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Feng Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Liu.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

TSEmbed: Unlocking Task Scaling in Universal Multimodal Embeddings

Despite the exceptional reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their adaptation into universal embedding models is significantly impeded by task conflict. To address this, we propose TSEmbed, a universal multimodal embedding framework that synergizes Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to explicitly disentangle conflicting task objectives. Moreover, we introduce Expert-Aware Negative Sampling (EANS), a novel strategy that leverages expert routing distributions as an intrinsic proxy for semantic similarity. By dynamically prioritizing informative hard negatives that share expert activation patterns with the query, EANS effectively sharpens the model's discriminative power and refines embedding boundaries. To ensure training stability, we further devise a two-stage learning paradigm that solidifies expert specialization before optimizing representations via EANS. TSEmbed achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark (MMEB) and real-world industrial production datasets, laying a foundation for task-level scaling in universal multimodal embeddings.

cs.CL↗

Development of a simulation and analysis framework for NνDEx experiment

N$ν$DEx aims to search for the neutrinoless double beta decay in $^{82}$Se using a high pressure $^{82}$SeF$_6$ gas time projection chamber (TPC). This paper presents a simulation and analysis framework developed specifically for the N$ν$DEx experiment. Using density functional theory and two-temperature theory, the reduced mobilities of SeF$_5^-$ and SeF$_6^-$ ions in SeF$_6$ were calculated, yielding values of 0.444 and 0.430 $\mathrm{cm^2V^{-1}s^{-1}}$ respectively, with an estimated uncertainty within 3\%. The TPC geometry, featuring a cathode, focusing plane, and anode structure, was modeled in COMSOL to compute electric fields. Signal and background events were generated using BxDecay0 and Geant4, while Garfield++ was employed to simulate charge transport and signal induction. Three-dimensional tracks were reconstructed from drift-time differences between the two assumed ion species using a breadth-first search algorithm. To demonstrate the framework's analytical capability, topological variables were taken from reconstructed tracks and used to define selection criteria. A boosted decision tree was then implemented to benchmark the signal-background separation. This simulation framework successfully validates the complete experimental workflow, serving as a robust tool for detector design and future sensitivity studies in the N$ν$DEx experiment.

physics.ins-det↗

Unlearning Evaluation through Subset Statistical Independence

Evaluating machine unlearning remains challenging, as existing methods typically require retraining reference models or performing membership inference attacks, both of which rely on prior access to training configuration or supervision labels, making them impractical in realistic scenarios. Motivated by the fact that most unlearning algorithms remove a small, random subset of the training data, we propose a subset-level evaluation framework based on statistical independence. Specifically, we design a tailored use of the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion to assess whether the model outputs on a given subset exhibit statistical dependence, without requiring model retraining or auxiliary classifiers. Our method provides a simple, standalone evaluation procedure that aligns with unlearning workflows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach reliably distinguishes in-training from out-of-training subsets and clearly differentiates unlearning effectiveness, even when existing evaluations fall short.

cs.LG↗

Quantum-Optically Resolving the Number of Colloidal Quantum Dots in a Subwavelength Volume

The number resolution of solid-state artificial atoms is of fundamental interest for the study of quantum few-body systems, yet remains experimentally challenging. Quantum optical experiments offer a non-invasive approach which links up macroscopic measurements with the quantity of quantum emitters. In this work, we propose a time-domain quantum optical methodology for the strict numbering of colloidal CdSe/CdS/ZnS quantum dots (QDs) confined in subwavelength-size polystyrene capsules. The non-polarized, homogeneously broadened emission of colloidal QDs in the subwavelength volume satisfies the description of Dicke's superradiance of identical quantum emitters. An analytic relation describes the numerical dependence of the second-order photon correlation on the number and the collective lifetime of emitters, yielding an experimental counting range of colloidal QDs from one to ten. This work provides a robust pathway for the non-invasive numbering of artificial atoms and the investigation of collective light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.

quant-ph↗

OrgFlow: Generative Modeling of Organic Crystal Structures from Molecular Graphs

Crystal structure prediction is a long-standing challenge in materials science, with most data-driven methods developed for inorganic systems. This leaves an important gap for organic crystals, which are central to pharmaceuticals, polymers, and functional materials, but present unique challenges, such as larger unit cells and strict chemical connectivity. We introduce a flow-matching model for predicting organic crystal structures directly from molecular graphs. The architecture integrates molecular connectivity with periodic boundary conditions while preserving the symmetries of crystalline systems. A bond-aware loss guides the model toward realistic local chemistry by enforcing distributions of bond lengths and connectivity. To support reliable and efficient training, we built a curated dataset of organic crystals, along with a preprocessing pipeline that precomputes bonds and edges, substantially reducing computational overhead during both training and inference. Experiments show that our method achieves a Match Rate more than 10 times higher than existing baselines while requiring fewer sampling steps for inference. These results establish generative modeling as a practical and scalable framework for organic crystal structure prediction.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Emergence of a symmetry-broken Chern insulator near a moiré Kondo breakdown

Moiré semiconductors built on angle-aligned transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterobilayers provide a physical realization of the Kondo lattice model, in which one TMD layer is prepared in a Mott insulating state supporting a lattice of local magnetic moments and the other layer in a metallic state supporting itinerant carriers. The artificial Kondo lattice enables the exploration of exotic states of matter near a continuously tunable Kondo breakdown. Here we report the emergence of a symmetry-broken Chern insulator at a moiré hole filling factor 4/3 in angle-aligned MoTe2/WSe2 moiré bilayers, which realize a chiral Kondo lattice. The symmetry-broken Chern insulator, which exhibits integer quantized Hall conductance at a fractional moiré filling, breaks the translational symmetry of the lattice spontaneously; it also appears only near a magnetic field-induced Kondo breakdown in the mixed-valence regime of the material. We further demonstrate that the magnetic field required to induce the Kondo breakdown and to stabilize the symmetry-broken Chern insulator is twist angle dependent. The results present new opportunities for exploring the subtle interplay between topology and Kondo interactions in moiré semiconductors.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Universal electrical transport of composite Fermi liquid to Metal transition in Moiré systems

We compute universal electrical transport near continuous transitions between a composite Fermi liquid (CFL) and a metallic phase in moire Chern bands, focusing on fillings $ν=-1/2$ and $ν=-3/4$. The critical theory represents a novel QED-Chern-Simons framework: a charged sector at a bosonic Laughlin-superfluid critical point is coupled, via emergent gauge fields and Chern-Simons mixing, to a neutral spinon Fermi surface. Integrating out matter fields to quadratic order yields an explicit Ioffe-Larkin composition rule for the full resistivity tensor, showing how longitudinal channels add in series while Chern-Simons terms generate Hall response. To obtain the DC limit in the quantum critical fan, we develop a controlled large-N expansion where both fermion flavors and Chern-Simons levels scale with $N$, and solve a quantum Boltzmann equation at leading nontrivial order $1/N$. Gauge-mediated inelastic scattering removes the collisionless Drude singularity and produces a universal scaling function $Σ(ω/T)$ and finite DC conductivities $σ(0) \approx 0.033 e^2/\hbar$ ($ν=-1/2$) and $0.047 e^2/\hbar$ ($ν=-3/4$). We also identify a Chern-Simons "filtering" mechanism that suppresses transmission of Landau damping from the spinon Fermi surface to the critical gauge mode. Our approach provides concrete transport diagnostics for detecting quantum criticality in moire superlattices.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Hydrostatic Pressure-enhanced correlated magnetism and Chern insulator in moir'e WSe2

Moiré semiconductors offer flat bands where Coulomb interactions and band topology intertwine, while interlayer coupling plays a central role in forming the moiré potential. However, limited interlayer coupling strength and the lack of efficient tuning methods hinder further exploration of correlated phenomena in moiré semiconductors. Here we introduce a cryogenic dual-gated diamond-anvil platform using helium as a pressure medium, enabling reversible hydrostatic tuning together with magneto-optical spectroscopy in twisted bilayer WSe2. Pressure enhances the moiré potential, redshifts excitons, and stabilizes Stoner ferromagnetism otherwise absent at a 3.1-degree twist. Simultaneously, the half-filled C = 1 Chern insulating state strengthens, exhibiting a reduced saturation field. Moreover, we observe a topological phase transition from a Chern insulator to a Mott insulator at around 2 GPa. First-principles calculations reveal that a Gamma-to-K valence-band-maximum switching drives this transition by converting an Ising-like topological K-valley miniband into a spin-degenerate trivial Gamma miniband. Our findings demonstrate hydrostatic pressure as a powerful, continuous control axis for correlated magnetism and topological band engineering in moiré materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

MedPlan: A Two-Stage RAG-Based System for Personalized Medical Plan Generation

Despite recent success in applying large language models (LLMs) to electronic health records (EHR), most systems focus primarily on assessment rather than treatment planning. We identify three critical limitations in current approaches: they generate treatment plans in a single pass rather than following the sequential reasoning process used by clinicians; they rarely incorporate patient-specific historical context; and they fail to effectively distinguish between subjective and objective clinical information. Motivated by the SOAP methodology (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan), we introduce \ours{}, a novel framework that structures LLM reasoning to align with real-life clinician workflows. Our approach employs a two-stage architecture that first generates a clinical assessment based on patient symptoms and objective data, then formulates a structured treatment plan informed by this assessment and enriched with patient-specific information through retrieval-augmented generation. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches in both assessment accuracy and treatment plan quality.

cs.CL↗

OmniEarth-Bench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Earth's Six Spheres and Cross-Spheres Interactions with Multimodal Observational Earth Data

Existing benchmarks for multimodal learning in Earth science offer limited, siloed coverage of Earth's spheres and their cross-sphere interactions, typically restricting evaluation to the human-activity sphere of atmosphere and to at most 16 tasks. These limitations: narrow-source heterogeneity (single/few data sources), constrained scientific granularity, and limited-sphere extensibility. Therefore, we introduce OmniEarth-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark that systematically spans all six spheres: atmosphere, lithosphere, oceanosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and human-activity sphere, and cross-spheres. Built with a scalable, modular-topology data inference framework and native multi-observation sources and expert-in-the-loop curation, OmniEarth-Bench produces 29,855 standardized, expert-curated annotations. All annotations are organized into a four-level hierarchy (Sphere, Scenario, Ability, Task), encompassing 109 expert-curated evaluation tasks. Experiments on 9 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that even the most advanced models struggle with our benchmarks, where none of them reach 35% accuracy, revealing systematic gaps in Earth-system cognitive ability. The dataset and evaluation code were released at OmniEarth-Bench (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OmniEarth-Bench-B1BD).

cs.CV↗

From Newborn to Impact: Bias-Aware Citation Prediction

As a key to accessing research impact, citation dynamics underpins research evaluation, scholarly recommendation, and the study of knowledge diffusion. Citation prediction is particularly critical for newborn papers, where early assessment must be performed without citation signals and under highly long-tailed distributions. We identify two key research gaps: (i) insufficient modeling of implicit factors of scientific impact, leading to reliance on coarse proxies; and (ii) a lack of bias-aware learning that can deliver stable predictions on lowly cited papers. We address these gaps by proposing a Bias-Aware Citation Prediction Framework, which combines multi-agent feature extraction with robust graph representation learning. First, a multi-agent x graph co-learning module derives fine-grained, interpretable signals, such as reproducibility, collaboration network, and text quality, from metadata and external resources, and fuses them with heterogeneous-network embeddings to provide rich supervision even in the absence of early citation signals. Second, we incorporate a set of robust mechanisms: a two-stage forward process that routes explicit factors through an intermediate exposure estimate, GroupDRO to optimize worst-case group risk across environments, and a regularization head that performs what-if analyses on controllable factors under monotonicity and smoothness constraints. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Specifically, our model achieves around a 13% reduction in error metrics (MALE and RMSLE) and a notable 5.5% improvement in the ranking metric (NDCG) over the baseline methods.

cs.SI↗

Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Large Language Models for Clinical Alzheimer's Disease Assessment and Diagnosis

Alzheimer's disease (AD) has become a prevalent neurodegenerative disease worldwide. Traditional diagnosis still relies heavily on medical imaging and clinical assessment by physicians, which is often time-consuming and resource-intensive in terms of both human expertise and healthcare resources. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly applied to the medical field using electronic health records (EHRs), yet their application in Alzheimer's disease assessment remains limited, particularly given that AD involves complex multifactorial etiologies that are difficult to observe directly through imaging modalities. In this work, we propose leveraging LLMs to perform Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning on patients' clinical EHRs. Unlike direct fine-tuning of LLMs on EHR data for AD classification, our approach utilizes LLM-generated CoT reasoning paths to provide the model with explicit diagnostic rationale for AD assessment, followed by structured CoT-based predictions. This pipeline not only enhances the model's ability to diagnose intrinsically complex factors but also improves the interpretability of the prediction process across different stages of AD progression. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CoT-based diagnostic framework significantly enhances stability and diagnostic performance across multiple CDR grading tasks, achieving up to a 15% improvement in F1 score compared to the zero-shot baseline method.

cs.CL↗

Choosing How to Remember: Adaptive Memory Structures for LLM Agents

Memory is critical for enabling large language model (LLM) based agents to maintain coherent behavior over long-horizon interactions. However, existing agent memory systems suffer from two key gaps: they rely on a one-size-fits-all memory structure and do not model memory structure selection as a context-adaptive decision, limiting their ability to handle heterogeneous interaction patterns and resulting in suboptimal performance. We propose a unified framework, FluxMem, that enables adaptive memory organization for LLM agents. Our framework equips agents with multiple complementary memory structures. It explicitly learns to select among these structures based on interaction-level features, using offline supervision derived from downstream response quality and memory utilization. To support robust long-horizon memory evolution, we further introduce a three-level memory hierarchy and a Beta Mixture Model-based probabilistic gate for distribution-aware memory fusion, replacing brittle similarity thresholds. Experiments on two long-horizon benchmarks, PERSONAMEM and LoCoMo, demonstrate that our method achieves average improvements of 9.18% and 6.14%.

cs.AI↗

Sample-Specific Noise Injection For Diffusion-Based Adversarial Purification

Diffusion-based purification (DBP) methods aim to remove adversarial noise from the input sample by first injecting Gaussian noise through a forward diffusion process, and then recovering the clean example through a reverse generative process. In the above process, how much Gaussian noise is injected to the input sample is key to the success of DBP methods, which is controlled by a constant noise level $t^*$ for all samples in existing methods. In this paper, we discover that an optimal $t^*$ for each sample indeed could be different. Intuitively, the cleaner a sample is, the less the noise it should be injected, and vice versa. Motivated by this finding, we propose a new framework, called Sample-specific Score-aware Noise Injection (SSNI). Specifically, SSNI uses a pre-trained score network to estimate how much a data point deviates from the clean data distribution (i.e., score norms). Then, based on the magnitude of score norms, SSNI applies a reweighting function to adaptively adjust $t^*$ for each sample, achieving sample-specific noise injections. Empirically, incorporating our framework with existing DBP methods results in a notable improvement in both accuracy and robustness on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1K, highlighting the necessity to allocate distinct noise levels to different samples in DBP methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/SSNI.

cs.CV↗

Semantic-aware Adversarial Fine-tuning for CLIP

Recent studies have shown that CLIP model's adversarial robustness in zero-shot classification tasks can be enhanced by adversarially fine-tuning its image encoder with adversarial examples (AEs), which are generated by minimizing the cosine similarity between images and a hand-crafted template (e.g., ''A photo of a {label}''). However, it has been shown that the cosine similarity between a single image and a single hand-crafted template is insufficient to measure the similarity for image-text pairs. Building on this, in this paper, we find that the AEs generated using cosine similarity may fail to fool CLIP when the similarity metric is replaced with semantically enriched alternatives, making the image encoder fine-tuned with these AEs less robust. To overcome this issue, we first propose a semantic-ensemble attack to generate semantic-aware AEs by minimizing the average similarity between the original image and an ensemble of refined textual descriptions. These descriptions are initially generated by a foundation model to capture core semantic features beyond hand-crafted templates and are then refined to reduce hallucinations. To this end, we propose Semantic-aware Adversarial Fine-Tuning (SAFT), which fine-tunes CLIP's image encoder with semantic-aware AEs. Extensive experiments show that SAFT outperforms current methods, achieving substantial improvements in zero-shot adversarial robustness across 16 datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/SAFT.

cs.CV↗

Interplay of Quantum Size Effect and Tensile Strain on Surface Morphology of Sn(100) Islands

The quantum size effect (QSE) and strain effect are two key factors influencing the surface morphology of thin films, which can increase film surface roughness through QSE-induced thickness oscillation and strain-induced island formation, respectively. Surface roughness usually manifests in the early stages of film growth and diminishes beyond a critical thickness. In this work, we employ molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to grow Sn(100) islands with varying thickness N on bilayer graphene-terminated 6H-SiC(0001) substrates. Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy measurements reveal an inverse surface roughness effect that highlights the interplay of QSE and misfit strain in shaping the surface morphology of Sn(100) islands. For N =< 10, the islands exhibit flat surfaces, while for N >= 26, the island surfaces become corrugated and patterned. For the intermediate range, i.e., 12 =< N =<24, both flat and patterned surfaces coexist, with the percentage coverage of the patterned surface oscillating as a function of N. By performing density functional theory calculations, we demonstrate that the unusual surface pattern evolution in our MBE-grown Sn(100) islands is a result of the interplay between QSE-induced surface roughing and tensile strain-induced smoothening effect.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Anomalous Non-Hermitian Topological Anderson Insulator

Strong disorder drives conventional Hermitian systems into Anderson insulating states, suppressing all topological phases. Here, we unveil symmetry-protected, anomalous topological phases in the strong disorder limit of a non-Hermitian system, characterized by a scale-invariant merging of zero-energy modes. Using the maximally symmetric Jx lattice as an ideal platform and introducing specifically engineered (ABBA-type) symmetry-preserving non-Hermitian disorder, we observe a sequence of disorder-induced phase transitions: from a trivial insulator into and through a non-Hermitian topological Anderson insulator (TAI) phase, culminating in a stable anomalous non-Hermitian TAI phase characterized by a quantized polarization P_x \approx 0.25. Within this anomalous phase protected by the mobility gap, the zero-energy modes exhibit a distinct (N/2)-mode coalescence that scales with system size. Our findings demonstrate that non-Hermitian disorder engineered to preserve symmetry can induce and protect novel topological order inaccessible to conventional Hermitian disorder, thereby advancing the fundamental understanding of topological phenomena mediated by the interplay of disorder and non-Hermiticity.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Ferroelectricity in Atomically Thin Metallic TaNiTe$_5$ with Ultrahigh Carrier Density

Ferroelectric metals, characterized by the coexistence of ferroelectricity and metallic conductivity, present a fundamental challenge due to the screening effect of free charge carriers on the long-range electric dipole order. Existing strategies to circumvent this obstacle include employing two-dimensional (2D) crystals, where reduced dimensionality and low carrier densities suppress screening, or designing materials of van der Waals (vdW) superlattice with spatially separated and decoupled conductive and nearly insulating ferroelectric layers. Here, we report an alternative paradigm in TaNiTe5, where an ultrahigh carrier density coexists with an out-of-plane ferroelectric order within the same surface monolayer. Using piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM), we observed robust ferroelectric behavior in TaNiTe5 down to single-unit-cell thickness (~1.3 nm) at room temperature. Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) gives structural evidence that the ferroelectricity might originate from the vertical displacement of outmost Te atoms on the surface, breaking the inversion symmetry. Concurrently, electrical transport measurements reveal a metallic state with a carrier density on the order of 10$^{15}$ cm$^{-2}$ (or 10$^{22}$ cm$^{-3}$) -- comparable to that of Copper (Cu). Our findings establish a unique platform for exploring the interplay between ferroelectricity and an ultrahigh density of mobile carriers in the 2D limit.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗