arXiv subjects

Linfeng Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Linfeng Zhang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

StreamMeCo: Long-Term Agent Memory Compression for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding

Vision agent memory has shown remarkable effectiveness in streaming video understanding. However, storing such memory for videos incurs substantial memory overhead, leading to high costs in both storage and computation. To address this issue, we propose StreamMeCo, an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework. Specifically, based on the connectivity of the memory graph, StreamMeCo introduces edge-free minmax sampling for the isolated nodes and an edge-aware weight pruning for connected nodes, evicting the redundant memory nodes while maintaining the accuracy. In addition, we introduce a time-decay memory retrieval mechanism to further eliminate the performance degradation caused by memory compression. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmark datasets (M3-Bench-robot, M3-Bench-web and Video-MME-Long) demonstrate that under 70% memory graph compression, StreamMeCo achieves a 1.87* speedup in memory retrieval while delivering an average accuracy improvement of 1.0%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Celina-love-sweet/StreamMeCo.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Are We Using the Right Benchmark: An Evaluation Framework for Visual Token Compression Methods

Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have largely focused on visual token compression. The effectiveness of these methods is commonly evaluated by measuring the accuracy drop on existing MLLM benchmarks before and after compression. However, these benchmarks are originally designed to assess general perception and reasoning abilities, rather than the specific challenges posed by visual token compression, leading to a fundamental task mismatch. In this work, we uncover a counterintuitive yet consistent phenomenon: simple image downsampling outperforms many advanced visual token compression methods across multiple widely used benchmarks. Through a comprehensive empirical study spanning eight popular benchmarks and multiple state-of-the-art compression techniques, we show that (i) current benchmarks contain substantial noise (task-irrelevant samples) for evaluating visual token compression, and (ii) downsampling can act as an effective data filter that distinguishes between simple and difficult samples with respect to compression sensitivity. Motivated by these findings, we propose VTC-Bench, an evaluation framework that explicitly leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks, enabling a fairer and more meaningful additional assessment of visual token compression methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DisCa: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers with Distillation-Compatible Learnable Feature Caching

While diffusion models have achieved great success in the field of video generation, this progress is accompanied by a rapidly escalating computational burden. Among the existing acceleration methods, Feature Caching is popular due to its training-free property and considerable speedup performance, but it inevitably faces semantic and detail drop with further compression. Another widely adopted method, training-aware step-distillation, though successful in image generation, also faces drastic degradation in video generation with a few steps. Furthermore, the quality loss becomes more severe when simply applying training-free feature caching to the step-distilled models, due to the sparser sampling steps. This paper novelly introduces a distillation-compatible learnable feature caching mechanism for the first time. We employ a lightweight learnable neural predictor instead of traditional training-free heuristics for diffusion models, enabling a more accurate capture of the high-dimensional feature evolution process. Furthermore, we explore the challenges of highly compressed distillation on large-scale video models and propose a conservative Restricted MeanFlow approach to achieve more stable and lossless distillation. By undertaking these initiatives, we further push the acceleration boundaries to $11.8\times$ while preserving generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code has been made publicly available: https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/DisCa

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ProtoCycle: Reflective Tool-Augmented Planning for Text-Guided Protein Design

Designing proteins that satisfy natural language functional requirements is a central goal in protein engineering. A straightforward baseline is to fine-tune generic instruction-tuned LLMs as direct text-to-sequence generators, but this is data- and compute-hungry. With limited supervision, LLMs can produce coherent plans in text yet fail to reliably realize them as sequences. This plan-execute gap motivates ProtoCycle, an agentic framework for protein design that uses LLMs primarily to drive a multi-round, feedback-driven decision cycle. ProtoCycle couples an LLM planner with a lightweight tool environment designed to emulate the iterative workflow of human protein engineering and uses LLM-driven reflection on tool feedback to revise plans. Trained with supervised trajectories and online reinforcement learning, ProtoCycle achieves strong language alignment while maintaining competitive foldability, and ablations show that reflection substantially improves sequence quality.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2026

PRL-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Evaluating LLMs' Capabilities in Frontier Physics Research

The paradigm of agentic science requires AI systems to conduct robust reasoning and engage in long-horizon, autonomous exploration. However, current scientific benchmarks remain confined to domain knowledge comprehension and complex reasoning, failing to evaluate the exploratory nature and procedural complexity of real-world research. In this work, we present research-oriented evaluations in theoretical and computational physics, a natural testbed with comprehensive domain knowledge, complex reasoning, and verifiable end-to-end workflows without reliance on experiments. Here we introduce PRL-Bench (Physics Research by LLMs), a benchmark designed to systematically map the capability boundaries of LLMs in executing end-to-end physics research. Constructed from 100 curated papers from the latest issues of Physical Review Letters since August 2025 and validated by domain experts, PRL-Bench covers five major theory- and computation-intensive subfields of modern physics: astrophysics, condensed matter physics, high-energy physics, quantum information, and statistical physics. Each task in the benchmark is designed to replicate the core properties of authentic scientific research, including exploration-oriented formulation, long-horizon workflows, and objective verifiability, thereby reconstructing the essential reasoning processes and research workflows of real physics research. Evaluation across frontier models shows that performance remains limited, with the best overall score below 50, revealing a pronounced gap between current LLM capabilities and the demands of real scientific research. PRL-Bench serves a reliable testbed for accessing next generation AI scientists advancing AI systems toward autonomous scientific discovery.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

IndustryCode: A Benchmark for Industry Code Generation

Code generation and comprehension by Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as core drivers of industrial intelligence and decision optimization, finding widespread application in fields such as finance, automation, and aerospace. Although recent advancements have demonstrated the remarkable potential of LLMs in general code generation, existing benchmarks are mainly confined to single domains and languages. Consequently, they fail to effectively evaluate the generalization capabilities required for real-world industrial applications or to reflect the coding proficiency demanded by complex industrial scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce IndustryCode, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to span multiple industrial domains and programming languages. IndustryCode comprises 579 sub-problems derived from 125 primary industrial challenges, accompanied by rigorous problem descriptions and test cases. It covers a wide range of fields, including finance, automation, aerospace, and remote sensing-and incorporates diverse programming languages such as MATLAB, Python, C++, and Stata. In our evaluation, the top-performing model, Claude 4.5 Opus, achieved an overall accuracy of 68.1% on sub-problems and 42.5% main problems. The benchmark dataset and automated evaluation code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with SlowFast Sampling: The Three Golden Principles

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs by enabling parallel token generation and significantly reducing inference latency. However, existing sampling strategies for dLLMs, such as confidence-based or semi-autoregressive decoding, often suffer from static behavior, leading to suboptimal efficiency and limited flexibility. In this paper, we propose SlowFast Sampling, a novel dynamic sampling strategy that adaptively alternates between exploratory and accelerated decoding stages. Our method is guided by three golden principles: certainty principle, convergence principle, and positional principle, which govern when and where tokens can be confidently and efficiently decoded. We further integrate our strategy with dLLM-Cache to reduce redundant computation. Extensive experiments across benchmarks and models show that SlowFast Sampling achieves up to 15.63$\times$ speedup on LLaDA with minimal accuracy drop, and up to 34.22$\times$ when combined with caching. Notably, our approach outperforms strong autoregressive baselines like LLaMA3 8B in throughput, demonstrating that well-designed sampling can unlock the full potential of dLLMs for fast and high-quality generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

FastVMT: Eliminating Redundancy in Video Motion Transfer

Video motion transfer aims to synthesize videos by generating visual content according to a text prompt while transferring the motion pattern observed in a reference video. Recent methods predominantly use the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture. To achieve satisfactory runtime, several methods attempt to accelerate the computations in the DiT, but fail to address structural sources of inefficiency. In this work, we identify and remove two types of computational redundancy in earlier work: motion redundancy arises because the generic DiT architecture does not reflect the fact that frame-to-frame motion is small and smooth; gradient redundancy occurs if one ignores that gradients change slowly along the diffusion trajectory. To mitigate motion redundancy, we mask the corresponding attention layers to a local neighborhood such that interaction weights are not computed unnecessarily distant image regions. To exploit gradient redundancy, we design an optimization scheme that reuses gradients from previous diffusion steps and skips unwarranted gradient computations. On average, FastVMT achieves a 3.43x speedup without degrading the visual fidelity or the temporal consistency of the generated videos.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Bridging Visual Representation and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards in Large Vision-Language Models

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models in abstract reasoning tasks. However, its application to Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remains constrained by a structural representational bottleneck. Existing approaches generally lack explicit modeling and effective utilization of visual information, preventing visual representations from being tightly coupled with the reinforcement learning optimization process and thereby limiting further improvements in multimodal reasoning performance. To address this limitation, we propose KAWHI (Key-Region Aligned Weighted Harmonic Incentive), a plug-and-play reward reweighting mechanism that explicitly incorporates structured visual information into uniform reward policy optimization methods (e.g., GRPO and GSPO). The method adaptively localizes semantically salient regions through hierarchical geometric aggregation, identifies vision-critical attention heads via structured attribution, and performs paragraph-level credit reallocation to align spatial visual evidence with semantically decisive reasoning steps. Extensive empirical evaluations on diverse reasoning benchmarks substantiate KAWHI as a general-purpose enhancement module, consistently improving the performance of various uniform reward optimization methods. Project page: KAWHI (https://kawhiiiileo.github.io/KAWHI_PAGE/)

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Toward Ultra-Long-Horizon Agentic Science: Cognitive Accumulation for Machine Learning Engineering

The advancement of artificial intelligence toward agentic science is currently bottlenecked by the challenge of ultra-long-horizon autonomy, the ability to sustain strategic coherence and iterative correction over experimental cycles spanning days or weeks. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated prowess in short-horizon reasoning, they are easily overwhelmed by execution details in the high-dimensional, delayed-feedback environments of real-world research, failing to consolidate sparse feedback into coherent long-term guidance. Here, we present ML-Master 2.0, an autonomous agent that masters ultra-long-horizon machine learning engineering (MLE) which is a representative microcosm of scientific discovery. By reframing context management as a process of cognitive accumulation, our approach introduces Hierarchical Cognitive Caching (HCC), a multi-tiered architecture inspired by computer systems that enables the structural differentiation of experience over time. By dynamically distilling transient execution traces into stable knowledge and cross-task wisdom, HCC allows agents to decouple immediate execution from long-term experimental strategy, effectively overcoming the scaling limits of static context windows. In evaluations on OpenAI's MLE-Bench under 24-hour budgets, ML-Master 2.0 achieves a state-of-the-art medal rate of 56.44%. Our findings demonstrate that ultra-long-horizon autonomy provides a scalable blueprint for AI capable of autonomous exploration beyond human-precedent complexities.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Accelerating Diffusion-based Video Editing via Heterogeneous Caching: Beyond Full Computing at Sampled Denoising Timestep

Diffusion-based video editing has emerged as an important paradigm for high-quality and flexible content generation. However, despite their generality and strong modeling capacity, Diffusion Transformers (DiT) remain computationally expensive due to the iterative denoising process, posing challenges for practical deployment. Existing video diffusion acceleration methods primarily exploit denoising timestep-level feature reuse, which mitigates the redundancy in denoising process, but overlooks the architectural redundancy within the DiT that many attention operations over spatio-temporal tokens are redundantly executed, offering little to no incremental contribution to the model output. This work introduces HetCache, a training-free diffusion acceleration framework designed to exploit the inherent heterogeneity in diffusion-based masked video-to-video (MV2V) generation and editing. Instead of uniformly reuse or randomly sampling tokens, HetCache assesses the contextual relevance and interaction strength among various types of tokens in designated computing steps. Guided by spatial priors, it divides the spatial-temporal tokens in DiT model into context and generative tokens, and selectively caches the context tokens that exhibit the strongest correlation and most representative semantics with generative ones. This strategy reduces redundant attention operations while maintaining editing consistency and fidelity. Experiments show that HetCache achieves a noticeable acceleration, including a 2.67$\times$ latency speedup and FLOPs reduction over commonly used foundation models, with negligible degradation in editing quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Towards Self-Evolving Benchmarks: Synthesizing Agent Trajectories via Test-Time Exploration under Validate-by-Reproduce Paradigm

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and agent system designs have empowered agents with unprecedented levels of capability. However, existing agent benchmarks are showing a trend of rapid ceiling-hitting by newly developed agents, making it difficult to meet the demands for evaluating agent abilities. To address this problem, we propose the Trajectory-based Validated-by-Reproducing Agent-benchmark Complexity Evolution (TRACE) framework. This framework takes an original task from an existing benchmark and encourages agents to freely explore and evolve it into a new task with higher difficulty while recording validatable agent trajectories. The framework proceeds in three stages: (1) evolutionary proposal mining, which provides task evolution proposals through preliminary exploration and divergent thinking; (2) problem formation and free exploration, where proposals are conceptualized into feasible problem candidates and the agents then explore them freely while recording their execution trajectories; and (3) multi-level validation, which ensures that the evolved tasks are accompanied by validatable and reproducible trajectories. Experiments on the GAIA benchmark demonstrate that the TRACE framework consistently enhances task complexity while improving the reliability of correctness through validatable execution trajectories. In addition, our framework can successfully adapt to and improve reasoning datasets represented by AIME-2024. This work marks a paradigm shift from static, manually curated benchmarks to dynamic, self-evolving evaluation systems, providing a sustainable and challenging runway for agent development

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Entity-Specific Cyber Risk Assessment using InsurTech Empowered Risk Factors

The lack of high-quality public cyber incident data limits empirical research and predictive modeling for cyber risk assessment. This challenge persists due to the reluctance of companies to disclose incidents that could damage their reputation or investor confidence. Therefore, from an actuarial perspective, potential resolutions conclude two aspects: the enhancement of existing cyber incident datasets and the implementation of advanced modeling techniques to optimize the use of the available data. A review of existing data-driven methods highlights a significant lack of entity-specific organizational features in publicly available datasets. To address this gap, we propose a novel InsurTech framework that enriches cyber incident data with entity-specific attributes. We develop various machine learning (ML) models: a multilabel classification model to predict the occurrence of cyber incident types (e.g., Privacy Violation, Data Breach, Fraud and Extortion, IT Error, and Others) and a multioutput regression model to estimate their annual frequencies. While classifier and regressor chains are implemented to explore dependencies among cyber incident types as well, no significant correlations are observed in our datasets. Besides, we apply multiple interpretable ML techniques to identify and cross-validate potential risk factors developed by InsurTech across ML models. We find that InsurTech empowered features enhance prediction occurrence and frequency estimation robustness compared to only using conventional risk factors. The framework generates transparent, entity-specific cyber risk profiles, supporting customized underwriting and proactive cyber risk mitigation. It provides insurers and organizations with data-driven insights to support decision-making and compliance planning.

q-fin.RM↗

arXiv2026

Flash-Unified: A Training-Free and Task-Aware Acceleration Framework for Native Unified Models

Native unified multimodal models, which integrate both generative and understanding capabilities, face substantial computational overhead that hinders their real-world deployment. Existing acceleration techniques typically employ a static, monolithic strategy, ignoring the fundamental divergence in computational profiles between iterative generation tasks (e.g., image generation) and single-pass understanding tasks (e.g., VQA). In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of unified models, revealing pronounced parameter specialization, where distinct neuron sets are critical for each task. This implies that, at the parameter level, unified models have implicitly internalized separate inference pathways for generation and understanding within a single architecture. Based on these insights, we introduce a training-free and task-aware acceleration framework, FlashU, that tailors optimization to each task's demands. Across both tasks, we introduce Task-Specific Network Pruning and Dynamic Layer Skipping, aiming to eliminate inter-layer and task-specific redundancy. For visual generation, we implement a time-varying control signal for the guidance scale and a temporal approximation for the diffusion head via Diffusion Head Cache. For multimodal understanding, building upon the pruned model, we introduce Dynamic Token Pruning via a V-Norm Proxy to exploit the spatial redundancy of visual inputs. Extensive experiments on Show-o2 demonstrate that FlashU achieves 1.78$\times$ to 2.01$\times$ inference acceleration across both understanding and generation tasks while maintaining SOTA performance, outperforming competing unified models and validating our task-aware acceleration paradigm. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Rirayh/FlashU.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Experimental Powder X-ray Diffraction Crystal Structure Determination with RealPXRD-Solver

Determining crystal structures from experimental powder X-ray diffraction data remains challenging because peak overlap, preferred orientation, and impurity phases obscure atomic arrangements. We present RealPXRD-Solver, a generative model trained on 6,250,238 theoretical structures with experiment-mimicking augmentations and a universal encoder of d-spacing--intensity fingerprints, enabling both lattice-conditioned and lattice-free inference. RealPXRD-Solver reaches a 98.3% Top-20 match rate on a 10,000-structure theoretical benchmark and achieves Top-1/Top-20 accuracies of 77.9%/91.9% on CNRS and 78.8%/92.9% on RRUFF experimental datasets, and it solved 39 previously unreported Powder Diffraction File entries.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Uni-Parser Technical Report

This technical report introduces Uni-Parser, an industrial-grade document parsing engine tailored for scientific literature and patents, delivering high throughput, robust accuracy, and cost efficiency. Unlike pipeline-based document parsing methods, Uni-Parser employs a modular, loosely coupled multi-expert architecture that preserves fine-grained cross-modal alignments across text, equations, tables, figures, and chemical structures, while remaining easily extensible to emerging modalities. The system incorporates adaptive GPU load balancing, distributed inference, dynamic module orchestration, and configurable modes that support either holistic or modality-specific parsing. Optimized for large-scale cloud deployment, Uni-Parser achieves a processing rate of up to 20 PDF pages per second on 8 x NVIDIA RTX 4090D GPUs, enabling cost-efficient inference across billions of pages. This level of scalability facilitates a broad spectrum of downstream applications, ranging from literature retrieval and summarization to the extraction of chemical structures, reaction schemes, and bioactivity data, as well as the curation of large-scale corpora for training next-generation large language models and AI4Science models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

GlyphBanana: Advancing Precise Text Rendering Through Agentic Workflows

Despite recent advances in generative models driving significant progress in text rendering, accurately generating complex text and mathematical formulas remains a formidable challenge. This difficulty primarily stems from the limited instruction-following capabilities of current models when encountering out-of-distribution prompts. To address this, we introduce GlyphBanana, alongside a corresponding benchmark specifically designed for rendering complex characters and formulas. GlyphBanana employs an agentic workflow that integrates auxiliary tools to inject glyph templates into both the latent space and attention maps, facilitating the iterative refinement of generated images. Notably, our training-free approach can be seamlessly applied to various Text-to-Image (T2I) models, achieving superior precision compared to existing baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed workflow. Associated code is publicly available at https://github.com/yuriYanZeXuan/GlyphBanana.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Draft-Refine-Optimize: Self-Evolved Learning for Natural Language to MongoDB Query Generation

Natural Language to MongoDB Query Language (NL2MQL) is essential for democratizing access to modern document-centric databases. Unlike Text-to-SQL, NL2MQL faces unique challenges from MQL's procedural aggregation pipelines, deeply nested schemas, and ambiguous value grounding. Existing approaches use static prompting or one-shot refinement, which inadequately model these complex contexts and fail to systematically leverage execution feedback for persistent improvement. We propose EvoMQL, a self-evolved framework that unifies evidence-grounded context construction with execution-driven learning through iterative Draft-Refine-Optimize (DRO) cycles. Each cycle uses draft queries to trigger query-aware retrieval, dynamically building compact evidence contexts that resolve schema ambiguities and ground nested paths to concrete values. The model then undergoes online policy optimization with execution-based rewards and curriculum scheduling, with refined models feeding back into subsequent cycles for progressive evolution. Overall, EvoMQL achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 76.6% on the EAI in-distribution benchmark and 83.1% on the TEND out-of-distribution benchmark, outperforming the strongest open-source baselines by up to 9.5% and 5.2%, respectively. With only 3B activated parameters, this closed-loop paradigm enables scalable, continuous improvement of NL2MQL systems in production.

cs.DB↗