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Xiaoqing Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaoqing Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

ZGCM-1: A Fully Open and Extremely Efficient Foundation Model for Math and Agentic Search

In this work, we present ZGCM-1, a fully open 7B dense foundation model trained from scratch with extreme data, system, and algorithmic efficiency. ZGCM-1 is founded on a core premise: compact models cannot passively memorize the open web, but can overcome parametric capacity limits by coupling deliberate internal thinking with active external tool use. To support this paradigm across a 256K context, we develop an end-to-end, high-efficiency open training recipe: Architecture & System Co-design: interleaved gated sliding-window and full attention, and a stable FP8 Muon optimizer; Progressive Curriculum & MDP Mid-Training: context scaling across 16K, 64K, and 256K, and the reformulation of interaction traces into Markov Decision Processes. Furthermore, we establish an AI-native R&D workflow where agent swarms autonomously manage cluster operations, data curation, and rapid diagnostic evaluation. Extensive evaluations show that ZGCM-1-7B is competitive across 7B model family on general benchmarks. On several challenging mathematical reasoning and agentic search suites, it remains competitive with frontier models orders of magnitude larger, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B and GLM-5.1. We also show that our pre-training design offers a ~4.2x efficiency improvement in 16K pre-training time-to-loss. Across the full development lifecycle, we distill eight actionable empirical findings-spanning architectural scaling, SFT quality pruning, long-context generalization, and agentic co-training dynamics. To facilitate community research, we open-source model weights from the pre-training, mid-training, and post-training stages, intermediate checkpoints, training code, per-stage data and data recipes, and W&B logs.

cs.AI

Hierarchical Graph Memory for LLM Agents with Path-level Localization and Rewrite

Agents for long term reasoning require a memory that can be efficiently and effectively updated over time, as new facts and external feedback continue to arrive. Recently, graph memory has been adopted to offer structural organization for multi-hop retrieval and reasoning. However, existing methods store all memories in a flat graph, and accumulated historical memories can introduce irrelevant contexts and increase the cost of evidence selection during retrieval. Moreover, they typically update memory units independently, requiring repeated unit-wise rewrite to cover related changes. To address these issues, we propose HiGram, an evolving hierarchical graph memory framework with path-level localization and rewriting. Specifically, we first propose a hierarchical graph memory, which organizes the memory into coarse-to-fine architecture composed of upper-level nodes and MemoryUnits, thereby reducing the amount of irrelevant information during retrieval. We further propose MicroGraph-based path-level localization, which leverages query and update conditioned MicroGraphs to identify support subgraph and evidence path before rewrite. Finally, we propose a coordinated rewriting method that jointly revises intra-unit memory and inter-unit dependencies, enable valid dependency structures updating in the localized evidence path. Experiments on benchmarks for long-term conversational question answering and conflict-aware memory evaluation demonstrate that our method demonstrate substantial improvements over baselines in answer quality and token efficiency. Besides, our method improves answer accuracy and query-valid evidence selection under dynamic, static, and conditional conflicts.

cs.AI

OrchBench: Evaluating Multi-Agent Orchestration Plans in Isolation via Deterministic Simulation

Complex tasks often decompose into parallelizable yet interdependent subtasks, making orchestration critical to the performance of multi-agent systems (MAS). Existing evaluations typically rely on end-to-end execution, which conflates orchestration-plan quality with worker capabilities, tool reliability, and environmental noise. Moreover, the time and token costs of real execution grow rapidly with workflow scale, making systematic evaluation expensive. We present OrchBench, a simulation-based benchmark for evaluating multi-agent orchestration plans in isolation. Starting from real-world tasks, OrchBench constructs directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that encode task dependencies, with controlled sizes and degrees of parallelism. Given a DAG, a per-agent context limit, and an agent budget, the evaluated planner assigns subtasks to agents and specifies cross-agent information transfers and their retention ratios. A deterministic simulator evaluates the resulting plan without invoking worker agents and returns interpretable measures of result quality, makespan, and token cost. The simulated scores produced by OrchBench correlate strongly with quality scores from Claude Code executions, achieving a Pearson correlation of \(r=0.816\), while requiring only \(1.3\%\) of the tokens and \(10.3\%\) of the wall-clock time. Across diverse planners and workflow scales, we find that preserving task-critical information is more important than simply increasing the number of agents, and the benefits of parallelism diminish as coordination failures accumulate. These results establish OrchBench as an efficient and interpretable benchmark for comparing and diagnosing multi-agent orchestration plans.

cs.AI

Pathology Context Recalibration Network for Ocular Disease Recognition

Pathology context and expert experience play significant roles in clinical ocular disease diagnosis. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have good ocular disease recognition results, they often ignore exploring the clinical pathology context and expert experience priors to improve ocular disease recognition performance and decision-making interpretability. To this end, we first develop a novel Pathology Recalibration Module (PRM) to leverage the potential of pathology context prior via the combination of the well-designed pixel-wise context compression operator and pathology distribution concentration operator; then this paper applies a novel expert prior Guidance Adapter (EPGA) to further highlight significant pixel-wise representation regions by fully mining the expert experience prior. By incorporating PRM and EPGA into the modern DNN, the PCRNet is constructed for automated ocular disease recognition. Additionally, we introduce an Integrated Loss (IL) to boost the ocular disease recognition performance of PCRNet by considering the effects of sample-wise loss distributions and training label frequencies. The extensive experiments on three ocular disease datasets demonstrate the superiority of PCRNet with IL over state-of-the-art attention-based networks and advanced loss methods. Further visualization analysis explains the inherent behavior of PRM and EPGA that affects the decision-making process of DNNs.

cs.CV

Adaptive Confidence-Wise Loss for Improved Lens Structure Segmentation in AS-OCT

Precise lens structure segmentation is essential for the design of intraocular lenses (IOLs) in cataract surgery. Existing deep segmentation networks typically weight all pixels equally under cross-entropy (CE) loss, overlooking the fact that sub-regions of lens structures are inhomogeneous (e.g., some regions perform better than others) and that boundary regions often suffer from poor segmentation calibration at the pixel level. Clinically, experts annotate different sub-regions of lens structures with varying confidence levels, considering factors such as sub-region proportions, ambiguous boundaries, and lens structure shapes. Motivated by this observation, we propose an Adaptive Confidence-Wise (ACW) loss to group each lens structure sub-region into different confidence sub-regions via a confidence threshold from the unique region aspect, aiming to exploit the potential of expert annotation confidence prior. Specifically, ACW clusters each target region into low-confidence and high-confidence groups and then applies a region-weighted loss to reweigh each confidence group. Moreover, we design an adaptive confidence threshold optimization algorithm to adjust the confidence threshold of ACW dynamically. Additionally, to better quantify the miscalibration errors in boundary region segmentation, we propose a new metric, termed Boundary Expected Calibration Error (BECE). Extensive experiments on a clinical lens structure AS-OCT dataset and other multi-structure datasets demonstrate that our ACW significantly outperforms competitive segmentation loss methods across different deep segmentation networks (e.g., MedSAM). Notably, our method surpasses CE with 6.13% IoU gain, 4.33% DSC increase, and 4.79% BECE reduction in lens structure segmentation under U-Net. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/XiaoLing12138/Adaptive-Confidence-Wise-Loss.

cs.CV

Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields in Efficient CNNs for Fair Medical Image Classification

Efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture design has attracted growing research interests. However, they typically apply single receptive field (RF), small asymmetric RFs, or pyramid RFs to learn different feature representations, still encountering two significant challenges in medical image classification tasks: 1) They have limitations in capturing diverse lesion characteristics efficiently, e.g., tiny, coordination, small and salient, which have unique roles on the classification results, especially imbalanced medical image classification. 2) The predictions generated by those CNNs are often unfair/biased, bringing a high risk when employing them to real-world medical diagnosis conditions. To tackle these issues, we develop a new concept, Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields (ERoHPRF), to simultaneously boost medical image classification performance and fairness. This concept aims to mimic the multi-expert consultation mode by applying the well-designed heterogeneous pyramid RF bag to capture lesion characteristics with varying significances effectively via convolution operations with multiple heterogeneous kernel sizes. Additionally, ERoHPRF introduces an expert-like structural reparameterization technique to merge its parameters with the two-stage strategy, ensuring competitive computation cost and inference speed through comparisons to a single RF. To manifest the effectiveness and generalization ability of ERoHPRF, we incorporate it into mainstream efficient CNN architectures. The extensive experiments show that our proposed ERoHPRF maintains a better trade-off than state-of-the-art methods in terms of medical image classification, fairness, and computation overhead. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/XiaoLing12138/Expert-Like-Reparameterization-of-Heterogeneous-Pyramid-Receptive-Fields.

cs.CV

PEMUTA: Pedagogically-Enriched Multi-Granular Undergraduate Thesis Assessment

The undergraduate thesis (UGTE) plays an indispensable role in assessing a student's cumulative academic development throughout their college years. Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced education intelligence, they typically focus on holistic assessment with only one single evaluation score, but ignore the intricate nuances across multifaceted criteria, limiting their ability to reflect structural criteria, pedagogical objectives, and diverse academic competencies. Meanwhile, pedagogical theories have long informed manual UGTE evaluation through multi-dimensional assessment of cognitive development, disciplinary thinking, and academic performance, yet remain underutilized in automated settings. Motivated by the research gap, we pioneer PEMUTA, a pedagogically-enriched framework that effectively activates domain-specific knowledge from LLMs for multi-granular UGTE assessment. Guided by Vygotsky's theory and Bloom's Taxonomy, PEMUTA incorporates a hierarchical prompting scheme that evaluates UGTEs across six fine-grained dimensions: Structure, Logic, Originality, Writing, Proficiency, and Rigor (SLOWPR), followed by holistic synthesis. Two in-context learning techniques, \ie, few-shot prompting and role-play prompting, are also incorporated to further enhance alignment with expert judgments without fine-tuning. We curate a dataset of authentic UGTEs with expert-provided SLOWPR-aligned annotations to support multi-granular UGTE assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PEMUTA achieves strong alignment with expert evaluations, and exhibits strong potential for fine-grained, pedagogically-informed UGTE evaluations.

cs.CY

Divide-Fuse-Conquer: Eliciting "Aha Moments" in Multi-Scenario Games

Large language models (LLMs) have been observed to suddenly exhibit advanced reasoning abilities during reinforcement learning (RL), resembling an ``aha moment'' triggered by simple outcome-based rewards. While RL has proven effective in eliciting such breakthroughs in tasks involving mathematics, coding, and vision, it faces significant challenges in multi-scenario games. The diversity of game rules, interaction modes, and environmental complexities often leads to policies that perform well in one scenario but fail to generalize to others. Simply combining multiple scenarios during training introduces additional challenges, such as training instability and poor performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose Divide-Fuse-Conquer, a framework designed to enhance generalization in multi-scenario RL. This approach starts by heuristically grouping games based on characteristics such as rules and difficulties. Specialized models are then trained for each group to excel at games in the group is what we refer to as the divide step. Next, we fuse model parameters from different groups as a new model, and continue training it for multiple groups, until the scenarios in all groups are conquered. Experiments across 18 TextArena games show that Qwen2.5-32B-Align trained with the Divide-Fuse-Conquer strategy reaches a performance level comparable to Claude3.5, achieving 7 wins and 4 draws. We hope our approach can inspire future research on using reinforcement learning to improve the generalization of LLMs.

cs.LG

The Stepwise Deception: Simulating the Evolution from True News to Fake News with LLM Agents

With the growing spread of misinformation online, understanding how true news evolves into fake news has become crucial for early detection and prevention. However, previous research has often assumed fake news inherently exists rather than exploring its gradual formation. To address this gap, we propose FUSE (Fake news evolUtion Simulation framEwork), a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based simulation approach explicitly focusing on fake news evolution from real news. Our framework model a social network with four distinct types of LLM agents commonly observed in daily interactions: spreaders who propagate information, commentators who provide interpretations, verifiers who fact-check, and bystanders who observe passively to simulate realistic daily interactions that progressively distort true news. To quantify these gradual distortions, we develop FUSE-EVAL, a comprehensive evaluation framework measuring truth deviation along multiple linguistic and semantic dimensions. Results show that FUSE effectively captures fake news evolution patterns and accurately reproduces known fake news, aligning closely with human evaluations. Experiments demonstrate that FUSE accurately reproduces known fake news evolution scenarios, aligns closely with human judgment, and highlights the importance of timely intervention at early stages. Our framework is extensible, enabling future research on broader scenarios of fake news.

cs.SI

SAGraph: A Large-Scale Social Graph Dataset with Comprehensive Context for Influencer Selection in Marketing

Influencer marketing campaign success heavily depends on identifying key opinion leaders who can effectively leverage their credibility and reach to promote products or services. The selecting influencers process is vital for boosting brand visibility, fostering consumer trust, and driving sales. While traditional research often simplifies complex factors like user attitudes, interaction frequency, and advertising content, into simple numerical values. However, this reductionist approach fails to capture the dynamic nature of influencer marketing effectiveness. To bridge this gap, we present SAGraph, a novel comprehensive dataset from Weibo that captures multi-dimensional marketing campaign data across six product domains. The dataset encompasses 345,039 user profiles with their complete interaction histories, including 1.3M comments and 554K reposts across 44K posts, providing unprecedented granularity in influencer marketing dynamics. SAGraph uniquely integrates user profiles, content features, and temporal interaction patterns, enabling in-depth analysis of influencer marketing mechanisms. Experimental results using both traditional baselines and state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the crucial role of content analysis in predicting advertising effectiveness. Our findings reveal that LLM-based approaches achieve superior performance in understanding and predicting campaign success, opening new avenues for data-driven influencer marketing strategies. We hope that this dataset will inspire further research https://github.com/xiaoqzhwhu/SAGraph/.

cs.SI

More is not always better? Enhancing Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Differentiated and Reweighting Objectives

Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) without requiring parameter updates. However, as ICL demonstrations increase from a few to many, performance tends to plateau and eventually decline. We identify two primary causes for this trend: the suboptimal negative log-likelihood (NLL) optimization objective and the incremental data noise. To address these issues, we introduce \textit{DrICL}, a novel optimization method that enhances model performance through \textit{Differentiated} and \textit{Reweighting} objectives. Globally, DrICL utilizes differentiated learning to optimize the NLL objective, ensuring that many-shot performance surpasses zero-shot levels. Locally, it dynamically adjusts the weighting of many-shot demonstrations by leveraging cumulative advantages inspired by reinforcement learning, thereby mitigating the impact of noisy data. Recognizing the lack of multi-task datasets with diverse many-shot distributions, we develop the \textit{Many-Shot ICL Benchmark} (ICL-50)-a large-scale benchmark of 50 tasks that cover shot numbers from 1 to 350 within sequences of up to 8,000 tokens-for both fine-tuning and evaluation purposes. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs enhanced with DrICL achieve significant improvements in many-shot setups across various tasks, including both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We release the code and dataset hoping to facilitate further research in many-shot ICL\footnote{https://github.com/xiaoqzhwhu/DrICL}.

cs.LG

Thinking Before Running! Efficient Code Generation with Thorough Exploration and Optimal Refinement

Code generation is crucial in software engineering for automating the coding process efficiently. While test-time computation methods show promise, they suffer from high latency due to multiple computation rounds. To overcome this, we introduce \textbf{ThinkCoder}, a framework that combines thorough exploration with optimal refinement. The exploration phase diversifies the solution space by searching for potential solutions, followed by a refinement phase that enhances precision. This approach allows us to select the best solution through careful consideration before taking action, avoiding excessive trial and error. To further minimize test-time computation overhead, we introduce preference-driven optimization with Reinforced Self-Training (ReST), which uses exploration trajectories from ThinkCoder to guide LLM's evolution. This approach enhances LLM's exploration efficiency via preference learning, cutting costs while maintaining accuracy. ThinkCoder boosts the performance with a single LLM, excelling on benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP. Compared to SOTA models, it improves Pass@1 by 3.0\% over MapCoder with just 6.4\% of the computation cost. Against AgentCoder, ThinkCoder achieves a 0.5\% higher Pass@1 after 2 rounds, outperforming AgentCoder's 5 rounds. Additionally, ReST with success trajectories enhances efficiency, allowing models like LLaMA2-7B to achieve competitive results using only 20\% of the computational resources. These results highlight the framework's effectiveness and scalability.

cs.SE

ManipLVM-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Embodied Manipulation with Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging vision for scene perception and language for instruction following. However, existing methods rely heavily on costly human-annotated training datasets, which limits their generalization and causes them to struggle in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios, reducing real-world adaptability. To address these challenges, we propose ManipLVM-R1, a novel reinforcement learning framework that replaces traditional supervision with Reinforcement Learning using Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). By directly optimizing for task-aligned outcomes, our method enhances generalization and physical reasoning while removing the dependence on costly annotations. Specifically, we design two rule-based reward functions targeting key robotic manipulation subtasks: an Affordance Perception Reward to enhance localization of interaction regions, and a Trajectory Match Reward to ensure the physical plausibility of action paths. These rewards provide immediate feedback and impose spatial-logical constraints, encouraging the model to go beyond shallow pattern matching and instead learn deeper, more systematic reasoning about physical interactions.

cs.RO

The Truth Becomes Clearer Through Debate! Multi-Agent Systems with Large Language Models Unmask Fake News

In today's digital environment, the rapid propagation of fake news via social networks poses significant social challenges. Most existing detection methods either employ traditional classification models, which suffer from low interpretability and limited generalization capabilities, or craft specific prompts for large language models (LLMs) to produce explanations and results directly, failing to leverage LLMs' reasoning abilities fully. Inspired by the saying that "truth becomes clearer through debate," our study introduces a novel multi-agent system with LLMs named TruEDebate (TED) to enhance the interpretability and effectiveness of fake news detection. TED employs a rigorous debate process inspired by formal debate settings. Central to our approach are two innovative components: the DebateFlow Agents and the InsightFlow Agents. The DebateFlow Agents organize agents into two teams, where one supports and the other challenges the truth of the news. These agents engage in opening statements, cross-examination, rebuttal, and closing statements, simulating a rigorous debate process akin to human discourse analysis, allowing for a thorough evaluation of news content. Concurrently, the InsightFlow Agents consist of two specialized sub-agents: the Synthesis Agent and the Analysis Agent. The Synthesis Agent summarizes the debates and provides an overarching viewpoint, ensuring a coherent and comprehensive evaluation. The Analysis Agent, which includes a role-aware encoder and a debate graph, integrates role embeddings and models the interactions between debate roles and arguments using an attention mechanism, providing the final judgment.

cs.SI

A Novel Transformed Fibered Rank Approximation with Total Variation Regularization for Tensor Completion

Recently, tensor fibered rank has demonstrated impressive performance by effectively leveraging the global low-rank property in all directions for low-rank tensor completion (LRTC). However, it still has some limitations. Firstly, the typical tensor fibered rank approximation based on tensor nuclear norm (TNN) processes fixed and data-independent transformation, which may not be optimal for the underlying tensor structure. Secondly, it ignores the local piecewise smoothness of the dataset. To address these limitations, we present a nonconvex learnable transformed fibered nuclear norm (NLTFNN) model for LRTC,which uses a learnable transformed fibered nuclear norm with Log-Determinant (LTFNNLog) as tensor fibered rank approximation, and employs a total variation (TV) regularization to explore local piecewise smoothness. An efficient algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is developed to solve NLTFNN and the convergence of the algorithm is proved theoretically. Experiments on various datasets show the superiority of NLTFNN over several existing methods.

math.NA

Adaptive Wavelet Filters as Practical Texture Feature Amplifiers for Parkinson's Disease Screening in OCT

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder globally. The eye's retina is an extension of the brain and has great potential in PD screening. Recent studies have suggested that texture features extracted from retinal layers can be adopted as biomarkers for PD diagnosis under optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Frequency domain learning techniques can enhance the feature representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) by decomposing frequency components involving rich texture features. Additionally, previous works have not exploited texture features for automated PD screening in OCT. Motivated by the above analysis, we propose a novel Adaptive Wavelet Filter (AWF) that serves as the Practical Texture Feature Amplifier to fully leverage the merits of texture features to boost the PD screening performance of DNNs with the aid of frequency domain learning. Specifically, AWF first enhances texture feature representation diversities via channel mixer, then emphasizes informative texture feature representations with the well-designed adaptive wavelet filtering token mixer. By combining the AWFs with the DNN stem, AWFNet is constructed for automated PD screening. Additionally, we introduce a novel Balanced Confidence (BC) Loss by mining the potential of sample-wise predicted probabilities of all classes and class frequency prior, to further boost the PD screening performance and trustworthiness of AWFNet. The extensive experiments manifest the superiority of our AWFNet and BC over state-of-the-art methods in terms of PD screening performance and trustworthiness.

eess.IV

Indoor Fusion Positioning Based on "IMU-Ultrasonic-UWB" and Factor Graph Optimization Method

This paper presents a high-precision positioning system that integrates ultra-wideband (UWB) time difference of arrival (TDoA) measurements, inertial measurement unit (IMU) data, and ultrasonic sensors through factor graph optimization. To overcome the shortcomings of standalone UWB systems in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios and the inherent drift associated with inertial navigation, we developed a novel hybrid fusion framework. First, a dynamic covariance estimation mechanism is incorporated, which automatically adjusts measurement weights based on real-time channel conditions. Then, a tightly-coupled sensor fusion architecture is employed, utilizing IMU pre-integration theory for temporal synchronization. Finally, a sliding-window factor graph optimization backend is utilized, incorporating NLOS mitigation constraints. Experimental results in complex indoor environments show a 38\% improvement in positioning accuracy compared to conventional Kalman filter-based approaches, achieving a 12.3 cm root mean square (RMS) error under dynamic motion conditions. The system maintains robust performance even with intermittent UWB signal availability, down to a 40\% packet reception rate, effectively suppressing IMU drift through multi-modal constraint fusion. This work offers a practical solution for applications that require reliable indoor positioning in GPS-denied environments.

eess.SY

Fundus Image Quality Assessment and Enhancement: a Systematic Review

As an affordable and convenient eye scan, fundus photography holds the potential for preventing vision impairment, especially in resource-limited regions. However, fundus image degradation is common under intricate imaging environments, impacting following diagnosis and treatment. Consequently, image quality assessment (IQA) and enhancement (IQE) are essential for ensuring the clinical value and reliability of fundus images. While existing reviews offer some overview of this field, a comprehensive analysis of the interplay between IQA and IQE, along with their clinical deployment challenges, is lacking. This paper addresses this gap by providing a thorough review of fundus IQA and IQE algorithms, research advancements, and practical applications. We outline the fundamentals of the fundus photography imaging system and the associated interferences, and then systematically summarize the paradigms in fundus IQA and IQE. Furthermore, we discuss the practical challenges and solutions in deploying IQA and IQE, as well as offer insights into potential future research directions.

eess.IV