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Kaituo Zhang

Kaituo Zhang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Are Tools All We Need? Unveiling the Tool-Use Tax in LLM Agents

Tool-augmented reasoning has become a popular direction for LLM-based agents, and it is widely assumed to improve reasoning and reliability. However, we demonstrate that this consensus does not always hold: in the presence of semantic distractors, tool-augmented reasoning does not necessarily outperform native CoT. To explain this performance gap, we propose a Factorized Intervention Framework that isolates the cost of prompt formatting, the overhead of the tool-calling protocol, and the actual gain from executing tools. Our analysis reveals a critical tradeoff: under semantic noise, the gains from tools often fail to offset the "tool-use tax", which is the performance degradation introduced by the tool-calling protocol itself. To address this, we introduce G-STEP, a lightweight inference-time gate to mitigate protocol-induced errors. While this yields partial recovery, our findings suggest that more substantial improvements still require strengthening the model's intrinsic reasoning and tool-interaction capabilities.

preprint2026arXiv

Cleansing the Artificial Mind: A Self-Reflective Detoxification Framework for Large Language Models

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed remarkable generative capabilities and emerging self-regulatory mechanisms, including self-correction and self-rewarding. However, current detoxification techniques rarely exploit these built-in abilities; instead, they rely on external modules, labor-intensive data annotation, or human intervention --factors that hinder scalability and consistency. In this paper, we introduce a fully self-reflective detoxification framework that harnesses the inherent capacities of LLMs to detect, correct toxic content, and refine LLMs without external modules and data annotation. Specifically, we propose a Toxic Signal Detector --an internal self-identification mechanism, coupled with a systematic intervention process to transform toxic text into its non-toxic counterpart. This iterative procedure yields a contrastive detoxification dataset used to fine-tune the model, enhancing its ability for safe and coherent text generation. Experiments on benchmark datasets such as DetoxLLM and ParaDetox show that our method achieves better detoxification performance than state-of-the-art methods while preserving semantic fidelity. By obviating the need for human intervention or external components, this paper reveals the intrinsic self-detoxification ability of LLMs, offering a consistent and effective approach for mitigating harmful content generation. Ultimately, our findings underscore the potential for truly self-regulated language models, paving the way for more responsible and ethically guided text generation systems.

preprint2022arXiv

A Demographic Attribute Guided Approach to Age Estimation

Face-based age estimation has attracted enormous attention due to wide applications to public security surveillance, human-computer interaction, etc. With vigorous development of deep learning, age estimation based on deep neural network has become the mainstream practice. However, seeking a more suitable problem paradigm for age change characteristics, designing the corresponding loss function and designing a more effective feature extraction module still needs to be studied. What is more, change of face age is also related to demographic attributes such as ethnicity and gender, and the dynamics of different age groups is also quite different. This problem has so far not been paid enough attention to. How to use demographic attribute information to improve the performance of age estimation remains to be further explored. In light of these issues, this research makes full use of auxiliary information of face attributes and proposes a new age estimation approach with an attribute guidance module. We first design a multi-scale attention residual convolution unit (MARCU) to extract robust facial features other than simply using other standard feature modules such as VGG and ResNet. Then, after being especially treated through full connection (FC) layers, the facial demographic attributes are weight-summed by 1*1 convolutional layer and eventually merged with the age features by a global FC layer. Lastly, we propose a new error compression ranking (ECR) loss to better converge the age regression value. Experimental results on three public datasets of UTKFace, LAP2016 and Morph show that our proposed approach achieves superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.