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Qingsong Wen

Publications and source records attributed to Qingsong Wen.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

HearSay Benchmark: Do Audio LLMs Leak What They Hear?

While Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in understanding and generation, their potential privacy implications remain largely unexplored. This paper takes the first step to investigate whether ALLMs inadvertently leak user privacy solely through acoustic voiceprints and introduces $\textit{HearSay}$, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from over 22,000 real-world audio clips. To ensure data quality, the benchmark is meticulously curated through a rigorous pipeline involving automated profiling and human verification, guaranteeing that all privacy labels are grounded in factual records. Extensive experiments on $\textit{HearSay}$ yield three critical findings: $\textbf{Significant Privacy Leakage}$: ALLMs inherently extract private attributes from voiceprints, reaching 92.89% accuracy on gender and effectively profiling social attributes. $\textbf{Insufficient Safety Mechanisms}$: Alarmingly, existing safeguards are severely inadequate; most models fail to refuse privacy-intruding requests, exhibiting near-zero refusal rates for physiological traits. $\textbf{Reasoning Amplifies Risk}$: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning exacerbates privacy risks in capable models by uncovering deeper acoustic correlations. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in ALLMs, underscoring the urgent need for targeted privacy alignment. The codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/JinWang79/HearSay_Benchmark

cs.CL↗

Digital Twin AI: Opportunities and Challenges from Large Language Models to World Models

Digital twins, as precise digital representations of physical systems, have evolved from passive simulation tools into intelligent and autonomous entities through the integration of artificial intelligence technologies. This paper presents a unified four-stage framework that systematically characterizes AI integration across the digital twin lifecycle, spanning modeling, mirroring, intervention, and autonomous management. By synthesizing existing technologies and practices, we distill a unified four-stage framework that systematically characterizes how AI methodologies are embedded across the digital twin lifecycle: (1) modeling the physical twin through physics-based and physics-informed AI approaches, (2) mirroring the physical system into a digital twin with real-time synchronization, (3) intervening in the physical twin through predictive modeling, anomaly detection, and optimization strategies, and (4) achieving autonomous management through large language models, foundation models, and intelligent agents. We analyze the synergy between physics-based modeling and data-driven learning, highlighting the shift from traditional numerical solvers to physics-informed and foundation models for physical systems. Furthermore, we examine how generative AI technologies, including large language models and generative world models, transform digital twins into proactive and self-improving cognitive systems capable of reasoning, communication, and creative scenario generation. Through a cross-domain review spanning eleven application domains, including healthcare, aerospace, smart manufacturing, robotics, and smart cities, we identify common challenges related to scalability, explainability, and trustworthiness, and outline directions for responsible AI-driven digital twin systems.

cs.AI↗

Advanced Global Wildfire Activity Modeling with Hierarchical Graph ODE

Wildfires, as an integral component of the Earth system, are governed by a complex interplay of atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial processes spanning a vast range of spatiotemporal scales. Modeling their global activity on large timescales is therefore a critical yet challenging task. While deep learning has recently achieved significant breakthroughs in global weather forecasting, its potential for global wildfire behavior prediction remains underexplored. In this work, we reframe this problem and introduce the Hierarchical Graph ODE (HiGO), a novel framework designed to learn the multi-scale, continuous-time dynamics of wildfires. Specifically, we represent the Earth system as a multi-level graph hierarchy and propose an adaptive filtering message passing mechanism for both intra- and inter-level information flow, enabling more effective feature extraction and fusion. Furthermore, we incorporate GNN-parameterized Neural ODE modules at multiple levels to explicitly learn the continuous dynamics inherent to each scale. Through extensive experiments on the SeasFire Cube dataset, we demonstrate that HiGO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on long-range wildfire forecasting. Moreover, its continuous-time predictions exhibit strong observational consistency, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

cs.LG↗

A Survey on Diffusion Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data

Diffusion models have been widely used in time series and spatio-temporal data, enhancing generative, inferential, and downstream capabilities. These models are applied across diverse fields such as healthcare, recommendation, climate, energy, audio, and traffic. By separating applications for time series and spatio-temporal data, we offer a structured perspective on model category, task type, data modality, and practical application domain. This study aims to provide a solid foundation for researchers and practitioners, inspiring future innovations that tackle traditional challenges and foster novel solutions in diffusion model-based data mining tasks and applications. For more detailed information, we have open-sourced a repository at https://github.com/yyysjz1997/Awesome-TimeSeries-SpatioTemporal-Diffusion-Model.

cs.LG↗

Comba: Improving Bilinear RNNs with Closed-loop Control

Recent efficient sequence modeling methods such as Gated DeltaNet, TTT, and RWKV-7 have achieved performance improvements by supervising the recurrent memory management through Delta learning rule. Unlike previous state-space models (e.g., Mamba) and gated linear attentions (e.g., GLA), these models introduce interactions between the recurrent state and the key vector, structurally resembling bilinear systems. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of Bilinear RNNs with a comprehensive analysis on the advantages and limitations of these models. Then, based on closed-loop control theory, we propose a novel Bilinear RNN variant named Comba, which adopts a scalar-plus-low-rank state transition, with both state feedback and output feedback corrections. We also implement a hardware-efficient chunk-wise parallel kernel in Triton and train models with 340M/1.3B parameters on large-scale corpus. Comba demonstrates superior performance and computation efficiency in both language and vision modeling.

cs.LG↗

EmoRAG: Evaluating RAG Robustness to Symbolic Perturbations

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are increasingly central to robust AI, enhancing large language model (LLM) faithfulness by incorporating external knowledge. However, our study unveils a critical, overlooked vulnerability: their profound susceptibility to subtle symbolic perturbations, particularly through near-imperceptible emoticon tokens such as "(@_@)" that can catastrophically mislead retrieval, termed EmoRAG. We demonstrate that injecting a single emoticon into a query makes it nearly 100% likely to retrieve semantically unrelated texts that contain a matching emoticon. Our extensive experiment across general question-answering and code domains, using a range of state-of-the-art retrievers and generators, reveals three key findings: (I) Single-Emoticon Disaster: Minimal emoticon injections cause maximal disruptions, with a single emoticon almost 100% dominating RAG output. (II) Positional Sensitivity: Placing an emoticon at the beginning of a query can cause severe perturbation, with F1-Scores exceeding 0.92 across all datasets. (III) Parameter-Scale Vulnerability: Counterintuitively, models with larger parameters exhibit greater vulnerability to the interference. We provide an in-depth analysis to uncover the underlying mechanisms of these phenomena. Furthermore, we raise a critical concern regarding the robustness assumption of current RAG systems, envisioning a threat scenario where an adversary exploits this vulnerability to manipulate the RAG system. We evaluate standard defenses and find them insufficient against EmoRAG. To address this, we propose targeted defenses, analyzing their strengths and limitations in mitigating emoticon-based perturbations. Finally, we outline future directions for building robust RAG systems.

cs.CR↗

FEANEL: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Error Analysis in K-12 English Writing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence, offering profound opportunities for educational applications. However, their ability to provide fine-grained educational feedback for K-12 English writing remains underexplored. In this paper, we challenge the error analysis and pedagogical skills of LLMs by introducing the problem of Fine-grained Error Analysis for English Learners and present the Fine-grained Error ANalysis for English Learners (FEANEL) Benchmark. The benchmark comprises 1,000 essays written by elementary and secondary school students, and a well-developed English writing error taxonomy. Each error is annotated by language education experts and categorized by type, severity, and explanatory feedback, using a part-of-speech-based taxonomy they co-developed. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on the FEANEL Benchmark to explore their error analysis and pedagogical abilities. Experimental results reveal significant gaps in current LLMs' ability to perform fine-grained error analysis, highlighting the need for advancements in particular methods for educational applications.

cs.CL↗

Turb-L1: Achieving Long-term Turbulence Tracing By Tackling Spectral Bias

Accurately predicting the long-term evolution of turbulence is crucial for advancing scientific understanding and optimizing engineering applications. However, existing deep learning methods face significant bottlenecks in long-term autoregressive prediction, which exhibit excessive smoothing and fail to accurately track complex fluid dynamics. Our extensive experimental and spectral analysis of prevailing methods provides an interpretable explanation for this shortcoming, identifying Spectral Bias as the core obstacle. Concretely, spectral bias is the inherent tendency of models to favor low-frequency, smooth features while overlooking critical high-frequency details during training, thus reducing fidelity and causing physical distortions in long-term predictions. Building on this insight, we propose Turb-L1, an innovative turbulence prediction method, which utilizes a Hierarchical Dynamics Synthesis mechanism within a multi-grid architecture to explicitly overcome spectral bias. It accurately captures cross-scale interactions and preserves the fidelity of high-frequency dynamics, enabling reliable long-term tracking of turbulence evolution. Extensive experiments on the 2D turbulence benchmark show that Turb-L1 demonstrates excellent performance: (I) In long-term predictions, it reduces Mean Squared Error (MSE) by $80.3\%$ and increases Structural Similarity (SSIM) by over $9\times$ compared to the SOTA baseline, significantly improving prediction fidelity. (II) It effectively overcomes spectral bias, accurately reproducing the full enstrophy spectrum and maintaining physical realism in high-wavenumber regions, thus avoiding the spectral distortions or spurious energy accumulation seen in other methods.

cs.LG↗

Assemble Your Crew: Automatic Multi-agent Communication Topology Design via Autoregressive Graph Generation

Multi-agent systems (MAS) based on large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful solution for dealing with complex problems across diverse domains. The effectiveness of MAS is critically dependent on its collaboration topology, which has become a focal point for automated design research. However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on a template graph modification paradigm with a predefined set of agents and hard-coded interaction structures, significantly limiting their adaptability to task-specific requirements. To address these limitations, we reframe MAS design as a conditional autoregressive graph generation task, where both the system composition and structure are designed jointly. We propose ARG-Designer, a novel autoregressive model that operationalizes this paradigm by constructing the collaboration graph from scratch. Conditioned on a natural language task query, ARG-Designer sequentially and dynamically determines the required number of agents, selects their appropriate roles from an extensible pool, and establishes the optimal communication links between them. This generative approach creates a customized topology in a flexible and extensible manner, precisely tailored to the unique demands of different tasks. Extensive experiments across six diverse benchmarks demonstrate that ARG-Designer not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also enjoys significantly greater token efficiency and enhanced extensibility. The source code of ARG-Designer is available at https://github.com/Shiy-Li/ARG-Designer.

cs.MA↗

LLM-based Agents Suffer from Hallucinations: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, and Directions

Driven by the rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have emerged as powerful intelligent systems capable of human-like cognition, reasoning, and interaction. These agents are increasingly being deployed across diverse real-world applications, including student education, scientific research, and financial analysis. However, despite their remarkable potential, LLM-based agents remain vulnerable to hallucination issues, which can result in erroneous task execution and undermine the reliability of the overall system design. Addressing this critical challenge requires a deep understanding and a systematic consolidation of recent advances on LLM-based agents. To this end, we present the first comprehensive survey of hallucinations in LLM-based agents. By carefully analyzing the complete workflow of agents, we propose a new taxonomy that identifies different types of agent hallucinations occurring at different stages. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth examination of eighteen triggering causes underlying the emergence of agent hallucinations. Through a detailed review of a large number of existing studies, we summarize approaches for hallucination mitigation and detection, and highlight promising directions for future research. We hope this survey will inspire further efforts toward addressing hallucinations in LLM-based agents, ultimately contributing to the development of more robust and reliable agent systems.

cs.AI↗

OccamVTS: Distilling Vision Models to 1% Parameters for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is fundamental to diverse applications, with recent approaches leverage large vision models (LVMs) to capture temporal patterns through visual representations. We reveal that while vision models enhance forecasting performance, 99% of their parameters are unnecessary for time series tasks. Through cross-modal analysis, we find that time series align with low-level textural features but not high-level semantics, which can impair forecasting accuracy. We propose OccamVTS, a knowledge distillation framework that extracts only the essential 1% of predictive information from LVMs into lightweight networks. Using pre-trained LVMs as privileged teachers, OccamVTS employs pyramid-style feature alignment combined with correlation and feature distillation to transfer beneficial patterns while filtering out semantic noise. Counterintuitively, this aggressive parameter reduction improves accuracy by eliminating overfitting to irrelevant visual features while preserving essential temporal patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that OccamVTS consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 1% of the original parameters, particularly excelling in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

cs.LG↗

SVTime: Small Time Series Forecasting Models Informed by "Physics" of Large Vision Model Forecasters

Time series AI is crucial for analyzing dynamic web content, driving a surge of pre-trained large models known for their strong knowledge encoding and transfer capabilities across diverse tasks. However, given their energy-intensive training, inference, and hardware demands, using large models as a one-fits-all solution raises serious concerns about carbon footprint and sustainability. For a specific task, a compact yet specialized, high-performing model may be more practical and affordable, especially for resource-constrained users such as small businesses. This motivates the question: Can we build cost-effective lightweight models with large-model-like performance on core tasks such as forecasting? This paper addresses this question by introducing SVTime, a novel Small model inspired by large Vision model (LVM) forecasters for long-term Time series forecasting (LTSF). Recently, LVMs have been shown as powerful tools for LTSF. We identify a set of key inductive biases of LVM forecasters -- analogous to the "physics" governing their behaviors in LTSF -- and design small models that encode these biases through meticulously crafted linear layers and constraint functions. Across 21 baselines spanning lightweight, complex, and pre-trained large models on 8 benchmark datasets, SVTime outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) lightweight models and rivals large models with 10^3 fewer parameters than LVMs, while enabling efficient training and inference in low-resource settings.

cs.LG↗

Unlocking Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Dynamics through Physics-Guided Augmentation

In dynamical system modeling, traditional numerical methods are limited by high computational costs, while modern data-driven approaches struggle with data scarcity and distribution shifts. To address these fundamental limitations, we first propose SPARK, a physics-guided quantitative augmentation plugin. Specifically, SPARK utilizes a reconstruction autoencoder to integrate physical parameters into a physics-rich discrete state dictionary. This state dictionary then acts as a structured dictionary of physical states, enabling the creation of new, physically-plausible training samples via principled interpolation in the latent space. Further, for downstream prediction, these augmented representations are seamlessly integrated with a Fourier-enhanced Graph ODE, a combination designed to robustly model the enriched data distribution while capturing long-term temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that SPARK significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in challenging out-of-distribution scenarios and data-scarce regimes, proving the efficacy of our physics-guided augmentation paradigm.

cs.LG↗

ShapeX: Shapelet-Driven Post Hoc Explanations for Time Series Classification Models

Explaining time series classification models is crucial, particularly in high-stakes applications such as healthcare and finance, where transparency and trust play a critical role. Although numerous time series classification methods have identified key subsequences, known as shapelets, as core features for achieving state-of-the-art performance and validating their pivotal role in classification outcomes, existing post-hoc time series explanation (PHTSE) methods primarily focus on timestep-level feature attribution. These explanation methods overlook the fundamental prior that classification outcomes are predominantly driven by key shapelets. To bridge this gap, we present ShapeX, an innovative framework that segments time series into meaningful shapelet-driven segments and employs Shapley values to assess their saliency. At the core of ShapeX lies the Shapelet Describe-and-Detect (SDD) framework, which effectively learns a diverse set of shapelets essential for classification. We further demonstrate that ShapeX produces explanations which reveal causal relationships instead of just correlations, owing to the atomicity properties of shapelets. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ShapeX outperforms existing methods in identifying the most relevant subsequences, enhancing both the precision and causal fidelity of time series explanations.

cs.LG↗

Can LLMs Correct Themselves? A Benchmark of Self-Correction in LLMs

Self-correction of large language models (LLMs) emerges as a critical component for enhancing their reasoning performance. Although various self-correction methods have been proposed, a comprehensive evaluation of these methods remains largely unexplored, and the question of whether LLMs can truly correct themselves is a matter of significant interest and concern. In this study, we introduce CorrectBench, a benchmark developed to evaluate the effectiveness of self-correction strategies, including intrinsic, external, and fine-tuned approaches, across three tasks: commonsense reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Our findings reveal that: 1) Self-correction methods can improve accuracy, especially for complex reasoning tasks; 2) Mixing different self-correction strategies yields further improvements, though it reduces efficiency; 3) Reasoning LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) have limited optimization under additional self-correction methods and have high time costs. Interestingly, a comparatively simple chain-of-thought (CoT) baseline demonstrates competitive accuracy and efficiency. These results underscore the potential of self-correction to enhance LLM's reasoning performance while highlighting the ongoing challenge of improving their efficiency. Consequently, we advocate for further research focused on optimizing the balance between reasoning capabilities and operational efficiency. Project Page: https://correctbench.github.io/

cs.CL↗

Urban-R1: Reinforced MLLMs Mitigate Geospatial Biases for Urban General Intelligence

Rapid urbanization intensifies the demand for Urban General Intelligence (UGI), referring to AI systems that can understand and reason about complex urban environments. Recent studies have built urban foundation models using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs and MLLMs, yet these models exhibit persistent geospatial bias, producing regionally skewed predictions and limited generalization. To this end, we propose Urban-R1, a reinforcement learning-based post-training framework that aligns MLLMs with the objectives of UGI. Urban-R1 adopts Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize reasoning across geographic groups and employs urban region profiling as a proxy task to provide measurable rewards from multimodal urban data. Extensive experiments across diverse regions and tasks show that Urban-R1 effectively mitigates geo-bias and improves cross-region generalization, outperforming both SFT-trained and closed-source models. Our results highlight reinforcement learning alignment as a promising pathway toward equitable and trustworthy urban intelligence.

cs.AI↗

Topological Structure Learning Should Be A Research Priority for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling complex tasks through collaborative intelligence. However, the topology of these systems--how agents in MASs should be configured, connected, and coordinated--remains largely unexplored. In this position paper, we call for a paradigm shift toward \emph{topology-aware MASs} that explicitly model and dynamically optimize the structure of inter-agent interactions. We identify three fundamental components--agents, communication links, and overall topology--that collectively determine the system's adaptability, efficiency, robustness, and fairness. To operationalize this vision, we introduce a systematic three-stage framework: 1) agent selection, 2) structure profiling, and 3) topology synthesis. This framework not only provides a principled foundation for designing MASs but also opens new research frontiers across language modeling, reinforcement learning, graph learning, and generative modeling to ultimately unleash their full potential in complex real-world applications. We conclude by outlining key challenges and opportunities in MASs evaluation. We hope our framework and perspectives offer critical new insights in the era of agentic AI.

cs.MA↗

ARM2: Adaptive Reasoning Model with Vision Understanding and Executable Code

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from the ``over-thinking'' problem, generating unnecessarily long reasoning on simple tasks. Some strategies have been proposed to mitigate this issue, such as length penalties or routing mechanisms, but they are typically heuristic and task-specific, lacking a general framework for adaptive reasoning. In this paper, we present ARM2, a unified model that adaptively balances reasoning performance and efficiency across multiple formats through a reinforcement learning framework augmented with length-aware optimization. Beyond conventional natural language inference, ARM2 integrates vision understanding, extending its applicability to multimodal. Moreover, ARM2 integrates executable code into reasoning, enabling substantial reductions in token cost while preserving task performance compared to long CoT. Experiments demonstrate that ARM2 achieves performance on par with traditional reasoning models trained with GRPO, while reducing token usage by over 70% on average. We further conduct extensive analyses to validate the effectiveness of ARM2 and the soundness of its design.

cs.CL↗