Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Yilin Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Yilin Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

X-Stage: Modeling Post-Issue Backpressure in GPU Communication--Computation Fusion

Fine-grained, device-initiated communication allows fused GPU kernels to issue remote stores directly from their compute pipelines, a pattern increasingly used in expert parallelism (EP), tensor parallelism (TP), and Ulysses-style sequence parallelism (UP). Existing designs reason about where communication is issued and when remote data becomes ready, but lack a quantitative model of the sender-side interval after a remote store is accepted and before it becomes visible at the destination. This interval determines whether communication remains decoupled from computation or backpressures it. We identify X-Stage, a software-visible post-issue stage with finite decoupling. Downstream pressure can dissipate while the issuer resumes useful work, whereas sustained injection consumes X-Stage headroom and eventually stalls the compute pipeline. We characterize this behavior and build a calibrated model that predicts whether remote-store arrivals accumulate backpressure or recover during intervening computation. Guided by the model, we reshape bursty arrivals when they would exhaust X-Stage headroom and exploit natural compute windows when headroom can recover concurrently. Evaluation across representative EP, TP, and UP workloads shows up to 1.62x fused-kernel, 1.75x end-to-end, and 1.43x sender-visible speedup, respectively. Microbenchmarks further validate the model's predictions of backlog accumulation, recovery, and sender-side backpressure.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Are Independently Estimated View Uncertainties Comparable? Unified Routing for Trusted Multi-View Classification

Trusted multi-view classification typically relies on a view-wise evidential fusion process: each view independently produces class evidence and uncertainty, and the final prediction is obtained by aggregating these independent opinions. While this design is modular and uncertainty-aware, it implicitly assumes that evidence from different views is numerically comparable. In practice, however, this assumption is fragile. Different views often differ in feature space, noise level, and semantic granularity, while independently trained branches are optimized only for prediction correctness, without any constraint enforcing cross-view consistency in evidence strength. As a result, the uncertainty used for fusion can be dominated by branch-specific scale bias rather than true sample-level reliability. To address this issue, we propose Trusted Multi-view learning with Unified Routing (TMUR), which decouples view-specific evidence extraction from fusion arbitration. TMUR uses view-private experts and one collaborative expert, and employs a unified router that observes the global multi-view context to generate sample-level expert weights. Soft load-balancing and diversity regularization further encourage balanced expert utilization and more discriminative expert specialization. We also provide theoretical analysis showing why independent evidential supervision does not identify a common cross-view evidence scale. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets and comparisons with 15 recent baselines demonstrate that TMUR consistently improves both classification performance and reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/YilinZhang107/TMUR.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Calibration-Aware Uncertainty Cascades for Efficient Heterogeneous Model Collaboration

Heterogeneous model collaboration seeks to exploit the complementary strengths of different models to balance predictive performance and inference cost. Existing approaches typically rely either on trained routers, which tie routing decisions to a fixed task and model pool, or on raw-confidence cascades, whose thresholds lack consistent reliability semantics across heterogeneous models. Consequently, these approaches adapt poorly to changing model pools and deployment budgets. We propose Calibration-Aware Uncertainty Cascades (CAUC), a simple post-hoc framework that independently calibrates each model's confidence and selects deployment policies using validation data. The resulting calibrated confidence scores establish a common reliability scale for accepting an early prediction, invoking a stronger model, or selectively combining model outputs. This unified decision criterion decouples deployment policies from any particular model pool or operating budget. We further show theoretically that calibration gives confidence thresholds an explicit selective-risk interpretation, whereas uncalibrated scores offer no comparable reliability guarantee. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, across six language benchmarks, CAUC achieves an average relative accuracy improvement of 1.9% over strong-model-only inference while avoiding approximately 47% of strong-model calls. On image classification benchmarks, it maintains or improves predictive performance while reducing measured GFLOPs by up to 57%.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

What's Your NIC Whispering? Network Threat Behavior Recognition via NIC Electromagnetic Side-Channel Leakage

Conventional network threat detection primarily relies on packet-level, flow-level, or host-level telemetry. This paper investigates a different observation surface: unintended electromagnetic(EM) emissions generated by network interface card(NIC) activity, and asks whether such physical leakage contains sufficiently structured information for network threat-behavior recognition. We present NICWhisper, which externally captures NIC EM emissions, transforms raw measurements into time-frequency representations, and recognizes network behaviors without inspecting packet contents or host-side runtime states. Rather than competing with traffic-based detection, NICWhisper exploits the physical manifestation of traffic-driven NIC activity, whose timing, rate, concurrency, and burst organization naturally shape the measured EM leakage. We construct a NIC EM dataset covering active benign workloads and seven representative threat behaviors under diverse execution conditions, and systematically evaluate signal dependence, execution variation, measurement perturbation, and cross-device transfer. NICWhisper achieves 80.67\% Macro-F1 across eight behavior classes, while further experiments show that the observed behavior-related information extends beyond simple signal magnitude and remains partially transferable across execution conditions and NIC hardware. These results establish NIC EM leakage as a complementary physical observation source for network security monitoring when direct access to conventional traffic or host telemetry is limited or undesirable.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Penalizing Length: Uncovering Systematic Bias in Quality Estimation Metrics

Quality Estimation (QE) metrics are vital in machine translation for reference-free evaluation and increasingly serve as selection criteria in data filtering and candidate reranking. However, the prevalence and impact of length bias in QE metrics have been underexplored. Through a systematic study of top-performing learned and LLM-as-a-Judge QE metrics across 10 diverse language pairs, we reveal two critical length effects: First, QE metrics consistently over-predict errors with increasing translation length, even for high-quality, error-free texts. Second, when candidates of comparable quality are available for the same source text, learned QE metrics tend to favor shorter translations, whereas LLM-as-a-Judge metrics range from being approximately length-neutral to favoring longer translations. These metric-dependent length effects can favor or penalize translations based on length rather than quality and can propagate into downstream pipelines that rely on QE signals for data selection or system optimization. We trace the root cause of MetricX-24 QE's cumulative-length penalty to skewed supervision distributions, in which longer error-free examples are underrepresented in training data. As a diagnostic intervention, we apply length normalization during training and show that this simple modification effectively decouples error prediction from sequence length, yielding more reliable QE signals across translations of varying length.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

A Novel Tool for Evaluating Effect Modification in Older Adults with ADRD Using Medicare Claims

Studying consequences following baseline exposures has become increasingly important for advancing comparative effectiveness research using real-world data. This case study evaluates the impact of hospital-acquired conditions (HAC) during hospitalization for hip fracture on post-discharge recovery trajectories among older adults living with Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementia, a population particularly vulnerable to high post-hospital mortality. To appropriately account for truncation of recovery trajectory due to death and to explore heterogeneity in effect modification by patient demographics, we introduce a novel pseudo data-based robust (PD-Robust) analysis strategy, accompanied by an R package and detailed usage guidance to inform real data analysis. Grounded in an interpretable estimand via principal stratification under principal ignorability and a structural working model, PD-Robust accommodates truncation by death, provides model diagnosis and robustness check against assumption violation, and facilitates the characterization of patient profiles among the principal stratum. Applied to Medicare claims data, where better recovery is defined as more days at home (DAH) over six months post-discharge, PD-Robust reveals heterogeneity in HAC effects, with males under the age of 85 years as a high-risk subgroup experiencing up to 23 fewer DAH, comparing HAC to no HAC. This exceeds the 8-day threshold regarded as clinically meaningful difference in DAH due to any exposure. Moreover, simulation studies further demonstrate that PD-Robust achieves low estimation bias and accurate statistical inference, supporting its utility in real-world data applications.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2026

A Foundational EDM2-Based Generative Model for High-Resolution Synthetic Fetal Ultrasound Imaging from Open Datasets

Prenatal ultrasound imaging is key for assessing fetal health, but AI progress is limited by scarce, privacy-restricted, and hard-to-annotate datasets. We propose a high-resolution fetal ultrasound synthesis framework based on the EDM2 diffusion architecture, trained on multiple public datasets to generate 512x512 images across six anatomical classes. Our method achieved improved image quality with lower FID scores and enhanced downstream fetal plane classification, reaching 93.36% ensemble accuracy after fine-tuning, surpassing real-data-only training. Clinical evaluation by an experienced fetal ultrasound specialist (10+ years) on 100 images yielded a mean realism score of 2.67/5, with real images rated higher than synthetic. Artefacts included smoothing, speckle irregularities, and anatomical inconsistencies. Code, data, models and other resources to reproduce this work are available at https://github.com/xfetus/fetal-ultrasound-edm2.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2026

Token-Operations-Oriented Inference Optimization Techniques for Large Models

Large model inference optimization serves as a key foundation for supporting the scalable, low-cost, and highly stable operation of large model services. Centered on token-oriented inference optimization technology, this paper proposes for the first time a four-layer technical architecture consisting of Multi-model Fusion, Model Optimization, Compute-Model Fusion, and Compute-Network-Model Fusion. It systematically reviews the key technologies and current industry status across these four levels and analyzes the application value of related technologies in real-world business scenarios. This paper provides a practical technical path for reducing token production costs, improving token service efficiency, ensuring the stability of token supply, and driving the transition of large model services from being merely callable to being operable.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Transition-Based Digital Twin Modelling for Alzheimer's Disease under Sparse Longitudinal Data

Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression is highly heterogeneous and is typically observed through sparse and irregular longitudinal data, posing challenges for prediction and personalised monitoring. Existing machine learning approaches have improved AD prediction using multimodal data, yet often focus on static classification or cohort-level risk estimation, providing limited support for subject-specific modelling and uncertainty-aware reasoning. To address these limitations, we present a personalised digital twin framework for AD prediction and scenario-based analysis using multimodal longitudinal data. The proposed approach integrates complementary modelling strategies to capture clinical transitions and temporal dependencies across visits. Using data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), including cognitive assessments, clinical variables, and MRI-derived phenotypes, the framework predicts cognitive status and diagnostic categories while quantifying predictive uncertainty and enabling patient-specific what-if trajectory analysis. Evaluation on leak-free subject-level splits demonstrates strong performance in score forecasting and diagnosis classification. In this sparse and irregular ADNI setting, transition-based modelling of adjacent visits achieved higher predictive accuracy than the sequence-based branch, suggesting that local transition modelling may be more data-efficient. While sequence models remain valuable for uncertainty-aware trajectory forecasting, local transition modelling offers a more data-efficient and robust predictive strategy. These findings highlight the importance of aligning temporal modelling strategies with clinical data structure and suggest that transition-based digital twin formulations may provide a practical and interpretable approach for personalised disease forecasting in neurodegenerative disorders.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Target-Agnostic Calibration under Distribution Shift with Frequency-Aware Gradient Rectification

Real-world model deployments inevitably encounter distribution shifts, rendering the confidence estimates of deep neural networks highly unreliable, posing severe risks in safety-critical applications. Existing methods improve calibration via training-time regularization or post-hoc adjustment, but often rely on access to (or simulation of) target domains, limiting practicality. We propose Frequency-aware Gradient Rectification (FGR), a target-agnostic training framework for robust calibration. From a frequency perspective, FGR applies low-pass filtering to a subset of training images to diminish spurious high-frequency cues and encourage the learning of domain-invariant features. However, the associated information loss can degrade In-Distribution (ID) calibration. To resolve this trade-off, FGR treats ID calibration as a hard constraint and rectifies conflicting parameter updates via geometric projection. This ensures a first-order non-increase in the ID calibration objective without introducing an additional loss-balancing coefficient. Extensive experiments on synthetic, real-world, and semantic shift datasets demonstrate that FGR significantly improves calibration under diverse shifts while preserving ID performance, and it remains compatible with post-hoc calibration methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/YilinZhang107/FGR-Calib.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

From Baseline to Follow-Up: Counterfactual Spine DXA Image Synthesis in UK Biobank Using a Causal Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder

Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is widely used for large-scale skeletal assessment, yet learning controllable and interpretable factor-specific anatomical variation remains challenging. We propose a metadata-conditioned causal hierarchical variational autoencoder (CHVAE) for causally consistent generation of anteroposterior (AP) spine DXA images from the UK Biobank (UKB). The model is trained on 3,743 raw AP spine scans from the first imaging visit and conditioned on basic participant attributes and lumbar morphometry. Causal consistency is evaluated in a baseline-to-follow-up setting using abduction--action--prediction (AAP): latent variables are abducted from baseline images, age is intervened to the repeat-imaging value, and the resulting counterfactual follow-up morphometry is compared with observed repeat-imaging measurements. Results show strong absolute-level agreement for key vertebral morphometry variables under age intervention, supporting intervention-aligned synthesis of anatomically plausible DXA images.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Don't Click That: Teaching Web Agents to Resist Deceptive Interfaces

Vision-language model (VLM) based web agents demonstrate impressive autonomous GUI interaction but remain vulnerable to deceptive interface elements. Existing approaches either detect deception without task integration or document attacks without proposing defenses. We formalize deception-aware web agent defense and propose DUDE (Deceptive UI Detector & Evaluator), a two-stage framework combining hybrid-reward learning with asymmetric penalties and experience summarization to distill failure patterns into transferable guidance. We introduce RUC (Real UI Clickboxes), a benchmark of 1,407 scenarios spanning four domains and deception categories. Experiments show DUDE reduces deception susceptibility by 53.8% while maintaining task performance, establishing an effective foundation for robust web agent deployment.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

CodeScout: An Effective Recipe for Reinforcement Learning of Code Search Agents

A prerequisite for coding agents to perform tasks on large repositories is code localization - the identification of relevant files, classes, and functions to work on. While repository-level code localization has been performed using embedding-based retrieval approaches such as vector search, recent work has focused on developing agents to localize relevant code either as a standalone precursor to or interleaved with performing actual work. Most prior methods on agentic code search equip the agent with complex, specialized tools, such as repository graphs derived from static analysis. In this paper, we demonstrate that, with an effective reinforcement learning recipe, a coding agent equipped with nothing more than a standard Unix terminal can be trained to achieve strong results. Our experiments on three benchmarks (SWE-Bench Verified, Pro, and Lite) reveal that our models consistently achieve superior or competitive performance over 2-18x larger base and post-trained LLMs and sometimes approach performance provided by closed models like Claude Sonnet, even when using specialized scaffolds. Our work particularly focuses on techniques for re-purposing existing coding agent environments for code search, reward design, and RL optimization. We release the resulting model family, CodeScout, along with all our code and data for the community to build upon.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Legendre Memory Unit with A Multi-Slice Compensation Model for Short-Term Wind Speed Forecasting Based on Wind Farm Cluster Data

With more wind farms clustered for integration, the short-term wind speed prediction of such wind farm clusters is critical for normal operation of power systems. This paper focuses on achieving accurate, fast, and robust wind speed prediction by full use of cluster data with spatial-temporal correlation. First, weighted mean filtering (WMF) is applied to denoise wind speed data at the single-farm level. The Legendre memory unit (LMU) is then innovatively applied for the wind speed prediction, in combination with the Compensating Parameter based on Kendall rank correlation coefficient (CPK) of wind farm cluster data, to construct the multi-slice LMU (MSLMU). Finally, an innovative ensemble model WMF-CPK-MSLMU is proposed herein, with three key blocks: data pre-processing, forecasting, and multi-slice compensation. Advantages include: 1) LMU jointly models linear and nonlinear dependencies among farms to capture spatial-temporal correlations through backpropagation; 2) MSLMU enhances forecasting by using CPK-derived weights instead of random initialization, allowing spatial correlations to fully activate hidden nodes across clustered wind farms.; 3) CPK adaptively weights the compensation model in MSLMU and complements missing data spatially, to facilitate the whole model highly accurate and robust. Test results on different wind farm clusters indicate the effectiveness and superiority of proposed ensemble model WMF-CPK-MSLMU in the short-term prediction of wind farm clusters compared to the existing models.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

The Shadow Self: Intrinsic Value Misalignment in Large Language Model Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents with extended autonomy unlock new capabilities, but also introduce heightened challenges for LLM safety. In particular, an LLM agent may pursue objectives that deviate from human values and ethical norms, a risk known as value misalignment. Existing evaluations primarily focus on responses to explicit harmful input or robustness against system failure, while value misalignment in realistic, fully benign, and agentic settings remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we first formalize the Loss-of-Control risk and identify the previously underexamined Intrinsic Value Misalignment (Intrinsic VM). We then introduce IMPRESS (Intrinsic Value Misalignment Probes in REalistic Scenario Set), a scenario-driven framework for systematically assessing this risk. Following our framework, we construct benchmarks composed of realistic, fully benign, and contextualized scenarios, using a multi-stage LLM generation pipeline with rigorous quality control. We evaluate Intrinsic VM on 21 state-of-the-art LLM agents and find that it is a common and broadly observed safety risk across models. Moreover, the misalignment rates vary by motives, risk types, model scales, and architectures. While decoding strategies and hyperparameters exhibit only marginal influence, contextualization and framing mechanisms significantly shape misalignment behaviors. Finally, we conduct human verification to validate our automated judgments and assess existing mitigation strategies, such as safety prompting and guardrails, which show instability or limited effectiveness. We further demonstrate key use cases of IMPRESS across the AI Ecosystem. Our code and benchmark will be publicly released upon acceptance.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Simple Yet Effective Selective Imputation for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (IMC) has emerged as a significant challenge in multi-view learning. A predominant line for IMC is data imputation; however, indiscriminate imputation can result in unreliable content. Recently, researchers have proposed selective imputation methods that use a post-imputation assessment strategy: (1) impute all or some missing values, and (2) evaluate their quality through clustering tasks. We observe that this strategy incurs substantial computational complexity and is heavily dependent on the performance of the clustering model. To address these challenges, we first introduce the concept of pre-imputation assessment. We propose an Implicit Informativeness-based Selective Imputation (SI$^3$) method for incomplete multi-view clustering, which explicitly addresses the trade-off between imputation utility and imputation risk. SI$^3$ evaluates the imputation-relevant informativeness of each missing position in a training-free manner, and selectively imputes data only when sufficient informative support is available. Under a multi-view generative assumption, SI$^3$ further integrates selective imputation into a variational inference framework, enabling uncertainty-aware imputation at the latent distribution level and robust multi-view fusion. Compared with existing selective imputation strategies, SI$^3$ is lightweight, data-driven, and model-agnostic, and can be seamlessly incorporated into existing incomplete multi-view clustering frameworks as a plug-in strategy. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SI$^3$ consistently outperforms both imputation-based and imputation-free methods, particularly under challenging unbalanced missing scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

XAttn-BMD: Multimodal Deep Learning with Cross-Attention for Femoral Neck Bone Mineral Density Estimation

Poor bone health is a significant public health concern, and low bone mineral density (BMD) leads to an increased fracture risk, a key feature of osteoporosis. We present XAttn-BMD (Cross-Attention BMD), a multimodal deep learning framework that predicts femoral neck BMD from hip X-ray images and structured clinical metadata. It utilizes a novel bidirectional cross-attention mechanism to dynamically integrate image and metadata features for cross-modal mutual reinforcement. A Weighted Smooth L1 loss is tailored to address BMD imbalance and prioritize clinically significant cases. Extensive experiments on the data from the Hertfordshire Cohort Study show that our model outperforms the baseline models in regression generalization and robustness. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both cross-attention fusion and the customized loss function. Experimental results show that the integration of multimodal data via cross-attention outperforms naive feature concatenation without cross-attention, reducing MSE by 16.7%, MAE by 6.03%, and increasing the R2 score by 16.4%, highlighting the effectiveness of the approach for femoral neck BMD estimation. Furthermore, screening performance was evaluated using binary classification at clinically relevant femoral neck BMD thresholds, demonstrating the model's potential in real-world scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Fairness-Aware Multi-view Evidential Learning with Adaptive Prior

Multi-view evidential learning aims to integrate information from multiple views to improve prediction performance and provide trustworthy uncertainty esitimation. Most previous methods assume that view-specific evidence learning is naturally reliable. However, in practice, the evidence learning process tends to be biased. Through empirical analysis on real-world data, we reveal that samples tend to be assigned more evidence to support data-rich classes, thereby leading to unreliable uncertainty estimation in predictions. This motivates us to delve into a new Biased Evidential Multi-view Learning (BEML) problem. To this end, we propose Fairness-Aware Multi-view Evidential Learning (FAML). FAML first introduces an adaptive prior based on training trajectory, which acts as a regularization strategy to flexibly calibrate the biased evidence learning process. Furthermore, we explicitly incorporate a fairness constraint based on class-wise evidence variance to promote balanced evidence allocation. In the multi-view fusion stage, we propose an opinion alignment mechanism to mitigate view-specific bias across views, thereby encouraging the integration of consistent and mutually supportive evidence.Theoretical analysis shows that FAML enhances fairness in the evidence learning process. Extensive experiments on five real-world multi-view datasets demonstrate that FAML achieves more balanced evidence allocation and improves both prediction performance and the reliability of uncertainty estimation compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗