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Xing Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xing Zhang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

SpaceRipple: Lightweight Semantic Delivery for Mission-Oriented LEO Earth Observation Satellite Networks

Earth observation satellite networks generate massive volumes of high-resolution imagery, whereas inter-satellite and downlink resources remain limited. In many time-sensitive missions, ground users require mission-relevant semantic information rather than a full raw-image downlink. This paper proposes SpaceRipple, a lightweight framework for mission-oriented semantic delivery and on-board processing in Earth observation satellite networks. A sensing satellite performs adaptive compression and metadata generation to reduce inter-satellite traffic, while an edge computing satellite restores the received representation and extracts task-relevant semantic information. Unlike fidelity-driven image transmission, SpaceRipple coordinates compression, forwarding, restoration, and semantic inference within a collaborative pipeline, enabling semantic-oriented delivery instead of pixel-level image delivery. A compression-aware MoE enhancement module is further introduced to improve robustness under degraded visual inputs. Experimental results show that SpaceRipple achieves favorable reconstruction quality, improved semantic detection performance, and substantial bandwidth savings, demonstrating its potential for efficient and reliable Earth observation under constrained satellite-network resources.

cs.CV↗

Classical computational simulation of the FeMo-cofactor model to chemical accuracy and its implications

We use classical computational methods to estimate the ground-state energy to chemical accuracy in a model of the FeMo-cofactor of nitrogenase which is widely studied as a target of quantum computing. Our result relies on the insight that the ground-state problem can be characterized as one of ranking many competing, but largely simple, states. This allows a combination of systematic high-order coupled cluster and density matrix renormalization group calculations together with an extrapolation protocol to obtain an accurate energy. Within the model we identify several spin isomer candidates for the ground-state that are degenerate to chemical accuracy. Beyond this model, we characterize the impact of additional electronic excitations and the cluster and protein geometric fluctuations on the low-lying electronic landscape. We find that many features of the landscape are retained in more detailed representations of nitrogenase, which points to the complexity of spectroscopic interpretations of the electronic structure of the FeMo-cofactor.

physics.chem-ph↗

Radio Resource Allocation for Beam Hopping Scheduling in LEO Satellite Communications: A Spatio-Temporal Perspective

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks face critical challenges in radio resource allocation due to dynamic traffic demands and stringent interference constraints. Beam-hopping (BH) technology offers a promising solution by enabling dynamic beam resource allocation across spatial and temporal domains. In this paper, we propose a Tabu Search-based spatio-temporal BH resource allocation strategy for LEO satellite communication systems. Specifically, the BH scheduling problem is formulated to maximize user demand satisfaction under interference constraints. To solve this problem efficiently, the proposed Tabu Search framework integrates adaptive tabu tenure control, greedy-based initialization with interference-aware beam selection, and Simulated Annealing acceptance criteria. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves system throughput by 17.2\% and user satisfaction by 11.7\% compared with greedy-based BH strategies. These results indicate that the proposed approach provides a scalable and robust solution for dynamic resource allocation in interference-limited LEO satellite networks.

eess.SP↗

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback -- objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts -- by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma -- outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance -- and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture -- rules, evidence, and skills -- connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

cs.AI↗

Towards Ubiquitous 6G Computing and Networking Convergence: Architecture and Mechanism for Cross-Domain Resource Coordination

The 6G network will support six major application scenarios, such as immersive communication, integrated AI and communication, and integrated sensing and communication. Many scenarios necessitate significant computational support. Moreover, user demands are becoming increasingly segmented, diverse, and personalized. Traditional network slicing alone is insufficient to meet the heterogeneous computing and networking demands of emerging service scenarios. Mobile computing network convergence (CNC) introduces a fundamentally different paradigm from the conventional cloud computing plus communication network model by deeply embedding computing resources into the mobile network infrastructure and enabling integrated computing-network services tailored to diverse user demands. In this article, we investigate orchestration architectures and mechanisms for CNC in 6G mobile networks. We begin by reviewing the evolution of CNC from a mobile network perspective and surveying existing studies, which we categorize according to mobile network architectures. Building on these insights, we propose a hierarchical, cross-domain coordination architecture and an orchestration mechanism based on hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning. Performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed architecture and mechanism significantly reduce system energy consumption while enhancing task satisfaction rate. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future research directions.

cs.NI↗

Guardrails Beat Guidance: A Large-Scale Study of Rules, Skills, and Persistent Configuration for Coding Agents

Random rules improve a coding agent's task performance as much as expert-curated ones (both $+13.8$pp on a discriminative subset of SWE-bench Verified), and in our data every individually beneficial rule is a negative constraint ("do not refactor unrelated code"), while every individually harmful one is a positive directive ("follow code style"). We arrive at these findings through the first large-scale controlled study of agent rule files (\texttt{CLAUDE.md}, \texttt{.cursorrules}, and the broader family of agent skills, plugin manifests, and persona definitions): we scrape 679 rule files (25{,}532 rules) from GitHub and conduct over 5{,}000 agent runs of Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-bench Verified. Three patterns emerge. (i) Rule polarity cleanly separates beneficial from harmful rules; we read this through the lens of potential-based reward shaping (PBRS). (ii) Performance gains are largely content-independent: random, shuffled, mismatched-domain, and unconverted-format rule files all match curated rules, pointing to a context priming mechanism. (iii) Individual rules often appear harmful in isolation yet do not visibly accumulate damage in ensemble: pass rates remain stable across rule counts from 0 to 50. These findings expose a hidden reliability risk in the rapidly growing ecosystem of community-authored rules and skills, and they yield a clear principle for safer agent configuration: constrain what agents must not do, rather than prescribing what they should.

cs.AI↗

The Alignment Floor: How Persona Customization Breaks Safety in Weakly-Aligned LLMs

Telling an LLM to "be enthusiastic" raises its sycophancy rate from 30\% to 50\% on a lightly-aligned model, but has zero effect on a strongly-aligned one. We define this gap as the alignment floor, $Δ_{\text{floor}}(m)=\max_pS(m,p)-\min_pS(m,p)$, the range of sycophancy rates a model produces across persona conditions, and treat sycophancy as a persona-conditional property rather than a fixed model property. Pluralistic AI relies on behavioral adaptation via persona prompts like "be creative" or "be thorough", which let systems respect diverse user values and communication styles; the safety question is how much customization a given model can absorb before its truthfulness shifts. We present a controlled case study contrasting a strongly-aligned RLHF + Constitutional-AI model (Claude Sonnet 4.6) with a more lightly-aligned model (Amazon Nova Lite), spanning seven persona conditions and five tasks for 1800 total runs. An existence-pair result motivates per-model auditing: there is at least one strongly-aligned model with $Δ_{\text{floor}}=5$pp (within 5pp of the 15\% control rate) and at least one lightly-aligned model with 45pp (5\%--50\% range). On the lightly-aligned model, all five Big Five personas increase sycophancy over control, and counterintuitively Agreeableness produces the smallest increase, not the largest. The single largest effect in the study is constructive: a Skeptic persona reduces sycophancy by 25pp on the lightly-aligned model, and is the only persona that instructs resistance against user claims rather than engagement with them, suggesting a directionality account. Cross-model transfer of persona effects is near-zero, so persona-alignment testing must be per-model. We propose $Δ_{\text{floor}}$ as a deployment-time audit metric: measure it on a small persona panel before deploying persona customization.

cs.HC↗

Prompt Optimization Is a Coin Flip: Diagnosing When It Helps in Compound AI Systems

Prompt optimization in compound AI systems is statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip: across 72 optimization runs on Claude Haiku 4.5 (6 methods $\times$ 4 tasks $\times$ 3 repeats), 49% score below zero-shot; on Amazon Nova Lite, the failure rate is even higher. Yet on one task, all six methods improve over zero-shot by up to $+6.8$ points. What distinguishes success from failure? We investigate with 18,000 grid evaluations and 144 optimization runs, testing two assumptions behind end-to-end optimization tools like TextGrad and DSPy, in the order they must be answered: (A) agent prompts interact, requiring joint rather than independent optimization, and (B) individual prompts are worth optimizing at all. Interaction effects are never significant ($p > 0.52$, all $F < 1.0$), and optimization helps only when the task has exploitable output structure: a format the model can produce but does not default to. We further give a mechanistic account: instruction-tuning compresses input phrasing into a narrow output distribution, eliminating the very phrasing-sensitivity that joint optimization assumes. We provide a two-stage diagnostic: an \$80 ANOVA pre-test for agent coupling, and a 10-minute headroom test that predicts whether optimization is worthwhile, turning a coin flip into an informed decision.

cs.AI↗

SCORP: Scene-Consistent Multi-agent Diffusion Planning with Stable Online Reinforcement Post-Training for Cooperative Driving

Cooperative driving is a safety- and efficiency-critical task that requires the coordination of diverse, interaction-realistic multi-agent trajectories. Although existing diffusion-based methods can capture multimodal behaviors from demonstrations, they often exhibit weak scene consistency and poor alignment with closed-loop cooperative objectives. This makes post-training necessary for further improvement, yet achieving stable online post-training in reactive multi-agent environments remains challenging. In this paper, we propose SCORP, a scene-consistent multi-agent diffusion planner with stable online reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for cooperative driving. For pre-training, we develop a scene-conditioned multi-agent denoising architecture that couples inter-agent self-attention with a dual-path conditioning mechanism: cross-attention provides direct scene-information injection, while AdaLN-Zero enables additional flexible and stable conditional modulation, thereby improving the scene consistency and road adherence of joint trajectories. For post-training, we formulate a two-layer Markov decision process (MDP) that explicitly integrates the reverse denoising chain with policy-environment interaction. We further co-design dense, well-shaped planning rewards and variance-gated group-relative policy optimization (VG-GRPO) to mitigate advantage collapse and gradient instability during closed-loop training. Extensive experiments show that SCORP outperforms strong open-source baselines on WOMD, with 10.47%-28.26% and 1.70%-7.22% improvements in core safety and efficiency metrics, respectively. Moreover, compared with alternative post-training methods, SCORP delivers significant and consistent gains in both driving safety and traffic efficiency, highlighting stable and sustained advances in closed-loop cooperative driving.

cs.RO↗

Tailored Prompts, Targeted Protection: Vulnerability-Specific LLM Analysis for Smart Contracts

Smart contracts on blockchains are prone to diverse security vulnerabilities that can lead to significant financial losses due to their immutable nature. Existing detection approaches often lack flexibility across vulnerability types and rely heavily on manually crafted expert rules. In this paper, we present an LLM-based framework for practical smart contract vulnerability detection. We construct and release a large-scale dataset comprising 31,165 professionally annotated vulnerability instances collected from over 3,200 real-world projects across 15 major blockchain platforms. Our approach leverages precise AST-based context extraction and vulnerability-specific prompt design to instantiate customized detectors for 13 prevalent vulnerability categories. Experimental results demonstrate strong effectiveness, achieving an average positive recall of 0.92 and an average negative recall of 0.85, highlighting the potential of carefully engineered contextual prompting for scalable and high-precision smart contract security analysis.

cs.CR↗

Hindsight Preference Optimization for Financial Time Series Advisory

Time series models predict numbers; decision-makers need advisory -- directional signals with reasoning, actionable suggestions, and risk management. Training language models for such predictive advisory faces a fundamental challenge: quality depends on outcomes unknown at prediction time. We bridge two ideas from reinforcement learning -- using information unavailable during execution to retrospectively generate training signal, and preference alignment -- and propose Hindsight Preference Optimization: observed outcomes let an LLM judge rank candidate advisories on dimensions that scalar metrics cannot capture, producing preference pairs for DPO without human annotation. We apply this to Vision-Language-Model-based predictive advisories on S&P 500 equity time series, demonstrated by a 4B model outperforming its 235B teacher on both accuracy and advisory quality.

cs.LG↗

AGNT2: Autonomous Agent Economies on Interaction-Optimized Layer 2 Infrastructure

Current blockchain Layer 2 solutions, including Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and their derivatives, optimize for human-initiated financial transactions. Autonomous AI agents instead generate high-frequency, semantically rich service invocations among mutually untrusting principals. Existing chains treat those interactions as generic calldata, forcing identity, escrow, dependency ordering, and session state to be encoded above the execution layer at the wrong cost point. We present AGNT2, a three-tier stack purpose-built for agent and microservice coordination on-chain. AGNT2 combines: (1) a sidecar deployment pattern that turns any Docker container into an on-chain agent without application-code modification; (2) Layer Top P2P state channels for established bilateral pairs (<100 ms, rough design target 1K-5K TPS per pair, 10M+ aggregate TPS design envelope under endpoint-resource limits), Layer Core as a dependency-aware sequenced rollup for first-contact and multi-party interactions (500 ms-2 s, 300K-500K TPS design target), and Layer Root settlement with computational fraud proofs anchored to any EVM L1; and (3) an agent-native execution environment plus interaction trie that make service invocation, identity, reputation, capabilities, and session context first-class protocol objects. This paper focuses on the execution-layer systems problem: sequencing, state, settlement, and the data-availability (DA) bandwidth gap that bounds all three. Simulation and analytical modeling support the architecture, and prototype measurements validate selected components, but no end-to-end Layer Core implementation exists yet. Practical deployment is currently constrained to roughly 10K-100K TPS by DA throughput, leaving a ~100x gap at the target ceiling. AGNT2 argues that the agent economy requires a dedicated execution layer rather than a general-purpose chain repurposed for agents.

cs.MA↗

AgentCity: Constitutional Governance for Autonomous Agent Economies via Separation of Power

Autonomous AI agents are beginning to operate across organizational boundaries on the open internet -- discovering, transacting with, and delegating to agents owned by other parties without centralized oversight. When agents from different human principals collaborate at scale, the collective becomes opaque: no single human can observe, audit, or govern the emergent behavior. We term this the Logic Monopoly -- the agent society's unchecked monopoly over the entire logic chain from planning through execution to evaluation. We propose the Separation of Power (SoP) model, a constitutional governance architecture deployed on public blockchain that breaks this monopoly through three structural separations: agents legislate operational rules as smart contracts, deterministic software executes within those contracts, and humans adjudicate through a complete ownership chain binding every agent to a responsible principal. In this architecture, smart contracts are the law itself -- the actual legislative output that agents produce and that governs their behavior. We instantiate SoP in AgentCity on an EVM-compatible layer-2 blockchain (L2) with a three-tier contract hierarchy (foundational, meta, and operational). The core thesis is alignment-through-accountability: if each agent is aligned with its human owner through the accountability chain, then the collective converges on behavior aligned with human intent -- without top-down rules. A pre-registered experiment evaluates this thesis in a commons production economy -- where agents share a finite resource pool and collaboratively produce value -- at 50-1,000 agent scale.

cs.MA↗

The Python Simulations of Chemistry Framework: 10 years of an open-source quantum chemistry project

Over the past decade, the Python-based Simulations of Chemistry Framework (PySCF) has developed into a widely used open-source platform for electronic structure theory and quantum chemical method development. This article reviews the major advances since the previous overview in 2020, covering new modules and methodology, infrastructure changes, and performance benchmarks.

physics.chem-ph↗

Mott-Derived Local Moments and Kondo Hybridization in a d-electron Kagome lattice

Unlike canonical Kondo lattices in f-electron systems, where localized f orbitalsnaturally provide local moments, d-electron Kondo lattices require a distinct mechanism for local-moment formation. However, the study of d-electron Kondo lattices in bulk materials remains far from settled, particularly with regard to the microscopic origin of the local moments. Here, we report a microscopic mechanism for this process in the bilayer kagome metal CsCr6Sb6, where strong correlations drive a Mott splitting of the kagome flat band to supply the requisite local moments. By combining STM/STS and ARPES, we resolve a spectroscopic hierarchy between high-energy correlation effects and low temperature hybridization. Low-temperature STS reveals a robust asymmetric suppression of the density of states near EF that is well captured phenomenologically by a Fano-type lineshape, while ARPES detects a sharp quasiparticlepeak near EF. These low-energy signatures evolveon the same temperature scale and disappear upon warming, consistent with the onset of Kondo hybridization. At the same time, STS resolves symmetric humps at approximately +-50 mV and ARPES identifies a weakly dispersive feature around 50 meV below EF; unlike the near-EF hybridization signatures, these features persist to substantially higher temperatures. This separation of energy and temperature scales supports a two-stage picture in which a kagome flat band first undergoes correlation-driven splitting into lower and upper Hubbard bands, and the occupied lower Hubbard band supplies the local moments that later hybridize with itinerant electrons at lower temperature. Our results therefore move beyond the phenomenology of a kagome Kondo lattice candidate and instead provide a microscopic spectroscopic picture linking Mottness to Kondo hybridization in a frustrated d-electron system.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Moving Light Adaptive Colonoscopy Reconstruction via Illumination-Attenuation-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time view synthesis in colonoscopy but assumes static illumination, making it incompatible with the strong photometric variations caused by the moving light source and camera. This mismatch leads existing methods to compensate for illumination attenuation with structure-violating Gaussians, degrading geometric fidelity. Prior work considers only distance-based attenuation and overlooks the physical characteristics of colonscopic lighting. In this paper, we propose ColIAGS, an improved 3DGS framework for colonoscopy. To mimic realistic appearance under varying illumination, we introduce a lighting model with two types of illumination attenuation factors. To satisfy this lighting model's approximation and effectively integrate it into the 3DGS framework, we design Improved Geometry Modeling to strengthen geometry details and Improved Appearance Modeling to implicitly optimize illumination attenuation solutions. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that ColIAGS supports both high-quality novel-view synthesis and accurate geometry reconstruction, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in rendering fidelity and Depth MSE. Our code is available at https://github.com/haowang020110/ColIAGS.

cs.CV↗

Implementation of the multigrid Gaussian-Plane-Wave algorithm with GPU acceleration in PySCF

We introduce a GPU-accelerated multigrid Gaussian-Plane-Wave density fitting (FFTDF) approach for efficient Fock builds and nuclear gradient evaluations within Kohn-Sham density functional theory, as implemented in the GPU4PySCF module of PySCF. Our CUDA kernels employ a grid-based parallelization strategy for contracting Gaussian basis function pairs and achieve up to 80% of the FP64 peak performance on NVIDIA GPUs, with no loss of efficiency for high angular momentum (up to f-shell) functions. Benchmark calculations on molecules and solids with up to 1536 atoms and 20480 basis functions show up to 25x speedup on an H100 GPU relative to the CPU implementation on a 28-core shared memory node. For a 256-water cluster, the ground-state energy and nuclear gradients can be computed in ~30 seconds on a single H100 GPU. This implementation serves as an open-source foundation for many applications, such as ab initio molecular dynamics and high-throughput calculations.

physics.chem-ph↗

Efficient feature matching for UAV images based on compact GPU data scheduling

Feature matching dominates the time costs in structure from motion (SfM). The primary contribution of this study is a GPU data schedule algorithm for efficient feature matching of Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. The core idea is to divide the whole dataset into blocks based on matrix band reduction (MBR) and achieve efficient feature matching via GPU-accelerated cascade hashing. First, match pairs are selected by using an image retrieval technique, which converts images into global descriptors and searches high-dimension nearest neighbors with graph indexing. Second, compact image blocks are iteratively generated from a MBR-based data schedule strategy, which exploits image connections to generate image blocks and increase the usage of GPU computing power. Third, guided by the generated image blocks, feature matching is executed sequentially within the framework of GPU-accelerated cascade hashing, and initial candidate matches are refined by combining a local geometric constraint and RANSAC-based global verification. For further performance improvement, these two steps are designed to execute in parallel in GPU and CPU. Finally, the performance of the proposed solution is evaluated by using large-scale UAV datasets. The results demonstrate that it increases the efficiency of feature matching with speedup ratios ranging from 77.0 to 100.0 compared with KD-Tree based matching methods due to its high usage of GPU computing power. Besides, it achieves comparable accuracy in both relative and absolute bundle adjustment (BA). The proposed algorithm is an efficient solution for feature matching of large-scale UAV images.

cs.CV↗