arXiv subjects

Li Du

Publications and source records attributed to Li Du.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Protocol for Shielding-Enhanced Loading of Single Polar Molecules into Optical Tweezers

We propose the high-fidelity preparation of single bosonic molecules in optical tweezers starting from small tweezer-trapped molecular ensembles. Our scheme combines a static electric field and a microwave field to generate strong, tunable, anisotropic interactions that shield the molecules against two-body collisional loss. We show that this shielding eliminates all long-range bound states, preventing three-body recombination. This elimination persists for all microwave ellipticities, including the experimentally practical limit of linear polarization. Application of an additional electric field gradient can be used to induce controlled spilling of strongly interacting molecules out of the trap until one remains. With realistic experimental parameters, we estimate that single tweezer-trapped NaCs molecules can be isolated from a pair with fidelities exceeding 99\%, and $> 95\%$ per site across an array. These results establish collisional shielding with electric fields as an effective tool for preparing highly-filled tweezer arrays of polar molecules.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2026

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LiftQuant: Continuous Bit-Width LLM via Dimensional Lifting and Projection

Existing quantization methods are fundamentally limited by rigid, integer-based bit-widths (e.g., 2, 3-bit), resulting in a ``deployment gap" where Large Language Models cannot be optimally fitted to specific memory budgets. To bridge this gap, we introduce LiftQuant, a novel framework that enables continuous bit-width control for true Pareto-optimal deployment. The core innovation is a ``lift-then-project" mechanism which approximates low-dimensional weight vectors by projecting a simple 1-bit lattice from a higher-dimensional ``lifted" space. Crucially, the effective bit-width is determined simply by the ratio of the lifted dimension to the original dimension, which allows the bit-width to be tuned quasi-continuous as the dimension is a flexible structural parameter. This projection generates a structured yet non-uniform codebook, capturing the expressive power of Vector Quantization (VQ). While beneficial over VQ, LiftQuant's decoding path relies solely on linear transformations and 1-bit uniform quantizers, retaining hardware-friendly nature. This flexibility is transformative: LiftQuant enables a 70B LLM to be compressed to 2.4 bits to precisely fit a 24GB GPU, where its performance significantly surpasses state-of-the-art 2-bit models fitted on the same device. Our code and ckpt is available at https://github.com/Heliulu/LiftQuant.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

MoASE++: Mixture of Activation Sparsity Experts with Domain-Adaptive On-policy Distillation for Continual Test Time Adaptation

Continual test-time adaptation adapts a source-pretrained model to non-stationary, unlabeled target streams while retaining past competence, yet texture-biased backbones risk error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting. Drawing inspiration from the process of decoupling shape and texture in the human visual system, we introduce MoASE, a plug-in mixture-of-experts that disentangles domain-agnostic structure from domain-specific texture using Activation Sparsity Experts with Spatial Differentiable Dropout, forming complementary high- and low-activation pathways, while high- and low-rank bottlenecks diversify representations. The Activation Sparsity Gate produces input-adaptive SDD thresholds for precise token selection, and the Domain-Aware Router assigns per-sample expert weights using texture-sensitive cues. To curb confirmation bias on unlabeled streams and stabilize supervision, we then introduce Domain-Adaptive On-Policy Distillation to constitute MoASE++, with an EMA-anchored on-policy reverse KL distillation and an augmentation policy conditioned on entropy and confidence that aligns predictions across the same views and improves the robustness-plasticity balance. Extensive experiments on classification (CIFAR-10/100-C, ImageNet-C) and semantic segmentation (Cityscapes->ACDC) demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art performance, offering a principled, controllable approach to continual adaptation in dynamic visual environments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

GR-Ben: A General Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Process Reward Models

Currently, process reward models (PRMs) have exhibited remarkable potential for test-time scaling. Since large language models (LLMs) regularly generate flawed intermediate reasoning steps when tackling a broad spectrum of reasoning and decision-making tasks, PRMs are required to possess capabilities for detecting process-level errors in real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on mathematical reasoning, thereby failing to comprehensively evaluate the error detection ability of PRMs across diverse reasoning scenarios. To mitigate this gap, we introduce GR-Ben, a process-level benchmark specifically designed for assessing PRM's performance across two primary reasoning domains (science and logic) and nine subdomains. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 22 models, encompassing both PRMs and LLMs, and derive two key findings: (1) In domains beyond mathematical reasoning, the error-detection ability of existing PRMs and LLMs is found to be markedly weaker by comparison.(2) In general, PRMs are less adept at identifying knowledge-based errors, whereas LLMs exhibit poorer performance in detecting computational errors. We hope GR-Ben can foster future researches on PRMs for general domains, thereby enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

A Switch-Centric In-Network Architecture for Accelerating LLM Inference in Shared-Memory Network

Tensor parallelism (TP) has become a key technique for latency-sensitive LLM inference, but it introduces frequent, tightly synchronized All-Reduce operations that lie directly on the inference critical path, making inter-GPU communication a major performance bottleneck. In-network computing offers a promising approach to mitigating this bottleneck. However, we observe that the existing solution, NVLink SHARP (NVLS), is fundamentally constrained by its GPU-driven execution model that exposes in-network computing as GPU-issued, element-granular memory operations rather than a switch-orchestrated collective. This design forces redundant switch-GPU-switch data movement and cannot perform scale-aware quantized All-Reduce due to its lack of cross-element coordination. To address these limitations, we propose SCIN, the first switch-centric in-network computing architecture for multi-accelerator shared-memory networks. SCIN replaces GPU-driven collective orchestration with an in-switch accelerator (ISA) that directly initiates memory transactions and orchestrates the complete All-Reduce operation. This switch-driven execution eliminates redundant data movement inherent in NVLS, shortens synchronization paths, and fully offloads collective execution from GPUs. Furthermore, centralized ISA control enables cross-element coordination between quantized data and their scale factors. SCIN exploits this capability through a pipelined dequantization-reduction-requantization datapath, enabling scale-aware in-network quantized All-Reduce and nearly halving communication volume with negligible accuracy degradation. We implement SCIN on a multi-FPGA prototype to validate its feasibility. For a simulated 8-GPU system, SCIN accelerates small- and large-message All-Reduce by up to 1.8x and 2.6x over NVLS, respectively, translating into up to 1.12x TPOT and 1.42x TTFT speedups.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

Key-Embedded Privacy for Decentralized AI in Biomedical Omics

The rapid adoption of data-driven methods in biomedicine has intensified concerns over privacy, governance, and regulation, limiting raw data sharing and hindering the assembly of representative cohorts for clinically relevant AI. This landscape necessitates practical, efficient privacy solutions, as cryptographic defenses often impose heavy overhead and differential privacy can degrade performance, leading to sub-optimal outcomes in real-world settings. Here, we present a lightweight federated learning method, INFL, based on Implicit Neural Representations that addresses these challenges. Our approach integrates plug-and-play, coordinate-conditioned modules into client models, embeds a secret key directly into the architecture, and supports seamless aggregation across heterogeneous sites. Across diverse biomedical omics tasks, including cohort-scale classification in bulk proteomics, regression for perturbation prediction in single-cell transcriptomics, and clustering in spatial transcriptomics and multi-omics with both public and private data, we demonstrate that INFL achieves strong, controllable privacy while maintaining utility, preserving the performance necessary for downstream scientific and clinical applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

LiveClawBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Complex, Real-World Assistant Tasks

OpenClaw-style personal assistants extend LLM agents from isolated tool use to open-ended, stateful, and personalized software environments. Evaluating these assistants is fundamentally a fidelity problem: benchmarks must be faithful both to the distribution of real assistant tasks and to the execution semantics of the environments in which those tasks unfold. Existing benchmarks often lose fidelity in one dimension or the other. Their task distributions are shaped by what is easy to isolate, mock, and verify, underrepresenting real-world difficulties such as cross-service dependency, contaminated state, implicit intent, and runtime change. Their environments are either live but hard to reproduce, or reproducible but reduced to endpoint-level stubs that remove sessions, artifacts, state transitions, and downstream side effects. We introduce LiveClawBench, a benchmark designed around this dual-fidelity requirement. LiveClawBench combines a Triple-Axis Complexity Framework for difficulty-driven task construction with reproducible full-stack mock applications that preserve stateful execution semantics. With 134 executable cases across 10 domains with 22 mocked services, LiveClawBench supports controlled, extensible, and factor-level diagnostic evaluation of realistic agentic tasks. We release the benchmark resources: (1) Benchmark: https://github.com/Mosi-AI/LiveClawBench; (2) Leaderboard: https://mosi-ai.github.io/LiveClawBench/leaderboard/; (3) Trajectories: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Mosi-AI/LiveClawbench-trajectories

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

LLMs Know More About Numbers than They Can Say

Although state-of-the-art LLMs can solve math problems, we find that they make errors on numerical comparisons with mixed notation: "Which is larger, $5.7 \times 10^2$ or $580$?" This raises a fundamental question: Do LLMs even know how big these numbers are? We probe the hidden states of several smaller open-source LLMs. A single linear projection of an appropriate hidden layer encodes the log-magnitudes of both kinds of numerals, allowing us to recover the numbers with relative error of about 2.3% (on restricted synthetic text) or 19.06% (on scientific papers). Furthermore, the hidden state after reading a pair of numerals encodes their ranking, with a linear classifier achieving over 90% accuracy. Yet surprisingly, when explicitly asked to rank the same pairs of numerals, these LLMs achieve only 50-70% accuracy, with worse performance for models whose probes are less effective. Finally, we show that incorporating the classifier probe's log-loss as an auxiliary objective during finetuning brings an additional 3.22% improvement in verbalized accuracy over base models, demonstrating that improving models' internal magnitude representations can enhance their numerical reasoning capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/VCY019/Numeracy-Probing.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CD-PIM: A High-Bandwidth and Compute-Efficient LPDDR5-Based PIM for Low-Batch LLM Acceleration on Edge-Device

Edge deployment of low-batch large language models (LLMs) faces critical memory bandwidth bottlenecks when executing memory-intensive general matrix-vector multiplications (GEMV) operations. While digital processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures promise to accelerate GEMV operations, existing PIM-equipped edge devices still suffer from three key limitations: limited bandwidth improvement, component under-utilization in mixed workloads, and low compute capacity of computing units (CUs). In this paper, we propose CD-PIM to address these challenges through three key innovations. First, we introduce a high-bandwidth compute-efficient mode (HBCEM) that enhances bandwidth by dividing each bank into four pseudo-banks through segmented global bitlines. Second, we propose a low-batch interleaving mode (LBIM) to improve component utilization by overlapping GEMV operations with GEMM operations. Third, we design a compute-efficient CU that performs enhanced GEMV operations in a pipelined manner by serially feeding weight data into the computing core. Forth, we adopt a column-wise mapping for the key-cache matrix and row-wise mapping for the value-cache matrix, which fully utilizes CU resources. Our evaluation shows that compared to a GPU-only baseline and state-of-the-art PIM designs, our CD-PIM achieves 11.42x and 4.25x speedup on average within a single batch in HBCEM mode, respectively. Moreover, for low-batch sizes, the CD-PIM achieves an average speedup of 1.12x in LBIM compared to HBCEM.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to open-domain settings remains a critical challenge, as unconstrained generation entails multi-faceted and often conflicting objectives - such as creativity versus factuality - where rigid, static reward scalarization is inherently suboptimal. To address this, we propose MAESTRO (Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization), which introduces a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model's terminal hidden states as a semantic bottleneck to perceive task-specific priorities. We formulate this as a contextual bandit problem within a bi-level optimization framework, where a lightweight Conductor network co-evolves with the policy by utilizing group-relative advantages as a meta-reward signal. Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines, while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO, and in some settings even reducing redundant generation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration

While Hybrid Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the standard paradigm for training LLM agents, effective mechanisms for data allocation between these stages remain largely underexplored. Current data arbitration strategies often rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. Since SFT targets pattern consolidation through imitation while RL drives structural adaptation via exploration, misaligning data with these functional roles causes severe optimization interference. We propose PRISM, a dynamics-aware framework grounded in Schema Theory that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. By analyzing the spatial geometric structure of gradients, PRISM identifies data triggering high spatial concentration as high-conflict signals that require RL for structural restructuring. In contrast, data yielding diffuse updates is routed to SFT for efficient consolidation. Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld demonstrate that PRISM achieves a Pareto improvement, outperforming state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22$\times$. Our findings suggest that disentangling data based on internal optimization regimes is crucial for scalable and robust agent alignment.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Towards Compositional Generalization of LLMs via Skill Taxonomy Guided Data Synthesis

Large Language Models (LLMs) and agent-based systems often struggle with compositional generalization due to a data bottleneck in which complex skill combinations follow a long-tailed, power-law distribution, limiting both instruction-following performance and generalization in agent-centric tasks. To address this challenge, we propose STEPS, a Skill Taxonomy guided Entropy-based Post-training data Synthesis framework for generating compositionally challenging data. STEPS explicitly targets compositional generalization by uncovering latent relationships among skills and organizing them into an interpretable, hierarchical skill taxonomy using structural information theory. Building on this taxonomy, we formulate data synthesis as a constrained information maximization problem, selecting skill combinations that maximize marginal structural information within the hierarchy while preserving semantic coherence. Experiments on challenging instruction-following benchmarks show that STEPS outperforms existing data synthesis baselines, while also yielding improved compositional generalization in downstream agent-based evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

A Scheduling Framework for Efficient MoE Inference on Edge GPU-NDP Systems

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models facilitate edge deployment by decoupling model capacity from active computation, yet their large memory footprint drives the need for GPU systems with near-data processing (NDP) capabilities that offload experts to dedicated processing units. However, deploying MoE models on such edge-based GPU-NDP systems faces three critical challenges: 1) severe load imbalance across NDP units due to non-uniform expert selection and expert parallelism, 2) insufficient GPU utilization during expert computation within NDP units, and 3) extensive data pre-profiling necessitated by unpredictable expert activation patterns for pre-fetching. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient inference framework featuring three key optimizations. First, the underexplored tensor parallelism in MoE inference is exploited to partition and compute large expert parameters across multiple NDP units simultaneously towards edge low-batch scenarios. Second, a load-balancing-aware scheduling algorithm distributes expert computations across NDP units and GPU to maximize resource utilization. Third, a dataset-free pre-fetching strategy proactively loads frequently accessed experts to minimize activation delays. Experimental results show that our framework enables GPU-NDP systems to achieve 2.41x on average and up to 2.56x speedup in end-to-end latency compared to state-of-the-art approaches, significantly enhancing MoE inference efficiency in resource-constrained environments.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Encyclo-K: Evaluating LLMs with Dynamically Composed Knowledge Statements

Benchmarks play a crucial role in tracking the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and identifying their capability boundaries. However, existing benchmarks predominantly curate questions at the question level, suffering from three fundamental limitations: vulnerability to data contamination, restriction to single-knowledge-point assessment, and reliance on costly domain expert annotation. We propose Encyclo-K, a statement-based benchmark that rethinks benchmark construction from the ground up. Our key insight is that knowledge statements, not questions, can serve as the unit of curation, and questions can then be constructed from them. We extract standalone knowledge statements from authoritative textbooks and dynamically compose them into evaluation questions through random sampling at test time. This design directly addresses all three limitations: the combinatorial space is too vast to memorize, and model rankings remain stable across dynamically generated question sets, enabling reliable periodic dataset refresh; each question aggregates 8-10 statements for comprehensive multi-knowledge assessment; annotators only verify formatting compliance without requiring domain expertise, substantially reducing annotation costs. Experiments on over 50 LLMs demonstrate that Encyclo-K poses substantial challenges with strong discriminative power. Even the top-performing OpenAI-GPT-5.1 achieves only 62.07% accuracy, and model performance displays a clear gradient distribution--reasoning models span from 16.04% to 62.07%, while chat models range from 9.71% to 50.40%. These results validate the challenges introduced by dynamic evaluation and multi-statement comprehensive understanding. These findings establish Encyclo-K as a scalable framework for dynamic evaluation of LLMs' comprehensive understanding over multiple fine-grained disciplinary knowledge statements.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Tool Zero: Training Tool-Augmented LLMs via Pure RL from Scratch

Training tool-augmented LLMs has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing language models' capabilities for complex tasks. The current supervised fine-tuning paradigm relies on constructing extensive domain-specific datasets to train models. However, this approach often struggles to generalize effectively to unfamiliar or intricate tool-use scenarios. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm can endow LLMs with superior reasoning and generalization abilities. In this work, we address a key question: Can the pure RL be used to effectively elicit a model's intrinsic reasoning capabilities and enhance the tool-agnostic generalization? We propose a dynamic generalization-guided reward design for rule-based RL, which progressively shifts rewards from exploratory to exploitative tool-use patterns. Based on this design, we introduce the Tool-Zero series models. These models are trained to enable LLMs to autonomously utilize general tools by directly scaling up RL from Zero models (i.e., base models without post-training). Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve over 7% performance improvement compared to both SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. These gains are consistently replicated across cross-dataset and intra-dataset evaluations, validating the effectiveness and robustness of our methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Ultrafast giant enhancement of second harmonic generation in a strongly correlated cobaltite

In quantum materials, nonlinear optical responses are highly sensitive to electronic structure and many-body interactions. Probing and manipulating such nonlinear processes is a complex and subtle endeavor, yet it offers deep insights into emerging physics and functionalities. Here, we report an anomalous ultrafast enhancement of second harmonic generation (SHG) in a strongly correlated cobaltite YbBaCo$_4$O$_7$. Above-bandgap femtosecond pumping increases SHG intensity by up to 60 % within 200 fs, with the enhancement persisting for tens of picoseconds. The enhancement is strongly anisotropic, with substantial amplification of in-plane susceptibility tensors, whereas the out-of-plane counterpart shows negligible change. We attribute these anomalies to ultrafast photodoping-induced modulation of the on-site Coulomb repulsion, which dynamically renormalizes the band structure and selectively amplifies specific $\chi^{(2)}$ components. These nonlinear dynamics encode rich information about the orbital symmetries and energies of the states involved, opening new avenues for all-optical probing of electronic structure in strongly correlated materials.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

RepCaM++: Exploring Transparent Visual Prompt With Inference-Time Re-Parameterization for Neural Video Delivery

Recently, content-aware methods have been employed to reduce bandwidth and enhance the quality of Internet video delivery. These methods involve training distinct content-aware super-resolution (SR) models for each video chunk on the server, subsequently streaming the low-resolution (LR) video chunks with the SR models to the client. Prior research has incorporated additional partial parameters to customize the models for individual video chunks. However, this leads to parameter accumulation and can fail to adapt appropriately as video lengths increase, resulting in increased delivery costs and reduced performance. In this paper, we introduce RepCaM++, an innovative framework based on a novel Re-parameterization Content-aware Modulation (RepCaM) module that uniformly modulates video chunks. The RepCaM framework integrates extra parallel-cascade parameters during training to accommodate multiple chunks, subsequently eliminating these additional parameters through re-parameterization during inference. Furthermore, to enhance RepCaM's performance, we propose the Transparent Visual Prompt (TVP), which includes a minimal set of zero-initialized image-level parameters (e.g., less than 0.1%) to capture fine details within video chunks. We conduct extensive experiments on the VSD4K dataset, encompassing six different video scenes, and achieve state-of-the-art results in video restoration quality and delivery bandwidth compression.

cs.NI↗