arXiv subjects

Kang An

Publications and source records attributed to Kang An.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SafeSceneReason: A Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark Connecting Industrial Hazards with Accident Knowledge

Industrial-safety understanding requires more than detecting workers, equipment, and personal protective equipment. Models must also assess compliance, identify hazardous interactions, explain potential accident mechanisms, and recommend preventive actions. Existing safety datasets primarily focus on visual perception or isolated violation recognition and provide limited supervision for evidence-grounded reasoning. We introduce SafeSceneReason, a multimodal industrial-safety reasoning benchmark and companion training corpus that connects workplace scenes with knowledge from occupational accident investigations. SafeSceneReason combines two complementary data-construction pipelines. The scene-centric pipeline converts annotated workplace images into executable safety scene graphs and generates deterministic answers through program execution over objects, relations, and safety rules. The report-centric pipeline extracts figures and contextual evidence from accident reports and constructs multimodal questions using evidence graphs, explicit information boundaries, multi-step reasoning paths, and iterative verification. The resulting resource contains 110,581 verified scene-centric question--answer pairs and 13,114 refined report-centric question--answer pairs, covering perception, spatial and quantitative reasoning, compliance assessment, evidence synthesis, causal analysis, and mitigation-oriented decision making. Evaluation of representative proprietary and open-source vision--language models reveals substantial performance differences and persistent weaknesses in comparative, technical, and multi-evidence reasoning, demonstrating that strong general visual understanding does not yet guarantee reliable industrial-safety reasoning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MMArch: Benchmarking Multimodal Reasoning Grounded in Architectural Evidence

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform strongly on engineering imagery, yet existing benchmarks mostly test drawing recognition, information extraction, or compliance checking, leaving open whether models can combine distributed visual evidence with engineering principles to reach a conclusion. We introduce MMArch, a benchmark for architecture and civil engineering spanning ten subdomains and built entirely from figures in peer-reviewed papers. Its $1{,}212$ short-answer items are produced by a decoupled planner--writer pipeline and validated through automated screening, a blind adversarial audit, and expert review, so that answering requires perceiving the relevant evidence, identifying the governing principle, and applying it, not exploiting textual or single-figure shortcuts. Evaluating $18$ open-weight and proprietary MLLMs against a domain-expert panel, we find a wide gap: the strongest open-source model attains about $30\%$ and the best proprietary system $52\%$, while human experts reach $95\%$, more than forty points ahead. Our error analysis shows that failures concentrate in applying principles and combining evidence across figures rather than in locating it, pointing to substantial headroom for future research. Code and data are available at https://dcx-swjtu.github.io/MMArch/.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CircuitReason-1k: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Visual-to-Symbolic Reasoning inElectrical Circuits

Electrical circuit analysis requires more than recognizing components in an image. A solver must ground symbols and labels, recover latent topology, select a physical model, formulate coupled equations, propagate intermediate quantities, and preserve units, signs, directions, and phase conventions. We introduce \benchmark, a benchmark of 1,000 authentic textbook problems for evaluating this complete long-horizon visual-to-symbolic reasoning process. Each problem pairs one or more circuit diagrams with a self-contained question, a typed or semantically specified answer, and a reference worked solution. An evidence-first construction pipeline aligns questions, figures, and solutions, while a reasoning-oriented taxonomy organizes problems by circuit type and dependency depth. Evaluation combines conservative typed scoring with identity-blinded multi-model semantic consensus, retaining every problem in the denominator. Across three commercial chatbot systems and six open-source multimodal large language models, the highest-scoring system reaches 84.8\% accuracy. However, performance consistently deteriorates on long-horizon problems, and qualitative analysis exposes persistent failures in topology-to-target binding, physical conventions, and late-stage output propagation. \benchmark{} provides a focused testbed for measuring whether multimodal models can transform technical visual evidence into sustained, physically valid symbolic reasoning. Code are available at GitHub - CircuitReason/CircuitReason1K.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

From Non-Convex Self-Concordant Regularization to Scalable Quasi-Newton Training of PINNs

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) often require high-accuracy quasi-Newton refinement to obtain reliable partial differential equation solutions, but their residual objectives can exhibit indefinite, nearly singular, and poorly scaled local curvature. Regularized quasi-Newton methods provide established mechanisms for stabilizing secant models, while self-concordant methods provide local-metric rules for curvature-dependent step selection. Building on these two lines of work, we propose SCORE, a self-concordance-inspired quasi-Newton method with decrement-coupled shifted secant geometry for PINN training. Its distinguishing mechanism is that a single quasi-Newton decrement computed from the learned inverse metric jointly determines a strong-Wolfe-tested candidate step and an adaptive shift used to define the next secant geometry. The shifted displacement represents the action of an averaged shifted metric along the accepted step, while requiring neither Hessian construction nor Hessian-vector products. Under a local spectral-equivalence condition, we show that the quasi-Newton decrement and candidate step remain comparable to their counterparts in a positive shifted metric, and recover the normalized self-concordant rule in the matched-metric case. Strong Wolfe acceptance, fallback line search, and standard curvature safeguards provide globalization without modifying the underlying PINN objective. Experiments on the viscous Burgers, Kuramoto--Sivashinsky, Korteweg--de Vries, and complex Ginzburg--Landau equations show that SCORE attains lower final errors than the tested BFGS and self-scaled Broyden baselines. The Burgers ablation further indicates that shifted curvature stabilization and decrement-based step selection make complementary contributions to high-accuracy refinement.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Shattering the Autoregressive Curse: Dynamic Epistemic Entropy Orchestrated Erasable Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

Although reinforcement learning (RL) has expanded the cognitive boundaries of large language models (LLMs), it often remains vulnerable to the autoregressive curse in long-horizon logical reasoning: small epistemic perturbations introduced early in generation can propagate irreversibly along the Markov decision process flow, triggering cascading failures that drive the reasoning trajectory toward collapse. To overcome this autoregressive cascade, in which a single early mistake can compromise all subsequent reasoning steps, we propose dynamic epistemic entropy orchestrated erasable reinforcement learning ($\text{E}^3\text{RL}$). $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ eliminates reliance on external signals by grounding the model's endogenous local autoregressive cross-entropy as an intrinsic coordinate of epistemic uncertainty. By introducing segment-level adaptive dynamic thresholds and advantage allocation, $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ enables the model to precisely excise localized logical defects while reusing historical key-value (KV) cache streams, thereby endowing the reasoning process with a self-healing capability. We train $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ on the DeepMath-103k dataset. Experimental results show that $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ reshapes the exploration efficiency of long-sequence reasoning and improves sample efficiency while maintaining linear memory overhead. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AIME, $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ achieves substantial performance gains, with the 4B and 8B parameter models surpassing previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) results by 5.349\% and 6.514\%, respectively. These findings suggest that $\text{E}^3\text{RL}$ shatters the autoregressive curse in long-sequence reasoning and establishes a theoretical and systems-level foundation for the next generation of self-healing artificial general intelligence (AGI).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

StepAudio 2.5 Technical Report

Unified audio-language modeling has emerged as a prominent trend in modern speech systems, promising to bring the reasoning capabilities of large language models to auditory tasks. However, existing unified foundations often struggle to match the depth of specialized systems across automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), and realtime spoken interaction. Bridging this gap remains an open challenge. This report presents StepAudio 2.5, a unified audio-language foundation model that matches or exceeds specialized systems across all three capabilities. Rather than treating these tasks as architecturally distinct, we operate on the premise that once text and audio share a multimodal representational space, task specialization becomes a matter of operational regimes: data construction, optimization targets, and decoding constraints. Guided by this insight, we advance the post-training paradigm from standard supervised learning to task-tailored Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), using it as the primary mechanism to define complex optimization targets. We leverage this RLHF-centric alignment, alongside specialized decoding, to shape a shared backbone into three distinct operational modes. Concretely, the ASR branch advances transcription efficiency via verifiable multi-token decoding; the TTS branch achieves controllable, expressive synthesis through preference-based RLHF and context-rich supervision; and the Realtime branch realizes low-latency, persona-consistent dialogue via generative reward modeling within an RLHF framework. On standard benchmarks, StepAudio 2.5 achieves state-of-the-art results across ASR, TTS, and Realtime, demonstrating that a singular audio-language foundation can successfully internalize the distinct deployment objectives of speech understanding, generation, and live interaction.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Port-Hamiltonian Systems with Dissipation Potential: Modelling and Trajectory Tracking Control

Port-Hamiltonian systems (PHS) and interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control (IDA-PBC) have achieved broad success in modelling and stabilisation of physical systems. However, the absence of a dedicated scalar potential for the momentum channel forces any modification of the momentum-dependent dynamics to proceed indirectly through the interconnection and damping matrices, rendering the matching partial differential equation (PDE) difficult to solve and complicating extensions to trajectory tracking. This paper proposes a port-Hamiltonian system with dissipation potential (PHS-DP), in which the damping matrix is replaced by scalar convex dissipation potentials, providing independent scalar objects for the momentum and auxiliary state channels and restoring the variational symmetry between stored and dissipated energy. Building on this framework, Dual Potential Shaping Control (DPSC) achieves trajectory tracking by sequentially shaping the potential energy and dissipation potentials without modifying the interconnection structure. Contraction of the closed-loop cascade is established via a hierarchical contraction argument, and the matching condition is satisfied automatically for any admissible choice of shaped potentials, requiring no PDE to be solved. In contrast to existing PDE-free energy shaping approaches, which achieve this by abandoning the port-Hamiltonian closed-loop structure and sacrificing physical interpretability, the proposed framework preserves the interconnection structure and retains a transparent energy-based interpretation at every stage of the design. Validation on a magnetic levitation system demonstrates tracking performance comparable to timed IDA-PBC with substantially reduced design complexity.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Grouped Annulus-Modulated Transceiver Is Almost Full DoF-Achieving for RIS-Assisted Symbiotic Radios Over Spatial-Correlated Channels

This paper considers a RIS-assisted symbiotic communication system, where additional information is conveyed by the passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). In existing schemes, individual phase modulation is usually adopted at the RIS elements, which severely limits exploiting all extra multiplexing gains brought by the RIS. To address the issue, we propose a novel matrix decomposition algorithm that transforms the equivalent channel into a structured form while effectively suppressing the decomposition residual. Based on this, a novel transceiver architecture employing grouped annulus modulation (GAM) with a hexagonal-lattice-based constellation is developed, which is capable of achieving the full degrees of freedom (DoFs) when the decomposition algorithm performs as expected. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed transceiver achieves much higher communication rates, thereby leading to higher spectral efficiency, compared to the conventional phase-only modulation scheme, while maintaining comparable error performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Demystifying Manifold Constraints in LLM Pre-training

The empirical success of large language model (LLM) pre-training relies heavily on heuristic stabilization techniques, such as explicit normalization layers and weight decay. While recent constrained optimization approaches that explicitly restrict weights may improve numerical stability and performance, the mechanism and motivation for adding constraints still remain elusive. This paper systematically demystifies the role of explicit manifold constraints in LLM pre-training. By introducing the Msign-Aligned Constrained Riemannian Optimizer (MACRO)-a provably convergent, single-loop optimization framework-our study disentangles weight regularization heuristics from interacting mechanisms like RMS normalization and decoupled weight decay. Theoretical analyses and comprehensive empirical evaluations reveal that manifold constraints independently bound forward activation scales and enforce stable rotational equilibrium, thereby subsuming the roles of these heuristic mechanisms. Evaluations on large-scale LLM architectures demonstrate that MACRO achieves highly competitive performance while rigorously preserving the theoretical guarantees of exact Riemannian optimization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

SELF-EMO: Emotional Self-Evolution from Recognition to Consistent Expression

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has become a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) in human-centric interaction. Beyond accurate recognition, coherent emotional expression is also crucial, yet both are limited by the scarcity and static nature of high-quality annotated data. In this work, we propose SELF-EMO, a self-evolution framework grounded in the hypothesis that better emotion prediction leads to more consistent emotional responses. We introduce two auxiliary tasks, emotional understanding and emotional expression, and design a role-based self-play paradigm where the model acts as both an emotion recognizer and a dialogue responder. Through iterative interactions, the model generates diverse conversational trajectories, enabling scalable data generation. To ensure quality, we adopt a data flywheel mechanism that filters candidate predictions and responses using a smoothed IoU-based reward and feeds selected samples back for continuous self-improvement without external supervision. We further develop SELF-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that stabilizes optimization with multi-label alignment rewards and group-level consistency signals. Experiments on IEMOCAP, MELD, and EmoryNLP show that SELF-EMO achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving accuracy by +6.33% on Qwen3-4B and +8.54% on Qwen3-8B, demonstrating strong effectiveness and generalization.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Lightweight Geometric Adaptation for Training Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) often suffer from slow convergence, training instability, and reduced accuracy on challenging partial differential equations due to the anisotropic and rapidly varying geometry of their loss landscapes. We propose a lightweight curvature-aware optimization framework that augments existing first-order optimizers with an adaptive predictive correction based on secant information. Consecutive gradient differences are used as a cheap proxy for local geometric change, together with a step-normalized secant curvature indicator to control the correction strength. The framework is plug-and-play, computationally efficient, and broadly compatible with existing optimizers, without explicitly forming second-order matrices. Experiments on diverse PDE benchmarks show consistent improvements in convergence speed, training stability, and solution accuracy over standard optimizers and strong baselines, including on the high-dimensional heat equation, Gray--Scott system, Belousov--Zhabotinsky system, and 2D Kuramoto--Sivashinsky system.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Revealing Magnon-Photon Coupling in Ultrathin Magnetic Films Using the Derivative-Divide Method

Magnon-photon coupling in planar cavities provides a promising platform for integrated cavity magnonics devices. However, its characterization becomes challenging in ultrathin magnetic films because their weak magnetic response can be obscured by the much stronger microwave background. Here, we employ the derivative-divide method to extract the field-dependent magnetic response from transmission measurements of split-ring resonators. The method reveals clear magn-photon anticrossings that are hardly discernible in conventional transmission spectra and enables quantitative extraction of the coupling strength. We resolve coupling in yttrium iron garnet films down to 60 nm and extend the approach to conductive CoFeB films down to 5 nm. Our results demonstrate a practical method for characterizing magno-photon coupling in ultrathin magnetic films, providing an experimental route toward cavity magnonics systems based on ultrathin magnetic films.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2026

Step 3.5 Flash: Open Frontier-Level Intelligence with 11B Active Parameters

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Step-DeepResearch Technical Report

As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Step-GUI Technical Report

Recent advances in multimodal large language models unlock unprecedented opportunities for GUI automation. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how to efficiently acquire high-quality training data while maintaining annotation reliability? We introduce a self-evolving training pipeline powered by the Calibrated Step Reward System, which converts model-generated trajectories into reliable training signals through trajectory-level calibration, achieving >90% annotation accuracy with 10-100x lower cost. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce Step-GUI, a family of models (4B/8B) that achieves state-of-the-art GUI performance (8B: 80.2% AndroidWorld, 48.5% OSWorld, 62.6% ScreenShot-Pro) while maintaining robust general capabilities. As GUI agent capabilities improve, practical deployment demands standardized interfaces across heterogeneous devices while protecting user privacy. To this end, we propose GUI-MCP, the first Model Context Protocol for GUI automation with hierarchical architecture that combines low-level atomic operations and high-level task delegation to local specialist models, enabling high-privacy execution where sensitive data stays on-device. Finally, to assess whether agents can handle authentic everyday usage, we introduce AndroidDaily, a benchmark grounded in real-world mobile usage patterns with 3146 static actions and 235 end-to-end tasks across high-frequency daily scenarios (8B: static 89.91%, end-to-end 52.50%). Our work advances the development of practical GUI agents and demonstrates strong potential for real-world deployment in everyday digital interactions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MMRPT: MultiModal Reinforcement Pre-Training via Masked Vision-Dependent Reasoning

Multimodal pre-training remains constrained by the descriptive bias of image-caption pairs, leading models to favor surface linguistic cues over grounded visual understanding. We introduce MMRPT, a masked multimodal reinforcement pre-training framework that strengthens visual reasoning in MLLMs. We are the first to incorporate reinforcement learning directly into the pre-training of large vision-language models, enabling learning signals that reward visual grounding rather than caption imitation. MMRPT constructs masked multimodal data by estimating sentence-level visual dependency via attention over visual tokens and masking highly vision-dependent segments; the model reconstructs these spans through vision-grounded reasoning guided by a semantic-visual reward. Experiments show consistent zero-shot gains across diverse benchmarks and substantially improved robustness under supervised fine-tuning, demonstrating that reinforcement-driven masked reasoning provides a more reliable and generalizable pre-training objective for multimodal models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

AutoBalance: An Automatic Balancing Framework for Training Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) provide a powerful and general framework for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into loss functions. However, training PINNs is notoriously difficult due to the need to balance multiple loss terms, such as PDE residuals and boundary conditions, which often have conflicting objectives and vastly different curvatures. Existing methods address this issue by manipulating gradients before optimization (a "pre-combine" strategy). We argue that this approach is fundamentally limited, as forcing a single optimizer to process gradients from spectrally heterogeneous loss landscapes disrupts its internal preconditioning. In this work, we introduce AutoBalance, a novel "post-combine" training paradigm. AutoBalance assigns an independent adaptive optimizer to each loss component and aggregates the resulting preconditioned updates afterwards. Extensive experiments on challenging PDE benchmarks show that AutoBalance consistently outperforms existing frameworks, achieving significant reductions in solution error, as measured by both the MSE and $L^{\infty}$ norms. Moreover, AutoBalance is orthogonal to and complementary with other popular PINN methodologies, amplifying their effectiveness on demanding benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Erase to Improve: Erasable Reinforcement Learning for Search-Augmented LLMs

While search-augmented large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, their reliability in complex multi-hop reasoning remains limited. This limitation arises from three fundamental challenges: decomposition errors, where tasks are incorrectly broken down; retrieval missing, where key evidence fails to be retrieved; and reasoning errors, where flawed logic propagates through the reasoning chain. A single failure in any of these stages can derail the final answer. We propose Erasable Reinforcement Learning (ERL), a novel framework that transforms fragile reasoning into a robust process. ERL explicitly identifies faulty steps, erases them, and regenerates reasoning in place, preventing defective logic from propagating through the reasoning chain. This targeted correction mechanism turns brittle reasoning into a more resilient process. Models trained with ERL, termed ESearch, achieve substantial improvements on HotpotQA, MuSiQue, 2Wiki, and Bamboogle, with the 3B model achieving +8.48% EM and +11.56% F1, and the 7B model achieving +5.38% EM and +7.22% F1 over previous state-of-the-art(SOTA) results. These findings suggest that erasable reinforcement learning provides a powerful paradigm shift for robust multi-step reasoning in LLMs.

cs.CL↗