arXiv subjects

Qiang Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Qiang Yang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Intent to Evidence: A Categorical Approach for Structural Evaluation of Deep Research Agents

Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to answer complex questions by searching the web, checking evidence, and synthesizing conclusions across heterogeneous sources. We introduce a category-theoretic framework for evaluating and improving such agents. The framework treats deep research as a structured mapping from user intent to evidence-grounded conclusions, making retrieval traces, cross-source alignment, and final synthesis explicit. Guided by this view, we derive a mechanism-aware benchmark of 296 bilingual questions. The benchmark targets four structural skills central to real research: following multi-hop evidence chains, verifying claims across sources, re-ordering fragmented information, and rejecting unsupported assumptions. We evaluate 16 frontier systems with human verification and find that these structural tasks remain highly challenging: the best system reaches only 19.9% average accuracy. The results show that strong agents can sometimes reorganize evidence and detect false premises, but still struggle with long-horizon synthesis and intersection-heavy verification. Beyond evaluation, the same theory also leads to practical system improvements. We instantiate theory-guided interventions such as tracked search, which preserves retrieval traces, and category tools, which add explicit verification and synthesis steps. These interventions yield measurable gains in API-based deep research systems. Our work therefore provides both a challenging benchmark and concrete design guidance for building more reliable research agents.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Federated Co-tuning Framework for Large and Small Language Models

By adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to domain-specific tasks or enriching them with domain-specific knowledge, we can fully harness the capabilities of LLMs. Nonetheless, a gap persists in achieving simultaneous mutual enhancement between the server's LLM and the downstream clients' Small Language Models (SLMs). To address this, we propose FedCoLLM, a novel and parameter-efficient federated framework designed for co-tuning LLMs and SLMs. This approach is aimed at adaptively transferring server-side LLMs knowledge to clients' SLMs while simultaneously enriching the LLMs with domain insights from the clients. To accomplish this, FedCoLLM utilizes lightweight adapters in conjunction with SLMs, facilitating knowledge exchange between server and clients in a manner that respects data privacy while also minimizing computational and communication overhead. Our evaluation of FedCoLLM, utilizing various public LLMs and SLMs across a range of NLP text generation tasks, reveals that the performance of clients' SLMs experiences notable improvements with the assistance of the LLMs. Simultaneously, the LLMs enhanced via FedCoLLM achieves comparable performance to that obtained through direct fine-tuning on clients' data. Our code has been contributed to the FATE open-source project and is now publicly accessible at https://github.com/FederatedAI/FATE-LLM/tree/main/python/fate_llm/algo/fedcollm.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

FedProxy: Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Proxy SLMs and Heterogeneity-Aware Fusion

Federated fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is obstructed by a trilemma of challenges: protecting LLMs intellectual property (IP), ensuring client privacy, and mitigating performance loss on heterogeneous data. Existing methods like Offsite-Tuning (OT) secure the LLMs IP by having clients train only lightweight adapters, yet our analysis reveals they suffer from a fundamental performance bottleneck, leaving a significant gap compared to centralized training. To bridge this gap, we introduce FedProxy, a new federated adaptation framework. FedProxy replaces weak adapters with a unified, powerful Proxy Small Language Model (SLM), compressed from the proprietary LLM, to serve as a high-fidelity surrogate for collaborative fine-tuning. Our framework systematically resolves the trilemma through a three-stage architecture: (i) Efficient Representation via server-guided compression to create a resource-friendly proxy; (ii) Robust Optimization through an interference-mitigating aggregation strategy to handle data heterogeneity; and (iii) Effortless Fusion via a training-free "plug-in" mechanism to integrate learned knowledge back into the LLM. Experiments show FedProxy significantly outperforms OT methods and approaches centralized performance, establishing a new benchmark for secure and high-performance federated LLM adaptation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

MFC-RFNet: A Multi-scale Guided Rectified Flow Network for Radar Sequence Prediction

Accurate and high-resolution precipitation nowcasting from radar echo sequences is crucial for disaster mitigation and economic planning, yet it remains a significant challenge. Key difficulties include modeling complex multi-scale evolution, correcting inter-frame feature misalignment caused by displacement, and efficiently capturing long-range spatiotemporal context without sacrificing spatial fidelity. To address these issues, we present the Multi-scale Feature Communication Rectified Flow (RF) Network (MFC-RFNet), a generative framework that integrates multi-scale communication with guided feature fusion. To enhance multi-scale fusion while retaining fine detail, a Wavelet-Guided Skip Connection (WGSC) preserves high-frequency components, and a Feature Communication Module (FCM) promotes bidirectional cross-scale interaction. To correct inter-frame displacement, a Condition-Guided Spatial Transform Fusion (CGSTF) learns spatial transforms from conditioning echoes to align shallow features. The backbone adopts rectified flow training to learn near-linear probability-flow trajectories, enabling few-step sampling with stable fidelity. Additionally, lightweight Vision-RWKV (RWKV) blocks are placed at the encoder tail, the bottleneck, and the first decoder layer to capture long-range spatiotemporal dependencies at low spatial resolutions with moderate compute. Evaluations on four public datasets (SEVIR, MeteoNet, Shanghai, and CIKM) demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, yielding clearer echo morphology at higher rain-rate thresholds and sustained skill at longer lead times. These results suggest that the proposed synergy of RF training with scale-aware communication, spatial alignment, and frequency-aware fusion presents an effective and robust approach for radar-based nowcasting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Systematic Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning for Molecular Property Prediction in the Foundation Model Era

Molecular property prediction integrates quantum chemistry, cheminformatics, and deep learning to connect molecular structure with physicochemical and biological behavior. This survey traces four complementary paradigms, including Quantum, Descriptor Machine Learning, Geometric Deep Learning, and Foundation Models, and outlines a unified taxonomy linking molecular representations, model architectures, and interdisciplinary applications. Benchmark analyses integrate evidence from both widely used datasets and datasets reflecting industry perspectives, encompassing quantum, physicochemical, physiological, and biophysical domains. The survey examines current standards in data curation, splitting strategies, and evaluation protocols, highlighting challenges including inconsistent stereochemistry, heterogeneous assay sources, and reproducibility limitations under random or poorly defined splits. These observations motivate the modernization of benchmark design toward more transparent, time- and scaffold-aware methodologies. We further propose three forward-looking directions: (i) physics-aware learning embedding quantum consistency, (ii) uncertainty-calibrated foundation models for trustworthy inference, and (iii) realistic multimodal benchmark ecosystems integrating computational and experimental data. Repository: https://github.com/Zongru-Li/Survey-and-Benchmarks-of-DL-for-Molecular-Property-Prediction-in-the-Foundation-Model-Era.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Wearable Foundation Models Should Go Beyond Static Encoders

Wearable foundation models (WFMs), trained on large volumes of data collected by affordable, always-on devices, have demonstrated strong performance on short-term, well-defined health monitoring tasks, including activity recognition, fitness tracking, and cardiovascular signal assessment. However, most existing WFMs primarily map short temporal windows to predefined labels via static encoders, emphasizing retrospective prediction rather than reasoning over evolving personal history, context, and future risk trajectories. As a result, they are poorly suited for modeling chronic, progressive, or episodic health conditions that unfold over weeks, months or years. Hence, we argue that WFMs must move beyond static encoders and be explicitly designed for longitudinal, anticipatory health reasoning. We identify three foundational shifts required to enable this transition: (1) Structurally rich data, which goes beyond isolated datasets or outcome-conditioned collection to integrated multimodal, long-term personal trajectories, and contextual metadata, ideally supported by open and interoperable data ecosystems; (2) Longitudinal-aware multimodal modeling, which prioritizes long-context inference, temporal abstraction, and personalization over cross-sectional or population-level prediction; and (3) Agentic inference systems, which move beyond static prediction to support planning, decision-making, and clinically grounded intervention under uncertainty. Together, these shifts reframe wearable health monitoring from retrospective signal interpretation toward continuous, anticipatory, and human-aligned health support.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

CN-Buzz2Portfolio: A Chinese-Market Dataset and Benchmark for LLM-Based Macro and Sector Asset Allocation from Daily Trending Financial News

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning from static Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including sentiment analysis and event extraction to acting as dynamic decision-making agents in complex financial environments. However, the evolution of LLMs into autonomous financial agents faces a significant dilemma in evaluation paradigms. Direct live trading is irreproducible and prone to outcome bias by confounding luck with skill, whereas existing static benchmarks are often confined to entity-level stock picking and ignore broader market attention. To facilitate the rigorous analysis of these challenges, we introduce CN-Buzz2Portfolio, a reproducible benchmark grounded in the Chinese market that maps daily trending news to macro and sector asset allocation. Spanning a rolling horizon from 2024 to mid-2025, our dataset simulates a realistic public attention stream, requiring agents to distill investment logic from high-exposure narratives instead of pre-filtered entity news. We propose a Tri-Stage CPA Agent Workflow involving Compression, Perception, and Allocation to evaluate LLMs on broad asset classes such as Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) rather than individual stocks, thereby reducing idiosyncratic volatility. Extensive experiments on nine LLMs reveal significant disparities in how models translate macro-level narratives into portfolio weights. This work provides new insights into the alignment between general reasoning and financial decision-making, and all data, codes, and experiments are released to promote sustainable financial agent research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Jailbreaking Embodied LLMs via Action-level Manipulation

Embodied Large Language Models (LLMs) enable AI agents to interact with the physical world through natural language instructions and actions. However, beyond the language-level risks inherent to LLMs themselves, embodied LLMs with real-world actuation introduce a new vulnerability: instructions that appear semantically benign may still lead to dangerous real-world consequences, revealing a fundamental misalignment between linguistic security and physical outcomes. In this paper, we introduce Blindfold, an automated attack framework that leverages the limited causal reasoning capabilities of embodied LLMs in real-world action contexts. Rather than iterative trial-and-error jailbreaking of black-box embodied LLMs, Blindfold adopts an Adversarial Proxy Planning strategy: it compromises a local surrogate LLM to perform action-level manipulations that appear semantically safe but could result in harmful physical effects when executed. Blindfold further conceals key malicious actions by injecting carefully crafted noise to evade detection by defense mechanisms, and it incorporates a rule-based verifier to improve the attack executability. Evaluations on both embodied AI simulators and a real-world 6DoF robotic arm show that Blindfold achieves up to 53% higher attack success rates than SOTA baselines, highlighting the urgent need to move beyond surface-level language censorship and toward consequence-aware defense mechanisms to secure embodied LLMs.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Model-based Large Language Model Customization as Service

Prominent Large Language Model (LLM) services from providers like OpenAI and Google excel at general tasks but often underperform on domain-specific applications. Current customization services for these LLMs typically require users to upload data for fine-tuning, posing significant privacy risks. While differentially private (DP) data synthesis presents a potential alternative, its application commonly results in low effectiveness due to the introduction of excessive noise on data for DP. To overcome this, we introduce Llamdex, a novel framework that facilitates LLM customization as a service, where the client uploads pre-trained domain-specific models rather than data. This client-uploaded model, optionally protected by DP with much lower noise, is inserted into the base LLM via connection modules. Significantly, these connecting modules are trained without requiring sensitive domain data, enabling clients to customize LLM services while preserving data privacy. Experiments demonstrate that Llamdex improves domain-specific accuracy by up to 26% over state-of-the-art private data synthesis methods under identical privacy constraints and, by obviating the need for users to provide domain context within queries, maintains inference efficiency comparable to the original LLM service.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

FedGRPO: Privately Optimizing Foundation Models with Group-Relative Rewards from Domain Client

One important direction of Federated Foundation Models (FedFMs) is leveraging data from small client models to enhance the performance of a large server-side foundation model. Existing methods based on model level or representation level knowledge transfer either require expensive local training or incur high communication costs and introduce unavoidable privacy risks. We reformulate this problem as a reinforcement learning style evaluation process and propose FedGRPO, a privacy preserving framework comprising two modules. The first module performs competence-based expert selection by building a lightweight confidence graph from auxiliary data to identify the most suitable clients for each question. The second module leverages the "Group Relative" concept from the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) framework by packaging each question together with its solution rationale into candidate policies, dispatching these policies to a selected subset of expert clients, and aggregating solely the resulting scalar reward signals via a federated group-relative loss function. By exchanging reward values instead of data or model updates, FedGRPO reduces privacy risk and communication overhead while enabling parallel evaluation across heterogeneous devices. Empirical results on diverse domain tasks demonstrate that FedGRPO achieves superior downstream accuracy and communication efficiency compared to conventional FedFMs baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking LoRA for Data Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Subspace and State Alignment

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used for federated fine-tuning. Yet under non-IID settings, it can substantially underperform full-parameter fine-tuning. Through with-high-probability robustness analysis, we uncover that this gap can be attributed to two coupled mismatches: (i) update-space mismatch, where clients optimize in a low-rank subspace but aggregation occurs in the full space; and (ii) optimizer-state mismatch, where unsynchronized adaptive states amplify drift across rounds. We propose FedGaLore, which combines client-side GaLore-style gradient-subspace optimization with server-side drift-robust synchronization of projected second-moment states via spectral shared-signal extraction, to address this challenge. Across NLU, vision, and NLG benchmarks, FedGaLore improves robustness and accuracy over state-of-the-art federated LoRA baselines in non-IID settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Financial Engineering with Foundation Models: Progress, Applications, and Challenges

The advent of foundation models (FMs), large-scale pre-trained models with strong generalization capabilities, has opened new frontiers for financial engineering. While general-purpose FMs such as GPT-4 and Gemini have demonstrated promising performance in tasks ranging from financial report summarization to sentiment-aware forecasting, many financial applications remain constrained by unique domain requirements such as multimodal reasoning, regulatory compliance, and data privacy. These challenges have spurred the emergence of financial foundation models (FFMs): a new class of models explicitly designed for finance. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of FFMs, with a taxonomy spanning three key modalities: financial language foundation models (FinLFMs), financial time-series foundation models (FinTSFMs), and financial visual-language foundation models (FinVLFMs). We review their architectures, training methodologies, datasets, and real-world applications. Furthermore, we identify critical challenges in data availability, algorithmic scalability, and infrastructure constraints and offer insights into future research opportunities. We hope this survey can serve as both a comprehensive reference for understanding FFMs and a practical roadmap for future innovation.

q-fin.CP↗

arXiv2025

A Survey on Recommendation Unlearning: Fundamentals, Taxonomy, Evaluation, and Open Questions

Recommender systems have become increasingly influential in shaping user behavior and decision-making, highlighting their growing impact in various domains. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of machine learning models in recommender systems has raised significant concerns regarding user privacy and security. As compliance with privacy regulations becomes more critical, there is a pressing need to address the issue of recommendation unlearning, i.e., eliminating the memory of specific training data from the learned recommendation models. Despite its importance, traditional machine unlearning methods are ill-suited for recommendation unlearning due to the unique challenges posed by collaborative interactions and model parameters. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in recommendation unlearning, exploring the design principles, challenges, and methodologies associated with this emerging field. We provide a unified taxonomy that categorizes different recommendation unlearning approaches, followed by a summary of widely used benchmarks and metrics for evaluation. By reviewing the current state of research, this survey aims to guide the development of more efficient, scalable, and robust recommendation unlearning techniques. Furthermore, we identify open research questions in this field, which could pave the way for future innovations not only in recommendation unlearning but also in a broader range of unlearning tasks across different machine learning applications.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

FedCoT: Federated Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative force in artificial intelligence, demonstrating exceptional proficiency across various tasks. However, their deployment in resource-constrained environments and concerns over user data privacy pose significant challenges. In contrast, Small Language Models (SLMs) offer computational efficiency but often lag in performance. To address these issues, we propose FedCoT, a federated framework designed for the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation of knowledge from LLMs to SLMs, while ensuring the preservation of clients' data privacy. FedCoT ensures secure and efficient knowledge transfer from an LLM on a high-powered server to an SLM on a resource-constrained client, while adhering to privacy requirements. Leveraging perturbed prompts and rationales generated through the CoT approach, the framework enhances the performance of the client's SLM without compromising user data privacy within a multi-task learning framework. We propose two privacy protection strategies: the Exponential Mechanism Strategy and the Adaptive Exponential Mechanism Strategy, which balance user prompt privacy and the usability of rationales. Empirical evaluation on various text generation tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of FedCoT in training task-specific SLMs with enhanced performance while prioritizing data privacy protection. Our code has been contributed to the FATE open-source project and is now publicly accessible at \textit{https://github.com/FederatedAI/FATE-LLM/tree/main/python/fate_llm/algo/fedcot}

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

PPC-GPT: Federated Task-Specific Compression of Large Language Models via Pruning and Chain-of-Thought Distillation

Compressing Large Language Models (LLMs) into task-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) encounters two significant challenges: safeguarding domain-specific knowledge privacy and managing limited resources. To tackle these challenges, we propose PPC-GPT, a novel unified framework that systematically addresses both privacy preservation and model compression in federated settings. PPC-GPT works on a server-client federated architecture, where the client sends differentially private (DP) perturbed task-specific data to the server's LLM. The LLM then generates synthetic data along with their corresponding rationales. This synthetic data is subsequently used for both LLM pruning and retraining processes. Our framework's key innovation lies in its holistic integration of privacy-preserving mechanisms, synthetic data generation, and task-specific compression techniques, creating unique benefits through component interaction. Our experiments across diverse text generation tasks demonstrate that PPC-GPT successfully achieves dual objectives: maintaining competitive performance comparable to full-sized LLMs while ensuring robust privacy protection through its federated architecture. Our code has been contributed to the FATE open-source project and is now publicly accessible at \textit{https://github.com/FederatedAI/FATE-LLM/tree/main/python/fate_llm/algo/ppc-gpt}

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Oblivionis: A Lightweight Learning and Unlearning Framework for Federated Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly leverage Federated Learning (FL) to utilize private, task-specific datasets for fine-tuning while preserving data privacy. However, while federated LLM frameworks effectively enable collaborative training without raw data sharing, they critically lack built-in mechanisms for regulatory compliance like GDPR's right to be forgotten. Integrating private data heightens concerns over data quality and long-term governance, yet existing distributed training frameworks offer no principled way to selectively remove specific client contributions post-training. Due to distributed data silos, stringent privacy constraints, and the intricacies of interdependent model aggregation, federated LLM unlearning is significantly more complex than centralized LLM unlearning. To address this gap, we introduce Oblivionis, a lightweight learning and unlearning framework that enables clients to selectively remove specific private data during federated LLM training, enhancing trustworthiness and regulatory compliance. By unifying FL and unlearning as a dual optimization objective, we incorporate 6 FL and 5 unlearning algorithms for comprehensive evaluation and comparative analysis, establishing a robust pipeline for federated LLM unlearning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Oblivionis outperforms local training, achieving a robust balance between forgetting efficacy and model utility, with cross-algorithm comparisons providing clear directions for future LLM development.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Federated Vision-Language-Recommendation with Personalized Fusion

Applying large pre-trained Vision-Language Models to recommendation is a burgeoning field, a direction we term Vision-Language-Recommendation (VLR). Bringing VLR to user-oriented on-device intelligence within a federated learning framework is a crucial step for enhancing user privacy and delivering personalized experiences. This paper introduces FedVLR, a federated VLR framework specially designed for user-specific personalized fusion of vision-language representations. At its core is a novel bi-level fusion mechanism: The server-side multi-view fusion module first generates a diverse set of pre-fused multimodal views. Subsequently, each client employs a user-specific mixture-of-expert mechanism to adaptively integrate these views based on individual user interaction history. This designed lightweight personalized fusion module provides an efficient solution to implement a federated VLR system. The effectiveness of our proposed FedVLR has been validated on seven benchmark datasets.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

SenWave: A Fine-Grained Multi-Language Sentiment Analysis Dataset Sourced from COVID-19 Tweets

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for a comprehensive understanding of public sentiment and reactions. Despite the availability of numerous public datasets on COVID-19, some reaching volumes of up to 100 billion data points, challenges persist regarding the availability of labeled data and the presence of coarse-grained or inappropriate sentiment labels. In this paper, we introduce SenWave, a novel fine-grained multi-language sentiment analysis dataset specifically designed for analyzing COVID-19 tweets, featuring ten sentiment categories across five languages. The dataset comprises 10,000 annotated tweets each in English and Arabic, along with 30,000 translated tweets in Spanish, French, and Italian, derived from English tweets. Additionally, it includes over 105 million unlabeled tweets collected during various COVID-19 waves. To enable accurate fine-grained sentiment classification, we fine-tuned pre-trained transformer-based language models using the labeled tweets. Our study provides an in-depth analysis of the evolving emotional landscape across languages, countries, and topics, revealing significant insights over time. Furthermore, we assess the compatibility of our dataset with ChatGPT, demonstrating its robustness and versatility in various applications. Our dataset and accompanying code are publicly accessible on the repository\footnote{https://github.com/gitdevqiang/SenWave}. We anticipate that this work will foster further exploration into fine-grained sentiment analysis for complex events within the NLP community, promoting more nuanced understanding and research innovations.

cs.CL↗