arXiv subjects

Yang Xiang

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Xiang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SemDiff: Binary Similarity Detection by Diffing Key-Semantics Graphs

Binary similarity detection is a critical technique that has been applied in many real-world scenarios where source code is not available, e.g., bug search, malware analysis, and code plagiarism detection. Existing works are ineffective in detecting similar binaries in cases where different compiling optimizations, compilers, source code versions, or obfuscation are deployed. We observe that all the cases do not change a binary's key code behaviors although they significantly modify its syntax and structure. With this key observation, we extract a set of key instructions from a binary to capture its key code behaviors. By detecting the similarity between two binaries' key instructions, we can address well the ineffectiveness limitation of existing works. Specifically, we translate each extracted key instruction into a self-defined key expression, generating a key-semantics graph based on the binary's control flow. Each node in the key-semantics graph denotes a key instruction, and the node attribute is the key expression. To quantify the similarity between two given key-semantics graphs, we first serialize each graph into a sequence of key expressions by topological sort. Then, we tokenize and concatenate key expressions to generate token lists. We calculate the locality-sensitive hash value for all token lists and quantify their similarity. %We implement a prototype, called SemDiff, consisting of two modules: graph generation and graph diffing. The first module generates a pair of key-semantics graphs and the second module diffs the graphs. Our evaluation results show that overall, SemDiff outperforms state-of-the-art tools when detecting the similarity of binaries generated from different optimization levels, compilers, and obfuscations. SemDiff is also effective for library version search and finding similar vulnerabilities in firmware.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Latent-Space Importance Weighting under Covariate Shift

In this work, we propose a transfer learning algorithm for covariate shift, integrating sample reweighting with representation learning. A key feature of our approach is the use of a lower-dimensional latent space for modeling, in contrast to conventional methods that operate directly in the high-dimensional ambient space. Our method estimates the density ratio of learned latent features for downstream weighted prediction. We establish explicit target-domain excess-risk rates with independent data folds for strictly sufficient learned representations with regular learned-space prediction scores and density ratios. We give dimension comparisons under stated smoothness conditions and a variance comparison for true weights and a fixed predictor. General finite-sample inequalities retain representation-quality errors. Experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate gains from combining learned representations and latent weighting, and reveal sensitivity to initialization and domain choice.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

IMF-aware N-body forward modelling of membership selection functions for young open clusters

We present an IMF-aware N-body forward-modelling framework, in which the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is an explicit input, to quantify the membership selection functions of open clusters, namely completeness and contamination as functions of magnitude. Accurate derivation of the IMF requires correcting for these selection effects, which otherwise distort the inferred present-day mass function. Our framework simulates clusters with IMF slopes $α_2 = -2.7, -2.3, -1.9$, converts them into synthetic Gaia observations, adds mock field populations, and recovers members with HDBSCAN to mimic observational membership selection. Applying this framework to 35 young open clusters (ages $\lesssim100$ Myr, distances $\lesssim600$ pc), we find declining completeness towards the faint limit; older, more expanded, and more diffuse models have lower completeness and higher contamination. For a given cluster, models with flatter IMFs yield modestly but systematically lower global completeness and higher contamination, despite initial cluster masses calibrated to the same observed member count. These models undergo more stellar evolution mass loss and expand more, resulting in lower projected stellar densities; their lower completeness is consistent with more diffuse clusters being harder to separate from field stars. Corrections derived from a mismatched IMF largely recover the total star counts but leave a larger distortion in the shape of the present-day luminosity function than those derived with the correct IMF. Because membership recovery is tied to a cluster's structural evolution and the specific membership algorithm used, our findings emphasize that selection functions should be inferred jointly with the IMF rather than assumed in advance.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

Functional Subnetwork Localization for Efficient Continual Learning in Large Language Models

Biological intelligence continually adapts to new information while retaining prior skills through localized plasticity. In contrast, continual learning in large language models (LLMs) remains vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting. A promising direction is to identify functionally specialized subnetworks within LLMs that enable targeted and resource-efficient adaptation. Using gradient-attribution profiling, we localize cognition-associated functional subnetworks exhibiting extremely low mutual overlap. Building on this finding, we propose Function-isolated Memory-Efficient Optimization (CiMEO), a continual learning framework that routes each training example to its corresponding functional subnetwork, restricting parameter updates and optimizer states to selected regions. Across 1.4 million sequential instructions, CiMEO achieves the highest average performance among the compared methods on five generative benchmarks spanning programming, examination-style tasks, and mathematical reasoning, while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Subspace-overlap and principal-angle analyses further indicate that localized updates help preserve pre-trained representations, highlighting functional subnetwork localization as a practical approach to efficient and stable continual learning in LLMs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

EvolvAttack: Backdooring self Evolving VLM Agents

Self-evolving mechanisms let vision-language model (VLM) agents continually adapt through evolving memory, but they also allow malicious behavior to emerge only after deployment. We introduce a new attack surface, the self-evolving backdoor, whose payload stays dormant in the initial agent and is progressively activated as the agent evolves. Unlike conventional backdoors, which can be exposed by testing triggered inputs on a static model, our attack requires both a visual trigger and a sufficiently evolved memory state; static scanning with clean memory thus yields near-zero attack success and may deem the agent benign. We realize this through memory-aware backdoor training, which couples trigger activation with the agent's evolving memory while preserving benign behavior unless the trigger co-occurs with payload-related memory. Across three VLM backbones, four agent pipelines, and recency-, semantic-, and reward-based memory evolution, the attack preserves normal functionality and stays nearly inactive before evolution (0.5% attack success rate), yet exceeds 95% attack success within 100 interactions, revealing a stealthy threat unique to self-evolving agents.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

MVGraph: Benchmarking LVLMs on Evidence Composition across Multi-View Visual Graph

We introduce MVGraph, a benchmark for evaluating large vision-language models (LVLMs) on multi-graph reasoning where the evidence required by a query is distributed across multiple interrelated visual graph views. Although such evidence commonly resides in source-specific graphs, temporal snapshots, or local observations, existing graph reasoning benchmarks remain confined to a single self-contained structure, assessing only graph perception and reasoning while leaving the alignment and composition of evidence across views underexplored. MVGraph comprises 8k instances spanning 8 \textit{graph-theoretic} tasks, abstracted from two multi-graph scenarios (partial and temporal graph views). Each problem is programmatically constructed and verified to be unsolvable from a single view. Beyond end-to-end evaluation, we decompose multi-graph reasoning into four complementary capabilities---Perception, Alignment, Composition, and Reasoning---and design 29 diagnostic tasks with 64k instances to probe each one, along with golden intermediate representations for evaluating the intermediate process. Across 15 LVLMs, we reveal the difficulty of multi-graph reasoning and identify cross-view edge alignment and relation-level composition as prominent bottlenecks through stage-oriented diagnostics. Meanwhile, temporal constraints and increasing view counts expose further capability boundaries. Code and data are available at https://github.com/AAAndy-Zhu/MVGraph.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

VN-GraphGG: von Neumann--Mullins--based graph grain growth simulation

Efficient simulations of grain growth are essential for investigating the process-structure-property relationships in polycrystalline materials. We introduce a two-dimensional von Neumann-Mullins-based graph grain growth simulation (VN-GraphGG), which couples the grain-scale kinetics with microstructure reconstruction. The polycrystalline microstructure is represented as a graph with grain and junction nodes. The grain-area evolution on the grain graph is governed by the von Neumann--Mullins (VN) law, while a graph neural network is trained to reconstruct the microstructure from the graph. This separation allows kinetic coefficients to be varied without retraining the neural reconstruction model. Topological changes during grain growth such as disappearance of grains and changes in neighbor relations are handled straightforwardly through reconstruction and postprocessing. Simulations demonstrate accurate predictions of VN kinetics and coarsening statistics, and significant speedup over the phase-field simulations. The proposed method provides a foundation for efficient grain growth simulation based on grain-scale kinetics, opening the way to incorporate a broader range of physical mechanisms. An application example is presented for abnormal grain growth, in which kinetic heterogeneity significantly influences the grain microstructure evolution.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

OCL-PDE: A Generative Framework for PDE Inverse Problems with Observation-Complementary Latents

Partial differential equation (PDE) inverse problems are often ill-posed, making fine-scale details difficult to recover. We address this problem by introducing a learned observation-complementary latent representation that preserves reconstruction-relevant information and is combined with the observation to reconstruct the unknown field. Building on this representation, we propose OCL-PDE, a generative framework that encourages the observation to guide large-scale structure and the latent to supply complementary fine-scale details. OCL-PDE is built on a physics-aware autoencoder (AE) and conditional Flow Matching, supporting inverse reconstruction as well as forward PDE prediction. Experiments demonstrate improved reconstruction accuracy and fine-detail recovery compared with the evaluated baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Not What a Child Expressed: Auditing the Sign-to-Text Safety Interface in Child-Facing AI

Automatic sign language translation (SLT) has entered consumer products, turning American Sign Language into English text for dictation, messaging, and queries put to a conversational assistant. Child-facing AI and platform trust-and-safety tooling decide on text, using filters on minor accounts and grooming classifiers that score chat messages. A signing child who uses SLT therefore reaches these safeguards through a translation. We found no publicly documented system in which the two have been jointly evaluated, and the leading deployed SLT model was neither trained nor formally evaluated on signers under 18. Errors that alter negation, participant roles, secrecy, urgency or help-seeking could change a safety decision without disturbing fluency. This paper proposes a Deaf-informed pre-deployment audit of that boundary, with a failure taxonomy, a sanitised scenario schema, four comparison conditions, and four outcome measures. Auslan is the planned first case study.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Verifier-Guided Synthetic Augmentation for 3D Human Shape Generation

Limited training data diversity constrains generative modeling of 3D human bodies: conservative models remain close to observed examples, whereas exploratory models often violate basic body proportions. We introduce a verifier-guided augmentation framework that uses global and mode-local PCA to generate inexpensive candidates, screens them using correspondence-derived skeletal proportions and body-part geometry, and retrains a diffusion model on accepted candidates. Elastic registration provides both the modal structure used by distributed PCA and the dense anatomical correspondence needed for scalable screening without per-candidate body-model fitting. A blinded human study supports the verifier as a conservative gatekeeper, favoring verifier-accepted over rejected outputs. We evaluate full-pool verifier acceptance separately from the coverage and departure of accepted samples and combine them through EAUC. On 4,498 registered DFAUST surfaces, distributed-PCA augmentation achieves 86.32% acceptance, the highest CP-AUC (0.871), and the highest EAUC (0.752), improving EAUC by 32% over real-only and self-augmented diffusion. These results show that mode-local, verifier-guided proposals broaden diffusion generation while maintaining high agreement with calibrated body measurements.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

GUITAR: Structured Failure Diagnosis of GUI Agents via State Transitions

Understanding where and why Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents fail is essential for building more reliable systems, yet current evaluation relies on step accuracy, a metric that treats each screen independently and overlooks the underlying structure of GUI environments. This leads to two critical blind spots: (1) functionally equivalent screens are evaluated in isolation, obscuring systematic failure patterns across shared screens; and (2) the long-tailed GUI distribution renders failures on rare but critical screens invisible under standard metrics. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{GUITAR}, a state-centric diagnostic framework that performs structured failure analysis over both states and transitions, using a State Transition Graph (STG) by mapping visually diverse screens to shared functional states. Across 8 agents and 6 tasks from AndroidControl and Mind2Web, GUITAR reveals that 60.4\% of failures occur in 20\% of states, localizing errors to a small set of bottlenecks. Bottleneck-targeted guidance improves SR by 2.8\% and retains a 1.88\% average gain across 7 agents under three-fold trajectory-held-out evaluation with fully automatic STGs. These findings demonstrate the diagnostic and actionable value of structure-aware evaluation within the evaluated mobile and web tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/sqzhang-lazy/GUITAR

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Devils in Question Relay: Source-Conditioned Relay Steering to Mitigate Hallucinations in Audio-visual Large Language Models

Audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) have made remarkable progress in multimodal understanding and reasoning through interactions among visual, auditory, and linguistic information. However, recent studies show that AVLLMs face a critical challenge: $\textbf{source-confused grounding hallucination}$, where cues from the unused modality induce responses that the required modality does not support, undermining reliability in real-world applications. Existing methods have made progress in mitigating this failure, yet how it arises from internal cross-modal interactions remains insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we conduct path-intervention and representation analyses, revealing a $\textbf{question-relay}$ mechanism: question states carry interfering cues alongside required-source evidence, undermining grounding in required-modality evidence. Cutting pathways from interfering modality to question states yields greater correct-answer logit recovery than cutting those to the generation position. Motivated by these findings, we propose $\textbf{SECRET}$ ($\textbf{S}$ourc$\textbf{E}$-$\textbf{C}$onditioned $\textbf{RE}$lay s$\textbf{T}$eering), a training-free method that mitigates cross-modal interference at the question relay. Using contrasting question representations elicited through different modality-pathway interventions, SECRET steers the original question states toward required-source evidence. Experiments on two widely adopted benchmarks CMM and AVHBench across three AVLLMs show that SECRET consistently outperforms prior training-free methods, substantially mitigating source-confused grounding hallucinations (e.g., up to +18.0 and +7.1 percentage points over base models). Modality-specific captioning further demonstrates its generalizability to open-ended generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Less Uniform Discrete Diffusion is More Powerful and Scalable

Although uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) represent a promising diffusion paradigm, scaling them remains challenging. We identify the core obstacle as an over-uniform training objective and condition-target confusion during sampling. To address these, we propose Less Uniform Diffusion (LUDI), a novel UDLM framework. Specifically, we (i) introduce a less uniform loss that directs each reverse transition toward the clean token, and (ii) equip the model with per-token time embeddings that supply token-level corruption hints, enabling confidence-based few-step sampling. Experiments across scales show that LUDI yields cleaner supervision and improves few-step generation. We further continue-train a 7B autoregressive model into LUDI-7B, resulting in a UDLM capable of complex reasoning. It achieves a 3-token-per-step speedup over AR decoding and competitive performance compared with masked diffusion baselines, revealing that the full potential of UDLMs for complex generation remains to be unlocked.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

ConSEAL: Connectivity-Informed Streamline Endpoint Alignment for Diffeomorphic Cortical Registration

Cortical surface registration is often driven by local geometric descriptors (e.g., sulcal depth and curvature). While this approach achieves geometric correspondence, it neglects the long-range wiring constraints imposed by white-matter anatomy. Diffusion MRI tractography offers these crucial constraints; however, prior connectivity-informed pipelines typically align precomputed connectivity matrices, making the optimization highly sensitive to connectivity estimation and its resolution. In this paper, we introduce ConSEAL (Connectivity-Informed Streamline Endpoint Alignment), a novel connectivity-based surface registration method that aligns cortical surfaces by operating directly on white-matter fiber-tract endpoints. We model tract endpoints as a point cloud on the product manifold $Ω\times Ω$, where $Ω$ represents the spherical domain of the inflated cortical hemispheres. Our alignment method iteratively (i) computes a small diffeomorphic warp for $Ω$ by minimizing connectivity mismatch, and (ii) updates the endpoints based on this warp. The method relies on a geometric framework that ensures output warps are diffeomorphisms and has a final goal that optimizes the matching of well-known fiber bundles. Experiments on Human Connectome Project (HCP) data demonstrate that ConSEAL improves tract-level correspondence, achieving higher connectivity-level overlap coefficients on major fiber bundles and stronger robustness across grid resolutions for $Ω$ compared to state-of-the-art methods such as ENCORE and MSMAll.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Semantic Refinement of Universal Audio Representations through Audio-Description Alignment

Universal audio representations must preserve acoustic detail while making high-level concepts accessible across speech, music, environmental sound, and downstream models of different capacities. We study semantic refinement of an acoustically pretrained encoder by adding audio-description alignment to a foundation of BEST-RQ, reconstruction, and CTC. We compare matched control, shuffled-description, and correctly paired trajectories to distinguish correct correspondence from an extra contrastive objective. Each endpoint is frozen and evaluated with a temporal-mean linear probe and a sequence-aware LLM readout, testing whether the refined information is directly accessible and remains useful to a stronger model. Across three paired seeds, correct alignment improves domain-balanced classification by 4.66 points with the linear probe and 2.59 points with the sequence-aware LLM, with positive changes in every domain. Correct pairing accounts for 87% of the linear-probe gain, while the LLM shows its clearest correspondence-specific benefit in captioning. Dense acoustic objectives provide complementary gains under both readouts. A separate 24-layer continuation remains competitive with leading public encoders under the shared evaluator, supporting the recipe beyond the controlled study.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

KaLM-Embedding-V2: Superior Training Techniques and Data Inspire A Versatile Embedding Model

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs)-based text embedding models primarily focus on data scaling or synthesis, yet limited exploration of training techniques and data quality, thereby constraining performance. In this work, we propose KaLM-Embedding-V2 from the Lychee-KaLM team, a series of versatile and compact embedding models, systematically incentivizing advanced embedding capability in LLMs by superior training techniques and high-quality data. For model architecture, we implement the models in a 0.5B compact size with simple mean-pooling to produce fixed-length embeddings and remove the causal attention mask to enable fully bidirectional representation learning. For training techniques, we propose a progressive multi-stage training pipeline: pre-training on weakly supervised large-scale datasets, fine-tuning with supervised high-quality datasets, and contrastive distillation with fine-grained soft signals, integrated with focal-style reweighting and online hard-negative mixing to emphasize difficult samples and enrich hard negatives, respectively. For training data, we curate over 20 categories for pre-training and 100 categories for fine-tuning and contrastive distillation to improve both performance and generalization, leveraging task-specific instructions, hard-negative mining, and example-based multi-class labeling to ensure high quality. Combining these techniques, our KaLM-Embedding-V2 series achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark, outperforming models of comparable size and rivaling models 3--26x larger, setting a new standard for versatile and compact embedding models under 1B parameters. The code, data, and models are available at https://kalm-embedding.github.io/.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

GrowPage: On-Demand KV Budgeting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Serving

Long-output reasoning has made the key--value (KV) cache a critical memory bottleneck for efficient LLM serving. Existing KV compression methods usually rely on a predefined per-request budget and adjust only which KV states are retained, leaving the total capacity fixed throughout decoding. However, reasoning workloads exhibit substantial demand variation: different requests require different KV capacities, and the attention demand of an individual request evolves during generation. We introduce \textbf{GrowPage}, an on-demand KV budgeting framework that treats KV capacity as a runtime resource. GrowPage maintains lightweight dual-timescale query summaries to capture recent and long-term attention behaviors, and uses their relative attention working sets to estimate demand evolution. At each capacity boundary, GrowPage either compresses KV states within the current allocation or acquires an additional physical page when broader demand emerges. By integrating with PagedAttention's page-level memory abstraction, GrowPage preserves continuous batching and prefix caching. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks across multiple models show that GrowPage achieves a superior performance--throughput trade-off over existing approaches.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Convex ordering for graphon mean-field systems

We establish marginal and functional convex order comparisons for graphon mean-field systems on $\mathbb{R}^d$, including the infinite-horizon setting. A key difficulty is that convex order cannot in general be transferred through the usual particle approximation, which requires us to work directly with Euler schemes for the graphon mean-field system. Under a suitable dissipativity condition, we establish Euler approximation estimates that are uniform in both time and the agent label, and combine them with forward-backward induction arguments to obtain the convex order comparisons. For the infinite-horizon problem, dissipativity provides the required uniform-in-time stability, while an exponentially weighted $L^2$-space enables trajectory-level convergence and leads to the functional convex order on $[0,\infty)$. As an application, we derive value-function comparisons for a class of one-dimensional linear-quadratic graphon mean-field games.

math.PR↗