arXiv subjects

Ming Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Ming Yan.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

SteerX: Disentangled Steering for LLM Personalization

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, enabling a wide range of applications, including intelligent assistants that support users' daily life and work. A critical factor in building such assistants is personalizing LLMs, as user preferences and needs vary widely. Activation steering, which directly leverages directions representing user preference in the LLM activation space to adjust its behavior, offers a cost-effective way to align the model's outputs with individual users. However, existing methods rely on all historical data to compute the steering vector, ignoring that not all content reflects true user preferences, which undermines the personalization signal. To address this, we propose SteerX, a disentangled steering method that isolates preference-driven components from preference-agnostic components. Grounded in causal inference theory, SteerX estimates token-level causal effects to identify preference-driven tokens, transforms these discrete signals into a coherent description, and then leverages them to steer personalized LLM generation. By focusing on the truly preference-driven information, SteerX produces more accurate activation steering vectors and enhances personalization. Experiments on two representative steering backbone methods across real-world datasets demonstrate that SteerX consistently enhances steering vector quality, offering a practical solution for more effective LLM personalization.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Qwen3Guard Technical Report

As large language models (LLMs) become more capable and widely used, ensuring the safety of their outputs is increasingly critical. Existing guardrail models, though useful in static evaluation settings, face two major limitations in real-world applications: (1) they typically output only binary "safe/unsafe" labels, which can be interpreted inconsistently across diverse safety policies, rendering them incapable of accommodating varying safety tolerances across domains; and (2) they require complete model outputs before performing safety checks, making them fundamentally incompatible with streaming LLM inference, thereby preventing timely intervention during generation and increasing exposure to harmful partial outputs. To address these challenges, we present Qwen3Guard, a series of multilingual safety guardrail models with two specialized variants: Generative Qwen3Guard, which casts safety classification as an instruction-following task to enable fine-grained tri-class judgments (safe, controversial, unsafe); and Stream Qwen3Guard, which introduces a token-level classification head for real-time safety monitoring during incremental text generation. Both variants are available in three sizes (0.6B, 4B, and 8B parameters) and support up to 119 languages and dialects, providing comprehensive, scalable, and low-latency safety moderation for global LLM deployments. Evaluated across English, Chinese, and multilingual benchmarks, Qwen3Guard achieves state-of-the-art performance in both prompt and response safety classification. All models are released under the Apache 2.0 license for public use.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

AutoBalance: An Automatic Balancing Framework for Training Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) provide a powerful and general framework for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into loss functions. However, training PINNs is notoriously difficult due to the need to balance multiple loss terms, such as PDE residuals and boundary conditions, which often have conflicting objectives and vastly different curvatures. Existing methods address this issue by manipulating gradients before optimization (a "pre-combine" strategy). We argue that this approach is fundamentally limited, as forcing a single optimizer to process gradients from spectrally heterogeneous loss landscapes disrupts its internal preconditioning. In this work, we introduce AutoBalance, a novel "post-combine" training paradigm. AutoBalance assigns an independent adaptive optimizer to each loss component and aggregates the resulting preconditioned updates afterwards. Extensive experiments on challenging PDE benchmarks show that AutoBalance consistently outperforms existing frameworks, achieving significant reductions in solution error, as measured by both the MSE and $L^{\infty}$ norms. Moreover, AutoBalance is orthogonal to and complementary with other popular PINN methodologies, amplifying their effectiveness on demanding benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

WebWeaver: Structuring Web-Scale Evidence with Dynamic Outlines for Open-Ended Deep Research

This paper tackles \textbf{open-ended deep research (OEDR)}, a complex challenge where AI agents must synthesize vast web-scale information into insightful reports. Current approaches are plagued by dual-fold limitations: static research pipelines that decouple planning from evidence acquisition and monolithic generation paradigms that include redundant, irrelevant evidence, suffering from hallucination issues and low citation accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{WebWeaver}, a novel dual-agent framework that emulates the human research process. The planner operates in a dynamic cycle, iteratively interleaving evidence acquisition with outline optimization to produce a comprehensive, citation-grounded outline linking to a memory bank of evidence. The writer then executes a hierarchical retrieval and writing process, composing the report section by section. By performing targeted retrieval of only the necessary evidence from the memory bank via citations for each part, it effectively mitigates long-context issues and citation hallucinations. Our framework establishes a new state-of-the-art across major OEDR benchmarks, including DeepResearch Bench, DeepConsult, and DeepResearchGym. These results validate our human-centric, iterative methodology, demonstrating that adaptive planning and focused synthesis are crucial for producing comprehensive, trusted, and well-structured reports.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

CALM Before the STORM: Unlocking Native Reasoning for Optimization Modeling

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex multi-step reasoning, opening new opportunities for automating optimization modeling. However, existing domain adaptation methods, originally designed for earlier instruction-tuned models, often fail to exploit the advanced reasoning patterns of modern LRMs -- In particular, we show that direct fine-tuning on traditional \textit{non-reflective} datasets leads to limited gains. To fully leverage LRMs' inherent reasoning abilities, we propose \textbf{CALM} (\textit{Corrective Adaptation with Lightweight Modification}), a framework that progressively refines LRMs within their native reasoning modes for optimization modeling tasks. In CALM, an expert intervener identifies reasoning flaws and provides concise corrective hints, which the LRM incorporates to produce improved reasoning trajectories. These interventions modify fewer than 2.6\% of generated tokens, but generate high-quality data for soft adaptation through supervised fine-tuning. The adapted model is then further improved through reinforcement learning. Building on CALM, we develop \textbf{STORM} (\textit{Smart Thinking Optimization Reasoning Model}), a 4B-parameter LRM that achieves a new state-of-the-art average accuracy of 68.9\% across five popular optimization modeling benchmarks, matching the performance of a 671B LRM. These results demonstrate that dynamic, hint-based data synthesis both preserves and amplifies the native reasoning patterns of modern LRMs, offering a more effective and scalable path towards expert-level performance on challenging optimization modeling tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Reinforced Strategy Optimization for Conversational Recommender Systems via Network-of-Experts

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to provide personalized recommendations through multi-turn natural language interactions with users. Given the strong interaction and reasoning skills of Large Language Models (LLMs), leveraging LLMs for CRSs has recently emerged as a promising direction. However, existing LLM-based methods often lack explicit optimization of interaction strategies, instead relying on unified prompts and the LLM's internal knowledge to decide how to interact, which can lead to suboptimal outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Reinforced Strategy Optimization (RSO) method for CRS, which decomposes the process of generating strategy-driven response decisions into the macro-level strategy planning and micro-level strategy adaptation through a network-of-experts architecture. At the macro level, a Planner expert selects macro-level interaction strategies (e.g., recommend, explain, encourage). At the micro level, an Actor expert generates detailed responses conditioned on the selected macro-level strategy, guided by auxiliary experts that provide complementary information such as user preferences and factual grounding. This hierarchical decomposition disentangles the optimization of different sub-tasks involved in CRS response generation, enabling more tractable learning at each level. To address the scarcity of high-quality multi-turn training data, we formulate strategy learning as a reinforcement learning problem, guided by an LLM-based reward model to achieve automatic strategy exploration. Extensive experiments show that RSO significantly improves interaction performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of explicit hierarchical strategy optimization for CRS.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

UniFlow-Audio: Unified Flow Matching for Audio Generation from Omni-Modalities

Audio generation, including speech, music and sound effects, has advanced rapidly in recent years. These tasks can be divided into two categories: time-aligned (TA) tasks, where each input unit corresponds to a specific segment of the output audio (e.g., phonemes aligned with frames in speech synthesis); and non-time-aligned (NTA) tasks, where such alignment is not available. Since modeling paradigms for the two types are typically different, research on different audio generation tasks has traditionally followed separate trajectories. However, audio is not inherently divided into such categories, making a unified model a natural and necessary goal for general audio generation. Previous unified audio generation works have adopted autoregressive architectures, while unified non-autoregressive approaches remain largely unexplored. In this work, we propose UniFlow-Audio, a universal audio generation framework based on flow matching. We propose a dual-fusion mechanism that temporally aligns audio latents with TA features and integrates NTA features via cross-attention in each model block. Task-balanced data sampling is employed to maintain strong performance across both TA and NTA tasks. UniFlow-Audio supports omni-modalities, including text, audio, and video. By leveraging the advantage of multi-task learning and the generative modeling capabilities of flow matching, UniFlow-Audio achieves strong results across 7 tasks using fewer than 8K hours of public training data and under 1B trainable parameters. Even the small variant with only ~200M trainable parameters shows competitive performance, highlighting UniFlow-Audio as a potential non-auto-regressive foundation model for audio generation. Code and models will be available at https://wsntxxn.github.io/uniflow_audio.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

UI-S1: Advancing GUI Automation via Semi-online Reinforcement Learning

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions through reinforcement learning. However, current approaches face a fundamental dilemma: offline RL enables stable training on pre-collected trajectories, but struggles with multi-step task execution for lack of trajectory-level reward signals; online RL captures these signals through environment interaction, but suffers from sparse rewards and prohibitive deployment costs. To address it, we present Semi-online Reinforcement Learning, a novel paradigm that simulates online RL on offline trajectories. During each rollout process, we preserve the original model output within the multi-turn dialogue, where a Patch Module adaptively recovers the divergence between rollout and expert trajectories. To capture long-term training signals, Semi-online RL introduces discounted future returns into the reward computation and optimizes the policy with weighted step-level and episode-level advantages. We further introduce Semi-Online Performance (SOP), a metric that aligns better with true online performance, serving as a practical and effective proxy for real-world evaluation. Experiments show that ours Semi-online RL achieves SOTA performance among 7B models across four dynamic benchmarks, with significant gains over the base model (e.g., +12.0% on AndroidWorld, +23.8% on AITW), demonstrating significant progress in bridging the gap between offline training efficiency and online multi-turn reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent/tree/main/UI-S1.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation

This paper introduces GUI-Owl, a foundational GUI agent model that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source end-to-end models on ten GUI benchmarks across desktop and mobile environments, covering grounding, question answering, planning, decision-making, and procedural knowledge. GUI-Owl-7B achieves 66.4 on AndroidWorld and 29.4 on OSWorld. Building on this, we propose Mobile-Agent-v3, a general-purpose GUI agent framework that further improves performance to 73.3 on AndroidWorld and 37.7 on OSWorld, setting a new state-of-the-art for open-source GUI agent frameworks. GUI-Owl incorporates three key innovations: (1) Large-scale Environment Infrastructure: a cloud-based virtual environment spanning Android, Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows, enabling our Self-Evolving GUI Trajectory Production framework. This generates high-quality interaction data via automated query generation and correctness validation, leveraging GUI-Owl to refine trajectories iteratively, forming a self-improving loop. It supports diverse data pipelines and reduces manual annotation. (2) Diverse Foundational Agent Capabilities: by integrating UI grounding, planning, action semantics, and reasoning patterns, GUI-Owl supports end-to-end decision-making and can act as a modular component in multi-agent systems. (3) Scalable Environment RL: we develop a scalable reinforcement learning framework with fully asynchronous training for real-world alignment. We also introduce Trajectory-aware Relative Policy Optimization (TRPO) for online RL, achieving 34.9 on OSWorld. GUI-Owl and Mobile-Agent-v3 are open-sourced at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Language Multi-Agent Learning with Credit Re-Assignment for Interactive Environment Generalization

LLM-based agents have made significant advancements in interactive environments, such as mobile operations and web browsing, and other domains beyond computer using. Current multi-agent systems universally excel in performance, compared to single agents, but struggle with generalization across environments due to predefined roles and inadequate strategies for generalizing language agents. The challenge of achieving both strong performance and good generalization has hindered the progress of multi-agent systems for interactive environments. To address these issues, we propose CollabUIAgents, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with a novel multi-agent credit re-assignment (CR) strategy, assigning process rewards with LLMs rather than environment-specific rewards and learning with synthesized preference data, in order to foster generalizable, collaborative behaviors among the role-free agents' policies. Empirical results show that our framework improves both performance and cross-environment generalizability of multi-agent systems. Moreover, our 7B-parameter system achieves results on par with or exceed strong closed-source models, and the LLM that guides the CR. We also provide insights in using granular CR rewards effectively for environment generalization, and accommodating trained LLMs in multi-agent systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Adaptively Clustering Neighbor Elements for Image-Text Generation

We propose a novel Transformer-based image-to-text generation model termed as \textbf{ACF} that adaptively clusters vision patches into object regions and language words into phrases to implicitly learn object-phrase alignments for better visual-text coherence. To achieve this, we design a novel self-attention layer that applies self-attention over the elements in a local cluster window instead of the whole sequence. The window size is softly decided by a clustering matrix that is calculated by the current input data and thus this process is adaptive. By stacking these revised self-attention layers to construct ACF, the small clusters in the lower layers can be grouped into a bigger cluster, \eg vision/language. ACF clusters small objects/phrases into bigger ones. In this gradual clustering process, a parsing tree is generated which embeds the hierarchical knowledge of the input sequence. As a result, by using ACF to build the vision encoder and language decoder, the hierarchical object-phrase alignments are embedded and then transferred from vision to language domains in two popular image-to-text tasks: Image captioning and Visual Question Answering. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of ACF, which outperforms most SOTA captioning and VQA models and achieves comparable scores compared with some large-scale pre-trained models. Our code is available \href{https://github.com/ZihuaEvan/ACFModel/}{[here]}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Broadband coherent Raman spectroscopy based on single-pulse spectral-domain ghost imaging

Broadband coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) spectroscopy plays a vital role in chemical sensing and label-free vibrational imaging, yet conventional methods suffer from limited acquisition speeds and complex detection schemes. Here, we demonstrate high-speed broadband CARS enabled by nonlinear spectral ghost imaging combined with time-stretch dispersive Fourier-transform spectroscopy (TS-DFT). We exploit modulation instability to generate a stochastic supercontinuum as the Stokes source and a synchronized narrowband pulse as the pump. Reference Stokes spectra are captured at 60.5 MHz via TS-DFT, while anti-Stokes signals are detected using a single non-spectrally resolving photodetector. Correlating these signals enables broadband CARS spectral reconstruction across the fingerprint (600-1600 cm-1) and C-H stretching (2600-3400 cm-1) regions with 13 cm-1 resolution and microsecond-scale acquisition times. Our method enables robust signal recovery without the need for spectral resolution in the detection path, facilitating measurements in complex biological and chemical environments.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Convolution-weighting method for the physics-informed neural network: A Primal-Dual Optimization Perspective

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are extensively employed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) by ensuring that the outputs and gradients of deep learning models adhere to the governing equations. However, constrained by computational limitations, PINNs are typically optimized using a finite set of points, which poses significant challenges in guaranteeing their convergence and accuracy. In this study, we proposed a new weighting scheme that will adaptively change the weights to the loss functions from isolated points to their continuous neighborhood regions. The empirical results show that our weighting scheme can reduce the relative $L^2$ errors to a lower value.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Rapid and precise distance measurement using balanced cross-correlation of a single frequency-modulated electro-optic comb

Ultra-rapid, high-precision distance metrology is critical for both advanced scientific research and practical applications. However, current light detection and ranging technologies struggle to simultaneously achieve high measurement speed, accuracy, and a large non-ambiguity range. Here, we present a time-of-flight optical ranging technique based on a repetition-frequency-modulated femtosecond electro-optic comb and balanced nonlinear cross-correlation detection. In this approach, a target distance is determined as an integer multiple of the comb repetition period. By rapidly sweeping the comb repetition frequency, we achieve absolute distance measurements within 500 ns and real-time displacement tracking at single-pulse resolution (corresponding to a refresh rate of 172 MHz). Furthermore, our system attains an ultimate ranging precision of 5 nm (with 0.3 s integration time). Our method uniquely integrates nanometer-scale precision, megahertz-level refresh rates, and a theoretically unlimited ambiguity range within a single platform, while also supporting multi-target detection. These advances pave the way for high-speed, high-precision ranging systems in emerging applications such as structural health monitoring, industrial manufacturing, and satellite formation flying.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

L-CLIPScore: a Lightweight Embedding-based Captioning Metric for Evaluating and Training

We propose a novel embedding-based captioning metric termed as L-CLIPScore that can be used for efficiently evaluating caption quality and training captioning model. L-CLIPScore is calculated from a lightweight CLIP (L-CLIP), which is a dual-encoder architecture compressed and distilled from CLIP. To compress, we apply two powerful techniques which are weight multiplexing and matrix decomposition for reducing the parameters of encoders and word embedding matrix, respectively. To distill, we design a novel multi-modal Similarity Regulator (SR) loss to transfer more vision-language alignment knowledge. Specifically, SR loss amplifies the multi-modal embedding similarity if the given image-text pair is matched and diminishes the similarity if the pair is non-matched. By compressing and distilling by this novel SR loss, our L-CLIP achieves comparable multi-modal alignment ability to the original CLIP while it requires fewer computation resources and running time. We carry out exhaustive experiments to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of L-CLIPScore when using it as the judge to evaluate caption quality. We also discover that when using L-CLIPScore as the supervisor to train the captioning model, it should be mixed up by an n-gram-based metric and meanwhile analyze why using L-CLIPScore only will cause fail training.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agent

Transcending human cognitive limitations represents a critical frontier in LLM training. Proprietary agentic systems like DeepResearch have demonstrated superhuman capabilities on extremely complex information-seeking benchmarks such as BrowseComp, a feat previously unattainable. We posit that their success hinges on a sophisticated reasoning pattern absent in open-source models: the ability to systematically reduce extreme uncertainty when navigating vast information landscapes. Based on this insight, we introduce WebSailor, a complete post-training methodology designed to instill this crucial capability. Our approach involves generating novel, high-uncertainty tasks through structured sampling and information obfuscation, RFT cold start, and an efficient agentic RL training algorithm, Duplicating Sampling Policy Optimization (DUPO). With this integrated pipeline, WebSailor significantly outperforms all opensource agents in complex information-seeking tasks, matching proprietary agents' performance and closing the capability gap.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

A Training-free LLM-based Approach to General Chinese Character Error Correction

Chinese spelling correction (CSC) is a crucial task that aims to correct character errors in Chinese text. While conventional CSC focuses on character substitution errors caused by mistyping, two other common types of character errors, missing and redundant characters, have received less attention. These errors are often excluded from CSC datasets during the annotation process or ignored during evaluation, even when they have been annotated. This issue limits the practicality of the CSC task. To address this issue, we introduce the task of General Chinese Character Error Correction (C2EC), which focuses on all three types of character errors. We construct a high-quality C2EC benchmark by combining and manually verifying data from CCTC and Lemon datasets. We extend the training-free prompt-free CSC method to C2EC by using Levenshtein distance for handling length changes and leveraging an additional prompt-based large language model (LLM) to improve performance. Experiments show that our method enables a 14B-parameter LLM to be on par with models nearly 50 times larger on both conventional CSC and C2EC tasks, without any fine-tuning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Mutual-Taught for Co-adapting Policy and Reward Models

During the preference optimization of large language models (LLMs), distribution shifts may arise between newly generated model samples and the data used to train the reward model (RM). This shift reduces the efficacy of the RM, which in turn negatively impacts the performance of the policy model (PM). To address this challenge, we propose Mutual-Taught, a self-training method that iteratively improves both the PM and RM without requiring additional human annotation. Our approach mirrors the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. In the E-step, the PM is updated using feedback from the current RM, guiding the PM toward a better approximation of the latent optimal preference distribution. In the M-step, we update the RM by constructing training data from the outputs of the PM before and after the E-step update. This process ensures that the RM adapts to the evolving policy distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that this iterative approach leads to consistent improvements in both models. Specifically, our 8B policy model, LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct-MT, achieves a length-controlled win rate of 54.1\% on AlpacaEval-2, while our 8B reward model, FsfairX-LLaMA3-RM-MT, performs on par with GPT-4o-2024-08-06 on RewardBench.

cs.LG↗