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Maolin Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Maolin Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Momentum-Space-Engineered Spatial Photonic Ising Machine for Long-Range Interactions

Long-range Ising models (LRIMs) with dense nonlocal and competing interactions are central to statistical physics, quantum simulation, and complex networks. Although the spatial photonic Ising machine (SPIM) exploits intrinsic optical parallelism for Ising computation, its ability to faithfully encode dense long-range couplings and capture the resulting thermodynamic signatures remains underexplored. Here, we present a momentum-space-engineered SPIM framework that maps prescribed long-range coupling kernels onto momentum-space masks for parallel Hamiltonian evaluation. Based on a high-fidelity optical field propagation model, the annealing dynamics of LRIMs with power-law and Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interactions are systematically investigated. For the power-law model, we investigate the modulation of the estimated critical temperature by the decay exponent {\sigma} and coupling cutoff radius R. For the RKKY model, we reproduce diverse ordered states induced by complex competing long-range interactions. A proof-of-principle experiment demonstrates the physical feasibility of our approach. This framework broadens the class of many-body systems accessible to the SPIM platform.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

LiST: Local-Simplex Test-Time LoRA Fusion

Task-specific LoRA adapters offer a modular way to specialize large language and vision-language models. However, existing adapter composition methods are mostly static and cannot adapt to individual test inputs. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{LiST}, a label-free test-time LoRA fusion framework that converts an existing LoRA bank into a target-conditioned local simplex and searches sample-specific fusion weights at inference time. LiST builds joint task representations from LoRA parameter anchors and prompt-level behavior vectors, retrieves neighboring adapters as a local search space, and performs branch-preserving fusion without updating the backbone or adapters. Candidate weights are selected by a prompt-level energy with prior, geometric, and stochastic-consistency constraints, and are deployed only when they pass a safe acceptance rule. Otherwise, LiST falls back to a target-conditioned prior. Experiments on multimodal and language benchmarks show that LiST outperforms static LoRA merging and conventional test-time adaptation baselines, while preserving task-specific adapter utility and improving robustness on unseen tasks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

TRACE: State-Aware Query Processing over Temporal Evidence Graphs for Conversational Data

Conversational data is increasingly used as a persistent source of user state for long-running assistants and AI agents. However, querying this data remains challenging because conversations naturally evolve: plans are revised, preferences change, and later messages frequently supersede or contradict earlier information. Existing long-memory pipelines largely treat memories as independent text or vector objects. This approach often retrieves semantically similar but stale evidence, offering limited support for state-aware reasoning. To address this problem, we present TRACE, a query processing framework over temporal evidence graphs for evolving conversational data. TRACE models conversations as a hierarchical graph spanning events, sessions, and topics, enriched with typed temporal, causal, update, and contradiction relations. Crucially, the framework maintains validity annotations so obsolete facts remain accessible for historical queries but are discounted for current-state answers. At query time, TRACE combines vector-based note retrieval with graph-guided evidence search, generating validity-aware support paths and a hybrid context for answer generation. This design separates lexical recall from evidence reconstruction, enabling bounded query-time reasoning over long conversational histories. Experiments on long-conversation query-answering (QA) benchmarks show that TRACE improves temporal and multi-hop reasoning, with ablations highlighting the importance of hierarchy, update-aware seeding, and path-grounded evidence.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

R$^2$-Searcher: Calibrating Retrieval and Reasoning Boundaries for Agentic Search

Recent search agents for multi-hop reasoning often fail by either retrieving incomplete evidence or reasoning over irrelevant portions of the retrieved content, leading to a retrieval-reasoning boundary shift. We propose R$^2$-Searcher, a novel framework that explicitly explores and calibrates the retrieval and reasoning boundaries via fine-grained, query-token-guided evidence modeling and post-retrieval reflection. Specifically, R$^2$-Searcher: (1) constructs fine-grained reasoning contexts by extracting precise facts from retrieved content based on query token semantics (e.g., subjects, actions, temporal markers, and degree modifiers), thereby guiding the attention of search agent; (2) introduces a retrieval reflection mechanism that evaluates and corrects boundary deviations after each retrieval step, guiding the generation of improved queries grounded in the extracted reasoning contexts; and (3) employs an end-to-end reasoning-reflection-guided reinforcement learning algorithm, R$^2$PO, which jointly optimizes both boundaries through a tree-based exploration of reasoning regions and reflections. Our method significantly enhances the quality of both retrieval and reasoning, establishing an iterative loop where retrieval and reasoning mutually enhance each other. Extensive experiments on seven complex multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that R$^2$-Searcher significantly outperforms state-of-the-art agentic search methods in answer accuracy and retrieval-reasoning quality. Ablation studies further confirm the critical role of retrieval-reasoning boundary calibration.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

DynamicPTQ: Mitigating Activation Quantization Collapse via Residual-Stream Dynamics

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for efficient large language model inference, but reliably quantizing activations remains challenging when weights, activations, and KV caches are all quantized to 4-bit precision. A key difficulty lies in massive activations, whose extreme values dominate the activation range and amplify quantization errors. State-of-the-art methods mainly mitigate massive activations through transformation-based smoothing, such as orthogonal rotations and affine scaling, but overlook the cross-layer dynamics of the residual stream. In this paper, we show that massive activations emerge and disappear in a phase-wise pattern across network depth, triggering large residual changes. These changes cause newly injected layer-wise updates to dominate the 4-bit quantization scale and weaken historical residual information. To characterize this behavior, we introduce Jump Ratio and Historical Feature SNR. This suggests that static transformation-based smoothing cannot fully resolve dynamic quantization instability caused by cross-layer residual changes. Based on this analysis, we propose DynamicPTQ, a Dynamic Post-Training Quantization policy for phase-aware mixed-precision activation quantization. DynamicPTQ identifies quantization-sensitive layers from residual-stream dynamics and assigns 8-bit activation precision only to these layers, while keeping weights, KV caches, and other activations in 4-bit precision. It can be directly integrated with strong PTQ baselines such as QuaRot, SpinQuant, and FlatQuant. Experiments on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DynamicPTQ consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot QA performance under W4A4KV4 quantization, while achieving 1.05 to 1.07 times throughput improvement with modest memory overhead. These results demonstrate a practical path toward robust low-bit LLM inference.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

T-GINEE: A Tensor-Based Multilayer Graph Representation Learning

Traditional network analysis focuses on single-layer networks, real-world systems often form multilayer networks with multiple relationship types. However, existing methods typically fail to capture complex inter-layer dependencies by treating layers independently or aggregating them. To address this, we propose T-GINEE (Tensor-Based Generalized Multilayer-graph Estimating Equation), a statistical regularization framework combining tensor-based generalized estimating equations with task-specific loss to model cross-network correlations explicitly. Key innovations include: (1) CP tensor decomposition capturing structural dependencies via shared latent factors; (2) a generalized estimating equation framework modeling inter-layer correlations through working covariance matrices; and (3) a flexible link function accommodating characteristics like sparsity. Our theoretical analysis establishes consistency and asymptotic normality under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate T-GINEE's effectiveness for multilayer network analysis.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Reinforced Preference Optimization for Reasoning-Augmented Recommendations

Recommender systems are critical for delivering personalized content across digital platforms, and recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to enhance them with richer world knowledge and explicit reasoning capabilities. With the help of reasoning knowledge, recommendations can better infer users' underlying intents, adapt to evolving preferences, and leverage semantic relationships for improved accuracy and interpretability. However, existing reasoning-based recommendation methods often fail to fully align the LLM's reasoning process with recommendation-specific objectives due to structural disruption during integration and difficulties in translating free-form generation into accurate item predictions. In this paper, we introduce RPORec, a reinforced preference optimization framework that unifies an LLM backbone's reasoning ability with a dedicated recommendation head (Rechead) for precise item retrieval. RPORec comprises two stages: (1) Reasoning-Augmented Recommendation Modeling, where high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is generated and used as auxiliary knowledge to guide the Rechead in learning recommendation-specific representations; and (2) Advanced Reasoning Refinement and Alignment, in which the trained Rechead produces verifiable rewards to fine-tune the LLM backbone via reinforcement learning, enhancing reasoning quality, structural consistency, and task relevance. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and large-scale online deployments show that RPORec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based recommendation methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of reasoning-augmented recommendation modeling in real-world systems.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have scaled the potential for reasoning and agentic search, wherein models autonomously plan, retrieve, and reason over external knowledge to answer complex queries. However, the iterative think-search loop accumulates long system memories, leading to memory dilution problem. In addition, existing memory management methods struggle to capture fine-grained semantic relations between queries and documents and often lose substantial information. Therefore, we propose MemSearch-o1, an agentic search framework built on reasoning-aligned memory growth and retracing. MemSearch-o1 dynamically grows fine-grained memory fragments from memory seed tokens from the queries, then retraces and deeply refines the memory via a contribution function, and finally reorganizes a globally connected memory path. This shifts memory management from stream-like concatenation to structured, token-level growth with path-based reasoning. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that MemSearch-o1 substantially mitigates memory dilution, and more effectively activates the reasoning potential of diverse LLMs, establishing a solid foundation for memory-aware agentic intelligence.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

SEARCH-R: Structured Entity-Aware Retrieval with Chain-of-Reasoning Navigator for Multi-hop Question Answering

Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) aims to answer questions that require multi-step reasoning. It presents two key challenges: generating correct reasoning paths in response to the complex user queries, and accurately retrieving essential knowledge in the face of potential limitations in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily rely on prompt-based methods to generate reasoning paths, which are further combined with traditional sparse or dense retrieval to produce the final answer. However, the generation of reasoning paths commonly lacks effective control over the generative process, thus leading the reasoning astray. Meanwhile, the retrieval methods over-rely on knowledge matching or similarity scores rather than evaluating the practical utility of the information, resulting in retrieving homogeneous or non-useful information. Therefore, we propose a Structured Entity-Aware Retrieval with Chain-of-Reasoning Navigator framework named SEARCH-R. Specifically, SEARCH-R trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator, which is able to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model. Moreover, a novel dependency tree-based retrieval is designed to evaluate the informational contribution of the document quantitatively. Extensive experiments on three challenging multi-hop datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ACL2026_SEARCH-R.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

DiffQEC: A versatile diffusion model for quantum error correction

Quantum computers could solve problems beyond the reach of classical devices, but this potential depends on quantum error correction (QEC) to protect fragile quantum states from noise. A central challenge in QEC is decoding: inferring likely physical errors from syndrome patterns generated by repeated stabilizer measurements. Existing decoders, including graph-based and neural approaches, typically return a single correction hypothesis and therefore discard the richer posterior structure of the error distribution conditioned on the observed syndrome. Here we recast QEC decoding as posterior inference using discrete denoising diffusion, exploiting the analogy between stochastic error accumulation and the forward diffusion process. We introduce DiffQEC, a generative decoder that combines a syndrome processor for multi-round spatial-temporal syndrome histories with syndrome feature modulation to condition denoising on the observed syndrome throughout inference. On experimental data from Google's superconducting quantum processor, DiffQEC reduces logical error rates by up to 10.2% relative to minimum-weight perfect matching and by about 5% relative to tensor-network decoding. These improvements persist for larger code distances up to 17 under depolarizing noise and for logical circuits of increasing depth. Beyond accuracy, the learned posterior provides confidence estimates for post-selection and reveals physically meaningful error structure, establishing posterior generative decoding as a practical framework for QEC.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

Logic Jailbreak: Efficiently Unlocking LLM Safety Restrictions Through Formal Logical Expression

Despite substantial advancements in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, current safety mechanisms remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks. We hypothesize that this vulnerability stems from distributional discrepancies between alignment-oriented prompts and malicious prompts. To investigate this, we introduce LogiBreak, a novel and universal black-box jailbreak method that leverages logical expression translation to circumvent LLM safety systems. By converting harmful natural language prompts into formal logical expressions, LogiBreak exploits the distributional gap between alignment data and logic-based inputs, preserving the underlying semantic intent and readability while evading safety constraints. We evaluate LogiBreak on a multilingual jailbreak dataset spanning three languages, demonstrating its effectiveness across various evaluation settings and linguistic contexts.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Semantic Collaborative Integration: Why Alignment Is Not Enough

Large language models (LLMs) have become an important semantic infrastructure for modern recommender systems. A prevailing paradigm integrates LLM-derived semantic embeddings with collaborative representations via representation alignment, implicitly assuming that the two views encode a shared latent entity and that stronger alignment yields better results. We formalize this assumption as the global low-complexity alignment hypothesis and argue that it is stronger than necessary and often structurally mismatched with real-world recommendation settings. We propose a complementary perspective in which semantic and collaborative representations are treated as partially shared yet fundamentally heterogeneous views, each containing both shared and view-specific factors. Under this shared-plus-private latent structure, enforcing global geometric alignment may distort local structure, suppress view-specific signals, and reduce informational diversity. To support this perspective, we develop complementarity-aware diagnostics that quantify overlap, unique-hit contribution, and theoretical fusion upper bounds. Empirical analyses on sparse recommendation benchmarks reveal low item-level agreement between semantic and collaborative views and substantial oracle fusion gains, indicating strong complementarity. Furthermore, controlled alignment probes show that low-capacity mappings capture only shared components and fail to recover full collaborative geometry, especially under distribution shift. These findings suggest that alignment should not be treated as the default integration principle. We advocate a shift from alignment-centric modeling to complementarity fusion-centric, complementarity-aware design, where shared factors are selectively integrated while private signals are preserved. This reframing provides a principled foundation for the next generation of LLM-enhanced recommender systems.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Job Skill Extraction via LLM-Centric Multi-Module Framework

Span-level skill extraction from job advertisements underpins candidate-job matching and labor-market analytics, yet generative large language models (LLMs) often yield malformed spans, boundary drift, and hallucinations, especially with long-tail terms and cross-domain shift. We present SRICL, an LLM-centric framework that combines semantic retrieval (SR), in-context learning (ICL), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with a deterministic verifier. SR pulls in-domain annotated sentences and definitions from ESCO to form format-constrained prompts that stabilize boundaries and handle coordination. SFT aligns output behavior, while the verifier enforces pairing, non-overlap, and BIO legality with minimal retries. On six public span-labeled corpora of job-ad sentences across sectors and languages, SRICL achieves substantial STRICT-F1 improvements over GPT-3.5 prompting baselines and sharply reduces invalid tags and hallucinated spans, enabling dependable sentence-level deployment in low-resource, multi-domain settings.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Privacy-Preserving EHR Data Transformation via Geometric Operators: A Human-AI Co-Design Technical Report

Electronic health records (EHRs) and other real-world clinical data are essential for clinical research, medical artificial intelligence, and life science, but their sharing is severely limited by privacy, governance, and interoperability constraints. These barriers create persistent data silos that hinder multi-center studies, large-scale model development, and broader biomedical discovery. Existing privacy-preserving approaches, including multi-party computation and related cryptographic techniques, provide strong protection but often introduce substantial computational overhead, reducing the efficiency of large-scale machine learning and foundation-model training. In addition, many such methods make data usable for restricted computation while leaving them effectively invisible to clinicians and researchers, limiting their value in workflows that still require direct inspection, exploratory analysis, and human interpretation. We propose a real-world-data transformation framework for privacy-preserving sharing of structured clinical records. Instead of converting data into opaque representations, our approach constructs transformed numeric views that preserve medical semantics and major statistical properties while, under a clearly specified threat model, provably breaking direct linkage between those views and protected patient-level attributes. Through collaboration between computer scientists and the AI agent \textbf{SciencePal}, acting as a constrained tool inventor under human guidance, we design three transformation operators that are non-reversible within this threat model, together with an additional mixing strategy for high-risk scenarios, supported by theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation under reconstruction, record linkage, membership inference, and attribute inference attacks.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

AdaSwitch: Balancing Exploration and Guidance in Knowledge Distillation via Adaptive Switching

Small language models (SLMs) are crucial for applications with strict latency and computational constraints, yet achieving high performance remains challenging. Knowledge distillation (KD) can transfer capabilities from large teacher models, but existing methods face a dilemma: off-policy distillation provides high-quality supervision but suffers from exposure bias (training inference mismatch), while on-policy approaches ensure consistency but are limited by the low quality of student-generated outputs. To address these issues, we propose AdaSwitch, a novel approach that dynamically combines on-policy and off-policy generation via an adaptive switching mechanism. AdaSwitch allows the student to explore its predictions within its capability and selectively integrates teacher guidance only when divergence exceeds a context-aware threshold. This paradigm preserves generation consistency while ensuring high-quality supervision. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that AdaSwitch consistently improves accuracy and reasoning capability with moderate overhead.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

MOSAIC: Composable Safety Alignment with Modular Control Tokens

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is commonly implemented as a single static policy embedded in model parameters. However, real-world deployments often require context-dependent safety rules that vary across users, regions, and applications. Existing approaches struggle to provide such conditional control: parameter-level alignment entangles safety behaviors with general capabilities, while prompt-based methods rely on natural language instructions that provide weak enforcement. We propose MOSAIC, a modular framework that enables compositional safety alignment through learnable control tokens optimized over a frozen backbone model. Each token represents a safety constraint and can be flexibly activated and composed at inference time. To train compositional tokens efficiently, we introduce order-based task sampling and a distribution-level alignment objective that mitigates over-refusal. Experiments show that MOSAIC achieves strong defense performance with substantially lower over-refusal while preserving model utility.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

BRIDGE: Bridging Reasoning In Distillation Gap Elimination via Structure-Aware Masking

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly improved LLMs' mathematical problem-solving capabilities, but distilling such capabilities into smaller models remains challenging due to the capacity mismatch between verbose teachers and compact students. Directly copying teachers' lengthy reasoning chains causes capacity overload, resulting in truncated outputs or repetitive failure. Existing remedies each sacrifice a critical property of CoT: implicit reasoning methods (e.g., compressing reasoning into hidden states) trade away interpretability and verifiability, while heuristic compression strategies (e.g., random step pruning) destroy logical integrity. To address this, we propose BRIDGE, a curriculum framework that first establishes structural understanding via masked reconstruction, then uses GRPO-based reinforcement learning to guide students in self-discovering the optimal balance between accuracy and brevity, and finally internalizes complex reasoning through teacher-guided rewriting on failure cases. On GSM8K, BRIDGE enables Qwen2.5-3B to achieve 11.29% accuracy improvement and 27.4% token reduction over the original model, outperforming instruction-tuned variants and distillation baselines. Zero-shot transfer experiments on SVAMP and MATH-500 further confirm the generalization of internalized reasoning. Our code and model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SDM2026_BRIDGE and https://huggingface.co/bowen0815/BRIDGE.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

NEZHA: A Zero-sacrifice and Hyperspeed Decoding Architecture for Generative Recommendations

Generative Recommendation (GR), powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), represents a promising new paradigm for industrial recommender systems. However, their practical application is severely hindered by high inference latency, which makes them infeasible for high-throughput, real-time services and limits their overall business impact. While Speculative Decoding (SD) has been proposed to accelerate the autoregressive generation process, existing implementations introduce new bottlenecks: they typically require separate draft models and model-based verifiers, requiring additional training and increasing the latency overhead. In this paper, we address these challenges with NEZHA, a novel architecture that achieves hyperspeed decoding for GR systems without sacrificing recommendation quality. Specifically, NEZHA integrates a nimble autoregressive draft head directly into the primary model, enabling efficient self-drafting. This design, combined with a specialized input prompt structure, preserves the integrity of sequence-to-sequence generation. Furthermore, to tackle the critical problem of hallucination, a major source of performance degradation, we introduce an efficient, model-free verifier based on a hash set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NEZHA through extensive experiments on public datasets and have successfully deployed the system on Taobao since October 2025, driving the billion-level advertising revenue and serving hundreds of millions of daily active users.

cs.AI↗