arXiv subjects

Ziyi Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Ziyi Liu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Head-wise Modality Specialization within MLLMs for Robust Fake News Detection under Missing Modality

Multimodal fake news detection (MFND) aims to verify news credibility by jointly exploiting textual and visual evidence. However, real-world news dissemination frequently suffers from missing modality due to deleted images, corrupted screenshots, and similar issues. Thus, robust detection in this scenario requires preserving strong verification ability for each modality, which is challenging in MFND due to insufficient learning of the low-contribution modality and scarce unimodal annotations. To address this issue, we propose Head-wise Modality Specialization within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for robust MFND under missing modality. Specifically, we first systematically study attention heads in MLLMs and their relationship with performance under missing modality, showing that modality-critical heads serve as key carriers of unimodal verification ability through their modality specialization. Based on this observation, to better preserve verification ability for the low-contribution modality, we introduce a head-wise specialization mechanism that explicitly allocates these heads to different modalities and preserves their specialization through lower-bound attention constraints. Furthermore, to better exploit scarce unimodal annotations, we propose a Unimodal Knowledge Retention strategy that prevents these heads from drifting away from the unimodal knowledge learned from limited supervision. Experiments show that our method improves robustness under missing modality while preserving performance with full multimodal input.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A State-Update Prompting Strategy for Efficient and Robust Multi-turn Dialogue

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with information forgetting and inefficiency in long-horizon, multi-turn dialogues. To address this, we propose a training-free prompt engineering method, the State-Update Multi-turn Dialogue Strategy. It utilizes "State Reconstruction" and "History Remind" mechanisms to effectively manage dialogue history. Our strategy shows strong performance across multiple multi-hop QA datasets. For instance, on the HotpotQA dataset, it improves the core information filtering score by 32.6%, leading to a 14.1% increase in the downstream QA score, while also reducing inference time by 73.1% and token consumption by 59.4%. Ablation studies confirm the pivotal roles of both components. Our work offers an effective solution for optimizing LLMs in long-range interactions, providing new insights for developing more robust Agents.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Degrees of Freedom and Information Criteria for the Synthetic Control Method

We provide an analytical characterization of the model flexibility of the synthetic control method (SCM) in the familiar form of degrees of freedom. We obtain estimable information criteria, which may be used to circumvent cross-validation when selecting either the tuning parameter in penalized variants of SCM or the weighting matrix in the SCM with covariates. We assess the impact of car license rationing in Tianjin; while a natural match is available, both it and other donors are noisy, inviting the use of SCM to average over approximately matching donors. The very large number of candidate donors calls for penalized variants of SCM and we observe that model selection using information criteria outperforms that based on cross-validation.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2026

Causal Panel Analysis under Parallel Trends: Lessons from a Large Reanalysis Study

Two-way fixed effects (TWFE) models are widely used in political science to establish causality, but recent methodological discussions highlight their limitations under heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) and violations of the parallel trends (PT) assumption. This growing literature has introduced numerous new estimators and procedures, causing confusion among researchers about the reliability of existing results and best practices. To address these concerns, we replicated and reanalyzed 49 studies from leading journals that employ TWFE models for causal inference using observational panel data with binary treatments. Using six HTE-robust estimators, diagnostic tests, and sensitivity analyses, we find: (i) HTE-robust estimators yield qualitatively similar but highly variable results; (ii) while a few studies show clear signs of PT violations, many lack evidence to support this assumption; and (iii) many studies are underpowered when accounting for HTE and potential PT violations. We emphasize the importance of strong research designs and rigorous validation of key identifying assumptions.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

Towards Natural Language Environment: Understanding Seamless Natural-Language-Based Human-Multi-Robot Interactions

As multiple robots are expected to coexist in future households, natural language is increasingly envisioned as a primary medium for human-robot and robot-robot communication. This paper introduces the concept of a Natural Language Environment (NLE), defined as an interaction space in which humans and multiple heterogeneous robots coordinate primarily through natural language. Rather than proposing a deployable system, this work aims to explore the design space of such environments. We first synthesize prior work on language-based human-robot interaction to derive a preliminary design space for NLEs. We then conduct a role-playing study in virtual reality to investigate how people conceptualize, negotiate, and coordinate human-multi-robot interactions within this imagined environment. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis, we refine the preliminary design space and derive design implications that highlight key tensions and opportunities around task coordination dominance, robot autonomy, and robot personality in Natural Language Environments.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

A three-dimensional multimode lumped-element resonator for collective spin manipulation and dispersive readout

We report a three-dimensional lumped-element multimode microwave resonator that enables homogeneous collective manipulation and dispersive readout of a macroscopic spin ensemble. By exploiting geometric symmetry, two antisymmetric modes with strongly suppressed cross-talk are engineered to spatially overlap and couple to the same ensemble at distinct frequencies. Using negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond at 28 mK, we observe collective strong coupling with a coupling strength of 5.0 MHz and demonstrate non-destructive dispersive readout via a detuned mode. The compact design, tunable coupling, and high field homogeneity make this resonator a versatile device for hybrid spin-photon systems and multimode solid-state quantum technologies.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

LongVideoAgent: Multi-Agent Reasoning with Long Videos

Recent advances in multimodal LLMs and systems that use tools for long-video QA point to the promise of reasoning over hour-long episodes. However, many methods still compress content into lossy summaries or rely on limited toolsets, weakening temporal grounding and missing fine-grained cues. We propose a multi-agent framework in which a master LLM coordinates a grounding agent to localize question-relevant segments and a vision agent to extract targeted textual observations. The master agent plans with a step limit, and is trained with reinforcement learning to encourage concise, correct, and efficient multi-agent cooperation. This design helps the master agent focus on relevant clips via grounding, complements subtitles with visual detail, and yields interpretable trajectories. On our proposed LongTVQA and LongTVQA+ which are episode-level datasets aggregated from TVQA/TVQA+, our multi-agent system significantly outperforms strong non-agent baselines. Experiments also show reinforcement learning further strengthens reasoning and planning for the trained agent. Code and data will be shared at https://longvideoagent.github.io/.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

FakeParts: a New Family of AI-Generated DeepFakes

We introduce FakeParts, a new class of deepfakes characterized by subtle, localized manipulations to specific spatial regions or temporal segments of otherwise authentic videos. Unlike fully synthetic content, these partial manipulations - ranging from altered facial expressions to object substitutions and background modifications - blend seamlessly with real elements, making them particularly deceptive and difficult to detect. To address the critical gap in detection, we present FakePartsBench, the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed to capture the full spectrum of partial deepfakes. Comprising over 81K (including 44K FakeParts) videos with pixel- and frame-level manipulation annotations, our dataset enables comprehensive evaluation of detection methods. Our user studies demonstrate that FakeParts reduces human detection accuracy by up to 26% compared to traditional deepfakes, with similar performance degradation observed in state-of-the-art detection models. This work identifies an urgent vulnerability in current detectors and provides the necessary resources to develop methods robust to partial manipulations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Translating Electrocardiograms to Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Useful for Cardiac Assessment and Disease Screening: A Multi-Center Study

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of global mortality, necessitating accessible and accurate diagnostic tools. While cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) provides gold-standard insights into cardiac structure and function, its clinical utility is limited by high cost and complexity. In contrast, electrocardiography (ECG) is inexpensive and widely available but lacks the granularity of CMR. We propose CardioNets, a deep learning framework that translates 12-lead ECG signals into CMR-level functional parameters and synthetic images, enabling scalable cardiac assessment. CardioNets integrates cross-modal contrastive learning and generative pretraining, aligning ECG with CMR-derived cardiac phenotypes and synthesizing high-resolution CMR images via a masked autoregressive model. Trained on 159,819 samples from five cohorts, including the UK Biobank (n=42,483) and MIMIC-IV-ECG (n=164,550), and externally validated on independent clinical datasets (n=3,767), CardioNets achieved strong performance across disease screening and phenotype estimation tasks. In the UK Biobank, it improved cardiac phenotype regression R2 by 24.8% and cardiomyopathy AUC by up to 39.3% over baseline models. In MIMIC, it increased AUC for pulmonary hypertension detection by 5.6%. Generated CMR images showed 36.6% higher SSIM and 8.7% higher PSNR than prior approaches. In a reader study, ECG-only CardioNets achieved 13.9% higher accuracy than human physicians using both ECG and real CMR. These results suggest that CardioNets offers a promising, low-cost alternative to CMR for large-scale CVD screening, particularly in resource-limited settings. Future efforts will focus on clinical deployment and regulatory validation of ECG-based synthetic imaging.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Topological Braiding and Dynamic Probing of Phase Transitions at Temporal Interfaces in Non-Hermitian Synthetic Dimensions

Non-Hermitian systems give rise to distinct topological phenomena, yet their manifestations at temporal interfaces characterized by abrupt changes in system parameters remain largely unex plored. Upon an abrupt alteration of the Hamiltonian in a one-dimensional non-Hermitian sys tem,the ensuring temporal interface excites both reflected and refracted wave modes. By intro ducing a chiral-symmetric Hamiltonian, this study reveals the topological effects at such temporal interfaces. We find that the reflection and refraction coefficients exhibit a topological braiding struc ture. This structure is directly determined by the difference in the topological invariants across the interface, establishing a bulk-boundary correspondence for temporal interfaces in non-Hermitian systems. Furthermore, we propose a dynamical probe that leverages the geometric similarity of eigenstates at the temporal interface to detect topological phase transitions. These findings estab lish a fundamental connection between topological braiding and nonreciprocal dynamics at temporal interfaces, providing a platform to explore phase transition detection and nonreciprocal phenomena in time-varying non-Hermitian systems.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

PersonaMem-v2: Towards Personalized Intelligence via Learning Implicit User Personas and Agentic Memory

Personalization is one of the next milestones in advancing AI capability and alignment. We introduce PersonaMem-v2, the state-of-the-art dataset for LLM personalization that simulates 1,000 realistic user-chatbot interactions on 300+ scenarios, 20,000+ user preferences, and 128k-token context windows, where most user preferences are implicitly revealed to reflect real-world interactions. Using this data, we investigate how reinforcement fine-tuning enables a model to improve its long-context reasoning capabilities for user understanding and personalization. We also develop a framework for training an agentic memory system, which maintains a single, human-readable memory that grows with each user over time. In our experiments, frontier LLMs still struggle with implicit personalization, achieving only 37-48% accuracy. While they support long context windows, reasoning remains the bottleneck for implicit personalization tasks. Using reinforcement fine-tuning, we successfully train Qwen3-4B to outperforms GPT-5, reaching 53% accuracy in implicit personalization. Moreover, our agentic memory framework achieves state-of-the-art 55% accuracy while using 16x fewer input tokens, relying on a 2k-token memory instead of full 32k conversation histories. These results underscore the impact of our dataset and demonstrate agentic memory as a scalable path toward real-world personalized intelligence.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Optimal Observables for the Chiral Magnetic Effect from Machine Learning

The detection of the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME) in relativistic heavy-ion collisions remains challenging due to substantial background contributions that obscure the expected signal. In this Letter, we present a novel machine learning approach for constructing optimized observables that significantly enhance CME detection capabilities. By parameterizing generic observables constructed from flow harmonics and optimizing them to maximize the signal-to-background ratio, we systematically develop CME-sensitive measures that outperform conventional methods. Using simulated data from the Anomalous Viscous Fluid Dynamics framework, our machine learning observables demonstrate up to 90\% higher sensitivity to CME signals compared to traditional $γ$ and $δ$ correlators, while maintaining minimal background contamination. The constructed observables provide physical insight into optimal CME detection strategies, and offer a promising path forward for experimental searches of CME at RHIC and the LHC.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Powered Text-Attributed Graph Anomaly Detection via Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

Anomaly detection on attributed graphs plays an essential role in applications such as fraud detection, intrusion monitoring, and misinformation analysis. However, text-attributed graphs (TAGs), in which node information is expressed in natural language, remain underexplored, largely due to the absence of standardized benchmark datasets. In this work, we introduce TAG-AD, a comprehensive benchmark for anomaly node detection on TAGs. TAG-AD leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate realistic anomalous node texts directly in the raw text space, producing anomalies that are semantically coherent yet contextually inconsistent and thus more reflective of real-world irregularities. In addition, TAG-AD incorporates multiple other anomaly types, enabling thorough and reproducible evaluation of graph anomaly detection (GAD) methods. With these datasets, we further benchmark existing unsupervised GNN-based GAD methods as well as zero-shot LLMs for GAD. As part of our zero-shot detection setup, we propose a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-assisted, LLM-based zero-shot anomaly detection framework. The framework mitigates reliance on brittle, hand-crafted prompts by constructing a global anomaly knowledge base and distilling it into reusable analysis frameworks. Our experimental results reveal a clear division of strengths: LLMs are particularly effective at detecting contextual anomalies, whereas GNN-based methods remain superior for structural anomaly detection. Moreover, RAG-assisted prompting achieves performance comparable to human-designed prompts while eliminating manual prompt engineering, underscoring the practical value of our RAG-assisted zero-shot LLM anomaly detection framework.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

anyECG-chat: A Generalist ECG-MLLM for Flexible ECG Input and Multi-Task Understanding

The advent of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has sparked interest in their application to electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. However, existing ECG-focused MLLMs primarily focus on report generation tasks, often limited to single 12-lead, short-duration (10s) ECG inputs, thereby underutilizing the potential of MLLMs. To this end, we aim to develop a MLLM for ECG analysis that supports a broader range of tasks and more flexible ECG inputs. However, existing ECG-QA datasets are often monotonous. To address this gap, we first constructed the anyECG dataset, which encompasses a wide variety of tasks, including report generation, abnormal waveform localization, and open-ended question answering. In addition to standard hospital ECGs, we introduced long-duration reduced-lead ECGs for home environments and multiple ECG comparison scenarios commonly encountered in clinical practice. Furthermore, we propose the anyECG-chat model, which supports dynamic-length ECG inputs and multiple ECG inputs. We trained the model using a three-stage curriculum training recipe with the anyECG dataset. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted, demonstrating that anyECG-chat is capable of supporting various practical application scenarios, including not only common report generation tasks but also abnormal waveform localization for long-duration reduced-lead ECGs in home environments and comprehensive comparative analysis of multiple ECGs. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/CuCl-2/anyECG-chat.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

High Pressure Superconducting transition in Dihydride BiH$_2$ with Bismuth Open-Channel Framework

Metal hydrides MHx with low hydrogen content are not expected to show high-Tc superconductivity owing to the low hydrogen-derived electronic density of states at Fermi level and the limited hydrogen contribution to electron-phonon coupling strength. In this work, we report on the successful synthesis of a novel bismuth dihydride superconductor, Cmcm-BiH$_2$, at approximately 150 GPa, and the discovery of superconductivity with Tc about 62 K at 163 GPa, marking the first instance of superconductor among the MH$_2$-type metal dihydrides. Cmcm-BiH$_2$ adopts a unique host-guest type structure, in which the Bi atoms via weak Bi-Bi covalent bonds form a three-dimensional open-channel framework that encapsulates H$_2$-like molecules as guests, thereby broadening the structural diversity of hydrides under high pressures. The occurrence of superconductivity is evidenced by a sharp drop of resistivity to zero and the characteristic downward shift of Tc under applied magnetic fields. Notably, Cmcm-BiH$_2$ remains stable down to at least 97 GPa during decompression, with the calculated lowest pressure for dynamic stability of 10 GPa. In-depth analysis reveals that the covalent bismuth open-channel structure forms metallic conduction channels, dominates the electronic states near the Fermi level, and contributes approximately 51% of the total $lambda$ in Cmcm-BiH$_2$, distinguishing it from known high-pressure hydride superconductors. These findings highlight the critical role of non-hydrogen elements in producing superconductivity and open new avenues for the design and optimization of high-Tc hydride superconductors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2025

Multi-Scale Diffusion Transformer for Jointly Simulating User Mobility and Mobile Traffic Pattern

User mobility trajectory and mobile traffic data are essential for a wide spectrum of applications including urban planning, network optimization, and emergency management. However, large-scale and fine-grained mobility data remains difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns and collection costs, making it essential to simulate realistic mobility and traffic patterns. User trajectories and mobile traffic are fundamentally coupled, reflecting both physical mobility and cyber behavior in urban environments. Despite this strong interdependence, existing studies often model them separately, limiting the ability to capture cross-modal dynamics. Therefore, a unified framework is crucial. In this paper, we propose MSTDiff, a Multi-Scale Diffusion Transformer for joint simulation of mobile traffic and user trajectories. First, MSTDiff applies discrete wavelet transforms for multi-resolution traffic decomposition. Second, it uses a hybrid denoising network to process continuous traffic volumes and discrete location sequences. A transition mechanism based on urban knowledge graph embedding similarity is designed to guide semantically informed trajectory generation. Finally, a multi-scale Transformer with cross-attention captures dependencies between trajectories and traffic. Experiments show that MSTDiff surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in traffic and trajectory generation tasks, reducing Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) across key statistical metrics by up to 17.38% for traffic generation, and by an average of 39.53% for trajectory generation. The source code is available at: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/MSTDiff .

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

Can LLMs Grasp Implicit Cultural Values? Benchmarking LLMs' Cultural Intelligence with CQ-Bench

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) refers to the ability to understand unfamiliar cultural contexts, a crucial skill for large language models (LLMs) to effectively engage with globally diverse users. Existing studies often focus on explicitly stated cultural norms, but fail to capture the subtle, implicit values that are common in daily conversation. To address this gap, we introduce CQBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' capability to infer implicit cultural values from natural conversational contexts. CQBench consists of multi character conversation based stories using values from the World Value Survey and the GlobalOpinions, with topics including ethical, religious, social, etc. Our automatic dataset construction pipeline integrates rigorous validation procedures (incorporation, consistency, and implicitness checks), achieving a 94.5% human model agreement in the final validation. To leverage CQBench data, we design three tasks of increasing complexity: attitude detection, value selection, and value extraction. These tasks evaluate whether models can detect attitude and recognize values embedded within natural dialogues rather than relying on explicit cultural knowledge. We find that while frontier models like o1 reach human level performance in value selection (0.809 F1), they still fall short in nuanced attitude detection (0.622 F1). Notably, finetuning a smaller LLaMA-3.2-3B on only 500 culturally rich examples improves performance by over 10%, even outperforming o3-mini in some cases. Using CQ-Bench, we provide insights into the current challenges in LLMs' CQ research and suggest practical pathways for enhancing LLMs' cross-cultural reasoning abilities.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Cohort-Anchored Robust Inference for Event-Study with Staggered Adoption

This paper proposes a cohort-anchored framework for robust inference in event studies with staggered adoption, building on Rambachan and Roth (2023). Robust inference based on event-study coefficients aggregated across cohorts can be misleading due to the dynamic composition of treated cohorts, especially when pre-trends differ across cohorts. My approach avoids this problem by operating at the cohort-period level. To address the additional challenge posed by time-varying control groups in modern DiD estimators, I introduce the concept of block bias: the parallel-trends violation for a cohort relative to its fixed initial control group. I show that the biases of these estimators can be decomposed invertibly into block biases. Because block biases maintain a consistent comparison across pre- and post-treatment periods, researchers can impose transparent restrictions on them to conduct robust inference. In simulations and a reanalysis of minimum-wage effects on teen employment, my framework yields better-centered (and sometimes narrower) confidence sets than the aggregated approach when pre-trends vary across cohorts. The framework is most useful in settings with multiple cohorts, sufficient within-cohort precision, and substantial cross-cohort heterogeneity.

econ.EM↗