When a task only needs a decision, does a foundation model still need to generate tokens?
COGNIT-Guard
Hao Chen · arXiv preprint ·
Calibrated Standalone Direct-Decision Guardrails with Heterogeneous CPU-NPU Confidence Cascading under Explicit Latency and False-Positive Constraints
Explores when real-time LLM guardrails need to generate tokens and when they can decide directly. Combines a fast CPU gatekeeper with an NPU direct-decision model to study routing, probability calibration, and detection efficiency under explicit latency and false-positive constraints.
AI Safety
Direct Decision
CPU-NPU Cascade
Ascend 910C
MAD-Guard
Hao Chen · arXiv preprint ·
Controlled Study of Autoregressive Generation versus Direct Decision Interfaces for Closed Multimodal Forensic Tasks
Studies whether closed multimodal forensic tasks require autoregressive generation. With a matched Qwen3-VL-8B backbone, compares generation, Logit Slice, Binary Head, and contrastive direct-decision interfaces across accuracy, calibration, and inference latency.
Multimodal Forensics
Deepfake Detection
Direct Decision
Ascend 910C
07 / JOURNEY
The journey so far
Peking University Big Data Laboratory / Data & AI Security Group
AI Security Intern (remote) April 2026 - present
Core developer of an AI and agent security evaluation platform. Substantially extended and rearchitected the early JoySafeter framework, evolving its agent-chat and individual-tool prototype into a unified platform for evaluating LLM, agent, RAG, and MCP security.
Independently reworked core FastAPI and Next.js functionality and the Agent Runtime. Designed the Agent Run → Tool Call → Evidence → Report workflow, using WebSocket, Durable Worker, and PostgreSQL/Redis for asynchronous long-running tasks, reconnection recovery, state tracking, and persistent results.
Designed an MCP ToolRegistry extension system integrating Garak, PyRIT, Promptfoo, Semgrep, ModelScan, and LLM Guard, connecting tool calls, background tasks, and result writeback. Validated 12 MCP services and 79 security tools with no loading failures.
Linked runs, traces, tool events, artifacts, and reports for evidence archiving and report generation. Reworked run-state transitions and stable IDs to resolve duplicate-consumption races and support idempotent recovery and retries, covering 53 backend and 21 frontend tests.
Supported production deployment and designed offline delivery and domestic-platform compatibility plans for customer intranets, covering model services, CPU/GPU/NPU/DCU hardware, domestic operating systems, network isolation, certificates, data persistence, and staged acceptance.
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data / CUHK-Shenzhen
LLM AI Infrastructure Intern June - September 2026
Contributed to TAOctx research and development for long-context agents, working on context compression, long-context inference, and distributed decoding performance on Ascend 910C. The team's work was presented in an open talk at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, and the project is open source.
Implemented HSP score-once online compression for Qwen3-235B-A22B W8A8.
Across all 387 LongBench v2 samples over 32K, reduced mean prompt tokens by 87.04% and TTFT p50 by 83.89%, improving accuracy by 1.03 percentage points.
Optimized TP8 + EP8 and A3 Flash Decoding with vLLM-Ascend and CANN/ATB 8.5.1, increasing sustained decoding from 4.71 to 27.99 tokens/s (about 5.9 times).
Optimized TAOmem embeddings, KV caching, and lazy decoding, reducing BEAVER prepare p50 by 31.26%, with batch-token caps to guard against OOM.