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Xue Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Xue Feng.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Evaluating Generalization Capabilities of LLM-Based Agents in Mixed-Motive Scenarios Using Concordia

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing evaluation methods fail to measure how well these capabilities generalize to novel social situations. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating the ability of LLM-based agents to cooperate in zero-shot, mixed-motive environments using Concordia, a natural language multi-agent simulation environment. Our method measures general cooperative intelligence by testing an agent's ability to identify and exploit opportunities for mutual gain across diverse partners and contexts. We present empirical results from the NeurIPS 2024 Concordia Contest, where agents were evaluated on their ability to achieve mutual gains across a suite of diverse scenarios ranging from negotiation to collective action problems. Our findings reveal significant gaps between current agent capabilities and the robust generalization required for reliable cooperation, particularly in scenarios demanding persuasion and norm enforcement.

cs.AI↗

On-chip Time-bin to Path Qubit Encoding Converter via Thin Film Lithium Niobate Photonics Chip

The development of quantum internet demands on-chip quantum processor nodes and interconnection between the nodes. Path-encoded photonic qubits are suitable for on-chip quantum information processors, while time-bin encoded ones are good at long-distance communication. It is necessary to develop an on-chip converter between the two encodings to satisfy the needs of the quantum internet. In this work, a quantum photonic circuit is proposed to convert time-bin-encoded photonic qubits to path-encoded ones via a thin-film lithium niobate high-speed optical switch and low-loss matched optical delay lines. The performance of the encoding converter is demonstrated by the experiment of time-bin to path encoding conversion on the fabricated sample chip. The converted path qubits have an average fidelity higher than 97%. The potential of the encoding converter on applications in quantum networks is demonstrated by the experiments of entanglement distribution and quantum key distribution. The results show that the on-chip encoding converter can serve as a foundational component in the future quantum internet, bridging the gap between quantum information transmission and on-chip processing based on photons.

quant-ph↗

CardioForest: An Explainable Ensemble Learning Model for Automatic Wide QRS Complex Tachycardia Diagnosis from ECG

This study aims to develop and evaluate an ensemble machine learning-based framework for the automatic detection of Wide QRS Complex Tachycardia (WCT) from ECG signals, emphasizing diagnostic accuracy and interpretability using Explainable AI. The proposed system integrates ensemble learning techniques, i.e., an optimized Random Forest known as CardioForest, and models like XGBoost and LightGBM. The models were trained and tested on ECG data from the publicly available MIMIC-IV dataset. The testing was carried out with the assistance of accuracy, balanced accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, ROC-AUC, and error rate (RMSE, MAE) measures. In addition, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) was used to ascertain model explainability and clinical relevance. The CardioForest model performed best on all metrics, achieving a test accuracy of 95.19%, a balanced accuracy of 88.76%, a precision of 95.26%, a recall of 78.42%, and an ROC-AUC of 0.8886. SHAP analysis confirmed the model's ability to rank the most relevant ECG features, such as QRS duration, in accordance with clinical intuitions, thereby fostering trust and usability in clinical practice. The findings recognize CardioForest as an extremely dependable and interpretable WCT detection model. Being able to offer accurate predictions and transparency through explainability makes it a valuable tool to help cardiologists make timely and well-informed diagnoses, especially for high-stakes and emergency scenarios.

cs.LG↗

Personalized Interpolation: Achieving Efficient Conversion Estimation with Flexible Optimization Windows

Optimizing conversions is crucial in modern online advertising systems, enabling advertisers to deliver relevant products to users and drive business outcomes. However, accurately predicting conversion events remains challenging due to variable time delays between user interactions (e.g., impressions or clicks) and the actual conversions. These delays vary substantially across advertisers and products, necessitating flexible optimization windows tailored to specific conversion behaviors. To address this, we propose a novel \textit{Personalized Interpolation} method that extends existing models based on fixed conversion windows to support flexible advertiser-specific optimization windows. Our method enables accurate conversion estimation across diverse delay distributions without increasing system complexity. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through extensive experiments using a real-world ads conversion model. Our results show that this method achieves both high prediction accuracy and improved efficiency compared to existing solutions. This study demonstrates the potential of our Personalized Interpolation method to improve conversion optimization and support a wider range of advertising strategies in large-scale online advertising systems.

cs.LG↗

World Models Should Prioritize the Unification of Physical and Social Dynamics

World models, which explicitly learn environmental dynamics to lay the foundation for planning, reasoning, and decision-making, are rapidly advancing in predicting both physical dynamics and aspects of social behavior, yet predominantly in separate silos. This division results in a systemic failure to model the crucial interplay between physical environments and social constructs, rendering current models fundamentally incapable of adequately addressing the true complexity of real-world systems where physical and social realities are inextricably intertwined. This position paper argues that the systematic, bidirectional unification of physical and social predictive capabilities is the next crucial frontier for world model development. We contend that comprehensive world models must holistically integrate objective physical laws with the subjective, evolving, and context-dependent nature of social dynamics. Such unification is paramount for AI to robustly navigate complex real-world challenges and achieve more generalizable intelligence. This paper substantiates this imperative by analyzing core impediments to integration, proposing foundational guiding principles (ACE Principles), and outlining a conceptual framework alongside a research roadmap towards truly holistic world models.

cs.CY↗

Social World Model-Augmented Mechanism Design Policy Learning

Designing adaptive mechanisms to align individual and collective interests remains a central challenge in artificial social intelligence. Existing methods often struggle with modeling heterogeneous agents possessing persistent latent traits (e.g., skills, preferences) and dealing with complex multi-agent system dynamics. These challenges are compounded by the critical need for high sample efficiency due to costly real-world interactions. World Models, by learning to predict environmental dynamics, offer a promising pathway to enhance mechanism design in heterogeneous and complex systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel method named SWM-AP (Social World Model-Augmented Mechanism Design Policy Learning), which learns a social world model hierarchically modeling agents' behavior to enhance mechanism design. Specifically, the social world model infers agents' traits from their interaction trajectories and learns a trait-based model to predict agents' responses to the deployed mechanisms. The mechanism design policy collects extensive training trajectories by interacting with the social world model, while concurrently inferring agents' traits online during real-world interactions to further boost policy learning efficiency. Experiments in diverse settings (tax policy design, team coordination, and facility location) demonstrate that SWM-AP outperforms established model-based and model-free RL baselines in cumulative rewards and sample efficiency.

cs.CY↗

Preference Discerning with LLM-Enhanced Generative Retrieval

In sequential recommendation, models recommend items based on user's interaction history. To this end, current models usually incorporate information such as item descriptions and user intent or preferences. User preferences are usually not explicitly given in open-source datasets, and thus need to be approximated, for example via large language models (LLMs). Current approaches leverage approximated user preferences only during training and rely solely on the past interaction history for recommendations, limiting their ability to dynamically adapt to changing preferences, potentially reinforcing echo chambers. To address this issue, we propose a new paradigm, namely preference discerning, which explicitly conditions a generative recommendation model on user preferences in natural language within its context. To evaluate preference discerning, we introduce a novel benchmark that provides a holistic evaluation across various scenarios, including preference steering and sentiment following. Upon evaluating current state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, we discover that their ability to dynamically adapt to evolving user preferences is limited. To address this, we propose a new method named Mender ($\textbf{M}$ultimodal Prefer$\textbf{en}$ce $\textbf{D}$iscern$\textbf{er}$), which achieves state-of-the-art performance in our benchmark. Our results show that Mender effectively adapts its recommendation guided by human preferences, even if not observed during training, paving the way toward more flexible recommendation models.

cs.IR↗

Cross-attention Secretly Performs Orthogonal Alignment in Recommendation Models

Cross-domain sequential recommendation (CDSR) aims to align heterogeneous user behavior sequences collected from different domains. While cross-attention is widely used to enhance alignment and improve recommendation performance, its underlying mechanism is not fully understood. Most researchers interpret cross-attention as residual alignment, where the output is generated by removing redundant and preserving non-redundant information from the query input by referencing another domain data which is input key and value. Beyond the prevailing view, we introduce Orthogonal Alignment, a phenomenon in which cross-attention discovers novel information that is not present in the query input, and further argue that those two contrasting alignment mechanisms can co-exist in recommendation models We find that when the query input and output of cross-attention are orthogonal, model performance improves over 300 experiments. Notably, Orthogonal Alignment emerges naturally, without any explicit orthogonality constraints. Our key insight is that Orthogonal Alignment emerges naturally because it improves scaling law. We show that baselines additionally incorporating cross-attention module outperform parameter-matched baselines, achieving a superior accuracy-per-model parameter. We hope these findings offer new directions for parameter-efficient scaling in multi-modal research.

cs.LG↗

Multimodal Slice Interaction Network Enhanced by Transfer Learning for Precise Segmentation of Internal Gross Tumor Volume in Lung Cancer PET/CT Imaging

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancerrelated deaths globally. Accurate delineation of internal gross tumor volume (IGTV) in PET/CT imaging is pivotal for optimal radiation therapy in mobile tumors such as lung cancer to account for tumor motion, yet is hindered by the limited availability of annotated IGTV datasets and attenuated PET signal intensity at tumor boundaries. In this study, we present a transfer learningbased methodology utilizing a multimodal interactive perception network with MAMBA, pre-trained on extensive gross tumor volume (GTV) datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on a private IGTV cohort. This cohort constitutes the PET/CT subset of the Lung-cancer Unified Cross-modal Imaging Dataset (LUCID). To further address the challenge of weak PET intensities in IGTV peripheral slices, we introduce a slice interaction module (SIM) within a 2.5D segmentation framework to effectively model inter-slice relationships. Our proposed module integrates channel and spatial attention branches with depthwise convolutions, enabling more robust learning of slice-to-slice dependencies and thereby improving overall segmentation performance. A comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach achieves a Dice of 0.609 on the private IGTV dataset, substantially surpassing the conventional baseline score of 0.385. This work highlights the potential of transfer learning, coupled with advanced multimodal techniques and a SIM to enhance the reliability and clinical relevance of IGTV segmentation for lung cancer radiation therapy planning.

cs.CV↗

ToMPO: Training LLM Strategic Decision Making from a Multi-Agent Perspective

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to make decisions in complex scenarios, where they need models to think deeply, reason logically, and decide wisely. Many existing studies focus solely on multi-round conversations in social tasks or simulated environments, neglecting the various types of decisions and their interdependence. Current reinforcement learning methods struggle to consider the strategies of others during training. To address these issues, we first define a strategic decision-making problem that includes two types of decisions and their temporal dependencies. Furthermore, we propose **T**heory **o**f **M**ind **P**olicy **O**ptimization **(ToMPO)** algorithm to optimize the perception of other individual strategies and the game situation trends. Compared to the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, ToMPO enhances the LLM's strategic decision-making mainly by: 1) generating rollouts based on reasoning the strategies of other individuals, 2) estimating advantages at both the graph-level and sample-level, and 3) balancing global and partial rewards. The ToMPO algorithm outperforms the GRPO method by 35% in terms of model output compliance and cooperative outcomes. Additionally, when compared to models with parameter sizes 100 times larger, it shows an 18% improvement. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the ToMPO algorithm in enhancing the model's strategic decision-making capabilities.

cs.AI↗

Enhancing LLM-Based Social Bot via an Adversarial Learning Framework

Developing Large Language Model (LLM) agents that exhibit human-like behavior, encompassing not only individual heterogeneity rooted in unique user profiles but also adaptive response to socially connected neighbors, is a significant research challenge. Social media platforms, with their diverse user data and explicit social structures, provide an ideal testbed for such investigations. This paper introduces EvoBot, an \textbf{Evo}lving LLM-based social \textbf{Bot} that significantly enhances human-like generative capabilities through a novel adversarial learning framework. EvoBot is initialized by Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on representative data from social media and then iteratively refines its generation of sophisticated, human-like content via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This refinement is guided by feedback from a co-adapting \textbf{Detector} which concurrently improves its ability to distinguish EvoBot from humans, thereby creating an increasingly challenging learning environment for EvoBot. Experiments demonstrate that EvoBot generates content aligned with diverse user profiles, increasingly bypassing the co-adapting Detector through human-like expression. Moreover, it exhibits strong social responsiveness, more accurately modeling real-world opinion dynamics and information spread in multi-agent simulations. The framework also yields a more robust Detector, underscoring its broader utility for both advanced agent development and related detection tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/kfq20/EvoBot.

cs.SI↗

Convergence Analysis of the Alternating Anderson-Picard Method for Nonlinear Fixed-point Problems

Anderson Acceleration (AA) has been widely used to solve nonlinear fixed-point problems due to its rapid convergence. This work focuses on a variant of AA in which multiple Picard iterations are performed between each AA step, referred to as the Alternating Anderson-Picard (AAP) method. Despite introducing more ``slow'' Picard iterations, this method has been shown to be efficient and even more robust in both linear and nonlinear cases. However, there is a lack of theoretical analysis for AAP in the nonlinear case. In this paper, we address this gap by establishing the equivalence between AAP and a multisecant-GMRES method that uses GMRES to solve a multisecant linear system at each iteration. From this perspective, we show that AAP ``converges'' to the Newton-GMRES method. Specifically, as the residual approaches zero, the multisecant matrix, the approximate Jacobian inverse, the search direction, and the optimization gain of AAP converge to their counterparts in the Newton-GMRES method. These connections provide insights for analyzing the asymptotic convergence properties of AAP. Consequently, we show that AAP is locally $q$-linear convergent and provide an upper bound for the convergence factor of AAP. To validate the theoretical results, numerical examples are provided.

math.NA↗

Multi-channel electrically tunable varifocal metalens with compact multilayer polarization-dependent metasurfaces and liquid crystals

As an essential module of optical systems, varifocal lens usually consists of multiple mechanically moving lenses along the optical axis. The recent development of metasurfaces with tunable functionalities holds the promise of miniaturizing varifocal lens. However, existing varifocal metalenses are hard to combine electrical tunability with scalable number and range of focal lengths, thus limiting the practical applications. Our previous work shows that the electrically tunable channels could be increased to 2N by cascading N polarization-dependent metasurfaces with liquid crystals (LCs). Here, we demonstrated a compact eight-channel electrically tunable varifocal metalens with three single-layer polarization-multiplexed bi-focal metalens and three LC cells. The total thickness of the device is ~6 mm, while the focal lengths could be switched among eight values within the range of 3.6 to 9.6 mm. The scheme is scalable in number and range of focal lengths and readily for further miniaturization. We believe that our proposal would open new possibilities of miniaturized imaging systems, AR/VR displays, LiDAR, etc.

physics.optics↗

Polarization Decoupling Multi-Port Beam-Splitting Metasurface for Miniaturized Magneto-Optical Trap

In regular magneto-optical trap (MOT) systems, the delivery of six circularly polarized (CP) cooling beams requires complex and bulky optical arrangements including waveplates, mirrors, retroreflectors, etc. To address such technique challenges, we have proposed a beam delivery system for miniaturized MOT entirely based on meta-devices. The key component is a novel multi-port beam-splitting (PD-MPBS) metasurface that relies on both propagation phase and geometric phase. The fabricated samples exhibit high beam-splitting power uniformity (within 4.4%) and polarization purities (91.29%~93.15%). By leveraging such beam-splitting device as well as reflective beam-expanding meta-device, an integrated six-beam delivery system for miniaturized MOT application has been implemented. The experimental results indicate that six expanded beams have been successfully delivered with uniform power (within 9.5%), the desired CP configuration and large overlapping volume (76.2 mm^3). We believe that a miniaturized MOT with the proposed beam delivery system is very promising for portable application of cold atom technology in precision measurement, atomic clock, quantum simulation and computing, etc.

physics.optics↗

A Language Vision Model Approach for Automated Tumor Contouring in Radiation Oncology

Background: Lung cancer ranks as the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. The complexity of tumor delineation, crucial for radiation therapy, requires expertise often unavailable in resource-limited settings. Artificial Intelligence(AI), particularly with advancements in deep learning (DL) and natural language processing (NLP), offers potential solutions yet is challenged by high false positive rates. Purpose: The Oncology Contouring Copilot (OCC) system is developed to leverage oncologist expertise for precise tumor contouring using textual descriptions, aiming to increase the efficiency of oncological workflows by combining the strengths of AI with human oversight. Methods: Our OCC system initially identifies nodule candidates from CT scans. Employing Language Vision Models (LVMs) like GPT-4V, OCC then effectively reduces false positives with clinical descriptive texts, merging textual and visual data to automate tumor delineation, designed to elevate the quality of oncology care by incorporating knowledge from experienced domain experts. Results: Deployments of the OCC system resulted in a significant reduction in the false discovery rate by 35.0%, a 72.4% decrease in false positives per scan, and an F1-score of 0.652 across our dataset for unbiased evaluation. Conclusions: OCC represents a significant advance in oncology care, particularly through the use of the latest LVMs to improve contouring results by (1) streamlining oncology treatment workflows by optimizing tumor delineation, reducing manual processes; (2) offering a scalable and intuitive framework to reduce false positives in radiotherapy planning using LVMs; (3) introducing novel medical language vision prompt techniques to minimize LVMs hallucinations with ablation study, and (4) conducting a comparative analysis of LVMs, highlighting their potential in addressing medical language vision challenges.

eess.IV↗

FedOSAA: Improving Federated Learning with One-Step Anderson Acceleration

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that enables multiple local clients and a central server to collaboratively train a model while keeping the data on their own devices. First-order methods, particularly those incorporating variance reduction techniques, are the most widely used FL algorithms due to their simple implementation and stable performance. However, these methods tend to be slow and require a large number of communication rounds to reach the global minimizer. We propose FedOSAA, a novel approach that preserves the simplicity of first-order methods while achieving the rapid convergence typically associated with second-order methods. Our approach applies one Anderson acceleration (AA) step following classical local updates based on first-order methods with variance reduction, such as FedSVRG and SCAFFOLD, during local training. This AA step is able to leverage curvature information from the history points and gives a new update that approximates the Newton-GMRES direction, thereby significantly improving the convergence. We establish a local linear convergence rate to the global minimizer of FedOSAA for smooth and strongly convex loss functions. Numerical comparisons show that FedOSAA substantially improves the communication and computation efficiency of the original first-order methods, achieving performance comparable to second-order methods like GIANT.

cs.LG↗

ValuePilot: A Two-Phase Framework for Value-Driven Decision-Making

Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), it poses challenges to ensure personalized decision-making in tasks that are not considered in training datasets. To address this issue, we propose ValuePilot, a two-phase value-driven decision-making framework comprising a dataset generation toolkit DGT and a decision-making module DMM trained on the generated data. DGT is capable of generating scenarios based on value dimensions and closely mirroring real-world tasks, with automated filtering techniques and human curation to ensure the validity of the dataset. In the generated dataset, DMM learns to recognize the inherent values of scenarios, computes action feasibility and navigates the trade-offs between multiple value dimensions to make personalized decisions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, given human value preferences, our DMM most closely aligns with human decisions, outperforming Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Gemini-2-flash, Llama-3.1-405b and GPT-4o. This research is a preliminary exploration of value-driven decision-making. We hope it will stimulate interest in value-driven decision-making and personalized decision-making within the community.

cs.AI↗

Are the Values of LLMs Structurally Aligned with Humans? A Causal Perspective

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into critical applications, aligning their behavior with human values presents significant challenges. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), typically focus on a limited set of coarse-grained values and are resource-intensive. Moreover, the correlations between these values remain implicit, leading to unclear explanations for value-steering outcomes. Our work argues that a latent causal value graph underlies the value dimensions of LLMs and that, despite alignment training, this structure remains significantly different from human value systems. We leverage these causal value graphs to guide two lightweight value-steering methods: role-based prompting and sparse autoencoder (SAE) steering, effectively mitigating unexpected side effects. Furthermore, SAE provides a more fine-grained approach to value steering. Experiments on Gemma-2B-IT and Llama3-8B-IT demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our methods.

cs.CL↗