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Junda Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Junda Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Beating the nonreciprocal isolation limit of integrated circulators by Floquet leakage interference

Time-modulation using semiconductor switches is a promising route to magnetless integrated nonreciprocal devices, as they can offer large modulation depths and high speeds. Yet, chip-scale devices are capped by the finite off-state capacitance of the switches, which induces detrimental leakage of the input wave to the isolated port, imposing a ceiling on the nonreciprocal isolation. Such leakage has largely constrained the development of nonreciprocal integrated systems at high frequency. Here, we beat this limit by using Floquet interference between leakages. In a time-Floquet switched-resonator circulator, two coherent leakages reach the isolated port: the release of the stored wave at the resonator's ring-down frequency, and the direct input leakage at the carrier frequency. We show that it is possible to create conditions under which the two leakages destructively interfere, and even completely cancel, yielding perfect isolation despite operating with non-ideal semiconductor switches. We experimentally confirm leakage interference in a 65-nm CMOS microwave Floquet circulator, reaching 40-dB isolation, which is more than 20 dB higher than the natural switch isolation. We also demonstrate that leakage interference has inherently fast dynamics, establishing itself within a single modulation period, allowing us to reverse the circulation chirality in 0.6~ns. Our results pave the way toward high-frequency integrated chips with ultra-high nonreciprocal isolation.

physics.app-ph

Foundation Agents Meet Agentic Deep Research: Evidence-Grounded Clinical Code Forecasting

Next-encounter ICD forecasting predicts which standardized diagnosis codes will be documented at a future visit from the longitudinal record available beforehand. The task is prospective and multi-label: the target note does not yet exist, and several codes may be correct. Structured EHR foundation models capture recurrence and temporal progression, whereas language foundation models generate flexible diagnostic hypotheses. We introduce ICD-Deepresearch, a DeepResearch workflow that composes these predictive foundation models with medical search and ICD dictionaries. Because no source reveals the future code set, research evaluates candidate transitions by linking patient evidence, external clinical relations, and exact code semantics under a fixed top-K budget. Candidate Generation uses SparseEHR to produce an EHR Prior that initializes two bounded Research Expansion rounds; an independent GPT-5 Direct Forecast supplies complementary candidates. Final Selection validates, deduplicates, and jointly ranks both paths, after which a separate module writes rationales without changing predictions. Finally ICD-Deepresearch achieves patient-averaged precision/recall of 24.60/35.09% on MIMIC-III and 25.14/48.32% on MIMIC-IV. Physicians rate 51% and 68% of its retrieved documents useful, compared with 22% and 39% for standalone GPT-5 web search and 32% and 41% for Medical Deep Research. ICD-Deepresearch therefore improves over the registered local comparators while retrieving evidence with higher physician-rated usefulness than the standalone research systems

cs.CL

Non-Hermitian Interaction between Light and Photonic Time Crystal Beyond the Floquet Quasinormal Mode Approximation

We report non-Hermitian mode couplings in a photonic time crystal induced by the light within its momentum bandgap. When the relative phase between the light and the photonic time crystal compensates for the detuning, we observe a periodic suppression of exponentially growing Floquet modes. In contrast, the optical response in this regime cannot be reproduced by the conventional Floquet expansion of the Green's function, revealing that the light induces effective mode couplings beyond the quasinormal mode approximation. We further investigate the parity-time phase transition through the exceptional point and quantitatively explain the suppression dynamics based on the phase, detuning, and modulation amplitude. The nontrivial interaction with light and the controllable non-Hermiticity indicate the great potential of photonic time crystals in temporally modulated nanophotonics.

physics.optics

Medical thinking with multiple images

Large language models perform well on many medical QA benchmarks, but real clinical reasoning often requires integrating evidence across multiple images rather than interpreting a single view. We introduce MedThinkVQA, an expert-annotated benchmark for thinking with multiple images, where models must interpret each image, combine cross-view evidence, and answer diagnostic questions with intermediate supervision and step-level evaluation. The dataset contains 8,067 cases, including 720 test cases, with an average of 6.62 images per case, substantially denser than prior work, whose expert-level benchmarks use at most 1.43 images per case. On the test set, the best closed-source models, Claude-4.6-Opus, Gemini-3-Pro, and GPT-5.2-xhigh, reach only 57.2%, 55.3%, and 54.9% accuracy, while GPT-5-mini and GPT-5-nano reach 39.7% and 30.8%. Strong open-source models lag behind, led by Qwen3.5-397B-A17B at 52.2% and Qwen3.5-27B at 50.6%. Further analysis identifies grounded multi-image reasoning as the main bottleneck: models often fail to extract, align, and compose evidence across views before higher-level inference can help. Providing expert single-image cues and cross-image summaries improves performance, whereas replacing them with self-generated intermediates reduces accuracy. Step-level analysis shows that over 70% of errors arise from image reading and cross-view integration. Scaling results further show that additional inference-time computation helps only when visual grounding is already reliable; when early evidence extraction is weak, longer reasoning yields limited or unstable gains and can amplify misread cues. These results suggest that the key challenge is not reasoning length alone, but reliable mechanisms for grounding, aligning, and composing distributed evidence across real-world multimodal clinical inputs.

cs.CV

TARSE: Test-Time Adaptation via Retrieval of Skills and Experience for Reasoning Agents

Complex clinical decision making often fails not because a model lacks facts, but because it cannot reliably select and apply the right procedural knowledge and the right prior example at the right reasoning step. We frame clinical question answering as an agent problem with two explicit, retrievable resources: skills, reusable clinical procedures such as guidelines, protocols, and pharmacologic mechanisms; and experience, verified reasoning trajectories from previously solved cases (e.g., chain-of-thought solutions and their step-level decompositions). At test time, the agent retrieves both relevant skills and experiences from curated libraries and performs lightweight test-time adaptation to align the language model's intermediate reasoning with clinically valid logic. Concretely, we build (i) a skills library from guideline-style documents organized as executable decision rules, (ii) an experience library of exemplar clinical reasoning chains indexed by step-level transitions, and (iii) a step-aware retriever that selects the most useful skill and experience items for the current case. We then adapt the model on the retrieved items to reduce instance-step misalignment and to prevent reasoning from drifting toward unsupported shortcuts. Experiments on medical question-answering benchmarks show consistent gains over strong medical RAG baselines and prompting-only reasoning methods. Our results suggest that explicitly separating and retrieving clinical skills and experience, and then aligning the model at test time, is a practical approach to more reliable medical agents.

cs.IR

ESTAR: Early-Stopping Token-Aware Reasoning For Efficient Inference

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance by generating long chains-of-thought, but often waste computation on redundant reasoning after the correct answer has already been reached. We introduce Early-Stopping for Token-Aware Reasoning (ESTAR), which detects and reduces such reasoning redundancy to improve efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Our method combines (i) a trajectory-based classifier that identifies when reasoning can be safely stopped, (ii) supervised fine-tuning to teach LRMs to propose self-generated signals, and (iii) -aware reinforcement learning that truncates rollouts at self-generated stop points with compute-aware rewards. Experiments on four reasoning datasets show that ESTAR reduces reasoning length by about 3.7x (from 4,799 to 1,290) while preserving accuracy (74.9% vs. 74.2%), with strong cross-domain generalization. These results highlight early stopping as a simple yet powerful mechanism for improving reasoning efficiency in LRMs.

cs.AI

Multimodal Imaging System Combining Hyperspectral and Laser Speckle Imaging for In Vivo Hemodynamic and Metabolic Monitoring

We present the development and validation of a novel multimodal optical imaging platform that integrates hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) to enable real-time, non-invasive mapping of tissue oxygenation, perfusion and metabolism, via blood flowmetry and targeting of oxy- (HbO2), deoxyhemoglobin (HHb), as well as oxidized cytochrome-c-oxidase (oxCCO). The system architecture features a single high-speed camera and dual optical path, with synchronized alternating illumination: a filtered, supercontinuum laser for HSI and a He-Ne laser for LSCI. The system performances were evaluated through in vivo experiments on rat spinal cord under normoxic and hypoxic conditions, revealing coherent physiological changes in hemodynamics, metabolism and relative blood flow index (rBFI). These results demonstrate the potential of the platform for functional tissue imaging and quantitative dynamic monitoring of both oxygen delivery and consumption.

physics.med-ph

Randomized Neural Network with Adaptive Forward Regularization for Online Task-free Class Incremental Learning

Class incremental learning (CIL) requires an agent to learn distinct tasks consecutively with knowledge retention against forgetting. Problems impeding the practical applications of CIL methods are twofold: (1) non-i.i.d batch streams and no boundary prompts to update, known as the harsher online task-free CIL (OTCIL) scenario; (2) CIL methods suffer from memory loss in learning long task streams, as shown in Fig. 1 (a). To achieve efficient decision-making and decrease cumulative regrets during the OTCIL process, a randomized neural network (Randomized NN) with forward regularization (-F) is proposed to resist forgetting and enhance learning performance. This general framework integrates unsupervised knowledge into recursive convex optimization, has no learning dissipation, and can outperform the canonical ridge style (-R) in OTCIL. Based on this framework, we derive the algorithm of the ensemble deep random vector functional link network (edRVFL) with adjustable forward regularization (-kF), where k mediates the intensity of the intervention. edRVFL-kF generates one-pass closed-form incremental updates and variable learning rates, effectively avoiding past replay and catastrophic forgetting while achieving superior performance. Moreover, to curb unstable penalties caused by non-i.i.d and mitigate intractable tuning of -kF in OTCIL, we improve it to the plug-and-play edRVFL-kF-Bayes, enabling all hard ks in multiple sub-learners to be self-adaptively determined based on Bayesian learning. Experiments were conducted on 2 image datasets including 6 metrics, dynamic performance, ablation tests, and compatibility, which distinctly validates the efficacy of our OTCIL frameworks with -kF-Bayes and -kF styles.

cs.LG

From Scores to Steps: Diagnosing and Improving LLM Performance in Evidence-Based Medical Calculations

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance on medical benchmarks; however, their ability to perform medical calculations, a crucial aspect of clinical decision-making, remains underexplored and poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks often assess only the final answer with a wide numerical tolerance, overlooking systematic reasoning failures and potentially causing serious clinical misjudgments. In this work, we revisit medical calculation evaluation with a stronger focus on clinical trustworthiness. First, we clean and restructure the MedCalc-Bench dataset and propose a new step-by-step evaluation pipeline that independently assesses formula selection, entity extraction, and arithmetic computation. Under this granular framework, the accuracy of GPT-4o drops from 62.7% to 43.6%, revealing errors masked by prior evaluations. Second, we introduce an automatic error analysis framework that generates structured attribution for each failure mode. Human evaluation confirms its alignment with expert judgment, enabling scalable and explainable diagnostics. Finally, we propose a modular agentic pipeline, MedRaC, that combines retrieval-augmented generation and Python-based code execution. Without any fine-tuning, MedRaC improves the accuracy of different LLMs from 16.35% up to 53.19%. Our work highlights the limitations of current benchmark practices and proposes a more clinically faithful methodology. By enabling transparent and transferable reasoning evaluation, we move closer to making LLM-based systems trustworthy for real-world medical applications.

cs.CL

ChatCLIDS: Simulating Persuasive AI Dialogues to Promote Closed-Loop Insulin Adoption in Type 1 Diabetes Care

Real-world adoption of closed-loop insulin delivery systems (CLIDS) in type 1 diabetes remains low, driven not by technical failure, but by diverse behavioral, psychosocial, and social barriers. We introduce ChatCLIDS, the first benchmark to rigorously evaluate LLM-driven persuasive dialogue for health behavior change. Our framework features a library of expert-validated virtual patients, each with clinically grounded, heterogeneous profiles and realistic adoption barriers, and simulates multi-turn interactions with nurse agents equipped with a diverse set of evidence-based persuasive strategies. ChatCLIDS uniquely supports longitudinal counseling and adversarial social influence scenarios, enabling robust, multi-dimensional evaluation. Our findings reveal that while larger and more reflective LLMs adapt strategies over time, all models struggle to overcome resistance, especially under realistic social pressure. These results highlight critical limitations of current LLMs for behavior change, and offer a high-fidelity, scalable testbed for advancing trustworthy persuasive AI in healthcare and beyond.

cs.AI

ChatThero: An LLM-Supported Chatbot for Behavior Change and Therapeutic Support in Addiction Recovery

Substance use disorders (SUDs) affect millions of people, and relapses are common, requiring multi-session treatments. Access to care is limited, which contributes to the challenge of recovery support. We present \textbf{ChatThero}, an innovative low-cost, multi-session, stressor-aware, and memory-persistent autonomous \emph{language agent} designed to facilitate long-term behavior change and therapeutic support in addiction recovery. Unlike existing work that mostly finetuned large language models (LLMs) on patient-therapist conversation data, ChatThero was trained in a multi-agent simulated environment that mirrors real therapy. We created anonymized patient profiles from recovery communities (e.g., Reddit). We classify patients as \texttt{easy}, \texttt{medium}, and \texttt{difficult}, three scales representing their resistance to recovery. We created an external environment by introducing stressors (e.g., social determinants of health) to simulate real-world situations. We dynamically inject clinically-grounded therapeutic strategies (motivational interview and cognitive behavioral therapy). Our evaluation, conducted by both human (blinded clinicians) and LLM-as-Judge, shows that ChatThero is superior in empathy and clinical relevance. We show that stressor simulation improves robustness of ChatThero. Explicit stressors increase relapse-like setbacks, matching real-world patterns. We evaluate ChatThero with behavioral change metrics. On a 1--5 scale, ChatThero raises \texttt{motivation} by $+1.71$ points (from $2.39$ to $4.10$) and \texttt{confidence} by $+1.67$ points (from $1.52$ to $3.19$), substantially outperforming GPT-5. On \texttt{difficult} patients, ChatThero reaches the success milestone with $26\%$ fewer turns than GPT-5.

cs.AI

RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models

This work introduces RARE (Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement), a versatile extension to the mutual reasoning framework (rStar), aimed at enhancing reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models (LLMs) for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks such as commonsense and medical reasoning. RARE incorporates two innovative actions within the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework: A6, which generates search queries based on the initial problem statement, performs information retrieval using those queries, and augments reasoning with the retrieved data to formulate the final answer; and A7, which leverages information retrieval specifically for generated sub-questions and re-answers these sub-questions with the relevant contextual information. Additionally, a Retrieval-Augmented Factuality Scorer is proposed to replace the original discriminator, prioritizing reasoning paths that meet high standards of factuality. Experimental results with LLaMA 3.1 show that RARE enables open-source LLMs to achieve competitive performance with top open-source models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o. This research establishes RARE as a scalable solution for improving LLMs in domains where logical coherence and factual integrity are critical.

cs.CL

Data Extraction Attacks in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Backdoors

Despite significant advancements, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with providing accurate answers when lacking domain-specific or up-to-date knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this limitation by incorporating external knowledge bases, but it also introduces new attack surfaces. In this paper, we investigate data extraction attacks targeting RAG's knowledge databases. We show that previous prompt injection-based extraction attacks largely rely on the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs. As a result, they fail on models that are less responsive to such malicious prompts -- for example, our experiments show that state-of-the-art attacks achieve near-zero success on Gemma-2B-IT. Moreover, even for models that can follow these instructions, we found fine-tuning may significantly reduce attack performance. To further reveal the vulnerability, we propose to backdoor RAG, where a small portion of poisoned data is injected during the fine-tuning phase to create a backdoor within the LLM. When this compromised LLM is integrated into a RAG system, attackers can exploit specific triggers in prompts to manipulate the LLM to leak documents from the retrieval database. By carefully designing the poisoned data, we achieve both verbatim and paraphrased document extraction. For example, on Gemma-2B-IT, we show that with only 5\% poisoned data, our method achieves an average success rate of 94.1\% for verbatim extraction (ROUGE-L score: 82.1) and 63.6\% for paraphrased extraction (average ROUGE score: 66.4) across four datasets. These results underscore the privacy risks associated with the supply chain when deploying RAG systems.

cs.CR

Incremental Online Learning of Randomized Neural Network with Forward Regularization

Online learning of deep neural networks suffers from challenges such as hysteretic non-incremental updating, increasing memory usage, past retrospective retraining, and catastrophic forgetting. To alleviate these drawbacks and achieve progressive immediate decision-making, we propose a novel Incremental Online Learning (IOL) process of Randomized Neural Networks (Randomized NN), a framework facilitating continuous improvements to Randomized NN performance in restrictive online scenarios. Within the framework, we further introduce IOL with ridge regularization (-R) and IOL with forward regularization (-F). -R generates stepwise incremental updates without retrospective retraining and avoids catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, we substituted -R with -F as it enhanced precognition learning ability using semi-supervision and realized better online regrets to offline global experts compared to -R during IOL. The algorithms of IOL for Randomized NN with -R/-F on non-stationary batch stream were derived respectively, featuring recursive weight updates and variable learning rates. Additionally, we conducted a detailed analysis and theoretically derived relative cumulative regret bounds of the Randomized NN learners with -R/-F in IOL under adversarial assumptions using a novel methodology and presented several corollaries, from which we observed the superiority on online learning acceleration and regret bounds of employing -F in IOL. Finally, our proposed methods were rigorously examined across regression and classification tasks on diverse datasets, which distinctly validated the efficacy of IOL frameworks of Randomized NN and the advantages of forward regularization.

cs.LG

CRTRE: Causal Rule Generation with Target Trial Emulation Framework

Causal inference and model interpretability are gaining increasing attention, particularly in the biomedical domain. Despite recent advance, decorrelating features in nonlinear environments with human-interpretable representations remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel method called causal rule generation with target trial emulation framework (CRTRE), which applies randomize trial design principles to estimate the causal effect of association rules. We then incorporate such association rules for the downstream applications such as prediction of disease onsets. Extensive experiments on six healthcare datasets, including synthetic data, real-world disease collections, and MIMIC-III/IV, demonstrate the model's superior performance. Specifically, our method achieved a $β$ error of 0.907, outperforming DWR (1.024) and SVM (1.141). On real-world datasets, our model achieved accuracies of 0.789, 0.920, and 0.300 for Esophageal Cancer, Heart Disease, and Cauda Equina Syndrome prediction task, respectively, consistently surpassing baseline models. On the ICD code prediction tasks, it achieved AUC Macro scores of 92.8 on MIMIC-III and 96.7 on MIMIC-IV, outperforming the state-of-the-art models KEPT and MSMN. Expert evaluations further validate the model's effectiveness, causality, and interpretability.

cs.LG

LEAF: Learning and Evaluation Augmented by Fact-Checking to Improve Factualness in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various natural language processing tasks, yet they often struggle with maintaining factual accuracy, particularly in knowledge-intensive domains like healthcare. This study introduces LEAF: Learning and Evaluation Augmented by Fact-Checking, a novel approach designed to enhance the factual reliability of LLMs, with a focus on medical question answering (QA). LEAF utilizes a dual strategy to enhance the factual accuracy of responses from models such as Llama 3 70B Instruct and Llama 3 8B Instruct. The first strategy, Fact-Check-Then-RAG, improves Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by incorporating fact-checking results to guide the retrieval process without updating model parameters. The second strategy, Learning from Fact-Checks via Self-Training, involves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on fact-checked responses or applying Simple Preference Optimization (SimPO) with fact-checking as a ranking mechanism, both updating LLM parameters from supervision. These findings suggest that integrating fact-checked responses whether through RAG enhancement or self-training enhances the reliability and factual correctness of LLM outputs, offering a promising solution for applications where information accuracy is crucial.

cs.CL

SemiHVision: Enhancing Medical Multimodal Models with a Semi-Human Annotated Dataset and Fine-Tuned Instruction Generation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides, yet they face challenges in the medical domain due to limited specialized knowledge. While recent medical MLLMs demonstrate strong performance in lab settings, they often struggle in real-world applications, highlighting a substantial gap between research and practice. In this paper, we seek to address this gap at various stages of the end-to-end learning pipeline, including data collection, model fine-tuning, and evaluation. At the data collection stage, we introduce SemiHVision, a dataset that combines human annotations with automated augmentation techniques to improve both medical knowledge representation and diagnostic reasoning. For model fine-tuning, we trained PMC-Cambrian-8B-AN over 2400 H100 GPU hours, resulting in performance that surpasses public medical models like HuatuoGPT-Vision-34B (79.0% vs. 66.7%) and private general models like Claude3-Opus (55.7%) on traditional benchmarks such as SLAKE and VQA-RAD. In the evaluation phase, we observed that traditional benchmarks cannot accurately reflect realistic clinical task capabilities. To overcome this limitation and provide more targeted guidance for model evaluation, we introduce the JAMA Clinical Challenge, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate diagnostic reasoning. On this benchmark, PMC-Cambrian-AN achieves state-of-the-art performance with a GPT-4 score of 1.29, significantly outperforming HuatuoGPT-Vision-34B (1.13) and Claude3-Opus (1.17), demonstrating its superior diagnostic reasoning abilities.

cs.CL

MedQA-CS: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-Style Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Skills

Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) in healthcare require advanced clinical skills (CS), yet current benchmarks fail to evaluate these comprehensively. We introduce MedQA-CS, an AI-SCE framework inspired by medical education's Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), to address this gap. MedQA-CS evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks, LLM-as-medical-student and LLM-as-CS-examiner, designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. Our contributions include developing MedQA-CS, a comprehensive evaluation framework with publicly available data and expert annotations, and providing the quantitative and qualitative assessment of LLMs as reliable judges in CS evaluation. Our experiments show that MedQA-CS is a more challenging benchmark for evaluating clinical skills than traditional multiple-choice QA benchmarks (e.g., MedQA). Combined with existing benchmarks, MedQA-CS enables a more comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' clinical capabilities for both open- and closed-source LLMs.

cs.AI