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Tiancheng He

Publications and source records attributed to Tiancheng He.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

LatticeMind: A Conflict-Aware Memory Primitive for Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent LLM systems often fail not for lack of candidate answers, but because they have no persistent mechanism for deciding which incompatible claim should currently be trusted. Majority vote, debate, and judge-based selection choose an output without recording which claim wins, which is contested, or why a later update supersedes it. We present \term{LatticeMind}, a conflict-aware structured memory that handles contradiction at write time. It maintains explicit item status, applies cheap symbolic conflict checks, and invokes LLM reconciliation only for unresolved semantic cases. On a label-blind ConflictBank evaluation that removes source-name hints, LatticeMind reaches 0.97 accuracy versus 0.61 for the strongest aggregation baseline, with the gap significant at $p<10^{-6}$ by paired McNemar test. Ablations show that removing the checker or the reconciler costs 12 to 14 points. On four secondary planning benchmarks the picture is mixed: LatticeMind beats naive merge on three of four, but does not replace deliberation methods on tasks rewarding iterative search.

cs.AI

RareLens: Towards End-to-End Rare Disease Care via Aligning Divergent Large Language Model Reasoning

Rare diseases represent one of the most challenging settings for clinical decision-making, where heterogeneous presentations, sparse evidence and limited expertise create persistent uncertainty throughout the care pathway. Although artificial intelligence could help, existing systems largely address isolated tasks, particularly diagnosis, and usually rely on downstream investigations rather than information available at initial presentation. Here we show that clinical AI performance under uncertainty can be improved not by scaling a single model, but by exploiting the diversity of multiple imperfect reasoning systems. Across heterogeneous large language models, we identify divergent reasoning trajectories with complementary error patterns and develop RareLens, which learns to reconcile these perspectives into actionable decisions across four stages of rare disease care: risk screening, diagnosis, treatment planning and prognosis prediction. Built on RarelensBench, a real-world dataset of 157,525 cases spanning all 33 Orphanet categories and more than 7,000 conditions, RareLens outperformed every frontier model tested, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, Claude-3.7-Sonnet and Gemini-2.5-Pro, across all stages. It achieved an area under the curve of 0.917 for screening and top-1 accuracies of 65.5% and 89.8% for diagnosis and treatment. In an external evaluation involving 1,287 cases and 23 physicians, autonomous RareLens and physicians assisted by RareLens both outperformed unaided physicians, while demonstrating that effective human-AI collaboration requires more than simply providing model outputs. These findings establish divergent model reasoning as an exploitable source of information and suggest a general strategy for building AI systems that operate reliably under high clinical uncertainty.

cs.AI

SaFeR-Steer: Evolving Multi-Turn MLLMs via Synthetic Bootstrapping and Feedback Dynamics

MLLMs are increasingly deployed in multi-turn settings, where attackers can escalate unsafe intent through the evolving visual-text history and exploit long-context safety decay. Yet safety alignment is still dominated by single-turn data and fixed-template dialogues, leaving a mismatch between training and deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose SaFeR-Steer, a progressive multi-turn alignment framework that combines staged synthetic bootstrapping with tutor-in-the-loop GRPO to train a single student under adaptive, on-policy attacks. We also introduce Trajectory-Consistent Summative Reward (TCSR), which aggregates the historical minimum and average of turn rewards so that any low-quality turn affects the trajectory-level return. I. Dataset. We release STEER, a multi-turn multimodal safety dataset with STEER-SFT (12,934), STEER-RL (2,000), and STEER-Bench (3,227) dialogues spanning 2-10 turns. II. Experiment. Starting from Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B, SaFeR-Steer substantially improves Safety/Helpfulness on both single-turn (48.30/45.86 $\rightarrow$ 81.84/70.77 for 3B; 56.21/60.32 $\rightarrow$ 87.89/77.40 for 7B) and multi-turn benchmarks (12.55/27.13 $\rightarrow$ 55.58/70.27 for 3B; 24.66/46.48 $\rightarrow$ 64.89/72.35 for 7B), shifting failures to later turns and yielding robustness beyond scaling alone. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SaFeR-Steer

cs.LG

SaFeR-ToolKit: Structured Reasoning via Virtual Tool Calling for Multimodal Safety

Vision-language models remain susceptible to multimodal jailbreaks and over-refusal because safety hinges on both visual evidence and user intent, while many alignment pipelines supervise only the final response. To address this, we present SaFeR-ToolKit, which formalizes safety decision-making as a checkable protocol. Concretely, a planner specifies a persona, a Perception $\to$ Reasoning $\to$ Decision tool set, and a constrained transition graph, while a responder outputs a typed key-value tool trace before the final answer. To make the protocol reliably followed in practice, we train a single policy with a three-stage curriculum (SFT $\to$ DPO $\to$ GRPO), where GRPO directly supervises tool usage beyond answer-level feedback. Our contributions are two-fold: I. Dataset. The first tool-based safety reasoning dataset, comprising 31,654 examples (SFT 6k, DPO 18.6k, GRPO 6k) plus 1k held-out evaluation. II. Experiments. On Qwen2.5-VL, SaFeR-ToolKit significantly improves Safety/Helpfulness/Reasoning Rigor on 3B (29.39/45.04/4.98 $\to$ 84.40/71.13/78.87) and 7B (53.21/52.92/19.26 $\to$ 86.34/80.79/85.34), while preserving general capabilities (3B: 58.67 $\to$ 59.21; 7B: 66.39 $\to$ 66.81). Codes are available at https://github.com/Duebassx/SaFeR_ToolKit.

cs.LG

RareAlert: Aligning heterogeneous large language model reasoning for early rare disease risk screening

Missed and delayed diagnosis remains a major challenge in rare disease care. At the initial clinical encounters, physicians assess rare disease risk using only limited information under high uncertainty. When high-risk patients are not recognised at this stage, targeted diagnostic testing is often not initiated, resulting in missed diagnosis. Existing primary care triage processes are structurally insufficient to reliably identify patients with rare diseases at initial clinical presentation and universal screening is needed to reduce diagnostic delay. Here we present RareAlert, an early screening system which predict patient-level rare disease risk from routinely available primary-visit information. RareAlert integrates reasoning generated by ten LLMs, calibrates and weights these signals using machine learning, and distils the aligned reasoning into a single locally deployable model. To develop and evaluate RareAlert, we curated RareBench, a real-world dataset of 158,666 cases covering 33 Orphanet disease categories and more than 7,000 rare conditions, including both rare and non-rare presentations. The results showed that rare disease identification can be reconceptualised as a universal uncertainty resolution process applied to the general patient population. On an independent test set, RareAlert, a Qwen3-4B based model trained with calibrated reasoning signals, achieved an AUC of 0.917, outperforming the best machine learning ensemble and all evaluated LLMs, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, o3-mini, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Qwen3-235B. These findings demonstrate the diversity in LLM medical reasoning and the effectiveness of aligning such reasoning in highly uncertain clinical tasks. By incorporating calibrated reasoning into a single model, RareAlert enables accurate, privacy-preserving, and scalable rare disease risk screening suitable for large-scale local deployment.

cs.AI

LiveSearchBench: An Automatically Constructed Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Dynamic Knowledge

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on question answering often relies on static benchmarks that reward memorization and understate the role of retrieval, failing to capture the dynamic nature of world knowledge. We present LiveSearchBench, an automated pipeline for constructing retrieval-dependent benchmarks from recent knowledge updates. Our method computes deltas between successive Wikidata snapshots, filters candidate triples for quality, and synthesizes natural-language questions at three levels of reasoning difficulty, each guaranteed to admit a unique, verifiable answer through SPARQL validation. The pipeline is fully automated, scalable across time, and minimizes human intervention, enabling continual regeneration of temporally grounded benchmarks. Experiments show a pronounced performance drop when models confront facts that post-date pretraining, with the gap most salient on multi-hop queries. Retrieval augmented methods and larger, instruction-tuned models provide partial gains but fail to close this recency gap. By design, LiveSearchBench shifts evaluation from static memorization toward tasks that require up-to-date retrieval and reasoning, offering a foundation for systematic, long-term assessment of LLMs under evolving knowledge.

cs.CL

Multimodal Breast Lesion Classification Using Cross-Attention Deep Networks

Accurate breast lesion risk estimation can significantly reduce unnecessary biopsies and help doctors decide optimal treatment plans. Most existing computer-aided systems rely solely on mammogram features to classify breast lesions. While this approach is convenient, it does not fully exploit useful information in clinical reports to achieve the optimal performance. Would clinical features significantly improve breast lesion classification compared to using mammograms alone? How to handle missing clinical information caused by variation in medical practice? What is the best way to combine mammograms and clinical features? There is a compelling need for a systematic study to address these fundamental questions. This paper investigates several multimodal deep networks based on feature concatenation, cross-attention, and co-attention to combine mammograms and categorical clinical variables. We show that the proposed architectures significantly increase the lesion classification performance (average area under ROC curves from 0.89 to 0.94). We also evaluate the model when clinical variables are missing.

eess.IV