arXiv subjects

Shuyao Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Shuyao Xiao.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Structure to Validity: Mechanism-Guided Generation and Refinement of LLM Rubrics

Rubrics have been widely used to evaluate and optimize language models on open-ended tasks. However, existing work primarily focuses on generating better rubrics, with limited understanding of what makes rubric design effective. In this work, we conduct a systematic mechanistic analysis of rubric design across criterion organization, criterion operationalization, and score aggregation. Our analysis shows that structural organization enables more comprehensive criterion construction, semantic specification alone does not ensure effective criterion-level judgments, and sophisticated score aggregation provides limited additional gains. Guided by these findings, we introduce Adaptive Rubric Tree Search with Hybrid refinement (ARTS-Hybrid), which combines adaptive tree construction with semantic-first, response-calibrated refinement. Experiments across benchmarks show that ARTS-Hybrid improves both end-to-end evaluation performance and intrinsic rubric quality. Further experiments suggest that, beyond evaluation, rubrics generated by ARTS-Hybrid provide effective signals for model optimization.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Search Shapes Conclusions: Auditing Evidence Selection Bias in Deep Research Agents

Deep Research agents synthesize evidence into cited reports, yet a well-cited report can still reach a misleading conclusion. Citation correctness checks whether cited sources support individual claims. It does not show whether adaptive search exposed a representative view of all documents made available for evaluation, which we call the candidate pool. Early findings redirect later queries, document choices, and stopping, so the documents an agent reads form a selective sample. Existing evaluations rarely account for this selection. We formulate the problem as adaptive evidence sampling and introduce Causal Evidence Selection Correction (CESS). CESS predicts each candidate document's evidence direction and corrects the candidate-pool average using the logged probabilities of selecting each document and reaching each search round. Shrinkage stabilizes short searches, while intervals replace point estimates when some documents cannot be sampled. We also prove that estimating the average evidence direction of a common pool differs from measuring how a change in search policy alters the evidence read. The latter requires intervention. On questions from the MS2 systematic-review benchmark, CESS reduces mean absolute error against the candidate-pool average by $9.2\%$ and reduces the estimate's change under opposing document rankings by $39.4\%$ relative to averaging the evidence scores of documents read. Across trajectories from a public Open Deep Research agent, the corresponding reductions reach $60.1\%$ and $87.2\%$. A further 4,800 trajectories under paired interventions confirm that correcting a pool estimate and measuring a policy effect are different tasks. CESS therefore audits whether the evidence direction underlying a report reflects the documents available for evaluation, while a separate intervention analysis measures the effect of search decisions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

When Harnesses Lose the Signal: Causal Evaluation of Recovery in LLM Agents

Large language model agents rely on external harnesses to pass information between the model and its environment and to recover from execution errors. Yet recovery is usually judged only by average task success. This hides an important tension. The same operation can rescue a failing trajectory or disrupt one that would otherwise succeed. We frame recovery as a causal decision problem. Starting from the same execution state, we compare what happens with and without recovery, separate rescue from harm, and study how the value of recovery changes over time. We then introduce the Causal Intervention Router (CIR), a lightweight policy that uses information available before recovery to decide when intervention is worthwhile. On long-horizon ALFWorld tasks with Qwen3-14B, CIR raises success from 70.33% to 73.33%, a gain of 3.00 percentage points. It leaves all evaluated trajectories with correct observations untouched. Additional controls show that the benefit of recovery cannot be explained solely by the new observation returned by the environment. These results provide a practical way to evaluate recovery and apply it selectively.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SubZero+: Memory-Efficient Adaptive Zeroth-Order LLM Fine-Tuning in Random Subspaces

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with SGD in random subspaces enables memory-efficient fine-tuning of large language models without backpropagation. However, high gradient estimation noise fundamentally undermines adaptive optimizers like Adam. We propose SubZero+, which achieves practical adaptive ZO optimization through a carefully designed dual low-dimensionality strategy: (i) multi-query forward-difference gradient estimation in periodically refreshed random subspaces to mitigate noise amplification in moment buffers, and (ii) Adam updates with periodic restarts performed directly in low-dimensional space rather than full-parameter space. In experiments, this dual design retains memory overhead comparable to momentum-free ZO methods while achieving stronger optimization performance than the evaluated ZO baselines. Theoretically, in the exact-directional limit, $K$-query averaging preserves conditional unbiasedness, while the coefficient estimator's covariance and mean-squared error, as well as query-induced second-moment inflation, scale exactly as $1/K$. Extensive experiments across SuperGLUE with models from 1.3B to 32B parameters under both full fine-tuning and LoRA schemes demonstrate consistent improvements over competing ZO methods. SubZero+ significantly narrows the performance gap with first-order optimization while preserving ZO's inference-time memory efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Employing the Structural Power to Achieve Supply-Demand Balanced Payment Channel Networks

Blockchain technology faces scalability challenges because transactions must be validated and recorded across the network. Payment channel networks (PCNs) improve efficiency by moving transactions off-chain and recording only critical interactions on the mainnet. However, PCNs require pre-deposited channel balances (supply) to match transaction demands (demand), and insufficient balances cause supply shortages. Existing approaches, including transaction path optimization and channel balance allocation, address this problem but incur high costs due to dynamic adaptation to fluctuating demands. We reveal a correlation between balance deficits in PCNs and network topology by uncovering the structural organization of liquidity allocation. This enables supply-demand conflicts to be mitigated from a static topological perspective through channel reconfiguration, without additional balance replenishment. We further introduce payment topological entropy (PTE), an information-theoretic metric that quantifies each node's deviation from the global average connection pattern and captures structural properties of balance supply. Based on PTE, we design MaxPTE, a topology optimization algorithm that reorganizes balance allocation across channels through structural reconfiguration, aligning static balance distribution with dynamic transaction demand. Extensive experiments show that MaxPTE reduces balance deficits by 27.25%, increases average maximum flow by 12.23%, and decreases transaction failure probability by 25.96%, outperforming existing benchmarks. The method also remains robust across diverse balance-demand distributions, improving supply-demand balance without prior demand prediction.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Who Drives the Probability Game of VLMs? A Temporal Causal Drive Evaluation Framework

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly evaluated on complex image and video understanding tasks, yet conventional metrics primarily assess final-answer quality and reveal little about how different information sources shape the generation process. We propose a causal and temporal evaluation framework that traces the evolving roles of visual input, question text, and generated prefixes during autoregressive decoding. Grounded in a Structural Causal Model, we use interventions and backdoor adjustment to derive three step-indexed causal-drive metrics---Visual Causal Drive (VCD), Question Causal Drive (QCD), and Prefix Causal Drive (PCD)---for characterizing source-specific generation patterns without requiring reference answers. Experiments on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct across MAVIS, LLaVA-Video-178K, and MiraData, together with cross-model validation on InternVL2-8B, reveal a consistent transition from stronger early question and visual guidance toward increasing reliance on generated prefixes. Randomized-intervention validation shows that QCD and PCD reduce recovery error over observational PMI baselines by 34.8\% and 47.1\%, respectively. On VLMBias, the prefix--visual imbalance score achieves 0.767 AUROC and 0.873 AUPRC for distinguishing prior-driven from visually grounded generations. These results show that causal-drive trajectories provide complementary source-level diagnostics for multimodal generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

When Errors Become Memories: Causal Pathway Tracing in Multi-Turn Memory-Augmented LLMs

Long-term memory enables large language models (LLMs) to preserve and reuse information across interactions, but it can also turn localized errors into persistent risks. Existing work mainly evaluates whether memory systems store and retrieve information correctly, leaving limited understanding of how errors propagate across responses, memory states, and future interactions. We propose a structural causal model (SCM)-based framework for cross-turn error propagation in memory-augmented LLMs. We model user questions, model responses, and memory states as a dynamic causal process, and identify two entry pathways: internal memory updating and external question feedback. By intervening on these pathways, we construct four counterfactual trajectories and quantify their downstream effects and interaction. Error influence is evaluated at four levels: memory retention, natural responses, targeted diagnostic probing, and probability-level error preference. Experiments show that error influence generally decays with interaction distance, while the memory-update pathway contributes more persistent effects than question feedback; latent errors may remain even after disappearing from natural responses. Propagation patterns also vary across memory categories and memory mechanisms. Pathway-guided restoration further validates this decomposition: Question Repair reduces residual error by 27.5%, Memory Repair by 70.2%, and Joint Repair by 98.3%, nearly eliminating residual propagation.

cs.CL↗