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Xu Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Chen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Understanding Reliability in LLM-based Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human survey responses and behavioral reactions, yet unreliable simulations can mislead social science conclusions. However, existing evaluations focus on end-to-end scores, leaving it unclear how different aspects of the simulation process interact to determine reliability. We propose ReliMap, which decomposes LLM-based human behavior simulation into three structured layers and evaluates reliability at both the individual level (R1) and population level (R2) across three configuration dimensions: model capacity, profile completeness, and population coverage. Through experiments across four simulation tasks and eleven LLMs, we find that all models exhibit substantial distributional bias without profile conditioning. Profile conditioning reduces this bias with diminishing returns. Larger models benefit more, and attribute informativeness matters more than quantity. Critically, R1 gains do not reliably transfer to R2--individual and population-level reliability can move in opposite directions. At the population layer, increasing coverage reduces variance but not systematic bias, with R2 stabilizing at around 50-100 individuals. These findings highlight that reliable simulation cannot be achieved by optimizing any single layer in isolation, but requires coordinated improvement across all three.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

ForgeTrain: Forging Production-Grade Training Frameworks via Harness-Driven AI Development

Training large models still relies on general-purpose frameworks such as Megatron-LM, whose generality tax constrains scenario-specific optimization and adds runtime overhead through accumulated abstraction. AI code generation reduces the cost of building a framework, and makes it affordable to forge one per scenario. We propose Forge Engineering: building a dedicated implementation from scratch for each scenario and iteratively optimizing it toward peak performance under correctness and usability constraints. Dedicated implementations inherit no abstraction boundaries, so they can integrate optimizations across the stack and reach a higher performance ceiling. We instantiate this paradigm for training frameworks as ForgeTrain, which holds a trusted framework as a golden reference and relaxes equivalence monotonically from Bit-for-Bit to Surpass. Experiments across multiple model--hardware configurations show that ForgeTrain consistently produces correct training engines and improves MFU over established training frameworks by 4.7--33.2%. To our knowledge this is the first production-grade training framework forged end-to-end by AI to match or surpass its human reference.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

ReUnit: Multi-Granularity Visual Unitization for Long Video Understanding

Long-video understanding is constrained by the limited visual input capacity of video multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs). Existing methods mainly optimize which content to retain, while the presentation of retained content often remains fixed. As a result, the same balance between spatial detail and content coverage is imposed across the entire visual input. We propose ReUnit, a training-free and query-aware framework that jointly determines which content to retain and how it should be presented. Guided by frame-level query relevance, ReUnit constructs and allocates visual units at multiple presentation granularities. More relevant content receives finer presentation, while broader context is represented more compactly. It realizes these granularities using visual units that carry one, four, or nine source frames and are each rendered as a standard image. Across four benchmarks and visual input budgets from 4 to 32 units, ReUnit achieves the highest average score at every tested budget. It improves over Uniform Sampling by 8.3--10.1 points on average, and the gains transfer across three additional Video-MLLM families. Project resources are available at https://github.com/charon525/ReUnit.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Preserving Subject-Clarity in Image Outpainting with Multiscale Wavelet Supervision

Commercial and advertising images are frequently affected by poor framing, partially cropped subjects, truncated text or logos, and insufficient context, all of which can reduce subject clarity, i.e., the ability of an image to clearly communicate its primary subject. Image outpainting offers a scalable solution by extending image boundaries and recovering missing content and context. However, existing diffusion-based outpainting methods often produce visually plausible completions while degrading subject fidelity through structural inconsistencies, semantic drift, or loss of fine-grained detail. To address this limitation, we propose a subject clarity outpainting framework that combines vision-language model (VLM)-guided semantic conditioning with multiscale wavelet supervision for subject-localized detail preservation. To support training, we develop a subject-centric data curation pipeline that constructs subject-intersecting outpainting pairs from advertising and natural images. The resulting objective introduces no additional inference cost and is designed to be compatible with diffusion-based backbones. Across four advertising and natural-image benchmarks, our method improves subject clarity, reducing subject-centered DreamSim error and FID on average by 3.0% and 2.4% over matched supervised fine-tuning, and by 10.8% and 7.7% over the strongest state-of-the-art approach per dataset, respectively.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Quantum Change Interval: Exact Asymptotics for Minimum Error Localization

We study a returning quantum change interval in which a source emits $\lvertψ\rangle$ over one interval and $\lvert0\rangle$ elsewhere. A collective measurement on the full sequence identifies both endpoints with minimum error. We analyze the Gram matrix using Toeplitz comparison and Følner transfer, together with an exact decomposition by excitation number and interval hull. The resulting bounds establish asymptotic Bayes optimality of the square root measurement (SRM). Let $c=\lvert\langle0\vertψ\rangle\rvert$ and $p_1(x)=4(1-x^2)K^2(x^2)/π^2$, where $K$ is the complete elliptic integral of the first kind. For a known interval length $i$, the SRM success probability and the Bayes optimum converge to the same Toeplitz symbol integral as the number $N$ of translations grows. For fixed $i$ and $0<c<1$, their gap is $P_{\mathrm{opt}}(G_{N,i})-P_{\mathrm{SRM}}(G_{N,i})=O_{i,c}(N^{-1/2})$. If $i$ and $N$ both diverge, their common limit is $p_1(c^2)$, with no constraint on their relative growth. For unknown length, the uniform prior over all $M_n=n(n+1)/2$ nonempty intervals gives the common limit $p_1(c)^2$ at fixed overlap. For a varying overlap $c_n$, set $τ_n=n(1-c_n)(\log n)^2$. Uniformly for $0\leqτ_n\leq T$, we obtain $M_nP_X=(1+2\sqrt{τ_n}/π+\sqrt{2}τ_n/π^2)^2+O_T(\log\log n/\log n)$, where $X\in\{\mathrm{tr},\mathrm{SRM},\mathrm{opt}\}$. More generally, if $c_n$ approaches one from below and $n p_1(c_n)\to\infty$, the same three quantities satisfy $P_X\sim p_1(c_n)^2$. These asymptotic laws also extend to joint detection and exact localization in the presence of a no change prior.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

Pailitao-MMSearch: Building Native E-Commerce Multimodal Search Foundation

The evolution of e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how users search for products, shifting from simple text-based keyword queries to complex multimodal interactions that seamlessly combine product images, natural language descriptions, and mixed-intent instructions. However, existing approaches face a critical dilemma: single-modal specialist models, deployed independently for text retrieval, visual search, and voice recognition, operate in isolation and cannot handle cross-modal queries, while general-purpose vision-language models lack the domain-specific knowledge necessary for fine-grained product understanding, user behavior modeling, and commercial intent reasoning. In this work, we present Pailitao-MMSearch, one native e-commerce multimodal search foundation model designed to bridge this gap. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1)HybSID (Hybrid Semantic ID);(2)a two-stage continual pre-training strategy; and (3)a hybrid reasoning post-training pipeline. Built upon Qwen and deployed on Taobao's Pailitao multimodal search platform, Pailitao-MMSearch achieves substantial improvements in online A/B testing, including up to +13.61\% in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and +8.21\% in transaction volume compared to traditional multi-modal search pipeline, demonstrating the effectiveness of our native e-commerce multimodal search large language models.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Grasp in Gaussians: Fast Monocular Reconstruction of Dynamic Hand-Object Interactions

We present Grasp in Gaussians (GraG), a fast and robust method for reconstructing dynamic 3D hand-object interactions from a single monocular video. Unlike recent approaches that optimize heavy neural representations, our method focuses on tracking the hand and the object efficiently, once initialized from pretrained large models. Our key insight is that, given strong pretrained object and hand priors, accurate and temporally stable hand-object motion can be recovered using a compact Sum-of-Gaussians (SoG) representation, revived from classical tracking literature and integrated with generative Gaussian-based initializations. We initialize object pose and geometry using a video-adapted SAM3D pipeline, then convert the resulting dense Gaussian representation into a lightweight SoG via subsampling. This compact representation enables efficient and fast tracking while preserving geometric fidelity, with the pretrained priors and simple geometric/contact losses providing accurate hand-object placement. For the hand, we adopt a complementary strategy: starting from off-the-shelf monocular hand pose initialization, we refine hand motion using simple yet effective 2D joint, silhouette, depth, and contact losses, avoiding per-frame refinement of a detailed 3D hand appearance model while maintaining stable articulation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that GraG reconstructs temporally coherent hand-object interactions on long sequences 4.4x-38.9x faster than prior work while preserving temporally coherent hand-object motion.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Spatio-Temporal Parallelism for Diffusion Model Inference on Heterogeneous Multi-GPU Systems

The widespread adoption of diffusion models for image generation necessitates efficient parallel inference to manage their substantial computational overhead. However, current parallel inference paradigms primarily target homogeneous clusters, often failing to maintain high efficiency in realistic, heterogeneous multi-GPU environments where hardware disparities and fluctuating background workloads cause severe straggler effects. This paper introduces Orchestra, a robust framework that orchestrates fine-grained parallelism across both temporal and spatial dimensions to harmonize computational loads in such settings. Temporally, Orchestra employs a novel computation-aware step allocator using a tiered step reduction strategy, intelligently pruning denoising steps on slower devices after warmup phases and execution synchronization. Spatially, Orchestra performs an elastic patch parallelism mechanism which adaptively adjusts the spatial workload intensity by assigning non-uniform image patches tailored to GPUs according to their computational capability. Extensive experiments on load-imbalanced and heterogeneous clusters validate Orchestra's efficacy in mitigating performance bottlenecks. Compared to patch parallelism, a state-of-the-art diffusion inference framework, our method reduces end-to-end latency by up to 45% and significantly boosts resource utilization on heterogeneous GPUs.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Towards Faithful Simulation of Human Shopping Behavior

Simulating realistic user shopping behavior underpins offline evaluation and reinforcement learning in e-commerce scenarios. While recent LLM- and VLM-based simulators have made encouraging progress, reproducing a real browsing session remains difficult for two reasons. (i) Memory Challenge: a shopping session spans dozens of pages, yet existing agents either discard long-range observation histories, losing the evolving user state, or naively concatenate them, overwhelming the context window and even degrading simulation quality. (ii) Optimization Challenge: current user simulators are typically supervised to match each logged action via imitation or step-level rewards; the resulting sessions often display unrealistic patterns, such as over-exploration or excessive passivity, which per-step supervision can neither detect nor correct. To address the above challenges, we present RecVerse, a GUI-grounded simulation agent that perceives pages through screenshots and produces faithful multi-turn trajectories. For the memory challenge, RecVerse adopts a cognitive-inspired hierarchical memory: Working Memory for short-term focus, Episodic Memory for in-session traces, and Preference Memory for high-level intent, with memory updates treated as actions so that the agent adaptively learns when and what to memorize. For the optimization challenge, RecVerse is optimized with a trajectory-level RL objective that scores entire sessions, aligning both macro-level action-type distributions and micro-level shopping intent with real users. We further release USB (User Simulation Benchmark), an interactive e-commerce GUI trajectory dataset for multi-turn user simulation. Experiments show that RecVerse significantly outperforms existing baselines in both behavioral fidelity and intent consistency.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking the Evaluation and Optimization of LLM-Based Social Simulation

LLM-based social simulation is a promising complement to traditional methods such as surveys and behavioral experiments. A core question is how to evaluate the fidelity of LLM-simulated human behavior and optimize LLMs toward it. Prevailing practice evaluates by accuracy, checking whether the model selects the single response observed from a human, and trains the LLM to reproduce this hard label. However, human behavior is inherently subjective: the same person in the same situation may reasonably act differently, so an observed response is only one draw from an underlying response distribution, rendering accuracy-based evaluation unreliable and hard-label training misleading. To address these problems, we first introduce the subjectivity coefficient, an entropy-based quantity distinguishing objective tasks such as coding from subjective ones such as social simulation, and use it to systematically analyze how accuracy-based evaluation and hard-label training fail as subjectivity grows. Based on the subjectivity coefficient, we propose Subjectivity-Adaptive soft-Label Training (SALT): it pools observed outputs from semantically nearby inputs into soft distributional labels, with an aggregation radius adapted to the estimated subjectivity of each input; in the near-objective limit the neighborhood shrinks, so SALT naturally falls back to standard single-label training. Moreover, since existing datasets record only single observed responses and cannot support distributional evaluation, we construct SUBJSIM, a benchmark of 19,300 contexts covering 193 annotators and 100 subjective questions. Since real-world data typically provide only a single observation per input, our experiments train models from single observed outputs while evaluating them against the full response distributions, verifying feasibility in realistic settings. Results on SUBJSIM demonstrate the advantages of our method.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

The role of weak interfaces in the tensile deformation and fracture of particle-filled polymers studied by phase-field model

Weak particle-matrix interfaces play a critical role in the tensile fracture of particle-filled polymer composites, but how they govern progressive debonding, fracture localization, and the resulting changes in macroscopic mechanical properties remains insufficiently understood. In this study, a cohesive-zone phase-field model incorporating a hyperelastic polymer matrix and a smeared interface is employed to investigate the coupled evolution of interfacial debonding and matrix fracture in particle-filled polymer composites. The model is calibrated against and compared with uniaxial tensile responses of particle-filled polyurethane composites and then used to study how interfacial strength, interfacial fracture energy, and matrix fracture properties affect the macroscopic stress-strain response and damage evolution. The results show that weak interfaces can induce an intermediate softening regime in the stress-strain response, characterized by a reduced effective tangent stiffness and associated with distributed interfacial damage. Interfacial strength mainly controls the initiation of debonding, whereas interfacial fracture energy affects whether debonding can develop progressively in a distributed manner or rapidly localizes into a dominant crack band. Comparisons with well-bonded reference systems further demonstrate that weak interfaces may reduce the maximum stress but increase the strain at break by promoting distributed debonding around particles and delaying the formation of a dominant crack band. These findings clarify the dual role of weak interfaces and provide a mechanistic understanding of interface-controlled tensile failure in particle-filled polymer composites.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

A Consolidated Game Framework for Cooperative Defense Against Cross-Domain Cyber Attacks in Satellite-Enabled Internet of Things

As the adoption of satellite-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) continues to rise, its intricate multidomain architecture becomes increasingly susceptible to cross-domain cyber threats. Attackers can exploit compromised IoT devices, inject malicious packets into data streams aggregated at the IoT gateway for satellite backhaul, and potentially endanger the satellite network during transmission by exploiting the hardware, software, and protocol vulnerabilities. Compared to single-domain defenses, cooperative defense at the IoT devices, IoT access network, and satellite transmission network provides fine-granularity defense against cross-domain intelligent attacks. However, quantifying cross-domain impacts and tilting incentive misalignment among different participants remain significant challenges, making systematic cooperative defense development a complex task. To address this, we develop a tripartite security game framework to characterize the impacts of attacks and defense methods across both the terrestrial and satellite domains. Leveraging this game model, we devise flow pricing to optimally motivate the IoT network operator (IoT-NO) to prevent malicious packet infiltration into the satellite domain. Subsequently, we propose efficient learning algorithms enabling both the IoT-NO to ascertain their ideal flow sampling strategies and the satellite service provider (SAT-SP) to determine optimal flow pricing. The simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the consolidated game in counteracting cross-domain cyber attacks and facilitating cooperative defense between the IoT-NO and the SAT-SP with nonaligned incentives.

cs.GT↗
arXiv2026

Integrated polarization-entangled photon source for wavelength-multiplexed quantum networks

Entangled photons are fundamental resources for quantum communication, computing, and networking. Among them, polarization-entangled photon pairs play an important role due to their straightforward state manipulation and direct use in quantum key distribution, teleportation, and network protocols. However, realizing compact, efficient, and scalable polarization-entangled sources that meet the requirements of practical deployment remains a major challenge. Here, we present a simple yet high-performance on-chip polarization-entangled photon-pair source on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN). Our device employs dual quasi-phase matching (D-QPM) that sequentially supports type-0 and type-I spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a single nanophotonic waveguide, eliminating the need for interferometers, polarization rotators, or other complex circuits. The source directly produces high-fidelity Bell states with broad bandwidth, high brightness, and low noise. Using this integrated platform, we realize wavelength-multiplexed entanglement distribution in a four-user quantum network deployed over metropolitan fiber links up to 50 km. These results establish a robust and scalable pathway toward practical quantum communication systems and multi-user quantum mesh networks based on integrated photonics.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2026

DARAD: Dual Adapters and Ranking-Aware Distillation for Continual Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval

With the rapid growth of Earth observation technologies, remote sensing archives are rapidly expanding, making remote sensing image-text retrieval (RS-ITR) increasingly important. However, continual RS-ITR remains challenging because scale variation and distribution shifts in RS aggravate cross-modal alignment space distortion, making it difficult for existing continual learning (CL) methods to support reliable continual retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose DARAD, a dual-adapter and ranking-aware distillation framework that preserves the historical cross-modal ranking structure while learning new visual and textual concepts from evolving archives. Specifically, the visual branch introduces a spatial fusion adapter, which integrates coarse regional cues and fine-grained patch cues to accommodate RS scale variation while anchoring visual updates to the pretrained alignment space. The textual branch employs multi-expert semantic routing, which separates shared textual semantics from semantically specialized residuals to absorb newly emerging descriptions while constraining global text embedding drift. Furthermore, bidirectional ranking distillation uses a frozen teacher model and historical anchors to preserve the historical cross-modal ranking structure, thereby mitigating alignment space distortion across continual stages. Experiments under a multi-stage continual retrieval protocol show that DARAD achieves superior performance over existing CL methods, improving adaptation to newly arrived data while maintaining effectiveness on historical data.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Metis: Memory Foundation Model

Recent advances in AI agents have increasingly internalized native capabilities into their underlying foundation models, giving rise to multimodal foundation models and large reasoning models. However, agent memory is still primarily implemented through external modules, leaving the native memory capability largely unexplored. In this paper, we take a first step toward this direction by introducing memory foundation models, which empower foundation models with native memory capabilities. We formalize native memory from two perspectives: a persistent and dynamically evolving memory state within the backbone, and native memory procedures that autonomously store and utilize information through model computation. We show that native memory offers advantages in architecture, end-to-end optimization, and efficiency. Based on this formulation, we propose Metis, the first prototype of memory foundation models. Metis introduces a new architecture that equips a foundation model with a native memory state, allowing historical information to be compressed into the model and accessed through memory attention. We construct large-scale memory-specific training data and introduce multiple optimization objectives to acquire these native memory procedures through mid-training. The online memory maintenance of Metis is gradient-free, and the memory update requires only a forward pass. At inference time, all learned model weights remain frozen, while the native memory states are autonomously transformed through standard forward computation. Through extensive experiments, we show that Metis exhibits native memory capabilities and further provide a detailed analysis of its strengths, limitations, and behaviors. To facilitate future research on memory foundation models, we release our project and model checkpoints.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

A data-driven stage-structured host-parasitoid model for optimizing Trichogramma interventions against soybean pod borer (Leguminivora glycinivorella) outbreaks

The soybean pod borer (Leguminivora glycinivorella) poses a severe threat to global soybean production.In this study, we developed a stage-structured host-parasitoid dynamic model that explicitly couples the holometabolous life cycle of the pest with the obligate egg-parasitism mechanism of Trichogramma wasps. Utilizing field monitoring data from Changchun, Jilin Province, key biological parameters were rigorously estimated via the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method.This calibration facilitated the establishment of a precise Economic Injury Level ($Q_{EIL}$) of 0.0389 individuals/$m^2$, based solely on the destructive larval stage. Through theoretical and numerical analyses of different intervention scenarios, we identified an optimal continuous release rate ($C^* = 2.645$) that efficiently suppresses the outbreak without causing wasteful parasitoid accumulation. Furthermore, simulations demonstrate that a 5-day impulsive release interval provides the optimal balance between strict pest suppression and field operational costs. This study bridges the gap between theoretical population dynamics and applied agricultural management, providing a directly applicable mathematical decision-making tool for the precise biological control of crop pests.

q-bio.PE↗
arXiv2026

PhiZero: A World Model Built Around Physical Language

We introduce PhiZero, a physical world model built around physical language, a compact discrete representation of world-state transitions. Existing physical world models typically predict future videos directly in pixel space, leaving the underlying world dynamics implicit within high-dimensional visual predictors. Motivated by humans' ability to abstract predictive structure from visual experience and organize it in natural language for explicit reasoning, we learn physical language from in-the-wild videos through self-supervision and use it to explicitly reason about how the physical world evolves. Accordingly, PhiZero adopts a reason-then-render paradigm: it first infers future world evolution as a physical-language sequence and then renders the inferred transitions into videos. Extensive experiments across generation and understanding benchmarks validate the ability of PhiZero to model physically coherent world evolution. We further show its potential for realistic and interactive world modeling, fine-grained action-conditioned simulation, and zero-shot motion transfer.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

R-SLPR: Region-based Small-to-Large Point-cloud Registration with Contrastive Learning

Point-cloud (PC) registration is fundamental to three-dimensional (3D) perception in robotic systems. However, classic registration algorithms falter when aligning a source PC containing limited, incomplete, or ambiguous geometric cues against a reference. This challenge of registering a small, partial PC to a significantly larger global reference is pervasive in real-world deployment yet remains insufficiently addressed by existing learning-based approaches, which typically assume comparable scales and significant overlap. To bridge this gap, we propose the Region-based Small-to-Large Point-cloud Registra- tion framework (R-SLPR), a novel three-stage architecture that fundamentally reformulates the scale-mismatched registration problem into a sequence of region proposal, regional matching, and iterative refinement. Unlike conventional methods that fail to localize specific regions, R-SLPR explicitly identifies candidate regions prior to estimating rigid transformations, ensuring robust alignment even under severe scale mismatch. The framework introduces a Fibonacci Grid Segmentation method coupled with a contrastive learning objective to effectively generate and match local geometric patches. Building on this, a novel Cascade Anchor Selection and Refinement algorithm iteratively aligns the source with the target region to maximize precision. Extensive evaluation on ModelNet40 demonstrates that R-SLPR establishes a new state-of-the-art accuracy standard, outperforming prior approaches and significantly reducing position and rotation Mean Absolute Error (MAE) to 0.009 and 1.104, respectively.

cs.CV↗