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Researcher profile

Cheng Qian

Cheng Qian contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Languageeess.SPComputational Engineering, Finance, and Sciencecs.CYInformation RetrievalInformation Theorymath.ITmath.NAMathematical SoftwareMethodologyNumerical AnalysisRobotics

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Published work

13 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks but remain fundamentally static, unable to adapt their internal parameters to novel tasks, evolving knowledge domains, or dynamic interaction contexts. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in open-ended, interactive environments, this static nature has become a critical bottleneck, necessitating agents that can adaptively reason, act, and evolve in real time. This paradigm shift -- from scaling static models to developing self-evolving agents -- has sparked growing interest in architectures and methods enabling continual learning and adaptation from data, interactions, and experiences. This survey provides the first systematic and comprehensive review of self-evolving agents, organizing the field around three foundational dimensions: what, when, and how to evolve. We examine evolutionary mechanisms across agent components (e.g., models, memory, tools, architecture), categorize adaptation methods by stages (e.g., intra-test-time, inter-test-time), and analyze the algorithmic and architectural designs that guide evolutionary adaptation (e.g., scalar rewards, textual feedback, single-agent and multi-agent systems). Additionally, we analyze evaluation metrics and benchmarks tailored for self-evolving agents, highlight applications in domains such as coding, education, and healthcare, and identify critical challenges and research directions in safety, scalability, and co-evolutionary dynamics. By providing a structured framework for understanding and designing self-evolving agents, this survey establishes a roadmap for advancing more adaptive, robust, and versatile agentic systems in both research and real-world deployments, and ultimately sheds light on the realization of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) where agents evolve autonomously and perform beyond human-level intelligence across tasks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process underlying inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities in closed-world settings, they struggle in open-ended and dynamic environments. Agentic reasoning marks a paradigm shift by reframing LLMs as autonomous agents that plan, act, and learn through continual interaction. In this survey, we organize agentic reasoning along three complementary dimensions. First, we characterize environmental dynamics through three layers: foundational agentic reasoning, which establishes core single-agent capabilities including planning, tool use, and search in stable environments; self-evolving agentic reasoning, which studies how agents refine these capabilities through feedback, memory, and adaptation; and collective multi-agent reasoning, which extends intelligence to collaborative settings involving coordination, knowledge sharing, and shared goals. Across these layers, we distinguish in-context reasoning, which scales test-time interaction through structured orchestration, from post-training reasoning, which optimizes behaviors via reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning. We further review representative agentic reasoning frameworks across real-world applications and benchmarks, including science, robotics, healthcare, autonomous research, and mathematics. This survey synthesizes agentic reasoning methods into a unified roadmap bridging thought and action, and outlines open challenges and future directions, including personalization, long-horizon interaction, world modeling, scalable multi-agent training, and governance for real-world deployment.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Code as Agent Harness

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding and generating code, from competitive programming to repository-level software engineering. In emerging agentic systems, code is no longer only a target output. It increasingly serves as an operational substrate for agent reasoning, acting, environment modeling, and execution-based verification. We frame this shift through the lens of agent harnesses and introduce code as agent harness: a unified view that centers code as the basis for agent infrastructure. To systematically study this perspective, we organize the survey around three connected layers. First, we study the harness interface, where code connects agents to reasoning, action, and environment modeling. Second, we examine harness mechanisms: planning, memory, and tool use for long-horizon execution, together with feedback-driven control and optimization that make harness reliable and adaptive. Third, we discuss scaling the harness from single-agent systems to multi-agent settings, where shared code artifacts support multi-agent coordination, review, and verification. Across these layers, we summarize representative methods and practical applications of code as agent harness, spanning coding assistants, GUI/OS automation, embodied agents, scientific discovery, personalization and recommendation, DevOps, and enterprise workflows. We further outline open challenges for harness engineering, including evaluation beyond final task success, verification under incomplete feedback, regression-free harness improvement, consistent shared state across multiple agents, human oversight for safety-critical actions, and extensions to multimodal environments. By centering code as the harness of agentic AI, this survey provides a unified roadmap toward executable, verifiable, and stateful AI agent systems.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight

Agents built on vision-language models increasingly face tasks that demand anticipating future states rather than relying on short-horizon reasoning. Generative world models offer a promising remedy: agents could use them as external simulators to foresee outcomes before acting. This paper empirically examines whether current agents can leverage such world models as tools to enhance their cognition. Across diverse agentic and visual question answering tasks, we observe that some agents rarely invoke simulation (fewer than 1%), frequently misuse predicted rollouts (approximately 15%), and often exhibit inconsistent or even degraded performance (up to 5%) when simulation is available or enforced. Attribution analysis further indicates that the primary bottleneck lies in the agents' capacity to decide when to simulate, how to interpret predicted outcomes, and how to integrate foresight into downstream reasoning. These findings underscore the need for mechanisms that foster calibrated, strategic interaction with world models, paving the way toward more reliable anticipatory cognition in future agent systems.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Distinguish Sense from Nonsense: Out-of-Scope Detection for Virtual Assistants

Out of Scope (OOS) detection in Conversational AI solutions enables a chatbot to handle a conversation gracefully when it is unable to make sense of the end-user query. Accurately tagging a query as out-of-domain is particularly hard in scenarios when the chatbot is not equipped to handle a topic which has semantic overlap with an existing topic it is trained on. We propose a simple yet effective OOS detection method that outperforms standard OOS detection methods in a real-world deployment of virtual assistants. We discuss the various design and deployment considerations for a cloud platform solution to train virtual assistants and deploy them at scale. Additionally, we propose a collection of datasets that replicates real-world scenarios and show comprehensive results in various settings using both offline and online evaluation metrics.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Clinical trial site matching with improved diversity using fair policy learning

The ongoing pandemic has highlighted the importance of reliable and efficient clinical trials in healthcare. Trial sites, where the trials are conducted, are chosen mainly based on feasibility in terms of medical expertise and access to a large group of patients. More recently, the issue of diversity and inclusion in clinical trials is gaining importance. Different patient groups may experience the effects of a medical drug/ treatment differently and hence need to be included in the clinical trials. These groups could be based on ethnicity, co-morbidities, age, or economic factors. Thus, designing a method for trial site selection that accounts for both feasibility and diversity is a crucial and urgent goal. In this paper, we formulate this problem as a ranking problem with fairness constraints. Using principles of fairness in machine learning, we learn a model that maps a clinical trial description to a ranked list of potential trial sites. Unlike existing fairness frameworks, the group membership of each trial site is non-binary: each trial site may have access to patients from multiple groups. We propose fairness criteria based on demographic parity to address such a multi-group membership scenario. We test our method on 480 real-world clinical trials and show that our model results in a list of potential trial sites that provides access to a diverse set of patients while also ensuing a high number of enrolled patients.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

GOCPT: Generalized Online Canonical Polyadic Tensor Factorization and Completion

Low-rank tensor factorization or completion is well-studied and applied in various online settings, such as online tensor factorization (where the temporal mode grows) and online tensor completion (where incomplete slices arrive gradually). However, in many real-world settings, tensors may have more complex evolving patterns: (i) one or more modes can grow; (ii) missing entries may be filled; (iii) existing tensor elements can change. Existing methods cannot support such complex scenarios. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a Generalized Online Canonical Polyadic (CP) Tensor factorization and completion framework (named GOCPT) for this general setting, where we maintain the CP structure of such dynamic tensors during the evolution. We show that existing online tensor factorization and completion setups can be unified under the GOCPT framework. Furthermore, we propose a variant, named GOCPTE, to deal with cases where historical tensor elements are unavailable (e.g., privacy protection), which achieves similar fitness as GOCPT but with much less computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate that our GOCPT can improve fitness by up to 2:8% on the JHU Covid data and 9:2% on a proprietary patient claim dataset over baselines. Our variant GOCPTE shows up to 1:2% and 5:5% fitness improvement on two datasets with about 20% speedup compared to the best model.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

JULIA: Joint Multi-linear and Nonlinear Identification for Tensor Completion

Tensor completion aims at imputing missing entries from a partially observed tensor. Existing tensor completion methods often assume either multi-linear or nonlinear relationships between latent components. However, real-world tensors have much more complex patterns where both multi-linear and nonlinear relationships may coexist. In such cases, the existing methods are insufficient to describe the data structure. This paper proposes a Joint mUlti-linear and nonLinear IdentificAtion (JULIA) framework for large-scale tensor completion. JULIA unifies the multi-linear and nonlinear tensor completion models with several advantages over the existing methods: 1) Flexible model selection, i.e., it fits a tensor by assigning its values as a combination of multi-linear and nonlinear components; 2) Compatible with existing nonlinear tensor completion methods; 3) Efficient training based on a well-designed alternating optimization approach. Experiments on six real large-scale tensors demonstrate that JULIA outperforms many existing tensor completion algorithms. Furthermore, JULIA can improve the performance of a class of nonlinear tensor completion methods. The results show that in some large-scale tensor completion scenarios, baseline methods with JULIA are able to obtain up to 55% lower root mean-squared-error and save 67% computational complexity.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Learning Barrier Functions with Memory for Robust Safe Navigation

Control barrier functions are widely used to enforce safety properties in robot motion planning and control. However, the problem of constructing barrier functions online and synthesizing safe controllers that can deal with the associated uncertainty has received little attention. This paper investigates safe navigation in unknown environments, using onboard range sensing to construct control barrier functions online. To represent different objects in the environment, we use the distance measurements to train neural network approximations of the signed distance functions incrementally with replay memory. This allows us to formulate a novel robust control barrier safety constraint which takes into account the error in the estimated distance fields and its gradient. Our formulation leads to a second-order cone program, enabling safe and stable control synthesis in a priori unknown environments.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

High-dimensional Gaussian graphical model for network-linked data

Graphical models are commonly used to represent conditional dependence relationships between variables. There are multiple methods available for exploring them from high-dimensional data, but almost all of them rely on the assumption that the observations are independent and identically distributed. At the same time, observations connected by a network are becoming increasingly common, and tend to violate these assumptions. Here we develop a Gaussian graphical model for observations connected by a network with potentially different mean vectors, varying smoothly over the network. We propose an efficient estimation algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness on both simulated and real data, obtaining meaningful and interpretable results on a statistics coauthorship network. We also prove that our method estimates both the inverse covariance matrix and the corresponding graph structure correctly under the assumption of network “cohesion”, which refers to the empirically observed phenomenon of network neighbors sharing similar traits.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

VoxCap: FFT-Accelerated and Tucker-Enhanced Capacitance Extraction Simulator for Voxelized Structures

VoxCap, a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-accelerated and Tucker-enhanced integral equation simulator for capacitance extraction of voxelized structures, is proposed. The VoxCap solves the surface integral equations (SIEs) for conductor and dielectric surfaces with three key attributes that make the VoxCap highly CPU and memory efficient for the capacitance extraction of the voxelized structures: (i) VoxCap exploits the FFTs for accelerating the matrix-vector multiplications during the iterative solution of linear system of equations arising due to the discretization of SIEs. (ii) During the iterative solution, VoxCap uses a highly effective and memory-efficient preconditioner that reduces the number of iterations significantly. (iii) VoxCap employs Tucker decompositions to compress the block Toeplitz and circulant tensors, requiring the largest memory in the simulator. By doing so, it reduces the memory requirement of these tensors from hundreds of gigabytes to a few megabytes and the CPU time required to obtain Toeplitz tensors from tens of minutes (even hours) to a few seconds for very large scale problems. VoxCap is capable of accurately computing capacitance of arbitrarily shaped and large-scale voxelized structures on a desktop computer.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Amplitude Retrieval for Channel Estimation of MIMO Systems with One-Bit ADCs

This letter revisits the channel estimation problem for MIMO systems with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) through a novel algorithm--Amplitude Retrieval (AR). Unlike the state-of-the-art methods such as those based on one-bit compressive sensing, AR takes a different approach. It accounts for the lost amplitudes of the one-bit quantized measurements, and performs channel estimation and amplitude completion jointly. This way, the direction information of the propagation paths can be estimated via accurate direction finding algorithms in array processing, e.g., maximum likelihood. The upsot is that AR is able to handle off-grid angles and provide more accurate channel estimates. Simulation results are included to showcase the advantages of AR.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Model-aided Deep Neural Network for Source Number Detection

Source number detection is a critical problem in array signal processing. Conventional model-driven methods e.g., Akaikes information criterion (AIC) and minimum description length (MDL), suffer from severe performance degradation when the number of snapshots is small or the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low. In this paper, we exploit the model-aided based deep neural network (DNN) to estimate the source number. Specifically, we first propose the eigenvalue based regression network (ERNet) and classification network (ECNet) to estimate the number of non-coherent sources, where the eigenvalues of the received signal covariance matrix and the source number are used as the input and the supervise label of the networks, respectively. Then, we extend the ERNet and ECNet for estimating the number of coherent sources, where the forward-backward spatial smoothing (FBSS) scheme is adopted to improve the performance of ERNet and ECNet. Numerical results demonstrate the outstanding performance of ERNet and ECNet over the conventional AIC and MDL methods as well as their excellent generalization capability, which also shows their great potentials for practical applications.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access