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Lam Nguyen

Publications and source records attributed to Lam Nguyen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

C$^3$ache: Accelerating World Action Models with Cross Inference Chunk Cache

World Action Models (WAMs) generalize better than standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies to novel motions and environments, because a video-modeling objective lets them learn from abundant unlabeled video rather than scarce labeled robot demonstrations. This generalization is computationally expensive. To complete a task, a WAM runs over multiple inference chunks, and each chunk requires a costly denoising process. Existing acceleration methods reduce this cost by caching and reusing computation within a single chunk's denoising trajectory. Our empirical analysis reveals a substantial source of redundancy they overlook: redundancy across chunks. When a robot executes a smooth behavior, the residuals computed at a given denoising step are strongly correlated from one chunk to the next. We introduce C$^3$ache, a training-free method that caches and reuses these residuals across inference chunks at the same denoising step. Experiments on benchmarks with a Fast-WAM backbone show that C$^3$ache achieves up to a $2.5\times$ speedup in total wall-clock inference time, with negligible degradation in task success rate.

cs.LG

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets -- CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore -- the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

cs.AI

ProAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Proactive Assistance with Real-World Data

Proactive agents that anticipate user intentions without explicit prompts represent a significant evolution in human-AI interaction, promising to reduce cognitive load and streamline workflows. However, existing datasets suffer from two critical deficiencies: (1) reliance on LLM-synthesized data that fails to capture authentic human decision-making patterns, and (2) focus on isolated tasks rather than continuous workflows, missing the pre-assistance behavioral context essential for learning proactive intervention signals. To address these gaps, we introduce ProAgentBench, a rigorous benchmark for proactive agents in working scenarios. Our contributions include: (1) a hierarchical task framework that decomposes proactive assistance into timing prediction and assist content generation; (2) a privacy-compliant dataset with 28,000+ events from 500+ hours of real user sessions, preserving bursty interaction patterns (burstiness B=0.787) absent in synthetic data; and (3) extensive experiments that evaluates LLM- and VLM-based baselines. Numerically, we showed that long-term memory and historical context significantly enhance prediction accuracy, while real-world training data substantially outperforms synthetic alternatives. We release our dataset and code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProAgentBench-6BC0.

cs.HC

Guaranteeing Conservation of Integrals with Projection in Physics-Informed Neural Networks

We propose a novel projection method that guarantees the conservation of integral quantities in Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). While the soft constraint that PINNs use to enforce the structure of partial differential equations (PDEs) enables necessary flexibility during training, it also permits the discovered solution to violate physical laws. To address this, we introduce a projection method that guarantees the conservation of the linear and quadratic integrals, both separately and jointly. We derived the projection formulae by solving constrained non-linear optimization problems and found that our PINN modified with the projection, which we call PINN-Proj, reduced the error in the conservation of these quantities by three to four orders of magnitude compared to the soft constraint and marginally reduced the PDE solution error. We also found evidence that the projection improved convergence through improving the conditioning of the loss landscape. Our method holds promise as a general framework to guarantee the conservation of any integral quantity in a PINN if a tractable solution exists.

cs.LG

PromptGuard: An Orchestrated Prompting Framework for Principled Synthetic Text Generation for Vulnerable Populations using LLMs with Enhanced Safety, Fairness, and Controllability

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-world applications poses unprecedented risks of generating harmful, biased, or misleading information to vulnerable populations including LGBTQ+ individuals, single parents, and marginalized communities. While existing safety approaches rely on post-hoc filtering or generic alignment techniques, they fail to proactively prevent harmful outputs at the generation source. This paper introduces PromptGuard, a novel modular prompting framework with our breakthrough contribution: VulnGuard Prompt, a hybrid technique that prevents harmful information generation using real-world data-driven contrastive learning. VulnGuard integrates few-shot examples from curated GitHub repositories, ethical chain-of-thought reasoning, and adaptive role-prompting to create population-specific protective barriers. Our framework employs theoretical multi-objective optimization with formal proofs demonstrating 25-30% analytical harm reduction through entropy bounds and Pareto optimality. PromptGuard orchestrates six core modules: Input Classification, VulnGuard Prompting, Ethical Principles Integration, External Tool Interaction, Output Validation, and User-System Interaction, creating an intelligent expert system for real-time harm prevention. We provide comprehensive mathematical formalization including convergence proofs, vulnerability analysis using information theory, and theoretical validation framework using GitHub-sourced datasets, establishing mathematical foundations for systematic empirical research.

cs.CV

KROMA: Ontology Matching with Knowledge Retrieval and Large Language Models

Ontology Matching (OM) is a cornerstone task of semantic interoperability, yet existing systems often rely on handcrafted rules or specialized models with limited adaptability. We present KROMA, a novel OM framework that harnesses Large Language Models (LLMs) within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline to dynamically enrich the semantic context of OM tasks with structural, lexical, and definitional knowledge. To optimize both performance and efficiency, KROMA integrates a bisimilarity-based concept matching and a lightweight ontology refinement step, which prune candidate concepts and substantially reduce the communication overhead from invoking LLMs. Through experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, we show that integrating knowledge retrieval with context-augmented LLMs significantly enhances ontology matching, outperforming both classic OM systems and cutting-edge LLM-based approaches while keeping communication overhead comparable. Our study highlights the feasibility and benefit of the proposed optimization techniques (targeted knowledge retrieval, prompt enrichment, and ontology refinement) for ontology matching at scale.

cs.AI

Who's at Risk? Effects of Inflation on Unemployment Risk

We empirically investigate the distributional effects of inflation on workers' unemployment tail risks using instrumental variable quantile regression. We find that supply-driven inflation disproportionately raises unemployment tail risks for cyclically vulnerable workers in both the short and medium term, while demand-driven inflation has differential effects -- limited to race and reason for unemployment -- only in the medium term. Demand-boosting policies, including monetary policy, can inadvertently widen those disparities through the inflation channel, underscoring the importance of inflation stabilization in promoting equitable growth in the labor market. Our findings could be explained structurally by heterogeneity in experienced inflation and wage inflation expectations.

econ.GN

Fluorescent emission and nondestructive 3D textural imaging in geologic materials by multiphoton microscopy

We greatly expand the application of multiphoton microscopy to geological investigations by using a tightly focused femtosecond laser beam to excite fluorescent emissions among minimally prepared rock and mineral samples. This new finding provides a tool for spatially resolving UV-visible fluorescent sources in minerals. Using a unique combination of harmonic generation and fluorescence, we explore applications to mineralogical investigations of terrestrial rocks and astromaterials. We report first-order demonstrations for 3D imaging of fluid inclusions in minerals and radiation-induced luminescence in meteorites. Nonlinear optical mineralogy, enabled by multiphoton microscopy, provides unique insights in mineralogic samples and holds the potential to revolutionize the analysis of geologic and astromaterials samples in the coming years.

physics.geo-ph

Count What You Want: Exemplar Identification and Few-shot Counting of Human Actions in the Wild

This paper addresses the task of counting human actions of interest using sensor data from wearable devices. We propose a novel exemplar-based framework, allowing users to provide exemplars of the actions they want to count by vocalizing predefined sounds ''one'', ''two'', and ''three''. Our method first localizes temporal positions of these utterances from the audio sequence. These positions serve as the basis for identifying exemplars representing the action class of interest. A similarity map is then computed between the exemplars and the entire sensor data sequence, which is further fed into a density estimation module to generate a sequence of estimated density values. Summing these density values provides the final count. To develop and evaluate our approach, we introduce a diverse and realistic dataset consisting of real-world data from 37 subjects and 50 action categories, encompassing both sensor and audio data. The experiments on this dataset demonstrate the viability of the proposed method in counting instances of actions from new classes and subjects that were not part of the training data. On average, the discrepancy between the predicted count and the ground truth value is 7.47, significantly lower than the errors of the frequency-based and transformer-based methods. Our project, code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/ExRAC.

cs.CV

A Cyber-HIL for Investigating Control Systems in Ship Cyber Physical Systems under Communication Issues and Cyber Attacks

This paper presents a novel Cyber-Hardware-in-the-Loop (Cyber-HIL) platform for assessing control operation in ship cyber-physical systems. The proposed platform employs cutting-edge technologies, including Docker containers, real-time simulator $OPAL-RT$, and network emulator $ns3$, to create a secure and controlled testing and deployment environment for investigating the potential impact of cyber attack threats on ship control systems. Real-time experiments were conducted using an advanced load-shedding controller as a control object in both synchronous and asynchronous manners, showcasing the platform's versatility and effectiveness in identifying vulnerabilities and improving overall Ship Cyber Physical System (SCPS) security. Furthermore, the performance of the load-shedding controller under cyber attacks was evaluated by conducting tests with man-in-the-middle (MITM) and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. These attacks were implemented on the communication channels between the controller and the simulated ship system, emulating real-world scenarios. The proposed Cyber-HIL platform provides a comprehensive and effective approach to test and validate the security of ship control systems in the face of cyber threats.

eess.SY

Carleman contraction mapping for a 1D inverse scattering problem with experimental time-dependent data

It is shown that the contraction mapping principle with the involvement of a Carleman Weight Function works for a Coefficient Inverse Problem for a 1D hyperbolic equation. Using a Carleman estimate, the global convergence of the corresponding numerical method is established. Numerical studies for both computationally simulated and experimentally collected data are presented. The experimental part is concerned with the problem of computing dielectric constants of explosive-like targets in the standoff mode using severely underdetermined data.

math.NA

Convexification-based globally convergent numerical method for a 1D coefficient inverse problem with experimental data

To compute the spatially distributed dielectric constant from the backscattering data, we study a coefficient inverse problem for a 1D hyperbolic equation. To solve the inverse problem, we establish a new version of Carleman estimate and then employ this estimate to construct a cost functional which is strictly convex on a convex bounded set with an arbitrary diameter in a Hilbert space. The strict convexity property is rigorously proved. This result is called the convexification theorem and is considered as the central analytical result of this paper. Minimizing this convex functional by the gradient descent method, we obtain the desired numerical solution to the coefficient inverse problems. We prove that the gradient descent method generates a sequence converging to the minimizer and we also establish a theorem confirming that the minimizer converges to the true solution as the noise in the measured data and the regularization parameter tend to zero. Unlike the methods that are based on optimization, our convexification method converges globally in the sense that it delivers a good approximation of the exact solution without requiring any initial guess. Results of numerical studies of both computationally simulated and experimental data are presented.

math.NA

Convexification for an Inverse Problem for a 1D Wave Equation with Experimental Data

The forward problem here is the Cauchy problem for a 1D hyperbolic PDE with a variable coefficient in the principal part of the operator. That coefficient is the spatially distributed dielectric constant. The inverse problem consists of the recovery of that dielectric constant from backscattering boundary measurements. The data depend on one variable, which is time. To address this problem, a new version of the convexification method is analytically developed. The theory guarantees the global convergence of this method. Numerical testing is conducted for both computationally simulated and experimental data. Experimental data, which are collected in the field, mimic the problem of the recovery of the spatially distributed dielectric constants of antipersonnel land mines and improvised explosive devices.

math.NA

Towards Skewness and Balancing of RPL Trees for the Internet of Things

In many application areas such as large-scale disaster detection, IoT networks connote the characteristics of LLN (Low power and Lossy Network). With few exceptions, prior work on RPL(Routing Protocol for LLN), a standard routing protocol standardized in the IETF, has focused on the evaluation of various aspects of routing performances and control overheads. In this paper, we address the problem of DODAG (Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph) created by the direct application of RPL. We first evaluate the skewness of DODAG both via numerical simulations and via actual large-scale testbed. RPL secures its flexibility and wide applicability by allowing the adoption of implementer-specific rank definitions and parent selection criteria. In addition to the metrics used in ContikiRPL and TinyRPL, the two most widely used open source implementations, we evaluated the skewness of RPL trees generated by applying various routing metrics. Performance analysis results show that RPL trees suffer from severe skewness regardless of routing metrics in both randomly generated networks and in real-world networks. We propose a novel routing protocol that may improve the balance of RPL trees. Rigorous performance analysis based on computer simulations shows that our algorithm improves the tree balance significantly.

cs.NI

Generative Adversarial Networks for Recovering Missing Spectral Information

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radar systems nowadays typical operate in the low frequency spectrum to achieve penetration capability. However, this spectrum is also shared by many others communication systems, which causes missing information in the frequency bands. To recover this missing spectral information, we propose a generative adversarial network, called SARGAN, that learns the relationship between original and missing band signals by observing these training pairs in a clever way. Initial results shows that this approach is promising in tackling this challenging missing band problem.

cs.LG

Classifying Multi-channel UWB SAR Imagery via Tensor Sparsity Learning Techniques

Using low-frequency (UHF to L-band) ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology for detecting buried and obscured targets, e.g. bomb or mine, has been successfully demonstrated recently. Despite promising recent progress, a significant open challenge is to distinguish obscured targets from other (natural and manmade) clutter sources in the scene. The problem becomes exacerbated in the presence of noisy responses from rough ground surfaces. In this paper, we present three novel sparsity-driven techniques, which not only exploit the subtle features of raw captured data but also take advantage of the polarization diversity and the aspect angle dependence information from multi-channel SAR data. First, the traditional sparse representation-based classification (SRC) is generalized to exploit shared information of classes and various sparsity structures of tensor coefficients for multi-channel data. Corresponding tensor dictionary learning models are consequently proposed to enhance classification accuracy. Lastly, a new tensor sparsity model is proposed to model responses from multiple consecutive looks of objects, which is a unique characteristic of the dataset we consider. Extensive experimental results on a high-fidelity electromagnetic simulated dataset and radar data collected from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory side-looking SAR demonstrate the advantages of proposed tensor sparsity models.

eess.SP

A new version of the convexification method for a 1-D coefficient inverse problem with experimental data

A new version of the convexification method is developed analytically and tested numerically for a 1-D coefficient inverse problem in the frequency domain. Unlike the previous version, this one does not use the so-called "tail function", which is a complement of a certain truncated integral with respect to the wave number. Globally strictly convex cost functional is constructed with the Carleman Weight Function. Global convergence of the gradient projection method to the correct solution is proved. Numerical tests are conducted for both computationally simulated and experimental data.

math.NA

Deep Network for Simultaneous Decomposition and Classification in UWB-SAR Imagery

Classifying buried and obscured targets of interest from other natural and manmade clutter objects in the scene is an important problem for the U.S. Army. Targets of interest are often represented by signals captured using low-frequency (UHF to L-band) ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology. This technology has been used in various applications, including ground penetration and sensing-through-the-wall. However, the technology still faces a significant issues regarding low-resolution SAR imagery in this particular frequency band, low radar cross sections (RCS), small objects compared to radar signal wavelengths, and heavy interference. The classification problem has been firstly, and partially, addressed by sparse representation-based classification (SRC) method which can extract noise from signals and exploit the cross-channel information. Despite providing potential results, SRC-related methods have drawbacks in representing nonlinear relations and dealing with larger training sets. In this paper, we propose a Simultaneous Decomposition and Classification Network (SDCN) to alleviate noise inferences and enhance classification accuracy. The network contains two jointly trained sub-networks: the decomposition sub-network handles denoising, while the classification sub-network discriminates targets from confusers. Experimental results show significant improvements over a network without decomposition and SRC-related methods.

eess.IV