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Lei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Lei Wang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Student Use of LLMs and the Limits of AI-Generated Question Difficulty in Data Science Courses

This paper presents a multi-source classroom study conducted during a 10-week quarter in data science courses at Drexel University. We first investigate the behaviors of student engagement with large language models (LLMs) using four surveys across three data science courses. Second, we evaluate the construct validity of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) generated by an LLM for in-lecture retrieval practice. Based on 378 authored questions (311 deployed, producing 7{,}888 student responses), we analyze whether the difficulty ratings assigned by an LLM match empirical item difficulty. Our study shows that student engagement with LLMs varied across courses and increased over the term. Although students expressed high satisfaction and reported saving considerable time, their perception of deep learning benefits declined, and many noted a tendency toward over-reliance. Regarding the difficulty ratings of LLM-generated MCQs, the Easy, Medium, and Hard labels correlated closely with its assigned Bloom's Taxonomy levels (Spearman $ρ=0.90$), reflecting an artifact of co-generation. However, neither metric predicted empirical item difficulty (difficulty label $ρ=0.06$; Bloom level $ρ=0.02$). The ratings reflect the structural formatting of a question rather than its underlying difficulty.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2026

TicTacBench: Benchmarking Timing Closure Capabilities of Coding Agents

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of coding agents capable of performing complex engineering tasks, including register-transfer level (RTL) design and optimization. Existing RTL benchmarks mainly evaluate functional correctness and performance, power, and area (PPA) of the generated RTL designs, leaving agents' ability for \emph{timing closure} under-evaluated. We propose TicTacBench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate coding agents' capabilities for RTL-level timing closure under post-place-and-route (post-PnR) evaluation. TicTacBench contains 30 diverse tasks, each provided with a suboptimal RTL design, realistic timing constraints, functional equivalence verification, and timing reports. With over 300 runs of coding agents driven by 8 frontier LLMs, we find that even the best agent can only close 53.3\% of tasks with 7.18\% area-delay product (ADP) degradation and 8.83\% energy-delay-squared product (EDDP) improvement on average. We identify common failure categories that explain why agents fail to close timing. Then we propose TicTacSkill, a new method that guides agents to follow standard timing-closure procedures and improves the Timing Closure Rate by 9\%. These results suggest that while coding agents have made significant progress in RTL design, their timing-closure capability still has substantial room for improvement.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Fiber-Topology-Assisted Indoor Positioning Under UWB Degradation with Fixed-Lag Factor Graphs

Ultra-wideband (UWB) provides absolute spatial constraints for indoor positioning, but these constraints become insufficient when multiple radio links are blocked or unavailable. A calibrated sensing fiber, in contrast, provides a fixed spatial topology that can be activated by distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) events independently of radio propagation. Motivated by this complementarity, we present FTALoc-FGO, a topology-aware fixed-lag factor-graph framework for fiber-assisted localization under UWB degradation. Along-fiber DAS events are mapped through the calibrated topology into anisotropic spatial observations, where a single fiber layer provides a directional constraint and two orthogonal layers provide complementary two-dimensional information. Fisher-information analysis characterizes this topology-dependent information and motivates the directional and joint fiber factors used in the fixed-lag graph. Experiments combining measured DAS events with simulated UWB ranges under controlled degradation evaluate the method over 30 paired realizations. Under complete UWB loss, FTALoc-FGO reduces the causal outage RMSE by 32.6\% and 66.4\% for single- and dual-layer routes, respectively, relative to robust UWB-only FGO. These results demonstrate that calibrated fiber topology can provide complementary spatial support when radio-based observations become insufficient.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale

Large-scale agentic training and evaluation with large language models (LLMs) rely on isolated, stateful execution environments in which models inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute commands, and interact with task-specific services. These workloads create sandboxes in large bursts, span heterogeneous functionality and isolation requirements, retain state across long interactions, and draw from large image corpora with limited reuse. Supporting them therefore requires an elastic execution platform rather than a single sandbox runtime. This report presents DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec), a production sandbox platform that exposes FnCall, container, microVM, and full-VM sandbox backends through a unified SDK. DSec coordinates placement and lifecycle management across the cluster, composes environments from independently versioned layers, combines memory sharing, reclamation, and CPU scheduling for high-density execution, and loads image data on demand from Fire-Flyer File System (3FS), a cluster-wide distributed filesystem. DSec is co-designed with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, decouples stateful rollout execution from preemptible GPU training, coordinates sandbox lifecycle with training to preserve rollout state while reclaiming idle resources, and mitigates agent misbehavior such as reward hacking. A single production-scale unit of DSec spans around 160 nodes, serving about 3 million sandboxes per day; in production, it supports over 380,000 concurrent sandboxes and sustains over 5,000 sandbox creations per second. Our evaluation and deployment experience show that these mechanisms reduce environment setup and image-distribution overhead, improve memory efficiency, and preserve latency-sensitive performance under high-density overcommit.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

GenTraceBench: A Benchmark for Tracing Audio Deepfakes Across Pre- and Post-training Stages

Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems are rarely deployed as unchanged pre-trained models. They are often adapted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or preference optimization such as DPO and GRPO. This raises a practical question for audio deepfake forensics: do fingerprints learned from a foundation generator remain valid after adaptation? We present GenTraceBench, a controlled benchmark spanning five TTS architectures, 16 pre-/post-training variants, and 49,728 utterances generated with fixed texts and speaker prompts. Under a train-on-foundation, test-on-adapted protocol, we evaluate binary detection, closed-set attribution, and open-set verification. DPO and GRPO generally preserve fingerprints, whereas some SFT and pre-training-data changes cause substantial drift; effect sizes vary across three forensic backbones. Repeated training runs confirm the largest W2V-BERT attribution drop, while a data-mixture control with comparable speech quality shows that composition change need not cause drift. In W2V-BERT verification, multi-shot enrollment reduces EER for the SFT condition from 44.4% to 11.0%, whereas the SingNet-only condition remains at or above 45% EER.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Graph-Supervised Hierarchical Clinical Alignment for Radiology Report Generation with Large Language Models

Radiology report generation (RRG) has recently benefited from large language models, which substantially improve report fluency. However, clinically faithful generation remains challenging because current supervision is still imposed mostly at the report level. This creates a granularity mismatch: radiology reports are composed of disease-grounded findings, while existing methods are trained mainly with whole-report objectives. To address this problem, we propose Graph-Supervised Hierarchical Clinical Alignment, which reformulates image-report supervision as a hierarchical clinical alignment problem. Our method structures this alignment as a disease-conditioned process, where supervision is decomposed into two levels: Disease-Centric Alignment for fine-grained disease-specific correspondence, and Global Clinical Semantic Alignment for report-level semantic coherence. A clinical knowledge graph is used as a training-time-only structural prior that defines disease-specific supervision units and their clinical relationships, introducing no additional overhead at inference. Because standard contrastive alignment could produce false negatives when studies share overlapping pathologies, we combine instance-conditioned discriminative matching with disease-conditioned soft regularization, enabling fine-grained yet clinically consistent cross-modal representations. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR, IU-Xray, and COV-CTR show that our method consistently improves performance on both conventional and clinical metrics. Notably, our 3B model surpasses several prior systems with larger 7B/13B backbones, suggesting that improving supervision structure, rather than increasing model size, can be more effective for RRG.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Understanding Reliability in LLM-based Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human survey responses and behavioral reactions, yet unreliable simulations can mislead social science conclusions. However, existing evaluations focus on end-to-end scores, leaving it unclear how different aspects of the simulation process interact to determine reliability. We propose ReliMap, which decomposes LLM-based human behavior simulation into three structured layers and evaluates reliability at both the individual level (R1) and population level (R2) across three configuration dimensions: model capacity, profile completeness, and population coverage. Through experiments across four simulation tasks and eleven LLMs, we find that all models exhibit substantial distributional bias without profile conditioning. Profile conditioning reduces this bias with diminishing returns. Larger models benefit more, and attribute informativeness matters more than quantity. Critically, R1 gains do not reliably transfer to R2--individual and population-level reliability can move in opposite directions. At the population layer, increasing coverage reduces variance but not systematic bias, with R2 stabilizing at around 50-100 individuals. These findings highlight that reliable simulation cannot be achieved by optimizing any single layer in isolation, but requires coordinated improvement across all three.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Policy Targeting with Binary Classification Trees: an Application to Rural Hospital Closures

Empirical researchers often use binary classification trees to identify subgroups at risk of adverse outcomes. We compare two classification tree algorithms in this policy-targeting context: classical classification and regression trees (CART) and the maximizing-distance final-split approach (MDFS). We establish a theoretical setting in which MDFS identifies a high-risk subgroup while CART identifies none. Applied to rural hospital closure data, MDFS targets a high-closure-probability subgroup: for-profit hospitals with more than 63 days in accounts receivable. CART misses this subgroup. To facilitate further application of these classification tree algorithms, we provide \texttt{targetree} package in Python, R, and Stata.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2026

DeepStack: Facilitating Co-Design Exploration of 3D DRAM-Stacked Accelerators for Distributed LLM Inference

Advances in hybrid bonding and packaging have driven growing interest in 3D DRAM-stacked AI accelerators. As large language models (LLMs) scale to hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, distributed inference across multiple 3D chips has become essential for AI serving. This trend makes cross-stack co-design critical because system-level parallelization and scheduling choices are tightly coupled with hardware characteristics such as memory organization, interconnects, and thermal constraints. We present DeepStack, an accurate performance model and efficient design space exploration (DSE) framework for distributed 3D-stacked LLM inference. At the hardware level, DeepStack captures transaction-aware memory bandwidth, bank activation constraints, buffering limitations, and thermal and power behavior. At the system level, it incorporates comprehensive parallelization strategies and execution scheduling. Through a dual-stage network abstraction and tile-level compute-communication overlap modeling, DeepStack achieves up to 100,000x faster evaluation than state-of-the-art simulators at comparable accuracy. We cross-validate DeepStack against our in-house 3D designs, an NS-3 backend with 2.12% error, and vLLM serving on eight B200 GPUs with 12.92% error. Combined with hierarchical search, DeepStack efficiently explores about 2.5 x 10^14 design points spanning the number of stacked DRAM layers, DRAM vertical connectivity, interconnects, compute-memory allocation, and distributed scheduling under thermal and area constraints. A search-space ablation shows that restricted DSE baselines can miss up to 9.5x modeled throughput. Beyond modeling and DSE, DeepStack derives design implications for distributed 3D AI systems and guides performance optimization across the stack. Source code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/tile-ai/DeepStack/tree/ae.

cs.AR↗
arXiv2026

Toward Interpretable Multimodal Fusion: Heat Conduction Modeling for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Joint Classification

The fusion of hyperspectral (HS) and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data plays a crucial role in enhancing land-cover classification by jointly exploiting spectral, spatial, and structural cues. However, existing multimodal fusion methods still struggle to model long-range dependencies and complex anisotropic interactions while maintaining computational efficiency. This paper introduces M2Heat, a physics-inspired framework that investigates multimodal fusion through the lens of heat conduction. At its core, a physics-driven visual heat conduction module (vHeat) and enhanced Frequency Value Embeddings (FVEs) simulate anisotropic information flow, enabling the capture of global dependencies with sub-quadratic complexity and physical interpretability. This mechanism, combined with a hybrid spatial-frequency fusion strategy named Cross-Frequency Fusion (CFF) module, produces highly discriminative and robust feature representations. M2Heat achieves competitive overall performance on three benchmarks, i.e., Trento, Houston2013, and Augsburg, while providing an interpretable heat-conduction-guided perspective for multimodal feature fusion. These results indicate the potential of heat-conduction-guided neural operators for efficient and interpretable RS multimodal fusion. The source code is publicly available at https: /github.com/Weikan0425/M2Heat_HSI_LiDAR.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

A unified quantum electrical platform for synchronous metrological realization of volt, ohm and ampere

A co-located integration quantum electrical standard is essential to reduce reliance on distributed traceability in high-accuracy metrology, especially for portable and on-site use. Metrologically, realizing any two of voltage, resistance, and current is sufficient, as the third follows from Ohm's law. The combination of Josephson voltage and quantum Hall resistance offers better uncertainty, but conflicts with the tesla-level field for quantum Hall and near-zero field for Josephson operation. Here we report a compact unified platform enabling co-realization of quantum voltage and resistance in a single cryostat near 4 K, with quantum current derived via Ohm's law. A hierarchical magnetic shielding with staged attenuation and spatial confinement allows 6 T and below 50 nT to coexist within 270 mm axial separation with negligible cross-coupling. In integrated operation, the Josephson and quantum Hall subsystems agree with expected quantized values within relative standard uncertainties of 2.6E-9 and 1.4E-8, respectively. Linking them via an improved cryogenic current comparator realizes a 50 μA quantum current with relative uncertainty of 6.6E-8. These results demonstrate that three basic electrical units can be synchronously realized with superior metrological consistency on a single integrated platform, offering a viable transition from distributed calibration chains toward compact-integrated quantum-based realization.

physics.ins-det↗
arXiv2026

Search for neutrinoless quadruple beta decay of $^{136}$Xe in PandaX-4T detector

The observation of neutrinoless quadruple beta decay (0$ν$4$β$) in the absence of neutrinoless double beta decay (0$ν$2$β$) has been argued to provide a strong indication that neutrinos are Dirac particles. We report a search for 0$ν$4$β$ decay of $^{136}\text{Xe}$ using a total $^{136}\text{Xe}$ exposure of 148.4 kg$\cdot$yr, collected during the commissioning and the first science runs of the PandaX-4T experiment. No significant excess of events over the background is observed. A lower limit on the 0$ν$4$β$ decay half-life of $^{136}\text{Xe}$ is set at 6.01 x $10^{24}$ yr at the 90% confidence level. This result establishes the most stringent constraint on this process in xenon, demonstrating the unique capability of the PandaX-4T detector in probing lepton number violation and shedding light on the fundamental nature of neutrinos.

nucl-ex↗
arXiv2026

MotionScape: A Motion-Stratified UAV Video Benchmark for World Modeling and Future Video Generation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly crucial for low-altitude autonomy and complex environment understanding. World models enable UAVs to anticipate how future states may evolve under potential actions, providing predictive support for autonomous decision-making. For video world models, future video generation serves as a means of simulating future visual states, providing a direct basis for evaluating their predictive capability. However, existing UAV video resources typically focus on specific control signals or simulated environments. Standardized benchmarks for multi-condition UAV-view future video generation are still limited. To bridge this gap, we introduce MotionScape, a real-world UAV-view benchmark comprising 228 high-resolution video clips totaling 62,700 frames, with semantic annotations of weather and illumination conditions, scene environment, and camera-viewpoint motion. The clips are stratified into low-, medium-, and high-motion strata using optical-flow-based motion intensity. MotionScape supports Text2World, Image2World, and Video2World evaluation under a unified future-generation protocol. Technical validation with representative baseline models assesses performance across conditioning settings and motion strata, providing a unified platform for evaluating the future visual simulation capabilities of UAV world models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

SmartANN: Object Causal Modeling Boosts Approximate Nearest Neighbor Diagnosis and Auto-Design

Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) algorithms achieve high efficiency through interdependent phases across index construction and query execution. This coupling allows upstream performance loss to propagate downstream, affecting execution behavior and measurable outputs. Existing component-level analyses mainly compare isolated design choices, while end-to-end benchmarks report aggregate metrics; neither traces loss propagation across dependent phases, hindering root-cause attribution and automated redesign. We present SmartANN, a framework based on the object causal model (OCM) for ANN bottleneck attribution and automated redesign. SmartANN represents an ANN workflow as eight ordered, replaceable objects and diagnoses them with a sequential diagnose-and-replace loop. At each iteration, it identifies the first object deviating from expected behavior or output as a bottleneck. Because an upstream bottleneck can obscure downstream ones, SmartANN replaces it with a test oracle when available, or with an implementation producing a better outcome, then continues downstream diagnosis. From the diagnosed bottlenecks and failure causes, SmartANN composes compatible actions from a pluggable action library to generate an optimized end-to-end ANN design. We instantiate SmartANN for IVF-PQ and HNSW, covering partition-and-quantization and graph-based ANN families. Experiments on eight real-world datasets show that SmartANN improves Recall by 0.24--74.20%, and increases QPS by 28.8--256.5% at comparable Recall, with low diagnosis and auto-design overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/zhouyutong20/SmartANN.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Novel Transition Mechanisms of Vector Localized Waves Induced by the Fourth-Order Effect

We investigate novel vector localized wave solutions in the coupled Lakshmanan-Porsezian-Daniel equa?tions, which describe the dynamics of the Heisenberg ferromagnetic spin chain. We present Tajiri-Watanabe breathers, rogue waves and resonant modes in both the degenerate and non-degenerate regions, together with the degenerate beating solitons. The fourth-order effect induces state transitions in both regions. In particular, the degenerate breathers can be transformed into solitons, whereas such transitions are absent in the coupled Hirota equations. Moreover, beating solitons can be converted into stable solitons only in the degenerate region, the phenomena not found in the Manakov system. We further uncover the state transitions of the resonant modes and derive the corresponding transition conditions for each branch. We derive the physical spectra and subsequently identify the state transition conditions in the spectral domain for both the degenerate and non-degenerate cases. These spectra provide an additional characterization of the transition dynamics. Finally, direct numerical simulations are performed to verify the validity of the exact solutions.

nlin.PS↗
arXiv2026

The Inert Doublet Model of Dark Matter and the LUX-ZEPLIN High-Recoil Event

The recent LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) search reported a nuclear-recoil event near $248~{\rm keV}$. Such a high-recoil event can be interpreted in terms of endothermic inelastic dark matter scattering, which typically requires a mass splitting of order a few hundred keV between the initial and final dark states. The inert doublet model (IDM) provides a natural realization of this scenario through the $Z$-mediated transition $H+N\to A+N$. In this work, we systematically examine whether this interpretation can be consistently realized in the IDM under the relevant theoretical constraints and existing experimental bounds. We perform a detailed profile-likelihood analysis of the LZ event, and find a viable high-mass IDM region with a profile best fit at $m_H=1080~{\rm GeV}$ and $m_A-m_H=369~{\rm keV}$.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2026

VTOS: Learning to Orchestrate Vision Tools by Co-Searching Solutions and Observers

Vision foundation tools such as open-vocabulary detectors, segmentation models, and post-processing operators are powerful building blocks for computer vision, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are orchestrated: which tools are used, in what order, with what parameters, and under what visual conditions. Existing visual-programming agents typically generate a fixed solution pipeline, making them brittle under dense objects, occlusion, small targets, and domain shift. We introduce VTOS (Vision Tools Orchestration Search), a framework for adaptive visual tool orchestration through joint solution-observer search. VTOS co-searches executable solution programs that compose vision tools such as Grounding DINO, SAM, NMS, and slice-and-detect, together with observer programs that diagnose candidate solutions, identify failure modes, and generate actionable feedback. These observations are accumulated in a shared VisionThoughts knowledge base to guide subsequent search. We evaluate VTOS through two case studies: dense object counting on LVIS-Count and zero-shot plant-disease segmentation on PlantSeg-OOD, which stress different orchestration challenges including threshold calibration, NMS, slicing, mask refinement, and domain generalization. Across both tasks, VTOS outperforms static tool pipelines and agentic visual-programming baselines, specifically in complex settings such as dense, occluded scenes and out-of-distribution segmentation where static pipelines leave measurable headroom, rather than in standard tasks where a single well-calibrated tool already approaches its ceiling.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

An Adaptive Projected-Gradient Algorithm for Sample-Average Approximations of Stochastic Multi-Objective Optimization

We consider stochastic multi-objective optimization over a nonempty closed convex set, where every objective is an expectation and only sample-gradient information is available. We develop a line-search-free and function-value-free adaptive projected-gradient algorithm for the sample-average approximation (SAA) problem. Each iteration computes a feasible regularized multi-gradient step and updates the regularization parameter from the projected step length. A normal-cone-based certificate yields descent estimates and an explicit complexity bound for the Pareto-stationarity residual of the SAA problem. The consistency of SAA gradients then transfers vanishing SAA residuals to Pareto stationarity for the population problem, while an additional concentration argument gives a finite-sample residual bound on compact sets. Experiments on synthetic problems, classification, portfolio selection, multi-task learning, and robot control illustrate the practical performance of our algorithm.

math.OC↗