arXiv subjects

Tongyuan Miao

Publications and source records attributed to Tongyuan Miao.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Interactive Clarification for Cloud Infrastructure-as-Code Synthesis

The scale and complexity of modern cloud infrastructure have made "Infrastructure-as-Code" (IaC) essential for managing deployments through declarative configurations. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate IaC configurations from natural language, user requests are often ambiguous and underspecified. Unlike traditional code generation, it is costly and time-consuming to test IaC configurations during the synthesis, forcing the LLMs into an almost one-shot regime. We observe that ambiguity in IaC synthesis exhibits a compositional structure: configurations decompose into three axes (resources, topology, attributes) where higher-level decisions constrain lower-level ones. We propose a training-free, multi-level disambiguation framework that generates diverse candidate specifications, identifies structural disagreements across these axes, ranks them by informativeness, and produces targeted clarification questions that progressively narrow the configuration space. We further introduce Ambig-IaC, an expert-verified benchmark of 300 validated IaC tasks with ambiguous requests, and define evaluation metrics based on graph edit distance and exact attribute matching. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing interactive clarification baselines, with gains that scale with the interaction budget and generalize across models. Extensive ablation studies and analyses further demonstrate its robustness for interactive IaC synthesis.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Synthesizing Voltage Ride-Through Controllers for Data Centers

Data centers are among the power grid's fastest-growing loads. Since data center servers are sensitive electronic components, they need to be protected against the grid's voltage disturbances during grid faults. While disconnecting from the grid achieves this, it can further destabilize the power system if many data centers trip at once. To address this emerging concern, voltage ride-through (VRT) grid codes have been proposed to standardize data center behavior. They require a data center to stay connected for a period of time through the disturbance, hold an active power floor, and recover its draw within a deadline upon restoration. However, systematically designing and certifying controllers that satisfy these coupled temporal and operational requirements remains challenging. We propose SolVRT, a system that synthesizes a grid-code-compliant VRT controller for a given data center using formal methods. We develop a specification language that expresses a grid code in Signal Temporal Logic (STL) as the basis for formal reasoning. Our encoding algorithm takes the specification, along with a model of the data center's power topology, and translates the constraints into a controller synthesis problem. This step produces a correct-by-construction controller if a solution can be found, or a proof that no such controller exists. For the latter case, SolVRT provides a diagnostic step: it traces the facility's "conflict frontier," isolates the conflicting clauses that led to non-compliance, and computes the smallest hardware or workload change that would enable compliance. We evaluate SolVRT through closed-loop simulations of a 200 MW data center connected to a 140-bus transmission system. The results demonstrate that SolVRT can synthesize compliant VRT controllers, certify infeasibility when compliance is unattainable, and identify targeted modifications that enable compliance.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Information Discernment in Large Language Models

LLMs are increasingly used with external knowledge sources like the internet. Do they weigh information appropriately -- updating more for reliable sources (source discernment) and more when claims bring priors closer to the truth (truth discernment)? We formalize this as information discernment and introduce Learn2Discern (L2D), an experimental framework and benchmark grounded in three normative axioms with interpretable metrics. To establish external validity, a pre-registered, quota-matched user study (n=299) confirms that real LLM users endorse all three axioms and report that violations reduce their trust and usage intent. Across 13 models and nearly 670K trials, we find consistent failures across both dimensions: models perform near chance on source and truth discernment, rely on source popularity twice as much as source reliability, and update roughly equally whether a claim improves or worsens their position relative to the ground truth. Models integrate external knowledge most effectively on datasets where their priors are already the most accurate. Newer and larger models improve truth discernment but not source discernment, a blind spot that model complexity does not address. We identify simple inference-time interventions that improve both forms of discernment. We release our dataset and survey as a testbed for a core alignment property that scales in importance as LLMs replace traditional search.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Experiment-as-Code Labs: A Declarative Stack for AI-Driven Scientific Discovery

To unleash the full potential of AI for Science, we must untether the agents from a purely digital environment. The agent's ability to control and explore in real-world labs is essential because the physical lab remains foundational to scientific discovery. While some tasks can be performed on a computer (e.g., data analysis, running simulated experiments), Eureka moments could occur at any time while operating lab instruments (e.g., when a scientist notices unexpected clues, intuition may prompt a real-time course change). Although autonomous labs are on the rise, which expose programmable APIs to control scientific instruments via software, bridging the gap between increasingly powerful AI agents and automated lab equipment requires innovation that draws insights from computer systems. We propose a new paradigm called ``Experiment-as-Code (EaC) Labs,'' where a core concept is to encode experiments as declarative configurations that can be compiled down to device-level APIs. AI agents come up with hypotheses and experiments, written as an ensemble of declarative configurations. The systems layer performs program analysis, safety checks, resource assignment, and job orchestration. Finally, programmatic experimentation occurs via actuating the device APIs. This is a general stack that is science-, lab-, and instrument-independent, representing a novel synthesis across the physical, systems, and intelligence layers to unleash the next breakthrough in AI for Science.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Context-Aware Initialization for Reducing Generative Path Length in Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) enable fully parallel token decoding but often remain impractical at inference time due to the many denoising iterations required to refine an information-free, fully masked initialization into coherent text. Most existing acceleration methods focus on traversing this generative trajectory more efficiently via improved solvers or sampling strategies. We advance a complementary perspective: shorten the trajectory itself by starting closer to the target distribution through context-aware initialization. We propose a training-free interface that injects prompt-conditioned priors from a lightweight auxiliary model into the diffusion initialization, and instantiate it with two mechanisms: discrete token injection and representation-level embedding interpolation. Because injected priors can be imperfect and unmask-only decoding can over-commit early, we also introduce a simple confidence-based remasking mechanism as a form of prior skepticism. Preliminary evidence on GSM8K suggests that context-aware initialization can substantially reduce denoising iterations (about 35\% fewer function evaluations in our setting), while also exposing a key open challenge: naive warm-starting can degrade final accuracy relative to strong diffusion baselines. We use these findings to motivate a research agenda around calibration, revision mechanisms, and representation alignment for reliable warm-started diffusion decoding.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Cloud Infrastructure Management in the Age of AI Agents

Cloud infrastructure is the cornerstone of the modern IT industry. However, managing this infrastructure effectively requires considerable manual effort from the DevOps engineering team. We make a case for developing AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) to automate cloud infrastructure management tasks. In a preliminary study, we investigate the potential for AI agents to use different cloud/user interfaces such as software development kits (SDK), command line interfaces (CLI), Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platforms, and web portals. We report takeaways on their effectiveness on different management tasks, and identify research challenges and potential solutions.

cs.AI↗