arXiv subjects

Yiding Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yiding Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Into the ORBIT for Time Series: Training Regimes for Foundation Models

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have advanced primarily through architectural innovation, while training regimes for large-scale heterogeneous corpora remain under-explored. As a result, pre-training distributions are often poorly controlled with respect to domain imbalance, context requirements, prediction horizons, and missingness. We introduce ORBIT (Omni-Range Bootstrap Incremental Training), a training paradigm that makes this distribution explicit and controllable. ORBIT combines Bootstrap Multi-Level Sampling, which controls dataset exposure and samples records, target variables, context windows, and prediction horizons, with Omni-Range Incremental Training, which varies context lengths and prediction horizons throughout a single training stage. Under ORBIT, we train Falcon-2.0, a simple univariate encoder-only Transformer with missingness-aware triple-channel patch tokenization and parallel patch prediction. We further introduce Rank-Guided Cross-Depth Alignment, a training objective that uses late-layer representations as stop-gradient teachers for shallow layers without additional inference cost. Evaluations on GIFT-Eval and fev-bench demonstrate strong zero-shot forecasting performance across diverse domains and frequencies.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Emergence of half-semiconductor behavior and tunable magnetism via carrier doping in Janus VXSe (X=Cl, Br, I) monolayers

Two-dimensional ferromagnetic semiconductors with high Curie temperature, large magnetic anisotropy, and electrically tunable properties are highly sought for nanoscale spintronics. Here, using first-principles calculations, we predict a new class of Janus VXSe (X=Cl, Br, I) monolayers. All three compounds are intrinsic ferromagnetic semiconductors with indirect band gaps of 1.66-2.33 eV, Curie temperatures up to 128 K, and magnetic anisotropy energies up to 910 ueV per V, leading to easy-plane magnetization for VClSe and VBrSe and an out-of-plane easy axis for VISe. The robust ferromagnetic order originates from the competition between superexchange and itinerant magnetism. Remarkably, VISe is a pristine half-semiconductor, whereas carrier doping unlocks fully spin-polarized states in the initially non-ideal VClSe and VBrSe. We also find that hole doping can switch the magnetic easy axis of VBrSe from in-plane to out-of-plane, enabling a spin-field-effect transistor with giant magnetoresistance. Our findings highlight carrier doping as a key to unlock hidden half-semiconducting behavior and establish Janus VXSe as a promising platform for 2D spintronics and magnetoelectric devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

The rapid evolution of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has advanced zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains. Inspired by the current form of Large Language Models, future TSFMs may be offered as commercialized, closed-source API services. However, many existing online adaptation methods still rely on white-box access for parameter fine-tuning or gradient backpropagation. This paradigm mismatch raises a question: In black-box online adaptation for TSFMs, what should we learn? We answer this with an insight: the predictive errors of the base model are conditioned on both the input and output of the base model (i.e., the context of errors). To validate this insight, we propose ORCA (Online Residual Contextual Adaptation). We conduct extensive experiments across 5 state-of-the-art TSFMs and 8 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, through ablation studies, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different adapter learning hypotheses on the final adaptation performance in black-box online adaptation. Code available at https://github.com/Fifthky/ORCA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Existence Precedes Value: Joint Modeling of Observational Existence and Evolving States in Time Series Forecasting

Real-world time series are often highly incomplete and irregular due to sensor dormancy, transmission delays, and event-driven sampling, making reliable forecasting fundamentally challenging. Existing methods have evolved from impute-then-forecast pipelines to continuous-time models such as Neural ODEs and continuous-time graph networks. While these approaches improve the modeling of historical irregularity, they still rely on an implicit oracle assumption at inference time: the timestamps of future valid observations are presumed to be known in advance. This assumption limits practical relevance, since in many real systems the more fundamental question is not only what the future value will be, but also whether a valid observation will occur at all. In this paper, we propose Timeflies, a unified framework that reformulates forecasting as a joint problem of future observability inference and value estimation. To explicitly model the interaction between observation dynamics and state evolution, Timeflies adopts an observation stream and a value stream, coupled through three dedicated modules for reliability-aware embedding, observation-guided dependency modeling, and joint prediction. We further construct Shadow, a benchmark that combines natural missingness from public datasets with real-world industrial data, and introduce the Observation-Value Joint Entropy (OVJE) metric to comprehensively evaluate this coupled predictability. Extensive experiments show that Timeflies consistently outperforms existing methods, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling future observability in time series forecasting with missing values. Code and dataset are available in https://github.com/ant-intl/Timeflies.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Falcon-X: A Time Series Foundation Model for Heterogeneous Multivariate Modeling

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are transforming the forecasting paradigm through large-scale cross-domain pretraining. However, most existing TSFMs remain univariate, and recent efforts to enable cross-variate modeling still operate directly within the raw variate space. This design introduces fundamental limitations in semantic alignment and relational expressivity. Specifically, raw-space group mixing lacks a dedicated mechanism to align heterogeneous physical quantities, while standard non-negative attention fails to capture the complex synergistic and antagonistic interactions ubiquitous in real-world systems. To address these challenges, we propose Falcon-X, decouples variates from the raw space and maps them into a unified latent prototype space. Falcon-X employs a Unified Prototype Diff-Attention mechanism that explicitly evaluates both positive and negative semantic affinities to explicitly align heterogeneous variates. Cross-variate interactions are then efficiently performed within this shared space via Latent Entity Attention, naturally facilitating zero-shot structural transfer. Finally, a Variate Reassembly Router robustly reconstructs variate-specific trajectories via a request-and-dispatch mechanism. Extensive evaluations on the GIFT-Eval and fev-bench benchmarks demonstrate that Falcon-X achieves excellent forecasting performance, offering a principled and scalable paradigm for complex multivariate environments. Falcon-X is publicly released to support future research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

KBest: Efficient Vector Search on Kunpeng CPU

Vector search, which returns the vectors most similar to a given query vector from a large vector dataset, underlies many important applications such as search, recommendation, and LLMs. To be economic, vector search needs to be efficient to reduce the resources required by a given query workload. However, existing vector search libraries (e.g., Faiss and DiskANN) are optimized for x86 CPU architectures (i.e., Intel and AMD CPUs) while Huawei Kunpeng CPUs are based on the ARM architecture and competitive in compute power. In this paper, we present KBest as a vector search library tailored for the latest Kunpeng 920 CPUs. To be efficient, KBest incorporates extensive hardware-aware and algorithmic optimizations, which include single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) accelerated distance computation, data prefetch, index refinement, early termination, and vector quantization. Experiment results show that KBest outperforms SOTA vector search libraries running on x86 CPUs, and our optimizations can improve the query throughput by over 2x. Currently, KBest serves applications from both our internal business and external enterprise clients with tens of millions of queries on a daily basis.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to Search

Robust deployment of large multimodal models (LMMs) in real-world scenarios requires access to external knowledge sources, given the complexity and dynamic nature of real-world information. Existing approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and prompt engineered search agents rely on rigid pipelines, often leading to inefficient or excessive search behaviors. We present MMSearch-R1, the first end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that enables LMMs to perform on-demand, multi-turn search in real-world Internet environments. Our framework integrates both image and text search tools, allowing the model to reason about when and how to invoke them guided by an outcome-based reward with a search penalty. To support training, We collect a multimodal search VQA dataset through a semi-automated pipeline that covers diverse visual and textual knowledge needs and curate a search-balanced subset with both search-required and search-free samples, which proves essential for shaping efficient and on-demand search behavior. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive and info-seeking VQA tasks show that our model not only outperforms RAG-based baselines of the same model size, but also matches the performance of a larger RAG-based model while reducing search calls by over 30%. We further analyze key empirical findings to offer actionable insights for advancing research in multimodal search.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users' interactions. However, these systems face challenges in dynamically adapting to shifts in users' goals and maintaining low latency for real-time interactions. In the Baidu Search AI assistant, an industrial-scale multi-turn search system, we propose a novel two-phase framework to provide proactive guidance. The first phase, Goal-adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning (G-SFT), employs a goal adaptation agent that dynamically adapts to user goal shifts and provides goal-relevant contextual information. G-SFT also incorporates scalable knowledge transfer to distill insights from LLMs into a lightweight model for real-time interaction. The second phase, Click-oriented Reinforcement Learning (C-RL), adopts a generate-rank paradigm, systematically constructs preference pairs from user click signals, and proactively improves click-through rates through more engaging guidance. This dual-phase architecture achieves complementary objectives: G-SFT ensures accurate goal tracking, while C-RL optimizes interaction quality through click signal-driven reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves 86.10% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95% over baseline) and 25.28% CTR in online deployment (149.06% relative improvement), while reducing inference latency by 69.55% through scalable knowledge distillation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Dispersion-Engineered Compact Twisted Metasurfaces Enabling 3D Frequency-Reconfigurable Holography

Flexible dispersion manipulation is critical for holography to achieve broadband imaging or frequency division multiplexing. Within this context, metasurface-based holography offers advanced dispersion control, yet dynamic reconfigurability remains largely unexplored. This work develops a dispersion-engineered inverse design framework that enables 3D frequency-reconfigurable holography through a twisted metasurface system. The physical implementation is based on a compact layered configuration that cascades the broadband radiation-type metasurface (RA-M) and phase-only metasurface (P-M). The RA-M provides a phase-adjustable input to excite P-M, while the rotation of P-M creates a reconfigurable response of holograms. By employing the proposed scheme, dynamic switching of frequency-space multiplexing and achromatic holograms are designed and experimentally demonstrated in the microwave region. This method advances flexible dispersion engineering for metasurface-based holography, and the compact system holds significant potential for applications in ultra-broadband imaging, high-capacity optical display, and switchable meta-devices.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Cat-Eye Inspired Active-Passive-Composite Aperture-Shared Sub-Terahertz Meta-Imager for Non-Interactive Concealed Object Detection

Within the feline eye, a distinctive tapetum lucidum as a mirror resides posterior to the retina, reflecting the incident rays to simulate light source emission. This secondary emission property enables felines to be highly sensitive to light, possessing remarkable visual capabilities even in dark settings. Drawing inspiration from this natural phenomenon, we propose an active-passive-composite sub-terahertz meta-imager integrated with a bifocus metasurface, a high-sensitivity radiometer, and a low-power signal hidden radiation source. Benefiting from its aperture-shared advantage, this advanced fusion imaging system, enabled to be deployed by a simplified portable hardware platform, allows for the concurrent acquisition of active and passive electromagnetic properties to extend the target detection category and realize multi-mode fusion perception. Notably, it also enables the extraction of radiation and reflection characteristics without additional calibration modules. Experiments demonstrate the multi-target fusion imaging and localized information decoupling with the tailored field of view and emission energy. This compact and multi-mode fusion imaging system may have plenty of potential for airplane navigation positioning, abnormal monitoring, and non-interactive concealed security checks.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval

Recent information retrieval (IR) models are pre-trained and instruction-tuned on massive datasets and tasks, enabling them to perform well on a wide range of tasks and potentially generalize to unseen tasks with instructions. However, existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making them insufficient for evaluating the latest IR models. In this paper, we propose MAIR (Massive Instructed Retrieval Benchmark), a heterogeneous IR benchmark that includes 126 distinct IR tasks across 6 domains, collected from existing datasets. We benchmark state-of-the-art instruction-tuned text embedding models and re-ranking models. Our experiments reveal that instruction-tuned models generally achieve superior performance compared to non-instruction-tuned models on MAIR. Additionally, our results suggest that current instruction-tuned text embedding models and re-ranking models still lack effectiveness in specific long-tail tasks. MAIR is publicly available at https://github.com/sunnweiwei/Mair.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

G3: An Effective and Adaptive Framework for Worldwide Geolocalization Using Large Multi-Modality Models

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our code and data are available online for reproduction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ChatASU: Evoking LLM's Reflexion to Truly Understand Aspect Sentiment in Dialogues

Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ASU) in interactive scenarios (e.g., Question-Answering and Dialogue) has attracted ever-more interest in recent years and achieved important progresses. However, existing studies on interactive ASU largely ignore the coreference issue for opinion targets (i.e., aspects), while this phenomenon is ubiquitous in interactive scenarios especially dialogues, limiting the ASU performance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) shows the powerful ability to integrate various NLP tasks with the chat paradigm. In this way, this paper proposes a new Chat-based Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ChatASU) task, aiming to explore LLMs' ability in understanding aspect sentiments in dialogue scenarios. Particularly, this ChatASU task introduces a sub-task, i.e., Aspect Chain Reasoning (ACR) task, to address the aspect coreference issue. On this basis, we propose a Trusted Self-reflexion Approach (TSA) with ChatGLM as backbone to ChatASU. Specifically, this TSA treats the ACR task as an auxiliary task to boost the performance of the primary ASU task, and further integrates trusted learning into reflexion mechanisms to alleviate the LLMs-intrinsic factual hallucination problem in TSA. Furthermore, a high-quality ChatASU dataset is annotated to evaluate TSA, and extensive experiments show that our proposed TSA can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art baselines, justifying the effectiveness of TSA to ChatASU and the importance of considering the coreference and hallucination issues in ChatASU.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is a pivotal concern. Whereas extensive research has demonstrated the privacy risks of large language models (LLMs), the RAG technique could potentially reshape the inherent behaviors of LLM generation, posing new privacy issues that are currently under-explored. In this work, we conduct extensive empirical studies with novel attack methods, which demonstrate the vulnerability of RAG systems on leaking the private retrieval database. Despite the new risk brought by RAG on the retrieval data, we further reveal that RAG can mitigate the leakage of the LLMs' training data. Overall, we provide new insights in this paper for privacy protection of retrieval-augmented LLMs, which benefit both LLMs and RAG systems builders. Our code is available at https://github.com/phycholosogy/RAG-privacy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

A Robust Semantics-based Watermark for Large Language Model against Paraphrasing

Large language models (LLMs) have show great ability in various natural language tasks. However, there are concerns that LLMs are possible to be used improperly or even illegally. To prevent the malicious usage of LLMs, detecting LLM-generated text becomes crucial in the deployment of LLM applications. Watermarking is an effective strategy to detect the LLM-generated content by encoding a pre-defined secret watermark to facilitate the detection process. However, the majority of existing watermark methods leverage the simple hashes of precedent tokens to partition vocabulary. Such watermark can be easily eliminated by paraphrase and correspondingly the detection effectiveness will be greatly compromised. Thus, to enhance the robustness against paraphrase, we propose a semantics-based watermark framework SemaMark. It leverages the semantics as an alternative to simple hashes of tokens since the paraphrase will likely preserve the semantic meaning of the sentences. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SemaMark under different paraphrases.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Variational Graph Autoencoder for Heterogeneous Information Networks with Missing and Inaccurate Attributes

Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs), which consist of various types of nodes and edges, have recently demonstrated excellent performance in graph mining. However, most existing heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) ignore the problems of missing attributes, inaccurate attributes and scarce labels for nodes, which limits their expressiveness. In this paper, we propose a generative self-supervised model GraMI to address these issues simultaneously. Specifically, GraMI first initializes all the nodes in the graph with a low-dimensional representation matrix. After that, based on the variational graph autoencoder framework, GraMI learns both node-level and attribute-level embeddings in the encoder, which can provide fine-grained semantic information to construct node attributes. In the decoder, GraMI reconstructs both links and attributes. Instead of directly reconstructing raw features for attributed nodes, GraMI generates the initial low-dimensional representation matrix for all the nodes, based on which raw features of attributed nodes are further reconstructed to leverage accurate attributes. In this way, GraMI can not only complete informative features for non-attributed nodes, but rectify inaccurate ones for attributed nodes. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of GraMI in tackling HINs with missing and inaccurate attributes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

HetCAN: A Heterogeneous Graph Cascade Attention Network with Dual-Level Awareness

Heterogeneous graph neural networks(HGNNs) have recently shown impressive capability in modeling heterogeneous graphs that are ubiquitous in real-world applications. Most existing methods for heterogeneous graphs mainly learn node embeddings by stacking multiple convolutional or attentional layers, which can be considered as capturing the high-order information from node-level aspect. However, different types of nodes in heterogeneous graphs have diverse features, it is also necessary to capture interactions among node features, namely the high-order information from feature-level aspect. In addition, most methods first align node features by mapping them into one same low-dimensional space, while they may lose some type information of nodes in this way. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel Heterogeneous graph Cascade Attention Network (HetCAN) composed of multiple cascade blocks. Each cascade block includes two components, the type-aware encoder and the dimension-aware encoder. Specifically, the type-aware encoder compensates for the loss of node type information and aims to make full use of graph heterogeneity. The dimension-aware encoder is able to learn the feature-level high-order information by capturing the interactions among node features. With the assistance of these components, HetCAN can comprehensively encode information of node features, graph heterogeneity and graph structure in node embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of HetCAN over advanced competitors and also exhibit its efficiency and robustness.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion

Query expansion, pivotal in search engines, enhances the representation of user information needs with additional terms. While existing methods expand queries using retrieved or generated contextual documents, each approach has notable limitations. Retrieval-based methods often fail to accurately capture search intent, particularly with brief or ambiguous queries. Generation-based methods, utilizing large language models (LLMs), generally lack corpus-specific knowledge and entail high fine-tuning costs. To address these gaps, we propose a novel zero-shot query expansion framework utilizing LLMs for mutual verification. Specifically, we first design a query-query-document generation method, leveraging LLMs' zero-shot reasoning ability to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents. Then, a mutual verification process synergizes generated and retrieved documents for optimal expansion. Our proposed method is fully zero-shot, and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods. Our code is available online at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/MILL to ease reproduction.

cs.IR↗