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Li Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Li Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

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↗

Inverse Problems Over Probability Measure Space

Define a forward problem as $ρ_y = G_\#ρ_x$, where the probability distribution $ρ_x$ is mapped to another distribution $ρ_y$ using the forward operator $G$. In this work, we investigate the corresponding inverse problem: Given $ρ_y$, how to find $ρ_x$? Depending on whether $ G$ is overdetermined or underdetermined, the solution can have drastically different behavior. In the overdetermined case, we formulate a variational problem $\min_{ρ_x} D( G_\#ρ_x, ρ_y)$, and find that different choices of the metric $ D$ significantly affect the quality of the reconstruction. When $ D$ is set to be the Wasserstein distance, the reconstruction is the marginal distribution, while setting $ D$ to be a $ϕ$-divergence reconstructs the conditional distribution. In the underdetermined case, we formulate the constrained optimization $\min_{\{ G_\#ρ_x=ρ_y\}} E[ρ_x]$. The choice of $ E$ also significantly impacts the construction: setting $ E$ to be the entropy gives us the piecewise constant reconstruction, while setting $ E$ to be the second moment, we recover the classical least-norm solution. We also examine the formulation with regularization: $\min_{ρ_x} D( G_\#ρ_x, ρ_y) + α\mathsf R[ρ_x]$, and find that the entropy-entropy pair leads to a regularized solution that is defined in a piecewise manner, whereas the $W_2$-$W_2$ pair leads to a least-norm solution where $W_2$ is the 2-Wasserstein metric.

math.OC↗

Hunting for Axions in REactor neutrino COherent scattering Detection Experiment

Nuclear power plants are not only vital sources of clean energy but also powerful facilities for probing new physics beyond the Standard Model. Due to the intense gamma-ray flux and an appropriate energy conditions, they are particularly well-suited for searches of light hypothetical particles such as sub-MeV axions and axion-like particles (ALPs). In this work, we propose to search for the ALPs in the REactor Neutrino COherent scattering Detection Experiment (RECODE), where two low-threshold, high-purity germanium detectors are placed at 11 m (near point) and 22 m (far point) from a 3.4 GW nuclear reactor at Sanmen nuclear power plant. With a 10 kg$\cdot$year exposure, we demonstrate that the expected sensitivities to the ALP couplings to the electrons and photons are competitive with or surpass the available results from the beam-dump experiments. A planned upgrade to 100 kg$\cdot$year will fully cover the so-called {$\it$ cosmological triangle} region, probing unexplored parameter space relevant to axions.

hep-ph↗

One Risk Down, Another Up: Cross-Risk Interactions Induced by LLM Defenses

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, where they face diverse risks. Numerous defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these risks, but they are almost always evaluated in isolation. This isolated view leaves a critical question open: does mitigating one risk inadvertently change a model's exposure to others? Beyond the well-studied risk-utility trade-off, we present the first systematic study of cross-risk interactions induced by LLM defenses. We propose CrossRiskEval, an evaluation paradigm that situates a defended model in a multi-dimensional risk space and quantifies how a defense built for one risk shifts the others. Among 166 cross-risk evaluations covering 32 defended models, 77.1% exhibit statistically significant cross-risk interactions. Most of these interactions amplify non-target risks, with increases exceeding 100% in some cases. Beyond behavioral evaluation, we conduct neuron-level analyses in seven selected cases to investigate one possible pathway associated with these interactions. We identify conflict-entangled neurons whose activation interventions produce opposing effects on proxies for the target and non-target risks. In conflict cases, restoring these neurons to their base-model activations partially reduces the corresponding risk increases, providing evidence that defense-induced changes to these neurons may contribute to the observed interactions. Building on this evidence, we propose Conflict-Aware Freezing, a training-time strategy that prevents direct updates to the parameters associated with the identified neurons. Across five conflict cases, it offsets 35%-196% of non-target risk amplification while meeting the original defense criterion.

cs.CR↗

Transferable End-to-End Optimization for Indirect Long-Term Memory Poisoning in LLM Agents

Long-term memory can turn untrusted external content into persistent influence over an LLM agent's future decisions, creating the threat of indirect memory poisoning. A successful attack must survive a multi-stage pipeline comprising memory writing, retrieval, and utilization. Existing attacks largely rely on intra-stage optimization, optimizing individual stages in isolation while overlooking inter-stage coupling. Specifically, these stages impose different requirements on the same poisoning content, and each stage operates on the transformed output of its predecessor. Consequently, optimizing one stage may undermine the effectiveness of other stages, while upstream transformations may erase improvements intended for downstream stages. Indirect memory poisoning should therefore be viewed as an end-to-end optimization problem. Based on this insight, we present \textsc{PipePoison}, which collects fine-grained stage feedback from local shadow systems, uses chain-structured losses to identify and optimize the stage bottlenecking end-to-end success, and applies stability-calibrated stage and configuration weights to improve transferability. Across three agent frameworks and four memory mechanisms, \textsc{PipePoison} improves attack utilization rate by 19.1 percentage points. Even on fully unseen victim configurations, it outperforms the strongest baseline by 16 percentage points and remains effective under eight representative defenses.

cs.CR↗

Understanding Stage-Wise Utility-Risk Trade-offs in LLM Agent Memory

Long-term memory is becoming a core capability of LLM agents, enabling personalization and long-horizon interaction. However, memory mechanisms that retain, transform, or expose more information can affect both benign utility and susceptibility to memory poisoning. Existing evaluations typically measure memory utility or attack risk in isolation under fixed configurations, providing limited insight into how stage-specific design choices reshape their trade-off. We present \textsc{MemGauge}, a controllable framework that separately varies writing admission, management policy, and retrieval exposure under matched clean and poisoned conditions. Across 11 LLMs and two long-term memory benchmarks, controlled evaluations reveal three distinct profiles: a threshold-like risk transition during writing, policy-dependent local decoupling during management, and coupled growth of utility and risk during retrieval. We further apply analogous stage-level measurements to four existing memory systems and observe diagnostic associations qualitatively consistent with these profiles. These results show that targeted poisoning risk varies across memory operations and motivate stage-aware evaluation and control of LLM-agent memory.

cs.CR↗

Extracting Knowledge from Tools in LLM Agents

LLM agents commonly use knowledge-based tools and access their underlying files, databases, and search indexes through tool invocation. This integration improves agents' ability to provide domain-specific services but also introduces the risk of tool-mediated knowledge extraction: source content exposed to an agent for legitimate responses may be progressively recovered from its outputs, enabling reconstruction of the knowledge source behind a target tool. This paper systematically investigates this risk and identifies two challenges introduced by tool invocation: tool-selection uncertainty, where an agent may invoke a competing tool instead of the target tool, and tool-argument compression, where fine-grained query information may be lost when the agent generates tool arguments. To tackle these challenges, we propose ToolSiphon, a query-only extraction attack that introduces two complementary signals: a target-discriminative signal, implemented through Tool Contrastive Analysis, to steer queries toward the target tool; and a response-grounded factual signal, implemented through Evidence Chained Feedback, to mitigate argument compression and progressively expand extraction coverage. Across three types of knowledge-based tools and six domain-specific datasets, ToolSiphon recovers 74.3% of source records on average when coarse-grained information about non-target tools is available, with 83.2% textual recovery and 90.2% semantic similarity. Even without such information, it recovers 66.3% of source records. ToolSiphon also remains effective against representative defenses and on three real-world agent platforms.

cs.CR↗

InfraOcc: An Infrastructure Occupancy Benchmark with Static-to-Dynamic Reasoning

Fixed-viewpoint infrastructure sensors repeatedly observe the same traffic space, making roadside 3D occupancy structurally different from ego-vehicle perception: a near-persistent static scaffold is overlaid with sparse, short-lived dynamic events. Existing occupancy benchmarks and methods, however, are built around moving ego vehicles and neither measure nor exploit this structure, instead treating occupancy as flat one-shot voxel classification. We address this gap from both data and model perspectives. We build InfraOcc, to our knowledge, the first real-world infrastructure-side semantic occupancy benchmark, with dense voxel annotations for 290 multi-modal sequences in a fixed roadside frame, a static-dynamic decoupled annotation pipeline, unified camera-only, LiDAR-only, and multi-modal evaluation, and diagnostics for static and dynamic occupancy. InfraOcc shows that static infrastructure fills 97.3% of occupied voxels and persists across frames, whereas dynamic participants have a median occupied-frame ratio of only 1.8% per location, revealing a structural static-dynamic asymmetry beyond semantic long-tailedness. We further propose ProSD-Occ, which reformulates occupancy as progressive static-to-dynamic evidence reasoning: it explains persistent layout, exposes residual dynamic evidence under static-confidence guidance, and recomposes static, dynamic, and free-space evidence into a unified field. ProSD-Occ ranks first in overall, dynamic, static, and geometric occupancy on every track, e.g., a 23.5% relative camera-only dynamic-mIoU gain over the strongest baseline and 65.87 multi-modal overall mIoU, establishing fixed-viewpoint roadside occupancy as a distinct problem with its own reasoning paradigm. The benchmark and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/yanglei18/InfraOcc

cs.CV↗

Understanding and Exploiting Initialization Anchoring Weakness in Feedback-Based Agent Planning

Feedback-based planning improves agent reliability by incorporating tool observations and corrective feedback. However, its protection may not be distributed uniformly across planning stages. We conduct a round-wise analysis of four representative feedback mechanisms and uncover an initialization anchoring weakness: the first feedback round corrects 46\% of adversarial directions, whereas the rates fall to 13\% and 7\% among directions surviving into the next two rounds. Our analysis attributes this weakness to three interacting factors: a contextually plausible shift in the initial plan, insufficient counterevidence, and the persistence of accepted directions in the accumulated trajectory. Based on these findings, we propose \textsc{InitAnchor}, a black-box framework for exploiting this weakness through attacker-controlled external materials. It operationalizes the three factors as directional-shift, contextual-plausibility, and counterevidence-resilience signals under either limited target access or no target access. Across 112 tasks from 16 domains, six agent architectures, and five backbone LLMs, \textsc{InitAnchor} achieves average ASRs of 76.1\% and 72.0\% under the two settings while reducing first-round mitigation rates to 21.0\% and 25.0\%, respectively. It also remains effective against six defenses and across six real-world agent systems. These findings show that feedback-based agents can retain early biases even when later correction is available.

cs.CR↗

Not All History Helps: Velocity-Aware Selective Memory for Long-Horizon End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Reliable long-horizon planning remains a key challenge in end-to-end autonomous driving. By accounting for future motion evolution and potential consequences, it provides forward-looking guidance for safe and consistent driving in evolving traffic environments. Existing methods use historical planning states as temporal context. Self-generated history may become stale or conflict with the current motion stage, introducing unreliable priors. We propose StableDrive to address cross-cycle historical reliability and within-horizon motion-stage evolution. Selective Momentum Memory (SMM), implemented with a Mamba selective state-space operator, controls the influence of the preceding self-predicted planning state on the current cycle. Motion-Stage Training Scaffold (MSTS) uses motion-stage, long-horizon trajectory, and longitudinal-motion supervision to guide stage-aware future motion learning and is removed before inference. A fixed parameter midpoint between two architecture-aligned endpoints yields a single deployable SMM planner without model ensembling or extra inference-time computation. On nuScenes under the MomAD evaluation protocol, StableDrive achieves SOTA performance across all reported planning metrics from 1 to 6 s, reducing average collision rate by 23.3%, TPC by 30.9%, and L2 by 11.8% over the best previously reported value for each metric. On the curated Longitudinal-Transition nuScenes (LT-nuScenes), StableDrive reduces 6-s collision rate by 23.81%, TPC by 10.90%, and L2 by 6.37%. On NAVSIM v1 and v2, StableDrive achieves the highest PDMS/EPDMS in all three reported settings, including a 5.7-point EPDMS gain on v2 navhard over the previous best.

cs.RO↗

Teffic-Audio: Tell Fact from Fiction

Speech deepfake detection has expanded in scope with increasingly heterogeneous spoofing mechanisms, including speech synthesis, voice conversion, vocoder reconstruction, and neural-codec resynthesis. The resulting spoofing artifacts can be further shaped by variability in source speech, recording environments, and transmission channels. This variability makes robust generalization across heterogeneous conditions a central requirement for practical detection systems. This report presents Teffic-Audio, a general speech deepfake detection system designed for comprehensive evaluation environment. Teffic-Audio adopts a straightforward detector architecture consisting of a Conformer-based speech encoder, multi-head attentive statistics pooling, and a binary classifier. Rather than relying on additional architectural complexity, the system improves generalization through its training recipe, which integrates multi-source data, attack- and source-balanced sampling, and diverse audio augmentation. Trained only with open-source data, Teffic-Audio achieves a pooled EER of 1.454% on the 14 test sets of Speech-DF-Arena, outperforming all currently public systems on the leaderboard. It also obtains the lowest EER on five individual test sets and shows a favorable performance-complexity trade-off compared with larger leading systems. Overall, Teffic-Audio provides a strong and practical reference system for general speech deepfake detection.

cs.SD↗

Multi-Agent Closed-Loop Reasoning for Organic Structure Elucidation from Multimodal Spectra

Following the molecular discovery and synthesis revolutions, scalable automated structure elucidation from routine spectroscopic data remains an outstanding challenge. Despite decades of computational efforts, no existing system achieved reliable reasoning over unseen spectra. Here, we propose MACROS, a multi-agent system automating structure elucidation by emulating expert iterative hypothesis-testing. Trained on 100M simulated and 1.6M experimental spectra-molecule pairs, it natively supports arbitrary combinations of routine spectroscopic techniques. It achieves unprecedented zero-shot generalization to diverse real-world samples, correctly identifying synthetic compounds, natural products and metabolites above 500 Da with 1D NMR. Remarkably, MACROS spontaneously recovers textbook spectroscopic correlations from unassigned data and exhibits emergent chemical intuition such as a ring-first parsing preference, learning fundamental chemical principles rather than memorizing database patterns. MACROS augments chemists via collaboration to deliver sixfold faster, 40% more accurate elucidation. MACROS establishes a scalable foundation for fully automated structure elucidation, and catalyzes accelerated molecular discovery toward autonomous laboratories.

physics.chem-ph↗

A Thermodynamic-Limit Pinning Criterion for Two-Dimensional Structural Superlubricity

Incommensurability and elastic reconstruction do not by themselves define a structurally superlubric phase. We define fully sliding and pinned zero-temperature phases by $\limsup_{A\to\infty}τ_{\rm dep}^{\max}(A)=0$ and $\liminf_{A\to\infty}τ_{\rm dep}^{\min}(A)>0$, respectively; $Λ_n=|V_n|G_{n,i}[D_{\rm rel}^{-1}(\mathbf q_n)]_{ij}G_{n,j}$ measures only reconstruction susceptibility. Translational covariance then proves that a clean, smooth, infinite moiré continuum can reconstruct without acquiring a bulk sliding barrier. We restore atomic sampling in a two-dimensional discrete model of graphene/hBN and test both a diffusion quantum Monte Carlo first-star potential and a 15-harmonic Leven potential across three rational approximants and five directions. No physical-coupling equilibrium or metastable barrier is resolved. The Leven spectrum raises the largest tested $Λ$ from $0.142$ to $0.212$, while artificial scaling through $Λ=1$ reaches uncontrolled strain before a size-independent threshold appears. The tested zero-temperature in-plane models are therefore consistent with an elastically relaxed sliding regime; $Λ=1$ is a reconstruction scale, not a static phase criterion.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Vacancies making jerky flow in complex alloys

Longevity of materials, especially alloys, is crucial for enhancing the sustainability and efficiency of various applications, including gas turbines. Jerky flow, also known as dynamic strain aging effect, can indeed have a significant impact on the fatigue life of high-temperature components in gas turbines. In general, three jerky flow types, i.e., A, B and C, existed in superalloys. Type A and B, occurring at low temperature, were proved to be caused by interstitial elements, such as carbon. However, Type C serration at high temperature has not been verified directly and remains unresolved, which was unanimously agreed it is caused by the interaction between solute elements and dislocations. In this study, our new discovery challenged this mainstream axiom. We proposed that vacancies play a dominant role in inducing jerky flow instead of solute atoms. By transmission electron microscopy, we observed directly that dislocations are pinned by vacancy-type dislocation loops (PDLs) or dipoles. Our findings suggest that vacancies located at dislocation jogs are primarily responsible for pinning and unpinning of superlattice dislocations. As dislocations move and interact with vacancies, PDLs or dipoles are left behind in their path. This pinning and unpinning process is repeated as successive dislocations encounter the newly formed PDLs or dipoles, leading to the recurring fluctuations in the stress, i.e., serrated flow. Additionally, antisite defects created by Co, Cr and Ti sitting on Ni positions is postulated to facilitate vacancy formation and migration towards dislocations via nearest neighbor jumps. This study provides a new avenue to show how future alloy design can improve the fatigue life of superalloys in extreme environments.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Adversarial Purification by Consistency-aware Latent Space Optimization on Data Manifolds

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial samples crafted by adding imperceptible perturbations to clean data, potentially leading to incorrect and dangerous predictions. Adversarial purification has been an effective means to improve DNNs robustness by removing these perturbations before feeding the data into the model. However, it faces significant challenges in preserving key structural and semantic information of data, as the imperceptible nature of adversarial perturbations makes it hard to avoid over-correcting, which can destroy important information and degrade model performance. In this paper, we break away from traditional adversarial purification methods by focusing on the clean data manifold. To this end, we reveal that samples generated by a well-trained generative model are close to clean ones but far from adversarial ones. Leveraging this insight, we propose Consistency Model-based Adversarial Purification (CMAP), which optimizes vectors within the latent space of a pre-trained consistency model to generate samples for restoring clean data. Specifically, 1) we propose a Perceptual consistency restoration mechanism by minimizing the discrepancy between generated samples and input samples in both pixel and perceptual spaces. 2) To maintain the optimized latent vectors within the valid data manifold, we introduce a Latent distribution consistency constraint strategy to align generated samples with the clean data distribution. 3) We also apply a Latent vector consistency prediction scheme via an ensemble approach to enhance prediction reliability. CMAP fundamentally addresses adversarial perturbations at their source, providing a robust purification. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that our CMAP significantly enhances robustness against strong adversarial attacks while preserving high natural accuracy.

cs.LG↗

UniGD: A Unified Generative-Discriminative Framework for Industrial Retrieval

Generative retrieval (GR) is a promising paradigm for industrial search advertising, yet its deployment is constrained by strict relevance and latency requirements. Existing systems cascade GR with an independent relevance model, decoupling the generative likelihood objective from query-ad relevance discrimination, which compromises effectiveness and increases serving costs. We propose a Unified Generative-Discriminative framework (UniGD) that integrates retrieval and relevance scoring within a single model. To mitigate gradient interference in joint optimization, UniGD introduces Conflict-Aware Gradient Enhancement (CAGE) to adaptively coordinate the two objectives. UniGD further designs a Codebook-Anchored Representation Module (CAM) that anchors item representations to frozen hierarchical codebooks distilled from a multimodal pretrained model, thereby endowing them with rich and generalizable semantic priors. For heterogeneous short-video, product, and live-stream ads, UniGD proposes Heterogeneous Ad-material Modeling (HAM), which captures cross-type semantic commonality over a shared backbone while preserving type-specific modeling capacity. Online AB tests on Kuaishou search advertising platform show that UniGD raises ad revenue by 5.78%, reduces inference latency by 33%, and improves discriminative relevance estimation. On NQ320K and MS300K, UniGD improves Recall@10 over the strongest reproduced GR baseline by 8.44% and 3.19%, respectively.

cs.AI↗

Bole: Efficient Tree Speculation for Hybrid-Attention Language Models

Hybrid-attention large language models combine full attention with recurrent linear attention to reduce long-context inference costs, yet their autoregressive decoding remains memory-bound. Tree speculative decoding offers an attractive acceleration path, but existing tree-speculation systems are designed around the key--value caches of full-attention models. On hybrid models, they traverse recurrent layers branch by branch and materialize a full state for every proposal node, causing verification latency and transient memory to scale poorly with tree and batch sizes. We present Bole, a kernel--runtime co-design that enables efficient tree speculation for hybrid-attention LLMs. Bole transforms the linear-attention recurrence into a tree-structured closed form and realizes it with a resource-efficient GPU kernel, verifying all proposal nodes in parallel and accelerating linear-attention tree verification by 3.4--7.7$\times$. It losslessly encodes speculative state updates as token-level factors and reconstructs only the state selected after sampling, reducing transient state memory by 82--99$\times$ and freeing GPU capacity for KV caches. Its integration into SGLang, a widely deployed production LLM serving engine, couples efficient state management with a batch-wide verification budget calibrated to the complete hybrid forward. Across four models, two GPU platforms, and diverse datasets, Bole delivers up to $4.72\times$ the offline decode throughput of autoregressive decoding and up to $2.03\times$ that of the strongest tree-speculative baseline. Under online agent workloads, it reduces TTFT and TPOT by up to $67.6%$ and $49.9%$, respectively, over the strongest tree-speculative baseline.

cs.DC↗

Toward Plasticity-Preserving KL Regularization for Capability Retention in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for large language model (LLM) post-training, but optimization toward new objectives can degrade capabilities already present in the base model. KL regularization is widely used to mitigate such forgetting by constraining policy drift toward a reference model. However, standard full-policy KL regularization constrains the entire response distribution and may unnecessarily restrict exploration and target-task learning. This raises a natural question: can a more precise constraint preserve existing capabilities while minimizing interference with learning new tasks? To this end, we propose \underline{Co}rrectness-Conditioned \underline{KL} Regularization (CoKL), a conditional regularization framework that narrows the preservation constraint from the full output distribution to correctness-conditioned response distributions. We instantiate CoKL with forward KL divergence and derive a practical finite-group training objective for RL-based LLM post-training. At the population level, CoKL decouples the total probability assigned to correct responses from their correctness-conditioned distribution, thereby regularizing the relative probability allocation among reference-supported correct responses without directly anchoring incorrect outputs or total correctness mass. We further show that full-policy forward and reverse KL regularization induce a strict optimal correctness gap when the reference policy is imperfect, whereas CoKL avoids this limitation. Experiments in controlled multi-solution environments and continual post-training settings across multiple model scales demonstrate that CoKL achieves a more favorable balance between target-task improvement and prior-capability retention than existing regularization methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lumina04/CoKL.

cs.LG↗