arXiv subjects

Liang Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Zhao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards Automatic Evolution Tree Generation from Citation Graphs

Surveys remain the primary way researchers grasp the lineage of methods within an AI subfield, but they scale poorly against the current rate of publication. Existing taxonomy-induction methods are largely leaf-bound and time-agnostic; they tend to force transitional papers into mature leaves and can create topological inversions between ancestors and descendants. We propose EvoTree, a staged framework that decouples conceptual backbone learning from temporal refinement: a graph-aware encoder with distribution-based hierarchical clustering yields a stable taxonomy backbone; temporal fine-tuning then re-attaches marginal papers to internal nodes under monotonic-path constraints; a final LLM pass labels concepts without altering the topology. We release the first annotated benchmark for this task across 11 AI subfields. EvoTree attains the highest NMI and citation-direction accuracy among all baselines and the best concept purity on the annotated benchmark, and is the only method with non-trivial marginal-paper detection on the annotated set.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

XAI-Refine: An Automated Explanation-Knowledge Loop for Brain-Age Prediction

Brain-age prediction models are commonly evaluated by predictive accuracy, yet accurate predictions alone do not establish that a model relies on reproducible or neurobiologically supported mechanisms. Post-hoc explanation methods can expose these mechanisms, but existing workflows typically stop at diagnosis or require correction targets to be specified before model analysis. We propose XAI-Refine, an automated explanation-knowledge loop for brain-age prediction from resting-state functional connectivity. At each iteration, XAI-Refine consolidates complementary post-hoc analyses across repeated training runs into reliable, structured model explanations. It converts each reliable explanation into a neutral neurobiological question, retrieves and verifies relevant literature, and compiles the verified evidence into an admissible set in the same typed explanation space. The target for refinement is defined as the minimal projection of the current model explanation onto the admissible set induced by applicable verified knowledge. This revised explanation is then translated into a differentiable constraint while preserving the originating model variable, measurement operator, and applicable scope. Candidate updates are promoted only when multi-seed validation confirms target-directed explanatory movement, predictive performance remains within a prespecified guardrail, and non-target explanatory drift remains bounded. Experiments on functional-connectivity-based brain-age prediction evaluate predictive performance, explanation reliability, literature alignment, and target-specific model revision, illustrating a structured route from post-hoc analysis to evidence-guided model refinement.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

CoRe-SAM3: Conditional Semantic--Visual Reconciliation for SAM3 Crack Segmentation

Crack segmentation requires a model to recognize target semantics while accurately recovering thin, low-contrast, and topologically continuous local structures. Although SAM3 provides strong open-concept segmentation, its direct application to the crack domain still misses weak cracks, activates crack-like background regions, and produces local boundary errors. We first diagnose the functional differences between the internal prompt-conditioned semantic representation and native visual representation of SAM3 on five crack datasets. The results show that the semantic representation already carries most task information for crack prediction, whereas the utility of the visual representation depends on the current semantic state. Directly combining the two representations does not yield consistent gains. Based on this finding, we propose Conditional Semantic--Visual Reconciliation, termed CoRe. CoRe retains semantic prediction as the primary decision path, applies lightweight semantic calibration to adjust the target-domain decision mapping, and uses spatially aligned native visual evidence to generate a zero-initialized, bounded, and regularized conditional residual that selectively corrects existing predictions. Across five domains, CoRe-SAM3 improves the average Crack IoU from 62.34% to 70.47% and clDice from 81.98% to 89.24%, while introducing only 18.914 K trainable parameters. Prediction-transition analysis further shows that CoRe corrects an average of 34.38% of native errors, with a damage rate of only 0.23% on pixels correctly classified by native SAM3. These results demonstrate that constrained prediction correction based on the functional differences between internal representations provides an effective and parameter-efficient target-domain adaptation strategy for vision foundation models with strong task-specific semantic priors.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

FANS: Federated Adaptive Network Search Learning for Heterogeneous Devices

Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HFL) aims to train models across devices with diverse resource budgets while preserving data privacy. Existing HFL methods typically bind training to a small predefined menu of model configurations, which limits architectural coverage. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Federated Adaptive Network Search (FANS), a hypernetwork-based framework that learns a shared architecture space rather than a fixed set of client models. To optimize this shared space efficiently, we propose the Federated Parallel Scaling (FPS) algorithm, which jointly trains multiple sampled subnetworks in parallel with self-distillation so that larger sampled subnetworks can supervise smaller ones during local updates. We evaluate FANS on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNLI using ResNet-18, DenseNet-121, and BERT-base, respectively. Across all benchmarks, FANS expands the feasible subnetwork pool by orders of magnitude (e.g., 4,680 candidates for ResNet-18 vs. 4 in existing methods) and improves the average accuracy-efficiency trade-off relative to representative HFL baselines. Device heterogeneity is emulated through resource tiers, and evaluation covers accuracy, parameter count, and MACs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Depth-Map-Guided Bundle Adjustment for Correspondence-Free Multi-View Point Cloud Registration

Robotic processing of irregular steel scrap requires dense 3-D measurement to replace manual visual assessment in hazardous cutting workcells. The reconstructed map is used to estimate piece dimensions, boundary geometry, feasible preheating and cutting regions, and collision-aware torch paths. The reconstruction errors therefore propagate directly to downstream measurement and planning. Existing multi-view registration methods commonly rely on feature extraction and data association to establish correspondences between views. In workcells with smooth metallic surfaces, repeated structures, occlusions, and partial overlaps, however, wrong correspondences may be established, leading to inaccurate pose estimation and distorted reconstruction. This paper presents an adaptive layered depth-map-guided bundle adjustment framework for correspondence-free multi-view point cloud registration. The scene is represented by a global 2.5-D grid, where each cell can adaptively maintain multiple depth hypotheses. Raw depth observations are directly projected into the global map to form depth constraints without explicit feature correspondences. At grid cells where multiple surfaces produce conflicting depths, a softmax-based layer assignment links each observation to compatible depth hypotheses. The resulting nonlinear least-squares formulation jointly refines sensor poses and the layered depth map, with correspondences implicitly induced by the depth-map representation and projection model. Experiments on self-collected industrial datasets show that the proposed method achieves consistently competitive reconstruction accuracy while maintaining robustness and low computational cost in challenging industrial scenarios. We release the open-source code implementation at: https://github.com/YiranZhou-Robotics/ADM-BA.git

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Poetic Heritage for Culturally Grounded Emotional Support: An Interaction Design Framework and Its Multimodal Agentic Instantiation

Digital systems increasingly mediate emotional support, yet their interactions often remain culturally generic. Accordingly, we examine how a poetic tradition can be operationalized as a culturally grounded interactive medium and how generative AI can support such engagement. The resulting interaction design framework translates staged literature-based support and tradition-specific poetic aesthetics into guidance for digital system design. Poemithy instantiates the framework as a multimodal, LLM-enabled multi-agent system for guided reflection through classical Chinese poetry. A controlled between-subjects study with 50 participants compared text-only and multimodal versions. Both conditions showed medium-to-large within-session improvements in affect, anxiety, and emotion regulation, while between-condition tests detected no differences in these changes. Among secondary post-session user-experience measures, the clearest observed differences favored multimodality in perceived attunement, perceived task success, and engagement; usability and hedonic quality were descriptively higher, while workload did not differ detectably. Post-only cultural ratings were descriptively favorable in both conditions for cultural identification, poetry-engagement and dissemination intentions, and perceived cultural enrichment. Together, the findings suggest that culturally grounded content and structured guidance should anchor system design, while multimodal presentation may strengthen resonance and engagement. More broadly, the work shows how generative AI can mediate engagement with poetic heritage in culturally grounded emotional-support interactions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

MegaMem: A Retrieval Solution for Ultra-Large Context Windows

Modern language models and agents increasingly require persistent memory for complete codebases, long interaction histories, and heterogeneous enterprise records. The key challenge is to keep hundreds of millions of tokens searchable while passing only bounded source evidence to the answer model. We introduce MegaMem, a source-resolved dual-view retrieval system that separates semantic access from generation evidence. Distilled records and detailed evidence are searched with original and transformed queries; every distilled hit resolves to an immutable source ID before reciprocal-rank fusion, deduplication, and cross-encoder reranking; and only the highest-ranked detailed evidence within a fixed budget supports generation. Post-answer attribution then identifies which loaded sources support the fixed answer. We evaluate MegaMem on EnterpriseRAG-Bench, which contains more than 500,000 heterogeneous enterprise documents and approximately 650M tokens. MegaMem improves Overall from 68.22 to 82.26 and reaches 86.50 Correctness. These results show that MegaMem supports ultra-large persistent memory while preserving strong answer accuracy under a bounded generation context. By separating searchable memory scale from answer-context size, MegaMem provides a practical path toward accurate retrieval over memories ranging from hundreds of millions to one billion tokens. Our code is available at https://github.com/ xfab-xinyuansong/MegaMem.git.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MEMONDEMAND: A Memory Management System for Large-Scale Enterprise Data

Enterprise repositories are large, heteroge- neous, and continuously updated, making re- trieval difficult when efficient access, source- faithful evidence, and cross-query adaptation must be supported together. Enterprise mem- ory extends retrieval beyond the model con- text, but existing systems do not jointly address collection-specific hierarchy construction, low- cost routing, detailed evidence loading, and workload-aware memory updates at this scale. We introduce MEMONDEMAND, short for On- Demand Memory, a memory management sys- tem with three coordinated mechanisms: a dy- namic multi-level hierarchy that determines the abstraction structure and depth for each col- lection, dual memory at every hierarchy level that separates distilled routing from detailed evidence, and on-demand memory promotion that updates node priority under a bounded active-state budget. On EnterpriseRAG-Bench, MEMONDEMAND outperforms the strongest published LB#1 result at every evaluated scale from 10M tokens through the complete 618M- token collection, with gains of 12.23% at 10M and 4.66% at 618M. Results on FinanceBench, HotpotQA, and FRAMES further show strong performance across financial, multi-hop, and fact-retrieval settings. Together, these results establish MEMONDEMAND as an accurate, ef- ficient, and scalable memory solution for very large enterprise repositories across data scales, domains, and evidence requirements. Our code is available at https://github.com/ xfab-xinyuansong/MemOnDemand.git.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DAS-PMVC: A Framework for Partial Multi-View Clustering via Dual Alignment and Structure Enhancement

In recent years, multi-view clustering has attracted widespread research interest. However, due to limitations in data collection devices, data across different views often suffer from misalignment, leading to the partial view alignment problem (PVAP). To mitigate the impact of view asymmetry and irrelevant samples, this paper proposes a framework for partial multi-view clustering via dual alignment and structure enhancement (DAS-PMVC), which leverages view structure consistency and semantic relevance. Specifically, DAS-PMVC includes three parts: \textbf{anchor graph structure alignment}, where sample joint embedding representations with consistent latent space are derived from anchor point relationships for initial view alignment; \textbf{structure-enhanced feature learning}, where the model learns view structure information through pretraining and combines multi-view graph convolutional networks to further extract deep latent features from the aligned graph structure to improve the discriminative power of representations; and \textbf{a dual alignment strategy}, where initial alignment is performed through the anchor graph in the pretraining phase, and contrastive learning loss and the Hungarian algorithm are introduced in the training phase to further optimize the alignment of latent features. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that the DAS-PMVC framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in clustering performance, showcasing its effectiveness and superiority.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Phonetic forced alignment for low-resource language varieties: Model training and evaluation on Chengdu Mandarin

Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties. We address this by training text-dependent and text-independent aligners for Chengdu Mandarin using a 17-hour corpus and a custom G2P dictionary. We trained a text-dependent GMM-HMM model (Chengdu-MFA) and fine-tuned a pretrained audio encoder on frame classification with Chengdu-MFA's pseudo label for text-independent alignment (Chengdu-FC). Evaluation on an expert-annotated test set show that both methods significantly outperform Standard Mandarin baselines. Chengdu-MFA reduced average phone boundary differences by 31.8%, while Chengdu-FC achieved a 61.2% reduction. This work establishes a practical bootstrapping pipeline for developing accurate aligners for under-resourced varieties without labor- and time-intensive manual annotation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Staypoint Detection from Noisy Trajectory Data [Experiment Paper]

Detecting staypoints from raw trajectory data is fundamental to numerous spatial computing applications. This process transforms raw numeric sequences of geolocations into semantically meaningful locations, such as homes, workplaces, or restaurants. Despite its importance for semantic trajectory analysis, staypoint detection lacks standard benchmarks, and existing algorithms have never been systematically evaluated. This gap persists because no publicly available datasets provide both raw individual trajectories and ground-truth staypoint annotations. This benchmark paper addresses this limitation with two key contributions: (1) we introduce 16 large-scale simulated datasets capturing thousands of agents with annotated staypoints across varying trajectory noise levels, and (2) we evaluate nine staypoint detection algorithms-including both state-of-the-art and novel methods-to analyze their robustness to noise. Our evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art algorithms perform poorly under realistic noise conditions. Conversely, our proposed unsupervised methods yield substantial improvements, while supervised approaches drastically outperform existing baselines. While these results are very promising, these datasets and methods are only meant as starting points for future research in staypoint detection.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Rapid-Deployment Crack Measurement Based on SAM3 Semantic-Edge Response Decoding

Reliable crack measurement is essential for infrastructure condition assessment, yet existing image-based approaches typically depend on pixel-wise annotations, task-specific segmentation training, and mask-based geometric measurement, making cross-scene deployment costly and sensitive to segmentation errors. We identify an output-interface mismatch in SAM3: its prompt-conditioned semantic response preserves crack evidence that is often suppressed or spatially distorted in the final candidate masks. Across six public crack datasets, the internal response achieves 82.66% average crack-pixel recall, compared with 74.66% for the retained SAM3 proposals, with an average mismatch ratio of 8.73%. Based on this observation, we propose Semantic-Edge Response Decoding (SERD) to calibrate the semantic response using a fixed Sobel structural field, and further develop SERD-DQ, a training-free framework that directly estimates crack centerline and transverse geometry from the continuous decoded response without generating an intermediate predicted mask. Experiments verify both segmentation fidelity and direct geometric measurement against manually established pixel-level references. Compared with native SAM3 mask-based quantification, SERD-DQ reduces width MAE from 6.072 to 5.547 pixels, length relative error from 22.245% to 17.355%, and area relative error from 33.921% to 26.228%, while achieving a latent geometry recovery rate of 0.394. The results indicate that continuous semantic-edge responses provide a more reliable interface for training-free crack quantification than conventional mask-mediated measurement.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

MentalThink: Shaping Thoughts in Mental SVG World

We introduce MentalThink, a visual-symbolic reasoning paradigm that equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for "mental" visualization. The core of MentalThink is a think-with-SVG pipeline, where the model learns to generate, render, and interpret scalable vector graphics (SVG) code as an intermediate visual representation for multi-turn reasoning. By creating structured vector sketches, the model can externalize spatial hypotheses, inspect them through deterministic rendering, and reason within a constrained geometric space, effectively mimicking the human process of mental imagery. We instantiate this paradigm through a two-stage training framework, combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for SVG syntactic alignment with multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (RL) to encourage iterative inspection, revision, and refinement of intermediate visual hypotheses. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MentalThink achieves superior performance on spatial understanding and reasoning benchmarks (e.g., 55.1% on VSIBench, 76.0% on MindCube), showing that executable vector graphics provide a verifiable visual workspace for dynamic perspective taking, visual reflection, and compositional scene construction.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AlgoBench: Benchmarking Algorithmic Adaptation in Code Generation

High pass rates on established programming benchmarks such as HumanEval and LiveCodeBench do not always show whether a model can reason about algorithms. Many fixed benchmarks eventually become part of the public training ecosystem through released problem statements, editorials, and generated solutions, allowing later models to improve partly by exposure rather than by stronger algorithmic ability. We introduce ALGOBENCH, a framework that automatically builds novel algorithmic problems from known competitive-programming problems through structured constraint-shifting transformations. Each accepted ALGOBENCH variant is traceable to a source problem, but must make the original reference algorithm fail. Beyond pass@$k$, we introduce complexity-aware metrics -- including OPTT, OPTS, TRAPRATE, GAPT, and CONSENS -- to test whether a solution is not only functionally correct but also asymptotically suitable for the generated problem. Experiments across multiple LLMs and prompting strategies show that performance drops sharply on ALGOBENCH variants, retrieval can increase reuse of the old algorithm, and many correct-looking solutions fail to meet the required complexity. Error analysis shows that failures are mainly algorithmic rather than implementation-level, suggesting that ALGOBENCH evaluates adaptation beyond functional correctness.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

AlgoSkill: Learning to Design Algorithms by Scheduling Human-Like Skills

Designing an algorithm from a natural-language problem statement requires identifying the problem structure, reading constraints, choosing a suitable paradigm, checking correctness, and refining complexity. Existing large language model (LLM) methods often rely on direct generation or generic self-refinement, leaving these steps implicit. We propose AlgoSkill, which models algorithm design as sequential decision-making over a typed library of algorithmic skills, including abstraction, constraint analysis, state design, data-structure selection, proof checking, counterexample construction, and complexity refinement. A learned scheduler proposes skills from the current design state, while a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) controller explores skill sequences using verification feedback from compilation, testing, stress testing, and complexity analysis. Experiments on competitive programming and combinatorial optimization benchmarks show that AlgoSkill improves over direct LLM generation, chain-of-thought prompting, self-refinement, and MCTS without typed skills. Ablations show that typed skills, verification-based repair, and search-based scheduling each contribute to performance. These results support treating automatic algorithm design as verification-guided skill scheduling rather than one-shot code generation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MOPD: Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Capability Integration in LLM Post-Training

Modern large language models (LLMs) rely on reinforcement learning during post-training to push specific capabilities, yet integrating multiple capabilities into one model remains hard. Existing methods, such as Off-Policy Finetune and Mix-RL, are either inefficient or lose performance. In this work, we propose Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD), a post-training paradigm for combining the capabilities of multiple domain RL teachers: we first run per-domain specialised RL to obtain a set of domain teachers, then distill these teachers into the student on its own rollouts. This eliminates exposure bias and provides a dense optimization signal. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, MOPD outperforms Mix-RL, Cascade RL, Off-Policy Finetune, and Param-Merge baselines, inheriting nearly all of each teacher's capability. MOPD also enables parallel, independent development of domain teachers, removing the cross-domain coupling typical of multi-domain post-training. MOPD has been deployed in the post-training of MiMo-V2-Flash, an industrial-scale frontier model, demonstrating its practical value for capability integration in frontier-scale LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Dual-Learning based Penalized Multi-Align Clustering for Multi-View Incomplete and Disorderly Data

Multimodal feature fusion can effectively capture complex patterns in real-world data by integrating complementary information from different modalities. However, in many applications, such as boiler combustion monitoring, equipment failure, inconsistent sensor sampling frequencies, and network delays often cause missing modalities and temporal asynchrony. These issues lead to incomplete and disorderly multimodal data. To address them, previous studies have proposed several data fusion methods that align cluster centers before fusion. However, these methods have two key limitations. First, they cannot guarantee accurate sample-level alignment of data pairs. Second, they do not address significant discrepancies in data sizes across different classes, which may affect subsequent fusion performance. To address these problems, we propose a dual-learning based penalized multi-align clustering model, named DLPMAC. The dual-learning mechanism enables the model to learn prior knowledge from each modality, including semantic and structural information. This helps preserve semantic consistency and structural similarity across modalities at both local and global levels. In addition, the penalized multi-align module performs multi-to-multi data alignment through a penalty mechanism. It allows one sample to form data pairs with different samples from other modalities, thereby improving data-pair alignment accuracy. The penalty mechanism also prevents data aggregation, avoiding the case where excessive samples are linked to a single sample. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DLPMAC in addressing data alignment and fusion challenges from both sampling and clustering perspectives.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

PerceptionRubrics: Calibrating Multimodal Evaluation to Human Perception

We introduce PerceptionRubrics, a rubric-based evaluation framework that addresses the gap between saturated benchmark scores and real-world brittleness. Shifting evaluation from holistic semantic matching to rigorous atomic auditing, PerceptionRubrics pairs 1,038 information-dense images with over 10,000 instance-specific rubrics. These criteria are derived from golden captions constructed via a novel Circular Peer-Review consensus pipeline and then distilled into a dual-stream system of Must-Right (essential facts) and Easy-Wrong (fine-grained details) rubrics. Crucially, PerceptionRubrics implements a Gated Scoring mechanism: unlike linear averages, failure on mandatory visual facts triggers sharp binary penalties. Extensive evaluation yields critical insights: (1) The Reliability Gap: models often verify fragmented elements correctly yet fail strict conjunctive constraints, exposing brittleness in dense domains; (2) Open-Closed Stratification: contrary to reasoning trends, we reveal a persistent 8% perception deficit between open-source and proprietary frontiers; and (3) Human-Aligned Rigor: our gated metrics substantially out-align conventional benchmarks, validating that strict perceptual fidelity is the prerequisite for reliable generation.

cs.CV↗