Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xing Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Xing Hu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

CoS-VQ: Coordinated Shared-Scale Vector Quantization for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) require substantial memory, motivating low-bit weight quantization for efficient deployment. Existing vector quantization (VQ) methods often improve accuracy by increasing the effective coding dimension, which can complicate independent lookup and local codeword updates. We propose CoS-VQ (Coordinated Shared-Scale Vector Quantization), which preserves low-dimensional codewords while jointly optimizing hard indices and their shared scale across positions. The key challenge is scale-induced coupling: the optimal scale depends on the entire codeword combination and, in turn, changes candidate rankings across positions, so pointwise updates can stall even after scale re-optimization. CoS-VQ collects candidates at multiple probe scales and constructs a tangent separable upper bound for the residual-aware quadratic objective. By reducing candidate comparisons to lower envelopes of lines over positive scales, it identifies finitely many representative intervals for joint index--scale updates without exhaustively enumerating codeword combinations. On Qwen3.8-27B, CoS-VQ outperforms QTIP and LLVQ on the evaluated language modeling, coding, and reasoning benchmarks. Ablations from the same initialization further show larger gains from joint updates than from scale-only refinement, highlighting joint selection as an alternative to increasing codeword dimensionality. The code is available at https://github.com/xzktx003/Cos_VQ.

cs.LG↗

Apparent magnetic field decay in a solar flare from Zeeman splitting of the Mg 12.32 microns observations

The magnetic field is the most fundamental observable in solar physics, while solar flares are the most violent, rapid magnetic energy-release events in the solar atmosphere. Decades of observations and theory have sketched the framework of flare evolution and magnetic-field-related physical process, yet the actual magnetic field variations during flares remained poorly understood. The main obstacle is that magnetic-diagnostic spectral lines are distorted by transient flare activity, making traditional spectro-polarimetry inversions complicated. Using a mid-infrared solar telescope, we investigate spectroscopic evolution of the Mg 12.32 microns line during an X1.5-class flare. Owing to the exceptionally large Zeeman sensitivity of this line, magnetic field strength can be directly determined from the measured line separation. Our analysis reveals apparent magnetic field weakening beneath flare ribbons in the impulsive phase. Radiative-hydrodynamic simulations and atmospheric inversions confirm that the formation height of the Mg 12.32 microns line increases during the flare. We suggest this apparent field change probably originates either from elevated line-formation altitude or magnetic-field redistribution. Additional observations and modeling are needed to clarify these two contributions. This study demonstrates the capability of mid-infrared wavelengths to trace magnetic-field evolution during flares.

astro-ph.SR↗

Generating Mitigations for Downstream Projects to Neutralize Upstream Library Vulnerability

Third-party libraries are essential in software development as they prevent the need for developers to recreate existing functionalities. However, vulnerabilities within these libraries pose significant risks to dependent projects. Upgrading dependencies is infeasible when no patched version is available or when downstream projects have strict version constraints. Moreover, repairing the vulnerability proves challenging when the source code of the library is inaccessible. State-of-the-art automatic vulnerability repair and automatic program repair methods both fail to address this issue. Therefore, mitigating library vulnerabilities without access to source code or available patches is crucial for a swift response to potential security attacks. Existing tools encounter challenges concerning generalizability and functional security. Upon vulnerability disclosure, LUMEN prepares a pool of candidate mitigation strategies by retrieving explicit workarounds from public sources and supplementing the pool with generated strategies based on vulnerability reproduction behavior. LUMEN then selects a suitable strategy, autonomously gathers repository-specific context, and adaptively generates a validated mitigation patch. We evaluate LUMEN on 474 impacted functions associated with 94 vulnerabilities. LUMEN successfully mitigates 393 functions, achieving a success rate of 82.91%, which substantially outperforms the adapted baseline in blocking vulnerability reproduction under our exploit-based evaluation. Additionally, our ablation study evaluates the contributions of strategy composition, strategy selection, and repository-level context collection. Further evaluations show that LUMEN can mitigate vulnerabilities disclosed after the knowledge cutoff of the base model.

cs.SE↗

Fine-Grained Units, Flat Decisions: Hierarchical Micro-Expert Pruning for Mixture-of-Experts Models

Micro-expert pruning reduces the capacity of mixture-of-experts (MoE) models by removing coupled channels within routed experts. However, finer pruning granularity alone does not guarantee the preservation of downstream capabilities, as similar language-modeling perplexity can accompany substantially different task performance. We revisit micro-expert mask construction as two distinct decisions: allocating retained capacity across experts and selecting channels within that capacity. We propose UC-RAMP, a two-stage post-training pruning framework that explicitly separates these decisions. CAPE uses cross-domain calibration evidence to redistribute expert widths under an exact layer-wise budget, while RAMP refines channel composition at fixed widths through one-out, one-in exchanges guided by a channel-interaction surrogate. Across three MoE models at 25% and 50% routed-expert channel pruning, UC-RAMP achieves the highest ten-task mean accuracy among evaluated pruning methods in five of six settings. At 50% pruning, it outperforms the strongest evaluated baseline by 8.19, 3.96, and 6.14 percentage points across the three models, respectively. In a single-A100 deployment at 25% pruning, UC-RAMP reduces measured time to first token by 19.7--23.9% and time per output token by 20.2--22.3% relative to the unpruned model. The code is available at https://github.com/xzktx003/UC_RAMP.

cs.AI↗

Editing as Language: Teaching LLM Agents a Grammar for Native Context Editing

A synopsis in novels folds a story into a few lines; a function in code gathers many steps with a single execution. Context editing is native to language itself. In this paper, we propose the Native Context Editing (NCE) framework, which gives language model agents a grammar for natively editing their own context. By encoding context-editing operations in a grammar of dedicated special tokens, we teach the agents to invoke edits through the language itself. We train agents on iteratively constructed trajectory segments, with each teacher edit conditioned on the evolving context. This establishes context editing as an atomic and inherent capability of LLM agents, enabling them to dynamically modify their context as they generate responses over long-horizon reasoning and interaction. Compared with context-editing methods that learn to generate tool-use code within specific external harness environments, our approach integrates context editing as an internal mechanism of the model's native generation process, enabling better generalization across diverse real-world workflows. On four long-horizon agentic benchmarks (Terminal-Bench 2.0, SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Multilingual, and SWE-bench Pro), NCE improves the average task success rate over the base model by 5.6 percentage points for LongCat-Flash-Lite-Sparse and by 4.5 for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, while reducing average token usage by 36% and 15%, respectively.

cs.AI↗

LoopQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Looped Transformers

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) improve parameter efficiency by recursively reusing shared Transformer modules, yet their repeated computation over evolving recurrent states poses new challenges for low-bit deployment. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods, largely designed for feed-forward Transformers, fail to account for cross-loop activation dynamics, heterogeneous loop sensitivity, and recursive error propagation, leading to substantial performance degradation at low precision. To address these challenges, we propose LoopQuant, a loop-aware PTQ framework for accurate and efficient low-bit quantization of LoopLMs. LoopQuant is built on three core components: 1) Cross-Loop Distribution Canonicalization (CLDC) learns a shared quantization-friendly representation across recurrent states while preserving parameter sharing; 2) Interaction-Aware Loop-wise Precision Allocation (ILPA) allocates activation precision under a fixed bit budget by modeling task-level loop sensitivity and cross-loop interactions; and 3) Loop-Conditioned Task Calibration (LCTC) further aligns quantized inference with the low-bit recursive trajectory through lightweight task-space calibration. Extensive experiments across LoopLM architectures demonstrate that LoopQuant consistently outperforms existing low-bit PTQ methods. On Ouro-2.6B, LoopQuant under W4A4 surpasses all W4A8 baselines in performance, while reducing model memory by 65.3% with only 3.4% additional storage overhead over naive INT4 and achieving a 1.7 times decoding speedup over BF16. These results demonstrate a strong balance among accuracy, compression, and inference efficiency, providing a practical and deployment-friendly solution for low-bit LoopLM inference. The code is available at [https://github.com/Kishon-zzx/LoopQuant].

cs.LG↗

Not All Correct Fixes Run Alike: An Empirical Study of Patch Performance in Repository-Level Issue Resolution

Repository-level issue-resolution benchmarks such as SWE-bench evaluate submitted patches primarily based on whether they pass the correctness tests, leaving the runtime performance of different test-passing patches largely unexplored. Evaluating patch performance is essential but challenging since designing performance workloads for each benchmark instance is costly. However, these benchmarks already provide a natural candidate: the built-in \emph{FAIL\_TO\_PASS} (F2P) tests, which exercise the behavior affected by the issue fix. We therefore investigate whether the provided F2P tests can be repurposed to evaluate patch performance. Overall, we choose four frontier models, Claude Opus~5, GPT~5.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Qwen~3.8 Max, paired with SWE-agent to resolve the pre-filtered measurable corpus from verified splits of SWE-bench and SWE-bench-Live, yielding 262 cases with at least two different correct solutions, including the developer ground-truth patch. We then measure each solution's runtime performance in instruction count and wall-clock time on the native F2P test, and use Welch ANOVA instead of the RSD proposed in prior work as a more robust statistical discrimination criterion. We find that this methodology exhibits notable discrimination capability in runtime performance and identifies performance differences among patches in almost half of the instances. Our empirical study shows that the runtime performance of generated patches is independent of the issue resolution rate of LLMs, with nearly reversed model rankings. The case study also shows that the performance analysis reveals architectural regression in some patches that the correctness evaluation overlooked. These findings suggest that resolution rate does not adequately characterize LLMs' capability for repository-level issue resolution, motivating future evaluations to consider patch performance alongside it.

cs.SE↗

UNITAS: A 3D-Native World Action Model for Embodied Manipulation

World action models (WAMs) aim to answer a coupled physical question: given a task instruction, what motion should the robot execute, and how will that motion change the surrounding world? Most existing WAMs build on pretrained video generators and represent world evolution through images or visual latents. Robotic interaction, however, takes place in metric three-dimensional space, while images are view-dependent projections whose pixel distances do not directly encode physical distances. We introduce UNITAS, to our knowledge the first 3D-native world action model that unifies observations, actions, and scene dynamics in a shared metric 3D frame within each interaction, using a common representation across robot embodiments and human hands. Action flow represents human hands and robot grippers as 3D point trajectories, while scene flow describes scene-point displacements conditioned on these trajectories. World-aligned 3D positional embeddings ground visual tokens with or without depth input, and a physical-time trajectory tokenizer encodes each point trajectory as one token anchored at its current 3D position. This interface supports both direct action execution and action-conditioned scene prediction. With 1.7B parameters, UNITAS achieves the best action-conditioned scene prediction on RoboTwin among the compared methods, with up to 49% lower displacement errors than PointWorld, and state-of-the-art manipulation success, including 99.8% on LIBERO and an average of 85% across real-world tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/DexForce/UNITAS.

cs.RO↗

CERO: Where and When to Allocate Rollouts for RL Post-Training

Adaptive rollout methods for group-relative reinforcement learning typically allocate a fixed per-update budget across prompts. We instead study how to coordinate a finite rollout budget over the entire training horizon. We formulate this problem using a concave surrogate utility of cumulative prompt exposure and introduce CERO, an online primal dual scheduler for prompt admission and budget pacing. In our experiments, each admitted prompt receives a fixed-size response group. CERO instead adapts which prompts are selected, how often they are revisited across rounds, and how many groups are generated in each round. A compact Fenchel representation linearizes the dependence on cumulative exposure, while projected online gradient descent updates prompt-specific supporting slopes and a shared budget price using reward-variation feedback and budget deviations. We establish pathwise guarantees for the surrogate allocation objective against fixed-rate and same-path time-varying benchmarks, with explicit terms for proxy discrepancy and rate variation. Under matched training-response budgets, CERO attains the highest avg@16 macro-average on each of three backbones across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Mechanistic analyses link CERO's prompt choices to within-group reward contrast, while multi-seed ablations show gains from adaptive pacing over both uniform and preset spending schedules.

cs.LG↗

SEER: Self-Enhancing Chain-of-Thought Compression for Reasoning Models

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can substantially improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but it often comes with high inference cost due to long and poorly controlled reasoning traces. This overhead is particularly problematic in software engineering tasks (e.g., code generation), where both latency and output reliability matter. To better understand this trade-off, we conduct an empirical study on widely used code generation benchmarks and observe that many modern reasoning models produce excessively verbose CoTs (often thousands of tokens), which frequently leads to truncation and unstable generation. Using a strict n-gram repetition detector, we find that most observed truncations are associated with degenerate looping behaviors. In addition, a HumanEval/129 case study shows that failed generations can be longer than successful ones, suggesting limited returns from overlong reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we propose SEER (Self-Enhancing Efficient Reasoning), a self-enhancing framework for adaptive CoT compression. SEER improves the conciseness of reasoning while preserving output quality, without relying on external compression tools. SEER refines self-generated CoT data via Best-of-N sampling to suppress looping and redundant traces, then applies a lightweight, data-driven filter to encourage concise yet correct reasoning. It then fine-tunes the model on the filtered data to internalize concise reasoning behaviors. Across four software engineering benchmarks on the evaluated DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B backbone, SEER reduces CoT length by 34.6% on average while improving task performance, with reduced truncation and fewer reasoning loops.

cs.SE↗

Unleashing the Power of Equality Saturation for Tensor Program Superoptimization

Efficient GPU implementations of tensor programs often require joint optimization of high-level algebraic formulations and low-level execution strategies. However, the resulting search space grows rapidly as transformations combine across operators, making joint optimization difficult to scale. We present EqiForge, a tensor program superoptimizer based on equality saturation. Its unified IR represents high-level tensor expressions and tiled computations in a single expression language. By composing equality rules, EqiForge derives fused implementations such as FlashAttention-style kernels directly from tensor expressions. Early compaction prunes redundant partial programs before completion, while subgraph composition extends the search to larger graphs. Across tensor-program benchmarks, EqiForge achieves a geometric mean speedup of 1.32x and a maximum of 2.74x over the fastest available baseline per configuration. Its attention kernels outperform FlashAttention by up to 1.87x in decode and approach its performance in prefill. EqiForge also discovers new implementations that outperform torch.compile on various Transformer layers, including QK-normalized MLA (3.16x) and mHC (5.84x).

cs.DC↗

ACE: Adaptive Calibration-Free Expert Skipping for MoE-based LLMs

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures provide an efficient paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs), yet fixed top-k routing activates the same number of expert slots for every token, causing substantial redundant computation. Existing expert-skipping methods often rely on router confidence, calibration data, or additional training, and therefore cannot reliably estimate the actual contribution of routed experts. To this end, we propose ACE, a training-free, calibration-free, and checkpoint-preserving framework for token-adaptive expert skipping in MoE-based LLMs. ACE contains two complementary components: 1) Global Spectral Proxy (GSP), which estimates global transformation capacity from the coupled gate, up, and down projections together with RMSNorm scaling; and 2) Router-Conditioned Refinement (RCR), which constructs expert-specific direction prototypes from centered router weights and evaluates expert responses along routing-preferred directions. During inference, ACE combines both estimates with runtime router gates and skips an expert slot only when both views identify it as low-contribution, while always retaining the top-1 expert. All expert statistics are computed offline, leaving only table lookups and lightweight scalar operations online. Extensive experiments across three MoE-based LLMs and eight benchmarks demonstrate that ACE consistently outperforms existing static and dynamic baselines, with increasingly pronounced advantages under aggressive expert skipping. For instance, at a 50% skipping ratio on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, ACE reduces WikiText-2 perplexity by 7.96% and improves average downstream accuracy by 4.15 percentage points over the strongest competing method.

cs.AI↗

Unsaid, Unsafe? Implicit Security Obligations in LLM-Based RTL Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate register-transfer-level (RTL) code with rapidly improving functional correctness. Security of LLM-generated code, however, has been studied mainly for software, where flaws can still be patched after deployment. Insecure RTL offers no such remedy once taped out into silicon. We construct SECRTL-GEN, a multi-language resource-access security benchmark grounded in real SoC IP: 392 tasks over five CWE families and four HDLs (Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, and Python), each with black-box functional and security testbenches. Functional specifications intentionally omit security obligations, matching how obligations are often kept out of functional docs in practice. An empirical study of five frontier LLMs shows a sharp gap: under vanilla prompts they pass functional tests in about 73-79% of cases but security tests in only 14-35%, and stronger functional models are not safer. Adding CWE knowledge raises security, while unaided self-thinking helps less and both security-oriented prompts cut functional pass rates, showing that the bottleneck is missing weakness awareness in the specification, not an inability to write defensive RTL. We present RTL-Obliger, a neuro-symbolic framework that infers these implicit obligations. An LLM extracts a functional-semantic graph from the specification; a symbolic engine then matches it against a CWE pattern ontology to surface mitigation-evidence gaps and signal-level obligations; the LLM finally revises RTL under those obligations in a functionality-preserving two-stage generation. Across five models and four languages, RTL-Obliger raises mean all-pass from 49.6-51.4% (SecV/RESCUE) to 61.6%, with higher security and functional rates than these secure-generation baselines.

cs.CR↗

Answer Is Cheap, Show Me the Evidence! Augmenting Automated Vulnerability Assessment with Evidence

Software vulnerability (SV) assessment helps prioritize remediation by characterizing reported vulnerabilities. Existing automated methods predict assessment results from SV reports (SVRs), but often overlook information in rich text, such as screenshots and code snippets, as well as contextual information about vulnerable projects. They also focus on prediction accuracy without providing explanations or supporting evidence, limiting their practical use when analysts must validate imperfect predictions. We propose EAVA, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to assess SVs and provide supporting evidence. EAVA employs specialized LLM agents to process rich-text content and project information, and builds a dedicated assessment model through a two-stage training pipeline. It first uses supervised instruction tuning on automatically annotated reasoning trajectories to inject domain knowledge, and then applies reinforcement learning to improve intrinsic reasoning. EAVA also retrieves similar historical vulnerabilities as supplementary evidence. Experiments on a newly collected SVR dataset show that EAVA outperforms the strongest baseline by 5.3 to 35.2 percent across multiple metrics. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of assessment-specific model training and information enrichment. A user study with security experts further demonstrates that the evidence provided by EAVA is useful and practical for real-world SV assessment.

cs.SE↗

QiMeng-ChipV-RTL: Exploiting Information Locality for IP-level Verilog Generation

The generation of Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code is a crucial yet labor-intensive step in digital hardware design, traditionally requiring engineers to manually translate complex specifications into thousands of lines of synthesizable Hardware Description Language (HDL) code. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating this process, existing approaches--including fine-tuned domain-specific models and advanced agent-based systems--struggle to scale to industrial IP-level design tasks. We identify three key challenges: (1) handling long, highly detailed documents, where critical interface constraints become buried in unrelated submodule descriptions; (2) generating long RTL code, where both syntactic and semantic correctness degrade sharply with increasing output length; and (3) navigating the complex debugging cycles required for functional verification through simulation and waveform analysis. To overcome these challenges, we propose ChipV-RTL, a multi-agent framework that leverages information locality in modular hardware design. ChipV-RTL decomposes the long-document to long-code generation problem into a set of short-document, short-code tasks, enabling scalable generation and debugging. Specifically, ChipV-RTL integrates hierarchical document partitioning, task planning, localized code generation, interface-consistent merging, and AST-guided locality-aware debugging. Experiments on RealBench, an IP-level Verilog generation benchmark, demonstrate that ChipV-RTL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs and agents, achieving a pass rate of 45.0% compared to 21.6%. Code, project page are available at https://iprc-dip.github.io/ChipV-RTL/.

cs.LG↗

Execution-Anchored Hallucination Calibration Reranking for Verilog Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet their performance degrades significantly on low-resource Hardware Description Languages such as Verilog. While multi-candidate sampling improves the likelihood of generating correct solutions, au-tomatically selecting the optimal candidate remains an open challenge. Through a systematic empirical study across nine models and two benchmarks, we identify two critical limitations:(1) existing execution-based reranking methods, which rely on testbench pass/fail outcomes, exhibit poor domain transferability due to low-quality generated testbenches; and (2) LLM-as-a-Judge suffers from reasoning hallucination, producing incon-sistent judgments for execution-equivalent code. These findings reveal two signal types with orthogonal errors: execution signals(deterministic but testbench coverage limited)and reasoning signals (semantically rich but hallucination-prone). Their orthog-onality suggests combining the two signals, yet in our experiments letting the reasoner directly observe execution results merely anchors its judgments on test outcomes; we therefore acquire the two signals independently and fuse them only at the decision stage. Based on these insights, we propose EAHC, an Execution-Anchored Hallucination Calibration reranking framework that anchors reasoning judgments to execution behavior so that execution-equivalent candidates receive consistent scores, which implements a dual-channel architecture: EAHC-R, a 4B reasoning discriminator; and EAHC-T, a testbench generator leveraging RAG for execution verification.

cs.SE↗

An Empirical Study of Speculative Decoding on Software Engineering Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become widely used for Software Engineering (SE) tasks, spanning from function-level code generation to complex repository-level workflows. However, the high latency of autoregressive inference remains a significant bottleneck, hindering their deployment in interactive environments. While Speculative Decoding (SD) offers a promising technique for lossless acceleration, prior research on long-context repository-level tasks and complex agentic interactions remains limited. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of SD in SE tasks. We systematically benchmark a comprehensive spectrum of strategies, encompassing both model-based and model-free methods, across representative generation, editing, and repair scenarios. Our empirical results indicate that SD demonstrates clear potential for accelerating inference, particularly for smaller models that achieve higher speedups than those of their larger counterparts. We find that the effectiveness of SD methods varies across different task scenarios. Model-based approaches are well-suited for code generation, whereas model-free methods are better adapted to repository-level repair and editing scenarios. Furthermore, we observe that the repetitiveness of SE tasks improves the performance of model-free methods. In contrast to natural language tasks, the higher predictability of SE tasks allows for more aggressive hyperparameters. Our findings are summarized as guidelines to help increase inference efficiency for SE scenarios.

cs.SE↗

Large Language Model for Verilog Code Generation: Literature Review and the Road Ahead

Code generation has emerged as a critical research area at the intersection of Software Engineering (SE) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), attracting significant attention from both academia and industry. Within this broader landscape, Verilog, as a representative hardware description language (HDL), plays a fundamental role in digital circuit design and verification, making its automated generation particularly significant for Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Consequently, recent research has increasingly focused on applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to Verilog code generation, particularly at the Register Transfer Level (RTL), exploring how these AI-driven techniques can be effectively integrated into hardware design workflows. Despite substantial research efforts have explored LLM applications in this domain, a comprehensive survey synthesizing these developments remains absent from the literature. This review fill addresses this gap by providing a systematic literature review of LLM-based methods for Verilog code generation, examining their effectiveness, limitations, and potential for advancing automated hardware design. The review encompasses research work from conferences and journals in the fields of SE, AI, and EDA, encompassing 70 papers published on venues, along with 32 high-quality preprint papers, bringing the total to 102 papers. By answering four key research questions, we aim to (1) identify the LLMs used for Verilog generation, (2) examine the datasets and metrics employed in evaluation, (3) categorize the techniques proposed for Verilog generation, and (4) analyze LLM alignment approaches for Verilog generation. Based on our findings, we have identified a series of limitations of existing studies. Finally, we have outlined a roadmap highlighting potential opportunities for future research endeavors in LLM-assisted hardware design.

cs.AR↗