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Zheng Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Zheng Zhang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Kairos: A Regret-Aware Native World-Action Model Stack for Physical AI

We introduce \textbf{Kairos}, a regret-aware native world-action model stack for Physical AI. Kairos is motivated by the view that a physical world model should not aim to fully simulate all future pixels, but should learn and maintain the information most relevant to embodiment control: object state, spatial relations, contact conditions, task progress, action consequences, failure boundaries, and deployment uncertainty. Kairos establishes three model-side prerequisites toward this goal. First, it \textbf{learns} control-relevant information through a \textbf{Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum}, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into an intervention-strength progression from passive physical observation to intentional behavior and embodied action grounding. Second, it \textbf{maintains} control-sufficient states through a unified \textbf{understanding, generation, and prediction architecture} equipped with \textbf{Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention}, where local, mid-range, and global temporal pathways support multi-timescale state maintenance under efficient inference. Third, it \textbf{deploys} these states through a \textbf{Deployment-Aware System Co-Design}, treating latency, memory footprint, and hardware compatibility as first-order constraints for future observation, action, and feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model benchmarks, world-action benchmarks, long-horizon generation, and inference-efficiency evaluation show that Kairos achieves superior performance while offering a favorable efficiency to capability trade-off.

cs.AI↗

One-dimensional carbon nanostructures with periodic graphitic nitrogen substitution

Heteroatom substitution is a powerful route to tune the chemical and electronic properties of carbon nanomaterials. In particular, replacement of an sp2 hybridized carbon atom in the graphene lattice with a nitrogen atom (denoted as graphitic nitrogen) induces substantial changes in the electronic properties. These include changes in the band structure that can influence electronic transport, and magnetism. A key requirement for applications is both the periodic and precise incorporation of the heteroatoms in extended carbon lattices. Here, we report the on-surface synthesis and characterization of two one dimensional carbon nanostructures, a polymer and a graphene nanoribbon, consisting of periodically incorporated graphitic nitrogen atoms. The on-surface reactions toward formation of the nanostructures were monitored by scanning tunneling microscopy. The bond-resolved chemical structures of the reaction intermediates and products were investigated by atomic force microscopy, which enabled atomic-scale visualization of the graphitic nitrogen sites. The electronic properties of the nanostructures were studied by scanning tunneling spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations. Our analyses revealed the presence of localized nitrogen-centered electronic states. In the gas phase where the nanostructures are in a neutral charge state, these states undergo spin polarization leading to an open-shell ground state. Upon adsorption on Au(111), the nanostructures exhibit electron transfer to the surface, which resulted in a closed-shell ground state. Our results demonstrate a straightforward and generally applicable route to synthesize graphitic nitrogen-substituted carbon nanomaterials with potential applications in spintronics, catalysis and energy storage.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Continuous Speculative Decoding for Autoregressive Image Generation

Continuous visual autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated promising performance in image generation, but their inherently sequential nature results in slow inference speed. Speculative decoding, a successful acceleration technique for large language models (LLMs), has effectively accelerated discrete visual AR models. However, the absence of an analogous theory for continuous distributions precludes its use in accelerating continuous AR models. To fill this gap, this work presents continuous speculative decoding, and addresses challenges from: 1) low acceptance rate, caused by inconsistent output distribution modeled by target and draft models, and 2) modified distribution without analytic expression, caused by a complex integral. For challenge 1), we address low acceptance rates through an approximated criterion, a novel denoising trajectory alignment strategy based on reparameterization proximity, and token pre-filling. For challenge 2), we introduce acceptance-rejection sampling algorithm with an appropriate upper bound, thereby avoiding explicitly calculating the integral. Furthermore, our denoising trajectory alignment is also reused in acceptance-rejection sampling, effectively avoiding repetitive diffusion model inference. Extensive experiments on various models at 256x256 and 512x512 resolutions demonstrate that our approach achieves over 2x wall-time speedup while preserving the image generation quality. Codes is available at: https://github.com/MarkXCloud/CSpD

cs.CV↗

Formal Security Analysis of Agent Protocol Composition

AI agent protocols define how agents use tools, delegate work, and coordinate across software systems, but their security requirements remain incomplete and inconsistently enforced across deployments. We present AgentThread, a source-linked framework for security assurance analysis of agent protocols, from specification text to running SDKs. AgentThread contributes a layered security scope, protocol-derived checks formalized as TLA+ invariants, and a two-phase checker that compiles protocol specifications into model-checkable models and replays executable counterexamples against real SDKs through protocol adapters. For each finding, AgentThread records the source text behind the check and separates violated protocol requirements from missing recommendations, hardening gaps, and unassigned cross-protocol responsibilities. Across five emerging agent protocols, AgentThread identifies 35 specification-level findings, supports them with 80 implementation tests against production SDKs and reference servers, and finds 30 additional failures that emerge only under protocol composition. We further show that only one protocol enforces a security-relevant control in practice and no protocol assigns enforcement for cross-protocol behavior. Insecurity in agent protocols is therefore not only a specification or implementation problem, but also a responsibility gap across protocols, SDKs, and deployments.

cs.CR↗

Probing Anomalous Microwave Emission with the Square Kilometre Array

Anomalous microwave emission (AME) represents an excess of radiation in the 10-60 GHz range, distinct from synchrotron, free-free, or thermal dust emission. Although most commonly attributed to electric dipole radiation from rapidly rotating small dust grains (spinning dust), alternative mechanisms such as magnetic dipole emission (MDE) remain plausible. The detection of AME across diverse environments, from diffuse interstellar clouds to protoplanetary disks and external galaxies, suggests that multiple physical processes or carriers may contribute to its origin. Understanding AME is essential for both Galactic astrophysics and cosmology, as it constitutes a significant foreground for cosmic microwave background (CMB) studies, potentially biasing measurements. This chapter reviews current theoretical frameworks and observational evidence for AME, highlighting the key outstanding questions concerning its emission mechanisms, carriers, and polarization properties. We discuss how the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), through its unprecedented sensitivity, angular resolution, and frequency coverage, will transform AME studies. SKA observations will enable detailed mapping of AME morphology, precise characterisation of its spectral energy distribution, and the identification of its carriers in Galactic and extragalactic environments. By combining SKA-mid data with higher-frequency observations from ALMA and other facilities such as SPHEREx, it will be possible to disentangle competing models and exploit AME as a diagnostic probe of interstellar grain physics and the small-scale structure of the interstellar medium.

astro-ph.GA↗

Methodological Frontiers in 21-cm Intensity Mapping: the Treatment of Systematics and Foreground Contamination

The distribution of neutral hydrogen (HI) in the post-reionization universe traces the cosmic large-scale structure and therefore serves as a powerful cosmological probe. An efficient way to measure its distribution over wide sky areas and redshift ranges is through single-dish intensity mapping, which exploits the autocorrelation signal of each dish in a telescope array while scanning the same sky patch. Thanks to its broad frequency coverage and technical capabilities, SKA-Mid will enable measurements of the integrated 21 cm emission from HI up to redshift $z\sim3$, making single-dish intensity mapping a key observable for probing dark matter and dark energy. Isolating the faint 21 cm cosmological signal without introducing biases is, however, challenging. The 21 cm signal is several orders of magnitude weaker than the astrophysical foregrounds, and its analysis is further affected by instrumental systematics. Overcoming these difficulties requires detailed modelling together with continuous improvements and innovations in data-analysis techniques. Over the past decade, the international community has developed and tested new methods to address current observational challenges and prepare for forthcoming SKA-Mid observations. This chapter reviews recent advances in map-making and component-separation techniques, with particular emphasis on telescope-specific systematics such as beam response and correlated noise. We focus on results obtained in controlled simulation environments, providing a valuable framework for assessing the strengths and limitations of different approaches. Developing robust algorithms capable of accurately handling instrumental effects and sky-model uncertainties is a crucial step toward fully exploiting the cosmological potential of HI intensity-mapping surveys in the SKA Observatory era.

astro-ph.CO↗

Higher-Order Debiased Estimators for General Treatment Models

It is now well known that estimators based on influence functions can be sub-optimal in terms of convergence rates in various settings. To address this issue, higher-order influence functions (HOIF) are developed, generalizing the classical semiparametric theory. However, most existing results in this regard focus on treatment effect parameters defined in explicit forms, such as average treatment effects (ATE). In applications, economists are often confronted with tasks of inferring more complex parameters, such as quantile treatment effects (QTE) or effects of complicated treatment regimes/policy. These more complex parameters can often only be implicitly defined as the solution to nonlinear estimating equations, which correspond to M/Z-estimation problems. Our current understanding of these problems is mainly limited to the classical semiparametric theory. Given the foundational role of HOIF for estimating explicit parameters such as ATE, a modest step toward enriching the statistical foundation of econometrics and causal inference is to develop the corresponding higher-order estimators for those more complex parameters. To this end, we consider parameters of a class of non-separable structural models in the econometrics literature and develop a class of higher-order estimators for the target parameters. Statistical properties of these higher-order estimators are derived using recent advances in U-processes theory. Our proposed higher-order estimators relax complexity-reducing assumptions, quantified by Holder smoothness, imposed on the nuisance parameters compared to existing alternative estimators for many important parameters in this class, including QTE and quantile dose-response functions, among others.

econ.EM↗

FirmCure:Towards Autonomous and Adaptive Rehosting of Linux-Based Firmware

Full-system rehosting plays a critical role in the security analysis of Linux-based firmware. It matches commonly deployed firmware with sufficient background knowledge. However, for custom devices, existing approaches struggle to handle initialization and runtime obstacles in the rehosting process caused by specialized architectures and hardware-dependent configuration, which heavily rely on expert intervention. This ultimately creates fundamental bottlenecks and results in low rehosting efficiency. To address the above challenges, we propose FirmCure, the first LLM-driven full-system rehosting framework designed for autonomous and adaptive rehosting of Linux-based firmware. FirmCure develops an Adaptive Perception Inference mechanism to extract firmware structural dependencies via static analysis, followed by a Reflective Synthesis module for iterative configuration optimization, and finally an Autonomous Runtime Intervention module for real-time error remediation through runtime fault diagnosis and monitoring. We evaluated 21 IoT firmware images from 10 vendors across 5 architectures, while FirmCure achieved a 100% network port opening rate and 90.5% service interactivity, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Our experiments confirm that FirmCure's intervention strategies generalize across heterogeneous firmware. The framework successfully reproduces known vulnerabilities and discovers new security flaws.

cs.CR↗

SCOPE: Scale-Consistent One-Pass Estimation of 3D Geometry

We present SCOPE (Scale-Consistent One-Pass Estimation of 3D Geometry), a novel approach for estimating 3D geometry from extended monocular video sequences, where existing methods struggle to maintain both geometric accuracy and temporal consistency across hundreds of frames. Our approach generates affine-invariant 3D point maps with shared parameters across entire sequences, enabling consistent scale-invariant representations. We introduce three key innovations: viewpoint-invariant geometry aligning multi-perspective points in a unified reference frame; appearance-invariant learning enforcing consistency across exponential timescales; and frequency-modulated positioning enabling extrapolation to sequences vastly exceeding training length. Experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate significant improvements, reducing relative point map error by 24.2% and temporal alignment error by 34.9% on ScanNet compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our approach handles challenging scenarios with complex camera trajectories and lighting variations while efficiently processing extended sequences in a single pass. Project page: https://scope3d.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

sft-wick: A formalism and package for Feynman-diagram expansion and evaluation in stochastic field theories

When stochastic field dynamics are cast into a path-integral formulation, perturbation theory becomes systematic but the resulting expansion quickly grows combinatorially large. The setting targeted here includes multi-component, multi-dimensional fields with matrix propagators, tensor-valued couplings, and non-Gaussian driving noise specified by arbitrary $n$-point cumulants. Wick pairings grow factorially, and component indices must be routed through the tensor-valued vertices. The useful output is not a raw contraction list, but a diagram table: one entry per topology, with multiplicities, coupling sums, signs, and causal constraints resolved. We present sft-wick, an open-source Python package that constructs these diagram tables and computes their integrals numerically. Given an action and an observable, it enumerates topologically distinct Feynman diagrams, derives their algebraic coefficients, and evaluates the resulting diagram integrals from user-supplied response and cumulant functions. The core algorithm enumerates spatial topologies before routing component indices, avoiding contraction-by-contraction Wick expansion. Response-field constraints, including vanishing response-response contractions, the ito prescription, and the absence of causal response loops, are enforced during enumeration. Predictions are validated against direct Langevin simulation, agreeing to within the simulation's statistical noise.

physics.comp-ph↗

Edu-Theater: A Data-Efficient Agent Framework for Scalable Learner Behavior Simulation through Staging Roll-Call

Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement. Learner simulators play a critical role in simulating scalable learner behavior without the need for continuous involvement of real learners. However, existing methods are predominantly \textbf{individual-centric}, pairing a simulator with each learner to iteratively infer latent knowledge states from dense interaction histories, which is both data- and computation-intensive, and fragile in cold-start scenarios. We propose a \textbf{cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm} that first constructs cohort-level proficiency priors and refines individual learner states through a small number of targeted diagnostic queries. Based on this paradigm, we introduce \textbf{Edu-Theater}, an LLM-powered agent system that performs cohort-aware learner simulation via a teacher agent and retrospective roll-call probing over learner logs. Edu-Theater enables scalable future behavior simulation without the need for dense per-learner histories. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Edu-Theater achieves higher simulation accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls, producing synthetic data that enhances downstream applications such as adaptive testing.

cs.LG↗

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

cs.LG↗

People-Centred Medical Image Analysis via Fairness-Aware Human-AI Cooperation

Machine learning models for medical image analysis often exhibit subgroup-dependent performance, which impacts how decisions should be allocated between automated systems and human experts under limited resources. Prior work on AI fairness and human-AI cooperation, including learning to defer (L2D) and learning to complement (L2C), typically addresses these problems in isolation. We propose People-Centred Medical Image Analysis (PecMan), a framework for fairness-aware human-AI co-operative classification that jointly models subgroup-dependent reliability, decision allocation, and collaborative prediction. PecMan combines subgroup-specialised predictors with a gating and consolidation mechanism that dynamically assigns cases to automated models, human experts, or their combination, without requiring sensitive attributes at test time. We also introduce the FairHAI benchmark for evaluating trade-offs between predictive accuracy, subgroup equity, and human involvement. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis of multi-agent gating via selection regret and characterise fairness-coverage trade-offs under input-dependent allocation. Experiments across multiple medical imaging datasets demonstrate that PecMan achieves consistently improved trade-offs compared to methods that address fairness or human-AI cooperation separately.

cs.LG↗

The 1st PortraitCraft Challenge: A CVPR 2026 Workshop Competition on Portrait Composition Understanding and Generation

This paper presents an overview of the inaugural PortraitCraft Challenge, held as one of the official competitions at CVPR 2026. The challenge focuses on portrait composition understanding and generation, aiming to advance AI research in portrait aesthetics analysis and controllable image synthesis. Unlike existing datasets and tasks that primarily focus on global aesthetic scoring, PortraitCraft introduces a unified evaluation framework comprising two complementary tracks. Track 1 requires models to perform structured portrait composition understanding, and Track 2 requires models to generate portrait images from structured composition descriptions under explicit compositional constraints. To support the challenge, we constructed and publicly released a large-scale portrait composition dataset consisting of approximately 50,000 curated real portrait images, providing multi-level supervision. This report describes the challenge setup, evaluation protocols, dataset composition, and final results, along with an analysis of the technical characteristics of the submitted solutions. The PortraitCraft Challenge provides a standardized and reproducible platform for research on portrait composition understanding and generation, and is expected to foster further progress in the fields of portrait aesthetics and controllable image generation.

cs.CV↗

UniADC: A Unified Framework for Anomaly Detection and Classification

In this paper, we introduce a novel task termed unified anomaly detection and classification, which aims to simultaneously detect anomalous regions in images and identify their specific categories. Existing methods typically treat anomaly detection and classification as separate tasks, thereby neglecting their inherent correlations and limiting information sharing, which results in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose UniADC, a model designed to effectively perform both tasks with only a few or even no anomaly images. Specifically, UniADC consists of two key components: a training-free Controllable Inpainting Network and an Implicit-Normal Discriminator. The inpainting network can synthesize anomaly images of specific categories by repainting normal regions guided by anomaly priors, and can also repaint few-shot anomaly samples to augment the available anomaly data. The implicit-normal discriminator addresses the severe challenge of the imbalance between normal and anomalous pixel distributions by implicitly modeling the normal state, achieving precise anomaly detection and classification by aligning fine-grained image features with anomaly-category embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments on four anomaly detection and classification datasets, including MVTec-FS, MTD, WFDD and Real-IAD, and the results demonstrate that UniADC consistently outperforms existing methods in anomaly detection, localization, and classification. The code is available at https://github.com/cnulab/UniADC.

cs.CV↗

Humans' ALMANAC: A Human Collaboration Dataset of Action-Level Mental Model Annotations for Agent Collaboration

Recent advances in LLM agents have enabled complex cognitive capabilities, such as multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use, that increasingly position these agents as human collaborators. Effective collaboration, however, requires collaborators to continuously maintain and align mental models of their own reasoning,partners' intentions, and shared goals during the collaborative process. Today's agents rarely develop such capabilities since they are primarily optimized for task completion, and the community lacks authentic human collaboration data with action-level mental model annotations that could guide agents toward process-level collaborative competence. To bridge this gap, we present ALMANAC, a dataset of Action-Level Mental model ANnotations for Agent Collaboration built from the Map Task, a classic dyadic routing task from social science. ALMANAC contains 2,987 collaboration actions, each paired with theory-informed mental model annotations that record the participants' self-reasoning, perceived partner intent, and perceived team goal. We benchmark six LLMs on predicting humans' next-turn behavior and mental models. Our results demonstrate ALMANAC's utility in evaluating models' ability to simulate human collaborative behaviors and infer their underlying mental models.

cs.AI↗

Muon$^2$: Boosting Muon via Adaptive Second-Moment Preconditioning

Muon has emerged as a promising optimizer for large-scale foundation model pre-training by exploiting the matrix structure of neural network updates through iterative orthogonalization. However, the orthogonalization quality of Muon hinges on the number of Newton--Schulz (NS) iterations performed, which poses efficiency challenges due to its non-trivial computation and communication cost. We propose Muon$^2$, an extension of Muon, to improve both quality and efficiency by applying Adam-style adaptive second-moment preconditioning before orthogonalization. Our key insight is that the core challenge of polar approximation in Muon lies in the ill-conditioned momentum matrix, of which the spectrum is substantially improved by Muon$^2$, leading to faster convergence toward a practically sufficient orthogonalization. We further characterize the practical orthogonalization quality via directional alignment, under which Muon$^2$ demonstrates dramatic improvement over Muon at each polar step. Across GPT, LLaMA, and Mixture-of-Experts pre-training experiments up to 13B parameters, Muon$^2$ (and its memory-efficient variant Muon$^2$-F that preserves most of its benefits) consistently outperforms Muon and its variants while reducing NS iterations by 40%, and saves up to 1/4 training time over Muon when achieving the same loss.

cs.LG↗

Focus-then-Context: Subject-Centric Progressive Visual Token Reduction for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face a bottleneck of prohibitive computational costs arising from massive visual token sequences during inference. Existing vision token reduction methods alleviate this burden, but they unintentionally preserve the isolated visual subject strictly aligned with the user's query, which fails to substantially explore salient subjects and their contextual relationships. In this paper, we propose SPpruner, a subject-centric progressive reduction paradigm that emulates the \textit{Focus-then-Context} mechanism of the human visual perception system. Specifically, we first construct a focus identification module to explicitly model the interplay between visual saliency and semantic relevance. Herein, it can excavate the comprehensive visual subject spectrum to ensure a high-fidelity representation of visual input. Subsequently, a context-aware structural scanning module is developed to aggregate contextual cues from neighboring regions. As such, it can effectively restore global relational dependencies to uphold the structural integrity of the preserved subjects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our paradigm consistently outperforms SOTA methods, achieving up to 2.53 times speedup with only 22.2% of visual tokens retained in Qwen2.5-VL and a 67% FLOPs reduction on LLaVA with a negligible 0.6% accuracy drop.

cs.CV↗