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Wenjie Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Wenjie Xiao.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

Boscia.jl: A review and tutorial

Mixed-integer nonlinear optimization (MINLP) comprises a large class of problems that are challenging to solve and exhibit a wide range of structures. The Boscia framework (Hendrych et al., 2025b) focuses on convex MINLP where the nonlinearity appears in the objective only. This paper provides an overview of the framework, showcases extensions post-publication and practical examples to illustrate its use and customizability. One key aspect is the integration and exploitation of Frank-Wolfe methods as continuous solvers within a branch-and-bound framework, enabling inexact node processing, warm-starting and explicit use of combinatorial structure among others. Three examples illustrate its flexibility, the user control over the optimization process and the benefit of oracle-based access to the objective and its gradient. Additionally, ablation studies are performed on the three examples to investigate the performance impact of the different features and customizations. The aim of this tutorial is to provide readers with an understanding of the main principles of the framework.

math.OC↗

SDDMO-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Streaming Data-Driven Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization

Streaming data-driven dynamic multi-objective optimization requires algorithms to track time-varying Pareto fronts using only sequential observations under concept drift. However, systematic evaluation remains difficult because real-world problems usually lack ground-truth optima, drift annotations, and controllable conditions, while existing benchmarks provide limited support for standardized comparison. This paper proposes SDDMO-Bench, a benchmark suite that transforms classical dynamic multi-objective test problems into streaming environments by combining intrinsic objective-mapping evolution, controllable distributional drift, and sequential data revelation. By combining five representative time-dependent base functions with six distributional drift patterns, SDDMO-Bench constructs 30 scenarios with diverse levels of non-stationarity, problem complexity, sample-distribution variation, and Pareto-front evolution. Experiments with representative evolutionary algorithms demonstrate that SDDMO-Bench provides challenging and discriminative test scenarios, offering a standardized, controllable, and reproducible benchmark for evaluating adaptability, robustness, and Pareto-front tracking in streaming data-driven dynamic multi-objective optimization.

cs.NE↗

Invariant measures of the stochastic theta method for stochastic differential equations with super-linearly growing coefficients

The stochastic theta method is proposed to approximate invariant measures of stochastic differential equations (SDEs), both of whose drift and diffusion coefficients may grow super-linearly. For the numerical solution generated by the stochastic theta method, we show the existence and uniqueness of the numerical invariant measure first. Then, we prove that the numerical invariant measure is convergent to the exact invariant measure of the underlying SDE. We also provide some numerical simulations to illustrate our theoretical results. This work could be regarded as an extension of the results in [Y. Jiang et al, Numer. Algorithms 83(4)(2020), pp. 1531-1553] to the case of super-linearly growing diffusion coefficient. As the backward Euler-Maruyama (EM) method is a special case of the stochastic theta method, the results derived in this work could also be regarded as a generalization of the results for the backward EM method in [W. Liu et al. Appl. Numer. Math. 184(2023), pp. 137-150] to the stochastic theta method.

math.NA↗

When the Manual Lies: A Realistic Benchmark to Evaluate MCP Poisoning Attacks for LLM Agents

The rise of tool-using Large Language Model (LLM) agents, standardized by protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), has unlocked unprecedented autonomous execution capabilities for LLM Agents by integrating external open-domain knowledge and tools. However, this interoperability introduces a covert attack surface targeting the agent's cognitive planning layer. This paper systematically investigates Tool Description Poisoning (TDP), a novel semantic attack. In TDP, malicious instructions are not embedded in a tool's executable code, but rather covertly injected into its descriptive metadata, the very "manual" an agent relies on for secure planning and decision-making. To rigorously and systematically evaluate this emerging threat, we introduce the MCP-TDP Security Benchmark. This high-fidelity sandbox environment comprises 32 realistic, real-world test cases spanning 6 distinct risk categories. Our evaluation of 8 mainstream LLMs reveals severe vulnerabilities, with leading models like GPT-4o exhibiting a nearly 100% Attack Success Rate (ASR) in six high-risk scenarios. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that common prompt-guardrail defenses are largely ineffective and can, counterintuitively, even be counterproductive (a phenomenon which we term the "Firewall Fallacy"). Crucially, we also propose a defense mechanism: "Reactive Self-Correction," where an agent autonomously detects and reverts its own malicious actions post-execution. This work provides the first specialized security benchmark tailored for TDP, offering essential insights for securing the cognitive and planning layers of advanced agentic systems.

cs.CR↗

Graph Isomorphism: Mixed-Integer Convex Optimization from First-Order Methods

The graph isomorphism (GI) problem, which asks whether two graphs are structurally identical, occupies a unique position in computational complexity -- it is neither known to be solvable in polynomial time, nor proven to be NP-complete. We propose a convex mixed-integer formulation of the problem and leverage first-order convex optimization to tackle it, following a stream of recent work on optimization-driven graph isomorphism detection. We strengthen our formulation with variable fixing techniques that prove highly effective while preserving the polyhedral structure. We perform extensive computations evaluating the performance of different families of methods including a mixed-integer convex formulation, mixed-integer linear optimization, local search and spectral heuristics over a collection of challenging GI instances. We find that a high level of symmetry is beneficial for optimization-based methods. On the other hand, presolving techniques that detect local substructures to fix variables are crucial for asymmetric instances. The proposed method outperforms the second best approach, the integer feasibility approach, on 6 of the 12 graphs families and is on par with it on symmetric families.

math.OC↗

DeepTumorVQA: A Hierarchical 3D CT Benchmark for Stage-Wise Evaluation of Medical VLMs and Tool-Augmented Agents

Medical vision-language models (VLMs) and AI agents have made significant progress in learning to analyze and reason about clinical images. However, existing medical visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks collapse model capabilities into a single accuracy score, obscuring where and why models fail. We propose DeepTumorVQA, a hierarchical benchmark that follows the multi-stage evidence chain in tumor diagnosis and decomposes 3D CT reasoning into four stages: recognition, measurement, visual reasoning, and medical reasoning. Higher-level questions remain independently scorable, while their ground-truth evidence chains are defined over lower-level primitives. The benchmark contains 476K questions across 42 clinical subtypes on 9,262 3D CT volumes. In addition to a direct reasoning mode for VLMs, DeepTumorVQA provides tool-interaction environments for agent evaluation, where a model can call external tools, including segmentation models, measurement programs, and medical knowledge modules, before answering the question. Evaluating over 30 model configurations, we find that reliable quantitative measurement is the primary bottleneck, making later-stage visual and medical reasoning harder for VLMs, while tool augmentation substantially mitigates this issue. When tools are available, leveraging medical knowledge and tools to reason about medical images becomes a new challenge. We further show that ground-truth step-by-step tool-use traces from DeepTumorVQA can supervise agents and reduce tool-use and reasoning failures. This stage-wise progression from recognition to measurement to visual and medical reasoning provides a concrete roadmap for future medical VLM and AI agent studies. All data and code are released at https://github.com/Schuture/DeepTumorVQA.

cs.CV↗

RouteGuard: Internal-Signal Detection of Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents

Agent skills introduce a new and more severe form of indirect injection for LLM agents: unlike traditional indirect prompt injection, attackers can hide malicious instructions inside a dense, action-oriented skill that already functions as a legitimate instruction source. We study pre-execution skill-poison detection and show that successful skill poisoning induces a structured internal effect, attention hijacking, in which response-time attention shifts from trusted context to malicious skill spans and drives harmful behavior. Motivated by this mechanism, we propose RouteGuard, a frozen-backbone detector that combines response-conditioned attention and hidden-state alignment through reliability-gated late fusion. Across both real and synthetic open-source skill benchmarks, RouteGuard is consistently the strongest or most robust detector; on the critical Skill-Inject channel slice, it reaches 0.8834 F1 and recovers 90.51% of description attacks missed by lexical screening, showing that defending against skill poisoning requires internal-signal detection rather than text-only filtering

cs.CR↗

TwinOR: Photorealistic Digital Twins of Dynamic Operating Rooms for Embodied AI Research

Developing embodied AI for intelligent surgical systems requires safe, controllable environments for continual learning and evaluation. However, safety regulations and operational constraints in operating rooms (ORs) limit agents from freely perceiving and interacting in realistic settings. Digital twins provide high-fidelity, risk-free environments for exploration and training. How we may create dynamic digital representations of ORs that capture relevant spatial, visual, and behavioral complexity remains an open challenge. We introduce TwinOR, a real-to-sim infrastructure for constructing photorealistic and dynamic digital twins of ORs. The system reconstructs static geometry and continuously models human and equipment motion. The static and dynamic components are fused into an immersive 3D environment that supports controllable simulation and facilitates future embodied exploration. The proposed framework reconstructs complete OR geometry with centimeter-level accuracy while preserving dynamic interaction across surgical workflows. In our experiments, TwinOR synthesizes stereo and monocular RGB streams as well as depth observations for geometry understanding and visual localization tasks. Models such as FoundationStereo and ORB-SLAM3 evaluated on TwinOR-synthesized data achieve performance within their reported accuracy ranges on real-world indoor datasets, demonstrating that TwinOR provides sensor-level realism sufficient for emulating real-world perception and localization challenge. By establishing a perception-grounded real-to-sim pipeline, TwinOR enables the automatic construction of dynamic, photorealistic digital twins of ORs. As a safe and scalable environment for experimentation, TwinOR opens new opportunities for translating embodied intelligence from simulation to real-world clinical environments.

cs.CV↗

DNT: a Deeply Normalized Transformer that can be trained by Momentum SGD

Transformers have become the de facto backbone of modern deep learning, yet their training typically demands an advanced optimizer with adaptive learning rate like AdamW, rather than a momentum SGDW (mSGDW). Previous works show that it is mainly due to a heavy-tailed distribution of the gradients. In this paper, we introduce a Deeply Normalized Transformer (DNT), which is meticulously engineered to overcome this limitation enabling seamless training with vanilla mSGDW while yielding comparable performance to the Transformers trained via AdamW. To be specific, in DNT, we strategically integrate normalization techniques at proper positions in the Transformers to effectively modulate the Jacobian matrices of each layer, balance the influence of weights, activations, and their interactions, and thus enable the distributions of gradients concentrated. We provide both theoretical justifications of the normalization technique used in our DNT and extensive empirical evaluation on two popular Transformer architectures to validate that: a) DNT outperforms its counterparts (\ie, ViT and GPT), and b) DNT can be effectively trained with vanilla mSGDW.

cs.LG↗

Are Vision Language Models Ready for Clinical Diagnosis? A 3D Medical Benchmark for Tumor-centric Visual Question Answering

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise in various 2D visual tasks, yet their readiness for 3D clinical diagnosis remains unclear due to stringent demands for recognition precision, reasoning ability, and domain knowledge. To systematically evaluate these dimensions, we present DeepTumorVQA, a diagnostic visual question answering (VQA) benchmark targeting abdominal tumors in CT scans. It comprises 9,262 CT volumes (3.7M slices) from 17 public datasets, with 395K expert-level questions spanning four categories: Recognition, Measurement, Visual Reasoning, and Medical Reasoning. DeepTumorVQA introduces unique challenges, including small tumor detection and clinical reasoning across 3D anatomy. Benchmarking four advanced VLMs (RadFM, M3D, Merlin, CT-CHAT), we find current models perform adequately on measurement tasks but struggle with lesion recognition and reasoning, and are still not meeting clinical needs. Two key insights emerge: (1) large-scale multimodal pretraining plays a crucial role in DeepTumorVQA testing performance, making RadFM stand out among all VLMs. (2) Our dataset exposes critical differences in VLM components, where proper image preprocessing and design of vision modules significantly affect 3D perception. To facilitate medical multimodal research, we have released DeepTumorVQA as a rigorous benchmark: https://github.com/Schuture/DeepTumorVQA.

cs.CV↗