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Zhenhua Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhenhua Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

AttnSR: Attention Step Reward for Long-Horizon Agentic RL

Long-horizon LLM agents make multi-step decisions, yet outcome-reward-only reinforcement learning provides little direct supervision for individual steps. We introduce AttnSR, a step-level reward augmentation method that derives reward allocations from policy attention extracted during training replay, without a separately trained reward model or additional rollouts. AttnSR traces backward through the policy model attention graph to estimate the relevance of earlier steps to the final response. The terminal step, measured relative to a running baseline, determines whether these rewards reinforce or penalize the selected steps. In a controlled Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct study, AttnSR consistently outperforms the PPO baseline across all evaluated checkpoints on ALFWorld, raising final held-out success from 91.2% to 97.1%. The ablation experiment shows that the benefit depends on how intermediate rewards are assigned, rather than simple accumulation of step rewards over time. AttnSR also improves ScienceWorld at every checkpoint while cutting environment interactions by 29.9%. These results support policy attention as a practical prior for step-level reward allocation in long-horizon agentic RL. Code is available at https://github.com/fairyshine/AttnSR .

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

General Linear-Layer Algorithms for Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference

Two-party privacy-preserving Transformer inference today mainly follows one of two paradigms: non-interactive computation over fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), or a hybrid of FHE and secure multi-party computation (MPC). Either way, linear layers account for a large share of the compute and communication budget. Most existing systems attack this cost by designing bespoke plaintext encodings and ciphertext matrix algorithms that minimize the expensive key-switching operations. The price is tight coupling: each scheme only works with its own packing/encoding strategy, and moving data between linear and nonlinear layers still triggers online ciphertext transmission and ring-field conversion. We take a different route. Instead of optimizing within a chosen encoding, we design a series of general algorithms for linear layers that can be readily integrated into existing inference systems, based on FHE and additive secret sharing. Our algorithms work with any compatible RLWE-based scheme and plug into both non-interactive FHE and hybrid FHE-MPC pipelines. Output interfaces in proposed algorithms allow them to be composed with different downstream nonlinear layers. Relative to existing linear layer schemes, our construction removes online key switching, ciphertext transmission, and online ring-field conversion. As a complement, we further propose a fused RNS-CKKS technique that reduces the computational cost of multiplication followed by rotation. We prove correctness and semi-honest security of the proposed algorithms and quantify the resulting savings analytically.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

A Global Magnetohydrodynamic Simulation of the Birth and Cannibalism of Homologous Coronal Mass Ejections

Homologous coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are sequential eruptions from the same active region. They are of particular space weather interest because they can interact and coalesce into compound ejecta, potentially amplifying their geomagnetic impact. Yet the full chain from recurrent initiation to magnetic merging has not been captured self-consistently in a single global simulation. We present a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic model that generates three homologous CMEs from a bipolar active region by recurrent photospheric shearing. All three eruptions follow the same initiation mechanism by tether-cutting reconnection within a recurrently formed sigmoid, while the later CMEs propagate significantly faster than the first. We demonstrate that this speed hierarchy arises from progressive coronal preconditioning; preceding eruptions evacuate the overlying corona, reducing both mass loading and ambient drag. The faster later CMEs catch up with their predecessors, and the compression between them forms inter-CME current sheets. Reconnection within these current sheets then progressively merges the interacting flux systems, completing the cannibalistic process. Synthetic coronagraph images reproduce the apparent coalescence of multiple white-light fronts. This simulation provides the first self-consistent global view of the birth, preconditioning, and cannibalistic interaction of homologous CMEs, bridging recurrent eruption initiation and inter-CME magnetic merging in the near-Sun corona.

astro-ph.SR↗
arXiv2026

Area-minimizing submanifolds are not generically smooth, except for geodesics, minimal surfaces, and minimal hypersurfaces

We prove that area-minimizing submanifolds in mod $2$ homology are not generically smooth, except in the case of geodesics, minimal surfaces and minimal hypersurfaces. This answers questions of White and Yau that ask about the generic smoothness of area-minimizing submanifolds. We furthermore establish a lower bound on the Hausdorff dimension of the singular sets of area-minimizing submanifolds with respect to open sets of Riemannian metrics. The lower bound is ${(d-3)}$ where $d$ denotes the dimension of the submanifold. As a crucial step, we prove that the cone over the Veronese minimal embedding of $\mathbb{RP}^2$ is mod $2$ area-minimizing, settling another long-standing open problem.

math.DG↗
arXiv2026

Demystifying the Privacy-Utility Trade-off in LLM Interactions

The integration of Large Language Models into daily tasks relies on context-rich instructions, inevitably exposing sensitive user information. Current privacy-preserving methods typically employ context-agnostic static rules, causing severe utility degradation. However, the specific mechanisms governing how sanitization impacts downstream performance remain largely underexplored. To address this, we conduct a systematic analysis to deconstruct the privacy-utility trade-off, uncovering three underlying mechanisms: (1) Context-Dependent Utility, which first establishes when to sanitize by revealing that data value shifts from critical constraints to dispensable noise based on user intent; (2) Strategic Adaptation, which subsequently determines how to sanitize by dictating that the choice between removal and replacement depends on the task's reliance on factual integrity versus structural coherence; and (3) Combinatorial Interplay, which finally extends the protection scope by demonstrating that attributes form a semantic web of synergistic dependencies or antagonistic redundancies. Guided by these insights, we introduce an intent-driven local protection framework. By distilling a lightweight model Veilmind-4B to drive a dynamic extraction-sanitization-restoration pipeline, our approach reaches a low-leakage privacy point while preserving substantially higher response utility than existing privacy-oriented baselines, advancing the privacy-utility trade-off toward the Pareto frontier.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Spillover-Aware Multi-Value Steering for Pluralistic LLM Alignment

Activation steering controls LLM behavior at inference time by adding learned directions to hidden states, but existing methods handle one concept at a time. Pluralistic alignment, where different stakeholders need different value emphases, requires steering multiple dimensions simultaneously. We show that naive steering produces substantial spillover: the effect intended for one value leaks into others. This parallels the treatment-versus-spillover decomposition in causal inference. We trace spillover to geometric entanglement of steering directions, captured by their Gram matrix, and derive a zero-cost correction from an activation-norm-penalized objective that decouples each direction's contribution exactly. Our end-to-end pipeline requires no fine-tuning, no reward model, and no manual prompt engineering: given only domain questions, it automatically discovers value dimensions, extracts directions, diagnoses entanglement, and applies corrected steering. On climate discourse, the correction improves the net steering effect from +5.9% to +14.0%, validated over 100,000 pairwise judgments.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Continue or Replan? Bernoulli-Continuation Policy Learning for Adaptive Horizon Execution

Existing chunk-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models execute a fixed number of actions (i.e., execution horizon) before replanning, turning replanning into a task-agnostic periodic schedule that is independent of task progress. As a result, when no replanning boundary falls before a critical manipulation stage, it is executed from a stale chunk rather than a freshly replanned one. To address this limitation, we propose Bernoulli-Continuation Policy (BCP), a lightweight, plug-and-play framework for adaptive horizon execution that keeps the base VLA frozen. Given a fixed-length action chunk, its continuation head decomposes execution-horizon selection into a sequence of continue-or-replan decisions, which imposes an ordinal, prefix-sharing inductive bias over candidate horizons rather than treating them as independent classes. Since the optimal horizon for each chunk is not observable, we train this head with reinforcement learning from trajectory-level outcomes and introduce a Replanning-Efficiency Reward that jointly rewards task success and efficient VLA usage, discouraging the policy from collapsing to unnecessarily short horizons. On RoboTwin 2.0 with LingBot-VLA as the base policy, BCP improves the average success rate by +11.08% on 13 low-success tasks and from 89.88% to 93.94% (+4.06%) across all 50 tasks. Although trained only under the Clean setting, BCP generalizes to the Randomized setting, raising the average success rate by +4.06%. It also transfers to a different base policy $π_{0.5}$, achieving a better result on LIBERO (+1.7%) and, notably, on the harder LIBERO-PRO (+6.8%). On a real robot, BCP lifts success from 74% to 92% and from 44% to 84% on two manipulation tasks. Meanwhile, its negligible overhead, combined with higher success, makes BCP's overall runtime even lower than the fixed-horizon baselines.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Evolutionary Guided Decoding: Iterative Value Refinement for LLMs

While guided decoding, especially value-guided methods, has emerged as a cost-effective alternative for controlling language model outputs without re-training models, its effectiveness is limited by the accuracy of the value function. We identify that this inaccuracy stems from a core distributional gap: existing methods train static value functions on trajectories sampled exclusively from the base policy, which inherently confines their training to a narrow and suboptimal view of the potential output space. We propose Iterative Value Refinement, a evolutionary framework designed to narrow this gap. It employs Value Exploration to provide a more comprehensive and robust training signal, complemented by Iterative Self-Refinement, which uses the improved value function from one iteration to guide the generation of higher-quality data for the next. Extensive experiments on text summarization, multi-turn dialogue, and instruction following demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in aligning language models. Our approach not only achieves alignment but also significantly reduces computational costs by leveraging principled value function optimization for efficient and effective control.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

EvoClawBench: Can Agents Learn Reusable Skills from Their Own Runs?

Existing agent benchmarks primarily test task completion, tool use, or skill utility, but do not isolate whether a runtime can convert evidence from its own runs into reusable skills that improve fresh executions after authoring overhead. We introduce EvoClawBench, a benchmark for this closed-loop skill-learning question on repeated, fixture-backed tasks. EvoClawBench compares direct execution without skills, PreSkill authoring before execution, and PostSkill summarization from first-run evidence followed by a fresh second execution. The suite contains 100 tasks and 502 sub-problems across coding, data, office, security, operations, and domain-document workflows, with support for multiple agent runtimes. Experiments with OpenClaw and nanobot under local execution show that direct baseline performance is strongly runtime-dependent: OpenClaw remains below 20% across models, while nanobot ranges from 56.45% to 96.13%. Self-authored skills have mixed effects. nanobot GPT-5.4 stays above 96% in all modes and MiniMax-M2.7 improves from 90.97% to 94.50% under PostSkill, but nanobot DeepSeek-V4-Pro drops from 77.77% to 4.80% with PreSkill and 0.99% with PostSkill. OpenClaw shows similarly non-monotonic behavior, with some skill runs near baseline and others collapsing. These results indicate that learning reusable skills from an agent's own runs is selective and cost-sensitive, rather than an automatic benefit of adding skill authoring to an agent loop.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

The Hasse Principle for Geometric Variational Problems: An Illustration via Area-minimizing Submanifolds

The Hasse principle in number theory states that information about integral solutions to Diophantine equations can be pieced together from real solutions and solutions modulo prime powers. We show that an analogous Hasse principle holds for area-minimizing submanifolds: information about area-minimizing submanifolds in integral homology can be recovered from those in real homology and mod $n$ homology for all $n\in \mathbb{Z}_{\ge 2}$. As a consequence we answer several questions of Almgren, Morgan and White and prove: area-minimizing submanifolds are not generically calibrated, products of area-minimizing submanifolds are not generically area-minimizing, and classification of area-minimizing pairs of planes mod $n$ for $n\ge 4$.

math.DG↗
arXiv2026

Athena: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Data-efficient Process Reward Models

We present Athena-PRM, a multimodal process reward model (PRM) designed to evaluate the reward score for each step in solving complex reasoning problems. Developing high-performance PRMs typically demands significant time and financial investment, primarily due to the necessity for step-level annotations of reasoning steps. Conventional automated labeling methods, such as Monte Carlo estimation, often produce noisy labels and incur substantial computational costs. To efficiently generate high-quality process-labeled data, we propose leveraging prediction consistency between weak and strong completers as a criterion for identifying reliable process labels. Remarkably, Athena-PRM demonstrates outstanding effectiveness across various scenarios and benchmarks with just 5,000 samples. Furthermore, we also develop two effective strategies to improve the performance of PRMs: ORM initialization and up-sampling for negative data. We validate our approach in three specific scenarios: verification for test time scaling, direct evaluation of reasoning step correctness, and reward ranked fine-tuning. Our Athena-PRM consistently achieves superior performance across multiple benchmarks and scenarios. Notably, when using Qwen2.5-VL-7B as the policy model, Athena-PRM enhances performance by 10.2 points on WeMath and 7.1 points on MathVista for test time scaling. Furthermore, Athena-PRM sets the state-of-the-art (SoTA) results in VisualProcessBench and outperforms the previous SoTA by 3.9 F1-score, showcasing its robust capability to accurately assess the correctness of the reasoning step. Additionally, utilizing Athena-PRM as the reward model, we develop Athena-7B with reward ranked fine-tuning and outperforms baseline with a significant margin on five benchmarks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

TaskGround: Structured Executable Task Inference for Full-Scene Household Reasoning

In real home deployments, household agents must often operate from a complete household scene and a situated household request, rather than from a clean task specification. Such requests require agents to identify task-relevant entities, recover intended task conditions, and resolve ordering constraints from the surrounding scene context. We formalize this capability as full-scene household reasoning: given a complete household scene and a situated household request, an agent must infer executable task structure before producing a grounded skill-level action sequence. This setting is challenging because complete household scenes contain substantial task-irrelevant information, making direct complete-scene prompting inefficient and error-prone. In practical deployment, this challenge is further amplified by privacy and local compute constraints, which favor compact open-weight models with limited long-context reasoning ability. We propose TaskGround, a training-free and model-agnostic Ground-Infer-Execute framework that grounds complete scenes into compact task-relevant scene slices, infers executable task structure, and compiles it into grounded skill-level action sequences. To evaluate this setting, we introduce FullHome, a human-validated evaluation suite of 400 household tasks spanning diverse home-scale environments and both goal-oriented and process-constrained requirements. On FullHome, TaskGround improves task success rates by large margins across both proprietary and open-weight models. Notably, it makes Qwen3.5-9B competitive with GPT-5 under direct complete-scene prompting while reducing total input-token cost by up to 18x. Our results identify executable task-structure inference as a central bottleneck in full-scene household reasoning and show that structured grounding can make compact local models substantially more effective for practical household deployment.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

AgentVista: Evaluating Multimodal Agents in Ultra-Challenging Realistic Visual Scenarios

Real-world multimodal agents solve multi-step workflows grounded in visual evidence. For example, an agent can troubleshoot a device by linking a wiring photo to a schematic and validating the fix with online documentation, or plan a trip by interpreting a transit map and checking schedules under routing constraints. However, existing multimodal benchmarks mainly evaluate single-turn visual reasoning or specific tool skills, and they do not fully capture the realism, visual subtlety, and long-horizon tool use that practical agents require. We introduce AgentVista, a benchmark for generalist multimodal agents that spans 25 sub-domains across 7 categories, pairing realistic and detail-rich visual scenarios with natural hybrid tool use. Tasks require long-horizon tool interactions across modalities, including web search, image search, page navigation, and code-based operations for both image processing and general programming. Comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models exposes significant gaps in their ability to carry out long-horizon multimodal tool use. Even the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Pro with tools, achieves only 27.3% overall accuracy, and hard instances can require more than 25 tool-calling turns. We expect AgentVista to accelerate the development of more capable and reliable multimodal agents for realistic and ultra-challenging problem solving.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

On a conjecture of Almgren II: area-minimizing submanifolds with fractal singular sets on almost any manifold

This paper is the second in a two-part solution to Almgren's conjecture on the existence of area-minimizing submanifolds with fractal singular sets. In part one, we construct area-minimizing submanifolds with fractal singular sets on certain special manifolds. Here we continue our work and show that area-minimizing submanifolds with fractal singular sets exist on almost any smooth manifold.

math.DG↗
arXiv2025

Response Attack: Exploiting Contextual Priming to Jailbreak Large Language Models

Contextual priming, where earlier stimuli covertly bias later judgments, offers an unexplored attack surface for large language models (LLMs). We uncover a contextual priming vulnerability in which the previous response in the dialogue can steer its subsequent behavior toward policy-violating content. While existing jailbreak attacks largely rely on single-turn or multi-turn prompt manipulations, or inject static in-context examples, these methods suffer from limited effectiveness, inefficiency, or semantic drift. We introduce Response Attack (RA), a novel framework that strategically leverages intermediate, mildly harmful responses as contextual primers within a dialogue. By reformulating harmful queries and injecting these intermediate responses before issuing a targeted trigger prompt, RA exploits a previously overlooked vulnerability in LLMs. Extensive experiments across eight state-of-the-art LLMs show that RA consistently achieves significantly higher attack success rates than nine leading jailbreak baselines. Our results demonstrate that the success of RA is directly attributable to the strategic use of intermediate responses, which induce models to generate more explicit and relevant harmful content while maintaining stealth, efficiency, and fidelity to the original query. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Dtc7w3PQ/Response-Attack.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

On a conjecture of Almgren: area-minimizing submanifolds with fractal singularities

We construct area-minimizing submanifolds with fractal singular sets on compact Riemannian manifolds. Thus, we settle a conjecture by Almgren and our answer is sharp dimensionwise. Furthermore, we can prescribe arbitrarily the strata in the Almgren stratification of the singular sets of our area-minimizing submanifolds, and our results hold in the category of integral currents, mod v currents and stable stationary varifolds.

math.DG↗
arXiv2025

SpecVLM: Fast Speculative Decoding in Vision-Language Models

Speculative decoding is a powerful way to accelerate autoregressive large language models (LLMs), but directly porting it to vision-language models (VLMs) faces unique systems constraints: the prefill stage is dominated by visual tokens whose count scales with image resolution and video length, inflating both compute and memory, especially the key-value (KV) cache. We study speculative decoding for VLMs and introduce SpecVLM, a practical system that (1) establishes a strong EAGLE-2-style baseline, EagleVLM, delivering 1.5--2.3x end-to-end speedups over full autoregressive inference, and (2) further accelerates VLM inference with an elastic visual compressor that adaptively selects among pruning, pooling, convolution, and resampler primitives to balance FLOPs/parameters and accuracy per input. To avoid costly offline distillation corpora, we propose an online-logit distillation protocol that trains the draft model with on-the-fly teacher logits and penultimate features using a combined cross-entropy and Smooth L1 objective, eliminating storage and preprocessing while remaining compute-efficient. This protocol reveals a training-time scaling effect: longer online training monotonically increases the draft model's average accepted length, improving speculative efficiency. Empirically, SpecVLM achieves additional acceleration, culminating in 2.5--2.9x end-to-end speedups within 5 epochs across LLaVA and MMMU, consistently over resolutions and task difficulties, while preserving the target model's output distribution (lossless decoding). Our code is available at https://github.com/haiduo/SpecVLM.

cs.CV↗