arXiv subjects

Yu Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Cao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

MAD-OPD: Breaking the Ceiling in On-Policy Distillation via Multi-Agent Debate

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories under token-level teacher supervision, but existing methods are capped by a single-teacher capability ceiling: when the teacher errs, the student inherits the error. OPD also remains largely unexplored in agentic tasks, where per-step errors compound across long trajectories and destabilize training. We propose MAD-OPD (Multi-Agent Debate-driven On-Policy Distillation), which breaks this ceiling by recasting the distillation teacher as a deliberative collective of teachers that debate over the student's on-policy state; the debate produces an emergent collective intelligence that supplies token-level supervision, with each teacher's contribution weighted by its post-debate confidence. To extend OPD to agentic tasks, we also introduce On-Policy Agentic Distillation (OPAD), which adds step-level sampling to stabilize training under multi-step error compounding. We additionally derive a task-adaptive divergence principle, selecting JSD (Jensen-Shannon divergence) for agentic stability and reverse KL (Kullback-Leibler) divergence for code generation, and verify it both theoretically and empirically. Across six teacher-student configurations (Qwen3 and Qwen3.5; 1.7B-14B students, 8B-32B teachers) and five agentic and code benchmarks, MAD-OPD ranks first across all six configurations; on the 14B+8B$\to$4B setting it lifts the agentic average by $+2.4\%$ and the code average by $+3.7\%$ over the stronger single-teacher OPD.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Symplectic connection third-order Hall effect in a room-temperature ferromagnet

Third-order nonlinear Hall effects (THE) have recently attracted considerable experimental interest as powerful probes for quantum geometric properties in emergent quantum materials, encompassing quadrupole moments of quantum metric and Berry curvature. Here, we report a fundamentally new THE in room-temperature van der Waals ferromagnet Fe3GaTe2 from second-order Berry connection polarizability, which manifests a higher-order characterization of band geometry called symplectic connection. Our observations show that the third-order transverse response in Fe3GaTe2 is odd to magnetization, vanishes above the Curie temperature and remains independent of driving current directions. Scaling law analysis combined with first-principles calculations establishes this response as the symplectic-connection-induced THE. This discovery opens the door to probing high-order quantum geometric properties beyond Berry curvature and quantum metric through nonlinear transport, unveiling the potential of exploring nonlinear Hall phenomena in broad classes of magnets without breaking inversion symmetry. Moreover, the room-temperature manipulation of THE holds promises for device applications based on harnessing the quantum-geometric connection structure.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2026

Optimized growth of large-size, high quality $\text{ZrTe}_5$ single crystals enabling clear quantum oscillations in electrical transport

Quantum oscillation with nontrivial Berry phase is one of the characteristics of topological materials. As a Dirac semimetal candidate, zirconium pentatelluride ($\text{ZrTe}_5$) stands out as an intriguing material for investigating topological phase transitions and Dirac fermion physics; however, the extreme sensitivity of its electronic properties to stoichiometric variations and crystalline defects has hindered consistent experimental observation. Here, we report an optimized Te-flux synthesis method designed to produce centimeter-scale, high-quality single crystals meanwhile minimizing extrinsic carrier contamination. Comprehensive morphology, structural and chemical characterizations, including scanning electron microscopy, Laue backscattering and Rietveld refinement, confirm a high-purity $Cmcm$ phase with excellent crystallinity. Furthermore, magnetotransport measurements reveal a remarkably low Shubnikov-de Haas oscillation onset field ($B_{int} \approx 0.38$ T) with an ultra-high mobility of $5.58\times10^5$cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ and access to the the quantum limit at $B \approx 1.3$ T, attesting to the superior crystalline quality and the efficacy of this growth optimization. These results demonstrate that growth control is crucial for stabilizing intrinsic electronic behavior in $\text{ZrTe}_5$, establishing a robust platform for exploring topological phase transitions and exotic quantum phenomena in topological semimetals.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Enhancing Lexicon-Based Text Embeddings with Large Language Models

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on general-purpose text embedding tasks. While dense embeddings have dominated related research, we introduce the first lexicon-based embeddings (LENS) leveraging LLMs that achieve competitive performance on these tasks. LENS consolidates the vocabulary space through token embedding clustering to handle the issue of token redundancy in LLM vocabularies. To further improve performance, we investigate bidirectional attention and various pooling strategies. Specifically, LENS simplifies lexical matching with redundant vocabularies by assigning each dimension to a specific token cluster, where semantically similar tokens are grouped together. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LENS outperforms dense embeddings on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), delivering compact representations with dimensionality comparable to dense counterparts. Furthermore, LENS inherently supports efficient embedding dimension pruning without any specialized objectives like Matryoshka Representation Learning. Notably, combining LENS with dense embeddings achieves state-of-the-art performance on the retrieval subset of MTEB (i.e., BEIR).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

HDLxGraph: Bridging Large Language Models and HDL Repositories via HDL Graph Databases

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is an essential agent for Large Language Model (LLM) aided Description Language (HDL) tasks, addressing the challenges of limited training data and prohibitively long prompts. However, its performance in handling ambiguous queries and real-world, repository-level HDL projects containing thousands or even tens of thousands of code lines remains limited. Our analysis demonstrates two fundamental mismatches, structural and vocabulary, between conventional semantic similarity-based RAGs and HDL codes. To this end, we propose HDLxGraph, the first framework that integrates the inherent graph characteristics of HDLs with RAGs for LLM-assisted tasks. Specifically, HDLxGraph incorporates Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to capture HDLs' hierarchical structures and Data Flow Graphs (DFGs) to address the vocabulary mismatch. In addition, to overcome the lack of comprehensive HDL search benchmarks, we introduce HDLSearch, an LLM generated dataset derived from real-world, repository-level HDL projects. Evaluations show that HDLxGraph improves search, debugging, and completion accuracy by 12.04%/12.22%/5.04% and by 11.59%/8.18%/4.07% over state-of-the-art similarity-based RAG and software-code Graph RAG baselines, respectively. The code of HDLxGraph and HDLSearch benchmark are available at https://github.com/UMN-ZhaoLab/HDLxGraph.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

ParkingTwin: Training-Free Streaming 3D Reconstruction for Parking-Lot Digital Twins

High-fidelity parking-lot digital twins provide essential priors for path planning, collision checking, and perception validation in Automated Valet Parking (AVP). Yet robot-oriented reconstruction faces a trilemma: sparse forward-facing views cause weak parallax and ill-posed geometry; dynamic occlusions and extreme lighting hinder stable texture fusion; and neural rendering typically needs expensive offline optimization, violating edge-side streaming constraints. We propose ParkingTwin, a training-free, lightweight system for online streaming 3D reconstruction. First, OSM-prior-driven geometric construction uses OpenStreetMap semantic topology to directly generate a metric-consistent TSDF, replacing blind geometric search with deterministic mapping and avoiding costly optimization. Second, geometry-aware dynamic filtering employs a quad-modal constraint field (normal/height/depth consistency) to reject moving vehicles and transient occlusions in real time. Third, illumination-robust fusion in CIELAB decouples luminance and chromaticity via adaptive L-channel weighting and depth-gradient suppression, reducing seams under abrupt lighting changes. ParkingTwin runs at 30+ FPS on an entry-level GTX 1660. On a 68,000 m^2 real-world dataset, it achieves SSIM 0.87 (+16.0%), delivers about 15x end-to-end speedup, and reduces GPU memory by 83.3% compared with state-of-the-art 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that typically requires high-end GPUs (RTX 4090D). The system outputs explicit triangle meshes compatible with Unity/Unreal digital-twin pipelines. Project page: https://mihoutao-liu.github.io/ParkingTwin/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Quantum Neural Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations

We introduce a unified framework -- Quantum Neural Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations (QNODEs and QNPDEs) -- which extends the continuous-time formalism of classical neural ordinary and partial differential equations into quantum machine learning and quantum control. QNODEs denote the evolution of finite-dimensional quantum systems, whereas QNPDEs denote their infinite-dimensional (continuous-variable) counterparts; both are governed by generalised Schrödinger-type Hamiltonian dynamics, coupled with a corresponding loss function. This formalism permits gradient estimation via an adjoint-state method, facilitating efficient learning of quantum dynamics, and other dynamics that can be mapped (relatively easily) to quantum dynamics. Using this method, we present quantum algorithms for computing gradients with and without time discretisation, achieving efficient gradient computation that would otherwise be intractable on classical devices. We provide detailed resource estimates for these algorithms and investigate the local energy landscape for training. The formalism subsumes a wide array of applications, including quantum state preparation, Hamiltonian learning, learning dynamics in open systems, and the learning of both autonomous and non-autonomous classical ODEs and PDEs. In many cases of interest, the Hamiltonian is composed of a relatively small number of local operators, yet the corresponding classical simulation remains inefficient, making quantum approaches advantageous for gradient estimation. This continuous-time perspective can also serve as a blueprint for designing novel quantum neural network architectures, generalising discrete-layered models into continuous-depth models.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

GigaWorld-0: World Models as Data Engine to Empower Embodied AI

World models are emerging as a foundational paradigm for scalable, data-efficient embodied AI. In this work, we present GigaWorld-0, a unified world model framework designed explicitly as a data engine for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning. GigaWorld-0 integrates two synergistic components: GigaWorld-0-Video, which leverages large-scale video generation to produce diverse, texture-rich, and temporally coherent embodied sequences under fine-grained control of appearance, camera viewpoint, and action semantics; and GigaWorld-0-3D, which combines 3D generative modeling, 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction, physically differentiable system identification, and executable motion planning to ensure geometric consistency and physical realism. Their joint optimization enables the scalable synthesis of embodied interaction data that is visually compelling, spatially coherent, physically plausible, and instruction-aligned. Training at scale is made feasible through our efficient GigaTrain framework, which exploits FP8-precision and sparse attention to drastically reduce memory and compute requirements. We conduct comprehensive evaluations showing that GigaWorld-0 generates high-quality, diverse, and controllable data across multiple dimensions. Critically, VLA model (e.g., GigaBrain-0) trained on GigaWorld-0-generated data achieve strong real-world performance, significantly improving generalization and task success on physical robots without any real-world interaction during training.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Tiny Chiplets Enabled by Packaging Scaling: Opportunities in ESD Protection and Signal Integrity

The scaling of advanced packaging technologies provides abundant interconnection resources for 2.5D/3D heterogeneous integration (HI), thereby enabling the construction of larger-scale VLSI systems with higher energy efficiency in data movement. However, conventional input/output (I/O) circuitry, including electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection and signaling, introduces significant area overhead. Prior studies have identified this overhead as a major constraint in reducing chiplet size below 100 mm2. In this study, we revisit reliability requirements from the perspective of chiplet interface design. Through parasitic extraction and simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE) simulations, we demonstrate that ESD protection and inter-chiplet signaling can be substantially simplified in future 2.5D/3D packaging technologies. Such simplification, in turn, paves the road for further chiplet miniaturization and improves the composability and reusability of tiny chiplets.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

Variable Impedance Control for Floating-Base Supernumerary Robotic Leg in Walking Assistance

In human-robot systems, ensuring safety during force control in the presence of both internal and external disturbances is crucial. As a typical loosely coupled floating-base robot system, the supernumerary robotic leg (SRL) system is particularly susceptible to strong internal disturbances. To address the challenge posed by floating base, we investigated the dynamics model of the loosely coupled SRL and designed a hybrid position/force impedance controller to fit dynamic torque input. An efficient variable impedance control (VIC) method is developed to enhance human-robot interaction, particularly in scenarios involving external force disturbances. By dynamically adjusting impedance parameters, VIC improves the dynamic switching between rigidity and flexibility, so that it can adapt to unknown environmental disturbances in different states. An efficient real-time stability guaranteed impedance parameters generating network is specifically designed for the proposed SRL, to achieve shock mitigation and high rigidity supporting. Simulations and experiments validate the system's effectiveness, demonstrating its ability to maintain smooth signal transitions in flexible states while providing strong support forces in rigid states. This approach provides a practical solution for accommodating individual gait variations in interaction, and significantly advances the safety and adaptability of human-robot systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Multi-Joint Physics-Informed Deep Learning Framework for Time-Efficient Inverse Dynamics

Time-efficient estimation of muscle activations and forces across multi-joint systems is critical for clinical assessment and assistive device control. However, conventional approaches are computationally expensive and lack a high-quality labeled dataset for multi-joint applications. To address these challenges, we propose a physics-informed deep learning framework that estimates muscle activations and forces directly from kinematics. The framework employs a novel Multi-Joint Cross-Attention (MJCA) module with Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) layers to capture inter-joint coordination, enabling each joint to adaptively integrate motion information from others. By embedding multi-joint dynamics, inter-joint coupling, and external force interactions into the loss function, our Physics-Informed MJCA-BiGRU (PI-MJCA-BiGRU) delivers physiologically consistent predictions without labeled data while enabling time-efficient inference. Experimental validation on two datasets demonstrates that PI-MJCA-BiGRU achieves performance comparable to conventional supervised methods without requiring ground-truth labels, while the MJCA module significantly enhances inter-joint coordination modeling compared to other baseline architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Mitigating Cross-modal Representation Bias for Multicultural Image-to-Recipe Retrieval

Existing approaches for image-to-recipe retrieval have the implicit assumption that a food image can fully capture the details textually documented in its recipe. However, a food image only reflects the visual outcome of a cooked dish and not the underlying cooking process. Consequently, learning cross-modal representations to bridge the modality gap between images and recipes tends to ignore subtle, recipe-specific details that are not visually apparent but are crucial for recipe retrieval. Specifically, the representations are biased to capture the dominant visual elements, resulting in difficulty in ranking similar recipes with subtle differences in use of ingredients and cooking methods. The bias in representation learning is expected to be more severe when the training data is mixed of images and recipes sourced from different cuisines. This paper proposes a novel causal approach that predicts the culinary elements potentially overlooked in images, while explicitly injecting these elements into cross-modal representation learning to mitigate biases. Experiments are conducted on the standard monolingual Recipe1M dataset and a newly curated multilingual multicultural cuisine dataset. The results indicate that the proposed causal representation learning is capable of uncovering subtle ingredients and cooking actions and achieves impressive retrieval performance on both monolingual and multilingual multicultural datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ABACUS: An Electronic Structure Analysis Package for the AI Era

ABACUS (Atomic-orbital Based Ab-initio Computation at USTC) is an open-source software for first-principles electronic structure calculations and molecular dynamics simulations. It mainly features density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics functions and is compatible with both plane-wave basis sets and numerical atomic orbital basis sets. ABACUS serves as a platform that facilitates the integration of various electronic structure methods, such as Kohn-Sham DFT, stochastic DFT, orbital-free DFT, and real-time time-dependent DFT, etc. In addition, with the aid of high-performance computing, ABACUS is designed to perform efficiently and provide massive amounts of first-principles data for generating general-purpose machine learning potentials, such as DPA models. Furthermore, ABACUS serves as an electronic structure platform that interfaces with several AI-assisted algorithms and packages, such as DeePKS-kit, DeePMD, DP-GEN, DeepH, DeePTB, HamGNN, etc.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Low Light Image Enhancement: Methods and Results

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final outcomes. The objective of the challenge is to identify effective networks capable of producing brighter, clearer, and visually compelling images under diverse and challenging conditions. A remarkable total of 762 participants registered for the competition, with 28 teams ultimately submitting valid entries. This paper thoroughly evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in LLIE, showcasing the significant progress.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Investigating the relationship between the Weyl semimetal phase and the three-dimensional quantum Hall phase in ZrTe$_5$

The material ZrTe$_5$ exhibits distinct topological phases, including a Weyl semimetal phase, characterized by a chiral anomaly and in-plane Hall effect, and a three-dimensional quantum Hall phase. The relationship between these phases remains poorly understood. This work systematically explores their connection in ZrTe$_5$ through rotatable, pressure-dependent measurements. At ambient pressure, both phases are observed; the WSM phase requires strong electronic polarization, while the 3D QH phase appears when the characteristic resistivity peak temperature $T_p$ is approximately 90 K. Under applied pressure, the polarization diminishes, weakening the WSM phase and its associated nontrivial Hall signals. Concurrently, $T_p$ rises dramatically from 2 K at ambient pressure to 70 K at 2.2 GPa, approaching the expected regime for the 3D QH phase. These findings clarify the conditions underlying the WSM and 3D QH phases and suggest that exploring the 3D QH phase at even higher pressures is a promising direction for future research.

cond-mat.other↗

arXiv2025

OpenRLHF: An Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework

Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly improve the alignment of human-AI values, further raising the upper bound of AI capabilities, particularly in reasoning-intensive, long-context Chain-of-Thought (CoT) tasks. However, existing frameworks commonly face challenges such as inference bottlenecks and complexity barriers, which restrict their accessibility to newcomers. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{OpenRLHF}, a user-friendly, scalable, and easy-to-learn open-source RLHF framework built upon Ray, vLLM, DeepSpeed, and HuggingFace Transformers, featuring a simplified design, clear code structure, and comprehensive documentation to facilitate entry for researchers and practitioners. Experimental results show that OpenRLHF achieves superior training efficiency, with speedups ranging from 1.22x to 1.68x across different model sizes, compared to state-of-the-art frameworks. Additionally, it requires significantly fewer lines of code for implementation. OpenRLHF is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenRLHF/OpenRLHF, and has already been adopted by leading institutions to accelerate RLHF research and learning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

HiVeGen -- Hierarchical LLM-based Verilog Generation for Scalable Chip Design

With Large Language Models (LLMs) recently demonstrating impressive proficiency in code generation, it is promising to extend their abilities to Hardware Description Language (HDL). However, LLMs tend to generate single HDL code blocks rather than hierarchical structures for hardware designs, leading to hallucinations, particularly in complex designs like Domain-Specific Accelerators (DSAs). To address this, we propose HiVeGen, a hierarchical LLM-based Verilog generation framework that decomposes generation tasks into LLM-manageable hierarchical submodules. HiVeGen further harnesses the advantages of such hierarchical structures by integrating automatic Design Space Exploration (DSE) into hierarchy-aware prompt generation, introducing weight-based retrieval to enhance code reuse, and enabling real-time human-computer interaction to lower error-correction cost, significantly improving the quality of generated designs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

MAHL: Multi-Agent LLM-Guided Hierarchical Chiplet Design with Adaptive Debugging

As program workloads (e.g., AI) increase in size and algorithmic complexity, the primary challenge lies in their high dimensionality, encompassing computing cores, array sizes, and memory hierarchies. To overcome these obstacles, innovative approaches are required. Agile chip design has already benefited from machine learning integration at various stages, including logic synthesis, placement, and routing. With Large Language Models (LLMs) recently demonstrating impressive proficiency in Hardware Description Language (HDL) generation, it is promising to extend their abilities to 2.5D integration, an advanced technique that saves area overhead and development costs. However, LLM-driven chiplet design faces challenges such as flatten design, high validation cost and imprecise parameter optimization, which limit its chiplet design capability. To address this, we propose MAHL, a hierarchical LLM-based chiplet design generation framework that features six agents which collaboratively enable AI algorithm-hardware mapping, including hierarchical description generation, retrieval-augmented code generation, diverseflow-based validation, and multi-granularity design space exploration. These components together enhance the efficient generation of chiplet design with optimized Power, Performance and Area (PPA). Experiments show that MAHL not only significantly improves the generation accuracy of simple RTL design, but also increases the generation accuracy of real-world chiplet design, evaluated by Pass@5, from 0 to 0.72 compared to conventional LLMs under the best-case scenario. Compared to state-of-the-art CLARIE (expert-based), MAHL achieves comparable or even superior PPA results under certain optimization objectives.

cs.AR↗