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Meng Liu

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Agent-as-a-Judge

LLM-as-a-Judge has revolutionized AI evaluation by leveraging large language models for scalable assessments. However, as evaluands become increasingly complex, specialized, and multi-step, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge has become constrained by inherent biases, shallow single-pass reasoning, and the inability to verify assessments against real-world observations. This has catalyzed the transition to Agent-as-a-Judge, where agentic judges employ planning, tool-augmented verification, multi-agent collaboration, and persistent memory to enable more robust, verifiable, and nuanced evaluations. Despite the rapid proliferation of agentic evaluation systems, the field lacks a unified framework to navigate this shifting landscape. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive survey tracing this evolution. Specifically, we identify key dimensions that characterize this paradigm shift and establish a developmental taxonomy. We organize core methodologies and survey applications across general and professional domains. Furthermore, we analyze frontier challenges and identify promising research directions, ultimately providing a clear roadmap for the next generation of agentic evaluation.

preprint2026arXiv

Exploring Synthesizable Chemical Space with Iterative Pathway Refinements

A well-known pitfall of molecular generative models is that they are not guaranteed to generate synthesizable molecules. Existing solutions for this problem often struggle to effectively navigate exponentially large combinatorial space of synthesizable molecules and suffer from poor coverage. To address this problem, we introduce ReaSyn, an iterative generative pathway refinement framework that obtains synthesizable analogs to input molecules by projecting them onto synthesizable space. Specifically, we propose a simple synthetic pathway representation that allows for generating pathways in both bottom-up and top-down traversal of synthetic trees. We design ReaSyn so that both bottom-up and top-down pathways can be sampled with a single unified autoregressive model. ReaSyn can thus iteratively refine subtrees of generated synthetic trees in a bidirectional manner. Further, we introduce a discrete flow model that refines the generated pathway at the entire pathway level with edit operations: insertion, deletion, and substitution. The iterative refinement cycle of (1) bottom-up decoding, (2) top-down decoding, and (3) holistic editing constitutes a powerful pathway reasoning strategy, allowing the model to explore the vast space of synthesizable molecules. Experimentally, ReaSyn achieves the highest reconstruction rate and pathway diversity in synthesizable molecule reconstruction and the highest optimization performance in synthesizable goal-directed molecular optimization, and significantly outperforms previous synthesizable projection methods in synthesizable hit expansion. These results highlight ReaSyn's superior ability to navigate combinatorially-large synthesizable chemical space.

preprint2026arXiv

MARS: Technical Report for the CASTLE Challenge at EgoVis 2026

This report presents MARS, short for Multimodal Agentic Reasoning with Source selection, our system for the CASTLE Challenge at EgoVis 2026. Participants must answer 185 closed-form questions over the CASTLE 2024 dataset. In contrast to prior single-video egocentric benchmarks, CASTLE requires reasoning over four days of activity, 15 synchronized perspectives, official transcripts, and multiple auxiliary modalities, including personal photos, auxiliary videos, gaze, thermal imagery, and heartrate measurements. MARS therefore treats the task as an agentic evidence-selection problem over multimodal sources rather than a purely text-only pipeline. MARS first follows the official CASTLE directory organization to build evidence memories from two primary sources, videos and transcripts, and four auxiliary sources, gaze, heartrate, photos, and thermal imagery. Long videos are converted into captions and DeepSeek-based summaries only because CASTLE videos are too long to fit directly into the model context for every question; this step compresses temporal evidence while keeping photos and other auxiliary media available as source-specific evidence. At inference time, a GPT-5.4 decision agent repeatedly chooses whether to continue reasoning, request a specific missing modality, produce an answer, or fall back to a random option when the evidence remains insufficient. The resulting system achieved second place on the final CASTLE Challenge leaderboard. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Hyu-Zhang/MARS.

preprint2022arXiv

Automatic detection of low surface brightness galaxies from SDSS images

Low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies are galaxies with central surface brightness fainter than the night sky. Due to the faint nature of LSB galaxies and the comparable sky background, it is difficult to search LSB galaxies automatically and efficiently from large sky survey. In this study, we established the Low Surface Brightness Galaxies Auto Detect model (LSBG-AD), which is a data-driven model for end-to-end detection of LSB galaxies from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) images. Object detection techniques based on deep learning are applied to the SDSS field images to identify LSB galaxies and estimate their coordinates at the same time. Applying LSBG-AD to 1120 SDSS images, we detected 1197 LSB galaxy candidates, of which 1081 samples are already known and 116 samples are newly found candidates. The B-band central surface brightness of the candidates searched by the model ranges from 22 mag arcsec $^ {- 2} $ to 24 mag arcsec $^ {- 2} $, quite consistent with the surface brightness distribution of the standard sample. 96.46\% of LSB galaxy candidates have an axis ratio ($b/a$) greater than 0.3, and 92.04\% of them have $fracDev\_r$\textless 0.4, which is also consistent with the standard sample. The results show that the LSBG-AD model learns the features of LSB galaxies of the training samples well, and can be used to search LSB galaxies without using photometric parameters. Next, this method will be used to develop efficient algorithms to detect LSB galaxies from massive images of the next generation observatories.

preprint2022arXiv

Fingering instabilities in binary granular systems

Fingering instabilities akin to the Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability in fluids have been observed in a binary granular system consisting of dense and small particles layered on top of lighter and larger particles, when the system is subjected to vertical vibration and fluidizing gas flow. Using observations from experiments and numerical modelling we explore whether the theory developed to describe the Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability in fluids is also applicable to binary granular systems. Our results confirm the applicability of the classic RT instability theory for binary granular systems demonstrating that several key features are observed in both types of systems, viz: (i) The characteristic wavenumber of the instability is constant with time, (ii) the amplitude of the characteristic wavenumber initially grows exponentially and (iii) the dispersion relation between the wavenumbers k of the interface instability and the growth rates n(k) of their amplitudes holds in both fluid-fluid and binary granular systems. Our results also demonstrate that inter-particle friction is essential for the RT instability to occur in granular media. For zero particle friction the interface instability bears a greater resembles to the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability. We further define a yield criterion Y for the interface by treating the granular medium as a viscoplastic material; only for Y > 15 fingering occurs. Interestingly, previous work has shown that instabilities in the Earth's lower mantle, another viscoplastic material, also occur for similar values of Y.

preprint2022arXiv

Generating 3D Molecules for Target Protein Binding

A fundamental problem in drug discovery is to design molecules that bind to specific proteins. To tackle this problem using machine learning methods, here we propose a novel and effective framework, known as GraphBP, to generate 3D molecules that bind to given proteins by placing atoms of specific types and locations to the given binding site one by one. In particular, at each step, we first employ a 3D graph neural network to obtain geometry-aware and chemically informative representations from the intermediate contextual information. Such context includes the given binding site and atoms placed in the previous steps. Second, to preserve the desirable equivariance property, we select a local reference atom according to the designed auxiliary classifiers and then construct a local spherical coordinate system. Finally, to place a new atom, we generate its atom type and relative location w.r.t. the constructed local coordinate system via a flow model. We also consider generating the variables of interest sequentially to capture the underlying dependencies among them. Experiments demonstrate that our GraphBP is effective to generate 3D molecules with binding ability to target protein binding sites. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/divelab/GraphBP.

preprint2022arXiv

GraphFM: Improving Large-Scale GNN Training via Feature Momentum

Training of graph neural networks (GNNs) for large-scale node classification is challenging. A key difficulty lies in obtaining accurate hidden node representations while avoiding the neighborhood explosion problem. Here, we propose a new technique, named feature momentum (FM), that uses a momentum step to incorporate historical embeddings when updating feature representations. We develop two specific algorithms, known as GraphFM-IB and GraphFM-OB, that consider in-batch and out-of-batch data, respectively. GraphFM-IB applies FM to in-batch sampled data, while GraphFM-OB applies FM to out-of-batch data that are 1-hop neighborhood of in-batch data. We provide a convergence analysis for GraphFM-IB and some theoretical insight for GraphFM-OB. Empirically, we observe that GraphFM-IB can effectively alleviate the neighborhood explosion problem of existing methods. In addition, GraphFM-OB achieves promising performance on multiple large-scale graph datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Neighbor2Seq: Deep Learning on Massive Graphs by Transforming Neighbors to Sequences

Modern graph neural networks (GNNs) use a message passing scheme and have achieved great success in many fields. However, this recursive design inherently leads to excessive computation and memory requirements, making it not applicable to massive real-world graphs. In this work, we propose the Neighbor2Seq to transform the hierarchical neighborhood of each node into a sequence. This novel transformation enables the subsequent mini-batch training for general deep learning operations, such as convolution and attention, that are designed for grid-like data and are shown to be powerful in various domains. Therefore, our Neighbor2Seq naturally endows GNNs with the efficiency and advantages of deep learning operations on grid-like data by precomputing the Neighbor2Seq transformations. We evaluate our method on a massive graph, with more than 111 million nodes and 1.6 billion edges, as well as several medium-scale graphs. Results show that our proposed method is scalable to massive graphs and achieves superior performance across massive and medium-scale graphs. Our code is available at https://github.com/divelab/Neighbor2Seq.

preprint2022arXiv

Performance Analysis and Power Allocation of Joint Communication and Sensing Towards Future Communication Networks

To mitigate the radar and communication frequency overlapping caused by massive devices access, we propose a novel joint communication and sensing (JCS) system in this paper, where a micro base station (MiBS) can realize target sensing and cooperative communication simultaneously. Concretely, the MiBS, as the sensing equipment, can also serve as a full-duplex (FD) decode-and-forward (DF) relay to assist the end-to-end communication. To further improve the spectrum utilization, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is adopted such that the communication between the macro base station (MaBS) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. To facilitate the performance evaluation, the exact and asymptotic outage probabilities, ergodic rates, sensing probability of the system are characterized. Subsequently, two optimal power allocation (OPA) problems of maximizing the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of sensing signal and maximizing the sum rate for communication are designed that are solved by means of the Lagrangian method and function monotonicity. The simulation results demonstrate that: 1) the proposed JCS NOMA system can accomplish both communication enhancement and sensing function under the premise of the same power consumption as non-cooperative NOMA; 2) the proposed OPA schemes manifest superiorities over a random power allocation scheme.

preprint2021arXiv

Lift force acting on an intruder in dense, granular shear flows

We report a new lift force model for intruders in dense, granular shear flows. Our derivation is based on the thermal buoyancy model of Trujillo & Hermann[L. Trujillo and H. J. Herrmann, Physica A 330, 519 (2003).], but takes into account both granular temperature and pressure differences in the derivation of the net buoyancy force acting on the intruder. In a second step the model is extended to take into account also density differences between the intruder and the bed particles. The model predicts very well the rising and sinking of intruders, the lift force acting on intruders as determined by discrete element model (DEM) simulations and the neutral-buoyancy limit of intruders in shear flows. Phenomenologically, we observe a cooling upon the introduction of an intruder into the system. This cooling effect increases with intruder size and explains the sinking of large intruders. On the other hand, the introduction of small to mid-sized intruders, i.e. up to 4 times the bed particle size, leads to a reduction in the granular pressure compared to the hydrostatic pressure, which in turn causes the rising of small to mid-sized intruders.

preprint2020arXiv

Microscopic aspects of artificial ageing in Al-Mg-Si alloys

Al-Mg-Si alloys with total solute contents ranging from 0.8 to 1.4 wt.% were solutionised, quenched and then artificially aged (AA) at 180 °C, after which positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy was applied to obtain information about precipitation and vacancy evolution during preceding ageing. Hardness and electrical resistivity measurements were carried out to complement these measurements. AA was carried out in four different heating media, which allowed for varying the heating rate from 2.4 K/s to 170 K/s. The main result of the study is that there is a competition between vacancy losses and precipitation. Any precipitation taking place during quenching or during heating to the AA temperature helps to prevent vacancies from going to sinks and allows them to assist in solute clustering. Higher solute content, slower heating to 180 °C and natural pre-ageing before AA were found to have a comparable effect.

preprint2020arXiv

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real Image Denoising: Dataset, Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real image denoising with focus on the newly introduced dataset, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge is a new version of the previous NTIRE 2019 challenge on real image denoising that was based on the SIDD benchmark. This challenge is based on a newly collected validation and testing image datasets, and hence, named SIDD+. This challenge has two tracks for quantitatively evaluating image denoising performance in (1) the Bayer-pattern rawRGB and (2) the standard RGB (sRGB) color spaces. Each track ~250 registered participants. A total of 22 teams, proposing 24 methods, competed in the final phase of the challenge. The proposed methods by the participating teams represent the current state-of-the-art performance in image denoising targeting real noisy images. The newly collected SIDD+ datasets are publicly available at: https://bit.ly/siddplus_data.

preprint2020arXiv

Sparsely Grouped Multi-task Generative Adversarial Networks for Facial Attribute Manipulation

Recent Image-to-Image Translation algorithms have achieved significant progress in neural style transfer and image attribute manipulation tasks. However, existing approaches require exhaustively labelling training data, which is labor demanding, difficult to scale up, and hard to migrate into new domains. To overcome such a key limitation, we propose Sparsely Grouped Generative Adversarial Networks (SG-GAN) as a novel approach that can translate images on sparsely grouped datasets where only a few samples for training are labelled. Using a novel one-input multi-output architecture, SG-GAN is well-suited for tackling sparsely grouped learning and multi-task learning. The proposed model can translate images among multiple groups using only a single commonly trained model. To experimentally validate advantages of the new model, we apply the proposed method to tackle a series of attribute manipulation tasks for facial images. Experimental results demonstrate that SG-GAN can generate image translation results of comparable quality with baselines methods on adequately labelled datasets and results of superior quality on sparsely grouped datasets. The official implementation is publicly available:https://github.com/zhangqianhui/Sparsely-Grouped-GAN.

preprint2020arXiv

Towards Deeper Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks have shown significant success in the field of graph representation learning. Graph convolutions perform neighborhood aggregation and represent one of the most important graph operations. Nevertheless, one layer of these neighborhood aggregation methods only consider immediate neighbors, and the performance decreases when going deeper to enable larger receptive fields. Several recent studies attribute this performance deterioration to the over-smoothing issue, which states that repeated propagation makes node representations of different classes indistinguishable. In this work, we study this observation systematically and develop new insights towards deeper graph neural networks. First, we provide a systematical analysis on this issue and argue that the key factor compromising the performance significantly is the entanglement of representation transformation and propagation in current graph convolution operations. After decoupling these two operations, deeper graph neural networks can be used to learn graph node representations from larger receptive fields. We further provide a theoretical analysis of the above observation when building very deep models, which can serve as a rigorous and gentle description of the over-smoothing issue. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we propose Deep Adaptive Graph Neural Network (DAGNN) to adaptively incorporate information from large receptive fields. A set of experiments on citation, co-authorship, and co-purchase datasets have confirmed our analysis and insights and demonstrated the superiority of our proposed methods.

preprint2015arXiv

Microfiber-based few-layer black phosphorus saturable absorber for ultra-fast fiber laser

Few-layer black phosphorus (BP), as the most alluring graphene analogue owing to its similar structure as graphene and thickness dependent direct band-gap, has now triggered a new wave of research on two-dimensional (2D) materials based photonics and optoelectronics. However, a major obstacle of practical applications for few-layer BPs comes from their instabilities of laser-induced optical damage. Herein, we demonstrate that, few-layer BPs, fabricated through the liquid exfoliation approach, can be developed as a new and practical saturable absorber (SA) by depositing few-layer BPs with microfiber. The saturable absorption property of few-layer BPs had been verified through an open-aperture z-scan measurement at the telecommunication band and the microfiber-based BP device had been found to show a saturable average power of ~4.5 mW and a modulation depth of 10.9%, which is further confirmed through a balanced twin detection measurement. By further integrating this optical SA device into an erbium-doped fiber laser, it was found that it can deliver the mode-locked pulse with duration down to 940 fs with central wavelength tunable from 1532 nm to 1570 nm. The prevention of BP from oxidation through the 'lateral interaction scheme' owing to this microfiber-based few-layer BP SA device might partially mitigate the optical damage problem of BP. Our results not only demonstrate that black phosphorus might be another promising SA material for ultrafast photonics, but also provide a practical solution to solve the optical damage problem of black phosphorus by assembling with waveguide structures such as microfiber.

preprint2014arXiv

Femtosecond pulse generation from a Topological Insulator mode-locked fiber laser

We reported on the generation of femtosecond pulse in an anomalous-dispersion fiber ring laser by using a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based Topological Insulator (TI), Bi2Se3 saturable absorber (SA). The PVA-TI composite has a low saturable optical intensity of 12 MW/cm2 and a modulation depth of ~3.9%. By incorporating the fabricated PVA-TISA into a fiber laser, mode-locking operation could be achieved at a low pump threshold of 25 mW. After an optimization of the cavity parameters, optical pulse with ~660 fs centered at 1557.5 nm wavelength had been generated. The experimental results demonstrate that the PVA could be an excellent host material for fabricating high-performance TISA, and also indicate that the filmy PVA-TISA is indeed a good candidate for ultrafast saturable absorption device.