arXiv subjects

Jindong Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Jindong Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

UniPath: Adaptive Coordination of Understanding and Generation for Unified Multimodal Reasoning

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to integrate understanding and generation within a single architecture. However, it remains underexplored how to effectively coordinate these two capabilities for more effective and efficient reasoning. Existing coordination approaches either perform coupling during training, without explicit inference-time coordination, or impose a fixed coordination pattern for all inputs. In this work, we show that multimodal tasks exhibit substantial coordination-path diversity: different inputs favor different coordination paths. This suggests that exploiting such diversity is key to improving performance. We propose UniPath, a framework for adaptively modeling and exploiting coordination-path diversity. Instead of enforcing a single coordination pattern, we represent task solving as the selection and execution of a path, ranging from direct answering to textual inference, visual-thought construction, and hypothesis-based exploration. We construct role-aligned trajectories to train a path-conditioned executor and introduce a lightweight planner mechanism to enable input-dependent path selection. Experiments show that leveraging coordination-path diversity improves performance over fixed coordination strategies while providing interpretable intermediate behaviors. The code is available at:https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/TorchUMM/tree/main/src/umm/post_training/unipath.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2026

AgentReview: Exploring Peer Review Dynamics with LLM Agents

Peer review is fundamental to the integrity and advancement of scientific publication. Traditional methods of peer review analyses often rely on exploration and statistics of existing peer review data, which do not adequately address the multivariate nature of the process, account for the latent variables, and are further constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. We introduce AgentReview, the first large language model (LLM) based peer review simulation framework, which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. Our study reveals significant insights, including a notable 37.1% variation in paper decisions due to reviewers' biases, supported by sociological theories such as the social influence theory, altruism fatigue, and authority bias. We believe that this study could offer valuable insights to improve the design of peer review mechanisms. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ahren09/AgentReview.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Understanding and Mitigating Bias Inheritance in LLM-based Data Augmentation on Downstream Tasks

Generating synthetic datasets via large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to improve LLM performance. However, LLMs inherently reflect biases in their training data, leading to a critical challenge: when models are trained on synthetic data, they may propagate and amplify the inherent biases that can significantly impact fairness and robustness on downstream tasks-a phenomenon we term bias inheritance. This work presents the first systematic investigation in understanding, analyzing, and mitigating bias inheritance. We fine-tune LLMs with a combined dataset of real and LLM-augmented data with varied bias ratio as the proportion of augmented data. Through systematic experiments across 10 classification and generation tasks, we analyze how 6 different types of biases manifest. Our results indicate that bias inheritance harms downstream task performance in bias directly-related classification and generation tasks. Then, our analysis identifies three key misalignment factors: misalignment of values, group data, and data distributions. Based on these insights, we propose three mitigation strategies: token-based, mask-based, and loss-based approaches, which can work differently on various tasks and bias, indicating the substantial challenges to mitigate bias inheritance. We hope this work can provide insights to the research of LLM data augmentation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC): Sample Collection, Data Curation, and Beyond

Large-scale data collection is essential for developing personalized training data, mitigating the shortage of training data, and fine-tuning specialized models. However, creating high-quality datasets quickly and accurately remains a challenge due to annotation errors, the substantial time and costs associated with human labor. To address these issues, we propose Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC), an innovative methodology that automates dataset creation with negligible cost and high efficiency. Taking the image classification task as a starting point, ADC leverages LLMs for the detailed class design and code generation to collect relevant samples via search engines, significantly reducing the need for manual annotation and speeding up the data generation process. To demonstrate ADC at scale, we construct Clothing-ADC: a dataset of over 1 million images spanning 12 main classes and 12,000 fine-grained subclasses. Our automated curation achieves 79\% agreement with human annotators and reduces label noise from 22.2\% to 10.7\%. Despite these advantages, ADC also encounters real-world challenges such as label errors (label noise) and imbalanced data distributions (label bias). We provide open-source software that incorporates existing methods for label error detection, robust learning under noisy and biased data, ensuring a higher-quality training data and more robust model training procedure. Furthermore, we design three benchmark datasets focused on label noise detection, label noise learning, and class-imbalanced learning. These datasets are vital because there are few existing datasets specifically for label noise detection, despite its importance. Finally, we evaluate the performance of existing popular methods on these datasets, thereby facilitating further research in the field.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

On Emotion-Sensitive Decision Making of Small Language Model Agents

Small language models (SLM) are increasingly used as interactive decision-making agents, yet most decision-oriented evaluations ignore emotion as a causal factor influencing behavior. We study emotion-sensitive decision making by combining representation-level emotion induction with a structured game-theoretic evaluation. Emotional states are induced using activation steering derived from crowd-validated, real-world emotion-eliciting texts, enabling controlled and transferable interventions beyond prompt-based methods. We introduce a benchmark built around canonical decision templates that span cooperative and competitive incentives under both complete and incomplete information. These templates are instantiated using strategic scenarios from \textsc{Diplomacy}, \textsc{StarCraft II}, and diverse real-world personas. Experiments across multiple model families in various architecture and modalities, show that emotional perturbations systematically affect strategic choices, but the resulting behaviors are often unstable and not fully aligned with human expectations. Finally, we outline an approach to improve robustness to emotion-driven perturbations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

LLM-MemCluster: Empowering Large Language Models with Dynamic Memory for Text Clustering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping unsupervised learning by offering an unprecedented ability to perform text clustering based on their deep semantic understanding. However, their direct application is fundamentally limited by a lack of stateful memory for iterative refinement and the difficulty of managing cluster granularity. As a result, existing methods often rely on complex pipelines with external modules, sacrificing a truly end-to-end approach. We introduce LLM-MemCluster, a novel framework that reconceptualizes clustering as a fully LLM-native task. It leverages a Dynamic Memory to instill state awareness and a Dual-Prompt Strategy to enable the model to reason about and determine the number of clusters. Evaluated on several benchmark datasets, our tuning-free framework significantly and consistently outperforms strong baselines. LLM-MemCluster presents an effective, interpretable, and truly end-to-end paradigm for LLM-based text clustering.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

UniGame: Turning a Unified Multimodal Model Into Its Own Adversary

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have shown impressive performance in both understanding and generation with a single architecture. However, UMMs still exhibit a fundamental inconsistency: understanding favors compact embeddings, whereas generation favors reconstruction-rich representations. This structural trade-off produces misaligned decision boundaries, degraded cross-modal coherence, and heightened vulnerability under distributional and adversarial shifts. In this paper, we present UniGame, a self-adversarial post-training framework that directly targets the inconsistencies. By applying a lightweight perturber at the shared token interface, UniGame enables the generation branch to actively seek and challenge fragile understanding, turning the model itself into its own adversary. Experiments demonstrate that UniGame significantly improves the consistency (+4.6%). Moreover, it also achieves substantial improvements in understanding (+3.6%), generation (+0.02)on GenEval, out-of-distribution and adversarial robustness (+4.8% and +6.2% on NaturalBench and AdVQA). The framework is architecture-agnostic, introduces less than 1% additional parameters, and is complementary to existing post-training methods. These results position adversarial self-play as a general and effective principle for enhancing the coherence, stability, and unified competence of future multimodal foundation models. The official code is available at: https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/TorchUMM

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Corruption-Aware Training of Latent Video Diffusion Models for Robust Text-to-Video Generation

Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs) have achieved state-of-the-art generative quality for image and video generation; however, they remain brittle under noisy conditioning, where small perturbations in text or multimodal embeddings can cascade over timesteps and cause semantic drift. Existing corruption strategies from image diffusion (Gaussian, Uniform) fail in video settings because static noise disrupts temporal fidelity. In this paper, we propose CAT-LVDM, a corruption-aware training framework with structured, data-aligned noise injection tailored for video diffusion. Our two operators, Batch-Centered Noise Injection (BCNI) and Spectrum-Aware Contextual Noise (SACN), align perturbations with batch semantics or spectral dynamics to preserve coherence. CAT-LVDM yields substantial gains: BCNI reduces FVD by 31.9 percent on WebVid-2M, MSR-VTT, and MSVD, while SACN improves UCF-101 by 12.3 percent, outperforming Gaussian, Uniform, and even large diffusion baselines like DEMO (2.3B) and Lavie (3B) despite training on 5x less data. Ablations confirm the unique value of low-rank, data-aligned noise, and theory establishes why these operators tighten robustness and generalization bounds. CAT-LVDM thus sets a new framework for robust video diffusion, and our experiments show that it can also be extended to autoregressive generation and multimodal video understanding LLMs. Code, models, and samples are available at https://github.com/chikap421/catlvdm

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Self-Corrected Image Generation with Explainable Latent Rewards

Despite significant progress in text-to-image generation, aligning outputs with complex prompts remains challenging, particularly for fine-grained semantics and spatial relations. This difficulty stems from the feed-forward nature of generation, which requires anticipating alignment without fully understanding the output. In contrast, evaluating generated images is more tractable. Motivated by this asymmetry, we propose xLARD, a self-correcting framework that uses multimodal large language models to guide generation through Explainable LAtent RewarDs. xLARD introduces a lightweight corrector that refines latent representations based on structured feedback from model-generated references. A key component is a differentiable mapping from latent edits to interpretable reward signals, enabling continuous latent-level guidance from non-differentiable image-level evaluations. This mechanism allows the model to understand, assess, and correct itself during generation. Experiments across diverse generation and editing tasks show that xLARD improves semantic alignment and visual fidelity while maintaining generative priors. Code is available at https://yinyiluo.github.io/xLARD/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

KnowledgeSmith: Uncovering Knowledge Updating in LLMs with Model Editing and Unlearning

Knowledge editing and machine unlearning are two popular approaches for large language models (LLMs) to stay up-to-date. However, the knowledge updating mechanism of LLMs remains largely unexplored due to insufficient, isolated, and small-scale evaluation. For instance, are LLMs similar to humans in modifying certain knowledge? What differs editing and unlearning as training data increases? This paper proposes KnowledgeSmith, a unified framework to systematically understand the updating mechanism of LLMs. We first cast editing and unlearning as instances of one constrained optimization problem. Then, we propose an automatic dataset generator that provides structured interventions across multiple graph levels and data scales, enabling controlled studies of how different modification strategies propagate through model knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate nuanced insights over knowledge propagation, plasticity scaling, consistency, and robustness. For instance, our results show that LLMs do not exhibit similar updating as humans for different levels of knowledge, and there exists consistency-capacity trade-off. We hope our findings can offer suggestions to the design of more reliable and scalable strategies. Code: https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/KnowledgeSmith.git

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Computational Multi-Agents Society Experiments: Social Modeling Framework Based on Generative Agents

This paper introduces CMASE, a framework for Computational Multi-Agent Society Experiments that integrates generative agent-based modeling with virtual ethnographic methods to support researcher embedding, interactive participation, and mechanism-oriented intervention in virtual social environments. By transforming the simulation into a simulated ethnographic field, CMASE shifts the researcher from an external operator to an embedded participant. Specifically, the framework is designed to achieve three core capabilities: (1) enabling real-time human-computer interaction that allows researchers to dynamically embed themselves into the system to characterize complex social intervention processes; (2) reconstructing the generative logic of social phenomena by combining the rigor of computational experiments with the interpretative depth of traditional ethnography; and (3) providing a predictive foundation with causal explanatory power to make forward-looking judgments without sacrificing empirical accuracy. Experimental results show that CMASE can not only simulate complex phenomena, but also generate behavior trajectories consistent with both statistical patterns and mechanistic explanations. These findings demonstrate CMASE's methodological value for intervention modeling, highlighting its potential to advance interdisciplinary integration in the social sciences. The official code is available at: https://github.com/armihia/CMASE .

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CAReDiO: Cultural Alignment via Representativeness and Distinctiveness Guided Data Optimization

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed across diverse regions, aligning them with pluralistic cultures is crucial for improving user engagement and mitigating cultural conflicts. Recent work has curated, either synthesized or manually annotated, culture-specific corpora for alignment. Nevertheless, inspired by cultural theories, we recognize they face two key challenges. (1) Representativeness: These corpora inadequately capture the target culture's core characteristics, causing insufficient cultural coverage and redundancy; (2) Distinctiveness: They fail to distinguish the unique nuances of the target culture from patterns shared across relevant ones, hindering precise culture modeling. To handle these challenges, we introduce CAReDiO, a novel data optimization framework that alternately optimizes culture-sensitive questions and responses according to two information-theoretic objectives in an in-context manner, enhancing both cultural representativeness and distinctiveness of constructed data. Extensive experiments on 15 cultures demonstrate that CAReDiO can create high-quality data with richer cultural information and enable efficient alignment of small open-source or large proprietary LLMs with as few as 200 training samples, consistently outperforming previous datasets in both multi-choice and open-ended benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Classroom AI: Large Language Models as Grade-Specific Teachers

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution to complement traditional teaching and address global teacher shortages that affect hundreds of millions of children, but they fail to provide grade-appropriate responses for students at different educational levels. We introduce a framework for finetuning LLMs to generate age-appropriate educational content across six grade levels, from lower elementary to adult education. Our framework successfully adapts explanations to match students' comprehension capacities without sacrificing factual correctness. This approach integrates seven established readability metrics through a clustering method and builds a comprehensive dataset for grade-specific content generation. Evaluations across multiple datasets with 208 human participants demonstrate substantial improvements in grade-level alignment, achieving a 35.64 percentage point increase compared to prompt-based methods while maintaining response accuracy. AI-assisted learning tailored to different grade levels has the potential to advance educational engagement and equity.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Harnessing Temporal Databases for Systematic Evaluation of Factual Time-Sensitive Question-Answering in Large Language Models

Facts change over time, making it essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle time-sensitive factual knowledge accurately and reliably. Although factual Time-Sensitive Question-Answering (TSQA) tasks have been widely developed, existing benchmarks often face manual bottlenecks that limit scalable and comprehensive TSQA evaluation. To address this issue, we propose TDBench, a new benchmark that systematically constructs TSQA pairs by harnessing temporal databases and database techniques, such as temporal functional dependencies, temporal SQL, and temporal joins. We also introduce a new evaluation metric called time accuracy, which assesses the validity of time references in model explanations alongside traditional answer accuracy for a more fine-grained TSQA evaluation. Extensive experiments on contemporary LLMs show how TDBench enables scalable and comprehensive TSQA evaluation while reducing the reliance on human labor, complementing current TSQA evaluation approaches that largely center on Wikipedia/Wikidata by enabling LLM evaluation on application-specific data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Temporal Pair Consistency for Variance-Reduced Flow Matching

Continuous-time generative models, such as diffusion models, flow matching, and rectified flow, learn time-dependent vector fields but are typically trained with objectives that treat timesteps independently, leading to high estimator variance and inefficient sampling. Prior approaches mitigate this via explicit smoothness penalties, trajectory regularization, or modified probability paths and solvers. We introduce Temporal Pair Consistency (TPC), a lightweight variance-reduction principle that couples velocity predictions at paired timesteps along the same probability path, operating entirely at the estimator level without modifying the model architecture, probability path, or solver. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that TPC induces a quadratic, trajectory-coupled regularization that provably reduces gradient variance while preserving the underlying flow-matching objective. Instantiated within flow matching, TPC improves sample quality and efficiency across CIFAR-10 and ImageNet at multiple resolutions, achieving lower FID at identical or lower computational cost than prior methods, and extends seamlessly to modern SOTA-style pipelines with noise-augmented training, score-based denoising, and rectified flow.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

SparseEval: Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models by Sparse Optimization

As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale up, their performance on various downstream tasks has significantly improved. However, evaluating their capabilities has become increasingly expensive, as performing inference on a large number of benchmark samples incurs high computational costs. In this paper, we revisit the model-item performance matrix and show that it exhibits sparsity, that representative items can be selected as anchors, and that the task of efficient benchmarking can be formulated as a sparse optimization problem. Based on these insights, we propose SparseEval, a method that, for the first time, adopts gradient descent to optimize anchor weights and employs an iterative refinement strategy for anchor selection. We utilize the representation capacity of MLP to handle sparse optimization and propose the Anchor Importance Score and Candidate Importance Score to evaluate the value of each item for task-aware refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the low estimation error and high Kendall's~$τ$ of our method across a variety of benchmarks, showcasing its superior robustness and practicality in real-world scenarios. Code is available at {https://github.com/taolinzhang/SparseEval}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Broadband tunable narrow-linewidth laser based on scattering-enhanced fiber covering E-S-C-L bands

This work demonstrates a broadband tunable narrow-linewidth laser based on scattering-enhanced fiber, covering the E-S-C-L wavelength bands from 1337.47 nm to 1631.39 nm, with a total tuning span of 293.92 nm. The laser employs two semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) centered at 1420 nm and 1550 nm, which are connected into a single ring resonator via polarization multiplexing. Wavelength selection and tunability is realized using an ultra-broadband tunable filter based on a blazed grating. To suppress side longitude modes, an 18-meter-long femtosecond-laser-empowered random scattering fiber is utilized inside the cavity as a feedback medium, yielding an output linewidths between 1.54 kHz and 2.61 kHz. Benefited from the fast response of the galvanometer mirror and short relaxation time of SOAs, wavelength switching time is less than 1 ms under different tuning channels among the wavelength range of near 300 nm. The stable single-longitude-mode operation is maintained across the entire tuning range. The exceptionally broad tuning range and high spectral purity of the laser endow it with significant application potentials across a wide range of fields.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

FedUMM: A General Framework for Federated Learning with Unified Multimodal Models

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) are emerging as strong foundation models that can do both generation and understanding tasks in a single architecture. However, they are typically trained in centralized settings where all training and downstream datasets are gathered in a central server, limiting the deployment in privacy-sensitive and geographically distributed scenarios. In this paper, we present FedUMM, a general federated learning framework for UMMs under non-IID multimodal data with low communication cost. Built on NVIDIA FLARE, FedUMM instantiates federation for a BLIP3o backbone via parameter-efficient fine-tuning: clients train lightweight LoRA adapters while freezing the foundation models, and the server aggregates only adapter updates. We evaluate on VQA v2 and the GenEval compositional generation benchmarks under Dirichlet-controlled heterogeneity with up to 16 clients. Results show slight degradation as client count and heterogeneity increase, while remaining competitive with centralized training. We further analyze computation--communication trade-offs and demonstrate that adapter-only federation reduces per-round communication by over an order of magnitude compared to full fine-tuning, enabling practical federated UMM training. This work provides empirical experience for future research on privacy-preserving federated unified multimodal models.

cs.LG↗