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Yongfeng Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Yongfeng Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

ACE-GraphRAG: Agentic Context Engineering for Hierarchical GraphRAG

Hierarchical Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) organizes corpus knowledge at multiple levels of granularity, yet fixed context construction may fail to translate these multi-resolution representations into a context suited to the current query. We identify this mismatch as the representation--inference gap. We propose Agentic Context Engineering for Hierarchical GraphRAG (ACE-GraphRAG), an inference-time context policy layer that supplements and adapts the initial context for generation. ACE-GraphRAG formulates context construction as a policy over gap-aware refinement, retrieval branches, and task-conditioned adaptation. Parallel Differential Retrieval acquires supplementary evidence from depth-oriented factual and breadth-oriented semantic branches. These evidence increments are consolidated with the initial context while preserving provenance and abstraction levels. Full-ACE applies the full policy uniformly within each task family, whereas Adaptive-ACE selects task- and topology-specific policies for individual queries. We evaluate ACE-GraphRAG on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and four UltraDomain subsets across multi-hop QA and query-focused summarization. Full-ACE outperforms the evaluated RAG and GraphRAG baselines across both task families, while Adaptive-ACE further improves multi-hop QA and is preferred over Full-ACE on all four UltraDomain subsets. Ablation and topology analyses support treating context construction as a query- and task-dependent inference policy rather than a fixed procedure.

cs.CL

Enforcing Cryptographic Distributed-VCS Access Control with No Trust on Servers

Version control systems (VCS), including central VCS (CVCS) and distributed VCS (DVCS), are widely adopted to manage changes to software code and various types of documents. Unlike CVCS, where entities obtain data from a central server, each entity in DVCS stores the entire repository and shares it independently. In VCS, existing access control schemes require the participation of a central server and cannot be deployed in a completely distributed scenario. Additionally, these schemes often fail to enforce fine-grained access control for write permissions, which is crucial for collaborative work in a distributed environment. In this paper, we propose a distributed version control system access control scheme (named DVAC), which enforces cryptographic access control on distributed user nodes based on attribute-based encryption (ABE) and attribute-based signature (ABS). DVAC is designed to enforce a cryptographic access control protocol for DVCS, which enables file granularity read and write separation access control without the support of a central server. To ensure the integrity of the core version control functions in DVCS while protecting data security, DVAC incorporates a version control adaptation protocol. Additionally, DVAC leverages Ethereum smart contracts to maintain access control policies, ensuring distributed storage and trusted management of access policies. The architecture of DVAC is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing mature DVCS, such as Git, with minimal modifications. We have implemented a prototype of DVAC and integrated it with Git. A comprehensive performance evaluation was conducted to assess the overhead introduced by DVAC, and it was demonstrated that the overhead is modest.

cs.CR

Membox: Weaving Topic Continuity into Long-Range Memory for LLM Agents

Long-term human-agent dialogues are organized by topic continuity: adjacent turns often develop the same goal, plan, problem, or event, while related activities may recur across distant sessions. Yet many LLM agent memory systems first decompose histories into isolated turns or fixed-size chunks, then compensate through enrichment, consolidation, or retrieval mechanisms still tied to semantic proximity or fragment-level records. This weakens temporal and causal organization and biases memory access toward semantic proximity rather than task- or topic-level continuity. We introduce \emph{Membox}, a hierarchical memory architecture that instantiates topic continuity as an explicit organization layer for agent memory. Its \textbf{Topic Loom} incrementally organizes dialogue streams into boxes whose internal turns follow the same local topic, while its \textbf{Trace Weaver} links extracted events across boxes into macro-topic traces that recover recurring activities, goals, and factual developments across distant sessions. On LoCoMo, Topic-Loom-only retrieval improves over the best Mem0/A-MEM retrieval-depth setting by 13.00 F1 points (53.95 vs. 40.95), and trace-expanded retrieval further raises F1 to 55.28; with GPT-4o, trace-expanded retrieval reaches 59.71 F1. Additional DialSim results show the same gain from adding cross-box traces in multi-party dialogue. These results show that local topic-continuity organization and macro-topic trace expansion improve long-range memory beyond semantic retrieval over fragmented records.

cs.CL

GRB 250424A: A Case Study of Energy Injection with Multiwavelength Observations

We present a comprehensive multiwavelength analysis of the long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) 250424A. Our dataset spans from the prompt gamma-ray emission to late-time optical monitoring, including spectra obtained with the Keck 10\,m telescope. We find that the afterglow light curves display a prominent, simultaneous shallow decay phase in both X-ray and optical bands, followed by an achromatic transition to a standard decay regime. The broadband spectral energy distributions are well-modeled by a single power-law function, indicating a common synchrotron origin for the emission across frequencies. We interpret the afterglow evolution within the framework of a relativistic forward shock refreshed by continuous energy injection. This scenario successfully reproduces the observed temporal and spectral behavior, yielding an isotropic equivalent kinetic energy of $E_{\rm K,iso} \approx 5.5 \times 10^{52}$ erg and an injection index of $q\approx 0.34$ in a constant-density circumburst environment. The shallow decay phase is consistent with sustained energy injection lasting $\sim$ 9 ks. Despite the relatively low redshift, late-time optical observations reveal no distinct supernova component; however, our derived upper limits do not strictly rule out the presence of a typical GRB-associated supernova.

astro-ph.HE

SEMA-RAG: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Reasoning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely employed to mitigate risks such as hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence in medical question answering, yet its predominantly single-round, static retrieval paradigm misaligns with the multi-stage process of clinical reasoning. This compressed workflow induces two structural deficiencies: question-to-query translation often lacks clinically grounded semantic interpretation, and retrieval lacks iterative sufficiency feedback, making it difficult to form reliable evidence chains. We argue that both issues stem from a deeper cause: overloading a single reasoning chain with heterogeneous tasks of interpretation, exploration, and adjudication. The remedy is to reconstruct the workflow via task decoupling and dynamic multi-round exploration. To this end, we propose SEMA-RAG, a Self-Evolving Multi-Agent RAG framework for medical question answering, which assigns these roles to three specialist agents: the Interpreter Agent for clinical schema interpretation, the Explorer Agent for sufficiency-driven self-evolving retrieval, and the Arbiter Agent for evidence adjudication and answer selection. Across five benchmarks and five LLM backbones, SEMA-RAG improves the strongest baseline by +6.46 accuracy points on average, measured per backbone.

cs.CL

Black-box Membership Inference Attacks on the Pre-training Data of Image-generation Models

The rapid advancement of diffusion-based image generation models has raised serious concerns regarding potential copyright and privacy infringements involving human-created data. Membership inference attacks (MIAs) have emerged as a promising tool for identifying unauthorized data usage during model training. Existing methods typically assess the ability of model to denoise perturbed suspect images as an indicator of membership status. However, the discriminative power of such features is highly dependent on the degree of model memorization and deteriorates significantly when applied to less exposed data (e.g., pre-training data). Although several methods attempt to enhance detection by leveraging internal model features, these features are generally inaccessible in mainstream closed-source image generation platforms, limiting their practicality. In this paper, we demonstrate that analyzing how a black-box diffusion model denoises a target image and corresponding perturbed textual instructions can reveal more distinctive membership cues. Based on this insight, we propose a black-box membership inference attack framework (named SD-MIA) that leverages a cross-modal data perturbation mechanism to detect pre-training data in diffusion models. We conduct extensive experiments on both a public benchmark dataset and a newly constructed dataset, each comprising pre-training membership and non-membership samples with identical distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that SD-MIA achieves superior performance compared to existing baselines, including those with the unfair advantage of accessing internal model features.

cs.CV

EnCAgg: Enhanced Clustering Aggregation for Robust Federated Learning against Dynamic Model Poisoning

Federated learning faces increasing threats from model poisoning attacks, which harms its application to improve privacy. Existing defense methods typically rely on fixed thresholds or perform clustering with a fixed number of clusters to distinguish malicious gradients from benign ones. However, these methods are difficult to adapt to dynamic poisoning strategies of malicious clients, and often result in the loss of benign gradients due to the heterogeneity of clients' local datasets. To address these problems, we propose a novel robust aggregation method that leverages a small number of known benign clients as references, enabling accurate identification and filtering of malicious gradients while retaining as many benign gradients as possible, even when the number of malicious clients is unknown and variable. First, we introduce a density-based low-dimensional gradient clustering method, which projects gradients onto the two most divergent dimensions and applies density-based clustering to identify malicious gradients while retaining clustered benign gradients and potentially benign outliers. Second, we design an enhancing clustering low-dimensional gradient generator model, which learns to generate pseudo-gradients aligned with the boundary of the benign cluster. These pseudo-gradients act as bridges to connect sparse benign gradient outliers. Third, we introduce low-dimensional gradient re-clustering that clusters the generated pseudo-gradients together with real gradients to recover benign gradients misclassified as noise points, enabling more benign gradients to participate in aggregation. Extensive experiments on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and MIND datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits superior fidelity and robustness under dynamic poisoning scenarios.

cs.CR

Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Medical Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a widely adopted paradigm for enhancing LLMs in medical applications by incorporating expert multimodal knowledge during generation. However, the underlying retrieval databases may naturally contain, or be intentionally injected with, adversarial knowledge, which can perturb model outputs and undermine system reliability. To investigate this risk, prior studies have explored knowledge poisoning attacks in medical RAG systems. Nevertheless, most of them rely on the strong assumption that adversaries possess prior knowledge of user queries, which is unrealistic in deployments and substantially limits their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose M\textsuperscript{3}Att, a knowledge-poisoning framework designed for medical multimodal RAG systems, assuming only limited distribution knowledge of the underlying database. Our core idea is to inject covert misinformation into textual data while using paired visual data as a query-agnostic trigger to promote retrieval. We first propose a unified framework that introduces imperceptible perturbations to visual inputs to manipulate retrieval probabilities. Besides, due to the prior medical knowledge in LLMs, naively poisoned medical content with explicit factual errors can be corrected during generation. Thus, we leverage the inherent ambiguity of medical diagnosis and design a covert misinformation injection strategy that degrades diagnostic accuracy while evading model self-correction. Experiments on five LLMs and datasets demonstrate that M\textsuperscript{3}Att consistently produces clinically plausible yet incorrect generations. Codes: https://github.com/ypr17/M3Att.

cs.CR

ADEPT: An Entropy-Driven Dual-Strategy Agent for Interactive Video Retrieval

This research aims to solve the challenge of video retrieval from massive datasets, caused by ambiguous user queries. Prevailing single-round retrieval paradigms face a performance bottleneck, as they lack effective feedback mechanisms to handle complex search intentions. The root cause is the "Intent-Query Gap", where users' intent cannot be captured by a simple text query. To solve this, we propose the ADEPT framework: a training-free agent that pioneers an entropy-driven decision engine to efficiently guide dialogue by dynamically selecting between ASK and REFINE strategies. Experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate that ADEPT significantly outperforms all non-interactive, heuristic, and Video-LLM baselines. The core contribution of this work is an efficient and interpretable entropy-driven interactive strategy that sets a new performance benchmark for the field of interactive video retrieval.

cs.IR

RedNote-Vibe: A Dataset for Capturing Temporal Dynamics of AI-Generated Text in Lifestyle Social Media

We introduce RedNote-Vibe, a dataset spanning five years (pre-LLM to July 2025) sourced from lifestyle platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu), capturing the temporal dynamics of content creation and is enriched with comprehensive engagement metrics. To address the detection challenge posed by RedNote-Vibe, we propose the \textbf{PsychoLinguistic AIGT Detection Framework (PLAD)}. Grounded in cognitive psychology, PLAD leverages deep psychological signatures for robust and interpretable detection. Our experiments demonstrate PLAD's superior performance and reveal insights into content dynamics: (1) human content continues to outperform AI in emotionally resonant domains; (2) AI content is more homogeneous and rarely produces breaking posts, however, this human-AI gap narrows for arousing higher-investment interactions; and (3) most interestingly, a small group of users who strategically utilize AI tools can achieve higher engagement outcomes. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ydli-ai/RedNote-Vibe

cs.CL

X-Ray Intraday Variability of the Blazar OJ 287 Observed with XMM-Newton

We present X-ray intraday variability, cross-correlated variability, and power spectrum density analysis of the binary black hole blazar candidate OJ 287. The X-ray pointed observations of the source were carried out on eight occasions by the EPIC-pn camera on board the XMM-Newton satellite from November 2005 to November 2022. These good time intervals range between 3.6 hours and 24.1 hours. Three energy bands -- 0.2-2 keV (soft), 2-10 keV (hard), and 0.2-10 keV (total) -- have been used to estimate variability. Low amplitude variations are observed in 4, 5, and 6 light curves in soft, hard, and total energy bands, respectively. Only two observation IDs has shown variation in the all energy bands. The discrete correlation function of the light curves in soft and hard energy bands peaks at zero lag, suggesting that the emission in both bands was cospatial and came from the same population of leptons. Red noise dominates the power spectral densities of variable light curves. According to our flux and spectrum investigations, both particle acceleration and synchrotron cooling mechanisms contribute significantly to the emission from this blazar.

astro-ph.HE

Explore-on-Graph: Incentivizing Autonomous Exploration of Large Language Models on Knowledge Graphs with Path-refined Reward Modeling

The reasoning process of Large Language Models (LLMs) is often plagued by hallucinations and missing facts in question-answering tasks. A promising solution is to ground LLMs' answers in verifiable knowledge sources, such as Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Prevailing KG-enhanced methods typically constrained LLM reasoning either by enforcing rules during generation or by imitating paths from a fixed set of demonstrations. However, they naturally confined the reasoning patterns of LLMs within the scope of prior experience or fine-tuning data, limiting their generalizability to out-of-distribution graph reasoning problems. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose Explore-on-Graph (EoG), a novel framework that encourages LLMs to autonomously explore a more diverse reasoning space on KGs. To incentivize exploration and discovery of novel reasoning paths, we propose to introduce reinforcement learning during training, whose reward is the correctness of the reasoning paths' final answers. To enhance the efficiency and meaningfulness of the exploration, we propose to incorporate path information as additional reward signals to refine the exploration process and reduce futile efforts. Extensive experiments on five KGQA benchmark datasets demonstrate that, to the best of our knowledge, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming not only open-source but also even closed-source LLMs.

cs.CL

SWE-SQL: Illuminating LLM Pathways to Solve User SQL Issues in Real-World Applications

Resolution of complex SQL issues persists as a significant bottleneck in real-world database applications. Current Large Language Models (LLMs), while adept at text-to-SQL translation, have not been rigorously evaluated on the more challenging task of debugging SQL issues. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-CRITIC, a new SQL issue debugging benchmark comprising 530 PostgreSQL tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-PG) and 570 multi-dialect tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-Multi), distilled from authentic user issues and replayed within new environments to facilitate rigorous evaluation. Baseline evaluations underscore the task's complexity, with the leading reasoning model O3-Mini achieving only 38.87% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 33.33% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi. Meanwhile, advancing open-source models for database tasks is crucial for empowering local development while safeguarding data privacy. Therefore, we present Six-Gym (Sql-fIX-Gym), a training environment for elevating open-source model capabilities for SQL issue debugging. This environment leverages SQL-Rewind strategy, which automatically generates executable issue-solution datasets by reverse-engineering issues from verified SQLs. However, popular trajectory-based fine-tuning methods do not explore substantial supervisory signals. We further propose f-Plan Boosting, which extracts high-level debugging plans from SQL solutions, enabling teacher LLMs to produce 73.7% more successful trajectories for training. We integrate these components into an open-source agent, Bird-Fixer. Based on Qwen-2.5-Coder-14B, Bird-Fixer achieves 38.11% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 29.65% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi, surpassing leading proprietary models such as Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4.1, marking a significant step toward democratizing sophisticated SQL-debugging capabilities. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-critic.github.io/

cs.DB

LiveSecBench: A Dynamic and Event-Driven Safety Benchmark for Chinese Language Model Applications

We introduce LiveSecBench, a continuously updated safety benchmark specifically for Chinese-language LLM application scenarios. LiveSecBench constructs a high-quality and unique dataset through a pipeline that combines automated generation with human verification. By periodically releasing new versions to expand the dataset and update evaluation metrics, LiveSecBench provides a robust and up-to-date standard for AI safety. In this report, we introduce our second release v251215, which evaluates across five dimensions (Public Safety, Fairness & Bias, Privacy, Truthfulness, and Mental Health Safety.) We evaluate 57 representative LLMs using an ELO rating system, offering a leaderboard of the current state of Chinese LLM safety. The result is available at https://livesecbench.intokentech.cn/.

cs.CL

Black-Box Membership Inference Attack for LVLMs via Prior Knowledge-Calibrated Memory Probing

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) derive their capabilities from extensive training on vast corpora of visual and textual data. Empowered by large-scale parameters, these models often exhibit strong memorization of their training data, rendering them susceptible to membership inference attacks (MIAs). Existing MIA methods for LVLMs typically operate under white- or gray-box assumptions, by extracting likelihood-based features for the suspected data samples based on the target LVLMs. However, mainstream LVLMs generally only expose generated outputs while concealing internal computational features during inference, limiting the applicability of these methods. In this work, we propose the first black-box MIA framework for LVLMs, based on a prior knowledge-calibrated memory probing mechanism. The core idea is to assess the model memorization of the private semantic information embedded within the suspected image data, which is unlikely to be inferred from general world knowledge alone. We conducted extensive experiments across four LVLMs and three datasets. Empirical results demonstrate that our method effectively identifies training data of LVLMs in a purely black-box setting and even achieves performance comparable to gray-box and white-box methods. Further analysis reveals the robustness of our method against potential adversarial manipulations, and the effectiveness of the methodology designs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/spmede/KCMP.

cs.CR

Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific tasks. However, existing RAG methods do not adequately utilize the naturally inherent hierarchical knowledge in human cognition, which limits the capabilities of RAG systems. In this paper, we introduce a new RAG approach, called HiRAG, which utilizes hierarchical knowledge to enhance the semantic understanding and structure capturing capabilities of RAG systems in the indexing and retrieval processes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HiRAG achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline methods.

cs.CL

Observatory Science with eXTP

Scheduled for launch in 2030, the enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarization (eXTP) telescope is a Chinese space-based mission aimed at studying extreme conditions and phenomena in astrophysics. eXTP will feature three main payloads: Spectroscopy Focusing Arrays (SFAs), Polarimetry Focusing Arrays (PFAs), and a Wide-field Camera (W2C). This white paper outlines observatory science, incorporating key scientific advances and instrumental changes since the publication of the previous white paper [1]. We will discuss perspectives of eXTP on the research domains of flare stars, supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulae, cataclysmic variables, X-ray binaries, ultraluminous X-ray sources, AGN, and pulsar-based positioning and timekeeping.

astro-ph.IM

Long-context Language Models Fail in Basic Retrieval Tasks Without Sufficient Reasoning Steps

Long-context language models (LCLMs), characterized by their extensive context window, are becoming popular. However, despite the fact that they are nearly perfect at standard long-context retrieval tasks, our evaluations demonstrate they fail in some basic cases. Later, we find they can be well addressed with a sufficient number of reasoning steps, guided by specific CoT prompts. This result emphasizes the potential necessity of solving specific long-context tasks using long-CoT methods, while previous long-context benchmarks always ignore the necessity of long reasoning for long-context tasks and treat them as direct QA tasks.

cs.CL