arXiv subjects

Tao Ning

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Ning.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Dependency-Aware Chain-of-Thought Compression for Financial Reasoning

Chain of thought prompting improves complex reasoning, but its long intermediate traces create substantial inference cost and hinder practical deployment in financial settings. We present a Hierarchical Semantic Distillation Network, HSDN, for compressing reasoning chains while preserving answer accuracy and logical coherence. The framework combines semantic segmentation, dependency graph construction, dual encoder importance scoring, constrained segment selection, and local boundary rewriting. A frozen Qwen3 4B model is used only for feature extraction and final answer generation, while the compression process remains structured and interpretable. On the AFAC2025 benchmark, HSDN achieves 91.0% accuracy with 68.4% compression, outperforming strong compression baselines in overall score and reasoning coherence. The results show that graph guided compression is effective for high stakes financial reasoning tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Context-Masked Truncated Reasoning Audits for Answer-Key Dependence in LLM Tutors

Large language model (LLM) tutors may have access to teacher notes, answer keys, rubrics, or retrieved solutions while producing student-facing explanations. We study whether truncated reasoning probes can distinguish direct access to such private context from answer information carried by the written explanation. Using Truncated Reasoning AUC Evaluation (TRACE), we evaluate 1000 GSM8K problems under question-only, correct answer-key, and wrong answer-key contexts. When forced-answer probes retain the private key, answer-key TRACE AUC rises from 0.375 to 0.900, and the gold answer is recoverable with no explanation at all in 998 of 1000 cases. We then introduce a context-masked replay: answer-key-generated prefixes are probed under the corresponding question-only prompt. Masking reduces 10\% prefix accuracy from 0.997 to 0.126 and median AUC from 0.900 to 0.375, nearly matching question-only values of 0.113 and 0.375. On 746 pairs where both explanations end correctly, the masked mean AUC difference is $-0.0086$ with a 95\% bootstrap interval spanning zero. Wrong keys still account for 272 of 387 incorrect final responses, showing that private artifacts can influence outputs even when early-prefix evidence disappears after masking. These results establish context masking as necessary for attributing early answer availability to an explanation rather than its hidden input.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

LLM-Driven CI-CD Workflow Intelligence for Cyber Systems Engineering

CI/CD workflows have become executable operational policy: they decide what gets built, tested, released, and deployed, and they mediate how maintainers interact with delivery infrastructure. That makes them an important measurement point for cyber-systems engineering. Recent large language model (LLM) work shows that workflow stages can be recognized directly from configuration files, but stage labels alone do not tell us whether a workflow is brittle, unusual for its ecosystem, or worth revising first. We present an LLM-based CI/CD analysis pipeline that combines repository enrichment, anti-pattern detection, stage mining, and recommendation generation over a large GitHub corpus. Starting from 59,550 repositories with at least 1,000 stars, we identify 34,225 projects with CI/CD and collect 127,559 configuration files. Across 75,201 analyzed workflows, the anti-pattern detector reports 434,769 findings, dominated by reliability and maintainability issues. Across 59,906 configurations, stage usage differs significantly by language ($\chi^2 = 4168.88$, $p < 0.001$, Cramer's $V = 0.063$), and domain analysis shows distinct operational profiles, including higher release and cache usage in mobile projects. For repository-level recommendation generation, few-shot prompting performs best overall, averaging 8.25 recommendations per repository with 96.1% YAML-valid snippets. Taken together, the results argue for CI/CD observability that combines diagnosis, context, and human review rather than treating workflow mining as a stage-classification problem alone.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

AdaStop: Cost-Aware Early Stopping for DNN Test Selection

Existing methods for testing deep neural networks (DNNs) primarily prioritize test inputs likely to reveal model faults under a fixed labeling budget. In practice, choosing that budget is difficult: too little testing misses failures, while too much incurs unnecessary labeling costs. This work studies the stopping problem in DNN testing. We formulate testing as a cost--benefit decision process in which labeling an input incurs cost $c$ and discovering a fault yields value $v$. Based on this formulation, we introduce \textit{AdaStop}, a framework that estimates the marginal fault discovery rate during testing and stops labeling when the estimated rate falls below the threshold $\tau = c/v$. Experiments across multiple datasets, architectures, and selection strategies show that $65$--$84\%$ of faults can be discovered using only $9$--$31\%$ of the labeling budget.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

SemHash-LLM: A Multi-Granularity Semantic Hashing Framework for Document Deduplication

Large scale document deduplication must preserve semantic equivalence while remaining efficient over massive corpora. We present SemHash LLM, a multi granularity framework that unifies semantic projection hashing, attention weighted MinHash, contrastive boundary learning, and selective LLM based adjudication. The method combines character, token, and document level signals through gated fusion, then applies a cascaded filtering pipeline for efficient candidate reduction. Semantic projection hashing learns compact binary codes in distilled LLM embedding space, while attention weighted Min- Hash suppresses boilerplate and emphasizes informative content. Adaptive decision boundaries and uncertainty estimation further improve robustness across template pollution, short text perturbation, containment, and viral fragments. Experiments show that SemHash LLM achieves strong duplicate detection quality with less than one percent neural verification cost.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Self-Commitment Latency: A Reward-Free Probe for Prompted Implicit Hacking

Implicit reward hacking is hard to audit when a language model's chain of thought appears benign: a final answer may be anchored by a prompt shortcut while the written reasoning still resembles ordinary problem solving. Verifier-based probes expose such behavior by measuring how early truncated reasoning contexts obtain high reward, but require a task-specific reward signal. This paper proposes a weaker-input alternative, self-commitment latency, which measures how early a prompted reasoning context commits to the model's own final answer. We evaluate the probe in a controlled paired GSM8K setting using Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct-4bit, comparing ordinary prompts with prompts that include an answer hint. Hinted contexts commit substantially earlier and with lower uncertainty than honest contexts. The primary latency metric, first-commitment latency at threshold 0.8, reaches AUROC 0.878; supporting whole-curve summaries reach AUROC 0.926 for commitment range and 0.904 for mean uncommitted mass. The signal is stronger when both prompt conditions answer correctly and remains stable across thresholds. These results show that shortcut-available reasoning contexts can leave an early behavioral commitment signature detectable without a reward model, external judge, or trained classifier.

cs.AI↗