arXiv subjects

Yifan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Yifan Zhang.

At least 289 records · Page 16Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models

This work introduces RARE (Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement), a versatile extension to the mutual reasoning framework (rStar), aimed at enhancing reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models (LLMs) for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks such as commonsense and medical reasoning. RARE incorporates two innovative actions within the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework: A6, which generates search queries based on the initial problem statement, performs information retrieval using those queries, and augments reasoning with the retrieved data to formulate the final answer; and A7, which leverages information retrieval specifically for generated sub-questions and re-answers these sub-questions with the relevant contextual information. Additionally, a Retrieval-Augmented Factuality Scorer is proposed to replace the original discriminator, prioritizing reasoning paths that meet high standards of factuality. Experimental results with LLaMA 3.1 show that RARE enables open-source LLMs to achieve competitive performance with top open-source models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o. This research establishes RARE as a scalable solution for improving LLMs in domains where logical coherence and factual integrity are critical.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LightRouter: Towards Efficient LLM Collaboration with Minimal Overhead

The rapid advancement of large language models has unlocked remarkable capabilities across a diverse array of natural language processing tasks. However, the considerable differences among available LLMs-in terms of cost, performance, and computational demands-pose significant challenges for users aiming to identify the most suitable model for specific tasks. In this work, we present LightRouter, a novel framework designed to systematically select and integrate a small subset of LLMs from a larger pool, with the objective of jointly optimizing both task performance and cost efficiency. LightRouter leverages an adaptive selection mechanism to identify models that require only a minimal number of boot tokens, thereby reducing costs, and further employs an effective integration strategy to combine their outputs. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that LightRouter matches or outperforms widely-used ensemble baselines, achieving up to a 25% improvement in accuracy. Compared with leading high-performing models, LightRouter achieves comparable performance while reducing inference costs by up to 27%. Importantly, our framework operates without any prior knowledge of individual models and relies exclusively on inexpensive, lightweight models. This work introduces a practical approach for efficient LLM selection and provides valuable insights into optimal strategies for model combination.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

ELABORATION: A Comprehensive Benchmark on Human-LLM Competitive Programming

While recent research increasingly emphasizes the value of human-LLM collaboration in competitive programming and proposes numerous empirical methods, a comprehensive understanding remains elusive due to the fragmented nature of existing studies and their use of diverse, application-specific human feedback. Thus, our work serves a three-fold purpose: First, we present the first taxonomy of human feedback consolidating the entire programming process, which promotes fine-grained evaluation. Second, we introduce ELABORATIONSET, a novel programming dataset specifically designed for human-LLM collaboration, meticulously annotated to enable large-scale simulated human feedback and facilitate costeffective real human interaction studies. Third, we introduce ELABORATION, a novel benchmark to facilitate a thorough assessment of human-LLM competitive programming. With ELABORATION, we pinpoint strengthes and weaknesses of existing methods, thereby setting the foundation for future improvement. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/ELABORATION

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

FormalMATH: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models

Formal mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge for artificial intelligence, hindered by limitations of existing benchmarks in scope and scale. To address this, we present FormalMATH, a large-scale Lean4 benchmark comprising 5,560 formally verified problems spanning from high-school Olympiad challenges to undergraduate-level theorems across diverse domains (e.g., algebra, applied mathematics, calculus, number theory, and discrete mathematics). To mitigate the inefficiency of manual formalization, we introduce a novel human-in-the-loop autoformalization pipeline that integrates: (1) specialized large language models (LLMs) for statement autoformalization, (2) multi-LLM semantic verification, and (3) negation-based disproof filtering strategies using off-the-shelf LLM-based provers. This approach reduces expert annotation costs by retaining 72.09% of statements before manual verification while ensuring fidelity to the original natural-language problems. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based theorem provers reveals significant limitations: even the strongest models achieve only 16.46% success rate under practical sampling budgets, exhibiting pronounced domain bias (e.g., excelling in algebra but failing in calculus) and over-reliance on simplified automation tactics. Notably, we identify a counterintuitive inverse relationship between natural-language solution guidance and proof success in chain-of-thought reasoning scenarios, suggesting that human-written informal reasoning introduces noise rather than clarity in the formal reasoning settings. We believe that FormalMATH provides a robust benchmark for benchmarking formal mathematical reasoning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

QuaDMix: Quality-Diversity Balanced Data Selection for Efficient LLM Pretraining

Quality and diversity are two critical metrics for the training data of large language models (LLMs), positively impacting performance. Existing studies often optimize these metrics separately, typically by first applying quality filtering and then adjusting data proportions. However, these approaches overlook the inherent trade-off between quality and diversity, necessitating their joint consideration. Given a fixed training quota, it is essential to evaluate both the quality of each data point and its complementary effect on the overall dataset. In this paper, we introduce a unified data selection framework called QuaDMix, which automatically optimizes the data distribution for LLM pretraining while balancing both quality and diversity. Specifically, we first propose multiple criteria to measure data quality and employ domain classification to distinguish data points, thereby measuring overall diversity. QuaDMix then employs a unified parameterized data sampling function that determines the sampling probability of each data point based on these quality and diversity related labels. To accelerate the search for the optimal parameters involved in the QuaDMix framework, we conduct simulated experiments on smaller models and use LightGBM for parameters searching, inspired by the RegMix method. Our experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that QuaDMix achieves an average performance improvement of 7.2% across multiple benchmarks. These results outperform the independent strategies for quality and diversity, highlighting the necessity and ability to balance data quality and diversity.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

TeLLMe: An Energy-Efficient Ternary LLM Accelerator for Prefilling and Decoding on Edge FPGAs

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge platforms is challenged by their high computational and memory demands. Although recent low-bit quantization methods (e.g., BitNet, DeepSeek) compress weights to as little as 1.58 bits with minimal accuracy loss, edge deployment is still constrained by limited on-chip resources, power budgets, and the often-neglected latency of the prefill phase. We present TeLLMe, the first ternary LLM accelerator for low-power FPGAs (e.g., AMD KV260) that fully supports both prefill and autoregressive decoding using 1.58-bit weights and 8-bit activations. Our contributions include: (1) a table-lookup matrix engine for ternary matmul that merges grouped activations with online precomputation to minimize resource use; (2) a fused, bandwidth-efficient attention module featuring a reversed reordering scheme to accelerate prefill; and (3) a tightly integrated normalization and quantization--dequantization unit optimized for ultra-low-bit inference. Under a 7W power budget, TeLLMe delivers up to 9 tokens/s throughput over 1,024-token contexts and prefill latencies of 0.55--1.15 s for 64--128 token prompts, marking a significant energy-efficiency advance and establishing a new edge FPGA benchmark for generative AI.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

COBRA: Algorithm-Architecture Co-optimized Binary Transformer Accelerator for Edge Inference

Transformer-based models have demonstrated superior performance in various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. However, their enormous model size and high demands in computation, memory, and communication limit their deployment to edge platforms for local, secure inference. Binary transformers offer a compact, low-complexity solution for edge deployment with reduced bandwidth needs and acceptable accuracy. However, existing binary transformers perform inefficiently on current hardware due to the lack of binary specific optimizations. To address this, we introduce COBRA, an algorithm-architecture co-optimized binary Transformer accelerator for edge computing. COBRA features a real 1-bit binary multiplication unit, enabling matrix operations with -1, 0, and +1 values, surpassing ternary methods. With further hardware-friendly optimizations in the attention block, COBRA achieves up to 3,894.7 GOPS throughput and 448.7 GOPS/Watt energy efficiency on edge FPGAs, delivering a 311x energy efficiency improvement over GPUs and a 3.5x throughput improvement over the state-of-the-art binary accelerator, with only negligible inference accuracy degradation.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

Think Hierarchically, Act Dynamically: Hierarchical Multi-modal Fusion and Reasoning for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable embodied agents to follow natural language instructions and reach target locations in real-world environments. While prior methods often rely on either global scene representations or object-level features, these approaches are insufficient for capturing the complex interactions across modalities required for accurate navigation. In this paper, we propose a Multi-level Fusion and Reasoning Architecture (MFRA) to enhance the agent's ability to reason over visual observations, language instructions and navigation history. Specifically, MFRA introduces a hierarchical fusion mechanism that aggregates multi-level features-ranging from low-level visual cues to high-level semantic concepts-across multiple modalities. We further design a reasoning module that leverages fused representations to infer navigation actions through instruction-guided attention and dynamic context integration. By selectively capturing and combining relevant visual, linguistic, and temporal signals, MFRA improves decision-making accuracy in complex navigation scenarios. Extensive experiments on benchmark VLN datasets including REVERIE, R2R, and SOON demonstrate that MFRA achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of multi-level modal fusion for embodied navigation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Guiding VLM Agents with Process Rewards at Inference Time for GUI Navigation

Recent advancements in visual language models (VLMs) have notably enhanced their capabilities in handling complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction tasks. Despite these improvements, current frameworks often struggle to generate correct actions in challenging GUI environments. State-of-the-art commercial VLMs are black-boxes, and fine-tuning open-source VLMs for GUI tasks requires significant resources. Additionally, existing trajectory-level evaluation and refinement techniques frequently fall short due to delayed feedback and local optimization issues. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that guides VLM agents with process supervision by a reward model during GUI navigation and control at inference time. This guidance allows the VLM agent to optimize actions at each inference step, thereby improving performance in both static and dynamic environments. In particular, our method demonstrates significant performance gains in three GUI navigation tasks, achieving a 3.4% improvement in single step action accuracy for static environments, along with a around 33% increase in task success rate in one dynamic environment. With further integration of trajectory reflection and retry mechanisms, we also demonstrate even greater enhancement in task success.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MalMixer: Few-Shot Malware Classification with Retrieval-Augmented Semi-Supervised Learning

Recent growth and proliferation of malware have tested practitioners ability to promptly classify new samples according to malware families. In contrast to labor-intensive reverse engineering efforts, machine learning approaches have demonstrated increased speed and accuracy. However, most existing deep-learning malware family classifiers must be calibrated using a large number of samples that are painstakingly manually analyzed before training. Furthermore, as novel malware samples arise that are beyond the scope of the training set, additional reverse engineering effort must be employed to update the training set. The sheer volume of new samples found in the wild creates substantial pressure on practitioners ability to reverse engineer enough malware to adequately train modern classifiers. In this paper, we present MalMixer, a malware family classifier using semi-supervised learning that achieves high accuracy with sparse training data. We present a domain-knowledge-aware data augmentation technique for malware feature representations, enhancing few-shot performance of semi-supervised malware family classification. We show that MalMixer achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot malware family classification settings. Our research confirms the feasibility and effectiveness of lightweight, domain-knowledge-aware data augmentation methods for malware features and shows the capabilities of similar semi-supervised classifiers in addressing malware classification issues.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Code LLM Training with Programmer Attention

Human attention provides valuable yet underexploited signals for code LLM training, offering a perspective beyond purely machine-driven attention. Despite the complexity and cost of collecting eye-tracking data, there has also been limited progress in systematically using these signals for code LLM training. To address both issues, we propose a cohesive pipeline spanning augmentation and reward-based fine-tuning. Specifically, we introduce (1) an eye-tracking path augmentation method to expand programmer attention datasets, (2) a pattern abstraction step that refines raw fixations into learnable attention motifs, and (3) a reward-guided strategy for integrating these insights directly into a CodeT5 supervised fine-tuning process. Our experiments yield +7.16 in CodeBLEU on the CodeXGlue benchmark for code summarization, underscoring how uniting human and machine attention can boost code intelligence. We hope this work encourages broader exploration of human-centric methods in next-generation AI4SE.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Integrating Artificial Intelligence with Human Expertise: An In-depth Analysis of ChatGPT's Capabilities in Generating Metamorphic Relations

Context: This paper provides an in-depth examination of the generation and evaluation of Metamorphic Relations (MRs) using GPT models developed by OpenAI, with a particular focus on the capabilities of GPT-4 in software testing environments. Objective: The aim is to examine the quality of MRs produced by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for a specific System Under Test (SUT) adopted from an earlier study, and to introduce and apply an improved set of evaluation criteria for a diverse range of SUTs. Method: The initial phase evaluates MRs generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 using criteria from a prior study, followed by an application of an enhanced evaluation framework on MRs created by GPT-4 for a diverse range of nine SUTs, varying from simple programs to complex systems incorporating AI/ML components. A custom-built GPT evaluator, alongside human evaluators, assessed the MRs, enabling a direct comparison between automated and human evaluation methods. Results: The study finds that GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5 in generating accurate and useful MRs. With the advanced evaluation criteria, GPT-4 demonstrates a significant ability to produce high-quality MRs across a wide range of SUTs, including complex systems incorporating AI/ML components. Conclusions: GPT-4 exhibits advanced capabilities in generating MRs suitable for various applications. The research underscores the growing potential of AI in software testing, particularly in the generation and evaluation of MRs, and points towards the complementarity of human and AI skills in this domain.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Fast and Accurate Interpolative Decompositions for General, Sparse, and Structured Tensors

In this work, we develop deterministic and random sketching-based algorithms for two types of tensor interpolative decompositions (ID): the core interpolative decomposition (CoreID, also known as the structure-preserving HOSVD) and the satellite interpolative decomposition (SatID, also known as the HOID or CURT). We adopt a new adaptive approach that leads to ID error bounds independent of the size of the tensor. In addition to the adaptive approach, we use tools from random sketching to enable an efficient and provably accurate calculation of these decompositions. We also design algorithms specialized to tensors that are sparse or given as a sum of rank-one tensors, i.e., in the CP format. Besides theoretical analyses, numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the power of the proposed algorithms.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

DriveGEN: Generalized and Robust 3D Detection in Driving via Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Generation

In autonomous driving, vision-centric 3D detection aims to identify 3D objects from images. However, high data collection costs and diverse real-world scenarios limit the scale of training data. Once distribution shifts occur between training and test data, existing methods often suffer from performance degradation, known as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problems. To address this, controllable Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion offers a potential solution for training data enhancement, which is required to generate diverse OOD scenarios with precise 3D object geometry. Nevertheless, existing controllable T2I approaches are restricted by the limited scale of training data or struggle to preserve all annotated 3D objects. In this paper, we present DriveGEN, a method designed to improve the robustness of 3D detectors in Driving via Training-Free Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Generation. Without extra diffusion model training, DriveGEN consistently preserves objects with precise 3D geometry across diverse OOD generations, consisting of 2 stages: 1) Self-Prototype Extraction: We empirically find that self-attention features are semantic-aware but require accurate region selection for 3D objects. Thus, we extract precise object features via layouts to capture 3D object geometry, termed self-prototypes. 2) Prototype-Guided Diffusion: To preserve objects across various OOD scenarios, we perform semantic-aware feature alignment and shallow feature alignment during denoising. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveGEN in improving 3D detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Hongbin98/DriveGEN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

RelationMatch: Matching In-batch Relationships for Semi-supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning has emerged as a pivotal approach for leveraging scarce labeled data alongside abundant unlabeled data. Despite significant progress, prevailing SSL methods predominantly enforce consistency between different augmented views of individual samples, thereby overlooking the rich relational structure inherent within a mini-batch. In this paper, we present RelationMatch, a novel SSL framework that explicitly enforces in-batch relational consistency through a Matrix Cross-Entropy (MCE) loss function. The proposed MCE loss is rigorously derived from both matrix analysis and information geometry perspectives, ensuring theoretical soundness and practical efficacy. Extensive empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks, including a notable 15.21% accuracy improvement over FlexMatch on STL-10, demonstrate that RelationMatch not only advances state-of-the-art performance but also provides a principled foundation for incorporating relational cues in SSL.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Poison-splat: Computation Cost Attack on 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), known for its groundbreaking performance and efficiency, has become a dominant 3D representation and brought progress to many 3D vision tasks. However, in this work, we reveal a significant security vulnerability that has been largely overlooked in 3DGS: the computation cost of training 3DGS could be maliciously tampered by poisoning the input data. By developing an attack named Poison-splat, we reveal a novel attack surface where the adversary can poison the input images to drastically increase the computation memory and time needed for 3DGS training, pushing the algorithm towards its worst computation complexity. In extreme cases, the attack can even consume all allocable memory, leading to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) that disrupts servers, resulting in practical damages to real-world 3DGS service vendors. Such a computation cost attack is achieved by addressing a bi-level optimization problem through three tailored strategies: attack objective approximation, proxy model rendering, and optional constrained optimization. These strategies not only ensure the effectiveness of our attack but also make it difficult to defend with simple defensive measures. We hope the revelation of this novel attack surface can spark attention to this crucial yet overlooked vulnerability of 3DGS systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiahaolu97/poison-splat .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Conditional Mutual Information and Information-Theoretic Phases of Decohered Gibbs States

Classical and quantum Markov networks -- including Gibbs states of commuting local Hamiltonians -- are characterized by the vanishing of conditional mutual information (CMI) between spatially separated subsystems. Adding local dissipation to a Markov network turns it into a \emph{hidden Markov network}, in which CMI is not guaranteed to vanish even at long distances. The onset of long-range CMI corresponds to an information-theoretic mixed-state phase transition, with far-ranging implications for teleportation, decoding, and state compressions. Little is known, however, about the conditions under which dissipation can generate long-range CMI. In this work we provide the first rigorous results in this direction. We establish that CMI in high-temperature Gibbs states subject to local dissipation decays exponentially, (i) for classical Hamiltonians subject to arbitrary local transition matrices, and (ii) for commuting local Hamiltonians subject to unital channels that obey certain mild restrictions. Conversely, we show that low-temperature hidden Markov networks can sustain long-range CMI. Our results establish the existence of finite-temperature information-theoretic phase transitions even in models that have no finite-temperature thermodynamic phase transitions. We also show several applications in quantum information and many-body physics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

CONSTRUCTA: Automating Commercial Construction Schedules in Fabrication Facilities with Large Language Models

Automating planning with LLMs presents transformative opportunities for traditional industries, yet remains underexplored. In commercial construction, the complexity of automated scheduling often requires manual intervention to ensure precision. We propose CONSTRUCTA, a novel framework leveraging LLMs to optimize construction schedules in complex projects like semiconductor fabrication. CONSTRUCTA addresses key challenges by: (1) integrating construction-specific knowledge through static RAG; (2) employing context-sampling techniques inspired by architectural expertise to provide relevant input; and (3) deploying Construction DPO to align schedules with expert preferences using RLHF. Experiments on proprietary data demonstrate performance improvements of +42.3% in missing value prediction, +79.1% in dependency analysis, and +28.9% in automated planning compared to baseline methods, showcasing its potential to revolutionize construction workflows and inspire domain-specific LLM advancements.

cs.AI↗