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Ying Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ying Zhang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Selection Integrity for LLM Graph Memory: An Accumulability Criterion for Information-Flow-Blind Retrieval

Agent memory is moving to graphs, and the provenance defenses now being built for it all check one thing: the provenance of the records an agent retrieves. We show that this entire class of defense is blind by construction. A long-term graph memory runs a global selection step over writable graph structure, so structure that an untrusted principal writes changes \emph{which} authenticated facts are selected while the cited evidence stays fully authenticated; faithful information-flow control (IFC), checking the provenance of what the reader uses (all of it authenticated), makes the byte-identical decision to no defense at all, across document-QA substrates and real multi-session agent memory. In the most consequential instance, a no-source structural write silently misdirects $28$ irreversible ledger transfers over $499$ live actions: faithful IFC permits every one, and \authselect\ prevents every one. We then characterize exactly which memories are exposed: a selector admits the channel when its structural term can reallocate an $Ω(1)$ share of top-$k$ membership past a selected fact's margin. Personalized PageRank can, since a sourceless write reroutes conserved random-walk mass; a content-fixed reranker cannot, and Graphiti's node-distance, which leans on structure \emph{more} than PageRank does, stays immune. Reallocatability, not reliance, is the predictor. We prove the immune case in general and the open case under a chokepoint condition we verify. Closing the channel forces any provenance defense to recompute selection on the authenticated subgraph, which is what \authselect\ does, at zero over-block and $2$--$3\%$ latency.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Self-Evolving Agents as Dynamic Graph Transformation: A Survey and New Perspective

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly becoming self-evolving systems that persist across interactions, maintain memories, use tools, acquire skills, refine workflows, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make agent states structural and dynamic: entities, relations, attributes, dependencies, and execution structures change with new evidence, feedback, and environmental conditions. Existing graph-agent surveys typically treat graphs as support structures for agent functions rather than as evolving substrates, while self-evolving-agent surveys focus on agent-level mechanisms and rarely discuss graph topology evolution. Thus, the coupling between evolving agent state and dynamic graph topology remains underexplored. This survey connects these two research lines by framing \textit{agent evolution as dynamic graph transformation}. We model agent state as a dynamic graph, where memories, tools, skills, workflows, and inter-agent relations are represented as typed nodes, edges, and subgraphs updated through schema-constrained rewrites. Based on this formulation, we organize existing dynamic-graph-based methods for self-evolving agents into four taxonomies: node/feature evolution, edge/topology evolution, subgraph activation, and cross-component co-evolution. Building on this taxonomy, we propose dynamic graph learning as reusable infrastructure for self-evolving agents and map nine dynamic-graph-learning subfields to agent-evolution capabilities, discussing their adaptations and possible failure modes. Finally, we discuss five types of graph-aware evaluation and governance protocols from a dynamic-graph perspective, which complement end-task evaluation. The goal is to provide a compact structural lens for designing and governing self-evolving agents.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Dual Implications of Quark Mass Hierarchies to Flavor Structure

To solve the mystery of flavor structure, we demonstrate two implications emerging from the hierarchical masses of quarks: one for the mass matrix itself and one for the CKM mixing. These implications naturally lead to a non-redundant, ordered, and family-unified quark flavor structure, which serves as a candidate to replace the unclear Yukawa interactions of the Standard Model.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2026

Deep Learning Based Multi-Step Channel Prediction for Adaptive Underwater Acoustic OFDM Systems

We develop an adaptive OFDM framework for underwater acoustic communications based on PatchCSI-T, a Transformer-based multistep channel prediction model with feature-independent modeling and parameter sharing. Combined with a greedy adaptive modulation and power allocation scheme, the proposed approach enables accurate, low-latency CSI forecasting and improves end-to-end BER and spectral efficiency on real-world UWA channel datasets.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

OpenHospital: A Thing-in-itself Arena for Evolving and Benchmarking LLM-based Collective Intelligence

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Collective Intelligence (CI) presents a promising approach to overcoming the data wall and continuously boosting the capabilities of LLM agents. However, there is currently no dedicated arena for evolving and benchmarking LLM-based CI. To address this gap, we introduce OpenHospital, an interactive arena where physician agents can evolve CI through interactions with patient agents. This arena employs a data-in-agent-self paradigm that rapidly enhances agent capabilities and provides robust evaluation metrics for benchmarking both medical proficiency and system efficiency. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of OpenHospital in both fostering and quantifying CI.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

MedCoG: Maximizing LLM Inference Density in Medical Reasoning via Meta-Cognitive Regulation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in complex medical reasoning yet face diminishing gains under inference scaling laws. While existing studies augment LLMs with various knowledge types, it remains unclear how effectively the additional costs translate into accuracy. In this paper, we explore how meta-cognition of LLMs, i.e., their self-assessment of their own cognitive states, can regulate the reasoning process. Specifically, we propose MedCoG, a Medical Meta-Cognition Agent with Knowledge Graph, where the meta-cognitive assessments of task complexity, familiarity, and knowledge density dynamically regulate utilization of procedural, episodic, and factual knowledge. The LLM-centric on-demand reasoning aims to mitigate the diminishing returns under scaling law by (1) reducing costs via avoiding indiscriminate scaling, (2) improving accuracy via filtering out distractive knowledge. To validate this, we empirically characterize the scaling curve and introduce inference density to quantify inference efficiency. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MedCoG on five hard sets of medical benchmarks, yielding 6.2x inference density. Furthermore, the Oracle study highlights the significant potential of meta-cognitive regulation.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

SpecDB: LLM-Generated Customized Databases via Feature-Oriented Decomposition

Mainstream relational databases ship a uniform feature set across deployments, although individual workloads exercise only a fraction of the available subsystems. We investigate whether a database can instead be generated on demand with a feature set matched to the target workload. We present SpecDB, a system that uses large language models (LLMs) to synthesize customized relational databases. We survey 9 production systems and decompose them into 10 functional modules, each further divided into implementation variants. To capture cross-module dependencies, including cases where implementations in disjoint subtrees must be co-designed, we adopt the FODA feature model and extend it with a cooperate edge, yielding a dependency graph DBGraph. SpecDB operationalizes DBGraph through a layered module-construction pipeline in which each module is generated, validated, and integrated by a dedicated subagent (driven by three inner agents: Main, Tester, Architect), and a Refining Agent that iteratively repairs and tunes the assembled database against a user-supplied refining harness with read-only access to existing database source code. A companion selection component translates a natural-language workload description into a set of implementation variants, providing an end-to-end pipeline from workload description to deployable database. We evaluate SpecDB on TPC-C with BenchmarkSQL. The generated database (23,779 lines of Rust) completes 60-minute TPC-C at 1 and 10 warehouses with zero errors. At 10 warehouses it reaches tpmC=130, compared to 128 for PostgreSQL and 127 for MySQL, with comparable latency at ~3% of their code size. Because the agent operates at module-specification level rather than product source, it can in principle combine techniques across system boundaries. Paired with falling LLM costs, generating a purpose-built database for a target workload is becoming straightforward.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Understanding Fact Recall in Language Models: Why Two-Stage Training Encourages Memorization but Mixed Training Teaches Knowledge

While fine-tuning is the standard for injecting factual knowledge into large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms enabling reliable fact recall via unseen queries remain poorly understood. Common two-stage training strategies, which sequentially train on fact storage and query formats, often cause rote memorization. In contrast, mixed training jointly optimizes both formats and exhibits superior generalized recall. We investigate this success by comparing the two paradigms across 2.8$\sim$4B LLMs and identify the core mechanism: the joint optimization objective in mixed training induces gradient consistency across storage and query formats. This in turn drives the representation consistency between the two formats, establishing a format-invariant retrieval process that maps unseen queries to stored facts. In contrast, the lack of such an objective in two-stage training results in inconsistent representations and failed recall. The consistency further localizes to the parameters updated by both formats, a set that is substantially larger under mixed training than under two-stage training. At the input level, the consistency leaves an interpretable signature: mixed training encodes facts in storage format from subject-relation tokens, the same components available in queries, while two-stage training relies on the full context. Our findings characterize the mechanisms of fact recall and offer mechanistic foundation for optimizing knowledge injection in LLMs.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

MIRAGE: Context-Aware Prompt Injection against Mobile GUI Agents via User-Generated Content

Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents driven by vision-language models (VLMs) perceive the screen as rendered pixels and choose actions from what they see, so they cannot reliably separate trusted interface elements from user-generated content. We present MIRAGE (Mobile Injection of Realistic Adversarial GUI Examples), a pipeline that turns benign mobile screenshots into prompt-injection samples by placing attacker-controlled text into ordinary user-generated content regions, without modifying the agent, the application, or the operating system. MIRAGE operates in three stages: a Localizer identifies user-controllable regions on the screenshot, a Generator synthesises context-aware payloads and renders them in the application's native style, and a Curator moderates realism and balances the samples across applications, region types, and attack intents. A key challenge is that an injected screenshot must stay visually indistinguishable from genuine user content while still diverting the agent; we address this by separating the stages that control reach, realism, and distributional balance. On a 1,111-sample benchmark spanning ten applications and eleven attack intents, all five evaluated VLM agents are vulnerable, with attack success rates of 23%-30%, and MIRAGE scores higher on human realism ratings than the strongest prior attack (3.02 versus 2.52 out of 5). We further find that per-sample realism and attack success are uncorrelated, so visual-quality filtering alone cannot reliably defend against this threat.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

SNARE: Adaptive Scenario Synthesis for Eliciting Overeager Behavior in Coding Agents

A coding agent executes a benign task as a sequence of shell, file, and network actions, any of which can quietly exceed the authorized scope while the task still completes. We call this overeager behavior: the prompt is not adversarial and the run succeeds, yet an out-of-scope step can leak credentials or delete files. Existing benchmarks miss it: task-completion suites credit any finished run, jailbreak suites probe adversarial prompts, and the one prior overeager benchmark applies a single fixed prompt set to every agent-model pair, leaving its easiest and most resistant pairs under-measured. We present SNARE (Synthesizing Non-adversarial scenarios for Adaptive Reward-guided Elicitation), a pipeline that composes benign scenarios from reusable scope and trap fragments, scores each run with a judge-free oracle flagging trap-pattern matches and unsolicited file additions or deletions, and uses Thompson sampling to steer each pair's run budget toward the scenarios that most often trigger it. Instantiating it over 24 overeager archetypes yields OverEager, which we run across a 4x5 matrix of four coding agents and five base models. Across 10,000 benign runs, 19.51% trigger overeager behavior, with per-pair rates spanning 11.9x. This variation is driven by the agent framework, not the model: the framework accounts for 56% of it against the model's 21%, so any single-framework or single-model evaluation undercounts the matrix by about a fifth.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

HiGraph: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Graph Dataset for Malware Analysis

The advancement of graph-based malware analysis is critically limited by the absence of large-scale datasets that capture the inherent hierarchical structure of software. Existing methods often oversimplify programs into single level graphs, failing to model the crucial semantic relationship between high-level functional interactions and low-level instruction logic. To bridge this gap, we introduce \dataset, the largest public hierarchical graph dataset for malware analysis, comprising over \textbf{200M} Control Flow Graphs (CFGs) nested within \textbf{595K} Function Call Graphs (FCGs). This two-level representation preserves structural semantics essential for building robust detectors resilient to code obfuscation and malware evolution. We demonstrate HiGraph's utility through a large-scale analysis that reveals distinct structural properties of benign and malicious software, establishing it as a foundational benchmark for the community. The dataset and tools are publicly available at https://higraph.org.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

ClueAegis: Heuristic-to-Reasoning Cognitive-skill Learning for Unified Evidence-based Synthetic Image Detection

The rapid advancement of generative models has made synthetic images increasingly realistic, challenging reliable detection. Existing methods are often limited to end-to-end classification or monolithic reasoning, and thus fail to model structured forensic reasoning and heterogeneous visual evidence. We revisit synthetic image detection from a cognitive perspective and propose a \textit{Heuristic-to-Reasoning} cognitive skill learning framework for evidence-based forensic analysis. Given an input image, our framework first extracts heuristic perceptual clues, selects the optimal forensic skill, and then performs skill-conditioned reasoning for evidence extraction and decision making. To support this paradigm, we introduce \textbf{ClueAegis-Bench}, which decomposes synthetic image detection into explicitly annotated forensic cognitive skills for structured evaluation beyond binary classification. Based on this benchmark, we propose \textbf{ClueAegis} (\underline{C}ognitive-skill \underline{L}earning for \underline{U}nified \underline{E}vidence-based Synthetic Image Detection), a two-stage agentic framework that conducts heuristic skill selection followed by evidence-guided reasoning through skill-conditioned toolchains. This design reformulates synthetic image detection as a configurable multi-skill reasoning process that bridges perception, skill selection, and forensic reasoning. Extensive experiments show that ClueAegis achieves state-of-the-art performance while improving cross-domain generalization and robustness. It also provides transparent reasoning trajectories and structured forensic evidence, offering a more explainable alternative to conventional end-to-end detectors.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ScaleAcross Explorer: Exploring Communication Optimization for Scale-Across AI Model Training

The rapid scaling of large language model training requires distributing GPU resources across multiple data center buildings and regions. We refer to such paradigm as "scale-across" training. As infrastructure expands, the system design space becomes increasingly intricate, encompassing new model architectures, hardware heterogeneity, and evolving communication patterns. Drawing from Meta's production experience, we highlight the complexities of deploying training jobs across a few data centers housing hundreds of thousands of GPUs. To accelerate exploration of the large design space and to enable efficient training for frontier model development, we conduct in-depth characterization of three key design dimensions: parallelism placement, parallelism scheduling, and network layer technologies. We then propose ScaleAcross Explorer, an optimizer that considers the interplay of design dimensions and holistically optimizes scale-across training. Testbed experiments and simulations demonstrate up to 64.62% training speedups over production configuration and up to 37.59% training speedups over the state-of-the-art baseline across a wide range of design points.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

GraphInstruct: A Progressive Benchmark for Diagnosing Capability Gaps in LLM Graph Generation

Graph-structured data underpins applications from citation analysis and social-network modeling to molecular design and knowledge-graph construction, and Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as prompt-driven graph synthesizers. Classical graph-generation reviews catalog deep generative models and their evaluation primitives, but predate the LLM era and provide no foundation for evaluating instruction-following graph synthesis. Recent LLM-era benchmarks evaluate models along graph-type or task-domain axes; such organizations, however, average over structural complexity and cannot localize where in the complexity spectrum an LLM breaks down. To close this diagnostic gap, we introduce GraphInstruct, a progressive-complexity benchmark that stratifies LLM graph generation into six complexity levels and five evaluation dimensions, paired with 800 hand-authored instructions, 1,582 algorithmically synthesized reference solutions, and a 12-LLM capability evaluation across 45 (model, strategy) configurations. We find that discriminative power peaks at multi-constraint composition rather than reasoning depth, that no single prompting strategy dominates across levels or model families, and that domain-semantic constraints remain iteration-invariant under all tested methods -- pointing to retrieval rather than additional compute as the next research frontier. Atop the benchmark, a verification-guided iterative framework with constraint-aware adaptive prompting consistently surpasses the prompt-engineering ceiling on tested target models, demonstrating that the benchmark's fine-grained signals drive method development. Data, code, and reproducibility artifacts are released alongside the paper at https://github.com/AI4DataSynth/GraphInstruct_formal

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

EXG: Self-Evolving Agents with Experience Graphs

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning and problem solving through multi-step interactions, yet most deployed agents remain behaviorally static, with knowledge acquired during execution rarely translating into systematic improvement over time. In response, a growing line of work on self-evolving agents explores how agents can improve through experience during deployment, but most existing approaches either rely on ad hoc reflection limited to single-task correction or adopt unstructured memory that accumulates fragmented experience with delayed usability. To address this limitation, we introduce EXG, an experience graph framework for self-evolving agents that explicitly organizes accumulated successes and failures into a structured, relational representation. EXG is the first experience graph designed for self-evolving agents, supporting both online, real-time graph growth during execution for immediate cross-task experience reuse, and offline reuse of a consolidated experience graph as an external memory module. This design also enables EXG to serve as a plug-and-play component for existing self-evolving agents, organizing prior experience into a unified experience graph and improving both solution quality and resource efficiency as deployment progresses. Extensive experiments across code generation and reasoning benchmarks show that EXG attains more favorable performance-efficiency trade-offs than reflection- and memory-based baselines in both online and offline evaluations. Our results suggest that structuring experience as a graph provides a principled foundation for scalable and transferable self-evolving agent behavior.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Overeager Coding Agents: Measuring Out-of-Scope Actions on Benign Tasks

Coding agents now run autonomously with shell, file, and network privileges. When a user issues a benign request, the agent sometimes does more than asked: it deletes unrelated files, wipes a stale credentials backup, or rewrites configuration the user never mentioned. We call these scope expansions overeager actions, an authorization problem distinct from capability failures, prompt injection, or sandbox escapes. We present OverEager-Gen, a benchmark dedicated to overeager behavior on benign tasks. Building it surfaces a measurement-validity issue: if a benchmark spells out the authorized scope inside the prompt, the agent stops inferring boundaries and starts pattern-matching declaration text. On Claude Code, stripping the consent declaration alone raises the overeager rate from 0.0% to 17.1% on paired scenarios (McNemar exact p = 2.4 x 10^-4). OverEager-Gen therefore certifies each scenario's discriminative power before admission via a behavioral-gradient validator, audits internal tool calls through a dual-channel stack (PATH-injected shim plus per-agent event streams), and ships byte-identical consent_kept and consent_stripped variants. OverEager-Bench contains 500 validated scenarios and ~7,500 runs across four agent products (Claude Code, OpenHands, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI) and six base models; a 50-sample re-annotation gives Cohen's kappa = 0.73 and rule-judge recall = 1.00. Stripping consent multiplies the overeager rate on every shared base model (Delta in [11.9, 17.2] pp). The framework axis dominates effect size: a permissive cluster (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI) runs at 5.4-27.7% while the ask-to-continue framework (OpenHands) sits at 0.2-4.5% (Fisher p <= 10^-5). Within-framework base-model variance reaches 15.9 pp, indicating that model-layer alignment does not fully propagate through permissive permission gating.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

COSMIC 1001: Engaging Future Speculation on Space Exploration with Generative AI

Cosmic 1001 is an interactive installation that transforms space exploration history into a speculative news experience. Participants first browse a news-based archive of major space events, then pose future-oriented questions or specify conditions such as year, celestial body, or mission name. In response, AI generates a future news item including a headline, article, narration, and visual media. These outputs are accumulated in the Future Tunnel, a shared visualization where individual stories form a collective landscape of possible futures. By combining historical space events with science fiction references, the installation explores a space between documentation and imagination, treating the future not as a fixed prediction but as a visible and discussable speculation.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

LLM as Graph Kernel: Rethinking Message Passing on Text-Rich Graphs

Text-rich graphs, which integrate complex structural dependencies with abundant textual information, are ubiquitous yet remain challenging for existing learning paradigms. Conventional methods and even LLM-hybrids compress rich text into static embeddings or summaries before structural reasoning, creating an information bottleneck and detaching updates from the raw content. We argue that in text-rich graphs, the text is not merely a node attribute but the primary medium through which structural relationships are manifested. We introduce RAMP, a Raw-text Anchored Message Passing approach that moves beyond using LLMs as mere feature extractors and instead recasts the LLM itself as a graph-native aggregation operator. RAMP exploits the text-rich nature of the graph via a novel dual-representation scheme: it anchors inference on each node's raw text during each iteration while propagating dynamically optimized messages from neighbors. It further handles both discriminative and generative tasks under a single unified generative formulation. Extensive experiments show that RAMP effectively bridges the gap between graph propagation and deep text reasoning, achieving competitive performance and offering new insights into the role of LLMs as graph kernels for general-purpose graph learning.

cs.LG↗