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Yue Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Yue Zhao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

MetaPersona: Task-Grounded Synthetic Populations from Empirical Social Science

Personas used to seed LLM social simulations face a cold-start problem: existing methods lack a principled basis for deciding which attributes to include and how to assign their values. As a result, synthetic populations may misrepresent the demographic composition, latent attributes, and dependency structure that shape downstream behavior. We introduce MetaPersona-DB, a dataset of 11,000+ empirical human-subjects studies annotated with task-relevant variables, reported relationships, and aggregate-level population statistics. Building on this resource, we propose MetaPersona, a framework that retrieves task-relevant evidence, constructs literature-derived persona dependency graphs, and samples synthetic populations from empirical priors linking demographics, latent attributes, and outcomes. Across three downstream case studies, three baselines, and three frontier models, results vary by task and model: MetaPersona performs strongly on misinformation belief and AI-tool sentiment, while results on income redistribution are mixed. It also reduces persona-construction cost to under $0.5 per task using GPT-5.2. Finally, we present MetaPersona-Studio, a prototype interactive interface for empirically grounded persona generation.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Auditable Agents

LLM agents call tools, query databases, delegate tasks, and trigger external side effects. Once an agent system can act in the world, the question is no longer only whether harmful actions can be prevented--it is whether those actions remain answerable after deployment. We distinguish accountability (the ability to determine compliance and assign responsibility), auditability (the system property that makes accountability possible), and auditing (the process of reconstructing behavior from trustworthy evidence). Our claim is direct: no agent system can be accountable without auditability. To make this operational, we define five dimensions of agent auditability, i.e., action recoverability, lifecycle coverage, policy checkability, responsibility attribution, and evidence integrity, and identify three mechanism classes (detect, enforce, recover) whose temporal information-and-intervention constraints explain why, in practice, no single approach suffices. We support the position with layered evidence rather than a single benchmark: lower-bound ecosystem measurements suggest that even basic security prerequisites for auditability are widely unmet (617 security findings across six prominent open-source projects); runtime feasibility results show that pre-execution mediation with tamper-evident records adds only 8.3 ms median overhead; and controlled recovery experiments show that responsibility-relevant information can be partially recovered even when conventional logs are missing. We propose an Auditability Card for agent systems and identify six open research problems organized by mechanism class.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

CUA-SWE: When Computer-Use Agents Meet Visual Software Engineering

Software development requires more than editing code: developers repeatedly run software, interact with its interfaces, visually inspect its behavior, and use these observations to decide what to change next and whether a change works. Existing coding agents and computer-use agents are largely studied in isolation, leaving this integrated development process underexplored. Diagnosing a runtime interaction failure requires agents to connect visual observations with the responsible code, then use the application again to verify the repair. We introduce CUA-SWE, a benchmark, environment, and evaluation pipeline for software engineering with computer use. Beyond studying how GUI feedback supports diagnosis and repair, we ask whether agents can complete software engineering tasks when required specification or operational information is available only through the running application's visual interface. CUA-SWE spans four software engineering domains and requires agents to modify code and configuration, execute commands, interact with running software, and inspect visual feedback within the same task. Each task includes deterministic, task-specific tests that verify whether the resulting software satisfies the requirements and preserves specified behavior. Our evaluation characterizes how frontier agents combine source-level execution with application screenshots and graphical interaction to produce verified software changes. We examine performance across domains and task information requirements, alongside the development behaviors associated with successful repairs. CUA-SWE provides a unified testbed for studying how agents use visual feedback and interaction to guide software engineering, with executable correctness criteria for the resulting software.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

PhoenixSR: Generative Heterogeneous Distillation Unleashes Efficient Models for Real-World Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (SR) requires recovering perceptually realistic high-resolution images from complex low-resolution observations while preserving faithful content. Diffusion-based SR benefits from strong generative priors but incurs substantial computational overhead, whereas feed-forward CNN and Transformer SR models are efficient yet often struggle to recover realistic high-frequency details. This motivates a natural question: can diffusion priors be transferred to existing diffusion-free SR networks without introducing diffusion components at inference time? To this end, we propose PhoenixSR, a generative heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers diffusion priors to independently designed feed-forward SR networks through score-based distribution matching. Rather than aligning heterogeneous features or imitating sampled diffusion outputs, PhoenixSR uses the pretrained diffusion model as distribution-level supervision, while paired SR supervision preserves reconstruction fidelity. To make distribution matching effective for fidelity-sensitive SR, we introduce Heterogeneous Distribution Adaptation, which adapts the target score to the SR domain, improves tracking of the evolving student distribution, and anchors training with paired supervision. We further employ Directional Reliability Weighting, a lightweight residual-consistency-based reweighting strategy that reduces unstable distributional guidance. All diffusion-related components are removed after training, leaving the original student architecture and inference cost unchanged. Experiments on three SR benchmarks and six feed-forward backbones, including SwinIR, HAT, Real-ESRGAN, and SeeMoRe, show consistent perceptual improvements with largely preserved reconstruction fidelity.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Stability for the inverse source problem of the stochastic fractional Helmholtz equation

This paper is concerned with the inverse source problem for the stochastic fractional Helmholtz equation driven by white noise. For every fractional order $0<α<1$, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the outgoing distributional solution to the direct problem with resolvent estimates at high frequencies, and establish its stochastic representation. For the inverse problem, we demonstrate that the variance of the source can be uniquely determined by the correlated random exterior data at a single frequency. We further establish an increasing stability estimate for the inverse problem by using the multifrequency correlated exterior data. Our stability result shows that as the upper bound of the bandwidth of the utilized frequency increases, the stability will also improve. The analysis employs the construction of geometric optics solutions, which connects the correlated data to the X-ray transform of the variance.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

High-Throughput Photovoltaic Screening and Spacer-Dependent Shift Current in Two-Dimensional Hybrid Perovskites

High-throughput first-principles screening of structurally diverse two-dimensional hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites (2D HOIPs) provides a route to systematically explore their photovoltaic properties. Here, we develop a computational workflow with two distinct objectives: spectroscopic limited maximum efficiency (SLME) screening to identify materials with promising photovoltaic potential and nonlinear shift current calculations to characterize their bulk photovoltaic response. Applying this workflow to a curated dataset of experimentally reported 2D HOIPs, we identify more than 25 compounds with SLME values above 25\% and more than 25 compounds exhibiting shift current responses exceeding 10~$μ$A/V$^2$. We then focus on the Pb-I-based 2D HOIPs with $n=1$ to investigate the influence of spacer chemistry on the shift current response, revealing substantial spacer-dependent variations in both its magnitude and spectral peak position. Overall, these results highlight the potential of high-throughput first-principles calculations to accelerate the discovery of experimentally relevant 2D HOIPs with promising photovoltaic properties while revealing how organic spacer chemistry influences their nonlinear shift photocurrent response.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Inelastic Dark Matter and High-Energy Recoil Signatures in LZ

We study the inelastic dark matter (iDM) that consists of two-component dark matter particles $(χ_1,χ_2)$ and serves as a minimal extension beyond the commonly used one-component DM models. A distinctive feature of such iDM scattering with the target nuclei is to favorably produce signals at high nuclear recoil (NR) energy region in both exothermic and endothermic processes. In particular, for the exothermic dark matter scenario, the signal does not rely on the tail of the Boltzmann velocity distribution. As a result, the required DM-nucleus scattering cross section is significantly reduced, which in turn helps to substantially relax the stringent constraints imposed by IceCube neutrino searches. Using the inelastic DM-nucleus scattering, we naturally explain the newly reported event excess at high recoil energy with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2026

SocialMaze: A Benchmark for Evaluating and Enhancing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models in Complex Social Environments

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially grounded applications, where success requires interpreting context, inferring others' mental states, and reasoning about unreliable information. Yet existing benchmarks rarely evaluate these demands jointly in complex, evolving settings. We introduce SocialMaze, a benchmark that organizes six tasks across social deduction games, daily-life interactions, and digital community platforms along three descriptive design axes: deep reasoning, dynamic interaction, and information uncertainty. These axes characterize intended sources of task difficulty rather than latent, factor-analytic dimensions of model capability. Automated checks and human validation support data quality. Evaluations of twelve proprietary and open-weight LLMs show substantial variation in the use of evolving interaction histories; stronger chain-of-thought reasoners perform better on tasks requiring deeper inference, while uncertainty consistently degrades performance. Reasoning workflows help weaker short-chain-of-thought backbones but saturate on stronger reasoners. Finally, targeted fine-tuning on curated reasoning traces substantially improves structured social-reasoning tasks, whereas transfer to language-aggregation tasks remains statistically inconclusive. The project homepage is available at https://xzx34.github.io/socialmaze/.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

CatchBench: When Can an Agent Failure Be Caught?

When can an agent failure be caught? A weak audit score alone cannot identify whether the record or the method is limiting. CatchBench therefore puts one auditor's question to three information states: the declared configuration before a run (PRE), a growing prefix of its trace (LIVE), and the finished trace (POST). Prior benchmarks fix one of these states or vary the telemetry; to our knowledge none scores all three under one task-method interface. Each state admits different questions, so seven task contracts carry their own labels and metrics rather than one leaderboard. Four are evidential; three are Gold-derived mechanism diagnostics. The release scores 72 entrants, from rule scanners and structural models to eleven LLM judges across nine model families (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Gemma, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Nova), over 1187 declared configurations and 1162 recorded runs. Every recorded comparison is published as a measured difference with its interval, uncorrected, and no board declares a winner it cannot show. The three sharpest results cut against our own data. One rule reads declaration order alone and reaches a perfect F1 on one of six configuration sources, so a score there measures how the corpus was built. Our admissibility bar then rejected one injected substrate and withheld evidential status from the other. A published structural gain also turns on which size reference it is measured against. A benchmark number is therefore not interpretable until the process behind its labels is published and tested for the shortcut it may leave. We report all three, and regenerate every ordering from released predictions with no model call.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

FoundAna: A GNN-assisted Foundation Model for Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify graph structures (e.g., nodes, edges, or subgraphs) that deviate significantly from expected patterns, which supports critical applications in fraud detection, spam identification, network intrusion, etc. Despite the growing methods in the field, existing approaches follow a one-model-per-dataset paradigm, limiting their transferability across diverse real-world scenarios due to task heterogeneity, label scarcity, and domain variability. In this work, we introduce FoundAna, a GNN-assisted Foundation Model for Graph Anomaly Detection - the first foundation model framework designated for generalizable, cross-graph anomaly detection by combining GNNs and transformers. FoundAna integrates an anomaly detection-specific GNN component with a standard transformer encoder augmented by four complementary positional encodings, which enable the model to capture both local and global structural information. Specifically, the positional encoding enriched node representations are passed through attribute and adjacency decoders, and the reconstruction errors serve as the anomaly score. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets spanning financial, social, and citation network domains demonstrate that FoundAna consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code implementation and Supplementary materials are here: https://github.com/FoundAna331/FoundAna.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

QEMScore: How Much Does the Measurement Add to Learned Quantum Error Mitigation?

How much does the noisy measurement add to learned quantum error mitigation? An accuracy table cannot say, because a model handed circuit structure can score well without reading the measurement at all. QEMScore adds the comparison that can. Each simulated circuit carries an exact ideal answer. The learned mitigator is scored beside a capacity-matched control, a model just as flexible that reads the same circuit description but never the measurement. Each method's measurement spend is accounted and not equalized. We run a controlled campaign on simulated circuits and reanalyze two published learned mitigators, Q-LEAR and QRAFT, from their released hardware data. Three findings stand out. First, under familiar within-family conditions (S0) evaluated across two spin-chain families and three seeds, continuous couplings identify the target, and the control that never reads the measurement matches 87.7 to 100.5 percent of the mitigator's gain over an affine fit to the circuit description. A plain polynomial in the coupling parameters, fitted after the campaign, beats the mitigator on all six evaluations, reflecting the selected learners' capacity. Second, for these selected learners, matching most of the gain is not matching the accuracy: on five of six evaluations the mitigator removes 19.5 to 74.5 percent of the error the capacity-matched control leaves, a learner-specific gap rather than a measurement requirement. Third, on released hardware data where descriptors only partially identify queries, the findings differ: flexible models of the descriptors show negligible mean gain over affine fits in Q-LEAR, and measurement inputs carry predictive gains in both Q-LEAR and QRAFT. These comparisons reflect representation- and protocol-specific behavior rather than an isolated cross-regime difference. A learned mitigator's accuracy should therefore be reported beside such controls.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

A Functional SVD Framework for Regularized Multivariate Functional PCA with Dual Penalization

This paper introduces a novel framework for Regularized Multivariate Functional Principal Component Analysis (ReMFPCA) via Functional Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The proposed method extends existing MFPCA approaches by incorporating a generalized functional SVD within a Hilbert space framework, enabling simultaneous regularization of both functional principal components (PCs) and their associated PC scores. A key innovation of this framework is the inclusion of a sparsity penalty on the PC scores, which enhances interpretability by filtering out irrelevant subject-specific variations. This dual-penalization strategy represents a significant advancement beyond existing covariance-based eigen decomposition methods, which penalize only the functional PCs. Two power algorithm implementations, sequential and joint, are proposed, together with a cross-validation approach based on iterative regression for optimal smoothing parameter selection. Comprehensive simulation studies and real data applications demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially improves the extraction of informative and interpretable components, offering methodological and practical benefits for analyzing multivariate functional data across diverse domains.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2026

Probing Inflationary Origins of Primordial Black Holes with LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA O1--O4a data

Large primordial curvature perturbations not only produce primordial black holes (PBHs) but also inevitably source a scalar-induced stochastic gravitational-wave background upon horizon reentry. We analyze the combined LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA O1--O4a data to constrain two representative inflationary mechanisms for generating such perturbations: ultra-slow-roll inflation and an inflationary phase transition. Detecting no evidence for either scenario, we place 95% credible upper limits on the curvature-spectrum amplitude across the frequency range accessible to ground-based interferometers. Translated into the PBH context, these limits already exceed conventional constraints, probing abundance fractions far below unity. Our results remain robust even when the PBHs themselves are too rare to be directly detected or have evaporated. This work demonstrates that stochastic gravitational-wave observations offer a powerful and complementary probe of small-scale inflationary physics and PBH formation, with upcoming interferometers promising to extend sensitivity to a wider range of inflationary epochs and PBH masses.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2026

When Speech Meets Lips: Interpretable Audio-Visual Synchronization for L2 Pronunciation Assessment

Automatic Pronunciation Assessment (APA) systems have achieved strong performance with transformer-based models and self-supervised speech representations. However, most methods rely only on acoustic signals and overlook temporal synchronization between speech and articulatory movements, limiting diagnostic feedback on timing mismatches important for L2 pronunciation training. We propose an interpretable audio-visual synchronization framework that explicitly models speech-lip temporal alignment through feature encoding, cross-attention fusion, lag estimation, stability quantification, and visualization. The framework introduces frame-level lag trajectories and a Lag Stability Index (LSI) to quantify synchronization robustness. We also interviewed 30 participants, including 10 instructors and 20 students with diverse first-language backgrounds, to assess its effectiveness. By transforming implicit alignment into interpretable representations, the framework connects automatic scoring with actionable Computer-Aided Pronunciation Training feedback. Datasets and supplemental materials are available at https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/lip_reading/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Top-$k$ Skill Retrieval: Diversity-Aware Skill Routing for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external skills, but routing user requests over large skill registries is difficult because many skills are functionally redundant while complex tasks often require complementary skill sets. Existing skill routers typically rank candidates independently by query relevance, which can waste context budget on redundant skills. We propose Diverse Skill Routing (DSR), a diversity-aware reranking framework that uses a Determinantal Point Process to balance relevance and non-redundancy. DSR introduces a query-residual diversity kernel that penalizes redundant skill overlap while reducing penalties caused only by shared query relevance. On the SkillRouter benchmark, DSR improves recall and full coverage over a strong pointwise reranking baseline, with larger gains on multi-skill queries. These results suggest that skill routing should be treated not only as relevance ranking, but also as complementary set selection.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

SpecAlign: Efficient Specification-Grounded Alignment of Large Language Models via Synthetic Data

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, alignment is no longer governed by a single universal notion of safety or helpfulness, but instead by provider- or application-specific model specifications. These specifications are typically long, structured, and frequently updated, yet existing alignment pipelines lack a systematic mechanism to operationalize them as training signals. In this paper, we propose specification-grounded alignment, a new alignment paradigm that treats provider-authored model specifications as the primary alignment target rather than abstract principles or static benchmarks. To instantiate this paradigm, we introduce SpecAlign, a framework that synthesizes alignment data directly from specification documents. SpecAlign combines structured rule annotation, controllable specification instantiation, and multi-agent adversarial data synthesis to generate fine-grained, boundary-aware preference pairs that capture both compliant behaviors and meaningful specification violations. Experiments across multiple model specifications and backbone models demonstrate that training with SpecAlign consistently improves rule compliance while preserving general capabilities and avoiding over-conservative behavior. These results suggest that grounding alignment in explicit model specifications enables rapid, precise, and scalable adaptation of LLM behavior to evolving policy requirements.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Residual Optimal Transport-Based Experts Collaboration Towards Modality-Aware Infrared-Visible Object Detection

Infrared-visible object detection (IVOD) integrates complementary evidence from visible and infrared sensors for reliable perception in challenging scenes. In practice, sensors may fail or drop frames, leaving one modality unavailable or intermittent. Existing methods for IVOD assume both modalities are always present, and fixed fusion collapses when one stream is missing. Furthermore, it remains a critical challenge to reliably estimate semantic correlation across heterogeneous modalities, especially under spectral distribution discrepancy. We present FlexibleFusion, a unified and adaptive method that flexibly allocates integration pathways and fusion strength, operating seamlessly across complete and missing-modality regimes. At its core, the Modality-Aware Experts Collaboration (MAEC) mechanism selectively activates and aggregates cross-modal or intra-modal expert pathways. It allows cross-modal fusion when full modalities are available and falls back to self-fusion under missing conditions. Additionally, we design Residual Self-Paced Entropic Optimal Transport (RSPEOT) to align heterogeneous feature distributions from a transport perspective. Instead of relying on the fixed sparsity coefficient in standard entropic optimal transport (EOT), RSPEOT introduces a residual-driven self-paced update that prioritizes reliable matches and progressively refines harder ones. This design alleviates the additional optimization burden of standard EOT while preserving reliable semantic alignment. Comprehensive experiments under complete and missing-modality protocols show consistent performance across arbitrary modality configurations. Code will be released upon publication.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

DOG-DPO:Dynamic Optimization in Geometry for Safety Alignment

Safety alignment for large language models relies on preference data, but current pipelines often train on large, redundant datasets. Existing data selection methods typically score each preference pair independently, collapsing directional preference information into scalar quality or diversity scores. This sample-centric view is especially limiting in multi-dataset settings, where shared safety directions coexist with dataset-specific residual risks. We propose DOG-DPO, a training-free data selection framework that treats preference pairs as structured geometric signals. DOG-DPO first represents each preference pair as a direction in model representation space. It then decomposes multi-dataset preference geometry into a global anchor subspace and dataset-specific residual subspaces. Finally, it selects subsets by maximizing diversity-based coverage, encouraging broad, non-redundant coverage of alignment directions before DPO training. Across six safety benchmarks and two model backbones, DOG-DPO achieves a strong utility-robustness trade-off using only 11% of the preference pairs. It recovers most of the safety gains of full-data training while remaining entirely teacher-free, training-free, and substantially faster than representative selection baselines.

cs.LG↗