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Yixuan Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Yixuan Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Theoretical Analysis of Muon on Transformers for Next-Token Prediction

Muon has recently shown strong empirical performance in training Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), yet its optimization dynamics remain poorly understood from a theoretical perspective. In this paper, we analyze the training dynamics of Muon for next-token prediction (NTP) in Transformers. The training procedure consists of two phases: the preprocessing phase learns the output-value component, while the main phase learns the key-query component. For the preprocessing phase, we characterize the optimization trajectory exactly and show that the normalized spectral margin is optimal after each update. For the main phase, we establish nonasymptotic convergence rates for the training loss and the normalized margin gap under softmax attention. These results suggest that Muon's update rule can help models efficiently learn which tokens matter for prediction, offering a possible explanation for its strong performance in large language model training. The learned weight structure also yields a generalization guarantee for unseen contexts. Furthermore, we validate our theoretical insights with experiments on next-token prediction tasks.

cs.LG↗

Efficient third-harmonic generation in high-Q tantalum pentoxide microcavities

Nonlinear harmonic generation in microcavities offers a compelling route toward energy efficient on-chip short-wavelength coherent light sources, enabled by tight optical confinement within compact mode volumes and flexible dispersion engineering. Tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5) photonic platforms are particularly promising for realizing such nonlinear processes: their broad transparency window (280-8000 nm) supports broadband operation, their large bandgap suppresses two-photon absorption, and their thick-film deposition capability enables dispersion management--features that can collectively enhance the performance of nonlinear light sources. Here, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first efficient third-harmonic generation (THG) in high-Q Ta2O5 microcavities. These microcavities feature smooth surfaces and high loaded Q factors up to 2.67X10^6, thereby facilitating nonlinear interactions. Through dispersion engineering, efficient THG is realized in both suspended microdisks and monolithic microrings under telecom-band continuous-wave laser pumping, as confirmed by optical spectra, visible-light microscopy, and the near-cubic pump-power dependence of the conversion efficiency. This work lays a foundation for chip-scale f-3f self-referencing of frequency combs and next-generation integrated nonlinear photonics.

physics.optics↗

Offset Dual Microcombs in a Single Microresonator: Kerr-Raman Interleaved Combs

Integrated Kerr microcombs have emerged as a central platform for chip-scale nonlinear photonics. One of their most compelling applications is dual-comb technology, which enables fast, high-resolution, coherent optical spectroscopy, precision metrology, ranging, and ultrasensitive sensing by interfering two frequency combs with slightly different repetition rates. However, no effective strategy yet exists to synergistically excite multiple spatial mode families, manage mode competition and energy partitioning, and precisely engineer dispersion, leaving offset co-propagating dual-microcombs in a single resonator elusive. Here we demonstrate a new mechanism for offset dual microcombs formation via Kerr-Raman interleaving for the first time, by leveraging single Raman-active thin-film lithium niobate microrings. Two spatial mode families with high loaded Q factors up to 5 million are dispersion engineered to have nearly identical free-spectral-ranges but a designed relative frequency offset. Stimulated Raman scattering efficiently generates a Raman comb in one family alongside a Kerr comb in the other. The two combs interleave with a fractional offset to form a broadband, densely interleaved spectrum. Pumping the microring at only 320 mW yields Kerr-Raman interleaved dual combs both featuring nearly identical repetition rates around 102 GHz with a small difference of 675 MHz, a relatively flat envelope exceeding 29 nm and an intrinsic comb-line linewidth of 410 Hz. Our results establish offset dual-comb generation in a single microresonator, enabling compact dual-comb sources for chip-scale precision spectroscopy, Vernier-enhanced sensing, and advanced quantum photonics.

physics.optics↗

TQTS-Bench: A Multi-Syntax Benchmark for Text-to-Query over Time-Series Databases

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language querying over relational databases, yet their ability to query time-series databases (TSDBs) remains largely unassessed. Existing benchmarks fail to adequately capture the non-unified query syntaxes, diverse application domains, and unique time-specific query intents inherent to TSDBs. To address this gap, we introduce TQTS-BENCH, a multi-syntax benchmark for evaluating text-to-query capabilities over TSDBs. TQTS-BENCH contains 6,125 high-quality question-answering (QA) pairs spanning 97 TSDBs, 23 distinct query syntaxes, 22 application domains, and 4 types of time-specific query intents. It is constructed through a human-centric AI-assisted workflow, where all QA pairs are carefully reviewed and revised by domain experts to ensure quality and correctness. Extensive evaluations of advanced LLMs and state-of-the-art text-to-query methods reveal challenges in querying TSDBs. Even the best-performing model evaluated, Claude-Opus-5, achieves only 48.98% execution accuracy, while humans reach 87.34%. Error analysis reveals that this performance gap mainly stems from the heterogeneous query syntaxes across different TSDBs, misinterpretation of time-specific intents, and incorrect schema linking. These findings highlight new opportunities to narrow the gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of TSDB queries in real-world applications. The benchmark is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TQTS-Bench-00CD.

cs.CL↗

Intervention Granularity Matters: Coherent Treatment Bundles in Counterfactual Simulation with Clinical World Models

Counterfactual simulation with a clinical world model means fixing a patient's history, changing the treatment, and reading off the predicted response. Doing so requires deciding what counts as one intervention. In clinical settings, interventions are documented as bundles: a co-occurrence audit of 945,707 patient-hours from MIMIC-IV shows groups of components, such as every parameter of a dialysis circuit, that never appear apart, so an edit that changes one component on its own describes an hour that never occurs in the data. We hypothesize that the granularity at which an intervention is edited changes how a world model responds, and test this with Clin-JEPA, a latent world model of patient trajectories conditioned on hourly treatment text. At 1,019 documented onsets of invasive ventilation, we keep the patient's history and other treatments fixed and compare editing one ventilator setting with editing the complete configuration recorded for a real patient with the most similar recent trajectory. The complete bundle moves the predicted next state further than any single setting, consistently across all five settings, and the difference remains after accounting for how much each edit changes the model's input. Intervention granularity therefore materially affects the response of a clinical world model: single-component edits may understate treatment sensitivity, and bundle-aware editing may offer a better-supported basis for counterfactual treatment simulation.

cs.LG↗

Clin-JEPA: A Multi-Phase Co-Training Framework for Joint-Embedding Predictive Pretraining on EHR Patient Trajectories

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPA) learn representations by predicting in latent space, as in computer vision; retaining the action-conditioned predictor at inference turns them into latent world models, enabling planning in robotics (V-JEPA 2-AC). Bringing this design to EHR patient trajectories---a predictor that simulates a patient's trajectory in latent space---has not been explored. We use an LLM as the encoder, reading the hourly record as text, avoiding feature engineering and vocabulary harmonisation. But an LLM adapted by supervised fine-tuning does not organise its latent space around physiological dynamics, and freezing it to train the predictor, as in V-JEPA 2-AC, leaves the encoder unaware of the rollout signal: the predictor degrades under rollout. We instead co-train encoder and predictor under one latent-prediction objective, grounding the encoder in the dynamics its predictor must follow. Naïve co-training, however, is unstable: the untrained predictor drags the encoder toward collapse, and the predictor's rollout diverges as its target space moves. We present Clin-JEPA, a five-phase curriculum that stably co-trains an LLM encoder with a latent trajectory predictor on MIMIC-IV. Three evaluations support the design: (1) under 48-hour autoregressive rollout the co-trained predictor degrades least (predictor degradation $\times$1.06, against $\times$1.23--1.36 for two-stage designs and $\times$6.3--66 for curriculum ablations) while the co-trained encoder resolves the progression of patient state most sharply (largest state displacement); (2) the co-trained encoder separates deteriorating from stable patients in its latent space with Cohen's $d{=}1.59$, against $\leq$0.50 for two-stage encoders; (3) one set of embeddings serves 34 downstream tasks across three benchmarks, outperforming strong per-task tuned baselines and a pretrained EHR foundation model.

cs.LG↗

Learning a Continuous Sepsis Severity Score Without Hour-by-Hour Supervision: A Two-Site Retrospective Study

Currently used sepsis severity indices rely on fixed variables and weights established decades ago, which are coarsely discretized and calibrated to a cohort that no longer reflects contemporary critical care. No alternative learned directly from patient trajectories is in routine use. We conducted a retrospective two-cohort study on a total of 29,116 and 7,691 adult patients meeting Sepsis-3 criteria from two hospital systems in Massachusetts and Georgie, respectively. We developed a sepsis index using 43 routinely charted variables over a 72-hour treatment window. Unlike previous studies, we use mortality as a treatment-level ranking signal rather than a per-state target, allowing credit to be redistributed non-uniformly across timesteps. Evaluation was done on a permanent 20% test holdout, using clinical vignettes and Spearman correlation. Uncertainty intervals were obtained by bootstrap resampling of whole patients. Under this ranking scheme, non-survivors scored 1.19-1.64 points higher than survivors on a 0-10 scale within all strata of baseline SOFA-2, with similar results stratifying within lactate, mean arterial pressure (MAP), and creatinine. Within-patient change in the index correlated with change in lactate (Spearman rho = 0.39; n = 1,854). Similar, weaker correlations were found for MAP and creatinine. On a cohort level, cross-institutional agreement measured by Spearman correlation between models trained on different sites, were 70-77% of same-site correlation. External within-patient correlations were 0.54 and 0.59 against ceilings of 0.92 and 0.90. Our index also correlated with established indices, while null controls stayed near zero. Our index demonstrated hourly prognostic information that meaningfully separates patient outcomes and is consistent with clinical expectation, indicating potential as a decision support tool complementing clinical judgement.

cs.AI↗

DreamTraj: Generating 6-DoF Object Trajectories by Reading Unrendered Video Diffusion Latents

Accurate prediction of object trajectories during manipulation is essential for closing the perception-action loop. Progress is limited on two fronts: available datasets lack fine-grained language-to-motion annotations, and existing predictors either rely on privileged inputs such as video, depth, or CAD models, or recover motion from fully generated videos through costly, error-prone perception pipelines. We close the supervision gap with the MOVE dataset, 5,038 object-centric egocentric trajectories, each paired with a fine-grained natural-language instruction rather than a coarse verb-noun label. We further propose DreamTraj, which predicts a 6-DoF object trajectory from a single RGB image and a task instruction, requiring no video, depth, or CAD model at inference: rather than generating a video, it reads motion from the internal representations of a frozen image-to-video diffusion model at an early denoising step. A lightweight flow-matching Reader decodes query-key attention tracks and pooled hidden states into relative 6-DoF poses. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to directly decode object 6-DoF trajectories from intermediate video diffusion representations rather than generated pixels. DreamTraj sets a new state of the art on both translation and rotation against forecasters that consume multi-frame or privileged inputs, and runs 4.6x faster than generate-then-extract pipelines.

cs.CV↗

Trans2Occ: Voxel Occupancy Estimation and Grasp for Transparent Objects from Simulation to Reality

Transparent objects remain challenging for robotic perception due to unreliable depth sensing caused by refraction and reflection. While prior approaches rely on multi-view reconstruction or depth completion, they are often difficult to scale or deploy in real-world robotic systems. In this paper, we present a practical framework for transparent object perception and manipulation based on single-view RGB input. Our approach predicts voxel-space occupancy directly from a single image, providing a geometry-aware representation that supports downstream robotic grasping. To enable large-scale training, we construct a simulation pipeline that generates paired RGB images and voxel occupancy annotations under diverse materials and lighting conditions. We demonstrate that the predicted occupancy representation is robust to domain shifts and transfers effectively from simulation to real-world robotic setups without fine-tuning. A simple rule-based grasping strategy built on top of the occupancy further achieves reliable grasp performance on transparent objects. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our framework provides accurate 3D understanding and enables practical manipulation of transparent objects. These results suggest that single-view occupancy prediction offers a scalable and effective solution for transparent object perception in robotics.

cs.RO↗

Isotropic fabrication of centimeter-scale, low propagation-loss periodically poled lithium niobate nanophotonic waveguides for efficient second harmonic generation

Periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) nanophotonic waveguides that simultaneously feature low propagation-loss and uniform periodic poling are essential for a wide range of applications ranging from classical nonlinear frequency-conversion to scalable integrated quantum technology. However, fabrication imperfections have frequently limited the propagation loss of fully domain-inverted PPLN nanophotonic waveguides to a few dB/cm, primarily due to anisotropic etching issue, thereby restricting the absolute conversion efficiency and scale of photonic integration. Here, we present a fabrication approach that overcomes this challenge, yielding a 1.2-cm-long PPLN nanophotonic waveguide with low propagation loss via femtosecond-laser photolithography-assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE). By carrying out domain inversion on a planar thin-film prior to waveguide definition, electric-field distortion is minimized during poling, while isotropic etching of the waveguide is achieved by PLACE with an average surface roughness of only 0.34 nm, resulting in uniform poling of duty cycle of 50% and a record-low propagation loss of 0.042 dB/cm in the telecom band. Under continuous-wave pumping at 1525 nm, the device demonstrates a high normalized quasi-phase-matched SHG conversion efficiency of 2021%/W, and an absolute conversion efficiency of 64% at a pump power of 86 mW which represents the state of the art for single-period PPLN nanophotonic waveguides.

physics.optics↗

Convergence of Spectral Descent for Non-smooth Optimization

The Muon optimizer has recently demonstrated remarkable empirical success in training large language models. However, the theoretical understanding of its mechanisms remains limited. Current convergence guarantees for Muon rely heavily on smoothness assumptions, leaving its non-smooth convergence behavior largely unexplored. In this work, we take a step toward bridging this gap by investigating Spectral Descent (SD), a simplified variant of Muon, together with its truncated counterpart, Truncated Spectral Descent (TSD). Under convexity, Lipschitz continuity, and sharpness conditions, we establish global linear convergence for both SD and TSD in non-smooth convex formulations. We also study regularized variants equipped with decoupled weight decay and derive sublinear convergence guarantees through their connection with Frank-Wolfe methods. Finally, we apply our theoretical framework to robust low-rank matrix recovery under mixed sparse and dense noise regimes and provide rigorous recovery guarantees. Numerical experiments support the theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of Muon-type methods for non-smooth optimization.

cs.LG↗

Toward Native Multimodal Modeling: A Roadmap

Multimodal modeling represents a vital step from modality-agnostic reasoning toward world modeling. While early approaches predominantly rely on late-fusion that assembles encoders and frozen language backbones with output heads, recent efforts have shifted the paradigm toward native multimodal modeling (NMM) with the intrinsic integration of modalities for superior multimodal performance. Despite its potential, the design space of native architectures remains insufficiently defined. In this paper, we present the community with a formalized roadmap for this transition. Specifically, we formally define the architectural nativity, distinguishing mid-fusion and early-fusion from non-native paradigms. We further organize the existing native models through the lens of input-output duality into three categories: (i) Multi-to-Text for cross-modal comprehension with text-only output; (ii) Multi-to-Target for scenario-oriented generation, e.g., image, audio and video generation, and (iii) Multi-to-Multi for unified modeling with symmetric input-output. We deliver a comprehensive and industrial-grade investigation into the transition toward the definitive NMM framework, where understanding and generation seamlessly coexist within a unified transformer paradigm. We systematically unpack the end-to-end pipeline from industrial perspectives from architectural coordination, massive data curation, to full-stack training recipes, inference & deployment, and the comprehensive evaluation for truly native modeling.

cs.CV↗

STABLE: Simulation-Ready Tabletop Layout Generation via a Semantics-Physics Dual System

Generating simulation-ready tabletop scenes from task instructions is an intriguing and promising research direction in the field of Embodied AI. However, existing task-to-scene generation methods rely exclusively on large language models (LLMs) to predict scene layouts, inevitably yielding object collisions or floating due to LLMs' inherent limitations in 3D spatial reasoning. In this paper, we present STABLE, a semantics-physics dual-system tailored for simulation-ready tabletop scene generation. STABLE consists of two complementary modules: (i) a Semantic Reasoner, a fine-tuned LLM trained on a structured tabletop scene dataset to generate coarse layouts from input task instructions, and (ii) a Physics Corrector, a physics-aware flow-based denoising model that outputs pose updates to refine layouts, which ensures the physical plausibility of scenes while preserves semantic alignment with task instructions. STABLE adopts a progressive generation paradigm: by alternating between the Semantic Reasoner and Physics Corrector, it incrementally expands the scene from task-critical objects to background objects. Experiments demonstrate that STABLE successfully generates simulation-ready tabletop scenes that strictly conform to task instructions and significantly enhances the physical validity of scenes over prior art.

cs.CV↗

Code-as-Room: Generating 3D Rooms from Top-Down View Images via Agentic Code Synthesis

Designing realistic and functional 3D indoor rooms is essential for a wide range of applications, including interior design, virtual reality, gaming, and embodied AI. While recent MLLM-based approaches have shown great potential for 3D room synthesis from textual descriptions or reference images, text-based methods struggle to capture precise spatial information, and existing image-conditioned agents suffer from instability and infinite looping when tasked with holistic room generation from top-down views. To address these limitations, we propose Code-as-Room, an MLLM-based agentic framework equipped with a structured execution harness, which represents 3D rooms with Blender codes. Given a top-down room image, the framework parses the reference image to extract scene elements and their spatial relationships, and synthesizes executable Blender code for geometry, materials, and lighting in a principled, multi-stage pipeline. A cross-stage memory module is maintained throughout to mitigate context forgetting inherent to existing agent-based frameworks. We further introduce a dedicated benchmark for code-based 3D room synthesis, encompassing various evaluation protocols. Based on our benchmark, comprehensive comparisons against existing agent-based methods are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed execution harness.

cs.CV↗

How Label Imbalance Shapes Geometry: A General Spectral Analysis of Multi-Label Neural Collapse

This work investigates the phenomenon of Neural Collapse (NC) in multi-label classification, extending its conceptual framework from multi-class learning to general correlated and imbalanced multi-label settings. Although recent studies have identified a ''tag-wise averaging'' structure for multi-label features, this view relies on implicit assumptions of label balance and combinatorial symmetry. Consequently, it fails to account for the geometrical distortions caused by intrinsic label correlations and data imbalance, which are common in practice. We resolve the multiplicity-one imbalance conjecture raised by Li et al. (2024), showing that higher-multiplicity prototypes obey a class-frequency-weighted synthesis rule rather than uniform averaging. To address this, we propose a rigorous spectral-control framework to analyze the terminal phase of multi-label learning under general imbalanced conditions. We introduce the label covariance spectrum $κ_m$, a scalar controlling the distribution-dependent lower-bound geometry, derived from the second-order moment matrix of the label distribution. Contrary to the averaging perspective, our analysis reveals that the centered label covariance spectrum controls the stability of terminal geometry by quantifying the weakest centered inter-class contrast directions. We prove that the classical Tag-wise Averaging emerges only as a special case under perfect orthogonality. Numerical experiments on synthetic distributions validate our theoretical bounds. This work resolves the scaled-average aspect of the imbalance conjecture and establishes a unifying theoretical framework that extends Neural Collapse to complex, imbalanced multi-label settings.

cs.LG↗

GEAR: Geography-knowledge Enhanced Analog Recognition Framework in Extreme Environments

The Mariana Trench and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau exhibit significant similarities in geological origins and microbial metabolic functions. Given that deep-sea biological sampling faces prohibitive costs, recognizing structurally homologous terrestrial analogs of the Mariana Trench on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is of great significance. Yet, no existing model adequately addresses cross-domain topographic similarity retrieval, either neglecting geographical knowledge or sacrificing computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we present \underline{\textbf{G}}eography-knowledge \underline{\textbf{E}}nhanced \underline{\textbf{A}}nalog \underline{\textbf{R}}ecognition (\textbf{GEAR}) Framework, a three-stage pipeline designed to efficiently retrieve analogs from 2.5 million square kilometers of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: (1) Skeleton guided Screening and Clipping: Recognition of candidate valleys and initial screening based on size and linear morphological criteria. (2) Physics aware Filtering: The Topographic Waveform Comparator (TWC) and Morphological Texture Module (MTM) evaluate the waveform and texture and filter out inconsistent candidate valleys. (3) Graph based Fine Recognition: We design a \underline{\textbf{M}}orphology-integrated \underline{\textbf{S}}iamese \underline{\textbf{G}}raph \underline{\textbf{N}}etwork (\textbf{MSG-Net}) based on geomorphological metrics. Correspondingly, we release an expert-annotated topographic similarity dataset targeting tectonic collision zones. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of every stage. Besides, MSG-Net achieved an F1-Score 1.38 percentage points higher than the SOTA baseline. Using features extracted by MSG-Net, we discovered a significant correlation with biological data, providing evidence for future biological analysis.

cs.CV↗

MCPSecBench: A Systematic Security Benchmark and Playground for Testing Model Context Protocols

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world applications via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a universal open standard for connecting AI agents with data sources and external tools. While MCP enhances the capabilities of LLM-based agents, it also introduces new security risks and significantly expands their attack surface. In this paper, we present the first formalization of a secure MCP and its required specifications. Based on this foundation, we establish a comprehensive MCP security taxonomy that extends existing models by incorporating protocol-level and host-side threats, identifying 17 distinct attack types across four primary attack surfaces. Building on these specifications, we introduce MCPSecBench, a systematic security benchmark and playground that integrates prompt datasets, MCP servers, MCP clients, attack scripts, a GUI test harness, and protection mechanisms to evaluate these threats across three major MCP platforms. MCPSecBench is designed to be modular and extensible, allowing researchers to incorporate custom implementations of clients, servers, and transport protocols for rigorous assessment. Our evaluation across three major MCP platforms reveals that all attack surfaces yield successful compromises. Core vulnerabilities universally affect Claude, OpenAI, and Cursor, while server-side and specific client-side attacks exhibit considerable variability across different hosts and models. Furthermore, current protection mechanisms proved largely ineffective, achieving an average success rate of less than 30%. Overall, MCPSecBench standardizes the evaluation of MCP security and enables rigorous testing across all protocol layers.

cs.CR↗

Monolithic tantalum pentoxide microrings with intrinsic Q factors exceeding 4X10(6)

Tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5), as a silicon-photonic-compatible material platform, has garnered significant attention for high-performance integrated photonics due to its exceptional properties: a broad transparency window spanning from 0.28 um to 8 um, a moderate refractive index of 2.05 at 1550 nm, and an impressive nonlinear refractive index of 7.2X10^(-19) m^2/W. Despite these advantages, achieving low-loss fabrication of monolithic microrings on the Ta2O5 platform remains challenging due to its inherent hardness and brittleness, which often result in rough sidewalls and significant scattering losses. In this work, we successfully demonstrated monolithic Ta2O5 microring resonators with exceptionally high intrinsic and loaded quality (Q) factors. This was accomplished through the innovative application of photolithography-assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE) technology. By optimizing the coupling region between the microring and the bus waveguide, as well as meticulously controlling surface roughness during fabrication, we achieved near-critical coupling in the resulting microrings. The devices exhibited loaded Q factors of 2.74X10(6) in the telecom band without employing expensive electron-beam lithography, showing an intrinsic Q factor as high as 4.47X10(6) and a low propagation loss of only 0.0732 dB/cm - representing the highest results reported for strongly confined Ta2O5-based microring resonators to date. This work paves the way for the development of advanced photonic devices on the Ta2O5 platform with low manufacturing cost, including low-threshold microlasers, highly sensitive sensors, broad bandwidth supercontinuum sources, and optical frequency combs.

physics.optics↗