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Kang Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Kang Zhao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Direct experimental measurement of femtonewton-scale momentum transfer force from electron beams

Electron beams (e-beams) are ubiquitous in imaging, patterning, and propulsion. This prevalence is rooted in the profound mastery of their wave-particle duality and energy-transfer pathways. Yet, a fundamental dimension remains largely unexplored: while the mechanical effect (i.e., the momentum transfer to a target) is theoretically known, quantification of its femtonewton-range force has remained elusive. This discrepancy represents a missing piece of the puzzle toward a comprehensive understanding of e-beam-matter interactions, and ultimately limits the multi-dimensional exploitation of e-beams. A force sensor combining femtonewton sensitivity, immunity to electromagnetic noise, compatibility with vacuum, and absolute calibration is critical to bridge the gap between theory and experiment. Here the FINEST (Femtonewton Interferometric Nanomechanical Electron-beam Sensing Technology) sensor is proposed and successfully tested to measure the force of an e-beam. FINEST is an optical-pressure-calibrated 3D spring-type optical sensor that operates reliably under e-beam conditions. Femtonewton-scale forces from 2-30 keV e-beams are directly measured, ranging from 505 fN to 13 pN. Both linear scaling with beam current and a non-monotonic energy dependence (peaking near 10 keV) are observed. Based on this calibrated force, the mechanical contribution to e-beam ice etching was quantitatively confirmed; its effect is orders of magnitude lower than the total etch depth and lacks noticeable energy dependence. By achieving the first direct experimental measurement of e-beam momentum transfer, this work adds a long-missing dimension to the physical landscape of e-beam processes. These findings provide a quantitative basis for furthering the multi-dimensional exploitation of e-beams, potentially transforming our approach to precision nanofabrication, sensing, and fundamental electron physics research.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2026

AppDeltaWorld: Transition-Grounded Delta Code World Model for Mobile GUI Agents

Mobile GUI agents can operate apps through pixel perception and touch actions, making them a promising interface for collecting and improving long-horizon mobile interaction policies. However, real trajectories are difficult to obtain for sensitive apps and privacy-critical operations. At the same time, existing simulated environments are costly to scale up, and GUI world models still suffer from unstable generation, limited modality coverage, and inconsistent action-transition logic. To address these limitations, we propose AppDeltaWorld, a transition-grounded delta code world model that predicts the next GUI as a reachable code update rather than as an unconstrained image or text description. AppDeltaWorld retrieves app-specific Level-1 HTML references under an action-transition constraint, generates Level-2 executable HTML conditioned on the current screen, action, predicted next-screen text, and retrieved structure, and inserts generated visual assets into image slots before browser rendering. As a world model, AppDeltaWorld achieves the highest fidelity on CMGUIBench-500 under Code2World evaluation, with clear gains in structural layout and UI element reconstruction over image-only and code-only baselines. As a training environment, AppDeltaWorld supports filtered closed-loop SFT data construction that, when combined with public supervision, enables AppDeltaAgent to achieve state-of-the-art performance on AndroidLens and consistent gains on MobileGym and MobileWorld. Moreover, world-model-based test-time reinforcement learning enables policy adaptation and shows further improvements without additional interaction with real apps.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Mi-Memory: A Lifecycle Memory Framework for Personal AI

Personal AI is moving beyond chat-only interaction toward continuous services that span phones, cars, homes, wearables, cameras, and tools. In this setting, memory cannot remain a cache of prior conversations. It should serve as a continuity and governance substrate: preserving durable user state, grounding answers in multimodal and device evidence, supporting correction and forgetting, bounding policy evolution, and remaining deployable under latency, cost, privacy, and edge-cloud constraints. This technical report presents Mi-Memory, a lifecycle memory framework for Personal AI organized around four roles: Structure, Expansion, Evolution, and Deployment. A shared audit contract links these roles through four recurring artifact families: typed evidence payloads preserve source identity and provenance, diagnostic traces localize evidence loss across the serving pipeline, strategy artifacts make memory-policy changes explicit, and gate/rollback records bound accepted evolution. MiMemory instantiates the roles through MemStack, MemSense/MemFuse, D$^{2}$ACCI/E$^{2}$MEND, and LiteMem. In controlled-reference Structure evaluations, MemStack reaches 93.59%, 57.24%, and 87.47% on LoCoMo, PersonaMem-V2, and LongMemEval, respectively; other tracks report module-level, preliminary/internal, transfer-feasibility, or design-only evidence with explicit boundaries. MiMemory is a step toward auditable, evidence-gated, and deployment-aware memory systems for Personal AI. Project homepage: https://darwin-agent.github.io/Mi-Memory/ .

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Efficient Difficulty-Aware Dynamic Routing for Diffusion-Based Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based methods have achieved impressive performance in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) by leveraging large pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) models as powerful generative priors. However, these methods still face two key limitations. First, existing SD-based one-step and multi-step Real-ISR approaches adopt a unified processing paradigm for all input samples, ignoring the varying restoration difficulty across images. Second, the aggressive resolution reduction of the VAE in SD models (e.g., 8x downsampling) leads to irreversible loss of fine-scale details, which cannot be recovered by the subsequent diffusion process. To address these limitations, we propose a Difficulty-aware Dynamic Routing (DDR) strategy that overcomes the rigid, one-size-fits-all processing paradigm. Specifically, we first design a difficulty estimator to predict the restoration cost of each input image, enabling automatic assignment to a network of appropriate capacity. Then, we construct a set of Real-ISR networks with varying model capacities by modulating the spatial downsampling ratio of the VAE in the SD backbone, thereby preserving more high-frequency information for challenging cases while maintaining efficiency for simpler inputs. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

IB-Flow: Information Bottleneck-Guided CFG Distillation for Few-Step Text-to-Image Generation

While large-scale text-to-image generative models have achieved unprecedented visual performance, their inherent reliance on multi-step iterative solvers incurs severe inference latency. Few-step distillation targeting the Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) trajectory has emerged as the prevalent dual-dimensional compression paradigm. However, existing frameworks remain subjugated by a coarse-grained blind injection paradigm that perpetually enforces a globally static guidance strength while indiscriminately sampling the supervisor timestep. This state-agnostic design completely disregards the intrinsic nature of image generation as a dynamic evolutionary process characterized by progressive entropy reduction, which not only restricts the performance boundary of few-step compression but also precipitates severe CFG over-conditioning artifacts. To transcend these limitations, we re-examine the distillation procedure through the theoretical lens of Information Theory, formally modeling it as a dynamic mutual information game constrained by the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. Specifically, we dismantle traditional blind assumptions via a dual-track adaptive framework. To determine the injection target, we propose an instance-aware selection mechanism that transmutes the intractable KL divergence constraint into a zero-overhead closed-form solution predicated on the local vector field norm. To regulate the injection strength, we introduce an entropy-aware schedule that dynamically decays alongside the SNR, applying maximal thrust for initial structural anchoring before smoothly reverting to the natural manifold to refine micro-details. Extensive empirical evaluations corroborate that our framework fundamentally eradicates over-conditioning artifacts, shattering the performance ceiling to achieve SOTA generative fidelity under extremely stringent 2-step configurations.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Depth Pruning for Vision Transformers: A Heterogeneity-Aware Perspective

While prior studies have successfully compressed vision Transformers (ViTs) through various pruning techniques, most have concentrated on width pruning to achieve significant reductions in model size. Depth pruning, which removes entire layers from a ViT, is notoriously difficult for accuracy recovery despite its potential to deliver higher speedups, limiting the acceleration achieved by existing joint width-and-depth pruning methods. In this work, we reveal that the failure of existing depth pruning methods lies in their neglect of heterogeneity between different layers, and we introduce HetDPT, a heterogeneity-aware depth pruning method that avoids dimension mismatch. Comprehensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, CIFAR-100, COCO, and ADE20K validate our method: HetDPT achieves a 1.58$\times$ speedup for DeiT-B while maintaining accuracy and a 1.39$\times$ speedup for DeiT-S with nearly no accuracy degradation. Furthermore, when combined with width pruning, HetDPT+ sets a new state-of-the-art record in extreme ViT pruning, enhancing the acceleration ratio from 4.24$\times$ to 5.19$\times$ for the Isomorphic-Pruning-2.6G configuration while maintaining near-lossless accuracy; our code is available at https://github.com/Efficient-AI-for-All/HetDPT.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CoDMD: Copula-aware Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Video Generation

Few-step distillation for video diffusion models has attracted significant attention, driven by the urgent demand for efficient deployment in real-world scenarios. However, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), a leading paradigm, tends to degrade under limited NFE budgets, manifesting in video generation as layout instability, oversaturation, and broken motion dynamics. We trace this failure to a structural limitation: standard DMD is an intra-sample distribution-matching objective with coordinate-wise gradients, and thus imposes no explicit constraint on the relational geometry across batch elements or temporal frames, leaving the underlying copula largely unregulated. Combined with the mode-seeking tendency of its reverse-KL objective, this absence of relational guidance makes DMD prone to collapsing into local optima in the few-step regime. Motivated by this insight, we propose Copula-aware DMD (CoDMD), a lightweight relational regularizer that reuses score estimates already produced by the frozen teacher and the online fake model to construct pairwise relation matrices across samples and frames. These are matched through a supplementary distributional objective that requires no additional networks, datasets, or sampling trajectories. On the Wan-2.1-T2V model series at 1.3B & 14B scales, CoDMD distills 50-step teachers into 4-step students, achieving an approximate 25$\times$ speed-up while attaining VBench scores of 84.46 & 84.87, outperforming prior trajectory-based (rCM 82.81 & 84.05) and distribution-based (DMD 83.38 & 83.81) methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. Project homepage: https://darwin-agent.github.io/HarnessX/.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Spectral decomposition of $(\star,\epsilon_1,\epsilon_2)$-structured matrix polynomials

We provide the spectral decompositions of $(\star,\epsilon_1,\epsilon_2)$-structured matrix polynomials $P(\lambda)$ in the unified form by a standard pair $(X, J)$ and a parameter matrix $\Gamma$. Using the recursive relationship between the coefficient matrices of $P(\lambda)$, equivalent expressions of these coefficient matrices are provided. When $J$ is assumed to be a block diagonal matrix, we show that the parameter matrix $\Gamma$ has a special structure.

math.NA↗
arXiv2026

A new approach for the model updating of $(\star,\epsilon)$-palindromic systems with no spill-over

In this paper, model updating problem of the $(\star, \epsilon)$-palindromic system with no spill-over (PMUP) is considered. First, we drive the spectral decomposition of $(\star, \epsilon)$-palindromic quadratic matrix polynomial $P(\lambda)$ by a standard pair $(X,\ J)$ and a parameter matrix $\Gamma$. And the structures of $\Gamma$ are provided when $J$ is assumed to be a block diagonal matrix. Using the spectral decomposition of $P(\lambda)$, a new sufficient solvable condition of the PMUP is provided and a set of analytical solutions is characterized. Finally, two algorithms are developed to address the cases of both simple and multiple eigenvalues. and the performance of our proposed method is illustrated by several numerical examples.

math.NA↗
arXiv2026

Wan-Image: Pushing the Boundaries of Generative Visual Intelligence

We present Wan-Image, a unified visual generation system explicitly engineered to paradigm-shift image generation models from casual synthesizers into professional-grade productivity tools. While contemporary diffusion models excel at aesthetic generation, they frequently encounter critical bottlenecks in rigorous design workflows that demand absolute controllability, complex typography rendering, and strict identity preservation. To address these challenges, Wan-Image features a natively unified multi-modal architecture by synergizing the cognitive capabilities of large language models with the high-fidelity pixel synthesis of diffusion transformers, which seamlessly translates highly nuanced user intents into precise visual outputs. It is fundamentally powered by large-scale multi-modal data scaling, a systematic fine-grained annotation engine, and curated reinforcement learning data to surpass basic instruction following and unlock expert-level professional capabilities. These include ultra-long complex text rendering, hyper-diverse portrait generation, palette-guided generation, multi-subject identity preservation, coherent sequential visual generation, precise multi-modal interactive editing, native alpha-channel generation, and high-efficiency 4K synthesis. Across diverse human evaluations, Wan-Image exceeds Seedream 5.0 Lite and GPT Image 1.5 in overall performance, reaching parity with Nano Banana Pro in challenging tasks. Ultimately, Wan-Image revolutionizes visual content creation across e-commerce, entertainment, education, and personal productivity, redefining the boundaries of professional visual synthesis.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Structural Diversity Drives Disruptive Scientific Innovation

Scientific innovation increasingly depends on collaboration, yet the organizational structure that fosters breakthrough ideas remains poorly understood. Existing metrics - such as team size or compositional diversity - capture readily observable characteristics but not the deeper architecture of collaboration. We introduce Structural Diversity (SD): the extent to which a team bridges multiple distinct knowledge communities within its prior collaboration network. Using a century-scale dataset of 260 million scientific publications (1900-2025) and combining causal inference with a quasi-natural experiment based on a U.S. National Science Foundation policy change in 2012, we show that SD is a powerful and robust predictor of disruptive innovation, outperforming traditional team novelty indicators such as team freshness and edge density. Moreover, SD positively interacts with team size and is able to mitigate the well-known "curse of scale" by transforming scale from a liability into a resource for creative synthesis. We find that one mechanism underlying this effect is Disciplinary Integration (DI): teams with higher SD can more effectively combine heterogeneous knowledge into novel configurations. Our findings position SD as both a new theoretical construct and an actionable design principle for organizing scientific collaboration. By linking the architecture of team assembly to the dynamics of creative discovery, our work offers a structural explanation for how collective intelligence can be systematically engineered to foster disruptive innovation.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

PreciseCache: Precise Feature Caching for Efficient and High-fidelity Video Generation

High computational costs and slow inference hinder the practical application of video generation models. While prior works accelerate the generation process through feature caching, they often suffer from notable quality degradation. In this work, we reveal that this issue arises from their inability to distinguish truly redundant features, which leads to the unintended skipping of computations on important features. To address this, we propose \textbf{PreciseCache}, a plug-and-play framework that precisely detects and skips truly redundant computations, thereby accelerating inference without sacrificing quality. Specifically, PreciseCache contains two components: LFCache for step-wise caching and BlockCache for block-wise caching. For LFCache, we compute the Low-Frequency Difference (LFD) between the prediction features of the current step and those from the previous cached step. Empirically, we observe that LFD serves as an effective measure of step-wise redundancy, accurately detecting highly redundant steps whose computation can be skipped through reusing cached features. To further accelerate generation within each non-skipped step, we propose BlockCache, which precisely detects and skips redundant computations at the block level within the network. Extensive experiments on various backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of our PreciseCache, such as achieving an average of $2.6\times$ speedup on Wan2.1-14B without noticeable quality loss.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

R^3: Replay, Reflection, and Ranking Rewards for LLM Reinforcement Learning

Large reasoning models (LRMs) aim to solve diverse and complex problems through structured reasoning. Recent advances in group-based policy optimization methods have shown promise in enabling stable advantage estimation without reliance on process-level annotations. However, these methods rely on advantage gaps induced by high-quality samples within the same batch, which makes the training process fragile and inefficient when intra-group advantages collapse under challenging tasks. To address these problems, we propose a reinforcement learning mechanism named \emph{\textbf{R^3}} that along three directions: (1) a \emph{cross-context \underline{\textbf{R}}eplay} strategy that maintains the intra-group advantage by recalling valuable examples from historical trajectories of the same query, (2) an \emph{in-context self-\underline{\textbf{R}}eflection} mechanism enabling models to refine outputs by leveraging past failures, and (3) a \emph{structural entropy \underline{\textbf{R}}anking reward}, which assigns relative rewards to truncated or failed samples by ranking responses based on token-level entropy patterns, capturing both local exploration and global stability. We implement our method on Deepseek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B and train it on the DeepscaleR-40k in the math domain. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves SoTA performance on several math benchmarks, representing significant improvements and fewer reasoning tokens over the base models. Code and model will be released.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Dynamics of Human-AI Collective Knowledge on the Web: A Scalable Model and Insights for Sustainable Growth

Humans and large language models (LLMs) now co-produce and co-consume the web's shared knowledge archives. Such human-AI collective knowledge ecosystems contain feedback loops with both benefits (e.g., faster growth, easier learning) and systemic risks (e.g., quality dilution, skill reduction, model collapse). To understand such phenomena, we propose a minimal, interpretable dynamical model of the co-evolution of archive size, archive quality, model (LLM) skill, aggregate human skill, and query volume. The model captures two content inflows (human, LLM) controlled by a gate on LLM-content admissions, two learning pathways for humans (archive study vs. LLM assistance), and two LLM-training modalities (corpus-driven scaling vs. learning from human feedback). Through numerical experiments, we identify different growth regimes (e.g., healthy growth, inverted flow, inverted learning, oscillations), and show how platform and policy levers (gate strictness, LLM training, human learning pathways) shift the system across regime boundaries. Two domain configurations (PubMed, GitHub and Copilot) illustrate contrasting steady states under different growth rates and moderation norms. We also fit the model to Wikipedia's knowledge flow during pre-ChatGPT and post-ChatGPT eras separately. We find a rise in LLM additions with a concurrent decline in human inflow, consistent with a regime identified by the model. Our model and analysis yield actionable insights for sustainable growth of human-AI collective knowledge on the Web.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2025

Towards Reason-Informed Video Editing in Unified Models with Self-Reflective Learning

Unified video models exhibit strong capabilities in understanding and generation, yet they struggle with reason-informed visual editing even when equipped with powerful internal vision-language models (VLMs). We attribute this gap to two factors: (1) existing datasets are inadequate for training and evaluating reasoning-aware video editing, and (2) an inherent disconnect between the models' reasoning and editing capabilities, which prevents understanding from guiding the editing process. To address this, we introduce the Reason-Informed Video Editing (RVE) task, which requires reasoning about physical plausibility and causal dynamics during editing. To support systematic evaluation, we construct RVE-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with two complementary subsets: Reasoning-Aware Video Editing (RAVE) and In-Context Video-to-Video Generation (ICVG), spanning diverse reasoning dimensions across both editing and generation scenarios. Building upon this foundation, we propose ReViSE, a self-reflective learning framework that harnesses the model's internal VLM to evaluate and refine its own generation during training. Unlike prior reward-based approaches that rely on external critics, ReViSE leverages the model's internal VLM as a self-reflective evaluator, providing differentiable feedback that directly refines the generator's reasoning behavior during training. Extensive experiments on RVE-Bench demonstrate that ReViSE enhances editing accuracy and visual fidelity, outperforming the finetuned counterpart by 10% in Overall score on the RAVE subset, demonstrating the effectiveness of self-reflective differentiable reward.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

FADiff: Fusion-Aware Differentiable Optimization for DNN Scheduling on Tensor Accelerators

Efficient deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), on tensor accelerators is essential for maximizing computational efficiency in modern AI systems. However, achieving this is challenging due to the enormous and complex design space created by the interaction of intra-layer mapping and inter-layer fusion. In this work, we present FADiff, a gradient-based optimization framework capable of automatically identifying high-quality intra-layer mapping and inter-layer fusion strategies to accelerate inference for DNN workloads. We first construct a unified and differentiable analytical cost model, which accurately predicts the energy and latency of both single-layer mappings and various layer fusion strategies. Then, by encoding discrete constraints into the loss function, we employ a gradient-based approach to efficiently explore the vast design space, determining the optimal joint strategy for mapping and fusion. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of FADiff, achieving better optimization in terms of energy and latency compared to existing methods.

cs.AR↗
arXiv2025

HAP: Hybrid Adaptive Parallelism for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Inference

Current inference systems for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models primarily employ static parallelization strategies. However, these static approaches cannot consistently achieve optimal performance across different inference scenarios, as they lack the flexibility to adapt to varying computational requirements. In this work, we propose HAP (Hybrid Adaptive Parallelism), a novel method that dynamically selects hybrid parallel strategies to enhance MoE inference efficiency. The fundamental innovation of HAP lies in hierarchically decomposing MoE architectures into two distinct computational modules: the Attention module and the Expert module, each augmented with a specialized inference latency simulation model. This decomposition promotes the construction of a comprehensive search space for seeking model parallel strategies. By leveraging Integer Linear Programming (ILP), HAP could solve the optimal hybrid parallel configurations to maximize inference efficiency under varying computational constraints. Our experiments demonstrate that HAP consistently determines parallel configurations that achieve comparable or superior performance to the TP strategy prevalent in mainstream inference systems. Compared to the TP-based inference, HAP-based inference achieves speedups of 1.68x, 1.77x, and 1.57x on A100, A6000, and V100 GPU platforms, respectively. Furthermore, HAP showcases remarkable generalization capability, maintaining performance effectiveness across diverse MoE model configurations, including Mixtral and Qwen series models.

cs.DC↗