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Junjie Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Junjie Yang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Intertwined polar, chiral, and ferro-rotational orders in a rotation-only insulator

Intertwined orders refer to strongly coupled and mutually dependent orders that coexist in correlated electron systems, often underpinning key physical properties of the host materials. Among them, polar, chiral, and ferro-rotational orders have been theoretically known to form a closed set of intertwined orders. However, experimental investigation into their mutual coupling and physical consequences has remained elusive. In this work, we employ the polar-chiral insulator Ni$_3$TeO$_6$ as a platform and utilize a multimodal optical approach to directly probe and reveal the intertwining among polarity, chirality, and ferro-rotational order. We demonstrate how their coupling governs the formation of domains and dictates the nature of domain walls. Within the domains, we identify spatial inversion symmetry as the operation connecting two domain states of opposite polarity and chirality, with a common ferro-rotational state serving as the prerequisite for these interlocked configurations. At the domain walls, we observe a pronounced enhancement of in-plane polarization accompanied by a suppression of chirality. By combining with Ginzburg-Landau theory within the framework of a pre-existing ferro-rotational background, we uncover the emergence of mixed Néel- and Bloch-type domain walls. Our findings highlight the critical role of intertwined orders in defining domain and domain wall characteristics and open pathways for domain switching and domain wall control via intertwined order parameters.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

RankGraph: Unified Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation systems face the challenge of integrating fine-grained user and item relationships across various product domains. To address this, we introduce RankGraph, a scalable graph learning framework designed to serve as a core component in recommendation foundation models (FMs). By constructing and leveraging graphs composed of heterogeneous nodes and edges across multiple products, RankGraph enables the integration of complex relationships between users, posts, ads, and other entities. Our framework employs a GPU-accelerated Graph Neural Network and contrastive learning, allowing for dynamic extraction of subgraphs such as item-item and user-user graphs to support similarity-based retrieval and real-time clustering. Furthermore, RankGraph integrates graph-based pretrained representations as contextual tokens into FM sequence models, enriching them with structured relational knowledge. RankGraph has demonstrated improvements in click (+0.92%) and conversion rates (+2.82%) in online A/B tests, showcasing its effectiveness in cross-domain recommendation scenarios.

cs.IR↗

Economy and Geography Shape the Collective Attention of Cities

Complex networks are commonly used to explore human behavior. However, previous studies largely overlooked the geographical and economic factors embedded in collective attention. To address this, we construct attention networks from time-series data for the United States and China, each a key economic power in the West and the East, respectively. We reveal a strong macroscale correlation between urban attention and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At the mesoscale, community detection of attention networks shows that high-GDP cities consistently act as core nodes within their communities and occupy strategic geographic positions. At the microscale, structural hole theory identifies these cities as key connectors between communities, with influence proportional to economic output. Overlapping community detection further reveals tightly connected urban clusters, prompting us to introduce geographic and topic-based metrics, which show that closely linked cities are spatially proximate and topically coherent. Of course, not all patterns were consistent across regions. A notable distinction emerged in the relationship between population size and urban attention, which was evident in the United States but absent in China. Building on these insights, we integrate key variables reflecting GDP, geography, and scenic resources into regression model to cross-verify the influence of economic and geographic factors on collective user attention, and unexpectedly discover that a composite index of population, access, and scenery fails to account for cross-city variations in attention. Our study bridges the gap between economic prosperity and geographic centrality in shaping urban attention landscapes.

physics.soc-ph↗

Are We on the Right Way for Assessing Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation?

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great promise for complex document understanding, yet their development is critically hampered by inadequate evaluation. Current benchmarks often focus on specific part of document RAG system and use synthetic data with incomplete ground truth and evidence labels, therefore failing to reflect real-world bottlenecks and challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Double-Bench: a new large-scale, multilingual, and multimodal evaluation system that is able to produce fine-grained assessment to each component within document RAG systems. It comprises 3,276 documents (72,880 pages) and 5,168 single- and multi-hop queries across 6 languages and 4 document types with streamlined dynamic update support for potential data contamination issues. Queries are grounded in exhaustively scanned evidence pages and verified by human experts to ensure maximum quality and completeness. Our comprehensive experiments across 9 state-of-the-art embedding models, 4 MLLMs and 4 end-to-end document RAG frameworks demonstrate the gap between text and visual embedding models is narrowing, highlighting the need in building stronger document retrieval models. Our findings also reveal the over-confidence dilemma within current document RAG frameworks that tend to provide answer even without evidence support. We hope our fully open-source Double-Bench provide a rigorous foundation for future research in advanced document RAG systems. We plan to retrieve timely corpus and release new benchmarks on an annual basis.

cs.CL↗

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts for Compositional Generalization: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Foundations of Optimal Sparsity

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures have gained prominence for their ability to scale neural networks, particularly transformers, without a proportional increase in computational cost. Despite their success, their role in compositional generalization, i.e., adapting to novel combinations of known components, remains under-explored. This study challenges the assumption that minimal expert activation suffices for task generalization and investigates the relationship between task complexity and optimal sparsity in SMoE models. Through empirical evaluations on the SRAVEN symbolic reasoning task and the SKILL-MIX benchmark, we demonstrate that (i) the number of activated experts consistently increases with the perceived task difficulty to maintain performance; and (ii) the optimal number of activated experts scales proportionally with task complexity. Our theoretical analysis derives a scaling law for optimal sparsity by balancing approximation and estimation errors, revealing alignment with empirical observations. We formally show that the optimal sparsity lies between minimal activation (1-2 experts) and full activation, with the exact number scaling proportionally to task complexity and further influenced by the size of the training data and the complexity of the model. These findings offer practical insights for designing SMoE models that achieve computational efficiency while enabling robust compositional generalization.

cs.LG↗

A Physics-informed End-to-End Occupancy Framework for Motion Planning of Autonomous Vehicles

Accurate and interpretable motion planning is essential for autonomous vehicles (AVs) navigating complex and uncertain environments. While recent end-to-end occupancy prediction methods have improved environmental understanding, they typically lack explicit physical constraints, limiting safety and generalization. In this paper, we propose a unified end-to-end framework that integrates verifiable physical rules into the occupancy learning process. Specifically, we embed artificial potential fields (APF) as physics-informed guidance during network training to ensure that predicted occupancy maps are both data-efficient and physically plausible. Our architecture combines convolutional and recurrent neural networks to capture spatial and temporal dependencies while preserving model flexibility. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves task completion rate, safety margins, and planning efficiency across diverse driving scenarios, confirming its potential for reliable deployment in real-world AV systems.

cs.RO↗

Highly reliable, ultra-wideband, isolator-free quantum-dot mode-locked frequency combs for optical interconnects beyond 3.2Tb/s

Quantum dot mode-locked laser-based optical frequency combs are emerging as a critical solution for achieving low-cost, high-efficiency, and large-capacity optical interconnects. The practical implementation of wavelength division multiplexing interconnects necessitates a temperature-stable OFC source with a minimum 100 GHz channel spacing to enable high-bandwidth modulation while mitigating the complexity of optical filtering and detection. By leveraging the advanced co-doping technique and a colliding pulse mode-locking scheme, here, we report a compact, ultra-wideband, highly reliable, isolator-free 100 GHz-spacing InAs/GaAs QD OFC source operating up to a record temperature of 140 °C. The comb source delivers a record 3 dB optical bandwidth of 14.312 nm, containing flat-top comb lines, each supporting 128 Gb/s PAM-4 modulation, which results in a total throughput of 3.328 Tb/s with an extremely low power consumption of 0.394 pJ/bit at 25°C. Performance remains stable at 85 °C, with negligible degradation of device critical metrics. Remarkably, accelerated aging tests under harsh conditions (85 °C with 8x threshold current injection) revealed a mean time to failure of approximately 207 years. The QD OFC source demonstrated in this work, for the first time, establishes a concrete link between fundamental research on comb sources and their practical deployment in next-generation, high-density optical interconnect systems.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Exploring Implicit Visual Misunderstandings in Multimodal Large Language Models through Attention Analysis

Recent advancements have enhanced the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to comprehend multi-image information. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate answer correctness, overlooking whether models genuinely comprehend the visual input. To address this, we define implicit visual misunderstanding (IVM), where MLLMs provide correct answers without fully comprehending the visual input. Through our analysis, we decouple the visual and textual modalities within the causal attention module, revealing that attention distribution increasingly converges on the image associated with the correct answer as the network layers deepen. This insight leads to the introduction of a scale-agnostic metric, \textit{attention accuracy}, and a novel benchmark for quantifying IVMs. Attention accuracy directly evaluates the model's visual understanding via internal mechanisms, remaining robust to positional biases for more reliable assessments. Furthermore, we extend our approach to finer granularities and demonstrate its effectiveness in unimodal scenarios, underscoring its versatility and generalizability.

cs.CV↗

Think When You Need: Self-Adaptive Chain-of-Thought Learning

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying problem complexity. Our approach constructs rewards through length and quality comparisons, guided by theoretical assumptions that jointly enhance solution correctness with conciseness. Moreover, we further demonstrate our method to fuzzy tasks where ground truth is unavailable. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method maintains accuracy while generating significantly more concise explanations, effectively teaching models to "think when needed."

cs.CL↗

Deployment-friendly Lane-changing Intention Prediction Powered by Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks

Accurate and real-time prediction of surrounding vehicles' lane-changing intentions is a critical challenge in deploying safe and efficient autonomous driving systems in open-world scenarios. Existing high-performing methods remain hard to deploy due to their high computational cost, long training times, and excessive memory requirements. Here, we propose an efficient lane-changing intention prediction approach based on brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNN). By leveraging the event-driven nature of SNN, the proposed approach enables us to encode the vehicle's states in a more efficient manner. Comparison experiments conducted on HighD and NGSIM datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves training efficiency and reduces deployment costs while maintaining comparable prediction accuracy. Particularly, compared to the baseline, our approach reduces training time by 75% and memory usage by 99.9%. These results validate the efficiency and reliability of our method in lane-changing predictions, highlighting its potential for safe and efficient autonomous driving systems while offering significant advantages in deployment, including reduced training time, lower memory usage, and faster inference.

cs.RO↗

Cross-cultural Deployment of Autonomous Vehicles Using Data-light Inverse Reinforcement Learning

More than the adherence to specific traffic regulations, driving culture touches upon a more implicit part - an informal, conventional, collective behavioral pattern followed by drivers - that varies across countries, regions, and even cities. Such cultural divergence has become one of the biggest challenges in deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) across diverse regions today. The current emergence of data-driven methods has shown a potential solution to enable culture-compatible driving through learning from data, but what if some underdeveloped regions cannot provide sufficient local data to inform driving culture? This issue is particularly significant for a broader global AV market. Here, we propose a cross-cultural deployment scheme for AVs, called data-light inverse reinforcement learning, designed to re-calibrate culture-specific AVs and assimilate them into other cultures. First, we report the divergence in driving cultures through a comprehensive comparative analysis of naturalistic driving datasets on highways from three countries: Germany, China, and the USA. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme by testing the expeditious cross-cultural deployment across these three countries, with cumulative testing mileage of over 56084 km. The performance is particularly advantageous when cross-cultural deployment is carried out without affluent local data. Results show that we can reduce the dependence on local data by a margin of 98.67% at best. This study is expected to bring a broader, fairer AV global market, particularly in those regions that lack enough local data to develop culture-compatible AVs.

cs.LG↗

Feature Alignment and Representation Transfer in Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring knowledge from complex teacher models to simpler student models, significantly enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. It has demonstrated substantial advancements in various applications including image classification, object detection, language modeling, text classification, and sentiment analysis. Recent innovations in KD methods, such as attention-based approaches, block-wise logit distillation, and decoupling distillation, have notably improved student model performance. These techniques focus on stimulus complexity, attention mechanisms, and global information capture to optimize knowledge transfer. In addition, KD has proven effective in compressing large language models while preserving accuracy, reducing computational overhead, and improving inference speed. This survey synthesizes the latest literature, highlighting key findings, contributions, and future directions in knowledge distillation to provide insights for researchers and practitioners on its evolving role in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

cs.CL↗

Meta ControlNet: Enhancing Task Adaptation via Meta Learning

Diffusion-based image synthesis has attracted extensive attention recently. In particular, ControlNet that uses image-based prompts exhibits powerful capability in image tasks such as canny edge detection and generates images well aligned with these prompts. However, vanilla ControlNet generally requires extensive training of around 5000 steps to achieve a desirable control for a single task. Recent context-learning approaches have improved its adaptability, but mainly for edge-based tasks, and rely on paired examples. Thus, two important open issues are yet to be addressed to reach the full potential of ControlNet: (i) zero-shot control for certain tasks and (ii) faster adaptation for non-edge-based tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel Meta ControlNet method, which adopts the task-agnostic meta learning technique and features a new layer freezing design. Meta ControlNet significantly reduces learning steps to attain control ability from 5000 to 1000. Further, Meta ControlNet exhibits direct zero-shot adaptability in edge-based tasks without any finetuning, and achieves control within only 100 finetuning steps in more complex non-edge tasks such as Human Pose, outperforming all existing methods. The codes is available in https://github.com/JunjieYang97/Meta-ControlNet.

cs.CV↗

Advanced Deep Learning Methods for Protein Structure Prediction and Design

After AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize, protein prediction with deep learning once again became a hot topic. We comprehensively explore advanced deep learning methods applied to protein structure prediction and design. It begins by examining recent innovations in prediction architectures, with detailed discussions on improvements such as diffusion based frameworks and novel pairwise attention modules. The text analyses key components including structure generation, evaluation metrics, multiple sequence alignment processing, and network architecture, thereby illustrating the current state of the art in computational protein modelling. Subsequent chapters focus on practical applications, presenting case studies that range from individual protein predictions to complex biomolecular interactions. Strategies for enhancing prediction accuracy and integrating deep learning techniques with experimental validation are thoroughly explored. The later sections review the industry landscape of protein design, highlighting the transformative role of artificial intelligence in biotechnology and discussing emerging market trends and future challenges. Supplementary appendices provide essential resources such as databases and open source tools, making this volume a valuable reference for researchers and students.

q-bio.BM↗

Generative Adversarial Networks Bridging Art and Machine Intelligence

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have greatly influenced the development of computer vision and artificial intelligence in the past decade and also connected art and machine intelligence together. This book begins with a detailed introduction to the fundamental principles and historical development of GANs, contrasting them with traditional generative models and elucidating the core adversarial mechanisms through illustrative Python examples. The text systematically addresses the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings including probability theory, statistics, and game theory providing a solid framework for understanding the objectives, loss functions, and optimisation challenges inherent to GAN training. Subsequent chapters review classic variants such as Conditional GANs, DCGANs, InfoGAN, and LAPGAN before progressing to advanced training methodologies like Wasserstein GANs, GANs with gradient penalty, least squares GANs, and spectral normalisation techniques. The book further examines architectural enhancements and task-specific adaptations in generators and discriminators, showcasing practical implementations in high resolution image generation, artistic style transfer, video synthesis, text to image generation and other multimedia applications. The concluding sections offer insights into emerging research trends, including self-attention mechanisms, transformer-based generative models, and a comparative analysis with diffusion models, thus charting promising directions for future developments in both academic and applied settings.

cs.LG↗

Ab initio quantum many-body description of superconducting trends in the cuprates

Using a systematic ab initio quantum many-body approach that goes beyond low-energy models, we directly compute the superconducting pairing order and estimate the pairing gap of several doped cuprate materials and structures within a purely electronic picture. We find that we can correctly capture two well-known trends: the pressure effect, where the pairing order and gap increase with intra-layer pressure, and the layer effect, where the pairing order and gap vary with the number of copper-oxygen layers. From these calculations, we observe that the strength of superexchange and the covalency at optimal doping are the best descriptors for these trends. Our microscopic analysis further identifies that strong short-range spin fluctuations and multi-orbital charge fluctuations drive the development of the pairing order. Our work illustrates the possibility of a material-specific ab initio understanding of unconventional high-temperature superconducting materials.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

EHCTNet: Enhanced Hybrid of CNN and Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Remote sensing (RS) change detection incurs a high cost because of false negatives, which are more costly than false positives. Existing frameworks, struggling to improve the Precision metric to reduce the cost of false positive, still have limitations in focusing on the change of interest, which leads to missed detections and discontinuity issues. This work tackles these issues by enhancing feature learning capabilities and integrating the frequency components of feature information, with a strategy to incrementally boost the Recall value. We propose an enhanced hybrid of CNN and Transformer network (EHCTNet) for effectively mining the change information of interest. Firstly, a dual branch feature extraction module is used to extract the multi scale features of RS images. Secondly, the frequency component of these features is exploited by a refined module I. Thirdly, an enhanced token mining module based on the Kolmogorov Arnold Network is utilized to derive semantic information. Finally, the semantic change information's frequency component, beneficial for final detection, is mined from the refined module II. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of EHCTNet in comprehending complex changes of interest. The visualization outcomes show that EHCTNet detects more intact and continuous changed areas and perceives more accurate neighboring distinction than state of the art models.

cs.CV↗

Deep Learning Model Security: Threats and Defenses

Deep learning has transformed AI applications but faces critical security challenges, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, model theft, and privacy leakage. This survey examines these vulnerabilities, detailing their mechanisms and impact on model integrity and confidentiality. Practical implementations, including adversarial examples, label flipping, and backdoor attacks, are explored alongside defenses such as adversarial training, differential privacy, and federated learning, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Advanced methods like contrastive and self-supervised learning are presented for enhancing robustness. The survey concludes with future directions, emphasizing automated defenses, zero-trust architectures, and the security challenges of large AI models. A balanced approach to performance and security is essential for developing reliable deep learning systems.

cs.CR↗