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Kai Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Ma.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization

Large-scale reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated its effectiveness in harnessing the potential of large language models (LLMs) for single-turn reasoning tasks. In realistic reasoning scenarios, LLMs can often utilize external tools to assist in task-solving processes. However, current RL algorithms inadequately balance the models' intrinsic long-horizon reasoning capabilities and their proficiency in multi-turn tool interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization (ARPO), a novel agentic RL algorithm tailored for training multi-turn LLM-based agents. Through preliminary experiments, we observe that LLMs tend to exhibit highly uncertain behavior, characterized by an increase in the entropy distribution of generated tokens, immediately following interactions with external tools. Motivated by this observation, ARPO incorporates an entropy-based adaptive rollout mechanism, dynamically balancing global trajectory sampling and step-level sampling, thereby promoting exploration at steps with high uncertainty after tool usage. By integrating an advantage attribution estimation, ARPO enables LLMs to internalize advantage differences in stepwise tool-use interactions. Our experiments across 13 challenging benchmarks in computational reasoning, knowledge reasoning, and deep search domains demonstrate ARPO's superiority over trajectory-level RL algorithms. Remarkably, ARPO achieves improved performance using only half of the tool-use budget required by existing methods, offering a scalable solution for aligning LLM-based agents with real-time dynamic environments. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/dongguanting/ARPO

cs.LG↗

Flavor Physics at the CEPC: a General Perspective

We discuss the landscape of flavor physics at the Circular Electron-Positron Collider (CEPC), based on the nominal luminosity outlined in its Technical Design Report. The CEPC is designed to operate in multiple modes to address a variety of tasks. At the $Z$ pole, the expected production of 4 Tera $Z$ bosons will provide unique and highly precise measurements of $Z$ boson couplings, while the substantial number of boosted heavy-flavored quarks and leptons produced in clean $Z$ decays will facilitate investigations into their flavor physics with unprecedented precision. We investigate the prospects of measuring various physics benchmarks and discuss their implications for particle theories and phenomenological models. Our studies indicate that, with its highlighted advantages and anticipated excellent detector performance, the CEPC can explore beauty and $τ$ physics in ways that are superior to or complementary with the Belle II and Large-Hadron-Collider-beauty experiments, potentially enabling the detection of new physics at energy scales of 10 TeV and above. This potential also extends to the observation of yet-to-be-discovered rare and exotic processes, as well as testing fundamental principles such as lepton flavor universality, lepton and baryon number conservation, etc., making the CEPC a vibrant platform for flavor physics research. The $WW$ threshold scan, Higgs-factory operation and top-pair productions of the CEPC further enhance its merits in this regard, especially for measuring the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements, and Flavor-Changing-Neutral-Current physics of Higgs boson and top quarks. We outline the requirements for detector performance and considerations for future development to achieve the anticipated scientific goals.

hep-ex↗

Deep reinforcement learning-based joint real-time energy scheduling for green buildings with heterogeneous battery energy storage devices

Green buildings (GBs) with renewable energy and building energy management systems (BEMS) enable efficient energy use and support sustainable development. Electric vehicles (EVs), as flexible storage resources, enhance system flexibility when integrated with stationary energy storage systems (ESS) for real-time scheduling. However, differing degradation and operational characteristics of ESS and EVs complicate scheduling strategies. This paper proposes a model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for joint real-time scheduling based on a combined battery system (CBS) integrating ESS and EVs. We develop accurate degradation models and cost estimates, prioritize EV travel demands, and enable collaborative ESS-EV operation under varying conditions. A prediction model optimizes energy interaction between CBS and BEMS. To address heterogeneous states, action coupling, and learning efficiency, the DRL algorithm incorporates double networks, a dueling mechanism, and prioritized experience replay. Experiments show a 37.94 percent to 40.01 percent reduction in operating costs compared to a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach.

eess.SY↗

Mono-lepton Signature of a Neutrino-philic Dark Fermion at Hadron Colliders

Searching for dark matter at high-energy colliders and direct detection experiments can effectively cover nearly the entire mass range from the MeV to the TeV scale. In this paper, we focus on four-fermion contact interactions formulated within the framework of Effective Field Theory. Specifically, we present a detailed analysis of mono-lepton production at the LHC. Our results demonstrate that tensor operators exhibit superior sensitivity in the mono-lepton channel, constraining energy scales up to 3\,TeV for a nearly massless dark fermion using current LHC data. Moreover, these operators mediate both spin-independent and spin-dependent absorption processes in nuclear targets. A systematic comparison of constraints between direct detection experiments and collider measurements reveals the LHC's distinct advantage in exploring sub-GeV dark matter candidates while maintaining competitive sensitivity at the TeV scale. Notably, direct detection experiments such as Super-Kamiokande and Borexino achieve complementary constraints in the 10-100\,TeV mass range through their unique capabilities: utilization of light nuclei targets, large exposure volumes, and distinctive features of the recoil energy spectra.

hep-ph↗

Is LLM an Overconfident Judge? Unveiling the Capabilities of LLMs in Detecting Offensive Language with Annotation Disagreement

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential for offensive language detection, yet their ability to handle annotation disagreement remains underexplored. Disagreement samples, which arise from subjective interpretations, pose a unique challenge due to their ambiguous nature. Understanding how LLMs process these cases, particularly their confidence levels, can offer insight into their alignment with human annotators. This study systematically evaluates the performance of multiple LLMs in detecting offensive language at varying levels of annotation agreement. We analyze binary classification accuracy, examine the relationship between model confidence and human disagreement, and explore how disagreement samples influence model decision-making during few-shot learning and instruction fine-tuning. Our findings reveal that LLMs struggle with low-agreement samples, often exhibiting overconfidence in these ambiguous cases. However, utilizing disagreement samples in training improves both detection accuracy and model alignment with human judgment. These insights provide a foundation for enhancing LLM-based offensive language detection in real-world moderation tasks.

cs.CL↗

Constraining Gluonic Contact Interaction of a Neutrino-philic Dark Fermion at Hadron Colliders and Direct Detection Experiments

Weakly interacting fermions with the Standard Model particles are promising candidates for the dark matter. In this paper, we study signatures of the gluonic interactions of a dark fermion and a neutrino at hadron colliders and direct detection experiments. The lowest order interactions are described by contact operators in dimension 7. At hadron colliders, the mono-jet production is the most sensitive channel. And these operators can also induce both spin-independent and spin-dependent absorption of the dark fermion at nuclear targets. We show that for a nearly massless dark fermion, the energy scales are constrained to be higher than 500 GeV and 1.2 TeV by the current LHC and HE-LHC searches, respectively. Furthermore, we also find that almost all the parameter space accessible by the spin-independent absorption has been excluded by the current LHC constraints. In contrast, for spin-dependent absorption at light nuclear targets there is still some parameter space which cannot be reached by current and upcoming LHC searches.

hep-ph↗

Cybersquatting in Web3: The Case of NFT

Cybersquatting refers to the practice where attackers register a domain name similar to a legitimate one to confuse users for illegal gains. With the growth of the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem, there are indications that cybersquatting tactics have evolved from targeting domain names to NFTs. This paper presents the first in-depth measurement study of NFT cybersquatting. By analyzing over 220K NFT collections with over 150M NFT tokens, we have identified 8,019 cybersquatting NFT collections targeting 654 popular NFT projects. Through systematic analysis, we discover and characterize seven distinct squatting tactics employed by scammers. We further conduct a comprehensive measurement study of these cybersquatting NFT collections, examining their metadata, associated digital asset content, and social media status. Our analysis reveals that these NFT cybersquatting activities have resulted in a significant financial impact, with over 670K victims affected by these scams, leading to a total financial exploitation of $59.26 million. Our findings demonstrate the urgency to identify and prevent NFT squatting abuses.

cs.CR↗

Make-It-Animatable: An Efficient Framework for Authoring Animation-Ready 3D Characters

3D characters are essential to modern creative industries, but making them animatable often demands extensive manual work in tasks like rigging and skinning. Existing automatic rigging tools face several limitations, including the necessity for manual annotations, rigid skeleton topologies, and limited generalization across diverse shapes and poses. An alternative approach is to generate animatable avatars pre-bound to a rigged template mesh. However, this method often lacks flexibility and is typically limited to realistic human shapes. To address these issues, we present Make-It-Animatable, a novel data-driven method to make any 3D humanoid model ready for character animation in less than one second, regardless of its shapes and poses. Our unified framework generates high-quality blend weights, bones, and pose transformations. By incorporating a particle-based shape autoencoder, our approach supports various 3D representations, including meshes and 3D Gaussian splats. Additionally, we employ a coarse-to-fine representation and a structure-aware modeling strategy to ensure both accuracy and robustness, even for characters with non-standard skeleton structures. We conducted extensive experiments to validate our framework's effectiveness. Compared to existing methods, our approach demonstrates significant improvements in both quality and speed. More demos and code are available at https://jasongzy.github.io/Make-It-Animatable/.

cs.GR↗

Motion-Aware Generative Frame Interpolation

Flow-based frame interpolation methods ensure motion stability through estimated intermediate flow but often introduce severe artifacts in complex motion regions. Recent generative approaches, boosted by large-scale pre-trained video generation models, show promise in handling intricate scenes. However, they frequently produce unstable motion and content inconsistencies due to the absence of explicit motion trajectory constraints. To address these challenges, we propose Motion-aware Generative frame interpolation (MoG) that synergizes intermediate flow guidance with generative capacities to enhance interpolation fidelity. Our key insight is to simultaneously enforce motion smoothness through flow constraints while adaptively correcting flow estimation errors through generative refinement. Specifically, we first introduce a dual guidance injection that propagates condition information using intermediate flow at both latent and feature levels, aligning the generated motion with flow-derived motion trajectories. Meanwhile, we implemented two critical designs, encoder-only guidance injection and selective parameter fine-tuning, which enable dynamic artifact correction in the complex motion regions. Extensive experiments on both real-world and animation benchmarks demonstrate that MoG outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of video quality and visual fidelity. Our work bridges the gap between flow-based stability and generative flexibility, offering a versatile solution for frame interpolation across diverse scenarios.

cs.CV↗

Simulating toponium formation signals at the LHC

We present a method to simulate toponium formation events at the LHC using the Green's function of non-relativistic QCD in the Coulomb gauge, which governs the momentum distribution of top quarks in the presence of the QCD potential. This Green's function can be employed to re-weight any matrix elements relevant for $t\bar{t}$ production and decay processes where a colour-singlet top-antitop pair is produced in the $S$-wave at threshold. As an example, we study the formation of $η_t$ toponium states in the gluon fusion channel at the LHC, combining the re-weighted matrix elements with parton showering.

hep-ph↗

Following Devils' Footprint: Towards Real-time Detection of Price Manipulation Attacks

Price manipulation attack is one of the notorious threats in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, which allows attackers to exchange tokens at an extensively deviated price from the market. Existing efforts usually rely on reactive methods to identify such kind of attacks after they have happened, e.g., detecting attack transactions in the post-attack stage, which cannot mitigate or prevent price manipulation attacks timely. From the perspective of attackers, they usually need to deploy attack contracts in the pre-attack stage. Thus, if we can identify these attack contracts in a proactive manner, we can raise alarms and mitigate the threats. With the core idea in mind, in this work, we shift our attention from the victims to the attackers. Specifically, we propose SMARTCAT, a novel approach for identifying price manipulation attacks in the pre-attack stage proactively. For generality, it conducts analysis on bytecode and does not require any source code and transaction data. For accuracy, it depicts the control- and data-flow dependency relationships among function calls into a token flow graph. For scalability, it filters out those suspicious paths, in which it conducts inter-contract analysis as necessary. To this end, SMARTCAT can pinpoint attacks in real time once they have been deployed on a chain. The evaluation results illustrate that SMARTCAT significantly outperforms existing baselines with 91.6% recall and ~100% precision. Moreover, SMARTCAT also uncovers 616 attack contracts in-the-wild, accounting for \$9.25M financial losses, with only 19 cases publicly reported. By applying SMARTCAT as a real-time detector in Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, it has raised 14 alarms 99 seconds after the corresponding deployment on average. These attacks have already led to $641K financial losses, and seven of them are still waiting for their ripe time.

cs.CR↗

Laser induced Compton Scattering to Dark Photon or Axion-like Particle

The laser of an intense electromagnetic field provides an important tool to study the strong-field particle physics. The nonlinear Compton scattering was observed in the collision of an ultra-relativistic electron beam with a laser pulse in 1990s. The precision measurement of the nonlinear Compton scattering shines the light on the studies of strong-field QED and nonlinear effects in QED. In this work, we propose to produce new massive particles through the nonlinear Compton scattering in the presence of a high intense laser field. We take dark photon or axion-like particle as illustrative new particle. Compared with other collider and beam dump experiments, the laser induced process provides a complementary and competitive search of new invisible particles lighter than 1 MeV.

hep-ph↗

SciSafeEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Safety Alignment of Large Language Models in Scientific Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have a transformative impact on a variety of scientific tasks across disciplines including biology, chemistry, medicine, and physics. However, ensuring the safety alignment of these models in scientific research remains an underexplored area, with existing benchmarks primarily focusing on textual content and overlooking key scientific representations such as molecular, protein, and genomic languages. Moreover, the safety mechanisms of LLMs in scientific tasks are insufficiently studied. To address these limitations, we introduce SciSafeEval, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety alignment of LLMs across a range of scientific tasks. SciSafeEval spans multiple scientific languages-including textual, molecular, protein, and genomic-and covers a wide range of scientific domains. We evaluate LLMs in zero-shot, few-shot and chain-of-thought settings, and introduce a "jailbreak" enhancement feature that challenges LLMs equipped with safety guardrails, rigorously testing their defenses against malicious intention. Our benchmark surpasses existing safety datasets in both scale and scope, providing a robust platform for assessing the safety and performance of LLMs in scientific contexts. This work aims to facilitate the responsible development and deployment of LLMs, promoting alignment with safety and ethical standards in scientific research.

cs.CL↗

IFAdapter: Instance Feature Control for Grounded Text-to-Image Generation

While Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models excel at generating visually appealing images of individual instances, they struggle to accurately position and control the features generation of multiple instances. The Layout-to-Image (L2I) task was introduced to address the positioning challenges by incorporating bounding boxes as spatial control signals, but it still falls short in generating precise instance features. In response, we propose the Instance Feature Generation (IFG) task, which aims to ensure both positional accuracy and feature fidelity in generated instances. To address the IFG task, we introduce the Instance Feature Adapter (IFAdapter). The IFAdapter enhances feature depiction by incorporating additional appearance tokens and utilizing an Instance Semantic Map to align instance-level features with spatial locations. The IFAdapter guides the diffusion process as a plug-and-play module, making it adaptable to various community models. For evaluation, we contribute an IFG benchmark and develop a verification pipeline to objectively compare models' abilities to generate instances with accurate positioning and features. Experimental results demonstrate that IFAdapter outperforms other models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

cs.CV↗

VFIMamba: Video Frame Interpolation with State Space Models

Inter-frame modeling is pivotal in generating intermediate frames for video frame interpolation (VFI). Current approaches predominantly rely on convolution or attention-based models, which often either lack sufficient receptive fields or entail significant computational overheads. Recently, Selective State Space Models (S6) have emerged, tailored specifically for long sequence modeling, offering both linear complexity and data-dependent modeling capabilities. In this paper, we propose VFIMamba, a novel frame interpolation method for efficient and dynamic inter-frame modeling by harnessing the S6 model. Our approach introduces the Mixed-SSM Block (MSB), which initially rearranges tokens from adjacent frames in an interleaved fashion and subsequently applies multi-directional S6 modeling. This design facilitates the efficient transmission of information across frames while upholding linear complexity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel curriculum learning strategy that progressively cultivates proficiency in modeling inter-frame dynamics across varying motion magnitudes, fully unleashing the potential of the S6 model. Experimental findings showcase that our method attains state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, particularly excelling in high-resolution scenarios. In particular, on the X-TEST dataset, VFIMamba demonstrates a noteworthy improvement of 0.80 dB for 4K frames and 0.96 dB for 2K frames.

cs.CV↗

FreeEdit: Mask-free Reference-based Image Editing with Multi-modal Instruction

Introducing user-specified visual concepts in image editing is highly practical as these concepts convey the user's intent more precisely than text-based descriptions. We propose FreeEdit, a novel approach for achieving such reference-based image editing, which can accurately reproduce the visual concept from the reference image based on user-friendly language instructions. Our approach leverages the multi-modal instruction encoder to encode language instructions to guide the editing process. This implicit way of locating the editing area eliminates the need for manual editing masks. To enhance the reconstruction of reference details, we introduce the Decoupled Residual ReferAttention (DRRA) module. This module is designed to integrate fine-grained reference features extracted by a detail extractor into the image editing process in a residual way without interfering with the original self-attention. Given that existing datasets are unsuitable for reference-based image editing tasks, particularly due to the difficulty in constructing image triplets that include a reference image, we curate a high-quality dataset, FreeBench, using a newly developed twice-repainting scheme. FreeBench comprises the images before and after editing, detailed editing instructions, as well as a reference image that maintains the identity of the edited object, encompassing tasks such as object addition, replacement, and deletion. By conducting phased training on FreeBench followed by quality tuning, FreeEdit achieves high-quality zero-shot editing through convenient language instructions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of FreeEdit across multiple task types, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods. The code will be available at: https://freeedit.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

Towards Patronizing and Condescending Language in Chinese Videos: A Multimodal Dataset and Detector

Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) is a form of discriminatory toxic speech targeting vulnerable groups, threatening both online and offline safety. While toxic speech research has mainly focused on overt toxicity, such as hate speech, microaggressions in the form of PCL remain underexplored. Additionally, dominant groups' discriminatory facial expressions and attitudes toward vulnerable communities can be more impactful than verbal cues, yet these frame features are often overlooked. In this paper, we introduce the PCLMM dataset, the first Chinese multimodal dataset for PCL, consisting of 715 annotated videos from Bilibili, with high-quality PCL facial frame spans. We also propose the MultiPCL detector, featuring a facial expression detection module for PCL recognition, demonstrating the effectiveness of modality complementarity in this challenging task. Our work makes an important contribution to advancing microaggression detection within the domain of toxic speech.

cs.CV↗

Dynamic and Compressive Adaptation of Transformers From Images to Videos

Recently, the remarkable success of pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) from image-text matching has sparked an interest in image-to-video adaptation. However, most current approaches retain the full forward pass for each frame, leading to a high computation overhead for processing entire videos. In this paper, we present InTI, a novel approach for compressive image-to-video adaptation using dynamic Inter-frame Token Interpolation. InTI aims to softly preserve the informative tokens without disrupting their coherent spatiotemporal structure. Specifically, each token pair at identical positions within neighbor frames is linearly aggregated into a new token, where the aggregation weights are generated by a multi-scale context-aware network. In this way, the information of neighbor frames can be adaptively compressed in a point-by-point manner, thereby effectively reducing the number of processed frames by half each time. Importantly, InTI can be seamlessly integrated with existing adaptation methods, achieving strong performance without extra-complex design. On Kinetics-400, InTI reaches a top-1 accuracy of 87.1 with a remarkable 37.5% reduction in GFLOPs compared to naive adaptation. When combined with additional temporal modules, InTI achieves a top-1 accuracy of 87.6 with a 37% reduction in GFLOPs. Similar conclusions have been verified in other common datasets.

cs.CV↗