Soochow University
Abstract:Humanoid robots operating in human-centered environments (e.g., homes, hospitals, and offices) must mitigate foot--ground impact transients, as impact-induced vibration and noise degrade user experience and repeated impacts accelerate hardware wear. However, existing low-noise locomotion training often relies on kinematic proxy objectives or fragile force sensors, and footwear-induced changes in contact dynamics introduce distribution shifts that hinder policy generalization.We present QuietWalk, a physics-informed reinforcement learning framework for ground-reaction-force-aware humanoid locomotion under diverse footwear conditions. QuietWalk employs an inverse-dynamics-constrained physics-informed neural network (PINN) to estimate per-foot vertical ground reaction forces (GRFs) from proprioceptive signals, and integrates the frozen predictor into the RL training loop to penalize predicted impact forces without requiring force sensors at deployment.On a held-out real-robot dataset, enforcing inverse-dynamics consistency reduces vertical GRF prediction errors by 82%-86% compared with a purely supervised predictor and improves the coefficient of determination from 0.39/0.67 to 0.99/0.99 for the left/right feet. On hardware at 1.2 m/s (barefoot; averaged over four floor materials), QuietWalk reduces mean A-weighted noise level by 7.17 dB and peak noise level by 4.98 dB under a consistent recording setup. Cross-footwear experiments (barefoot, skate shoes, athletic sneakers, and high heels) across multiple surfaces further demonstrate robust adaptation to footwear-induced contact variations.
Abstract:Gadoxetate disodium-enhanced MRI is essential for the detection and characterization of hepatocellular carcinoma. However, acquisition of the hepatobiliary phase (HBP) requires a prolonged post-contrast delay, which reduces workflow efficiency and increases the risk of motion artifacts. In this study, we propose a Triple-Phase Sequential Fusion Network (TriPF-Net) to synthesize HBP images by leveraging the sequential information from pre-HBP sequences: while T1-weighted imaging serves as the indispensable baseline, the model adaptively integrates arterial-phase (AP) and venous-phase (VP) features when available. By modeling the tissue-specific contrast uptake and excretion dynamics across these three phases, TriPF-Net ensures robust HBP synthesis even under the stochastic absence of one or both dynamic contrast-enhanced sequences. The framework comprises an Enhanced Region-Guided Encoder and a Dynamic Feature Unification Module, optimized with a Region-Guided Sequential Fusion Loss to maintain physiological consistency. In addition, clinical variables, including age, sex, total bilirubin, and albumin, are incorporated to enhance physiological consistency. Compared with conventional methods, TriPF-Net achieved superior performance on datasets from two centers. On the internal dataset, the model achieved an MAE of 10.65, a PSNR of 23.27, and an SSIM of 0.76. On the external validation dataset, the corresponding values were 12.41, 23.11, and 0.78, respectively. This flexible solution enhances clinical workflow and lesion depiction, potentially eliminating the need for delayed HBP acquisition in HCC imaging.
Abstract:Automated feature generation extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. Traditional methods rely on predefined operator libraries and cannot leverage task semantics, limiting their ability to produce diverse, high-value features for complex tasks. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches introduce richer semantic signals, but still suffer from a restricted feature space due to fixed generation patterns and from the absence of feedback from the learning objective. To address these challenges, we propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (\textbf{MALMAS}) for automated feature generation. MALMAS decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities, and a Router Agent activates an appropriate subset of agents per iteration, further broadening exploration of the feature space. We further integrate a memory module comprising procedural memory, feedback memory, and conceptual memory, enabling iterative refinement that adaptively guides subsequent feature generation and improves feature quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets against state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/fxdong24/MALMAS
Abstract:Background: Agent skills are increasingly deployed as modular, reusable capability units in AI agent systems. Medical research agent skills require safeguards beyond general-purpose evaluation, including scientific integrity, methodological validity, reproducibility, and boundary safety. This study developed and preliminarily evaluated a domain-specific audit framework for medical research agent skills, with a focus on reliability against expert review. Methods: We developed MedSkillAudit (skill-auditor@1.0), a layered framework assessing skill release readiness before deployment. We evaluated 75 skills across five medical research categories (15 per category). Two experts independently assigned a quality score (0-100), an ordinal release disposition (Production Ready / Limited Release / Beta Only / Reject), and a high-risk failure flag. System-expert agreement was quantified using ICC(2,1) and linearly weighted Cohen's kappa, benchmarked against the human inter-rater baseline. Results: The mean consensus quality score was 72.4 (SD = 13.0); 57.3% of skills fell below the Limited Release threshold. MedSkillAudit achieved ICC(2,1) = 0.449 (95% CI: 0.250-0.610), exceeding the human inter-rater ICC of 0.300. System-consensus score divergence (SD = 9.5) was smaller than inter-expert divergence (SD = 12.4), with no directional bias (Wilcoxon p = 0.613). Protocol Design showed the strongest category-level agreement (ICC = 0.551); Academic Writing showed a negative ICC (-0.567), reflecting a structural rubric-expert mismatch. Conclusions: Domain-specific pre-deployment audit may provide a practical foundation for governing medical research agent skills, complementing general-purpose quality checks with structured audit workflows tailored to scientific use cases.
Abstract:Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful training paradigm for LLM-based agents. However, scaling agentic RL for deep research remains constrained by two coupled challenges: hand-crafted synthetic data fails to elicit genuine real-world search capabilities, and real-world search dependency during RL training introduces instability and prohibitive cost, which limits the scalability of Agentic RL. LiteResearcher is a training framework that makes Agentic RL scalable: by constructing a lite virtual world that mirrors real-world search dynamics, we enable a continuously improving training recipe that empowers a tiny search agent to outperform large-scale open-source and commercial models (e.g., Tongyi DeepResearch and Claude-4.5 Sonnet). Specifically, on common benchmarks such as GAIA and Xbench, our LiteResearcher-4B achieves open-source state-of-the-art results of 71.3% and 78.0% respectively, demonstrating that scalable RL training is a key enabler for Deep Research Agents.
Abstract:Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) extrapolation aims to predict future events based on historical facts. Recent studies have attempted to enhance TKG extrapolation by integrating TKG's evolving structural representations and textual event chains into Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, two main challenges limit these approaches: (1) The loss of essential spatial-temporal information due to shallow alignment between TKG's graph evolving structural representation and the LLM's semantic space, and (2) the progressive dilution of the TKG's evolving structural features during LLM fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Adapter (STK-Adapter), which flexibly integrates the evolving graph encoder and the LLM to facilitate TKG reasoning. In STK-Adapter, a Spatial-Temporal MoE is designed to capture spatial structures and temporal patterns inherent in TKGs. An Event-Aware MoE is employed to model intricate temporal semantics dependencies within event chains. In addition, a Cross-Modality Alignment MoE is proposed to facilitate deep cross-modality alignment by TKG-guided attention experts. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that STK-Adapter significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits strong generalization capabilities in cross-dataset task. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaoshuyuan0246/STK-Adapter.
Abstract:The combination of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has shown significant potential for enhancing the multi-task learning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, existing methods face two primary challenges: (1)Imprecise Routing in the current MoE-LoRA method fails to explicitly match input semantics with expert capabilities, leading to weak expert specialization. (2)Uniform weight fusion strategies struggle to provide adaptive update strengths, overlooking the varying complexity of different tasks. To address these limitations, we propose SAMoRA (Semantic-Aware Mixture of LoRA Experts), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework tailored for task-adaptive learning. Specifically, A Semantic-Aware Router is proposed to explicitly align textual semantics with the most suitable experts for precise routing. A Task-Adaptive Scaling mechanism is designed to regulate expert contributions based on specific task requirements dynamically. In addition, a novel regularization objective is proposed to jointly promote expert specialization and effective scaling. Extensive experiments on multiple multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that SAMoRA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and holds excellent task generalization capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/boyan-code/SAMoRA
Abstract:As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, caching responses so that they can be reused by users with semantically similar queries has become a vital strategy for reducing inference costs and latency. Existing caching frameworks have proposed to decide which query responses to cache by assuming a finite, known universe of discrete queries and learning their serving costs and arrival probabilities. As LLMs' pool of users and queries expands, however, such an assumption becomes increasingly untenable: real-world LLM queries reside in an infinite, continuous embedding space. In this paper, we establish the first rigorous theoretical framework for semantic LLM response caching in continuous query space under uncertainty. To bridge the gap between discrete optimization and continuous representation spaces, we introduce dynamic $ε$-net discretization coupled with Kernel Ridge Regression. This design enables the system to formally quantify estimation uncertainty and generalize partial feedback on LLM query costs across continuous semantic query neighborhoods. We develop both offline learning and online adaptive algorithms optimized to reduce switching costs incurred by changing the cached responses. We prove that our online algorithm achieves a sublinear regret bound against an optimal continuous oracle, which reduces to existing bounds for discrete query models. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our framework approximates the continuous optimal cache well while also reducing computational and switching overhead compared to existing methods.
Abstract:Knowledge Graph (KG) can effectively integrate valuable information from massive data, and thus has been rapidly developed and widely used in many fields. Traditional KG construction methods rely on manual annotation, which often consumes a lot of time and manpower. And KG construction schemes based on deep learning tend to have weak generalization capabilities. With the rapid development of Pre-trained Language Models (PLM), PLM has shown great potential in the field of KG construction. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent research advances in the field of construction of KGs using PLM. In this paper, we explain how PLM can utilize its language understanding and generation capabilities to automatically extract key information for KGs, such as entities and relations, from textual data. In addition, We also propose a new Hyper-Relarional Knowledge Graph construction framework based on lightweight Large Language Model (LLM) named LLHKG and compares it with previous methods. Under our framework, the KG construction capability of lightweight LLM is comparable to GPT3.5.
Abstract:Preference optimization is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, many margin-based objectives suppress the chosen response along with the rejected one, a phenomenon known as likelihood displacement, and no general mechanism currently prevents this across objectives. We bridge this gap by presenting a unified \emph{incentive-score decomposition} of preference optimization, revealing that diverse objectives share identical local update directions and differ only in their scalar weighting coefficients. Building on this decomposition, by analyzing the dynamics of the chosen/rejected likelihoods, we identify the \emph{disentanglement band} (DB), a simple, testable condition that characterizes when training can avoid likelihood displacement by realizing the preferred pathway: suppressing the loser while maintaining the winner, possibly after an initial transient. Leveraging the DB, we propose a plug-and-play \emph{reward calibration} (RC) that adaptively rebalances chosen versus rejected updates to satisfy the DB and mitigate likelihood displacement, without redesigning the base objective. Empirical results show that RC steers training toward more disentangled dynamics and often improves downstream performance across a range of objectives. Our code is available at https://github.com/IceyWuu/DisentangledPreferenceOptimization.