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Rui Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Rui Zhao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Data-Efficient Language Modeling: From Frontier Advancement to Principle-Guided Model Improvement

Learning from limited text requires models to use context, generalize to new inputs, and retain useful capabilities. Qiushi Engine conducted a long-horizon, end-to-end autonomous research program on BabyLM 2026 Strict-Small, within 10 million corpus words and 100 million cumulative word presentations. Three stages connected frontier advancement, principle discovery, and principle-guided model improvement. Stage I combined compact restatements, budget reinvestment, and residual incremental learning to build a frontier model. Stage II found that exact repetition and aligned restatement produce different patterns of context use, depending on target relations and prediction windows. In controlled tasks, recovering familiar performance did not ensure that unseen inputs could still use learned computations. These findings support a testable data-efficient learning principle: organize experience around the contextual dependencies needed for prediction; separately design visible information, supervision, and preservation; test learning, generalization, and retention. Stage III retained source text, masked more local clues, supervised selected targets, and preserved predictions on ordinarily masked inputs. Two continuation seeds from the same parent outperformed ordinary continuation on the complete nine-metric aggregate. Overall rose from 42.02 to 42.25 across two generations; the second achieved the highest Overall in the public Strict-Small snapshot of 8 September 2026. Further studies addressed compression, relational anchors, shared representations, and measurement. Models are available on Hugging Face; code and research records accompany the GitHub repository. Together, these stages illustrate Research RSI: recursive self-improvement of the research process. Scientific understanding and method innovations change subsequent questions and designs; new experiments test and refine them.

cs.CL

VI-Bench: Benchmarking Prompt Inversion from AIGC Videos

Recent advances in video generation have made prompt-based control increasingly central to AIGC video generation. Prompts specify what a video should depict and how it should be represented, controlling factors such as visual style or camera behavior. Understanding this recoverability is important both for creative reuse and editing, and for assessing prompt leakage risks. However, existing video understanding benchmarks do not measure this capability: a caption may describe what is visible, but a replayable prompt must recover the generation-relevant controls needed to reproduce the video. To address this gap, we introduce VI-Bench, a benchmark built from 16.1 million real-user prompts and 900 human-verified AIGC videos. VI-Bench spans three progressively harder settings, namely single-shot semantic grounding, control over style and camera behavior, and multi-shot compositional inversion, and evaluates five generation-critical dimensions: subject, action, scene, style, and camera. We evaluate 18 representative VLMs, including 2 proprietary and 16 open-source models on VI-Bench, using an Inversion Score that measures prompt-level alignment with the original prompt and video-level fidelity of the regenerated video. The results reveal substantial limitations: even the strongest model achieves only 0.632 on Inversion Score, performance degrades sharply as samples require richer control and multi-shot reasoning, and models often produce plausible prompts whose regenerated videos deviate from the reference. These findings show that video prompt inversion is a distinct and under-evaluated capability requiring models to transform visual understanding into replay-stable generative control.

cs.CV

Qiushi Engine on AstaBench E2E-Bench-Hard

This report analyzes Qiushi Engine v0.8 across all 40 test tasks in AstaBench E2E-Bench-Hard, a benchmark that requires autonomous agents to carry a research question through experimental design, code implementation, actual execution, result analysis, and report delivery. Qiushi Engine is model-configurable; this evaluation selected DeepSeek deepseek-v4pro-preview as the model backend. The official AstaBench leaderboard records a score of 0.816 and an average benchmark cost of USD 15.209 per task, while the full-precision local recomputation is $81.59 \pm 1.87$. Four tasks satisfied every rubric item, yielding a full-task completion rate of 4/40 = 10% -- 7 percentage points above, and about 3.3 times, the approximately 3% best rate reported for AstaBench's official agents. Across 507 required rubric items, 416 were satisfied (82.1%). Official scoring archives and 40 Meta-Trace records show sustained production and verification of reports, code, and experimental artifacts; the principal gaps lie in repeated runs, external dependencies, specified metrics, and ablation studies. The report explains the benchmark, system workflow, aggregate results, representative cases, and limits of interpretation.

cs.AI

Just Noticeable Difference Modeling for Token Compression in Vision-Language-Action Models

Token compression has become a key technique for reducing the inference cost of large foundation models, with approaches such as token pruning and KV-cache reuse widely adopted in vision-language models and recently explored for embodied agents. In embodied agents, tokens not only support perception and semantic understanding but also directly affect latency-sensitive closed-loop robot action prediction. Existing schemes typically guide compression using redundancy or importance cues, such as visual similarity, attention scores, and saliency. However, these cues only indirectly measure the key factor for safe compression: how much a token can change before causing an unacceptable deviation in downstream actions. This receiver-dependent tolerance is closely related to the principle of just noticeable difference (JND). Classical JND characterizes signal tolerance in the human visual system, while machine-oriented JND extends this concept to downstream machine responses. Building on this progression, we introduce Action-JND, which extends JND modeling to embodied perception by defining noticeability through the language-conditioned action response of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy in closed-loop control. A token change is considered admissible only when the induced action deviation remains within a tolerated margin. To realize this concept, we develop a lightweight token-wise JND estimator in deep visual-feature space to predict the maximum tolerable perturbation while preserving policy responses. The resulting action-tolerance score serves as a plug-and-play criterion for VLA compression paradigms, including stale-KV reuse and token pruning, prioritizing action-tolerant tokens for compression. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark with OpenVLA and OpenVLA-OFT demonstrate that Action-JND consistently improves compression reliability, especially under aggressive compression ratios.

cs.CV

EATR-Stereo: Embodiment-Aware Token Routing of Paired Stereo Evidence for Humanoid Vision-Language-Action Control

Long-horizon humanoid vision--language--action (VLA) control with head-mounted stereo cameras requires visual interfaces that can exploit complementary views while maintaining compatibility with pretrained representations. Existing interfaces often discard complementary stereo evidence or fuse additional observations without preserving the native primary-view pathway and adapting auxiliary information to robot embodiment. We present EATR-Stereo, an embodiment-aware token-routing framework that retains primary-view tokens and constructs primary-aligned Cross-View Auxiliary Tokens (CVATs) by querying the synchronized auxiliary-view token sequence. A body-segmented proprioceptive encoder further conditions token-wise auxiliary usage on robot configuration history, enabling selective incorporation of stereo evidence during action generation. The routed auxiliary stream augments the language and primary-visual context of a pretrained VLA while keeping its vision--language model frozen. On a 33-DoF physical humanoid with a 37-D proprioceptive state, we evaluate nine configurations in over-100-s search--approach--grasp--place--return tasks. EATR-Stereo achieves 60.0% full-task success, 100.0% grasp success, and 80.0% stage success. Under severe asymmetric occlusion, it improves recovery to 80% compared with 30% for CVAT alone. Ablation studies further show the importance of preserving primary tokens and combining cross-view auxiliary features with structured proprioceptive routing. These results demonstrate that selectively routed paired stereo evidence improves spatial grounding for reliable long-horizon humanoid VLA control.

cs.RO

Causality Sum Rules in Conventional Scattering Matrices

Scattering matrices are the standard experimental and computational description of photonic and electromagnetic devices. Passivity is explicit in the conventional incoming-outgoing matrix, whereas causality sum rules are usually formulated only after transforming the response into auxiliary variables. Here we show that these rules can be written directly in the conventional scattering matrix by removing the time advance introduced by the reference domain. Using the earliest-arrival delay of each channel, we define a domain-delayed matrix that preserves real-frequency passivity while restoring the causal time origin. Under explicit analyticity, transparency, and regularity assumptions, this matrix becomes a Schur function, enabling a Cayley-Herglotz construction. The resulting projected and determinant bounds constrain coherent channel superpositions and aggregate multichannel loss. The framework recovers Rozanov's absorber limit and spherical-multipole sum rules, while extending causality bounds to measurable quantities including insertion loss, suppressed singular-value channels, and conditional lossless delay-bandwidth trade-offs. Our work directly connects fundamental causality theory with experimentally accessible scattering data. The initial theoretical route is autonomously explored by Qiushi Engine, an AI research system for open-ended scientific discovery, and subsequently verified, refined, and developed by the authors, demonstrating a hybrid AI-human discovery workflow.

physics.optics

PHASE-Tree: Modeling Character-State Evolution in Long-Horizon Role-Playing Dialogue

Long-horizon role-playing demands that characters remain recognizable as they evolve with the narrative. Yet existing work falls short on two fronts: representations are typically static profiles that cannot be updated locally without destabilizing unchanged traits, and benchmarks mainly test persona preservation and memory recall rather than whether a model speaks from a character's currently evolved state. We address both. PHASE-Tree is a multi-timescale character-state tree with an immutable identity root and mutable persona, session, and moment layers, making each mutable field an addressable target for localized within- and cross-episode updates. It conditions generation through explicit textual provision or implicit parametric adaptation. To measure evolved-state generation, we introduce LongEvoRoleBench, which pairs four long-dialogue corpora for cross-episode evolution with four short-dialogue corpora as within-scene state-tracking checks, under a unified next-utterance protocol. On the long-dialogue core, textual PHASE-Tree ranks first in 11 of 12 dataset-metric cells against internal variants and all 12 cells against external textual baselines, improving character-level, semantic, and embedding scores by 19.7%, 12.4%, and 15.1% respectively. In a blinded 200-response study, human ratings correlate with the GPT-4.1 judge (Pearson r= 0.65); on descriptive n= 10 PT and NR prompt subsets, the Overall difference is +0.20. The long-dialogue Sem advantage persists across LLM judges and generation backbones.

cs.CL

Current Injection Spiking Neural Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) integrates the complementary information of two modalities into a single image with richer scene content. While existing methods are largely built on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which densely compute over all activations, spiking neural networks (SNNs) communicate through sparse binary spikes and compute only where and when a spike occurs, offering a route to more energy-efficient fusion. However, directly applying SNNs to IVIF creates a fundamental tension: cross-modal fusion relies on fine-grained responses from both modalities, whereas binary spikes can discard complementary cues that remain below the firing threshold. The membrane potential retains these subthreshold responses before firing, letting both modalities jointly shape the output when integrated at this stage. Building on this, we propose CIS-Fuse, a spiking network that performs cross-modal fusion directly at the membrane-potential level. At its core is the current injection spiking (CIS) operator, which injects one modality as a gated auxiliary current into the driving neuron of the other, so the two integrate before spike firing, with a per-channel learnable injection strength that adaptively regulates the modulation magnitude. Building on CIS, we construct a bidirectional cross-modal fusion (BCMF) module and deploy it on a dual-branch architecture with asymmetric stacking depths, where the two branches develop a clear functional specialization. Extensive experiments on four IVIF benchmarks and on downstream detection and segmentation show that CIS-Fuse achieves fusion quality on par with state-of-the-art ANN-based methods while inheriting the energy efficiency of spike-based computation, with roughly an order of magnitude lower inference energy than the similarly-sized ANN-based DCEvo. Code will be released upon publication.

cs.CV

MBTI: A Multi-Branch Efficient Fine-Tuning Framework for Hyperspectral Image Classification with Foundation Models

Hyperspectral foundation models learn transferable spectral-spatial representations from large-scale unlabeled data. They provide an effective paradigm for adapting to downstream hyperspectral image (HSI) classification tasks with limited labeled samples. However, spectral band configurations vary substantially across sensors, which makes direct model transfer difficult. Existing adaptation strategies often compress, select, or reshape the original spectra to match model-specific input requirements. These operations may discard useful spectral information and weaken local spectral continuity. To address this problem, we propose MBTI, a Multi-Branch efficient fine-tuning framework for Hyperspectral Image classification. MBTI adapts hyperspectral foundation models to downstream classification tasks while preserving full-band spectral information. First, we introduce a spectral-continuity-preserving multi-branch preprocessing strategy. The original HSI is divided into multiple continuous spectral subsets, and a band reuse mechanism is used when the remaining bands cannot form a complete branch. This avoids invalid padding and unnecessary spectral loss. Second, independent Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules are inserted into each branch. They enable different spectral intervals to learn task-specific discriminative features while keeping most pre-trained parameters frozen. Finally, a multi-branch channel attention fusion module adaptively recalibrates and integrates features from all spectral branches. Experiments on three public hyperspectral datasets show that MBTI achieves competitive and superior performance compared with representative classification methods. Under the final rank-8 configuration, only about 2.33\%--2.36\% of the parameters are trainable. The code will be available at https://github.com/Azhenmiddleblock/MBTI/tree/main.

cs.CV

Do LLM Agents Negotiate Rationally? A Mechanism-Design Framework for Verifiable Multi-Agent Interaction over A2A/MCP

Modern LLM-agent frameworks increasingly interoperate through standards such as Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agent-to-tool access and Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol for agent delegation and negotiation. However, these protocols specify transport and discovery rather than strategic correctness and do not guarantee efficient, individually rational, or strategy-proof outcomes. We introduce a framework that (i) encodes classical negotiation mechanisms, including alternating-offers bargaining and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-style auctions, as constraints over A2A message schemas; (ii) provides a lightweight runtime verification and repair layer that checks messages against protocol invariants; and (iii) offers a benchmark of negotiation and allocation tasks with known optimal solutions for measuring deviations from game-theoretic predictions. We evaluate multiple LLM backbones using unstructured dialogue, structured protocols, and structured protocols with verification. Across negotiation trials (N=30 per condition), verification reduces outcome variance, while structured protocols achieve 100 percent success for both models. After correcting parser artifacts, audited unstructured baselines achieve approximately 97 percent and 93.3 percent success. In auction experiments (N=30 per model), both models achieve 100 percent efficient allocation but differ sharply in truthful bidding: one bids its exact valuation in every trial, whereas the other does so in only 3.3 percent of trials. Thus, mechanism-level incentive compatibility does not automatically transfer to LLM-agent behavior. A three-party fair-allocation task produced only 4.2 percent usable outcomes; we report this negative result with a diagnosis. This work bridges classical multi-agent systems theory and modern LLM-agent infrastructure and defines verifiable interaction at the A2A protocol layer.

cs.AI

Beyond the Leaderboard: A Synthesis of Tool-Use, Planning, and Reasoning Failures in Large Language Model Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts. This paper synthesizes 27 benchmark, taxonomy, and audit papers (2023-2026), spanning 19 distinct benchmarks, into a cross-cutting taxonomy of agent limitations. To our knowledge, this is the first synthesis that integrates evidence across tool use, planning, long-horizon reasoning, multi-agent coordination, safety, and measurement validity into a single, unified taxonomy of LLM agent limitations. We identify six failure clusters: (1) tool invocation and parameter-level errors, (2) planning and constraint-satisfaction failures, (3) long-horizon degradation from context accumulation, (4) multi-agent coordination failures, (5) safety and security failures under adversarial or underspecified conditions, and (6) measurement validity problems. The taxonomy was derived iteratively by grouping independently reported error categories into themes corresponding to distinct stages of the agent reasoning-to-action pipeline. Across the literature, we find that failures compound nonlinearly with task length, that strong performance on individual sub-tasks does not reliably translate into end-to-end success, and that additional scaffolding does not consistently improve reliability. At the same time, substantial progress has been demonstrated in single-turn tool use, short-horizon web navigation, and narrowly scoped coding tasks.

cs.AI

Compress the Cache, Not the Speech Embedding: KV Compression for Efficient Speech LLMs

Speech large language models (Speech LLMs) typically encode speech into sequences far longer than text, creating a major efficiency bottleneck during autoregressive decoding. A common remedy is to compress the speech sequence at the adapter level to remove temporal redundancy before it enters the LLM; however, such early downsampling risks discarding fine-grained information that cannot be recovered. We propose SpeechKV, which applies a learned pooling to the KV cache of speech tokens inside the LLM. This design allows the LLM to fuse speech and text internally while directly accelerating decoding. Trained on 71K hours of speech data, SpeechKV compresses the speech to approximately text-level granularity yet maintains performance on par with or even slightly better than the uncompressed baseline, with relative gains of 6.6% on out-of-domain entity recognition and 2.3% on OpenASR, while delivering at least 1.49 times decoding speedup that scales with audio length.

eess.AS

Regulation, Power, and the Compliance 1 Paradox: A Longitudinal Study of Smart Homes

Smart home technologies are becoming increasingly embedded in domestic environments, yet their implications for power, privacy, and inequality remain insufficiently understood, particularly in non-Western contexts. This paper presents a longitudinal socio-technical study of smart home adoption in Jordan, examining how cultural norms, regulatory frameworks, and everyday technological practices shape domestic power dynamics. Building on our 2022 study, we employ a two-phase grounded theory approach comprising (1) a secondary analysis of 30 interviews and (2) 28 new interviews conducted in 2025 with returning and new participants, including household members, domestic workers, policymakers, and civil society advocates. This design provides a rare longitudinal perspective on how regulatory and technological change reshapes domestic surveillance practices. Our findings reveal a compliance paradox: although Jordan's 2023 Data Protection Law has increased privacy awareness, it also enables new forms of exploitation by leaving domestic contexts largely outside its scope. We identify three dynamics: (1) the normalization of passive surveillance through convenience and legal compliance; (2) regulatory ambiguity that shifts responsibility to households, reinforcing existing hierarchies; and (3) constrained resistance among domestic workers facing intensified monitoring. We contribute a longitudinal account of how privacy regulation is appropriated within socio-cultural systems to reproduce existing inequalities. We conclude by identifying four intervention spaces across design, policy, and advocacy, emphasizing the need for contextually grounded approaches to privacy governance in smart home ecosystems.

cs.HC

Rethinking Speech-LLM Integration for ASR: Effective Joint Speech-Text Training by Interleaving

Speech-LLM integration has shown promising results by leveraging extensive textual pretraining, yet its specific benefits for automatic speech recognition (ASR) remain unclear. We observe that as supervised ASR training data increases, the contribution of LLM priors becomes less evident, and simple speech-text joint training under-utilizes textual knowledge. We therefore propose Joint Speech-Text Interleaved Pretraining (JSTIP), an ASR-oriented pretraining strategy that constructs word-level and segment-level interleaved speech-text sequences within aligned pairs for speech-LLM architectures that accept continuous inputs. Experiments on 38k hours of ASR data show consistent entity accuracy improvement compared to ASR-only and joint speech-text training baselines. JSTIP achieves on-par entity recognition performance using domain transcription text compared to synthetic speech-text pairs, simplifying domain adaptation. Benefiting from textual pretraining and domain text data, JSTIP is competitive with open-source ASR and Speech-LLM systems in medical entity recognition. The zero-shot speech question answering behaviors further suggest that interleaving reduces the speech-text modality gap and preserves the LLM generative prior, which is likely the reason for the entity improvements on the ASR task.

cs.CL

The $^{229}$Th Isomer: Nuclear Structure, Clocks, and Tests of Fundamental Physics

The $^{229}$Th nucleus possesses an isomeric state at an excitation energy of $\sim 8$ eV, the lowest known nuclear transition energy, placing its frequency in the vacuum-ultraviolet range and making it directly accessible to laser spectroscopy. In this review, we discuss the $^{229}$Th isomer from three connected perspectives: experimental spectroscopy and clock development, nuclear structure theory, and applications to precision tests of fundamental physics. We first trace the experimental progress from indirect $\gamma$-ray energy inference to resonant laser excitation, absolute frequency comparison with an atomic clock, and feedback-loop operation of a solid-state nuclear clock, and discuss trapped-ion, highly charged ion, and solid-state platforms together with mechanisms for nuclear-state manipulation and readout. We then review, from the nuclear-structure perspective, how the near-degeneracy of the $5/2^+[633]$ and $3/2^+[631]$ neutron Nilsson configurations, together with Coriolis mixing and octupole correlations, underlies the anomalously low transition energy and its electromagnetic properties. Comparisons among different phenomenological and microscopic models show that octupole correlations are a common structural ingredient, while magnetic moments and transition strengths remain sensitive tests of the calculated wave functions. Finally, we discuss how the near-cancellation of MeV-scale nuclear contributions into an eV-scale transition can enhance sensitivity to variations of fundamental constants, signatures of ultralight dark matter, CP-violating interactions, Lorentz-invariance violation, and possible nuclear quantum technologies.

nucl-th

One Image is All You Need: Agentic One-Shot Image Generation via Text-Based World Models for Long-Tail Spatial Perception

Reliable spatial decision automation, such as autonomous driving and maritime surveillance, critically depends on robust visual perception. However, real-world spatiotemporal data exhibits severe heterogeneity, often manifesting as extreme long-tail distributions for safety-critical scenarios. This data scarcity induces dataset shift that degrades detection performance and pose safety risks. While synthetic data generation offers a potential solution, existing generative approaches, such as diffusion models and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), often lack explicit spatial grounding and structural constraints, resulting in spatial and physical inconsistencies in generated scenes. To address these challenges, we introduce WMGen-v1, an agentic text-based world model framework for long-tail spatial data generation. WMGen-v1 employs a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to construct a structured scene representation from a single reference image, while a Large Language Model (LLM) performs guidance-based scene expansion under physical plausibility and commonsense constraints. Subsequently, conditioned on the structured semantic representations produced by this reasoning process, a diffusion model generates diverse and physically grounded long-tail training data. Experiments on internal industrial datasets, ROADWork, and LaRS benchmarks demonstrate that WMGen-v1 outperforms baseline approaches. Notably, detectors trained solely on WMGen-v1 synthetic data approach real-only performance on aggregate dataset-level metrics, highlighting its potential to alleviate long-tail data scarcity for downstream spatial perception.

cs.CV

AI Supply Chain Galaxy: 3D Visual Analytics for License Compliance

The rapid proliferation of machine learning model reuse has transformed the AI ecosystem into a highly interconnected supply chain. Traditional compliance tools and static reports struggle to navigate these massive, multi-hop dependency networks. To address this, we present AI Supply Chain Galaxy (AISCG), an interactive 3D visual analytics system for model provenance and compliance auditing. AISCG maps models into a 3D spatial layout, integrating explicit structural dependencies with a rule-based compliance engine. It supports multi-scale exploration, from global community detection to localized, path-aware lineage tracing. We demonstrate its efficacy through an ecosystem-scale empirical analysis of 908,449 models from Hugging Face. Our findings reveal a concerning landscape: 55.46% of models exhibit compliance risks or metadata conflicts/omissions. We also identified distinct risk patterns, including a 56.67% license omission rate in adapter derivations and an 8.05% "license drift" rate in fine-tuning. Through a case study on the complex Llama model family, we show how AISCG empowers analysts to intuitively trace inherited restrictive terms and identify root causes across deep topological networks, significantly reducing the cognitive load of compliance auditing.

cs.SE

YouZhi: Towards High-Concurrency Financial LLMs via Adaptive GQA-to-MLA Transition

Large language models (LLMs) drive significant financial innovations, yet their high-concurrency deployment is severely bottlenecked by KV cache memory overhead, which inflates infrastructure costs and throttles scalability. To address this, we propose YouZhi-LLM, a highly efficient financial LLM empowered by a comprehensive structural transition and training pipeline natively built on the Huawei Ascend ecosystem. At its algorithmic core, YouZhi-LLM features a layer-adaptive GQA-to-MLA transition framework that dynamically assigns per-layer FreqFold sizes, maximizing KV-cache compression while minimizing perplexity degradation. To recover representation capacity and inject domain expertise, the Ascend-based training pipeline seamlessly integrates generalized knowledge distillation with financial-specific supervised fine-tuning. Evaluations demonstrate the superiority of this systematic approach, with the adaptive transition reducing perplexity degradation by up to 35% over uniform baselines. Crucially, when evaluated on Ascend NPUs via vLLM-Ascend, the massive KV-cache reduction translates directly into deployment efficiency. Compared to their respective base models, YouZhi-7B yields a 12.3% improvement in average financial benchmark score alongside a 2.69$\times$ increase in maximum concurrency; similarly, YouZhi-14B achieves a 7.0% accuracy gain and a 2.43$\times$ concurrency boost, establishing a new paradigm for cost-effective, high-throughput financial inference.

cs.CL