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Yuming Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Yuming Feng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Neurosymbolic Embodied Agents

Language and vision-language models generate plausible embodied plans but do not guarantee executability, as their outputs can violate environment dynamics or act on incorrectly grounded entities. We present a neurosymbolic agent that factors long-horizon household tasks into task-directed visual exploration and constrained symbolic planning. In the first phase, a vision-language model and exploration harness acquire goal-relevant predicates and instance bindings from egocentric observations and grounded interactions, producing a symbolic initial state. In the second, a PDDL transition model restricts decoding to tokens that extend applicable actions. Monte Carlo tree search then evaluates executable continuations using a domain-independent planning heuristic. The resulting plans are executable by construction under the transition model, with transfer to the environment conditioned on correct visual grounding. On VirtualHome and ALFWorld, open 4B-27B models exceed 90% success in both environments, and our smallest agent substantially outperforms a 27B direct visual policy in each. Constraints and search prove complementary rather than interchangeable: in ALFWorld either alone solves under a third of tasks, whereas their combination solves over 95%. The method also uses several times fewer generated tokens than extended thinking and far fewer model-visible images than direct interaction, and residual failures localize to state acquisition rather than plan generation without any specialized training.

cs.RO

Does the Proof Prove It That Way? Faithful Formalization of Elements Proofs

In formal verification, both the autoformalization of statements and automated proof search have been studied extensively. While automated proof search can produce a formal proof that compiles, the generated proof does not necessarily reflect how the natural-language argument arrives at its conclusion--a property we refer to as faithfulness. With faithfully formalized proofs, one can check the reasoning behind a human- or AI-written argument, and assist mathematicians in formalizing their proof sketches. However, it is particularly challenging due to misalignment of formal proof tactics and natural language reasoning. In this work, we rigorously describe a set of five necessary conditions a faithful formal proof must satisfy, and introduce Pistis, an agentic, oracle-guided proof search that produces formal Lean proofs that satisfy them. At its core is a novel faithfulness-preserving divide-and-conquer search, which we name OrderDecompose, that tracks citation dependencies and blocks unfaithful shortcuts, paired with a refutation search, that surfaces gaps and errors in the natural language proof source. OrderDecompose completes proofs that baselines cannot close even within a 12-hour budget, and its artifacts compile over 33$\times$ as fast as prior work's. We apply Pistis on the first three books of Euclid's Elements, producing high-quality artifacts containing faithful formal proofs. Under a blinded human study and an LLM-as-a-judge protocol on rigorous rubrics, Pistis-generated proofs are favored over prior works--2.89$\times$ and 5.2$\times$ as often by human reviewers and the LLM judge, respectively. It further uncovers gaps in Euclid's proofs and their translation, and can accept or refute natural language proofs written by humans or AI, demonstrating that faithful formalization is useful as a proof-checking tool.

cs.AI

From Answer Generators to Reasoning Facilitators: Designing AI Tutors for Mathematical Reasoning in High-Stakes Environments

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into educational technology threatens to reduce mathematical learning to mere answer generation. This paper presents a generative study, usability study, and 12-participant field deployment of AITutor, an interactive system that translates theoretical pedagogical mechanisms into concrete user interface features. We explore how junior-high students preparing for high-stakes exams (Zhongkao) interact with AI tutoring. Through mixed-methods triangulation (7,379 telemetry events, 8 contextual observations, 10 interviews), we reveal that students actively resist traditional Socratic dialogue under time pressure, repurposing "answer-first" shortcuts as vital diagnostic checkpoints. We demonstrate how features like layered worked examples, step-linked visual grounding, and metacognitive scaffolding lower the interaction cost of reasoning repair. We contribute a "Reasoning-Centered Product Loop," offering actionable implications for designing AI that structurally supports the inspection, local repair, curriculum verification, and delayed retrieval of mathematical reasoning in the wild.

cs.HC

Theory-Scale Auto-Formalization of Logics for Computer Science

Auto-formalization is critical for scalable formal verification, but existing progress largely focuses on isolated statements, while theory-scale auto-formalization, which coherently translates hundreds of interdependent definitions, lemmas, and theorems, remains open due to challenges in consistency, faithfulness, scalability, and correctness. In this paper, we introduce LCS-Bench, a stand-alone, theory-scale benchmark based on Logics for Computer Science. LCS-Bench is built through a novel semi-automated agentic pipeline that leverages concept graphs, formal signature planning, issue tracking, sorry-filling with counter-example search, complemented by faithfulness review from human experts. The resulting artifact covers 327 textbook items, over 4,076 Lean declarations, and more than 85K lines of Lean code. The dataset supports broad evaluation through a data engine that automatically derives five tracks of evaluation benchmarks, measuring different aspects of auto-formalization and theorem-proving capabilities. We also introduce a novel evaluation protocol featuring definitional equivalence checkers, enabling more fine-grained and faithful assessment. Through extensive evaluation on 14 models, we demonstrate that (1) LCS-Bench is of high quality, consistent, and faithful; (2) the benchmark is challenging, with state-of-the-art models achieving only 20.1% on auto-formalization tasks; and (3) our analysis reveals key findings regarding theory-scale auto-formalization and suggests promising directions for future work.

cs.LG

GoAT-X: A Graph of Auditing Thoughts for Securing Token Transactions in Cross-Chain Contracts

Cross-chain bridges, the critical infrastructure of the multi-chain ecosystem, have become a primary target for attackers, resulting in over $2.8 billion in losses due to subtle implementation flaws. Existing defenses, such as bytecode-level static analysis, are ill-equipped to handle the semantic complexity of cross-chain interactions, while LLM-based approaches, which can understand source code, struggle with hallucinatory reasoning over complex, multi-contract dependencies. In this paper, we propose GoAT-X, a framework that shifts automated cross-chain smart contract codebases auditing from heuristic pattern matching toward systematic first-principles verification. GoAT-X structures the audit process as a Graph of Auditing Thoughts, explicitly mirroring how human experts decompose, reason about, and validate security logic. By anchoring LLM reasoning in statically extracted data flows and explicitly linking abstract security properties to concrete code implementations, the framework constrains semantic reasoning within well-defined structural and state boundaries. Within this constrained space, GoAT-X treats missing constraints and adversarial bypass paths in cross-chain logic as first-class vulnerability targets and dynamically explores reasoning paths to identify exploitable semantic gaps. We evaluate GoAT-X on a comprehensive benchmark covering all known cross-chain token transaction attacks. GoAT-X achieves 92% recall on fine-grained audit points and 95% coverage of vulnerable projects, while identifying 117 confirmed risks in the wild with low operational cost, establishing a new standard for scalable, logic-driven cross-chain security.

cs.CR

V2E: Validating Smart Contract Vulnerabilities through Profit-driven Exploit Generation and Execution

Smart contracts are a critical component of blockchain systems. Due to the large amount of digital assets carried by smart contracts, their security is of critical importance. Although numerous tools have been developed for detecting smart contract vulnerability, their effectiveness remains limited, particularly due to the high false positives included in the reported results. Therefore, developers and auditors are often overwhelmed with manually verifying the reported issues. A fundamental reason behind this is that while a reported vulnerability satisfies specific vulnerable patterns, it may not actually be exploitable, either because the vulnerable code cannot be triggered or it does not result in any financial loss. In this paper, we propose V2E, a new framework for validating whether a reported vulnerability is truly exploitable. The core idea of V2E is to automatically generate executable Proof-of-Concept Exploit (PoC for short), and then assess if the vulnerability could be triggered and incur any real damage (i.e., causing financial loss) by the PoC. While LLMs have shown proficiency in PoC generation, achieving our task is by no means trivial. In detail, it is difficult for LLM to: (1) generate and update PoC to trigger a specific vulnerability, (2) evaluate the PoC's effectiveness to validate exploitable vulnerability. To this end, V2E automates the whole process through a novel combination of PoC generation, validation, and refinement: (1) Firstly, V2E generates targeted PoCs by analyzing potential vulnerability paths. (2) Then, V2E verifies the validity of PoCs through triggerability and profitability analysis. (3) In addition, V2E iteratively refines the generated PoC based on PoC execution feedback, therefore, increasing the chance to confirm the vulnerability. Evaluation on 264 manually labeled contracts shows that V2E outperforms the baseline approach.

cs.SE

An Empirical Study of SFT-DPO Interaction and Parameterization in Small Language Models

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely used after supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align language models, yet empirical behavior under small backbones and modest data is under-specified. We systematically compare SFT-only, DPO-only, and staged SFT-to-DPO training alongside full fine-tuning (FFT) versus LoRA on a GPT-2-scale decoder, evaluating paraphrase detection and Shakespearean sonnet continuation. DPO yields small, task-dependent gains over strong SFT and can match competitive SFT accuracy without a warm start when the preference construction closely parallels the supervised objective. In contrast, parameterization dominates: FFT consistently outperforms LoRA at matched training depth, and LoRA does not reduce wall-clock time on our hardware. These findings indicate that, in this small-scale regime, supervised full-parameter adaptation remains the primary performance lever, while preference optimization and low-rank adaptation provide limited marginal returns.

cs.CL

SSR: Safeguarding Staking Rewards by Defining and Detecting Logical Defects in DeFi Staking

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) staking is one of the most prominent applications within the DeFi ecosystem, where DeFi projects enable users to stake tokens on the platform and reward participants with additional tokens. However, logical defects in DeFi staking could enable attackers to claim unwarranted rewards by manipulating reward amounts, repeatedly claiming rewards, or engaging in other malicious actions. To mitigate these threats, we conducted the first study focused on defining and detecting logical defects in DeFi staking. Through the analysis of 64 security incidents and 144 audit reports, we identified six distinct types of logical defects, each accompanied by detailed descriptions and code examples. Building on this empirical research, we developed SSR (Safeguarding Staking Reward), a static analysis tool designed to detect logical defects in DeFi staking contracts. SSR utilizes a large language model (LLM) to extract fundamental information about staking logic and constructs a DeFi staking model. It then identifies logical defects by analyzing the model and the associated semantic features. We constructed a ground truth dataset based on known security incidents and audit reports to evaluate the effectiveness of SSR. The results indicate that SSR achieves an overall precision of 92.31%, a recall of 87.92%, and an F1-score of 88.85%. Additionally, to assess the prevalence of logical defects in real-world smart contracts, we compiled a large-scale dataset of 15,992 DeFi staking contracts. SSR detected that 3,557 (22.24%) of these contracts contained at least one logical defect.

cs.SE

SUMFORU: An LLM-Based Review Summarization Framework for Personalized Purchase Decision Support

Online product reviews contain rich but noisy signals that overwhelm users and hinder effective decision-making. Existing LLM-based summarizers remain generic and fail to account for individual preferences, limiting their practical utility. We propose SUMFORU, a steerable review summarization framework that aligns outputs with explicit user personas to support personalized purchase decisions. Our approach integrates a high-quality data pipeline built from the Amazon 2023 Review Dataset with a two-stage alignment procedure: (1) persona-aware Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) via asymmetric knowledge distillation, and (2) Reinforcement Learning with AI Feedback (RLAIF) using a preference estimator to capture fine-grained, persona-relevant signals. We evaluate the model across rule-based, LLM-based, and human-centered metrics, demonstrating consistent improvements in consistency, grounding, and preference alignment. Our framework achieves the highest performance across all evaluation settings and generalizes effectively to unseen product categories. Our results highlight the promise of steerable pluralistic alignment for building next-generation personalized decision-support systems.

cs.CL

NoveltyRank: A Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Conceptual Novelty Estimation in AI Research

The accelerating pace of scientific publication makes it difficult to identify truly original research among incremental work. We propose a framework for estimating the conceptual novelty of research papers by combining semantic representation learning with retrieval-based comparison against prior literature. We model novelty as both a binary classification task (novel vs. non-novel) and a pairwise ranking task (comparative novelty), enabling absolute and relative assessments. Experiments benchmark three model scales, ranging from compact domain-specific encoders to a zero-shot frontier model. Results show that fine-tuned lightweight models outperform larger zero-shot models despite their smaller parameter count, indicating that task-specific supervision matters more than scale for conceptual novelty estimation. We further deploy the best-performing model as an online system for public interaction and real-time novelty scoring.

cs.LG

Balancing Efficiency and Fairness: An Iterative Exchange Framework for Multi-UAV Cooperative Path Planning

Multi-UAV cooperative path planning (MUCPP) is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems, aiming to generate collision-free trajectories for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to complete distributed tasks efficiently. A key challenge lies in achieving both efficiency, by minimizing total mission cost, and fairness, by balancing the workload among UAVs to avoid overburdening individual agents. This paper presents a novel Iterative Exchange Framework for MUCPP, balancing efficiency and fairness through iterative task exchanges and path refinements. The proposed framework formulates a composite objective that combines the total mission distance and the makespan, and iteratively improves the solution via local exchanges under feasibility and safety constraints. For each UAV, collision-free trajectories are generated using A* search over a terrain-aware configuration space. Comprehensive experiments on multiple terrain datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves superior trade-offs between total distance and makespan compared to existing baselines.

cs.RO

One Signature, Multiple Payments: Demystifying and Detecting Signature Replay Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts

Smart contracts have significantly advanced blockchain technology, and digital signatures are crucial for reliable verification of contract authority. Through signature verification, smart contracts can ensure that signers possess the required permissions, thus enhancing security and scalability. However, lacking checks on signature usage conditions can lead to repeated verifications, increasing the risk of permission abuse and threatening contract assets. We define this issue as the Signature Replay Vulnerability (SRV). In this paper, we conducted the first empirical study to investigate the causes and characteristics of the SRVs. From 1,419 audit reports across 37 blockchain security companies, we identified 108 with detailed SRV descriptions and classified five types of SRVs. To detect these vulnerabilities automatically, we designed LASiR, which utilizes the general semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist in the static taint analysis of the signature state and identify the signature reuse behavior. It also employs path reachability verification via symbolic execution to ensure effective and reliable detection. To evaluate the performance of LASiR, we conducted large-scale experiments on 15,383 contracts involving signature verification, selected from the initial dataset of 918,964 contracts across four blockchains: Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Arbitrum. The results indicate that SRVs are widespread, with affected contracts holding $4.76 million in active assets. Among these, 19.63% of contracts that use signatures on Ethereum contain SRVs. Furthermore, manual verification demonstrates that LASiR achieves an F1-score of 87.90% for detection. Ablation studies and comparative experiments reveal that the semantic information provided by LLMs aids static taint analysis, significantly enhancing LASiR's detection performance.

cs.CR

Copy-and-Paste? Identifying EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells in Multi-chain Reuse Contracts

As the development of Solidity contracts on Ethereum, more developers are reusing them on other compatible blockchains. However, developers may overlook the differences between the designs of the blockchain system, such as the Gas Mechanism and Consensus Protocol, leading to the same contracts on different blockchains not being able to achieve consistent execution as on Ethereum. This inconsistency reveals design flaws in reused contracts, exposing code smells that hinder code reusability, and we define this inconsistency as EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells. In this paper, we conducted the first empirical study to reveal the causes and characteristics of EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells. To ensure the identified smells reflect real developer concerns, we collected and analyzed 1,379 security audit reports and 326 Stack Overflow posts related to reused contracts on EVM-compatible blockchains, such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon. Using the open card sorting method, we defined six types of EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells. For automated detection, we developed a tool named EquivGuard. It employs static taint analysis to identify key paths from different patterns and uses symbolic execution to verify path reachability. Our analysis of 905,948 contracts across six major blockchains shows that EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells are widespread, with an average prevalence of 17.70%. While contracts with code smells do not necessarily lead to financial loss and attacks, their high prevalence and significant asset management underscore the potential threats of reusing these smelly Ethereum contracts. Thus, developers are advised to abandon Copy-and-Paste programming practices and detect EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells before reusing Ethereum contracts.

cs.SE

Defining and Detecting the Defects of the Large Language Model-based Autonomous Agents

AI agents are systems capable of perceiving their environment, autonomously planning and executing tasks. Recent advancements in LLM have introduced a transformative paradigm for AI agents, enabling them to interact with external resources and tools through prompts. In such agents, the workflow integrates developer-written code, which manages framework construction and logic control, with LLM-generated natural language that enhances dynamic decision-making and interaction. However, discrepancies between developer-implemented logic and the dynamically generated content of LLMs in terms of behavior and expected outcomes can lead to defects, such as tool invocation failures and task execution errors. These issues introduce specific risks, leading to various defects in LLM-based AI Agents, such as service interruptions. Despite the importance of these issues, there is a lack of systematic work that focuses on analyzing LLM-based AI Agents to uncover defects in their code. In this paper, we present the first study focused on identifying and detecting defects in LLM Agents. We collected and analyzed 6,854 relevant posts from StackOverflow to define 8 types of agent defects. For each type, we provided detailed descriptions with an example. Then, we designed a static analysis tool, named Agentable, to detect the defects. Agentable leverages Code Property Graphs and LLMs to analyze Agent workflows by efficiently identifying specific code patterns and analyzing natural language descriptions. To evaluate Agentable, we constructed two datasets: AgentSet, consists of 84 real-world Agents, and AgentTest, which contains 78 Agents specifically designed to include various types of defects. Our results show that Agentable achieved an overall accuracy of 88.79% and a recall rate of 91.03%. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the 889 defects of the AgentSet, highlighting the prevalence of these defects.

cs.SE

MotionWavelet: Human Motion Prediction via Wavelet Manifold Learning

Modeling temporal characteristics and the non-stationary dynamics of body movement plays a significant role in predicting human future motions. However, it is challenging to capture these features due to the subtle transitions involved in the complex human motions. This paper introduces MotionWavelet, a human motion prediction framework that utilizes Wavelet Transformation and studies human motion patterns in the spatial-frequency domain. In MotionWavelet, a Wavelet Diffusion Model (WDM) learns a Wavelet Manifold by applying Wavelet Transformation on the motion data therefore encoding the intricate spatial and temporal motion patterns. Once the Wavelet Manifold is built, WDM trains a diffusion model to generate human motions from Wavelet latent vectors. In addition to the WDM, MotionWavelet also presents a Wavelet Space Shaping Guidance mechanism to refine the denoising process to improve conformity with the manifold structure. WDM also develops Temporal Attention-Based Guidance to enhance prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of MotionWavelet, demonstrating improved prediction accuracy and enhanced generalization across various benchmarks. Our code and models will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV

Learning Multi-Agent Loco-Manipulation for Long-Horizon Quadrupedal Pushing

Recently, quadrupedal locomotion has achieved significant success, but their manipulation capabilities, particularly in handling large objects, remain limited, restricting their usefulness in demanding real-world applications such as search and rescue, construction, industrial automation, and room organization. This paper tackles the task of obstacle-aware, long-horizon pushing by multiple quadrupedal robots. We propose a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with three levels of control. The high-level controller integrates an RRT planner and a centralized adaptive policy to generate subgoals, while the mid-level controller uses a decentralized goal-conditioned policy to guide the robots toward these sub-goals. A pre-trained low-level locomotion policy executes the movement commands. We evaluate our method against several baselines in simulation, demonstrating significant improvements over baseline approaches, with 36.0% higher success rates and 24.5% reduction in completion time than the best baseline. Our framework successfully enables long-horizon, obstacle-aware manipulation tasks like Push-Cuboid and Push-T on Go1 robots in the real world.

cs.RO

MCGMark: An Encodable and Robust Online Watermark for Tracing LLM-Generated Malicious Code

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), numerous software service providers (SSPs) are dedicated to developing LLMs customized for code generation tasks, such as CodeLlama and Copilot. However, these LLMs can be leveraged by attackers to create malicious software, which may pose potential threats to the software ecosystem. For example, they can automate the creation of advanced phishing malware. To address this issue, we first conduct an empirical study and design a prompt dataset, MCGTest, which involves approximately 400 person-hours of work and consists of 406 malicious code generation tasks. Utilizing this dataset, we propose MCGMark, the first robust, code structure-aware, and encodable watermarking approach to trace LLM-generated code. We embed encodable information by controlling the token selection and ensuring the output quality based on probabilistic outliers. Additionally, we enhance the robustness of the watermark by considering the structural features of malicious code, preventing the embedding of the watermark in easily modified positions, such as comments. We validate the effectiveness and robustness of MCGMark on the DeepSeek-Coder. MCGMark achieves an embedding success rate of 88.9% within a maximum output limit of 400 tokens. Furthermore, it also demonstrates strong robustness and has minimal impact on the quality of the output code. Our approach assists SSPs in tracing and holding responsible parties accountable for malicious code generated by LLMs.

cs.CR

Collaborative Planar Pushing of Polytopic Objects with Multiple Robots in Complex Scenes

Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it can also be beneficial for low-cost mobile robots that are not equipped with a manipulator. This work tackles the general problem of controlling a team of mobile robots to push collaboratively polytopic objects within complex obstacle-cluttered environments. It incorporates several characteristic challenges for contact-rich tasks such as the hybrid switching among different contact modes and under-actuation due to constrained contact forces. The proposed method is based on hybrid optimization over a sequence of possible modes and the associated pushing forces, where (i) a set of sufficient modes is generated with a multi-directional feasibility estimation, based on quasi-static analyses for general objects and any number of robots; (ii) a hierarchical hybrid search algorithm is designed to iteratively decompose the navigation path via arc segments and select the optimal parameterized mode; and (iii) a nonlinear model predictive controller is proposed to track the desired pushing velocities adaptively online for each robot. The proposed framework is complete under mild assumptions. Its efficiency and effectiveness are validated in high-fidelity simulations and hardware experiments. Robustness to motion and actuation uncertainties is also demonstrated.

cs.RO