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Xi Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xi Zhang.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Beyond Surface-Level Detection: Towards Cognitive-Driven Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks via Meta-Operations Reasoning

Defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks is essential for their safe and reliable deployment. Existing defenses often rely on shallow pattern matching, which struggles to generalize to novel and unseen attack strategies. To address this challenge, we propose the Cognitive-Driven Defense (CDD) framework, which targets the underlying structure of jailbreak prompts by applying meta-operations, defined as basic manipulations that conceal harmful intent.CDD emulates human cognitive reasoning through a structured reasoning chain. It begins with a global perception of the prompt and follows with a localized analysis to uncover hidden manipulations. By applying supervised fine-tuning on this structured chain, the model learns to identify and reason about known manipulation patterns. To enhance generalization to unseen threats, an entropy-guided reinforcement learning algorithm (EG-GRPO) is introduced to encourage exploration of new types and variants of meta-operations. Experiments demonstrate that CDD can achieve state-of-the-art defense performance and exhibit strong generalization to unseen jailbreak attacks.

cs.AI↗

FLLIC: Functionally Lossless Image Compression

Recently, DNN models for lossless image coding have surpassed their traditional counterparts in compression performance, reducing the previous lossless bit rate by about ten percent for natural color images. But even with these advances, mathematically lossless image compression (MLLIC) ratios for natural images still fall short of the bandwidth and cost-effectiveness requirements of most practical imaging and vision systems at present and beyond. To overcome the performance barrier of MLLIC, we question the very necessity of MLLIC. Considering that all digital imaging sensors suffer from acquisition noises, why should we insist on mathematically lossless coding, i.e., wasting bits to preserve noises? Instead, we propose a new paradigm of joint denoising and compression called functionally lossless image compression (FLLIC), which performs lossless compression of optimally denoised images (the optimality may be task-specific). Although not literally lossless with respect to the noisy input, FLLIC aims to achieve the best possible reconstruction of the latent noise-free original image. Extensive experiments show that FLLIC achieves state-of-the-art performance in joint denoising and compression of noisy images and does so at a lower computational cost.

eess.IV↗

T3MAL: Test-Time Fast Adaptation for Robust Multi-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction

Information diffusion prediction (IDP) is a pivotal task for understanding how information propagates among users. Most existing methods commonly adhere to a conventional training-test paradigm, where models are pretrained on training data and then directly applied to test samples. However, the success of this paradigm hinges on the assumption that the data are independently and identically distributed, which often fails in practical social networks due to the inherent uncertainty and variability of user behavior. In the paper, we address the novel challenge of distribution shifts within IDP tasks and propose a robust test-time training (TTT)-based framework for multi-scale diffusion prediction, named T3MAL. The core idea is to flexibly adapt a trained model to accommodate the distribution of each test instance before making predictions via a self-supervised auxiliary task. Specifically, T3MAL introduces a BYOL-inspired self-supervised auxiliary network that shares a common feature extraction backbone with the primary diffusion prediction network to guide instance-specific adaptation during testing. Furthermore, T3MAL enables fast and accurate test-time adaptation by incorporating a novel meta-auxiliary learning scheme and a lightweight adaptor, which together provide better weight initialization for TTT and mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that T3MAL outperforms various state-of-the-art methods.

cs.SI↗

The fantastic single-molecule techniques

In the past 40 years, single-molecule techniques have been rapidly developed and widely applied in numerous fields of biology researches, offering new insights that conventional biochemical assays cannot discover. In this review, to help fully appreciate the powerfulness of single-molecule methods, we systemically summarize the various advantages of performing biochemical assays at the single-molecule level. Inspired by these examples, we propose a new single-molecule polysome profiling technique, to demonstrate that this strategy is not limited to the few special "outliers". Finally, we point out a possibility in the future of unifying different biochemical assays on the platform of single-molecule microscopy, which will reduce the cost of instrumentation and inevitably promote the applicability and adoptability of new biochemical and biophysical methods.

physics.bio-ph↗

LLMs are Introvert

The exponential growth of social media and generative AI has transformed information dissemination, fostering connectivity but also accelerating the spread of misinformation. Understanding information propagation dynamics and developing effective control strategies is essential to mitigate harmful content. Traditional models, such as SIR, provide basic insights but inadequately capture the complexities of online interactions. Advanced methods, including attention mechanisms and graph neural networks, enhance accuracy but typically overlook user psychology and behavioral dynamics. Large language models (LLMs), with their human-like reasoning, offer new potential for simulating psychological aspects of information spread. We introduce an LLM-based simulation environment capturing agents' evolving attitudes, emotions, and responses. Initial experiments, however, revealed significant gaps between LLM-generated behaviors and authentic human dynamics, especially in stance detection and psychological realism. A detailed evaluation through Social Information Processing Theory identified major discrepancies in goal-setting and feedback evaluation, stemming from the lack of emotional processing in standard LLM training. To address these issues, we propose the Social Information Processing-based Chain of Thought (SIP-CoT) mechanism enhanced by emotion-guided memory. This method improves the interpretation of social cues, personalization of goals, and evaluation of feedback. Experimental results confirm that SIP-CoT-enhanced LLM agents more effectively process social information, demonstrating behaviors, attitudes, and emotions closer to real human interactions. In summary, this research highlights critical limitations in current LLM-based propagation simulations and demonstrates how integrating SIP-CoT and emotional memory significantly enhances the social intelligence and realism of LLM agents.

cs.AI↗

Machine Learning based Enterprise Financial Audit Framework and High Risk Identification

In the face of global economic uncertainty, financial auditing has become essential for regulatory compliance and risk mitigation. Traditional manual auditing methods are increasingly limited by large data volumes, complex business structures, and evolving fraud tactics. This study proposes an AI-driven framework for enterprise financial audits and high-risk identification, leveraging machine learning to improve efficiency and accuracy. Using a dataset from the Big Four accounting firms (EY, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG) from 2020 to 2025, the research examines trends in risk assessment, compliance violations, and fraud detection. The dataset includes key indicators such as audit project counts, high-risk cases, fraud instances, compliance breaches, employee workload, and client satisfaction, capturing both audit behaviors and AI's impact on operations. To build a robust risk prediction model, three algorithms - Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) - are evaluated. SVM uses hyperplane optimization for complex classification, RF combines decision trees to manage high-dimensional, nonlinear data with resistance to overfitting, and KNN applies distance-based learning for flexible performance. Through hierarchical K-fold cross-validation and evaluation using F1-score, accuracy, and recall, Random Forest achieves the best performance, with an F1-score of 0.9012, excelling in identifying fraud and compliance anomalies. Feature importance analysis reveals audit frequency, past violations, employee workload, and client ratings as key predictors. The study recommends adopting Random Forest as a core model, enhancing features via engineering, and implementing real-time risk monitoring. This research contributes valuable insights into using machine learning for intelligent auditing and risk management in modern enterprises.

q-fin.RM↗

CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models

Faithfulness hallucinations are claims generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) not supported by contexts provided to the LLM. Lacking assessment standards, existing benchmarks focus on "factual statements" that rephrase source materials while overlooking "cognitive statements" that involve making inferences from the given context. Consequently, evaluating and detecting the hallucination of cognitive statements remains challenging. Inspired by how evidence is assessed in the legal domain, we design a rigorous framework to assess different levels of faithfulness of cognitive statements and introduce the CogniBench dataset where we reveal insightful statistics. To keep pace with rapidly evolving LLMs, we further develop an automatic annotation pipeline that scales easily across different models. This results in a large-scale CogniBench-L dataset, which facilitates training accurate detectors for both factual and cognitive hallucinations. We release our model and datasets at: https://github.com/FUTUREEEEEE/CogniBench

cs.CL↗

Automated Detection of Pre-training Text in Black-box LLMs

Detecting whether a given text is a member of the pre-training data of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring data privacy and copyright protection. Most existing methods rely on the LLM's hidden information (e.g., model parameters or token probabilities), making them ineffective in the black-box setting, where only input and output texts are accessible. Although some methods have been proposed for the black-box setting, they rely on massive manual efforts such as designing complicated questions or instructions. To address these issues, we propose VeilProbe, the first framework for automatically detecting LLMs' pre-training texts in a black-box setting without human intervention. VeilProbe utilizes a sequence-to-sequence mapping model to infer the latent mapping feature between the input text and the corresponding output suffix generated by the LLM. Then it performs the key token perturbations to obtain more distinguishable membership features. Additionally, considering real-world scenarios where the ground-truth training text samples are limited, a prototype-based membership classifier is introduced to alleviate the overfitting issue. Extensive evaluations on three widely used datasets demonstrate that our framework is effective and superior in the black-box setting.

cs.CL↗

Navigating the Black Box: Leveraging LLMs for Effective Text-Level Graph Injection Attacks

Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) integrate textual data with graph structures, providing valuable insights in applications such as social network analysis and recommendation systems. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) effectively capture both topological structure and textual information in TAGs but are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing graph injection attack (GIA) methods assume that attackers can directly manipulate the embedding layer, producing non-explainable node embeddings. Furthermore, the effectiveness of these attacks often relies on surrogate models with high training costs. Thus, this paper introduces ATAG-LLM, a novel black-box GIA framework tailored for TAGs. Our approach leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate interpretable text-level node attributes directly, ensuring attacks remain feasible in real-world scenarios. We design strategies for LLM prompting that balance exploration and reliability to guide text generation, and propose a similarity assessment method to evaluate attack text effectiveness in disrupting graph homophily. This method efficiently perturbs the target node with minimal training costs in a strict black-box setting, ensuring a text-level graph injection attack for TAGs. Experiments on real-world TAG datasets validate the superior performance of ATAG-LLM compared to state-of-the-art embedding-level and text-level attack methods.

cs.AI↗

Fast Point Cloud Geometry Compression with Context-based Residual Coding and INR-based Refinement

Compressing a set of unordered points is far more challenging than compressing images/videos of regular sample grids, because of the difficulties in characterizing neighboring relations in an irregular layout of points. Many researchers resort to voxelization to introduce regularity, but this approach suffers from quantization loss. In this research, we use the KNN method to determine the neighborhoods of raw surface points. This gives us a means to determine the spatial context in which the latent features of 3D points are compressed by arithmetic coding. As such, the conditional probability model is adaptive to local geometry, leading to significant rate reduction. Additionally, we propose a dual-layer architecture where a non-learning base layer reconstructs the main structures of the point cloud at low complexity, while a learned refinement layer focuses on preserving fine details. This design leads to reductions in model complexity and coding latency by two orders of magnitude compared to SOTA methods. Moreover, we incorporate an implicit neural representation (INR) into the refinement layer, allowing the decoder to sample points on the underlying surface at arbitrary densities. This work is the first to effectively exploit content-aware local contexts for compressing irregular raw point clouds, achieving high rate-distortion performance, low complexity, and the ability to function as an arbitrary-scale upsampling network simultaneously.

cs.CV↗

Fact in Fragments: Deconstructing Complex Claims via LLM-based Atomic Fact Extraction and Verification

Fact verification plays a vital role in combating misinformation by assessing the veracity of claims through evidence retrieval and reasoning. However, traditional methods struggle with complex claims requiring multi-hop reasoning over fragmented evidence, as they often rely on static decomposition strategies and surface-level semantic retrieval, which fail to capture the nuanced structure and intent of the claim. This results in accumulated reasoning errors, noisy evidence contamination, and limited adaptability to diverse claims, ultimately undermining verification accuracy in complex scenarios. To address this, we propose Atomic Fact Extraction and Verification (AFEV), a novel framework that iteratively decomposes complex claims into atomic facts, enabling fine-grained retrieval and adaptive reasoning. AFEV dynamically refines claim understanding and reduces error propagation through iterative fact extraction, reranks evidence to filter noise, and leverages context-specific demonstrations to guide the reasoning process. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that AFEV achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and interpretability.

cs.AI↗

Reasoning Paths as Signals: Augmenting Multi-hop Fact Verification through Structural Reasoning Progression

The growing complexity of factual claims in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges for automated fact verification systems, particularly in accurately aggregating and reasoning over multi-hop evidence. Existing approaches often rely on static or shallow models that fail to capture the evolving structure of reasoning paths, leading to fragmented retrieval and limited interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a Structural Reasoning framework for Multi-hop Fact Verification that explicitly models reasoning paths as structured graphs throughout both evidence retrieval and claim verification stages. Our method comprises two key modules: a structure-enhanced retrieval mechanism that constructs reasoning graphs to guide evidence collection, and a reasoning-path-guided verification module that incrementally builds subgraphs to represent evolving inference trajectories. We further incorporate a structure-aware reasoning mechanism that captures long-range dependencies across multi-hop evidence chains, enabling more precise verification. Extensive experiments on the FEVER and HoVer datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of reasoning-path modeling in enhancing retrieval precision and verification accuracy.

cs.AI↗

Loki's Dance of Illusions: A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination in Large Language Models

Edgar Allan Poe noted, "Truth often lurks in the shadow of error," highlighting the deep complexity intrinsic to the interplay between truth and falsehood, notably under conditions of cognitive and informational asymmetry. This dynamic is strikingly evident in large language models (LLMs). Despite their impressive linguistic generation capabilities, LLMs sometimes produce information that appears factually accurate but is, in reality, fabricated, an issue often referred to as 'hallucinations'. The prevalence of these hallucinations can mislead users, affecting their judgments and decisions. In sectors such as finance, law, and healthcare, such misinformation risks causing substantial economic losses, legal disputes, and health risks, with wide-ranging consequences.In our research, we have methodically categorized, analyzed the causes, detection methods, and solutions related to LLM hallucinations. Our efforts have particularly focused on understanding the roots of hallucinations and evaluating the efficacy of current strategies in revealing the underlying logic, thereby paving the way for the development of innovative and potent approaches. By examining why certain measures are effective against hallucinations, our study aims to foster a comprehensive approach to tackling this issue within the domain of LLMs.

cs.CL↗

Venus Cloud Research: Progress and Perspectives

Venus has regained attention on the international stage with the approval of three new missions by ESA and NASA. As the twin sister of Earth, Venus exhibits a distinct atmosphere, which casts a veil of mystery over the planetary evolution and is of great scientific significance. One of the most important components of Venus-the cloud-is believed to have significantly regulated its climate evolution and affect the environmental habitability. However, due to sparse in-situ measurements and the limitation of remote sensing, properties of these clouds remain largely unknown. Based on research conducted in past decades, this article reviews the observational structure of cloud properties, the progress of microphysical and simplified cloud model developments, and perspectives of future directions of this research field. Several possible solutions to the challenges associated with the coupling effect, ultraviolet absorption, and habitability are proposed and discussed in details, providing insights for future Venus' explorations.

astro-ph.EP↗

Diffusion with a Linguistic Compass: Steering the Generation of Clinically Plausible Future sMRI Representations for Early MCI Conversion Prediction

Early prediction of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) conversion is hampered by a trade-off between immediacy--making fast predictions from a single baseline sMRI--and accuracy--leveraging longitudinal scans to capture disease progression. We propose MCI-Diff, a diffusion-based framework that synthesizes clinically plausible future sMRI representations directly from baseline data, achieving both real-time risk assessment and high predictive performance. First, a multi-task sequence reconstruction strategy trains a shared denoising network on interpolation and extrapolation tasks to handle irregular follow-up sampling and learn robust latent trajectories. Second, an LLM-driven "linguistic compass" is introduced for clinical plausibility sampling: generated feature candidates are quantized, tokenized, and scored by a fine-tuned language model conditioned on expected structural biomarkers, guiding autoregressive generation toward realistic disease patterns. Experiments on ADNI and AIBL cohorts show that MCI-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving early conversion accuracy by 5-12%.

cs.LG↗

Mobile-Agent-V: A Video-Guided Approach for Effortless and Efficient Operational Knowledge Injection in Mobile Automation

The exponential rise in mobile device usage necessitates streamlined automation for effective task management, yet many AI frameworks fall short due to inadequate operational expertise. While manually written knowledge can bridge this gap, it is often burdensome and inefficient. We introduce Mobile-Agent-V, an innovative framework that utilizes video as a guiding tool to effortlessly and efficiently inject operational knowledge into mobile automation processes. By deriving knowledge directly from video content, Mobile-Agent-V eliminates manual intervention, significantly reducing the effort and time required for knowledge acquisition. To rigorously evaluate this approach, we propose Mobile-Knowledge, a benchmark tailored to assess the impact of external knowledge on mobile agent performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-V enhances performance by 36% compared to existing methods, underscoring its effortless and efficient advantages in mobile automation.

cs.CL↗

Mobile-Agent-V: A Video-Guided Approach for Effortless and Efficient Operational Knowledge Injection in Mobile Automation

The exponential rise in mobile device usage necessitates streamlined automation for effective task management, yet many AI frameworks fall short due to inadequate operational expertise. While manually written knowledge can bridge this gap, it is often burdensome and inefficient. We introduce Mobile-Agent-V, an innovative framework that utilizes video as a guiding tool to effortlessly and efficiently inject operational knowledge into mobile automation processes. By deriving knowledge directly from video content, Mobile-Agent-V eliminates manual intervention, significantly reducing the effort and time required for knowledge acquisition. To rigorously evaluate this approach, we propose Mobile-Knowledge, a benchmark tailored to assess the impact of external knowledge on mobile agent performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-V enhances performance by 36% compared to existing methods, underscoring its effortless and efficient advantages in mobile automation.

cs.AI↗