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Yixin Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Yixin Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

ProMediConv: Benchmarking Proactive Conversational Agents in Legal Dispute Mediation

Dispute mediation is essential for maintaining social harmony and resilience, yet developing skilled mediators is costly and time-consuming. Existing LLM-based mediation research remains limited by unrealistic task formulations, low-fidelity datasets, and coarse evaluation metrics that obscure turn-by-turn dynamics. To address these gaps, we introduce ProMediConv, a novel benchmarking framework that models mediation as a proactive, multi-stage, and party-aware dialogue process incorporating 11 mediation strategies and four party behavior pattern (BP) states. Using 972 complete real-world cases, we construct a high-fidelity mediation dataset with utterance-level annotations of strategies and BP states. Furthermore, to better assess agent impact, we propose MAD (Mean Attribute Difference), a fine-grained metric that captures BP shifts throughout the dialogue. Leveraging this framework, we establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating diverse models alongside our tailored baseline ProMediAgent. Extensive empirical analyses reveal critical behavioral phenomena and underscore the persistent challenges current models face in dynamic, multi-party mediation. Ultimately, ProMediConv provides a rigorous foundation and a vital quantitative standard for advancing AI-assisted conflict resolution. Our dataset and codebase are accessible at https://github.com/ZsWei66/ProMediConv_repo.

cs.CL

An evidence-guided reinforcement learning method to improve psychiatric reasoning in small language models

Privacy and computational constraints limit the use of large language models in psychiatry, while adapting small language models (SLMs) often requires substantial data and expert annotation. We developed ClinMPO, an evidence-guided reinforcement-learning framework guided by the psychiatrist-defined Clinical Psychiatry Thinking Strategy (CPTS). ClinMPO uses ClinRM, a reward model trained on 18,569 question--answer pairs from 4,474 psychiatry articles. We evaluated four Qwen3 sizes on 1,737 model-screened questions. ClinMPO outperformed Base, supervised fine-tuning and standard group relative policy optimization across scales. From responses by 300 senior pre-licensure medical students, we established the human baseline, a medical-student reference. The 4B model approached this baseline, whereas the 8B model surpassed it and ranked first among 31 models and post-training variants. ClinMPO improved performance across two complementary schemes covering ICD-11 diagnostic categories and psychiatric practice competencies. Blinded assessment by three clinicians showed improved rationale quality across CPTS criteria. These findings highlight how existing clinical evidence and specialist knowledge can be incorporated into the development of medical AI systems through evidence-guided learning.

cs.CL

World Models for Policy Refinement in StarCraft II

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong reasoning capabilities, motivating their use in complex decision-making environments. StarCraft II (SC2), with its massive state-action space and partial observability, is a challenging testbed. However, existing LLM-based SC2 agents primarily focus on improving the policy itself, leaving the integration of a learnable, action-conditioned dynamics model into the decision loop largely unexplored. In this work, we propose StarWM and StarWM-Agent, and conduct the first systematic study of the learnability and decision utility of player-view, action-conditioned textual world models for SC2. StarWM predicts short-horizon future observations under partial observability. StarWM-Agent integrates StarWM into a lightweight Generate-Simulate-Refine loop for foresight-driven policy refinement. Extensive experiments show that StarWM substantially outperforms zero-shot baselines across multiple dimensions, while StarWM-Agent achieves consistent win-rate gains of 30%, 15%, and 30% against the SC2 built-in AI at Hard (LV5), Harder (LV6), and VeryHard (LV7), respectively. Additional analyses show that our method is complementary to existing history-summarization SC2-agent approaches, with their combination achieving the strongest online performance in our evaluation.

cs.AI

Scale-Aware Pretraining of Time Series Foundation Models via Multi-Patch Token Alignment and Hybrid Masking

Pretraining time series foundation models across heterogeneous datasets necessitates effective handling of varying sampling frequencies. Current methods either employ dataset-specific patch sizes and separate FFNs, leading to fragmented representations, or enforce a fixed patch size that neglects inherent temporal variations. To address this, we propose SATS, featuring a scale-aware token alignment mechanism that treats patch size as an explicit notion of scale. By incorporating a contrastive-inspired alignment regularizer, SATS aligns representation spaces across scales while preserving distinct modeling capacities. Furthermore, a hybrid masking strategy combining random and contiguous masking is introduced to capture multi-scale temporal structures. Experimental results on LSTF benchmarks demonstrate that SATS achieves a 9.2% improvement in MSE and an 8.3% gain in GIFT-Eval MASE compared to competitive baselines. Notably, SATS consistently delivers SOTA performance while achieving a 65.6% increase in model efficiency over advanced baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and scalability in time series pretraining.

cs.LG

Homebot: A Personal AI Agent for Conversational Home Assistance and Automation

\texttt{Homebot} is a locally deployable AI agent for conversational household assistance and automation. It accepts voice and instant-messaging requests through a shared runtime that combines language-model responses with registered tools and task-specific skills. The design separates common request processing from session ownership: messaging history remains scoped to a channel and chat, whereas voice interaction is bounded by wake-word activation. For hands-free use, \texttt{Homebot} combines local wake-word detection, streaming speech recognition and synthesis, and an explicit dialogue-state protocol for ending, following up, or continuing a conversation. Clear channel, tool, and skill contracts support practical customization for household use.

cs.AI

MA-HEAD-Net: Adaptive Rule-Guided Multi-Agent DRL for AoI Minimization in UAV-Assisted Emergency Networks

In post-disaster scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are critical for establishing emergency communication networks. For time-critical rescue missions, information freshness is crucial because decisions based on outdated data may lead to ineffective control actions. This paper investigates age of information (AoI) minimization for UAV-assisted emergency communications with heterogeneous emergency services. We model bursty packet arrivals using a Markov-modulated Poisson process and adopt finite blocklength theory to capture the coupling among transmission duration, packet completion, and AoI evolution. To balance delay-tolerant long-packet transmission and urgent short-packet response, we propose a mini-slot-embedded scheduling mechanism with adaptive checkpoint-interval selection. We formulate the joint optimization of UAV trajectory control, user scheduling, and checkpoint-interval selection as a multi-agent decision problem, and develop MA-HEAD-Net, an adaptive rule-guided multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework. MA-HEAD-Net incorporates communication-domain rule priors into a gated multi-head policy, where adaptive gates regulate the contributions of rule-prior and learned-policy logits for different subtasks. The policy and gating components are jointly optimized under multi-agent proximal policy optimization. Simulation results show that MA-HEAD-Net improves policy-formation efficiency compared with representative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning baselines and achieves lower AoI than both learning-based and heuristic methods in dynamic UAV-assisted emergency communication scenarios.

cs.AI

EgoWAM: World Action Models Beyond Pixels with In-the-Wild Egocentric Human Data

Egocentric human data offers scalable supervision for robot manipulation. However, behavior cloning entangles transferable content like objects, scenes, and task semantics, with non-transferable factors like human morphology, head motion, and behavioral style. We study whether World Action Models (WAMs) provide a better training signal by requiring policies to predict not only actions, but also how the scene evolves. The central question is what world representation best enables human-to-robot transfer. We hypothesize that an effective world target should abstract appearance, capture agent-invariant physical effects, and separate camera motion from environment change. We introduce EgoWAM, a controlled human-robot co-training framework that fixes the policy backbone, action head, and data mixture while varying only the world prediction target, comparing Pixel, DINO, and 3D motion flow. Across three real-world bimanual tasks, WAM co-training scales more effectively with in-the-wild egocentric human data than behavior cloning. Pixel-based prediction transfers weakly, while DINO and 3D flow yield substantial gains: DINO improves out-of-distribution object and scene generalization by up to 4x, and 3D flow improves in-domain performance by 20-30%. More details: https://gatech-rl2.github.io/egowam.github.io

cs.RO

Dual-domain fused LSTM modeling for efficient time-dependent reliability analysis

Time-dependent reliability analysis is crucial for ensuring the long-term safety and performance of engineering systems under uncertainties. However, traditional surrogate model methods often struggle to incorporate time-independent random variables and capture their complex interactions with time-dependent stochastic processes. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a dual-domain fused long short-term memory (DDF-LSTM) model for efficient and accurate time-dependent reliability analysis. A novel network architecture is developed to jointly process information from both time-dependent and time-independent domains. Specifically, the time-independent variables are embedded into the initial hidden states, and a fully connected layer is introduced to map both LSTM outputs and time-independent variables into the final output space. Furthermore, an improved loss function is designed to emphasize the model's sensitivity to minimum responses, thereby improving the precision of failure probability estimation. The proposed method effectively captures the dependencies among random variables, stochastic processes, and the temporal behavior of limit state functions. Once trained, the DDF-LSTM model enables efficient Monte Carlo simulation to estimate time-dependent failure probabilities with minimal computational cost. Four case studies validate the proposed method's enhanced computational efficiency and predictive accuracy.

cs.LG

Compact Spin-Charge Separated Neural Quantum States for Valence-Bond States

Neural-network quantum states (NQS) provide a flexible nonlinear representation of quantum many-body wavefunctions, but their efficiency depends sensitively on whether the architecture reflects the sign structure and constrained Hilbert space of the target state. In this work, we propose a solvable-point-guided strategy: design the architecture at an exactly solvable point where the correct local rules can be read off, then refine to the non-exact regime by enlarging only the kernel size and hidden dimension. The strategy is built from four physics-motivated designs: a stride-matched local-rule convolution, geometric pooling, a sign-resolving $\tanh(x^{2k+1})$ activation, and explicit spin-hole sector separation. We test this approach on quasi-one-dimensional valence-bond-solid (VBS) states and their doped soliton variants (sVBS), the exact ground states of a $t$-$J$-like model with a single mobile hole. In finite-size benchmarks, this architecture reaches high fidelity for the exact sVBS state with substantially fewer parameters than generic fully connected, convolutional, and transformer baselines tested under the same setup. For the spin sector, the learned local rule transfers from small to larger systems without retraining. Away from the solvable point, increasing kernel size and hidden dimension systematically improves accuracy, and the model shows approximately $L^2$ parameter scaling in the gapless regime for system size $L$, compared with approximately $L^4$ for matrix-product states in the same regime. Our work establishes a recipe for compact NQS in sign-structured, constrained Hilbert spaces and paves the pathway to physics-informed architectures for the broader $t$-$J$ and Hubbard families.

cond-mat.str-el

Rethinking Pulmonary Embolism Segmentation: A Study of Current Approaches and Challenges with an Open Weight Model

Pulmonary Embolism (PE) is a life-threatening condition for which accurate and timely detection is critical to patient care. However, our systematic study of PE segmentation algorithms reveals concerning limitations in the current state of research. Challenges such as small and inconsistent datasets, a lack of reproducible baselines, and limited comparative evaluation across models are hindering progress in the field. In this study, we curated a densely annotated dataset comprising 490 CTPA scans, each from a unique patient (430 for training and 60 for testing). We evaluated nine widely used segmentation architectures, including both CNN- and ViT-based models, in 2D and 3D configurations, using mean Dice Similarity Coefficient (mDSC) and Average Symmetric Surface Distance (ASSD) as evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the highest-performing model was evaluated on a public dataset without fine-tuning and achieved reasonable generalization performance. Our results show that: (1) a 3D U-Net with ResNet encoding blocks remains a highly effective architecture for PE segmentation; (2) 3D models consistently outperform their 2D counterparts; (3) across all architectures, when trained and evaluated on the same datasets, model error patterns are highly consistent; and (4) distal emboli remain particularly challenging due to both task complexity and the scarcity of high-quality datasets, highlighting the need for datasets with more comprehensive and consistent distal PE coverage. To promote research reproducibility, the architecture and pretrained weights of our best-performing model are publicly available at https://github.com/mazurowski-lab/PulmonaryEmbolismSegmentation

cs.CV

SonoSelect: Efficient Ultrasound Perception via Active Probe Exploration

Ultrasound perception typically requires multiple scan views through probe movement to reduce diagnostic ambiguity, mitigate acoustic occlusions, and improve anatomical coverage. However, not all probe views are equally informative. Exhaustively acquiring a large number of views can introduce substantial redundancy, increase scanning and processing costs. To address this, we define an active view exploration task for ultrasound and propose SonoSelect, an ultrasound-specific method that adaptively guides probe movement based on current observations. Specifically, we cast ultrasound active view exploration as a sequential decision-making problem. Each new 2D ultrasound view is fused into a 3D spatial memory of the observed anatomy, which guides the next probe position. On top of this formulation, we propose an ultrasound-specific objective that favors probe movements with greater organ coverage, lower reconstruction uncertainty, and less redundant scanning. Experiments on the ultrasound simulator show that SonoSelect achieves promising multi-view organ classification accuracy using only 2 out of N views. Furthermore, for a more difficult kidney cyst detection task, it reaches 54.56% kidney coverage and 35.13% cyst coverage, with short trajectories consistently centered on the target cyst.

cs.CV

Optical Hall absorption sum rule and spectral compensation in time-reversal-breaking moiré and Hofstadter systems

Optical spectroscopy provides a powerful, contact-free probe of topological quantum states, yet exact constraints on antisymmetric Hall absorption remain much less well developed than their longitudinal counterparts. Motivated by earlier Hall-conductivity sum rules, we formulate the corresponding first-frequency-moment constraint for the antisymmetric optical conductivity, whose imaginary part governs chirality-dependent absorption. We then demonstrate this sum rule in two classes of time-reversal-breaking topological systems. For a zero-field moiré continuum model hosting topological bands, the moment vanishes exactly, implying that any low-frequency anomalous Hall absorption must be compensated by higher-frequency spectral weight of the opposite sign. For a Hofstadter model under a uniform magnetic field, the same moment takes a universal value fixed by the magnetic flux density, independent of microscopic model details. By linking low- and high-frequency spectral contributions, this optical Hall absorption sum rule provides a rigorous framework for quantifying circular dichroism constraints and diagnosing Landau-level mixing. Our results show how a known Hall spectral constraint acquires new and experimentally relevant content in modern interacting topological materials.

cond-mat.mes-hall

Influence of van der Waals forces on the instability of a liquid film in a tube

The instability of a liquid film in a nanotube is significantly influenced by van der Waals forces. A theoretical framework based on the axisymmetric Stokes equations is developed to investigate their effects through linear stability analysis. The model reveals that van der Waals forces markedly enhance perturbation growth, reduce the dominant wavelength, and lower the critical film thickness that distinguishes collapse from non-collapse regimes. Direct numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations both confirm these theoretical predictions and extend the analysis into the nonlinear regime. In this regime, van der Waals forces are found to alter the interfacial morphology and suppress the formation of satellite lobes. Both rupture and collapse follow a universal temporal scaling law with exponent 1/3 and exhibit self-similar behavior near the singularity.

physics.flu-dyn

Compositional Visual Planning via Inference-Time Diffusion Scaling

Diffusion models excel at short-horizon robot planning, yet scaling them to long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to computational constraints and limited training data. Existing compositional approaches stitch together short segments by separately denoising each component and averaging overlapping regions. However, this suffers from instability as the factorization assumption breaks down in noisy data space, leading to inconsistent global plans. We propose that the key to stable compositional generation lies in enforcing boundary agreement on the estimated clean data (Tweedie estimates) rather than on noisy intermediate states. Our method formulates long-horizon planning as inference over a chain-structured factor graph of overlapping video chunks, where pretrained short-horizon video diffusion models provide local priors. At inference time, we enforce boundary agreement through a novel combination of synchronous and asynchronous message passing that operates on Tweedie estimates, producing globally consistent guidance without requiring additional training. Our training-free framework demonstrates significant improvements over existing baselines, effectively generalizing to unseen start-goal combinations that were not present in the original training data. Project website: https://comp-visual-planning.github.io/

cs.RO

Magnon-Mediated Superconductivity in the Infinite-$U$ Triangular Lattice

We demonstrate that the infinite-$U$ triangular-lattice Hubbard model supports a superconducting state built from tightly bound Cooper pairs composed of two holes and one magnon ($2h1m$). Building on the seminal prediction of repulsively bound $2h1m$ states, we show that next-nearest-neighbor hopping $t_{2}$ coherently mixes symmetry-related configurations, stabilizing an $s$-wave bound state with substantial binding energy and a light effective mass. Large-scale DMRG calculations at finite doping identify a magnetization plateau corresponding to a gas of such bound states and quasi--long--range superconducting order with power-law $2h1m$ pair correlations. Our results establish a magnon-mediated superconducting mechanism driven by kinetic frustration, with immediate detectable signatures for moiré Hubbard materials and ultracold-atom simulators.

cond-mat.supr-con

Speech-Aware Long Context Pruning and Integration for Contextualized Automatic Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable performance in common conditions but often struggle to leverage long-context information in contextualized scenarios that require domain-specific knowledge, such as conference presentations. This challenge arises primarily due to constrained model context windows and the sparsity of relevant information within extensive contextual noise. To solve this, we propose the SAP$^{2}$ method, a novel framework that dynamically prunes and integrates relevant contextual keywords in two stages. Specifically, each stage leverages our proposed Speech-Driven Attention-based Pooling mechanism, enabling efficient compression of context embeddings while preserving speech-salient information. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of SAP$^{2}$ on the SlideSpeech and LibriSpeech datasets, achieving word error rates (WER) of 7.71% and 1.12%, respectively. On SlideSpeech, our method notably reduces biased keyword error rates (B-WER) by 41.1% compared to non-contextual baselines. SAP$^{2}$ also exhibits robust scalability, consistently maintaining performance under extensive contextual input conditions on both datasets.

cs.CL

When Alignment Fails: Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have recently demonstrated remarkable progress in embodied environments, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act through unified multimodal understanding. Despite their impressive capabilities, the adversarial robustness of these systems remains largely unexplored, especially under realistic multimodal and black-box conditions. Existing studies mainly focus on single-modality perturbations and overlook the cross-modal misalignment that fundamentally affects embodied reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce VLA-Fool, a comprehensive study of multimodal adversarial robustness in embodied VLA models under both white-box and black-box settings. VLA-Fool unifies three levels of multimodal adversarial attacks: (1) textual perturbations through gradient-based and prompt-based manipulations, (2) visual perturbations via patch and noise distortions, and (3) cross-modal misalignment attacks that intentionally disrupt the semantic correspondence between perception and instruction. We further incorporate a VLA-aware semantic space into linguistic prompts, developing the first automatically crafted and semantically guided prompting framework. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark using a fine-tuned OpenVLA model reveal that even minor multimodal perturbations can cause significant behavioral deviations, demonstrating the fragility of embodied multimodal alignment.

cs.CV

CureAgent: A Training-Free Executor-Analyst Framework for Clinical Reasoning

Current clinical agent built on small LLMs, such as TxAgent suffer from a \textit{Context Utilization Failure}, where models successfully retrieve biomedical evidence due to supervised finetuning but fail to ground their diagnosis in that information. In this work, we propose the Executor-Analyst Framework, a modular architecture that decouples the syntactic precision of tool execution from the semantic robustness of clinical reasoning. By orchestrating specialized TxAgents (Executors) with long-context foundation models (Analysts), we mitigate the reasoning deficits observed in monolithic models. Beyond simple modularity, we demonstrate that a Stratified Ensemble strategy significantly outperforms global pooling by preserving evidentiary diversity, effectively addressing the information bottleneck. Furthermore, our stress tests reveal critical scaling insights: (1) a \textit{Context-Performance Paradox}, where extending reasoning contexts beyond 12k tokens introduces noise that degrades accuracy; and (2) the \textit{Curse of Dimensionality} in action spaces, where expanding toolsets necessitates hierarchical retrieval strategies. Crucially, our approach underscores the potential of training-free architectural engineering, achieving state-of-the-art performance on CURE-Bench without the need for expensive end-to-end finetuning. This provides a scalable, agile foundation for the next generation of trustworthy AI-driven therapeutics. Code has been released on https://github.com/June01/CureAgent.

cs.AI