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Wei Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Gao.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Finite Temperature Stacking Fault Stability in Random and Locally Ordered CoCrNi beyond the Harmonic Approximation

Previous density functional theory (DFT) calculations for random solid solution (RSS) CoCrNi predict negative intrinsic stacking-fault energy (ISFE) at 0 K, contrary to experimental observations of finite stacking-fault widths. Two explanations have been proposed: finite-temperature stabilization of the RSS state, suggested by harmonic approximations showing increasing ISFE with temperature, and local chemical order (LCO), which shifts the ISFE to positive values at 0 K. Here, we compute temperature-dependent generalized stacking-fault free energies for RSS and LCO CoCrNi using a near-quantum-accuracy machine learning interatomic potential and the fully anharmonic projected average force integrator. Unlike harmonic approximations, our anharmonic calculations show that the RSS ISFE decreases with temperature and remains negative, indicating that RSS stacking faults are not thermally stabilized at elevated temperatures. By contrast, LCO maintains positive ISFE over 0-1000 K. Molecular dynamics simulations further confirm unbounded dislocation dissociation in RSS CoCrNi but finite stacking-fault widths in the LCO state.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

MultiPhishGuard: An Explainable and Adaptive Multi-Agent LLM System for Phishing Email Detection

Phishing email detection faces significant challenges due to evolving adversarial tactics and heterogeneous attack patterns. Traditional approaches, such as rule-based filters and denylists, often struggle to keep pace, leading to missed detections and security risks. While machine learning methods have improved detection performance, they remain limited in adapting to novel and rapidly changing phishing strategies. We present MultiPhishGuard, an LLM-based multi-agent detection framework with learned coordination across specialized agents. The system consists of five cooperative agents (text, URL, metadata, explanation simplifier, and adversarial agents), with agent contributions dynamically weighted using Proximal Policy Optimization. To address emerging threats, the framework incorporates an adversarial training loop in which an LLM-based agent generates subtle, context-aware email variants to expose potential model weaknesses and improve robustness to ambiguous phishing cases. Experimental evaluations on public datasets show that MultiPhishGuard achieves stronger performance than established baselines, including Chain-of-Thought prompting and single-agent variants, as supported by ablation studies and comparative analyses. The system achieves an accuracy of 97.89%, with a false positive rate of 2.73% and a false negative rate of 0.20%. In addition, an explanation simplifier agent transforms technical model outputs into plain-language rationales intended for human users. Overall, these results suggest that multi-agent LLM architectures with adaptive coordination and adversarial training represent a promising direction for phishing email detection.

cs.CR↗

ROSE: Rollout On Serving GPUs via Cooperative Elasticity for Agentic RL

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) is reshaping LLM post-training, but end-to-end training time is dominated by compute-intensive, multi-turn rollouts whose resource demand varies significantly across training steps. Resource-fixed systems cannot adapt to this variation, while resource-elastic approaches that provision external GPUs on demand suffer from high allocation overhead and limited availability. We observe that serving clusters leave substantial GPU compute and memory idle, and propose cooperative elasticity: sharing already-deployed serving GPUs with rollout workloads to provide on-demand elastic capacity. Realizing this is non-trivial, as it must preserve serving SLOs under bursty traffic while minimizing cross-cluster communication overhead. We present ROSE, a system that realizes cooperative elasticity for agentic RL post-training, comprising three components: (1) an SLO-safe co-serving executor that co-locates heterogeneous serving and rollout models on the same GPUs, dynamically sharing memory and compute while preserving serving SLOs; (2) a cross-cluster weight transfer engine that leverages shard-aware routing and weight sparsity for fast synchronization; and (3) an elastic rollout scheduler that dynamically routes rollouts across dedicated and opportunistic serving GPUs. Experiments across multiple model sizes and cluster scales show that ROSE improves end-to-end throughput by 1.3 - 3.3 x over resource-fixed baselines and reduces rollout time by 1.2 - 1.5 x over resource-elastic baselines, with no serving SLO violations.

cs.DC↗

LightTransfer: Your Long-Context LLM is Secretly a Hybrid Model with Effortless Adaptation

Scaling language models to handle longer contexts introduces substantial memory challenges due to the growing cost of key-value (KV) caches. Motivated by the efficiency gains of hybrid models and the broad availability of pretrained large transformer backbones, we explore transitioning transformer models into hybrid architectures for a more efficient generation. In this work, we propose LightTransfer, a lightweight method that transforms models such as LLaMA into hybrid variants. Our approach identifies lazy layers -- those focusing on recent or initial tokens -- and replaces their full attention with streaming attention. This transformation can be performed without any training for long-context understanding tasks or with minimal fine-tuning for o1-like long reasoning generation tasks that require stronger reasoning capabilities. Experiments across diverse benchmarks and models (e.g., LLaMA, Mistral, QwQ-STILL) demonstrate that, even when half of the layers are identified as lazy, LightTransfer achieves up to 2.17$\times$ throughput improvement with minimal performance loss ($<1.5\%$ on LongBench) and achieves 53.3\% on math benchmark AIME24 of advanced o1-like long reasoning model QwQ-STILL.

cs.CL↗

Sparse-to-Dense: A Free Lunch for Lossless Acceleration of Video Understanding in LLMs

Due to the auto-regressive nature of current video large language models (Video-LLMs), the inference latency increases as the input sequence length grows, posing challenges for the efficient processing of video sequences that are usually very long. We observe that during decoding, the attention scores of most tokens in Video-LLMs tend to be sparse and concentrated, with only certain tokens requiring comprehensive full attention. Based on this insight, we introduce Sparse-to-Dense (StD), a novel decoding strategy that integrates two distinct modules: one leveraging sparse top-K attention and the other employing dense full attention. These modules collaborate to accelerate Video-LLMs without loss. The fast (sparse) model speculatively decodes multiple tokens, while the slow (dense) model verifies them in parallel. StD is a tuning-free, plug-and-play solution that achieves up to a 1.94$\times$ walltime speedup in video processing. It maintains model performance while enabling a seamless transition from a standard Video-LLM to a sparse Video-LLM with minimal code modifications.

cs.CV↗

Lever: Speculative LLM Inference on Smartphones

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly needed for interactive mobile applications, but high-quality models exceed the limited DRAM available on smartphones. Flash storage can hold larger models, yet flash-backed inference is slow because autoregressive decoding repeatedly invokes the target model and incurs costly I/O. We observe that speculative decoding is a natural fit for this setting: a small draft model can remain in DRAM, while a larger flash-resident target model verifies multiple candidate tokens per invocation. However, existing methods assume server-class accelerators and fail to account for prolonged I/O latency, limited computation parallelism, and irregular speculation execution. We present Lever, an end-to-end system for efficient flash-backed LLM inference on smartphones. Lever jointly optimizes the three stages of speculative decoding under mobile constraints. For drafting, it builds token trees using an I/O- and compute-aware gain-cost objective. For verification, it prunes low-value branches through early-exit prediction to reduce target-model computation. For execution, it maps speculation efficiently across mobile CPU-NPU hardware to improve utilization. Comprehensive evaluations show that Lever reduces inference latency by an average of 2.93x over baseline flash-offloaded inference and 1.50x over conventional speculative decoding, narrowing the latency gap between flash-backed and memory-resident LLM inference.

cs.LG↗

ResiHP: Taming LLM Training Failures with Dynamic Hybrid Parallelism

Hybrid parallelism underpins large-scale LLM training across tens of thousands of GPUs. At such scale, hardware failures on individual devices lead to performance skew across devices, diminishing overall training efficiency. Existing resilient systems overlook sequence length variability in datasets and device performance skew under hybrid parallelism. As a result, (1) iteration time fluctuations induced by sequence length variability can trigger spurious fail-slow detections, and (2) failures are mitigated through individual adaptations in hybrid parallelism, leading to unnecessary detection overhead and inefficient resilient training. To respond, this paper presents ResiHP, a resilient system that enables robust failure detection and fine-grained adaptation for hybrid parallel training. First, we develop a Detector to accurately identify failures. In particular, it employs a workload-aware execution time predictor that disentangles failures from iteration time fluctuations while remaining lightweight for online detection. Second, we design a Scheduler that dynamically adapts parallelism group sizes, model partitioning, and workload scheduling policies to improve training efficiency under failures. Experiments show that ResiHP improves training throughput by 1.04-4.39$\times$ compared with state-of-the-art resilient training systems under diverse failure scenarios in a 256-GPU cluster.

cs.DC↗

Correlation between nuclear isospin asymmetry and $α$-particle preformation probability for superheavy nuclei from a Bayesian inference

In the study of $α$ decay within the superheavy nuclear region ($Z \geq 90$ and $N \geq 140$), the $α$-particle preformation probability $P_α$ serves as a crucial physical quantity linking nuclear structure to decay observables. We introduce a phenomenological model incorporating the decay energy $Q_α$, mass number $A$, orbital angular momentum $l$, isospin asymmetry $I$, and unpaired nucleon effect. For the first time, a Bayesian inference method combined with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling has been employed to impose global constraints on the model parameters, enabling the systematic and high-precision calculation of $P_α$. The results reveal a significant suppressing effect of isospin asymmetry on $P_α$, a finding independently corroborated by random forest-based feature importance analysis, which identified $I$ as a dominant factor. Furthermore, calculations using the maximum a posteriori (MAP) parameters not only reproduce the shell effect at $N=152$ but also yield $α$ decay half-life predictions in excellent agreement with experimental ones, thereby validating this model universality. This work provides the first global analysis tool for probing the $α$ preformation mechanism in superheavy nuclei, underscores the potential of the Bayesian framework for inverting complex nuclear physics problems, and establishes a reliable theoretical benchmark for guiding future experimental exploration of superheavy nuclei.

nucl-th↗

Uncovering and Shaping the Latent Representation of 3D Scene Topology in Vision-Language Models

Decades of cognitive science establish that humans navigate environments by forming cognitive maps, defined as allocentric and topology-preserving representations of 3D space. While modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate emergent spatial reasoning from 2D egocentric inputs, it remains unclear whether they construct an analogous 3D internal representation. In this paper, we demonstrate that current VLMs do possess a latent topological map of 3D scenes, but it is heavily overshadowed by non-geometric visual semantics, such as color and shape. By isolating this spatial subspace through cross-scene linear feature extraction, we extract a clean spatial subspace that causally controls the model's spatial outputs. We mathematically shape this latent representation and prove its correspondence to the Laplacian eigenmaps of the scene's 3D Gaussian-kernel graph, converging to the physical 3D space in the continuous limit. Motivated by this geometric identification, we further introduce a mathematically principled latent regularization method for VLMs, based on Dirichlet energy. Applying this single-term regularizer to a minimal 500-step supervised VLM fine-tuning (SFT) on simple synthetic data yields significant improvements on real-world spatial benchmarks, outperforming standard SFT and competitive baselines by up to 12.1\% in spatial tasks involving scene topology understanding. Source code is available at https://github.com/pittisl/vlm-latent-shaping

cs.CV↗

Observation of field-odd and field-free superconducting diode effects in $\mathrm{Mo}_2\mathrm{C}$ nanoflakes

The superconducting diode effect (SDE) enables nonreciprocal supercurrent flow, holding immense potential for ultra-low-power quantum electronics. Intrinsic SDE typically requires materials with inherent symmetry breakings. Here, we report the discovery of SDE in chemical vapor deposition-grown molybdenum carbide ($\mathrm{Mo}_2\mathrm{C}$) nanoflakes, a material traditionally considered centrosymmetric. Strikingly, this system uniquely hosts both field-odd and field-free SDEs. Transport measurements reveal a field-odd SDE with tunable efficiency exceeding 40% at 4 K under a perpendicular in-plane magnetic field. In a separate sample, a robust field-free SDE persists under zero-field and field-coolings. Out-of-plane field sweeps confirm the intrinsic nature of these phenomena. We propose that domain-boundary supercurrents or charge density wave-like orders drive this unexpected combination of symmetry breakings. Our findings establish air-stable $\mathrm{Mo}_2\mathrm{C}$ as an ideal platform for nonreciprocal superconducting electronics operating at liquid-helium temperatures, expanding the search for SDE into nominally centrosymmetric superconductors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

PPLLaVA: Varied Video Sequence Understanding With Prompt Guidance

In the past year, video-based large language models (Video LLMs) have achieved impressive progress, particularly in their ability to process long videos through extremely extended context lengths. However, this comes at the cost of significantly increased computational overhead due to the massive number of visual tokens, making efficiency a major bottleneck. In this paper, we identify the root of this inefficiency as the high redundancy in video content. To address this, we propose a novel pooling strategy that enables aggressive token compression while retaining instruction-relevant visual semantics. Our model, Prompt-guided Pooling LLaVA (PPLLaVA), introduces three key components: a CLIP-based visual-prompt alignment module that identifies regions of interest based on user instructions, a prompt-guided pooling mechanism that adaptively compresses the visual sequence using convolution-style pooling, and a clip context extension module tailored for processing long and complex prompts in visual dialogues. With up to 18x token reduction, PPLLaVA maintains strong performance across tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results on diverse video understanding benchmarks-ranging from image-to-video tasks such as captioning and QA to long-form video reasoning-while significantly improving inference throughput. Codes have been available at https://github.com/farewellthree/PPLLaVA.

cs.CV↗

Crab: A Semantics-Aware Checkpoint/Restore Runtime for Agent Sandboxes

Autonomous agents act through sandboxed containers and microVMs whose state spans filesystems, processes, and runtime artifacts. Checkpoint and restore (C/R) of this state is needed for fault tolerance, spot execution, RL rollout branching, and safe rollback-yet existing approaches fall into two extremes: application-level recovery preserves chat history but misses OS-side effects, while full per-turn checkpointing is correct but too expensive under dense co-location. The root cause is an agent-OS semantic gap: agent frameworks see tool calls but not their OS effects; the OS sees state changes but lacks turn-level context to judge recovery relevance. This gap hides massive sparsity: over 75% of agent turns produce no recovery-relevant state, so most checkpoints are unnecessary. Crab (Checkpoint-and-Restore for Agent SandBoxes) is a transparent host-side runtime that bridges this gap without modifying agents or C/R backends. An eBPF-based inspector classifies each turn's OS-visible effects to decide checkpoint granularity; a coordinator aligns checkpoints with turn boundaries and overlaps C/R with LLM wait time; and a host-scoped engine schedules checkpoint traffic across co-located sandboxes. On shell-intensive and code-repair workloads, Crab raises recovery correctness from 8% (chat-only) to 100%, cuts checkpoint traffic by up to 87%, and stays within 1.9% of fault-free execution time.

cs.OS↗

SVOM/VT: Instrument Overview, Science Objectives, and First-Year Performance

The 44-cm Visible Telescope (VT) aboard the Space-based Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) is a dual-band (400-650 nm and 650-1000 nm) instrument designed to detect and characterize the optical counterparts of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and other high-energy transients. This paper presents the VT's design, scientific objectives, observing strategies, and both space- and ground-based data processing pipelines, along with its first-year in-orbit performance. In-orbit commissioning tests confirm a sensitivity of 22.5 AB mag (300 s exposure), extendable to $\sim\!24$ AB mag through stacking. This performance enables the VT to monitor over 100 GRBs in its first year with an exceptional $\sim\!80\%$ detection rate for \textit{SVOM}/ECLAIRS-triggered bursts and ToO-observed bursts from other missions (e.g., \textit{Swift, Fermi, Einstein Probe (EP)}), outperforming \textit{Swift}/UVOT's $\sim\!40\%$ detection rate. Beyond its exceptional detection efficiency, the VT played a key role in identifying high-redshift GRBs-most notably GRB 250314A (z = 7.3). Its deep upper limits at long wavelengths (up to 1 $μ$m) were pivotal in guiding follow-up observations with large ground-based telescopes, enabling crucial near-infrared (NIR) detections. With its rapid response, deep sensitivity, and real-time processing capabilities, the VT is a key instrument for GRB research in \textit{SVOM}-era, enabling critical studies of GRB optical afterglows, circumburst environments, relativistic jet dynamics, and the origins of optically dark bursts.

astro-ph.HE↗

SVOM/VT: Flight Model Verification and Pre-launch Testing

This paper presents pre-launch testing and calibration results for the SVOM/VT (Space-based Variable Objects Monitor, Visible Telescope) Flight Model (FM), validating its performance under simulated space conditions through thermal vacuum cycling, energy concentration analysis, stray light suppression, and CCD/electronics calibrations (gain, noise, quantum efficiency). The results confirm full compliance with design requirements: stray light suppression achieves point-source transmittance $<10^{-7}$ at $30^\circ$ off-axis, thermal control maintains stable CCD temperatures ($-75^\circ$C for the red channel, $-65^\circ$C for the blue channel), and detection sensitivity meets the limiting magnitude of 22.50 (SNR $>$ 3 with 300 seconds exposure). Early in-orbit tests further validate performance, yielding limiting magnitudes of 22.70 (V-band, red) and 22.78 (blue), consistent with pre-launch specifications.

astro-ph.IM↗

SVOM/VT: Real-Time Onboard Data Processing

The SVOM Visible Telescope (VT) is critical for the rapid identification of gamma-ray burst (GRB) optical counterparts, particularly for high-redshift candidates that require immediate infrared spectroscopic follow-up. To address the stringent bandwidth constraints of the VHF downlink while ensuring real-time data availability, we developed the VT Onboard Data Processing Pipeline (VOPP).This paper details the software architecture, algorithms, and hardware implementation of VOPP using an FPGA and a CPU. The pipeline performs essential real-time tasks, including image quality assessment, dark and flat-field correction, and optimized image stacking to mitigate cosmic ray contamination and variable background noise. Furthermore, it generates compact source catalogs and highly compressed 1-bit images to facilitate rapid downlink.In-flight performance analysis confirms the pipeline's robustness, demonstrating the availability of VT VHF data for 78 percent of promptly slewed SVOM GRBs, with 56 percent leading to the identification of optical counterparts, typically within 18 minutes post-trigger.

astro-ph.IM↗

FACT-E: Causality-Inspired Evaluation for Trustworthy Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved LLM reasoning, but models often generate explanations that appear coherent while containing unfaithful intermediate steps. Existing self-evaluation approaches are prone to inherent biases: the model may confidently endorse coherence even when the step-to-step implication is not valid, leading to unreliable faithfulness evaluation. We propose FACT-E, a causality-inspired framework for evaluating CoT quality. FACT-E uses controlled perturbations as an instrumental signal to separate genuine step-to-step dependence from bias-driven artifacts, producing more reliable faithfulness estimates (\textit{intra-chain faithfulness}). To select trustworthy trajectories, FACT-E jointly considers \textit{intra-chain faithfulness} and \textit{CoT-to-answer consistency}, ensuring that selected chains are both faithful internally and supportive of the correct final answer. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH, and CommonsenseQA show that FACT-E improves reasoning-trajectory selection and yields stronger in-context learning exemplars. FACT-E also reliably detects flawed reasoning under noisy conditions, providing a robust metric for trustworthy LLM reasoning.

cs.AI↗

AccelCIM: Systematic Dataflow Exploration for SRAM Compute-in-Memory Accelerator

SRAM-based compute-in-memory (CIM) offers high computational density and energy efficiency for deep neural network (DNN) accelerators, but its limited capacity causes on/off-chip data movement overhead for large DNN models. Existing CIM accelerator studies typically assume that DNN models fit entirely on-chip, leaving efficient dataflow design largely untapped. This paper introduces AccelCIM, a systematic dataflow exploration framework for SRAM CIM accelerator, which addresses two key limitations of prior work. (1) It formulates a systematic dataflow design space spanning CIM macro configurations and macro-array organizations. (2) It introduces rigorous design evaluation using cycle-accurate architectural simulation and post-layout PPA analysis. We conduct an extensive design space exploration and apply AccelCIM to representative LLM applications, providing practical insights for the principled design of CIM accelerators.

cs.AR↗

3D Instruction Ambiguity Detection

In safety-critical domains, linguistic ambiguity can have severe consequences; a vague command like "Pass me the vial" in a surgical setting could lead to catastrophic errors. Yet, most embodied AI research overlooks this, assuming instructions are clear and focusing on execution rather than confirmation. To address this critical safety gap, we are the first to define 3D Instruction Ambiguity Detection, a fundamental new task where a model must determine if a command has a single, unambiguous meaning within a given 3D scene. To support this research, we build Ambi3D, the large-scale benchmark for this task, featuring over 700 diverse 3D scenes and around 22k instructions. Our analysis reveals a surprising limitation: state-of-the-art 3D Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to reliably determine if an instruction is ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose AmbiVer, a two-stage framework that collects explicit visual evidence from multiple views and uses it to guide an vision-language model (VLM) in judging instruction ambiguity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the challenge of our task and the effectiveness of AmbiVer, paving the way for safer and more trustworthy embodied AI. Code and dataset available at https://jiayuding031020.github.io/ambi3d/.

cs.AI↗