updates. We evaluate TextualRL with five target agents on six benchmarks. Averaged over the six benchmarks, TextualRL improves test accuracy over the base model by 24.4 and 15.3 percentage points for GPT-5.5 and Qwen3.8-27B, respectively.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

LegalRewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models for Legal Preference Evaluation

Reward models are central to preference alignment for legal tasks, yet existing reward model benchmarks are still primarily centered on general-domain preferences. In this work, we introduce LegalRewardBench, the first human-verified benchmark for evaluating reward models in the legal domain. The benchmark organizes legal preference evaluation into five capability levels: knowledge, understanding, analysis, decision, and writing, and preference examples are constructed through rubric-guided automatic judging combined with human verification. We evaluate three families of judges, covering both general and fine-tuned models, and generative and discriminative architectures. Experimental results show that strong general-purpose generative models are currently the most robust legal reward models, while existing fine-tuned reward models transfer less reliably to legal preference evaluation. We also conduct detailed comparisons of input organizations and training strategies.

cs.CL↗