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Min Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Min Yang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

cs.AI↗

Temporal2Seq: A Unified Framework for Temporal Video Understanding Tasks

With the development of video understanding, there is a proliferation of tasks for clip-level temporal video analysis, including temporal action detection (TAD), temporal action segmentation (TAS), and generic event boundary detection (GEBD). While task-specific video understanding models have exhibited outstanding performance in each task, there remains a dearth of a unified framework capable of simultaneously addressing multiple tasks, which is a promising direction for the next generation of AI. To this end, in this paper, we propose a single unified framework, coined as Temporal2Seq, to formulate the output of these temporal video understanding tasks as a sequence of discrete tokens. With this unified token representation, Temporal2Seq can train a generalist model within a single architecture on different video understanding tasks. In the absence of multi-task learning (MTL) benchmarks, we compile a comprehensive co-training dataset by borrowing the datasets from TAD, TAS, and GEBD tasks. We evaluate our Temporal2Seq generalist model on the corresponding test sets of three tasks, demonstrating that Temporal2Seq can produce reasonable results on various tasks and achieve advantages compared with single-task training on this framework. We also investigate the generalization performance of our generalist model on new datasets from different tasks, which yields superior performance to the specific model.

cs.CV↗

SpikeTAD: Spiking Neural Networks for End-to-End Temporal Action Detection

Video understanding is a crucial part of computer vision, with numerous application scenarios. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, an increasing number of efforts are trying to deploy video understanding models on them. However, existing video understanding models are difficult to deploy due to their large size and prohibitive power consumption. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown bioplausibility and low power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), especially on neuromorphic chips which are regarded as essential components of future mobile devices. However, excessively long conversion time-steps and severe performance degradation problems limit their application. To solve the problems above, we explore the application of SNNs on temporal action detection (TAD), which is an important task in video understanding, and propose the first SNN-based end-to-end TAD architecture coined as SpikeTAD. While maintaining extremely low power consumption, SpikeTAD achieves an average mAP of 67.2% in THUMOS14 and 37.42% in ActivityNet-1.3, demonstrating the feasibility of a low-power TAD model. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/SpikeTAD.

cs.CV↗

Unified Safe In-context Image Generation in Multimodal Diffusion Transformers via Restricting Unsafe Information Flows

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) equipped with multimodal attention (MM-Attn) have become a dominant paradigm for image generation. However, preventing the generation of harmful content remains a critical challenge, particularly in image-to-image (I2I) editing tasks. Existing safety mechanisms are primarily designed for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis or U-Net-based architectures, which limits their effectiveness for unified safety mitigation in DiT-based frameworks. To bridge this gap, we propose Unified Visual Safety Regulator (UVR), a training-free safe generation framework that regulates unsafe semantics in generated images. UVR is grounded in an analysis of attention dynamics from the perspective of information flow in MM-Attn. We identify a task-independent start-up stage, during which unsafe semantics in output patches rapidly emerge and can be accurately localized, followed by task-specific semantic amplification and interference stages, where harmful signals are further propagated and entangled with benign content. Based on these observations, UVR mitigates unsafe generation through unified, targeted attention modulation and explicit restriction of harmful information flow over the identified unsafe output patches. Experiments across various concepts show that UVR achieves state-of-the-art safety performance by achieving 91% and 77% erase rate in image synthesis and editing tasks, while preserving visual quality and fidelity with minimal degradation. Code is available at https://github.com/deng12yx/UVR.

cs.CV↗

Description-Code Inconsistency in Real-world MCP Servers: Measurement, Detection, and Security Implications

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a critical standard empowering Large Language Models (LLMs) to utilize external tools. In this ecosystem, LLMs rely on natural language descriptions provided by MCP servers to select and execute functions. This interaction implicitly assumes that tool descriptions faithfully reflect their underlying implementations, while this assumption is not mandatorily verified in practice. As a result, MCP deployments may suffer from a problem named Description-Code Inconsistency (DCI), where a tool's description of its capabilities and security boundaries is not consistent with what the code actually does. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of DCI in real-world MCP servers. We formally define the problem and propose a comprehensive taxonomy spanning functionality inconsistencies and undeclared side effects. Guided by this taxonomy, we develop DCIChecker, an automated framework that combines structure-aware static analysis with the Direct-Reverse-Arbitration prompting method to cross-validate tool descriptions against actual code implementations. We apply this framework to a large-scale dataset comprising 19,200 description-code pairs extracted from 2,214 real-world MCP servers. Our measurement reveals that DCI is widespread, with 9.93% of these pairs exhibiting inconsistencies. We further demonstrate that DCI creates a critical defense blind spot, facilitating varied risks from operational failures to stealthy malicious behaviors. Finally, we propose mitigation strategies to enforce semantic consistency and enhance the reliability of the emerging agentic ecosystem.

cs.CR↗

TInR: Exploring Tool-Internalized Reasoning in Large Language Models

Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) has emerged as a promising direction by extending Large Language Models' (LLMs) capabilities with external tools during reasoning. Existing TIR methods typically rely on external tool documentation during reasoning. However, this leads to tool mastery difficulty, tool size constraints, and inference inefficiency. To mitigate these issues, we explore Tool-Internalized Reasoning (TInR), aiming at facilitating reasoning with tool knowledge internalized into LLMs. Achieving this goal presents notable requirements, including tool internalization and tool-reasoning coordination. To address them, we propose TInR-U, a tool-internalized reasoning framework for unified reasoning and tool usage. TInR-U is trained through a three-phase pipeline: 1) tool internalization with a bidirectional knowledge alignment strategy; 2) supervised fine-tuning warm-up using high-quality reasoning annotations, and 3) reinforcement learning with TInR-specific rewards. We comprehensively evaluate our method across in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Experiment results show that TInR-U achieves superior performance in both settings, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency.

cs.CL↗

Broken Memories: Detecting and Mitigating Memorization in Diffusion Models with Degraded Generations

While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images, their tendency to memorize training data poses significant privacy and copyright risks. In this work, we for the first time identify that memorization induces internal numerical instability, often manifesting as visually ``broken'' artifacts. Inspired by stability analysis in numerical methods, we introduce empirical stability regions based on latent update norms to quantitatively characterize stable behavior during generation. Leveraging this, we propose a principled, on-the-fly framework for step-wise detection and adaptive mitigation. Our approach suppresses memorization without altering prompts or guidance, thereby preserving semantic fidelity and image quality. Extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion 1.4 demonstrate that our method achieves an AUC $>0.999$ detection performance and a $0.0\%$ memorization rate after mitigation with negligible overhead ($\approx0.01$s per image).

cs.CV↗

Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers

Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a \emph{blind self-thinking} paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70\% higher accuracy, 22.90\% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR. Model and code are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/SUAT-AIRI/Proactive-Interactive-R1}

cs.CL↗

EVADE-Bench: Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating and Enhancing Evasive Content Detection

E-commerce platforms increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) to detect illicit or misleading product content. However, these models remain vulnerable to evasive content, which refers to inputs that have been deliberately modified through techniques such as word splitting, euphemistic language, or image cropping to conceal policy violations while still conveying prohibited claims. Crucially, detecting such content requires a model to simultaneously master two capabilities: accurately comprehending complex rules, and correctly inferring the true intent behind deliberately obfuscated multimodal inputs. While prior work has separately explored LLM reasoning over complex rules and LLM-based detection of evasive content, no existing benchmark combines both within a unified evaluation framework. This gap is particularly consequential in e-commerce, where accurate moderation demands that both capabilities operate in concert. To address this gap, we introduce EVADE-Bench, the first expert-curated Chinese multimodal benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs and VLMs on evasive content detection in real-world e-commerce scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation of 26 open- and closed-source LLMs and VLMs reveals that even state-of-the-art models frequently misclassify evasive samples. We further demonstrate that clearer rule categorization significantly improves model prediction consistency and reduces false predictions, highlighting the critical role of benchmark design in enabling reliable evaluation. To explore paths for performance improvement, we investigate the feasibility of multi-agent decomposition for multimodal reasoning, wherein visual description and logical inference are decoupled into separate agents, and find that this strategy yields notable accuracy gains.

cs.CL↗

AgentGuard: An Attribute-Based Access Control Framework for Tool-Use LLM-Based Agent

LLM-based agents have recently attracted significant attention due to their ability to autonomously invoke relevant tools to accomplish complex tasks. However, recent studies have shown that these agents face severe security risks, which may lead to privacy leakage, financial loss, or even full system compromise. In this paper, we present AgentGuard, an attribute-based access control framework for tool-use LLM-based agents. AgentGuard adopts a client-server architecture. On the client side, AgentGuard provides lightweight integration for agents implemented in different programming languages and architectures. It requires only minor code modifications (e.g., around 10 lines) without changing the underlying agent execution logic. On the server side, AgentGuard provides three complementary inspection mechanisms to cover both single-tool and cross-tool security risks in agent execution. In addition, it offers a visualized front-end interface for security policy specification and runtime auditing. Currently, AgentGuard is publicly accessible at https://github.com/WhitzardAgent/AgentGuard.

cs.CR↗

Think Twice Before You Act: Enhancing Agent Behavioral Safety with Thought Correction

LLM-based agents solve complex tasks through iterative reasoning, tool use, and environment interaction, where each intermediate thought directly shapes subsequent actions. Small deviations in these thoughts can therefore propagate into unsafe behaviors, yet existing guardrails typically operate only on final outputs or require intrusive model modifications. We introduce Thought-Aligner, a lightweight plug-in safety model that performs causal correction on unsafe thoughts before action execution, without altering the underlying agent. The corrected thoughts are fed back into the agent, steering its decision process and tool use toward safer trajectories. Because it operates solely at the thought level, Thought-Aligner is model-agnostic and can be integrated into diverse agent frameworks. We train Thought-Aligner via two-stage contrastive learning on paired safe and unsafe thoughts generated across ten risk scenarios. Experiments on diverse agent-safety benchmarks and six LLMs show that Thought-Aligner increases behavioral safety from about 50% without protection to around 90% on average, exceeding state-of-the-art guardrails by roughly 23%, while also improving helpfulness by about 5%. The method incurs low per-step latency and minimal overhead, enabling scalable and practical deployment. We publicly release Thought-Aligner-7B at https://huggingface.co/WhitzardAgent/Thought-Aligner-7B.

cs.AI↗

A First Measurement Study on Authentication Security in Real-World Remote MCP Servers

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as a common interface connecting large language models (LLMs) with external services. Remote deployments are becoming increasingly important as agents connect to user-linked online services, such as social, productivity, and financial services. In such deployments, the authentication boundary between MCP clients and remote servers becomes security-critical, yet remains underexplored. We present the first measurement study of authentication security in real-world remote MCP servers. We identify 7,973 live remote MCP servers, finding that 40.55% expose tools without authentication. Among authenticated servers, OAuth is the dominant authorization mechanism for reaching remote services, and OAuth deployments in the MCP ecosystem commonly exhibit three characteristics: open client environments, dynamic client registration, and delegated authorization. These characteristics distinguish MCP deployments from traditional OAuth and introduce new attack surfaces. Guided by this observation, we derive a taxonomy of authentication flaws comprising three MCP-specific categories and conventional OAuth misconfigurations, for a total of four categories and nine concrete flaw types. To evaluate these flaws at scale, we implement a semi-automated detection framework that combines passive traffic inspection with active dynamic probing. Applying it to 119 testable real-world OAuth-enabled MCP servers, we find that each server exhibits at least one flaw, with a total of 325 flaws identified, among which dynamic client registration flaws affect 96.6% of tested servers. Many of these flaws can lead to sensitive information leakage and account takeover. Through responsible disclosure, we obtained 9 CVE IDs. Our findings expose pervasive authentication weaknesses in the MCP ecosystem and underscore the urgent need for hardened OAuth-based remote deployments.

cs.CR↗

SCOT: Multi-Source Cross-City Transfer with Optimal-Transport Soft-Correspondence Objective

Cross-city transfer improves prediction in label-scarce cities by leveraging labeled data from other cities, but it becomes challenging when cities adopt incompatible partitions and no ground-truth region correspondences exist. Existing approaches either rely on heuristic region matching, which is often sensitive to anchor choices, or perform distribution-level alignment that leaves correspondences implicit and can be unstable under strong heterogeneity. We propose SCOT, a cross-city representation learning framework that learns explicit soft correspondences between unequal region sets via Sinkhorn-based entropic optimal transport. SCOT further sharpens transferable structure with an OT-weighted contrastive objective and stabilizes optimization through a cycle-style reconstruction regularizer. For multi-source transfer, SCOT aligns each source and the target to a shared prototype hub using balanced entropic transport guided by a target-induced prototype prior. Across real-world cities and tasks, SCOT consistently improves transfer accuracy and robustness, while the learned transport couplings and hub assignments provide interpretable diagnostics of alignment quality.

cs.LG↗

GATHER: Convergence-Centric Hyper-Entity Retrieval for Zero-Shot Cell-Type Annotation

Zero-shot single-cell cell-type annotation aims to determine a cell's type from a given set of expressed genes without any training. Existing knowledge-graph-based RAG approaches retrieve evidence by expanding from source entities and relying on iterative LLM reasoning. However, in this setting each query contains tens to hundreds of genes, where no single gene is decisive and the label emerges only from their collective co-occurrence. Such hyper-entity queries fundamentally challenge local, entity-wise exploration strategies, which reason from individual genes, leading to poor scalability and substantial LLM cost. We propose GATHER (Graph-Aware Traversal with Hyper-Entity Retrieval), a convergence-centric retriever tailored to hyper-entity queries. It performs global multi-source graph traversal and identifies topological convergence points -- nodes jointly reachable from many input genes. These convergence nodes act as high-information hyper-entities that capture entity synergy. By incorporating node- and path-importance scoring, GATHER selects informative evidence entirely without LLM involvement during retrieval. Instantiated on a self-constructed cell-centric biological knowledge graph (VCKG), GATHER outperforms strong KG-RAG baselines (ToG, ToG-2, RoG, PoG) on two datasets (Immune and Lung), achieving the highest exact-match accuracy (27.45% and 59.64%) with only a single LLM call per sample, compared to 2--61 calls for KG-RAG baselines. Our results demonstrate that convergence nodes compress multi-entity signals into compact, high-information evidence that conveys more per item than multi-hop paths, providing an efficient global alternative to local entity-wise reasoning.

cs.CL↗

ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in reasoning-intensive tasks, but they remain vulnerable to harmful content generation, particularly in the mid-to-late steps of their reasoning processes. Current defense methods, however, depend on costly fine-tuning and additional expert knowledge, which limits their scalability. In this work, we propose ReasoningGuard, an inference-time safeguard for LRMs. It injects timely safety aha moments during the reasoning process to guide the model towards harmless yet helpful reasoning. Our approach leverages the internal attention mechanisms of the LRM to accurately identify key points in the reasoning path, triggering safety-oriented reflections. To safeguard both the subsequent reasoning steps and the final answers, we implement a scaling sampling strategy during decoding to select the optimal reasoning path. With minimal additional inference cost, ReasoningGuard effectively mitigates four types of jailbreak attacks, including recent ones targeting the reasoning process of LRMs. Our approach outperforms nine existing safeguards, providing state-of-the-art defenses while avoiding common exaggerated safety issues.

cs.CL↗

PatRe: A Full-Stage Office Action and Rebuttal Generation Benchmark for Patent Examination

Patent examination is a complex, multi-stage process requiring both technical expertise and legal reasoning, increasingly challenged by rising application volumes. Prior benchmarks predominantly view patent examination as discriminative classification or static extraction, failing to capture its inherently interactive and iterative nature, similar to the peer review and rebuttal process in academic publishing. In this paper, we introduce PatRe, the first benchmark that models the full patent examination lifecycle, including Office Action generation and applicant rebuttal. PatRe comprises 480 real-world cases and supports both oracle and retrieval-simulated evaluation settings. Our benchmark reframes patent examination as a dynamic, multi-turn process of justification and response. Extensive experiments across various LLMs reveal critical insights into model performance, including differences between proprietary and open-source models, as well as task asymmetries between examiner analysis and applicant-side rebuttal. These findings highlight both the potential and current limitations of LLMs in modeling complex, real-world legal reasoning and technical novelty judgment in patent examination. We release our code and dataset to facilitate future research on patent examination modeling.

cs.CL↗

InteractWeb-Bench: Can Multimodal Agent Escape Blind Execution in Interactive Website Generation?

With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and coding agents, the website development has shifted from manual programming to agent-based project-level code synthesis. Existing benchmarks rely on idealized assumptions, especially for well-structured, information-rich inputs and static execution settings. In contrast, real-world development is constrained by a critical bottleneck: the semantic misalignment between ambiguous, low-quality instructions from non-expert users and model understanding, which results in a failure mode that we term blind execution. To address this gap, we introduce InteractWeb-Bench, the first multimodal interactive benchmark for website generation under non-expert low-code user conditions. InteractWeb-Bench introduces four types of user agents and persona-driven instruction perturbations to systematically simulate diverse user behaviors, including ambiguity, redundancy, and contradiction, grounded in requirement engineering defect taxonomies. We develop an interactive execution environment for agents, featuring a unified action space comprising Clarify, Implement, Verify, and Submit, enabling iterative intent refinement, code synthesis, and visual feedback-based validation. Extensive experiments and analysis reveal that frontier MLLM-based agents remain trapped in blind execution, exposing limitations in intent recognition and adaptive interaction.

cs.AI↗

Enzyme: Incremental View Maintenance for Data Engineering

Materialized views are a core construct in database systems, used to accelerate analytical queries and optimize batch pipelines for extract-transform-load (ETL) workflows. Maintaining view consistency as underlying data evolves is a fundamental challenge, especially in high-throughput and real-time settings. Incremental view maintenance (IVM) has been studied for decades and continues to attract significant investment from major database vendors. However, most industrial systems either offer limited SQL-operator coverage or require users to hand-tune refresh strategies. This paper presents Enzyme, an IVM engine developed at Databricks to power Spark Declarative Pipelines. It provides a built-in, end-to-end approach to incremental pipelines, utilizing materialized views as first-class building blocks. By automating refresh planning, Enzyme reduces total cost of ownership and lets users focus on business logic rather than MV mechanics. Validation across thousands of large-scale production pipelines spanning diverse application domains has demonstrated substantial computational efficiency gains, yielding a cumulative daily compute reduction of billions of CPU seconds. Built atop Apache Spark primitives, Enzyme adds a cost-based optimization layer that selects refresh strategies for collections of materialized views organized into pipelines. Enzyme's modular architecture is designed to generalize across data sources and query engines. We present key design decisions for incremental refresh planning and execution, including optimizations that exploit batching opportunities across materialized view sources. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements at scale.

cs.DB↗