arXiv subjects

Shaofan Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Shaofan Liu.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

NovGauge: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Diagnosing LLMs' Capability in Paper Novelty Assessment

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in peer review at major AI conferences, yet novelty remains a persistent weak point. Existing benchmarks assess novelty as a single holistic score, making it difficult to diagnose which dimension a model misjudges or whether its evidence is faithful. We present NovGauge, a human-anchored benchmark for fine-grained novelty assessment diagnosis. The benchmark contains 619 paper pairs and 50 multi-paper sets, drawn from two expert sources: ICLR reviewer overlap claims and survey co-citations. Instances are independently labeled along three dimensions: task, problem, and method, capturing application goals, technical challenges, and solution approaches. We propose a cascading diagnostic pipeline that verifies per-dimension correctness, evidence grounding, and logical support. Evaluation of 18 LLMs shows hallucination rates ranging from 0% to 39% across dimensions, and among non-hallucinated correct-positive judgments, over 70% cite evidence fails to logically support the stated reason. The best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves 43-72% Verified F1 across dimensions, while most models retain less than half of their raw F1 after faithfulness verification. These results suggest that current LLMs remain far from reliable scientific novelty assessment, particularly when correctness is conditioned on faithful evidence grounding.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SMELT: Scaling Laws for Compute-Matched MoE Looped Transformers

Looped Transformers increase effective depth by iterating a shared block of layers, but most evaluations compare at fixed model size, conflating architectural advantage with extra FLOPs. We study looping on Mixture-of-Experts Transformers while closely matching per-token FLOPs, total non-embedding parameters, and KV cache. Through a series of ablations, we arrive at a recipe we call SMELT (Sparse MoE Transformer, middle layers Loop Twice), which loops the middle half of layers twice while matching the unlooped Baseline on all three budgets. We scale SMELT across four sizes up to 54B non-embedding parameters and fit a separate Chinchilla-style scaling law for each architecture. SMELT's loss drops faster with compute, saving 6.8--18.0\% of training FLOPs on the compute-optimal frontier. The advantage transfers to downstream benchmarks beyond what validation loss predicts, is largest on Code, and grows with sample length and the number of in-context examples. Mechanistic analysis shows that the second visit reduces the attention sink and redirects mass toward content-relevant tokens, an inductive bias that may underlie the observed performance gains. These results show that looping can improve Transformers even under budget matching, offering a practical recipe that turns depth reuse into measurable gains.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Agents in the Large: Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agents

Cognitive language agents have achieved substantial progress by equipping language models with memory, tools, and decision-making procedures, enabling agents to reason and act in interactive environments. Existing frameworks largely cast these agents as systems for solving user-specified, bounded tasks. An increasingly important goal is for language agents to provide persistent assistance in long-lived settings where user needs, context, and service procedures persist and change, and to remain useful across the broad range of tasks that arise over time. Yet we still lack a framework to characterize persistent AI agents, organize existing work, and guide future development. To this end, we propose a Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agents (Pera). Pera describes a persistent agent organized around perception and control components that continually perceive service-relevant signals from episodic task executions, internal context, and changes in the surrounding environment, and use these signals to construct lifecycle tasks. These tasks drive the ongoing operation and adaptation of the agent's service procedures. We use Pera to retrospectively organize recent work, examine a detailed case study, and offer forward-looking insights for building more capable persistent agents. Just as software engineering moved from programming in the small to programming in the large, Pera frames the evolution of language agents as an analogous architectural transition toward long-lived, adaptive intelligence systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Cramer-Rao Inequality Generalizes the Equilibrium Energy Fluctuation-Response Relation to Nonequilibrium Steady States

Equilibrium steady states are fully characterized by the Boltzmann distribution, which depends only on the energy and the temperature. In contrast, nonequilibrium steady states, which describe a wide range of physical and biological phenomena, are generically much more complex, and their stationary distributions can depend on a zoo of kinetic parameters. A central challenge of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics is the identification of universal relations that hold for nonequilibrium steady states despite this complexity. We show here that a form of the Cramer-Rao inequality applies to arbitrary nonequilibrium steady-state distributions and contains no explicit dependence on kinetic parameters. A main original feature in our observation is that this inequality becomes a well-known fluctuation-response relation in equilibrium. The inequality involves three well-defined quantities: the fluctuations of the energy, the response given by the derivative of the average energy with respect to the inverse temperature, and the Fisher information with respect to the inverse temperature. We illustrate this inequality using three representative models: an active particle in a harmonic potential, a simple scheme for kinetic proofreading, and a one-dimensional model for heat conduction between two baths.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2026

SPIEval: Evaluating Large Language Models as Mobile Assistants over Scattered Personal Information

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as mobile assistants, where a key challenge is leveraging personal information scattered across multiple applications (apps) to complete user instructions. However, due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks, their capabilities remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we introduce SPIEval, a human-curated benchmark grounded in five cognitive capabilities (i.e., reasoning, disambiguation, integration, preference inference, and multi-intent decomposition). SPIEval comprises 250 tasks spanning 4,335 personal records distributed across 10 apps and supports multi-turn interaction through 21 tools. Analysis shows that the benchmark exhibits diverse scenarios, challenging tasks, scattered information, controllable environments, and verifiable outcomes. We evaluate nine representative LLMs and find substantial room for improvement. The best-performing model, GPT-5.5 (xhigh), achieves only 57.3% accuracy, while the weakest achieves just 16.4%. Further analysis reveals that 79% of failures stem from inaccurate information localization, as LLMs often commit to plausible but incorrect information instead of continuing retrieval for verification. We also find that fewer than 2% of retrieval actions employ advanced search methods and observe substantial variation in search efficiency across models. These findings expose fundamental limitations of current LLM-based mobile assistants and motivate future research in this direction. Data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Junjie-Ye/SPIEval.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Incremental Online Scene Reconstruction by 3D Gaussian Triangulation

Incremental scene reconstruction is essential for real-world applications. Although 3D Gaussian Splatting shows strong potential, most existing approaches require offline conversion of the optimized Gaussians into an intermediate implicit field for explicit mesh extraction, which hinders seamless integration with downstream tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a novel online framework that incrementally reconstructs and updates high-fidelity explicit meshes by directly triangulating a dense geometric Gaussian representation, which supports both high-quality rendering and incremental surface reconstruction. Moreover, we present a direct meshing algorithm that efficiently extracts and updates the mesh from the Gaussian set. To ensure mesh accuracy, we enforce a plane-based pulling constraint that dynamically aligns 3D Gaussian primitives to the approximated local surface. Furthermore, our framework significantly reduces memory and computational overhead during long-sequence processing by dynamically freezing fully optimized historical regions. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional Gaussian-based methods on both rendering quality and reconstruction accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AdaRoPE: Not All Attention Heads Should Rotate and Scale Equally

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in Transformers to encode positional information, yet standard implementations enforce a uniform frequency schedule and scaling across all attention heads. Using simplified retrieval tasks and length generalization scenarios, we show -- both empirically and theoretically -- that heads with different functional roles require distinct frequency ranges and attention scaling factors to operate effectively. Ignoring this structure leads to suboptimal utilization of embedding dimensions and degraded performance, particularly under long-context settings. To address these limitations, we propose AdaRoPE, which equips each attention head with learnable rotation frequencies and attention scaling factors. Pretrained LLMs with AdaRoPE consistently outperform existing RoPE variants, including partial RoPE and NoPE baselines. For context extension, we further show that uniform frequency and attention scaling, used in methods such as YaRN, are suboptimal. By applying head-specific scaling, AdaRoPE enables better context extension while better preserving short-context performance in both the extrapolation setting and the long-context continued pretraining setting. These results highlight the importance of optimizing rotary position embedding at the level of individual attention heads.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Entropy Polarity in Reinforcement Fine-Tuning: Direction, Asymmetry, and Control

Policy entropy has emerged as a fundamental measure for understanding and controlling exploration in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for LLMs. However, existing entropy-aware methods mainly regulate entropy through global objectives, while the token-level mechanism by which sampled policy updates reshape policy entropy remains underexplored. In this work, we develop a theoretical framework of entropy mechanics in RLVR. Our analysis yields a first-order approximation of the entropy change, giving rise to entropy polarity, a signed token-level quantity that predicts how much a sampled update expands or contracts entropy. This analysis further reveals a structural asymmetry: reinforcing frequent high-probability tokens triggers contraction tendencies, whereas expansive tendencies typically require lower-probability samples or stronger distributional correction. Empirically, we show that entropy polarity reliably predicts entropy changes, and that positive and negative polarity branches play complementary roles in preserving exploration while strengthening exploitation. Building on these insights, we propose Polarity-Aware Policy Optimization (PAPO), which preserves both polarity branches and implements entropy control through advantage reweighting. With the empirical entropy trajectory as an online phase signal, PAPO adaptively reallocates optimization pressure between entropy-expanding and entropy-contracting updates. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and agentic benchmarks show that PAPO consistently outperforms competitive baselines, while delivering superior training efficiency and substantial reward improvements.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

CL-bench Life: Can Language Models Learn from Real-Life Context?

Today's AI assistants such as OpenClaw are designed to handle context effectively, making context learning an increasingly important capability for models. As these systems move beyond professional settings into everyday life, the nature of the contexts they must handle also shifts. Real-life contexts are often messy, fragmented, and deeply tied to personal and social experience, such as multi-party conversations, personal archives, and behavioral traces. Yet it remains unclear whether current frontier language models can reliably learn from such contexts and solve tasks grounded in them. To this end, we introduce CL-bench Life, a fully human-curated benchmark comprising 405 context-task pairs and 5,348 verification rubrics, covering common real-life scenarios. Solving tasks in CL-bench Life requires models to reason over complex, messy real-life contexts, calling for strong real-life context learning abilities that go far beyond those evaluated in existing benchmarks. We evaluate ten frontier LMs and find that real-life context learning remains highly challenging: even the best-performing model achieves only 19.3% task solving rate, while the average performance across models is only 13.8%. Models still struggle to reason over contexts such as messy group chat histories and fragmented behavioral records from everyday life. CL-bench Life provides a crucial testbed for advancing real-life context learning, and progress on it can enable more intelligent and reliable AI assistants in everyday life.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Probing How Scalable Table Data Enhances General Long-Context Reasoning

As real-world tasks grow increasingly complex, long-context reasoning has become a core capability for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, few studies explore which data types are effective for long-context reasoning and why. We find that structured table data with periodic structures shows strong potential for long-context reasoning. Motivated by this observation, we mathematically analyze tabular dependency structures using mutual information, revealing periodic non-vanishing dependencies in table data. Furthermore, we systematically analyze the capabilities of structured table data, conduct relevant scaling experiments, and validate its underlying mechanisms for enhancing long-context reasoning, yielding several meaningful insights. Leveraging these insights, we propose a simple yet scalable pipeline(TableLong) for synthesizing high-quality, diverse, and verifiable structured table data to boost long-context reasoning via RL. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that table data significantly enhances the long-context reasoning capability of LLMs across multiple long-context benchmarks (+8.24\% on average), and even improves performance on out-of-domain benchmarks (+8.06\% on average). We hope that our insights provide practical guidance for effective post-training data to enhance long-context reasoning in LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Step-GUI Technical Report

Recent advances in multimodal large language models unlock unprecedented opportunities for GUI automation. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how to efficiently acquire high-quality training data while maintaining annotation reliability? We introduce a self-evolving training pipeline powered by the Calibrated Step Reward System, which converts model-generated trajectories into reliable training signals through trajectory-level calibration, achieving >90% annotation accuracy with 10-100x lower cost. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce Step-GUI, a family of models (4B/8B) that achieves state-of-the-art GUI performance (8B: 80.2% AndroidWorld, 48.5% OSWorld, 62.6% ScreenShot-Pro) while maintaining robust general capabilities. As GUI agent capabilities improve, practical deployment demands standardized interfaces across heterogeneous devices while protecting user privacy. To this end, we propose GUI-MCP, the first Model Context Protocol for GUI automation with hierarchical architecture that combines low-level atomic operations and high-level task delegation to local specialist models, enabling high-privacy execution where sensitive data stays on-device. Finally, to assess whether agents can handle authentic everyday usage, we introduce AndroidDaily, a benchmark grounded in real-world mobile usage patterns with 3146 static actions and 235 end-to-end tasks across high-frequency daily scenarios (8B: static 89.91%, end-to-end 52.50%). Our work advances the development of practical GUI agents and demonstrates strong potential for real-world deployment in everyday digital interactions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

REArtGS++: Generalizable Articulation Reconstruction with Temporal Geometry Constraint via Planar Gaussian Splatting

Articulated objects are pervasive in daily environments, such as drawers and refrigerators. Towards their part-level surface reconstruction and joint parameter estimation, REArtGS introduces a category-agnostic approach using multi-view RGB images at two different states. However, we observe that REArtGS still struggles with screw-joint or multi-part objects and lacks geometric constraints for unseen states. In this paper, we propose REArtGS++, a novel method towards generalizable articulated object reconstruction with temporal geometry constraint and planar Gaussian splatting. We first model a decoupled screw motion for each joint without type prior, and jointly optimize part-aware Gaussians with joint parameters through part motion blending. To introduce time-continuous geometric constraint for articulated modeling, we encourage Gaussians to be planar and propose a temporally consistent regularization between planar normal and depth through Taylor first-order expansion. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world articulated objects demonstrate our superiority in generalizable part-level surface reconstruction and joint parameter estimation, compared to existing approaches. Project Site: https://sites.google.com/view/reartgs2/home.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

HVOFusion: Incremental Mesh Reconstruction Using Hybrid Voxel Octree

Incremental scene reconstruction is essential to the navigation in robotics. Most of the conventional methods typically make use of either TSDF (truncated signed distance functions) volume or neural networks to implicitly represent the surface. Due to the voxel representation or involving with time-consuming sampling, they have difficulty in balancing speed, memory storage, and surface quality. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid voxel-octree approach to effectively fuse octree with voxel structures so that we can take advantage of both implicit surface and explicit triangular mesh representation. Such sparse structure preserves triangular faces in the leaf nodes and produces partial meshes sequentially for incremental reconstruction. This storage scheme allows us to naturally optimize the mesh in explicit 3D space to achieve higher surface quality. We iteratively deform the mesh towards the target and recovers vertex colors by optimizing a shading model. Experimental results on several datasets show that our proposed approach is capable of quickly and accurately reconstructing a scene with realistic colors.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Covariant transport equation and gravito-conductivity in generic stationary spacetimes

We find a near detailed balance solution to the relativistic Boltzmann equation under the relaxation time approximation with a collision term which differs from the Anderson-Witting model and is dependent on the stationary observer. Using this new solution, we construct an explicit covariant transport equation for the particle flux in response to the generalized temperature and chemical potential gradients in generic stationary spacetimes, with the transport tensors characterized by some integral functions in the chemical potential and the relativistic coldness. To illustrate the application of the transport equation we study probe systems in Rindler and Kerr spacetimes and analyze the asymptotic properties of the gravito-conductivity tensor in the near horizon limit. It turns out that both the longitudinal and lateral parts (if present) of the gravito-conductivity tend to be divergent in the near horizon limit. In the weak field limit, our results coincide with with the non-relativistic gravitational transport equation which follows from the direct application of the Drude model.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2021

Relativistic transformation of thermodynamic parameters and refined Saha equation

The relativistic transformation rule for temperature is a subject under debate for more than 110 years. Several incompatible proposals exist in the literature, but a final resolution is still missing. In this work, we reconsider the problem of relativistic transformation rules for a number of thermodynamic parameters, including temperature, chemical potential, pressure, entropy and enthalpy densities for a relativistic perfect fluid using relativistic kinetic theory. The analysis is carried out in a fully relativistic covariant manner, and the explicit transformation rules for the above quantities are obtained in both Minkowski and Rindler spacetimes. Our results suggest that the temperature of a moving fluid appears to be colder, supporting the proposal by de Broglie, Einstein and Planck in contrast to other proposals. Moreover, in the case of Rindler fluid, our work indicates that, the total number of particles and the total entropy of a perfect fluid in a box whose bottom is parallel to the Rindler horizon are proportional to the area of the bottom, but are independent of the height of the box, provided the bottom of the box is sufficiently close to the Rindler horizon. The area dependence of the particle number implies that the particles tend to be gathered toward the bottom of the box and hence implicitly determines the distribution of chemical potential of the system, whereas the area dependence of the entropy indicates that the entropy is still additive and may find some applications in explaining the area law of black hole entropy. As a by product, we also obtain a relativistically refined version of the famous Saha equation which holds in both Minkowski and Rindler spacetimes.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2021

Work and work-energy theorem in curved spacetime

The definitions of gravitational work as well as work done by the total external force on a massive probe particle moving in generic spacetime backgrounds are proposed. These definitions are given in the form of scalar integrals and thus, are independent of coordinate choices. However, the dependence on the choice of observer field is essential and inevitable. The definitions are checked in the case of Minkowski, Schwarzschild, Reisner-Nordström and Kerr-Newman spacetimes and agreements with Newtonian mechanical definitions are verified in the slow motion or the far field limit.

gr-qc↗