collaborators

23 papers

cs.LG2026

Margin-Drop Coordinates for Cross-Budget Robustness Evaluation

Yanliang Huang, Zhen Zhang, Peng Xie +4

Fixed-budget robustness evaluation can select the wrong frozen vision encoder. An encoder that survives a shallow attack may lose most of that robustness when the same evaluation i…

cs.RO2026

CompCPZ: Preserving Multi-Modal Intent in Language-Guided Robot Manipulation

Zhen Zhang, Ahmad Hafez, Peng Xie +3

A robot asked to "place the cup near the red plate or the blue plate" may reach the centroid between them and appear geometrically successful, while satisfying neither disjunct of…

cs.LG2026

Cross-View Correspondence Is a Measurement Intervention: Two-Sided Validation for Agent Evaluation and Credit Assignment

Zhen Zhang, Ahmad Hafez, Amr Alanwar

Agent evaluations and trace-based learning often compare outputs across transformed views through a post-response correspondence treated as neutral preprocessing. We show that this…

cs.AI2026

The Cost of Conservation: Coordination-Memory Laws for Exact-Support Generation

Zhen Zhang, Amr Alanwar

Many AI systems make decisions locally, even when every realized output must obey an additive conservation law, such as selecting exactly a fixed number of items. This constraint c…

cs.CL2026

Differentiable Fuzzy Inference Layer: A Monotone, Compositional Ordinal Reasoning Head for Large Language Models

Zhen Zhang, Amr Alanwar

A state-of-the-art language model asked to interpret "most of most students passed" typically answers "most," though composing two instances of "most" yields a proportion closer to…

cs.LG2026

Certified Mechanistic Interpretability: Lifting Single-Input Findings to Bounded Neighbourhoods

Zhen Zhang, Yanliang Huang, Peng Xie +2

Mechanistic interpretability reverse-engineers transformer circuits one input at a time, leaving observed mechanisms without guarantees over bounded input neighbourhoods. We addres…

cs.LG2026

Matrix Zonotopic Attention: A Context-Adaptive Value Projection for Set Transformers

Zhen Zhang, Amr Alanwar

Multi-head attention combines an input-dependent softmax routing with an input-independent linear value projection, so the per-sample operator mapping aggregated values to outputs…

cs.LG2026

Hybrid Probabilistic Zonotopes for Identifiable and Refinable Predictive Uncertainty

Zhen Zhang, Amr Alanwar

Probabilistic prediction heads in neural networks typically output either a Gaussian mixture or a single conformal region. Neither separates the distinct sources of uncertainty oft…

cs.RO2026

Probabilistic Reachable-Action Verification of Visuomotor Policies via Set-Based Training

Yanliang Huang, Zhuocheng Zhang, Peng Xie +5

Reachability analysis for visuomotor policies is difficult because large visual encoders make end-to-end set propagation computationally expensive and excessively conservative. We…

cs.RO2026

Certifying Plans under Model Mismatch: A Trilemma for Reachability from Scarce Data

Yanliang Huang, Zhen Zhang, Ahmad Hafez +4

Sim-to-real policies are designed under nominal dynamics, but target-system trials may yield only a few isolated one-step transitions. We study pre-execution certification of a fix…

eess.SY2026

Reachability Analysis With Probabilistic Zonotopes: Learning Realized Disturbances and Refining Aleatory Uncertainty

Amir Modares, Zhen Zhang, Themistoklis Charalambous +2

This paper develops a data-driven reachability framework for linear systems whose disturbances are modeled by probabilistic zonotopes (PZs), combining bounded deterministic and Gau…

cs.LG2026

DiffSlack: Learning under Nonlinear Inequality Constraints via Learnable Slack Variables

Ziqian Wang, Chenxi Fang, Zhen Zhang

Enforcing nonlinear inequality constraints in neural networks remains challenging, especially when the output is subject to many coupled constraints. Existing hard constraint metho…

eess.SY2026

Data-Driven Reachability Analysis Using Matrix Perturbation Theory

Peng Xie, Abdulla Fawzy, Zhen Zhang +1

We propose a matrix zonotope perturbation framework that leverages matrix perturbation theory to characterize how noise-induced distortions alter the dynamics within sets of models…

eess.SY2026

From Points to Sets: Set-Based Safety Verification in the Latent Space

Wenyuan Wu, Peng Xie, Zhen Zhang +3

We extend latent representation methods for safety control design to set-valued states. Recent work has shown that barrier functions designed in a learned latent space can transfer…

math.OC2026

PINNs in PDE Constrained Optimal Control Problems: Direct vs Indirect Methods

Zhen Zhang, Shanqing Liu, Alessandro Alla +2

We study physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) as numerical tools for the optimal control of semilinear partial differential equations. We first recall the classical direct and…

eess.SY2026

Bridging Data-Driven Reachability Analysis and Statistical Estimation via Constrained Matrix Convex Generators

Peng Xie, Zhen Zhang, Rolf Findeisen +1

Data-driven reachability analysis enables safety verification when first-principles models are unavailable. This requires constructing sets of system models consistent with measure…

eess.SY2026

Data-Driven Nonconvex Reachability Analysis using Exact Set Propagation

Zhen Zhang, M. Umar B. Niazi, Michelle S. Chong +2

This paper studies deterministic data-driven reachability analysis for dynamical systems with unknown dynamics and nonconvex reachable sets. Existing deterministic data-driven appr…

eess.SY2026

Transformer-Enhanced Data-Driven Output Reachability with Conformal Coverage Guarantees

Zhen Zhang, Peng Xie, Wenyuan Wu +2

This paper considers output reachability analysis for linear time-invariant systems with unknown state-space matrices and unknown observation map, given only noisy input-output mea…

math.OC2026

Data-Driven Tube-Based Zonotopic Predictive Control With Nonconvex Layered Terminal Sets

Zhen Zhang, Bogdan Gheorghe, Florin Stoican +1

This paper presents a data-driven tube-based zonotopic predictive control (DTZPC) framework with nonconvex layered terminal sets. Existing DTZPC schemes with closed-loop guarantees…

eess.SY2026

Transformer-Accelerated Interpolated Data-Driven Reachability Analysis from Noisy Data

Zhen Zhang, Ahmad Hafez, Peng Xie +3

Data-driven reachability analysis provides guaranteed outer approximations of reachable sets from input-state measurements, yet each propagation step requires a matrix-zonotope mul…

eess.SY2026

Conformalized Data-Driven Reachability Analysis with PAC Guarantees

Yanliang Huang, Zhen Zhang, Peng Xie +2

Data-driven reachability analysis computes over-approximations of reachable sets directly from noisy data. Existing deterministic methods require either known noise bounds or syste…

eess.SY2025

Hybrid Polynomial Zonotopes: A Set Representation for Reachability Analysis in Hybrid Nonaffine Systems

Peng Xie, Zhen Zhang, Amr Alanwar

Reachability analysis for hybrid nonaffine systems remains computationally challenging, as existing set representations--including constrained, polynomial, and hybrid zonotopes--ei…

eess.SY2025

Data-Driven Nonconvex Reachability Analysis using Exact Multiplication

Zhen Zhang, M. Umar B. Niazi, Michelle S. Chong +2

This paper addresses a fundamental challenge in data-driven reachability analysis: accurately representing and propagating non-convex reachable sets. We propose a novel approach us…