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Shijin Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Shijin Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

A Human-in-the-Loop Autonomous Agent for Industry Time Series Forecasting

Real-world time-series forecasting is rarely a one-shot model invocation: practitioners must formulate tasks, connect data and models, incorporate domain expertise, assess prediction plausibility, and communicate uncertainty. Specialized forecasting models provide strong numerical predictions but usually operate in fixed pipelines, while general-purpose large language model (LLM) agents often lack forecasting-specific checks, constraints, and stopping rules. We present CastClaw, a human-in-the-loop autonomous forecasting system built through forecasting-oriented harness engineering. CastClaw connects data, specialized models, analytical tools, user input, and a versioned execution record in one runtime. Users specify the target, horizon, constraints, and hypotheses in natural language. Starting from a supplied or model-generated forecast, CastClaw checks temporal patterns and user constraints; when evidence is missing, it retrieves context, runs an analysis or another model, or asks the user. It then keeps, revises, or escalates the result under explicit stopping conditions. The output contains the final forecast and an execution report recording inputs, evidence, actions, and revisions. In this five-dataset electricity-price setting, CastClaw reports the lowest point-estimate MSE and MAE among 16 baselines. A Nord Pool case demonstrates the inspectable workflow. CastClaw was also validated offline on provincial electricity-load data from North China covering January--June 2026.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Incorporating Cognitive Load and Knowledge Transfer for Multi-Domain Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to assess students' dynamic knowledge states from their learning histories. While most existing KT methods focus on single-domain learning with notable success, real-world learning scenarios often involve multiple domains simultaneously, introducing two critical factors: 1) Cognitive load, arising from managing learning across domains in both temporal and knowledge dimensions. 2) Knowledge transfer, where knowledge states in one domain influence related states both within and across domains. In this paper, we focus on exploring these factors to improve students' knowledge state assessment in multi-domain learning scenarios and propose a novel method incorporating cognitive Load and knowledge Transfer for Multi-domain Knowledge Tracing (LT-MKT). Specifically, to bridge isolated domains, LT-MKT first integrates textual information from questions and their associated concepts to construct a Multi-domain Hierarchical Graph, leveraging the advanced representational capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Then, cross-domain features in both the temporal and knowledge dimensions are explicitly modeled to capture the effects of cognitive load. Additionally, a knowledge transfer module is designed to model the propagation of knowledge states within and across domains. By jointly modeling these factors, LT-MKT enables more accurate prediction of students' future performance. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

PoseAlign: Sculpting Pose-Consistent Meshes via Text-Guided Deformation

Mesh deformation, the process of altering the vertex positions of a 3D mesh while preserving its topological structure, is a cornerstone of computer graphics. Despite the recent emergence of numerous text-guided 3D mesh deformation methods, deforming an initial mesh into one that both adheres to text prompts and preserves its pose remains challenging. This paper proposes PoseAlign, which decomposes text-guided mesh deformation into two stages: global pose scaling and local detail sculpting. Specifically, in the first stage, we introduce the Laplacian as a differentiable mesh representation to enable more efficient yet smoother global deformation. Then, we propose a novel pose-aligned SDS loss by adapting score distillation sampling (SDS) with an attention-sharing mechanism, which sculptures fine-grained geometric details for the deformed mesh while preserving its original pose. PoseAlign significantly enhances the controllability of the overall deformation process, achieving a favorable balance between pose preservation and text alignment. Experiments demonstrate the competitive advantages of our method in text alignment and mesh quality. Code is available at: https://cousingrade6.github.io/PoseAlign

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

Edu-Theater: A Data-Efficient Agent Framework for Scalable Learner Behavior Simulation through Staging Roll-Call

Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement. Learner simulators play a critical role in simulating scalable learner behavior without the need for continuous involvement of real learners. However, existing methods are predominantly \textbf{individual-centric}, pairing a simulator with each learner to iteratively infer latent knowledge states from dense interaction histories, which is both data- and computation-intensive, and fragile in cold-start scenarios. We propose a \textbf{cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm} that first constructs cohort-level proficiency priors and refines individual learner states through a small number of targeted diagnostic queries. Based on this paradigm, we introduce \textbf{Edu-Theater}, an LLM-powered agent system that performs cohort-aware learner simulation via a teacher agent and retrospective roll-call probing over learner logs. Edu-Theater enables scalable future behavior simulation without the need for dense per-learner histories. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Edu-Theater achieves higher simulation accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls, producing synthetic data that enhances downstream applications such as adaptive testing.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

SocraticPO: Policy Optimization via Interactive Guidance

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models usually supervises reasoning with scalar outcome rewards, such as binary correctness. Such rewards provide an optimization direction but rarely explain how a model should revise its mistaken reasoning, which can encourage shortcut learning and brittle policies. We propose \textbf{SocraticPO} (Socratic Policy Optimization), a policy-optimization framework that augments RL rollouts with Socratic-style natural-language guidance. During rollout, the student first answers independently; if the answer is incorrect, a teacher diagnoses the attempt and provides concise corrective guidance, after which the student continues under the expanded context. Crucially, this guidance is paired with reward decay: correct answers obtained after teacher intervention only receive decayed rewards, preventing the policy from treating teacher help as a free path to reward. Since SocraticPO only modifies the rollout process while leaving the standard expected-reward objective intact, it can be plugged into existing policy-gradient backends such as Reinforce++. Moreover, because the teacher provides only text-level guidance, SocraticPO can leverage stronger black-box teacher models without requiring access to logits or distribution matching. On undergraduate-level scientific reasoning benchmarks from SciKnowEval, SocraticPO improves over strong RL and self-distillation baselines. Ablations show that both targeted guidance and reward decay are necessary, with reward decay mitigating reliance on assisted correction.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

GeoDecider: An Evidence-Grounded Agent for Geological Interpretation via Deliberative Reasoning

Geological interpretation infers subsurface properties and structures from indirect geophysical observations. Well-log classification provides a measurable setting by assigning geological classes to depth-indexed petrophysical records. The task is difficult because different subsurface units may exhibit similar logging responses, whereas accurate interpretation often depends on local measurements, depth-wise context, domain knowledge, and reasonable transitions between neighboring layers. Existing automated methods mainly follow fixed prediction pipelines, leaving little room to gather additional evidence for difficult samples. In this work, we propose GeoDecider, an evidence-grounded agent for deliberative geological interpretation. GeoDecider retains efficient numerical prediction as the first stage, then selectively invokes tool-assisted reasoning for difficult intervals. A lightweight classifier produces point-wise predictions and estimates sample difficulty from its prediction scores. High-difficulty points act as routing anchors, triggering interval-level analysis so that nearby observations can be examined together. For each activated interval, specialized tools build an Evidence Profile that summarizes geological knowledge, depth-wise trends, previous predictions from the same well, and similar cases retrieved from training wells. Three complementary scientific views generate candidate interpretations. GeoDecider compares their supporting evidence, resolves disagreements, then applies geology-informed checks on continuity, boundary cues, and petrophysical consistency. Experiments on four public well-log benchmarks show that GeoDecider consistently outperforms representative baselines, demonstrating the value of selective evidence gathering and deliberative reasoning for geological interpretation.~\footnote{Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/GeoDecider}

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

CAPO: Critic-Guided Action-Aligned Policy Optimization for Advancing LLM Agent Capabilities

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for improving the agentic capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although critic-free methods such as GRPO are increasingly popular, we argue that critic-based methods remain well suited to long-horizon agentic tasks because their critic models can assess each state and assign credit to different decisions. However, representative critic-based methods such as PPO still organize value estimation, credit assignment, and policy updates at token granularity, whereas the environment state changes only after the agent completes a full action. In this work, we propose CAPO, a critic-guided action-aligned policy optimization method for advancing LLM agent capabilities. CAPO introduces two action-aligned designs. First, it estimates the state value at the action boundary using a critic model and assigns the corresponding advantage to the complete action rather than individual tokens. Second, CAPO introduces a novel action-aware policy ratio that aggregates token ratios within each action with length calibration for consistent updates across actions of different lengths. These two designs effectively achieve fine-grained credit assignment and consistent policy updates while remaining compatible with token-level gradient computation. Experiments across multi-hop QA, academic paper search, and text-world action tasks show that CAPO consistently outperforms representative RL methods. Further analyses validate both designs and reveal how action-aligned optimization improves multi-turn RL training. We hope this work provides a practical path for training more capable LLM agents.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

MemCast: Memory-Driven Time Series Forecasting with Experience-Conditioned Reasoning

Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a critical role in decision-making for many real-world applications. Recently, large language model (LLM)- based forecasters have made promising advancements. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods often lack explicit experience accumulation and continual evolution. In this work, we propose MemCast, a learning-to-memory framework that reformulates TSF as an experience-conditioned reasoning task. Specifically, we learn experience from the training set and organize it into a hierarchical memory. This is achieved by summarizing prediction results into historical patterns, distilling inference trajectories into reasoning wisdom, and inducing extracted temporal features into general laws. Furthermore, during inference, we leverage historical patterns to guide the reasoning process and utilize reasoning wisdom to select better trajectories, while general laws serve as criteria for reflective iteration. Additionally, to enable continual evolution, we design a dynamic confidence adaptation strategy that updates the confidence of individual entries without leaking the test set distribution. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MemCast consistently outperforms previous methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/MemCast-TS.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Latent Shadows: The Gaussian-Discrete Duality in Masked Diffusion

Masked discrete diffusion is a dominant paradigm for high-quality language modeling where tokens are iteratively corrupted to a mask state, yet its inference efficiency is bottlenecked by the lack of deterministic sampling tools. While diffusion duality enables deterministic distillation for uniform models, these approaches generally underperform masked models and rely on complex integral operators. Conversely, in the masked domain, prior methods typically assume the absence of deterministic trajectories, forcing a reliance on stochastic distillation. To bridge this gap, we establish explicit Masked Diffusion Duality, proving that the masked process arises as the projection of a continuous Gaussian process via a novel maximum-value index preservation mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce Masked Consistency Distillation (MCD), a principled framework that leverages this duality to analytically construct the deterministic coupled trajectories required for consistency distillation, bypassing numerical ODE solvers. This result strictly improves upon prior stochastic distillation methods, achieving a 16$\times$ inference speedup without compromising generation quality. Our findings not only provide a solid theoretical foundation connecting masked and continuous diffusion, but also unlock the full potential of consistency distillation for high-performance discrete generation. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCD-70FD.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

CE-GOCD: Central Entity-Guided Graph Optimization for Community Detection to Augment LLM Scientific Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for question answering over scientific research papers. Existing retrieval augmentation methods often rely on isolated text chunks or concepts, but overlook deeper semantic connections between papers. This impairs the LLM's comprehension of scientific literature, hindering the comprehensiveness and specificity of its responses. To address this, we propose Central Entity-Guided Graph Optimization for Community Detection (CE-GOCD), a method that augments LLMs' scientific question answering by explicitly modeling and leveraging semantic substructures within academic knowledge graphs. Our approach operates by: (1) leveraging paper titles as central entities for targeted subgraph retrieval, (2) enhancing implicit semantic discovery via subgraph pruning and completion, and (3) applying community detection to distill coherent paper groups with shared themes. We evaluated the proposed method on three NLP literature-based question-answering datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority over other retrieval-augmented baseline approaches, confirming the effectiveness of our framework.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT), achieved by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, reasoning in current LLMs is primarily generated as plain text, where performing semantic evaluation on such unstructured data creates a computational bottleneck during training. Despite RLVR-based optimization, existing methods still suffer from coarse-grained supervision, reward hacking, high training costs, and poor generalization. To address these issues, we propose the Graph Reasoning Paradigm (GRP), which realizes structured and symbolic reasoning, implemented via graph-structured representations with step-level cognitive labels. Building upon GRP, we further design Process-Aware Stratified Clipping Group Relative Policy Optimization (PASC-GRPO), which leverages structured evaluation to replace semantic evaluation, achieves process-aware verification through graph-structured outcome rewards, and mitigates reward hacking via stratified clipping advantage estimation. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Data, models, and code will be released later.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Evaluating Large Language Models on Multimodal Chemistry Olympiad Exams

Multimodal scientific reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in chemistry, where problem-solving relies on symbolic diagrams, molecular structures, and structured visual data. Here, we systematically evaluate 40 proprietary and open-source multimodal LLMs, including GPT-5, o3, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Qwen2.5-VL, on a curated benchmark of Olympiad-style chemistry questions drawn from over two decades of U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad (USNCO) exams. These questions require integrated visual and textual reasoning across diverse modalities. We find that many models struggle with modality fusion, where in some cases, removing the image even improves accuracy, indicating misalignment in vision-language integration. Chain-of-Thought prompting consistently enhances both accuracy and visual grounding, as demonstrated through ablation studies and occlusion-based interpretability. Our results reveal critical limitations in the scientific reasoning abilities of current MLLMs, providing actionable strategies for developing more robust and interpretable multimodal systems in chemistry. This work provides a timely benchmark for measuring progress in domain-specific multimodal AI and underscores the need for further advances at the intersection of artificial intelligence and scientific reasoning.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

BLADE: A Behavior-Level Data Augmentation Framework with Dual Fusion Modeling for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation

Multi-behavior sequential recommendation aims to capture users' dynamic interests by modeling diverse types of user interactions over time. Although several studies have explored this setting, the recommendation performance remains suboptimal, mainly due to two fundamental challenges: the heterogeneity of user behaviors and data sparsity. To address these challenges, we propose BLADE, a framework that enhances multi-behavior modeling while mitigating data sparsity. Specifically, to handle behavior heterogeneity, we introduce a dual item-behavior fusion architecture that incorporates behavior information at both the input and intermediate levels, enabling preference modeling from multiple perspectives. To mitigate data sparsity, we design three behavior-level data augmentation methods that operate directly on behavior sequences rather than core item sequences. These methods generate diverse augmented views while preserving the semantic consistency of item sequences. These augmented views further enhance representation learning and generalization via contrastive learning. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

CARE-Bench: A Benchmark of Diverse Client Simulations Guided by Expert Principles for Evaluating LLMs in Psychological Counseling

The mismatch between the growing demand for psychological counseling and the limited availability of services has motivated research into the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this domain. Consequently, there is a need for a robust and unified benchmark to assess the counseling competence of various LLMs. Existing works, however, are limited by unprofessional client simulation, static question-and-answer evaluation formats, and unidimensional metrics. These limitations hinder their effectiveness in assessing a model's comprehensive ability to handle diverse and complex clients. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{CARE-Bench}, a dynamic and interactive automated benchmark. It is built upon diverse client profiles derived from real-world counseling cases and simulated according to expert guidelines. CARE-Bench provides a multidimensional performance evaluation grounded in established psychological scales. Using CARE-Bench, we evaluate several general-purpose LLMs and specialized counseling models, revealing their current limitations. In collaboration with psychologists, we conduct a detailed analysis of the reasons for LLMs' failures when interacting with clients of different types, which provides directions for developing more comprehensive, universal, and effective counseling models.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

RE$^2$: Improving Chinese Grammatical Error Correction via Retrieving Appropriate Examples with Explanation

The primary objective of Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) is to detect and correct errors in Chinese sentences. Recent research shows that large language models (LLMs) have been applied to CGEC with significant results. For LLMs, selecting appropriate reference examples can help improve their performance. However, existing methods predominantly rely on text similarity for example retrieval, a strategy that frequently mismatches actual error patterns and retrieves lexically similar yet grammatically irrelevant sentences. To address this problem, we propose a method named RE$^2$, which retrieves appropriate examples with explanations of grammatical errors. Instead of using text similarity of the input sentence, we use explanations of grammatical errors to select reference examples, which are used by LLMs to improve the performance of CGEC. We conduct experiments on two CGEC datasets and create a high-quality grammatical error explanation (GEE) dataset, which is not only used in our research but also serves as a valuable resource for future studies in both CGEC and GEE. The experimental results on the two datasets indicate that our proposed method effectively improves the performance of CGEC.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

ChartHal: A Fine-grained Framework Evaluating Hallucination of Large Vision Language Models in Chart Understanding

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable progress, yet hallucination remains a critical barrier, particularly in chart understanding, which requires sophisticated perceptual and cognitive abilities as well as rigorous factual accuracy. While prior work has investigated hallucinations and chart comprehension independently, their intersection remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we present ChartHal, a benchmark that features a fine-grained taxonomy of hallucination scenarios in chart understanding, along with a human-validated dataset of 1,062 samples. Our evaluation shows that state-of-the-art LVLMs suffer from severe hallucinations on ChartHal, including proprietary models such as GPT-5 and o4-mini, which achieve only 34.46% and 22.79% accuracy, respectively. Further analysis reveals that questions involving information absent from or contradictory to charts are especially likely to trigger hallucinations, underscoring the urgent need for more robust mitigation strategies. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ymcui/ChartHal .

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Disentangling the Drivers of LLM Social Conformity: An Uncertainty-Moderated Dual-Process Mechanism

As large language models (LLMs) integrate into collaborative teams, their social conformity -- the tendency to align with majority opinions -- has emerged as a key concern. In humans, conformity arises from informational influence (rational use of group cues for accuracy) or normative influence (social pressure for approval), with uncertainty moderating this balance by shifting from purely analytical to heuristic processing. It remains unclear whether these human psychological mechanisms apply to LLMs. This study adapts the information cascade paradigm from behavioral economics to quantitatively disentangle the two drivers to investigate the moderate effect. We evaluated nine leading LLMs across three decision-making scenarios (medical, legal, investment), manipulating information uncertainty (q = 0.667, 0.55, and 0.70, respectively). Our results indicate that informational influence underpins the models' behavior across all contexts, with accuracy and confidence consistently rising with stronger evidence. However, this foundational mechanism is dramatically modulated by uncertainty. In low-to-medium uncertainty scenarios, this informational process is expressed as a conservative strategy, where LLMs systematically underweight all evidence sources. In contrast, high uncertainty triggers a critical shift: while still processing information, the models additionally exhibit a normative-like amplification, causing them to overweight public signals (beta > 1.55 vs. private beta = 0.81).

cs.CY↗
arXiv2025

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

cs.LG↗