arXiv subjects

Tian Jin

Publications and source records attributed to Tian Jin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

CUA-Universe: A Scalable and Dynamic Environment for Hybrid GUI+CLI Agents

Computer-use agents have advanced on benchmarks like OSWorld and AndroidWorld, but still act mostly through the GUI, often producing inefficient trajectories. Real-world computer work is hybrid, combining visual-state inspection with precise, high-throughput command-line operations, so capable agents must coordinate both modalities over shared application state. Yet scalable hybrid environments remain scarce because supporting both GUI and CLI over real applications typically requires substantial manual engineering for each application. Existing agents also struggle to use the two interfaces complementarily: CLI-native agents lack visual perception for tasks involving interface state or layout, while GUI-native agents are inefficient for operations better executed through commands. We introduce CUA-Universe, a scalable environment-to-data pipeline that turns real desktop software into hybrid GUI+CLI environments. App-Forge adapts applications into reproducible VMs and command-line surfaces it discovers, wraps, or generates, scaling to 16 applications; Task-Weave synthesizes diverse hybrid tasks of controllable difficulty from reusable operations over seed files; and Path-Steer steers rollouts along efficient hybrid paths and harvests verified trajectories for post-training. Training on this data shifts behavior from inefficient GUI interaction and brittle CLI scripting toward effective GUI+CLI orchestration. Our 9B model improves both success and efficiency on CUA-Verse (Score +39.3 pts; -37% steps, -60% tokens), OSWorld (SR +16.8 pts; -57% steps, -44% tokens), and OSWorld-MCP (Score +7.84 pts; -27% steps, -30% tokens). CUA-Universe provides a scalable path toward more capable and efficient computer-use agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

ARENA: Automated Red-Teaming for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio-language models (LALMs) make it possible to interact with language models through speech, music, and environmental sound, but they also introduce a safety surface that is difficult to expose with text-only red-teaming. We study automated audio-grounded red-teaming, where a text query must remain safe in isolation while the joint text-audio input induces harmful target behavior. We propose ARENA, a closed-loop framework that trains a controller on an independent 2,000case text-audio dataset. MD-Judge supplies training rewards and adaptive search feedback, while a separate, non-adaptive Llama Guard 3 evaluator alone labels final outcomes. On 520 held-out AdvBench objectives, ARENA achieves FDR/PSR of 87.9/100.0%, 71.5/96.3%, 68.1/100.0%, and 75.4/98.5% on Audio Flamingo 3, Qwen2-Audio, MiMo-Audio, and GPTAudio, respectively. Ablations show that feedback-based refinement and audio-variant search substantially improve attack discovery.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

HyPASE: Hyperbolic Geometry for Parameter-Efficient Speech Emotion Fine-Tuning Framework for Large Audio-Language Models

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at general speech understanding; however, adapting them to fine-grained tasks like Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) remains a significant bottleneck. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods typically operate in flat Euclidean space, and this geometry fails to capture the multi-granularity nature of emotion cues, which range from low-level prosody to high-level semantics. To address this, we propose HyPASE, a hyperbolic PEFT framework for LALM-based SER. HyPASE leverages the Poincare ball model, using the hyperbolic radius as an explicit proxy for representational granularity. The framework consists of two core components: a Hyperbolic Geometric Adapter (HGA) for layer-adaptive weight modulation, and an Emotion-aware Multi-capacity Cross-modal Aggregator (EMCA) that compresses multi-scale features into compact audio prefixes. Empirical results on standard benchmarks show that HyPASE outperforms Euclidean PEFT baselines across all metrics on MELD and achieves a notable Unweighted Accuracy gain on IEMOCAP, particularly in class-imbalanced emotion recognition, with the accompanying slight Weighted Accuracy trade-off reflecting hyperbolic space's geometric prioritization of minority-class representations; furthermore, HyPASE achieves robust zero-shot cross-dataset generalization within a constrained parameter budget. By grounding the adaptation process in hyperbolic geometry, HyPASE offers a highly efficient path for LALM fine-tuning.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

ABSeeker: Training Long-Horizon Search Agents via Answer-Backtracked Credit Assignment

Long-horizon search agents must make multiple sequential actions (steps) to search, retrieve, verify, and integrate evidence to reach a final answer. However, existing methods for training these agents typically treat all steps within a trajectory uniformly during both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), failing to distinguish useful actions from erroneous or redundant ones. In this paper, we propose Answer-Backtracked Credit Assignment (ABC), a fine-grained credit assignment framework for training long-horizon search agents by converting sparse trajectory-level outcomes into dense step-level supervision that rewards useful actions (even in failed trajectories) while suppressing erroneous or redundant actions. Specifically, given a potentially obscure query and its corresponding ground-truth answer, ABC first performs Answer-Backtracked Clue Recovery, which traces back from the answer to recover intermediate clues required to solve the question. It then applies Clue-Anchored Step Scoring to evaluate each search step against these clues, converting sparse binary outcome supervision into dense step-level rewards. Based on these rewards, we develop ABC-SFT, which reweights the loss of each turn, and ABC-GRPO, which uses the step-level scores as rewards in GRPO. Building on this framework, we train ABSeeker based on Qwen3.5-4B with only 8.5k examples. ABSeeker achieves 37.3% on BrowseComp and 39.1% on BrowseComp-ZH. With context management, the scores further improve to 55.3% and 52.9%, respectively, significantly outperforming same-scale (4B) agents and even matching the performance of larger ones (approximately 30B). These results demonstrate the effectiveness of answer-backtracked step-level credit assignment for training long-horizon search agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

YouZhi: Towards High-Concurrency Financial LLMs via Adaptive GQA-to-MLA Transition

Large language models (LLMs) drive significant financial innovations, yet their high-concurrency deployment is severely bottlenecked by KV cache memory overhead, which inflates infrastructure costs and throttles scalability. To address this, we propose YouZhi-LLM, a highly efficient financial LLM empowered by a comprehensive structural transition and training pipeline natively built on the Huawei Ascend ecosystem. At its algorithmic core, YouZhi-LLM features a layer-adaptive GQA-to-MLA transition framework that dynamically assigns per-layer FreqFold sizes, maximizing KV-cache compression while minimizing perplexity degradation. To recover representation capacity and inject domain expertise, the Ascend-based training pipeline seamlessly integrates generalized knowledge distillation with financial-specific supervised fine-tuning. Evaluations demonstrate the superiority of this systematic approach, with the adaptive transition reducing perplexity degradation by up to 35% over uniform baselines. Crucially, when evaluated on Ascend NPUs via vLLM-Ascend, the massive KV-cache reduction translates directly into deployment efficiency. Compared to their respective base models, YouZhi-7B yields a 12.3% improvement in average financial benchmark score alongside a 2.69$\times$ increase in maximum concurrency; similarly, YouZhi-14B achieves a 7.0% accuracy gain and a 2.43$\times$ concurrency boost, establishing a new paradigm for cost-effective, high-throughput financial inference.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Towards Recursive Self-Evolving Agentic Literature Retrieval

Scientific literature retrieval must understand complex search intents while preserving source authenticity. Traditional keyword and embedding-based systems return authentic sources but miss nuanced intents, whereas large language models capture richer intents but may fabricate citations. We introduce PaSaMaster, a Recursive Self-Evolving agentic literature retrieval system that iteratively analyzes intent, retrieves verified papers and ranks them with evidence-grounded relevance scores. PaSaMaster combines self-evolving retrieval that refines search intent from ranked evidence over time, hallucination-free ranking over verified papers rather than generated citations, and cost-efficient planning--retrieval separation that reserves frontier LLMs for intent understanding while delegating retrieval and scoring to lightweight models and customized corpora. Across 38 disciplines in PaSaMaster-Bench, PaSaMaster achieves a 16.5$\times$ higher F1-score than Google Scholar and a 37.8\% higher F1-score than GPT-5.2 at about 1\% of the cost, while reducing source hallucination from 32.66\% in generative LLMs to zero: https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/PaSaMaster

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

PhysMaster: Building an Autonomous AI Physicist for Theoretical and Computational Physics Research

Advances in LLM reasoning and tool use have enabled agentic science, yet frontier theoretical and computational physics remains challenging because research requires deep domain expertise, long-horizon reasoning, and reliable numerical computation. We introduce PRL-Bench, a research-reproduction benchmark adapted from 100 Physical Review Letters papers across major areas of modern physics. PRL-Bench distills realistic research workflows into traceable tasks with explicit intermediate artifacts and diverse evaluation rubrics; each task is estimated by domain experts to require more than six hours for a specialized PhD student to reproduce independently. Evaluations show that existing agents remain unreliable on extended research workflows. We therefore present PhysMaster, a scientific agent combining adaptive MCTS-based multi-trajectory exploration with hierarchical memory to improve long-horizon robustness and knowledge accumulation. PhysMaster achieves the highest overall PRL-Bench score of 51.08, outperforming Codex, OpenHands, OpenClaw, and ReAct, and yields relative improvements of 14.13 percent to 93.38 percent across backbone models. Error analysis shows that PhysMaster substantially reduces failures from incomplete long-horizon execution, while remaining bottlenecks lie in physics knowledge and analytical reasoning. Together, PRL-Bench and PhysMaster provide a rigorous benchmark and effective system for advancing autonomous AI research in frontier physics.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Sharing State Between Prompts and Programs

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced a new type of programming: natural language programming. Users write prompts, which are instructions in natural language, to direct LLMs to perform tasks such as natural language processing, code generation, reasoning, etc. An emerging area of research enables interoperability between prompts and programs. We present a novel programming abstraction, shared program state, that removes the manual work required to enable interoperability between prompts and program states. With shared program state, programmers can write prompts that directly access program variables, compute with program objects, and implement control flow in the program. We present a schema for specifying natural function interfaces that extend programming systems to support programs with prompts and leverage this schema to specify shared program state as a natural function interface. We implement shared program state in the Nightjar programming system. Nightjar enables programmers to write Python programs containing prompts that share the Python program state. We show that Nightjar programs achieve comparable or higher task accuracy than manually written implementations (+4-19%), while decreasing the lines of code by 39.6% on average. The tradeoff is that Nightjar may incur runtime overhead (0.4-4.3x manual implementations).

cs.PL↗

arXiv2025

Planned Diffusion

Most large language models are autoregressive: they generate tokens one at a time. Discrete diffusion language models can generate multiple tokens in parallel, but sampling from them requires a denoising order: a strategy for deciding which tokens to decode at each step. Determining a good denoising order is difficult, and existing approaches use heuristics that create a steep trade-off between quality and latency. We propose planned diffusion, a system that trains the model to determine its own denoising order. Planned diffusion uses a single model that transitions between autoregressive and diffusion-based generation: first, the model autoregressively generates a plan that partitions the response into semantically independent chunks; second, the model denoises all chunks in parallel. The autoregressive plan enables the model to define the denoising order itself. On AlpacaEval, planned diffusion achieves 1.27x to 1.81x speedup over autoregressive generation with only 0.87% to 5.4% drop in win rate, establishing a new Pareto frontier for parallel generation with discrete diffusion. Additionally, planned diffusion's instruction following quality continues to improve with more finetuning compute, while the autoregressive baseline plateaus. Our implementation provides simple runtime knobs that offer tunable control over the quality-latency trade-off.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Large Language Models, and LLM-Based Agents, Should Be Used to Enhance the Digital Public Sphere

This paper argues that large language model-based recommenders can displace today's attention-allocation machinery. LLM-based recommenders would ingest open-web content, infer a user's natural-language goals, and present information that matches their reflective preferences. Properly designed, they could deliver personalization without industrial-scale data hoarding, return control to individuals, optimize for genuine ends rather than click-through proxies, and support autonomous attention management. Synthesizing evidence of current systems' harms with recent work on LLM-driven pipelines, we identify four key research hurdles: generating candidates without centralized data, maintaining computational efficiency, modeling preferences robustly, and defending against prompt-injection. None looks prohibitive; surmounting them would steer the digital public sphere toward democratic, human-centered values.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

S2A: A Unified Framework for Parameter and Memory Efficient Transfer Learning

Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) aims to reduce the scales of pretrained models for multiple downstream tasks. However, as the models keep scaling up, the memory footprint of existing PETL methods is not significantly reduced compared to the reduction of learnable parameters. This limitation hinders the practical deployment of PETL methods on memory-constrained devices. To this end, we proposed a new PETL framework, called Structure to Activation (S2A), to reduce the memory footprint of activation during fine-tuning. Specifically, our framework consists of: 1) Activation modules design(i.e., bias, prompt and side modules) in the parametric model structure, which results in a significant reduction of adjustable parameters and activation memory; 2) 4-bit quantization of activations based on their derivatives for non-parametric structures (e.g., nonlinear functions), which maintains accuracy while significantly reducing memory usage. Our S2A method consequently offers a lightweight solution in terms of both parameters and memory footprint. We evaluated S2A with different backbones and performed extensive experiments on various datasets to evaluate the effectiveness. The results show that our methods not only outperform existing PETL techniques, achieving a fourfold reduction in GPU memory footprint on average, but also shows competitive performance in accuracy with fewer tunable parameters. These demonstrate that our method is highly suitable for practical transfer learning on hardware-constrained devices.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MASLab: A Unified and Comprehensive Codebase for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing single LLMs to address complex and diverse tasks in practical applications. Despite considerable advancements, the field lacks a unified codebase that consolidates existing methods, resulting in redundant re-implementation efforts, unfair comparisons, and high entry barriers for researchers. To address these challenges, we introduce MASLab, a unified, comprehensive, and research-friendly codebase for LLM-based MAS. (1) MASLab integrates over 20 established methods across multiple domains, each rigorously validated by comparing step-by-step outputs with its official implementation. (2) MASLab provides a unified environment with various benchmarks for fair comparisons among methods, ensuring consistent inputs and standardized evaluation protocols. (3) MASLab implements methods within a shared streamlined structure, lowering the barriers for understanding and extension. Building on MASLab, we conduct extensive experiments covering 10+ benchmarks and 8 models, offering researchers a clear and comprehensive view of the current landscape of MAS methods. MASLab will continue to evolve, tracking the latest developments in the field, and invite contributions from the broader open-source community.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MobileA3gent: Training Mobile GUI Agents Using Decentralized Self-Sourced Data from Diverse Users

The advancement of mobile GUI agents has opened new opportunities for automating tasks on mobile devices. Training these agents requires large-scale high-quality data, which is prohibitively expensive when relying on human labor. Given the vast population of global mobile phone users, if automated data collection from them becomes feasible, the resulting data volume and the subsequently trained mobile agents could reach unprecedented levels. Nevertheless, two major challenges arise: (1) extracting user instructions without human intervention and (2) utilizing distributed user data while preserving privacy. To tackle these challenges, we propose MobileA3gent, a collaborative framework that trains mobile GUI Agents using decentralized self-sourced data from diverse users. The framework comprises two components, each targeting a specific challenge: (1) Auto-Annotation, which enables the automatic collection of high-quality datasets during users' routine phone usage with minimal cost. (2) FedVLM-A, which enhances federated VLM training under non-IID distributions by incorporating adapted global aggregation based on both episode-level and step-level variability. Extensive experiments prove that MobileA3gent achieves superior performance over traditional approaches at only 1% of the cost, highlighting its potential for real-world applications

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

GraphMaster: Automated Graph Synthesis via LLM Agents in Data-Limited Environments

The era of foundation models has revolutionized AI research, yet Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) remain constrained by the scarcity of large-scale graph corpora. Traditional graph data synthesis techniques primarily focus on simplistic structural operations, lacking the capacity to generate semantically rich nodes with meaningful textual attributes: a critical limitation for real-world applications. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional text generation capabilities, their direct application to graph synthesis is impeded by context window limitations, hallucination phenomena, and structural consistency challenges. To address these issues, we introduce GraphMaster, the first multi-agent framework specifically designed for graph data synthesis in data-limited environments. GraphMaster orchestrates four specialized LLM agents (Manager, Perception, Enhancement, and Evaluation) that collaboratively optimize the synthesis process through iterative refinement, ensuring both semantic coherence and structural integrity. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we create new data-limited "Sub" variants of six standard graph benchmarks, specifically designed to test synthesis capabilities under realistic constraints. Additionally, we develop a novel interpretability assessment framework that combines human evaluation with a principled Grassmannian manifold-based analysis, providing both qualitative and quantitative measures of semantic coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that GraphMaster significantly outperforms traditional synthesis methods across multiple datasets, establishing a strong foundation for advancing GFMs in data-scarce environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

EDENet: Echo Direction Encoding Network for Place Recognition Based on Ground Penetrating Radar

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) based localization has gained significant recognition in robotics due to its ability to detect stable subsurface features, offering advantages in environments where traditional sensors like cameras and LiDAR may struggle. However, existing methods are primarily focused on small-scale place recognition (PR), leaving the challenges of PR in large-scale maps unaddressed. These challenges include the inherent sparsity of underground features and the variability in underground dielectric constants, which complicate robust localization. In this work, we investigate the geometric relationship between GPR echo sequences and underground scenes, leveraging the robustness of directional features to inform our network design. We introduce learnable Gabor filters for the precise extraction of directional responses, coupled with a direction-aware attention mechanism for effective geometric encoding. To further enhance performance, we incorporate a shift-invariant unit and a multi-scale aggregation strategy to better accommodate variations in di-electric constants. Experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed EDENet not only surpasses existing solutions in terms of PR performance but also offers advantages in model size and computational efficiency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Synthesizing Post-Training Data for LLMs through Multi-Agent Simulation

Post-training is essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions. However, its effectiveness depends on high-quality instruction data, which is challenging to obtain in the real world due to privacy concerns, data scarcity, and high annotation costs. To fill this gap, inspired by the recent success of using LLMs to simulate human society, we propose MATRIX, a multi-agent simulator that automatically generates diverse text-based scenarios, capturing a wide range of real-world human needs in a realistic and scalable manner. Leveraging these outputs, we introduce a novel scenario-driven instruction generator MATRIX-Gen for controllable and highly realistic data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively generates both general and domain-specific data. On AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks, Llama-3-8B-Base, post-trained on datasets synthesized by MATRIX-Gen with just 20K instruction-response pairs, outperforms Meta's Llama-3-8B-Instruct model, which was trained on over 10M pairs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Learning to Keep a Promise: Scaling Language Model Decoding Parallelism with Learned Asynchronous Decoding

Decoding with autoregressive large language models (LLMs) traditionally occurs sequentially, generating one token after another. An emerging line of work explored parallel decoding by identifying and simultaneously generating semantically independent chunks of LLM responses. However, these techniques rely on hand-crafted heuristics tied to syntactic structures like lists and paragraphs, making them rigid and imprecise. We present PASTA, a learning-based system that teaches LLMs to identify semantic independence and express parallel decoding opportunities in their own responses. At its core are PASTA-LANG and its interpreter: PASTA-LANG is an annotation language that enables LLMs to express semantic independence in their own responses; the language interpreter acts on these annotations to orchestrate parallel decoding on-the-fly at inference time. Through a two-stage finetuning process, we train LLMs to generate PASTA-LANG annotations that optimize both response quality and decoding speed. Evaluation on AlpacaEval, an instruction following benchmark, shows that our approach Pareto-dominates existing methods in terms of decoding speed and response quality; our results demonstrate geometric mean speedups ranging from 1.21x to 1.93x with corresponding quality changes of +2.2% to -7.1%, measured by length-controlled win rates against sequential decoding baseline.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The Journey Matters: Average Parameter Count over Pre-training Unifies Sparse and Dense Scaling Laws

Pruning eliminates unnecessary parameters in neural networks; it offers a promising solution to the growing computational demands of large language models (LLMs). While many focus on post-training pruning, sparse pre-training--which combines pruning and pre-training into a single phase--provides a simpler alternative. In this work, we present the first systematic exploration of optimal sparse pre-training configurations for LLMs through an examination of 80 unique pruning schedules across different sparsity levels and training durations. We find that initiating pruning at 25% of total training compute and concluding at 75% achieves near-optimal final evaluation loss. These findings provide valuable insights for efficient and effective sparse pre-training of LLMs. Furthermore, we propose a new scaling law that modifies the Chinchilla scaling law to use the average parameter count over pre-training. Through empirical and theoretical validation, we demonstrate that this modified scaling law accurately models evaluation loss for both sparsely and densely pre-trained LLMs, unifying scaling laws across pre-training paradigms. Our findings indicate that while sparse pre-training achieves the same final model quality as dense pre-training for equivalent compute budgets, it provides substantial benefits through reduced model size, enabling significant potential computational savings during inference.

cs.LG↗