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Xiaojian Li

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaojian Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Before the Script, Set the Stage: How Worldview Simulation Amplifies Psychologically Grounded Persuasion in Multi-Turn Jailbreaking

Multi-turn jailbreak attacks demonstrate that harmful intent can be distributed across dialogue, yet existing methods obscure what conversational mechanisms drive vulnerability. We introduce BLUEPRINT, a safety-evaluation framework separating a factorized social-influence strategy space from WORLDVIEWSIM, a cross-turn situational context module. Monte Carlo Tree Search optimizes turn-level combinations of 18 theory-grounded influence factors across a four-turn trajectory. Across six frontier models, BLUEPRINT achieves near-ceiling ASR on major open-weight and proprietary models, while requiring the fewest average queries (2.46). The resulting trajectories further reveal model-specific vulnerability among resistant targets: each responds to distinct influence factors and strategy transitions, yet all share a common recovery pathway-shifting toward concrete, executable task framing consistently escapes hard-refusal states. Ablations confirm operational cues matter most: making requests actionable has the largest impact, gain framing is unusually potent, and some legitimacy appeals can backfire. These findings suggest robust multi-turn safety requires monitoring not only harmful content, but also how dialogue state makes unsafe requests appear concrete and locally executable.

cs.CL

Revisiting Degree-Corrected Spectral Clustering: a Condition-Free Spectral Analysis and Extension

Spectral clustering is a representative graph clustering technique with strong interpretability and theoretical guarantees. Degree-corrected spectral clustering (DCSC) has emerged as the state-of-the-art for this technique. While prior studies have provided impressive theoretical insights for DCSC, their analyses typically depend on specific probabilistic frameworks (e.g., stochastic block models) and conditions. In this study, we explore an alternative condition-free analysis for the clustering quality of DCSC from a pure spectral view, without any random graph models. It gives bounds for the number of mis-clustered nodes w.r.t. the optimal partition of conductance minimization while involving quantities that indicate impacts of (\romannumeral1) degree heterogeneity and (\romannumeral2) weakness of clustering structures to the clustering quality. Inspired by graph neural networks (GNNs) and their over-smoothing effect, we propose ASCENT (Adaptive Spectral ClustEring with Node-wise correcTion), a simple yet effective extension of DCSC. Different from most DCSC methods with a constant degree correction, ASCENT follows a node-wise correction scheme. It can assign different corrections for nodes via a GNN mean aggregator. We demonstrate that (\romannumeral1) ASCENT reduces to conventional DCSC methods when encountering over-smoothing; (\romannumeral2) some early stages before over-smoothing can potentially result in better clustering quality.

cs.SI

Reinforcement learning in linear embedding space unlocks generalizable control across soft robot configurations

Soft-bodied organisms such as octopuses and elephant trunks exhibit remarkable morphological adaptability, dynamically reconfiguring body shape and stiffness, and flexibly adjusting their control strategies to enable versatile behaviors. Inspired by these biological systems, various soft robots have emerged in recent decades, featuring diverse materials, stiffnesses, and morphologies tailored to specific tasks. Despite substantial advances in the materials and structural designs of soft robots, developing a generalizable control framework capable of rapid adaptation across diverse configurations remains a long-standing challenge. Existing controllers are limited to fixed configurations, demanding laborious configuration-specific remodelling and policy redesign for new configurations. Here, we introduce a generalizable control system that enables rapid adaptation across diverse soft robot configurations via reinforcement learning in a shared linear Koopman embedding space. By encoding robot dynamics into this embedding space, our method decouples control policies from specific morphologies, allowing real-time, model-free policy adaptation across diverse configurations without retraining from scratch. We validate our system across 33 distinct robot configurations. Our system achieves a 75 times reduction in transfer samples across configurations, while sustaining robust performance under high-speed motion, heavy payloads, and multiactuator faults, and achieving real-world skills previously unattainable in soft robotics. This work establishes a unified and adaptable control paradigm for diverse soft robot configurations, bridging mechanical reconfigurability with control flexibility, and may offer broader insights for generalizable control in complex physical systems.

cs.RO

Prioritization of Risks from Artificial Intelligence: A Delphi Study of 272 International Experts

Artificial intelligence poses many risks, ranging from familiar present-day harms to unprecedented and potentially catastrophic ones. Effective risk management requires prioritization: we must understand which risks are most severe, who is most vulnerable, and who is most responsible for addressing them. We report results from a three-round Delphi study conducted late 2025 with 272 international AI experts. Experts rated 24 AI risks on harm probability and severity, sector and actor vulnerability, actor responsibility, and overall concern. Experts estimated the five most severe harms in the next 5 years were likely to come from dangerous capabilities, competitive dynamics, weapons & cyberattacks (including CBRNE), power centralization, and false information. In a business-as-usual scenario, experts judged 18 of 24 risks as having a more than 10% probability of catastrophic outcomes (e.g., more than 1 million deaths or more than USD 100B in financial loss) in the next 5 years (2025-2030). In a scenario where pragmatic mitigations are implemented, experts still judged five risks as having a more than 10% probability of catastrophic outcomes: dangerous capabilities, weapons & cyberattacks, environmental harm, inequality & unemployment, and power centralization. All 24 risks were judged as being more than 5% likely to cause catastrophic outcomes. AI users and the general public were judged the most vulnerable to these risks, but experts assigned the highest responsibility for addressing them to general-purpose AI developers and governance actors (including governments, regulators, and standards bodies). Across most risks, experts identified information, finance, and national security as the most vulnerable sectors. These findings can guide AI risk prioritization and clarify expert expectations about who should bear responsibility for mitigation.

cs.CY

AICrypto: Evaluating Cryptography Capabilities of Large Language Models

We build \textbf{AICrypto}, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the cryptography capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The benchmark comprises 135 multiple-choice questions, 150 capture-the-flag challenges, and 30 proof problems, covering a broad range of skills from knowledge memorization to vulnerability exploitation and formal reasoning. All tasks are carefully reviewed or constructed by cryptography experts to improve correctness and rigor. For each proof problem, we provide detailed scoring rubrics and reference solutions that enable automated grading, achieving high correlation with human expert evaluations. We introduce strong human expert performance baselines for comparison across all task types. Our evaluation of 17 leading LLMs reveals that state-of-the-art models match or even surpass human experts in memorizing cryptographic concepts, exploiting common vulnerabilities, and routine proofs. However, our analysis reveals that they still lack a deep understanding of abstract mathematical concepts and struggle with tasks that require multi-step reasoning and dynamic analysis. We hope this work could provide insights for future research on LLMs in cryptographic applications. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wangyu-ovo/aicrypto-agent.

cs.CR

Autonomous Laparoscope Control through Unified Mechanics-Based Representation of Multimodal Intraoperative Information

Laparoscope-holding robots can provide surgeons with a stable laparoscopic field of view (FOV) and reduce the burden on human assistants. To maintain an ideal intraoperative FOV, the robot must continuously adjust the laparoscope pose according to intraoperative information. However, intraoperative multimodal signals, such as position, force/torque, and images, differ markedly in physical meaning and units, making it difficult to build a unified representation and to generate control commands that can be used directly for laparoscope control. To address this issue, we propose a laparoscope-holding robot control method based on unified mechanics modeling of multimodal information. First, we design mapping strategies for multiple intraoperative sources, including position, force/torque, and images, and unify them into an equivalent-wrench representation in the operational space. Then, using a task-priority scheme, we inject the wrenches into the task space and the null space, respectively, and synthesize laparoscope control commands via task-priority projection, thereby achieving consistent representation and coordinated fusion of multimodal information within a single framework. Finally, taking the intraoperative remote center of motion (RCM) position, force/torque sensor readings, and laparoscopic images as examples, we construct an RCM-constraint wrench to enforce the RCM geometric constraint and reduce the contact force at the trocar site, a laparoscope-manipulation wrench to enable compliant dragging, and an instrument-tracking wrench to achieve autonomous visual tracking of the instruments. Experiments on a surgical phantom and in vivo porcine trials demonstrate that the proposed method supports multi-task operation, including compliant laparoscope manipulation and autonomous instrument tracking, while maintaining the RCM constraint and reducing sustained trocar-site loading.

cs.RO

From EMR Data to Clinical Insight: An LLM-Driven Framework for Automated Pre-Consultation Questionnaire Generation

Pre-consultation is a critical component of effective healthcare delivery. However, generating comprehensive pre-consultation questionnaires from complex, voluminous Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is a challenging task. Direct Large Language Model (LLM) approaches face difficulties in this task, particularly regarding information completeness, logical order, and disease-level synthesis. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-stage LLM-driven framework: Stage 1 extracts atomic assertions (key facts with timing) from EMRs; Stage 2 constructs personal causal networks and synthesizes disease knowledge by clustering representative networks from an EMR corpus; Stage 3 generates tailored personal and standardized disease-specific questionnaires based on these structured representations. This framework overcomes limitations of direct methods by building explicit clinical knowledge. Evaluated on a real-world EMR dataset and validated by clinical experts, our method demonstrates superior performance in information coverage, diagnostic relevance, understandability, and generation time, highlighting its practical potential to enhance patient information collection.

cs.AI

The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities

Rapidly improving AI capabilities and autonomy hold significant promise of transformation, but are also driving vigorous debate on how to ensure that AI is safe, i.e., trustworthy, reliable, and secure. Building a trusted ecosystem is therefore essential -- it helps people embrace AI with confidence and gives maximal space for innovation while avoiding backlash. The "2025 Singapore Conference on AI (SCAI): International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety" aimed to support research in this space by bringing together AI scientists across geographies to identify and synthesise research priorities in AI safety. This resulting report builds on the International AI Safety Report chaired by Yoshua Bengio and backed by 33 governments. By adopting a defence-in-depth model, this report organises AI safety research domains into three types: challenges with creating trustworthy AI systems (Development), challenges with evaluating their risks (Assessment), and challenges with monitoring and intervening after deployment (Control).

cs.AI

AI Awareness

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought about increasingly capable systems that demonstrate remarkable abilities in reasoning, language understanding, and problem-solving. These advancements have prompted a renewed examination of AI awareness not as a philosophical question of consciousness, but as a measurable, functional capacity. AI awareness is a double-edged sword: it improves general capabilities, i.e., reasoning, safety, while also raising concerns around misalignment and societal risks, demanding careful oversight as AI capabilities grow. In this review, we explore the emerging landscape of AI awareness, which includes metacognition (the ability to represent and reason about its own cognitive state), self-awareness (recognizing its own identity, knowledge, limitations, inter alia), social awareness (modeling the knowledge, intentions, and behaviors of other agents and social norms), and situational awareness (assessing and responding to the context in which it operates). First, we draw on insights from cognitive science, psychology, and computational theory to trace the theoretical foundations of awareness and examine how the four distinct forms of AI awareness manifest in state-of-the-art AI. Next, we systematically analyze current evaluation methods and empirical findings to better understand these manifestations. Building on this, we explore how AI awareness is closely linked to AI capabilities, demonstrating that more aware AI agents tend to exhibit higher levels of intelligent behaviors. Finally, we discuss the risks associated with AI awareness, including key topics in AI safety, alignment, and broader ethical concerns.

cs.AI

FLSSM: A Federated Learning Storage Security Model with Homomorphic Encryption

Federated learning based on homomorphic encryption has received widespread attention due to its high security and enhanced protection of user data privacy. However, the characteristics of encrypted computation lead to three challenging problems: ``computation-efficiency", ``attack-tracing" and ``contribution-assessment". The first refers to the efficiency of encrypted computation during model aggregation, the second refers to tracing malicious attacks in an encrypted state, and the third refers to the fairness of contribution assessment for local models after encryption. This paper proposes a federated learning storage security model with homomorphic encryption (FLSSM) to protect federated learning model privacy and address the three issues mentioned above. First, we utilize different nodes to aggregate local models in parallel, thereby improving encrypted models' aggregation efficiency. Second, we introduce trusted supervise nodes to examine local models when the global model is attacked, enabling the tracing of malicious attacks under homomorphic encryption. Finally, we fairly reward local training nodes with encrypted local models based on trusted training time. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that our model significantly outperforms baseline models in terms of both efficiency and security metrics.

cs.CR

Point Tracking in Surgery--The 2024 Surgical Tattoos in Infrared (STIR) Challenge

Understanding tissue motion in surgery is crucial to enable applications in downstream tasks such as segmentation, 3D reconstruction, virtual tissue landmarking, autonomous probe-based scanning, and subtask autonomy. Labeled data are essential to enabling algorithms in these downstream tasks since they allow us to quantify and train algorithms. This paper introduces a point tracking challenge to address this, wherein participants can submit their algorithms for quantification. The submitted algorithms are evaluated using a dataset named surgical tattoos in infrared (STIR), with the challenge aptly named the STIR Challenge 2024. The STIR Challenge 2024 comprises two quantitative components: accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy component tests the accuracy of algorithms on in vivo and ex vivo sequences. The efficiency component tests the latency of algorithm inference. The challenge was conducted as a part of MICCAI EndoVis 2024. In this challenge, we had 8 total teams, with 4 teams submitting before and 4 submitting after challenge day. This paper details the STIR Challenge 2024, which serves to move the field towards more accurate and efficient algorithms for spatial understanding in surgery. In this paper we summarize the design, submissions, and results from the challenge. The challenge dataset is available here: https://zenodo.org/records/14803158 , and the code for baseline models and metric calculation is available here: https://github.com/athaddius/STIRMetrics

cs.CV

Nuclear Deployed: Analyzing Catastrophic Risks in Decision-making of Autonomous LLM Agents

Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into autonomous decision-makers, raising concerns about catastrophic risks in high-stakes scenarios, particularly in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) domains. Based on the insight that such risks can originate from trade-offs between the agent's Helpful, Harmlessness and Honest (HHH) goals, we build a novel three-stage evaluation framework, which is carefully constructed to effectively and naturally expose such risks. We conduct 14,400 agentic simulations across 12 advanced LLMs, with extensive experiments and analysis. Results reveal that LLM agents can autonomously engage in catastrophic behaviors and deception, without being deliberately induced. Furthermore, stronger reasoning abilities often increase, rather than mitigate, these risks. We also show that these agents can violate instructions and superior commands. On the whole, we empirically prove the existence of catastrophic risks in autonomous LLM agents. We release our code to foster further research.

cs.CL

Cognitive Activation and Chaotic Dynamics in Large Language Models: A Quasi-Lyapunov Analysis of Reasoning Mechanisms

The human-like reasoning capabilities exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs) challenge the traditional neural network theory's understanding of the flexibility of fixed-parameter systems. This paper proposes the "Cognitive Activation" theory, revealing the essence of LLMs' reasoning mechanisms from the perspective of dynamic systems: the model's reasoning ability stems from a chaotic process of dynamic information extraction in the parameter space. By introducing the Quasi-Lyapunov Exponent (QLE), we quantitatively analyze the chaotic characteristics of the model at different layers. Experiments show that the model's information accumulation follows a nonlinear exponential law, and the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) accounts for a higher proportion in the final output than the attention mechanism. Further experiments indicate that minor initial value perturbations will have a substantial impact on the model's reasoning ability, confirming the theoretical analysis that large language models are chaotic systems. This research provides a chaos theory framework for the interpretability of LLMs' reasoning and reveals potential pathways for balancing creativity and reliability in model design.

cs.LG

The Brain-Inspired Cooperative Shared Control Framework for Brain-Machine Interface

In brain-machine interface (BMI) applications, a key challenge is the low information content and high noise level in neural signals, severely affecting stable robotic control. To address this challenge, we proposes a cooperative shared control framework based on brain-inspired intelligence, where control signals are decoded from neural activity, and the robot handles the fine control. This allows for a combination of flexible and adaptive interaction control between the robot and the brain, making intricate human-robot collaboration feasible. The proposed framework utilizes spiking neural networks (SNNs) for controlling robotic arm and wheel, including speed and steering. While full integration of the system remains a future goal, individual modules for robotic arm control, object tracking, and map generation have been successfully implemented. The framework is expected to significantly enhance the performance of BMI. In practical settings, the BMI with cooperative shared control, utilizing a brain-inspired algorithm, will greatly enhance the potential for clinical applications.

cs.RO

BFLN: A Blockchain-based Federated Learning Model for Non-IID Data

As the application of federated learning becomes increasingly widespread, the issue of imbalanced training data distribution has emerged as a significant challenge. Federated learning utilizes local data stored on different training clients for model training, rather than centralizing data on a server, thereby greatly enhancing the privacy and security of training data. However, the distribution of training data across different clients may be imbalanced, with different categories of data potentially residing on different clients. This presents a challenge to traditional federated learning, which assumes data distribution is independent and identically distributed (IID). This paper proposes a Blockchain-based Federated Learning Model for Non-IID Data (BFLN), which combines federated learning with blockchain technology. By introducing a new aggregation method and incentive algorithm, BFLN enhances the model performance of federated learning on non-IID data. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that, compared to other state-of-the-art models, BFLN improves training accuracy and provides a sustainable incentive mechanism for personalized federated learning.

cs.DC

Embedded Silicon-Organic Integrated Neuromorphic System

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are both based on the tenet of "science and technology are people-oriented", and both need to achieve efficient communication with the human brain. Based on multi-disciplinary research in systems neuroscience, computer architecture, and functional organic materials, we proposed the concept of using AI to simulate the operating principles and materials of the brain in hardware to develop brain-inspired intelligence technology, and realized the preparation of neuromorphic computing devices and basic materials. We simulated neurons and neural networks in terms of material and morphology, using a variety of organic polymers as the base materials for neuroelectronic devices, for building neural interfaces as well as organic neural devices and silicon neural computational modules. We assemble organic artificial synapses with simulated neurons from silicon-based Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) into organic artificial neurons, the basic components of neural networks, and later construct biological neural network models based on the interpreted neural circuits. Finally, we also discuss how to further build neuromorphic devices based on these organic artificial neurons, which have both a neural interface friendly to nervous tissue and interact with information from real biological neural networks.

q-bio.NC

P-adic incomplete gamma functions and Artin-Hasse-type series

We define and study a $p$-adic analogue of the incomplete gamma function related to Morita's $p$-adic gamma function. We also discuss a combinatorial identity related to the Artin-Hasse series, which is a special case of the exponential principle in combinatorics. From this we deduce a curious $p$-adic property of $|\mathrm{Hom} (G,S_n)|$ for a topologically finitely generated group $G$, using a characterization of $p$-adic continuity for certain functions $f \colon \mathbb Z_{>0} \to \mathbb Q_p$ due to O'Desky-Richman. In the end, we give an exposition of some standard properties of the Artin-Hasse series.

math.NT

The Brain-Inspired Decoder for Natural Visual Image Reconstruction

Decoding images from brain activity has been a challenge. Owing to the development of deep learning, there are available tools to solve this problem. The decoded image, which aims to map neural spike trains to low-level visual features and high-level semantic information space. Recently, there are a few studies of decoding from spike trains, however, these studies pay less attention to the foundations of neuroscience and there are few studies that merged receptive field into visual image reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a deep learning neural network architecture with biological properties to reconstruct visual image from spike trains. As far as we know, we implemented a method that integrated receptive field property matrix into loss function at the first time. Our model is an end-to-end decoder from neural spike trains to images. We not only merged Gabor filter into auto-encoder which used to generate images but also proposed a loss function with receptive field properties. We evaluated our decoder on two datasets which contain macaque primary visual cortex neural spikes and salamander retina ganglion cells (RGCs) spikes. Our results show that our method can effectively combine receptive field features to reconstruct images, providing a new approach to visual reconstruction based on neural information.

cs.CV