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Tao Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

DiffCap-Bench: A Comprehensive, Challenging, Robust Benchmark for Image Difference Captioning

Image Difference Captioning (IDC) generates natural language descriptions that precisely identify differences between two images, serving as a key benchmark for fine-grained change perception, cross-modal reasoning, and image editing data construction. However, existing benchmarks lack diversity and compositional complexity, and standard lexical-overlap metrics (e.g., BLEU, METEOR) fail to capture semantic consistency or penalize hallucinations, which together prevent a comprehensive and robust evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on IDC. To address these gaps, we introduce DiffCap-Bench, a comprehensive IDC benchmark covering ten distinct difference categories to ensure diversity and compositional complexity. Furthermore, we propose an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation protocol grounded in human-validated Difference Lists, enabling a robust assessment of models' ability to both capture and describe visual changes. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs, we reveal significant performance gaps between proprietary and open-source models, highlight the critical importance of reasoning capability, and identify clear limitations in model scaling. Our framework also demonstrates strong alignment with human expert judgments and strong correlation with downstream image editing data construction quality. These findings establish DiffCap-Bench as both a reliable IDC evaluation framework and a practical predictor of downstream utility. The benchmark and code will be made publicly available to support further research.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Auriga Technical Report: A Task-Agnostic Agent Harness for Zero-Shot Embodied Manipulation

Vision-language models can interpret instructions and plan manipulation tasks, yet struggle when acting directly as robot policies. On RoboDojo, a large planning-execution gap separates high-level task decisions from physical execution: removing arm execution raises GPT-6 Astra's success rate from 22.5% under the reference control interface to 76.2%. We present Auriga, a task-agnostic agent harness that closes 68.3% of this gap in zero-shot manipulation without target-task trials or resets. In Auriga, the model makes all task decisions over an explicit task belief and acts through either direct tool calls or synthesized multi-step Python programs, while the harness supplies calibrated 3D measurements, finger-referenced dual-arm control, and a single admission gateway to the robot. Before motion, the model inspects a visual trajectory preview while simulation is paused; during execution, the harness checks declared stage tolerances and grasp bounds, stopping the robot on divergence and returning the measured discrepancy for in-place recovery. Developed across 13 cross-task capability iterations and frozen for evaluation, Auriga ranks first on the RoboDojo leaderboard with a 57.7% success rate (64.0 Score), more than doubling the reference harness on the same model, and remains first under scene randomization while learned policies drop by up to 33.9%. On RoboCasa365, the same frozen harness reaches a 73.2% success rate, outperforming VLA-assisted agents by up to 23.1% on composite tasks. Project page: https://auriga.stelledge.com/ Code: https://github.com/lose4578/Auriga

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Agent Stack for ML Training Lifecycle: Generation, Validation, and Optimization

Production model development requires repeated architecture design, platform integration, debugging, training, and evaluation. We present an agent stack deployed at LinkedIn with two independently usable agent loops: AutoTorch for model generation and migration, and AutoResearch for model optimization. AutoTorch generates PyTorch models and training pipelines for TensorFlow migration, XGBoost replacement, and new-model development. Executable validation hooks check platform API compliance, trainability, and conversion fidelity on sampled data, guiding iterative repair before engineer review and full-scale distributed training. AutoResearch explores architecture and training-configuration changes through expert-steered or autonomous experimentation. An external orchestrator manages parallel trials, experiment history, candidate selection, and wall-clock budgets across agent sessions. A shared runtime preserves execution state independently of agent reasoning and allocates GPUs separately from agent execution. Across ranking, content understanding, and recommendation workloads, AutoTorch completed generation and full-scale training in 92 of 115 workflow runs (80%). Of these, 77 (83.7%) produced models meeting post-training quality requirements. In a separate cohort, AutoResearch improved the primary task metric on held-out data for 28 of 100 production pipelines. Engineering teams estimate that the stack reduced elapsed end-to-end migration time from approximately eight weeks to two weeks, a 4x speedup.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

ROAD: Modern Adversarial Training for Simple One-Step Distillation at Scale

One-step distillation turns pretrained diffusion models into fast generators, but strong results often require substantial training machinery and compute. Pure adversarial distillation offers a simpler route, yet has struggled at modern text-to-image scale. To address this limitation, we propose ROAD (Representation-grounded One-step Adversarial Distillation), a one-stage framework that distills text-to-image models with one adversarial objective and a lightweight representation-space critic. First, we replace the classical convolutional head with a Lipschitz-controlled Transformer head with token-level text conditioning, which matches the semantic tokens of modern visual encoders. Second, we observed a fixed random feature mixing leads to long-horizon degradation. We attribute it to generator-critic co-adaptation around one realization-specific view, and periodically re-draw the mixing to keep the randomization effective. Third, for our dense and vector-valued logits, we introduce Jacobian R1 which penalizes the full input-logit Jacobian, overcoming pooled R1's limitation of neglecting most of logit sensitivities. A single adversarial objective then suffices: in one step, ROAD reaches 11.03 FID on SDXL and 13.73 on SD3.5-M on COCO-10K, surpassing the multi-step teachers at a fraction of distribution matching's training compute.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

PASA-KV: Attacking Action-Facing Visual Routes in World Action Models

World action models (WAMs) increasingly couple internal visual or world representations with action generation, making their world-to-action pathways a critical yet poorly understood source of robustness. We investigate when perturbations to these internal representations actually become behaviorally consequential, and uncover a pronounced mismatch between representation perturbability and closed-loop vulnerability: attack effectiveness varies sharply across visual K/V routes, while larger representation displacement does not reliably imply stronger control failure. Our analysis attributes this mismatch to the action-conditioned readout, where keys determine where action queries read and values determine what content they receive. This motivates an action-facing view of vulnerability, in which the effect of a perturbation depends on how it is routed into action generation rather than on representation-space magnitude alone. We instantiate this view with Tail-AV, a short-probe signal for identifying vulnerable routes, and operationalize it in PASA-KV, which selects action-facing K/V targets before training a fresh task-shared attack. Experiments across multiple WAM systems and a physical robot validate readout-informed target selection, demonstrate strong closed-loop attacks, and reveal substantial system-level differences in resistance.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

GWDM: A Guided Wavelet Diffusion Model for Realistic Histopathology Image Generation

Histopathology images are recognized as a reliable and comprehensive modality for Deep Learning (DL) based diagnosis. However, effectiveness is constrained by limited large-scale annotated datasets, as collecting expert-labeled medical data is costly and time-intensive. Recent advances in generative models, particularly diffusion models, demonstrate strong capabilities in synthesizing medically relevant content for dataset augmentation. Existing generative frameworks treat histopathology patches as generic natural images, failing to enforce biological constraints such as histomorphological structures and heterogeneous staining patterns essential for valid synthesis. We propose a guided wavelet diffusion model (GWDM) framework that captures image details at multiple scales using wavelets and leverages controllable conditioning based on domain-specific histopathological features (e.g., tissue patterns and color variations). We further formulate a histomorphological guidance loss applied to real and generated patches. A loss ramping strategy gradually introduces these constraints during training, ensuring stable optimization and robust modeling of tissue architecture. GWDM was evaluated on three benchmark datasets (BCSS, MoNuSeg, and PAIP2019), consistently outperforming state-of-the-art generative methods. Ablation studies confirmed that domain-guided conditioning, perceptual loss, and structural similarity loss each contribute meaningfully to synthesis quality. Downstream nuclei and tissue segmentation experiments further validated the clinical utility of GWDM-generated images, demonstrating consistent performance improvements when synthetic data augments real training sets. This work shows that domain-specific conditioning and dual-loss optimization generate realistic histopathology patches, reducing data scarcity and improving clinical downstream segmentation performance.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2026

Detecting Misbehaviors of Large Vision-Language Models by Evidential Uncertainty Quantification

%Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown substantial advances in multimodal understanding and generation. However, when presented with incompetent or adversarial inputs, they frequently produce unreliable or even harmful content, such as fact hallucinations or dangerous instructions. This misalignment with human expectations, referred to as \emph{misbehaviors} of LVLMs, raises serious concerns for deployment in critical applications. These misbehaviors are found to stem from epistemic uncertainty, specifically either conflicting internal knowledge or the absence of supporting information. However, existing uncertainty quantification methods, which typically capture only overall epistemic uncertainty, have shown limited effectiveness in identifying such issues. To address this gap, we propose Evidential Uncertainty Quantification (EUQ), a fine-grained method that captures both information conflict and ignorance for effective detection of LVLM misbehaviors. In particular, we interpret features from the model output head as either supporting (positive) or opposing (negative) evidence. Leveraging Evidence Theory, we model and aggregate this evidence to quantify internal conflict and knowledge gaps within a single forward pass. %We extensively evaluate our method across four categories of misbehavior, including hallucinations, jailbreaks, adversarial vulnerabilities, and out-of-distribution (OOD) failures, using state-of-the-art LVLMs, and find that EUQ consistently outperforms strong baselines, showing that hallucinations correspond to high internal conflict and OOD failures to high ignorance. Furthermore, layer-wise evidential uncertainty dynamics analysis helps interpret the evolution of internal representations from a new perspective. The source code is available at https://github.com/HT86159/EUQ.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Generative Retrieval for Reverse Target Fishing with a Proteome-Scale Benchmark

Reverse target fishing identifies protein targets for a query molecule and is central to drug discovery and repurposing. Discriminative approaches adapted from virtual screening face sparse, long-tailed associations and missing-not-at-random measurements: treating unrecorded pairs as negatives can suppress genuine targets. We reformulate the task as generative retrieval and introduce GenFish. Residual vector quantization converts frozen protein language model features into shared semantic identifiers. Given a molecular fingerprint, GenFish autoregressively models codes conditioned on the query and preceding code, ranking proteins by identifier likelihood without explicitly labeling unrecorded pairs as negatives. We introduce ProTargetBench, the first proteome-scale benchmark for reverse target fishing to jointly support measured-panel discrimination and full-catalogue recovery of experimentally recorded positives. Covering 20,431 UniProt-reviewed human proteins, it integrates curated bioactivity evidence and distinguishes experimental inactivity from unmeasured associations. On 198 held-out molecules, GenFish achieves higher mean performance across all three full-catalogue retrieval metrics than four discriminative neural baselines and three non-neural baselines, including ligand-based methods. A controlled positive-hiding experiment shows that targeted removal of false-negative competition improves contrastive retrieval beyond matched random masking; GenFish remains stronger under the same incomplete supervision. Pfam alignment indicates that the semantic identifiers capture biologically meaningful relationships among proteins. These results establish generative retrieval as a principled paradigm for reverse target fishing under incomplete bioactivity records.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Partial regularity of heat flow of fractional harmonic maps to spheres

In this paper, we introduce the notation of stationary heat flow of $s$-harmonic maps from $\R^m$ into the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{\ell-1}\hookrightarrow \mathbb{R}^\ell$, for $0<s<1$, framed through the parabolic version of Caffarelli-Silvestre's extension. We prove that any stationary heat flow of $s$-harmonic maps is smooth away from a closed set of vanishing $(m+2-2s)$-dimensional parabolic Hausdorff measure. This extends to the fractional settings the partial regularity theorem on the heat flow of harmonic maps into spheres by Chen-Li-Lin and Feldman.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

Agentic Communication Networks: When Agents Become Network Entities

Autonomous agents are moving from application-layer components to active participants in networked systems. They not only generate traffic but also perceive context, express intent, invoke services, coordinate with other agents, and act under task, policy, and resource constraints. This evolution exposes a mismatch between emerging agentic interactions and conventional endpoint- and traffic-centric network abstractions. This white paper introduces Agentic Communication Networks (ACN) as a network-centric paradigm for the time when agents become first-order network entities. At its core, ACN reshapes networking around three fundamental aspects. First, agents are represented as identifiable and governable network entities with explicit identity, authority, and lifecycle. Second, agentic services are expressed through intent, capability, context, policy, and task state, allowing the network to capture what an agent seeks to accomplish and under what conditions. Third, agentic execution becomes an explicit network concern as tasks involve multiple agents, services, tools, and distributed capabilities across heterogeneous infrastructures. Based on these shifts, the paper defines the scope, principles, architecture, and research directions of ACN, positioning it as a networking foundation for autonomous agent ecosystems.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

Physical AI: Concepts, Techniques, and Challenges

In recent years, physical artificial intelligence (physical AI) has experienced rapid development, capturing significant attention in academia and industry. However, the field has yet to reach consensus on its definition, technical landscape, and core challenges. To address this gap, this monograph seeks to define physical AI, present its technical landscape, and examine each key technical subfield in depth. In doing so, it establishes a unified framework for Physical AI: artificial systems that perceive, model, and act upon the physical world through continuous feedback under real-world constraints. Further, this monograph distinguishes physical AI from conventional digital AI, embodied AI, cyber-physical systems, and digital twins. It develops the foundations of physical AI across physics, control, cognition, learning, and reasoning. It reviews key methodologies, including multimodal perception, physical data and simulation, world models, embodied foundation models, motor-control systems, multi-agent coordination, and hardware-software co-design. Furthermore, it examines applications spanning robotics, manufacturing, infrastructure, scientific experimentation, and autonomous services. Particular attention is given to sim-to-real transfer, reliability, real-time execution, evaluation, safety, governance, and long-term deployment. By connecting perception, prediction, decision-making, action, and adaptation in a closed loop, this monograph identifies the technical challenges and research directions required to advance from narrow automation toward more generalizable physical AI and, ultimately, physical artificial general intelligence (Physical AGI).

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Coordination-Free Workload Regularization for Variable-Cost Distributed Training

Synchronous data-parallel training usually assigns every rank the same number of records, even when record costs vary by orders of magnitude. For variable-length models, this converts input variation into idle time because each step waits for its most expensive rank-local batch. We present Batch Cost Lookahead (BCL), a coordination-free data-loading policy that buffers a bounded rank-local window and repartitions it into fixed-cardinality packs with balanced estimated cost. BCL preserves the trainer's record-count contract and requires neither cross-rank metadata exchange nor runtime modification. In simulation over public workload distributions, enabling BCL reduces per-rank estimated batch-cost variability by up to 82.8%. Across 13 NeMo-RL SFT corpora on eight H200 GPUs, rank-local BCL runs 1.050 to 1.167 times faster than pooled MFFD. Compiled H200 measurements on an internal sequence workload show speedups of 1.197 to 1.343 times over packed execution from one to four nodes. We also identify a memory-feasibility boundary: a p99 cap for high-variance or OOM-prone data bounds outliers before BCL balances the rest. These results show that substantial variable-cost imbalance can be removed at the data-loader boundary, while clarifying when data preparation or broader coordination is still necessary.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

How Do LLMs Understand Legal Philosophy? Diagnosing Legal-Philosophical Reasoning in LLMs

Legal reasoning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) to complete legal AI tasks such as legal judgment prediction. In legal practice, this reasoning is shaped by legal philosophy: a judge's view of the nature and sources of law guides how legal materials are interpreted and applied, so judges working from the same statutes and precedents can reach different judgments. Existing research has largely overlooked whether LLMs can understand legal philosophy and apply it in legal reasoning, an ability we call \textit{legal-philosophical reasoning}. To fill this gap, we introduce LePhilBench, a benchmark for evaluating the legal-philosophical reasoning of LLMs that comprises two benchmarking tasks and a dataset. The two tasks evaluate how well LLMs understand legal philosophy and how well they apply it in legal reasoning, respectively. The dataset is manually and meticulously constructed. Its test set contains 220 U.S. Supreme Court opinions. A law professor designed fourteen annotation questions on legal philosophy, and three law-trained annotators with formal training in jurisprudence answered all fourteen questions for every opinion, yielding 9,240 legal-philosophical labels. LePhilBench takes the first step toward exploring legal-philosophical reasoning in LLMs.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Physical-Field-Bridged Material Parameter Inference from Multi-View Deformation Videos

Estimating simulation-ready material parameters from visual observations is crucial for deformable-object manipulation but challenging because material properties are only indirectly revealed through physical responses. We introduce physical-field-bridged material inference, a single-pass framework that uses dense physical responses to connect multi-view RGB deformation videos with constitutive-type classification and continuous parameter regression. Unlike inverse-physics methods requiring per-scene reconstruction, online tuning, or simulation-in-the-loop optimization, our model predicts force/contact masks, projected motion-flow fields, and projected stress-response maps, then conditions material inference on these fields to reduce reliance on appearance or category shortcuts. We construct DeformFieldBench, a 3DGS MPM learning environment comprising 5,000 simulations across 100 object shapes and five mechanically informative loading modes, with dense pixel-aligned physical supervision. Our method achieves the best median errors on all four continuous parameters, improves stress-hotspot recall from 0.0762 to 0.5121, and attains 0.8676 SSIM/36.82 dB PSNR in same-simulator replay on unseen objects. Under a protocol-matched GSO evaluation, inference and future-state prediction take approximately 30 seconds, compared with 15-120 minutes for per-scene optimization. The method also yields measurable replay agreement on five real-world sequences. These results support dense physical fields as an effective bridge for fast material inference, while cross-simulator and real-world tests reveal remaining domain and identifiability gaps.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

LinMorph: Learning to Morph Weights for Efficient Video DiT Linearization

Post-hoc linearization is an attractive way to accelerate pretrained Video Diffusion Transformers (Video DiTs), yet existing methods largely treat the quality loss induced by attention replacement as a recovery problem. We show that a more fundamental bottleneck lies upstream: \emph{initialization}. Random initialization discards pretrained knowledge, whereas manual weight reuse transfers it through rigid and incomplete source--target correspondences. We introduce \textbf{LinMorph}, which recasts Video DiT linearization as a learnable softmax-to-linear weight transformation problem. Instead of copying predefined counterparts, LinMorph learns a cross-parameter morphism that lets each target Gated DeltaNet (GDN) parameter draw jointly from pretrained query, key, value, and output projections, including for parameters with no direct softmax counterpart. A single morphism is shared across layers and learned through local teacher alignment, while producing layer-specific initializations from their respective pretrained weights. The resulting weights are then materialized as independent GDN modules for progressive distillation and joint recovery.Since the morphism operates in weight space rather than token space, it can be learned on short, low-resolution clips and directly reused at larger video scales. Across pretrained Video DiTs, LinMorph enables markedly faster recovery and better final generation quality than random initialization and heuristic weight reuse. Results show that efficient linearization depends not only on how a converted model is recovered, but critically on how pretrained knowledge is transferred before recovery. Project page: https://lonelyling.github.io/LinMorph.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Cost-Efficient Privacy Enforcement for Email-Generating LLM Agents under Strategic Information Requests

LLM agents now act as delegated communication intermediaries: they read private context, draft messages, and send externally visible emails on behalf of a user. Existing checker-repair defenses can reduce inappropriate disclosure, but they rely on repeated calls to a remote action LLM (the model that drafts and repairs the email) and a remote checker LLM whenever a draft fails validation. This creates a cost problem as well as a privacy problem, especially when a requester strategically asks for exact values, raw records, source evidence, or other details that induce leakage-heavy drafts. We propose local contract-conditioned rewriting as a cost-efficient enforcement layer for email-generating agents. The mechanism intercepts an outgoing draft, constructs an information-release contract that specifies what to preserve, generalize, and forbid, rewrites the draft with a local Gemma rewriter, and selectively invokes a final PrivacyChecker. Across extensive email tasks under normal prompts and attack prompts that operationalize strategic information requests, Gemma + Checker reduces normal-prompt leakage from 11.41% to 4.03% while improving UsableRate (satisfied or partially satisfied outputs) from 85.2% to 92.6%. Under the strategic attack-prompt condition, it reduces leakage from 28.19% to 18.79% and reduces checker-only cost amplification from 1.32x to 1.02x. Offline replay ablation shows that the full contract reduces leakage relative to generic Gemma rewriting by 36.3% under normal prompts and 54.1% under attack prompts. These results support a local-first privacy enforcement design: move repair to a cheaper trusted local layer when possible, but retain the checker as the final semantic gate for high-risk sends.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Evaluating Sequence Assembly Strategies for Differentially Private Synthetic Time-Series Forecasting

Differentially private time-series generators commonly produce fixed-length synthetic windows, whereas downstream forecasting models often require long continuous training sequences. How these windows are assembled after generation can therefore alter the effective synthetic data presented to a forecaster, even when the trained generator remains unchanged. We study this post-generation sequence assembly process by systematically varying overlap rates and window-weighting schemes and evaluating the resulting sequences in terms of boundary continuity, statistical and temporal fidelity, and Train-on-Synthetic-Test-on-Real (TSTR) forecasting utility. Across four types of public datasets (ETTh1, ETTm1, Weather, and Appliances) and five forecasting models, the results reveal a clear forecaster-dependent assembly principle: downstream TSTR utility is jointly shaped by the forecaster, overlap rate, and window-weighting scheme, leading to distinct assembly preferences across forecasting models. Increased overlap generally improves boundary continuity, but improvements in continuity or individual fidelity diagnostics do not consistently reduce forecasting error, indicating that these diagnostics alone are insufficient for selecting assembly configurations. Complete five-forecaster assembly grids, together with matched Train-on-Real-Test-on-Real (TRTR) references, further characterize these regularities and quantify assembly-dependent utility relative to real-data training. We then validate the identified principles through additional analyses of robustness and generator variability.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Pistachio: Towards Synthetic, Balanced, and Long-Form Video Anomaly Benchmarks

Automatically detecting abnormal events in videos is crucial for modern autonomous systems, yet existing Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) benchmarks lack the scene diversity, balanced anomaly coverage, and temporal complexity needed to reliably assess real-world performance. Meanwhile, the community is increasingly moving toward Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU), which requires deeper semantic and causal reasoning but remains difficult to benchmark due to the heavy manual annotation effort it demands. In this paper, we introduce Pistachio, a new VAD/VAU benchmark constructed entirely through a controlled, generation-based pipeline. By leveraging recent advances in video generation models, Pistachio provides precise control over scenes, anomaly types, and temporal narratives, effectively eliminating the biases and limitations of Internet-collected datasets. Our pipeline integrates scene-conditioned anomaly assignment, multi-step storyline generation, and a temporally consistent long-form synthesis strategy that produces coherent 41-second videos with minimal human intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the scale, diversity, and complexity of Pistachio, revealing new challenges for existing methods and motivating future research on dynamic and multi-event anomaly understanding.

cs.CV↗