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Lei Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Lei Xu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Symmetry-Adapted Eigensolver from Real-Space Sampling of Tensor-Network-Bridged Quantum Circuits

We propose a symmetry-adapted eigensolver for strongly correlated systems that separates where the wave function is \emph{sampled} from where it is \emph{defined}. The lattice is divided into equal blocks: parallel quantum circuits absorb the entanglement within each block, while a matrix product state (MPS) backbone bridges the blocks and restores global correlations. The resulting real-space amplitude $ϕ(a_{\rm real})$ acts only as a sample generator---configurations are drawn from $|ϕ(a_{\rm real})|^2$ directly, block by block, without any Markov chain. The variational state itself is defined in a symmetry-adapted basis by two separate rules: the modulus of $ψ(a_{\rm symm})$ is the square root of the total weight accumulated over the entire equivalence class, $\widetilde{p}(a_{\rm symm})=\sum_{a_{\rm real}\in\{g a_{\rm repr}\}}|ϕ(a_{\rm real})|^2$, whereas its phase is inherited from the single representative amplitude $ϕ(a_{\rm repr})$. The modulus rule is what makes the scheme both exact and cheap: the distribution$\widetilde{p}(a_{\rm symm})$ sampled in the symmetric basis is exactly the one induced by the mapping from the real-space distribution $p(a_{\rm real})$, so every generated configuration is an unbiased sample of $|ψ(a_{\rm symm})|^2$; the phase rule then fixes the only freedom that remains. Because amplitudes within a class are combined in probability rather than summed with symmetry characters, $ψ$ is \emph{not} a group projection of the circuit-MPS state; the class-wide aggregation instead supplies long-range, symmetry-enforced entanglement that the MPS never has to carry itself.

quant-ph↗

Reasoning without Gold Standards: A Proxy-Judge Theory of Autoformalization

Autoformalization (AF) requires both prover acceptance and fidelity to an informal source, but prover acceptance alone cannot establish fidelity, and expert-validated reference formalizations are costly to obtain. We introduce a reference-free proxy-judge framework, which separates correctness into grounding, statement faithfulness, coverage, and inference, and a theory of how imperfect checks shape iterative refinement. We establish three results. First, for a fixed sequence of candidates, an added proxy's false-positive and false-negative rates bound its effect on the pass-but-wrong rate. Second, damage to a correct formalization requires a false rejection that exposes it to further refinement, and harmful revisions are then retained through unguarded changes, missed changes, or prover progress that overrides judge warnings. Third, a decomposition of the final pass rate distinguishes continued refinement, generation of new candidates, and their success in passing the checks. We instantiate the framework with eight proxies and test these predictions on ProofNet and miniF2F in Lean~4 and on e-SNLI and ProntoQA in Isabelle/HOL. Under single-proxy removal, no prediction written before the runs is contradicted, and all traced breaks follow the identified failure routes. The results connect proxy reliability to the benefits, risks, and limits of refinement without reference formalizations.

cs.CL↗

A counterexample to integral Aleksandrov-Bakelman-Pucci estimates for a nonlocal operator

We construct a counterexample to integral Aleksandrov-Bakelman-Pucci estimates for nonlocal inequalities of the form \begin{equation*} L_au(x):=\int_{\mathbb R^n}δ_yu(x) \frac{a(x,y)}{|y|^{n+σ}}\,dy \ge-f(x)\quad\text{in }B_1, \end{equation*} with $u\le0$ in $\mathbb R^n\setminus B_1$, where $δ_yu(x)=u(x+y)+u(x-y)-2u(x)$, and the measurable coefficient satisfies \begin{equation}\tag{C} λ\le a(x,y)\leΛ,\qquad a(x,y)=a(x,-y),\qquad x\in\mathbb R^n,\quad y\ne0. \end{equation} More precisely, for every $n\ge1$, $0<σ<2$, and $0<λ<Λ$, there exist a fixed coefficient $a(x,y)$ satisfying \textup{(C)}, a constant $d>0$, and nonnegative functions $u_j,f_j\in C_c^\infty(B_1)$ such that $L_au_j\ge-f_j$ in $B_1$, $0\le f_j\le1$, and $|\operatorname{supp}f_j|\to0$ as $j\to\infty$, while $u_j\ge d$ on $B_{1/4}$ for every $j$. Consequently, this fixed operator admits no $L^p$ maximum estimate for any $1\le p<\infty$.

math.AP↗

The Illusion of AI Expertise Under Uncertainty: A Probabilistic Paradigm to Interpret Results Under Ground Truth Variation

Benchmarking the capabilities of AI systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Models, typically ignores the impact of uncertainty in the underlying ground truth answers from experts. This ambiguity is not just limited to human preferences, but is also consequential even in safety critical domains such as medicine where uncertainty is pervasive. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic paradigm to theoretically explain how high certainty in ground truth answers is almost always necessary for even an expert to achieve high scores. In contrast, in datasets with high variation in ground truth answers, the expert performance drops substantially resulting in almost no difference between a random labeller and an expert. This characteristic also manifests when comparing models, where uncertainty obfuscates differences between poor and high performing models. Therefore, ignoring uncertainty in ground truth evaluation data can result in the misleading conclusion that a non-expert has similar performance to that of an expert. Given ground truth answer variability and commonly used F1 and accuracy metrics, we bring forth a simple and explainable probabilistic coin toss model to estimate expected accuracyand expected F1 and compare the estimated scores with those that experts (human or model) achieve across multiple domains -- including radiology and models such as GPT-5 and Gemini-3. The results lead to the recommendation that stratification by the probability of the ground truth answer becomes critical when expert performance is relatively low. Under stratified evaluation, performance comparison becomes more reliable in high certainty bins, mitigating the effect of the key confounding factor --- uncertainty.

cs.AI↗

SSCBench: Evaluating the Evidential Validity of Fault-Injection Tests for Tool-Using LLM Agents

Fault injection is increasingly used to evaluate the reliability of tool-using LLM agents. However, there has been limited study of how fault-adoption results should be interpreted when the agent itself determines which authoritative observations become visible during execution. In this paper, we present a systematic study of this evidential validity problem in agent fault-injection evaluation. We develop a measurement protocol that specifies what observations can refute an injected assertion, determines whether they can become visible before the affected fact is first used, and records whether the evaluated execution actually realizes this condition. We construct SSCBench as an instantiation of the protocol and evaluate four fault operators and five agent configurations over 1,191 faulted executions in two $τ$-bench environments. Our experiments show that an admitted fault case and agent configuration can realize substantially different evidential conditions across executions, and that aggregate adoption can remain well defined even when the population supporting a timely-counterevidence claim is sparse or absent. For example, among 44 adopted runs in which counterevidence eventually became visible, only 17 received it before first use, while 27 received it afterward. We also find that first-error timing and later stance revision need not coincide, and that automated trajectory analysis can recover adoption without reliably recovering the first faulty-reliance event needed for temporal diagnosis. We argue that the evidential condition realized by an execution and the population supporting a claim-specific interpretation are part of fault-injection evaluation itself and should be reported before adoption is interpreted as failure under pre-use counterevidence.

cs.SE↗

Investigating X-ray Emission from Radio-detected Broad- and Narrow-line Seyfert 1 Galaxies

Context: This paper presents a study of the X-ray emission for a sample of radio-detected (RD-) broad- and narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s and BLS1s). Aims: To investigate the X-ray emission properties of early-stage accretion activity or early jets in NLS1s. Methods: By fitting XMM-Newton X-ray spectra and combining with multi-band data from SDSS and FIRST, we conducted a statistical comparative study on the X-ray emission and multi-band correlations of NLS1s and BLS1s. Results: NLS1s and BLS1s show no significant difference in their soft X-ray blackbody temperatures, but NLS1s exhibit steeper hard X-ray photon indices and optical-to-X-ray slopes ($α_{\rm ox}$). Moreover, correlation analyses of various parameters reveal intrinsic differences in the X-ray emission between the two samples. For instance, at comparable optical luminosities, NLS1s exhibit a higher $ α_{\rm ox} $ (i.e., weaker X-ray emission), marginally distinct dependencies between radio luminosity and black hole mass in the fundamental plane, and different correlations between $α_{\rm ox} $ and radio loudness. Based on the relationship between UV luminosity and $α_{\rm ox} $ in RQ-AGN, the estimated X-ray excess ($Δα_{\rm ox} $) in both samples is positively correlated with radio loudness. RQ-BLS1s generally display the X-ray excess, whereas RQ-NLS1s tend to show an X-ray deficiency. The Eddington ratio of RQ-NLS1s derived from X-ray luminosity is lower than that inferred from optical luminosity, further supporting their intrinsically weaker X-ray emission. Conclusions: These differences in X-ray emission between NLS1s and BLS1s may ultimately stem from the earlier evolutionary stage of NLS1s. Multivariate linear fits among radio luminosity, X-ray luminosity, and radio loudness for NLS1s and BLS1s support a multi-wavelength radiative connection associated with jets.

astro-ph.HE↗

Near-uniform $q$-matroids

We study the $q$-matroids associated with nondegenerate $\F_{q^m}$-linear near-MRD codes, which we call near-uniform $q$-matroids. Using the correspondence between rank-metric codes and their associated $q$-systems, we determine explicitly their rank functions and characterize their cyclic flats. We show that near-uniform $q$-matroids form a class of representable paving $q$-matroids. and prove an upper bound on the number of their cyclic flats, which is shown to be sharp for certain parameters. Finally, when $n>m$, exploiting the rank distribution of near-MRD codes, we obtain an exact count of the nontrivial cyclic flats of the associated $q$-matroids.

math.CO↗

UnfoldCRF: Structured Mask Refinement with Image-Conditioned Latent Regions

Learned mask refiners improve segmentation accuracy, but it is hard to tell how much of the improvement comes from explicit structure rather than from extra capacity, and whether it holds up when the mask generator or its error distribution changes. UnfoldCRF treats refinement as inference in a conditional random field over pixel labels and latent region variables. Its energy has a corrected unary term, learned local pairwise interactions, and image-conditioned latent-region consistency, with a null state that lets a region with weak label agreement withdraw from the consistency term; inference unrolls damped mean-field updates on this one energy. To isolate the effect of structure, we compare against recurrent black-box refiners that read the same inputs and receive the same parameter budget, stage count, and supervision. On COD10K, UnfoldCRF beats the strongest matched control by 1.0 $F^ω_β$ point, improves all four COD metrics, and lowers the fraction of images made worse from 11.7\% to 8.5\%. Under a train-once protocol over five datasets and several mask sources, the 2.6M-parameter variant gains 4.2 mean $Δ$IoU against 2.0 for its control, and a variant built on frozen DINOv2 features matches the strongest foundation-model refiner with about a seventh of its resident parameters while staying ahead of its own control. On mask generators never seen in training, the gain is 2.0 $F^ω_β$ points against 0.6 for the control. Zeroing individual messages shows where the corrections come from: the pairwise messages mostly fix boundaries, the region messages mostly fix non-boundary errors. Code and supporting materials will be publicly released.

cs.CV↗

Certificate-Carrying Distributed Model Predictive Control on Product Manifolds with $\mathrm{SO}(3)$

This paper studies constraint certification in synchronous distributed model predictive control (DMPC) when neighboring predictions change between sampling instants. Before the parallel local solves, each agent communicates a shifted prediction and an announced update budget. A hard trajectory trust region makes that budget enforceable, while an edge-wise feasibility cap computed from the shifted packets keeps the fallback feasible without using any current optimizer output. Distance and relative-attitude constraints are tightened with explicit Lipschitz constants and two budget layers: one accounts for the simultaneous neighbor update and the other retains a checkable shift reserve. We prove hard pairwise constraint satisfaction and recursive feasibility under stated nominal-execution and terminal assumptions, give the additional residual caused by execution error, and derive a local practical value-decrease bound. A spacecraft formation example uses hard terminal and pairwise constraints, a geodesic relative- attitude constraint on $\SO$, and reproducible terminal-set checks. Comparisons with fixed, trajectory-only, and windowed online margins show that the proposed budget reduces conservatism while preserving a positive shifted-feasibility margin.

eess.SY↗

When Does Unsupervised Learning Succeed or Fail? A PoS Perspective on Reconstruction-Based Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based unsupervised learning can fail in two opposing ways: a model may reconstruct anomalies too accurately or discard valid nominal variation. Using the Pursuit of Subspaces hypothesis, we characterize these failures through the meet, union, and join geometries induced by the nominal components. Excess learned range produces join blindness, while insufficient capacity produces meet preference and loss of nominal fidelity. We show that the compact nominal union is optimal among nominal faithful ranges and generally requires a nonlinear reconstruction map. Based on this geometry, we introduce Dynamic Push and Pull, which learns from controlled perturbations without anomaly labels, and nested manifold carving, which applies the same principle recursively in latent space. Experiments confirm the predicted changes in latent geometry across every tested Push and Pull configuration. The proposed methods improve reconstruction-based anomaly detection across standard benchmarks and unseen image degradations, while also improving pretrained ECG representations for downstream classification. These results connect reconstruction failures to identifiable geometric conditions and provide practical mechanisms for learning compact representations.

cs.LG↗

From Reports to Ontologies: Ontology-Guided Representation Learning for 12-Lead ECG

The 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is a quasi-periodic, multi-channel signal with diagnostic content spanning timescales from millisecond waveform morphology to multi-second rhythm dynamics. Existing ECG representation learning relies on signal-only self-supervision or ECG-text multimodal alignment, neither of which exploits the structured diagnostic codes attached to every clinical recording. We present \textbf{MAR-ECG}, an ontology-guided masked autoregressive framework that supervises the encoder with a curated 40-node SNOMED-CT cardiac graph through \emph{graph alignment}, eliminating the need for paired clinical reports. MAR-ECG combines two complementary objectives. First, \emph{graph-smoothed contrastive learning} (GSCL) anchors the encoder's rhythm-pooled features to the SNOMED graph, softening supervision targets by ontology distance so that clinically related concepts reinforce one another rather than function as hard negatives. Second, \emph{multi-scale physiological supervision} complements GSCL with signal-derived patch auxiliaries that target rhythm-physiology statistics extracted automatically from the input, extending supervision beyond the patch tier at no annotation cost. Pretrained on ${\sim}40$K publicly available 12-lead ECGs with SNOMED-CT codes and evaluated by frozen linear probing on five downstream classification benchmarks, MAR-ECG consistently outperforms a strong masked-autoregressive baseline, with mean gains in the low-label regime. Despite the absence of paired clinical text, MAR-ECG achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art multimodal ECG-text methods.

cs.CE↗

Gradient-Aligned Pair Selection for Personalized Preference Optimization

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) requires aligning generation behavior with user-specific preferences rather than aggregate quality. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) provides a stable framework for preference learning, its effectiveness in personalized settings critically depends on how preference pairs are selected. Existing approaches typically rely on heuristic criteria, such as likelihood-based extremes, which decouple optimization from explicit user utility and can lead to degraded personalization. We formalize personalized preference learning as a geometry-aligned optimization problem by analyzing the first-order interaction between gradients of expected user utility and DPO update directions. Our analysis reveals that, under off-policy sampling, the DPO update transitions from a purely error-corrective signal to a reinforcement-like update when preference margins are directionally aligned with utility gradients. This perspective exposes pair selection as a geometric decision that governs whether preference optimization advances or hinders personalization. Motivated by this insight, we propose GAP-DPO (Geometry-Aligned Preference DPO), an iterative algorithm that performs utility-aware, geometry-aligned pair selection while controlling distribution shift via epoch-wise regeneration. Experiments on personalized text generation benchmarks show that GAP-DPO consistently improves stylistic fidelity, preference alignment, and generation quality compared to standard DPO variants. Together, our results establish gradient alignment as a unifying principle for personalized preference optimization and demonstrate that pair selection is an intrinsic component of the optimization geometry rather than a heuristic preprocessing step.

cs.AI↗

Distributed risk-averse optimization via CVaR

Distributed systems often operate under uncertainty, where minimizing expected loss may overlook rare but severe events. This paper studies a distributed risk-averse convex optimization problem in which agents cooperatively minimize the average of local conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) objectives over a time-varying network. Each agent has access only to noisy evaluations of its local loss function, rather than to its CVaR objective or gradient. We therefore develop a zeroth-order algorithm that uses sampled losses to construct empirical CVaR estimates and their gradient estimates. At each iteration, agents combine neighboring decisions and perform a local update. Under convexity and Lipschitz continuity assumptions, we prove that the agents reach exact asymptotic consensus. We also establish a finite-time expected suboptimality bound for the weighted ergodic iterate. With diminishing step sizes and fixed sample sizes, the local last iterates converge almost surely to a common optimum, and their limiting expected CVaR gap is bounded in terms of the smoothing and finite-sample errors. This distributed bound matches the parameter dependence of the centralized benchmark provided in this paper. Finally, simulations on a distributed sensor network estimation problem illustrate the efficacy of the method.

math.OC↗

Topological Lithography via External Field: Creating Topological States Anywhere Beyond the Edge

Topological insulators (TIs), recognized for their robust boundary states and unconventional phase transitions, have emerged as one of the most impactful discoveries in recent decades, attracting considerable interest across diverse fields. However, conventional TIs require topological contrasts between adjacent bulk regions, typically achieved by distinct symmetries, which limits their flexibility and broader applicability. In this work, we introduce a "lithography" approach to inducing topological states by applying external fields in time-reversal-symmetric systems. These states transcend the conventional bulk topology design paradigm and offer exceptional tunability: they can exist at geometric edges, within the bulk, or even be induced remotely. Because the external field is highly controllable, the induced states are programmable, reconfigurable, and can be easily tailored into desirable patterns. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the external field modifies the Jackiw-Rebbi mechanism, inducing a real-space topological transition characterized by a local topological marker (LTM). We further establish an extended valley bulk-edge correspondence, which explains both the conventional scenario and our findings. Our results, validated across mechanical, electronic, and acoustic platforms, highlight the broad applicability of this approach to various systems. This work not only advances the theory of topology but also enhances the diversity, tunability, and practical implementation of topological states and materials.

cond-mat.other↗

Frequency-aware forecasting for short-term typhoon gust prediction

Accurate gust forecasting under typhoon conditions remains challenging due to the highly non-stationary and multi-scale characteristics of extreme wind fluctuations. Existing deep learning models often struggle to simultaneously capture long-term trends and rapid local variations, resulting in degraded performance during extreme events. We propose WDANet, a frequency-aware forecasting framework that integrates stationary wavelet decomposition, a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) strategy, and a dual-branch encoder-decoder architecture, enabling separate modeling of trend and fluctuation components. Taking the offshore regions of the Western Pacific in China as an example, we conduct fine-grid wind gust prediction research. The results demonstrate that WDANet shows advantages for short lead times under the experimental setting across a 24-h forecasting horizon and achieves higher prediction accuracy than ECMWF-HRES within the first 6 h. During extreme wind events, WDANet more accurately captures gust peaks and attains the best RMSE and MAE performance. These results highlight its potential for offshore wind power operation, disaster warning, and risk mitigation.

cs.LG↗

Reachability-Based Capability Confinement for LLM Agents under Indirect Prompt Injection

Large language model agents place outputs from external skills into their execution context, allowing attacker-controlled data to influence later privileged actions. Existing defenses mainly classify untrusted content or authorize proposed operations. They do not directly address how an agent's future authority should change once untrusted data enters its state. We present SkillGuard, a harness-level enforcement layer that treats this event as contamination and restricts future capabilities to disconnect the resulting state from deployer-defined forbidden states. Given sound skill summaries and policies, SkillGuard represents security-relevant transitions with a Skill Impact Graph, specifies admissible control over skill parameters via steerability signatures, and mediates invocations with an inline reference monitor. Following contamination, it computes weighted capability restrictions using binary, fractional, or fractional-flow strategies without auxiliary language-model inference. We evaluate SkillGuard on four AgentDojo suites with two backend LLMs, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Llama3.3-70B, against an LLM-only No Defense baseline and three defenses at different system layers: Spotlighting, CaMeL, and AttriGuard. We construct a compositional attack benchmark in which each attack combines observations individually insufficient to induce target violation and evaluate the same baselines on it. Under AgentDojo's Tool Knowledge attacks, SkillGuard eliminates attack success on three of four suites for both backends and reduces it to 4.8% and 14.3% on Slack. Against compositional attacks, it outperforms every baseline on Llama and matches the strongest baseline on Gemini at higher benign utility. Fractional-flow restriction preserves substantially more capabilities than binary restriction at the same attack success rate. Across both settings, SkillGuard adds no model calls or token overhead.

cs.CR↗

Amorphous and Nanocrystalline Topological Semimetal YPtBi/W/CoFeB Heterostructures for BEOL-Compatible Spin-Orbit Torque Devices

Spin-orbit torque (SOT) devices require spin-source materials that combine efficient charge-to-spin conversion with back-end-of-line (BEOL) thermal compatibility. Here, we show that YPtBi/W/CoFeB heterostructures deposited directly on Si/SiOx remain predominantly amorphous or weakly nanocrystalline from room temperature to 400 °C while preserving a large effective damping-like SOT response. Anomalous Hall and harmonic Hall measurements, together with X-ray diffraction, cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy, X-ray reflectivity, and electron energy-loss spectroscopy, show that the response does not correlate with bulk crystallization of YPtBi. Instead, the interfacial analysis indicates that the strongest trend of the spin Hall angle is associated with the chemistry of the upper YPtBi/W boundary: the effective SOT response tracks the integrated W concentration at that YPtBi surface. Meanwhile, a two-spin source analysis shows that the Pt-W-rich interlayer provides only a small positive correction, insufficient to explain the large negative effective spin Hall angle by itself. The dominant control variable is therefore inferred to be the incorporation of W into the upper YPtBi interface, which plausibly modifies the local electronic structure of YPtBi and amplifies the stack-level response. These results provide a more physically constrained interpretation of the stack behavior and identify a BEOL-compatible route to disordered topological spin-source layers for scaled SOT memory and compute-in-memory hardware.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Lensing and enhanced single atom detection via a single-pixel nanostructure

We propose and demonstrate a general mechanism for nanoscale lensing based on the phase gradient imposed by a single nanostructure scattering light in its near-field. We verify this effect using an optical waveguide on a substrate, with single atoms serving as quantum probes that sample the near-field intensity through their fluorescence. This quantum probing technique provides a unique, non-destructive approach to characterizing focused optical fields and reveals a 4-fold enhancement in single atom detection efficiency. This work establishes on-chip nanostructures as a multi-functional quantum optics platform that can efficiently route photons, localize fields, and enhance atom-photon coupling, offering new opportunities for trapping and manipulating single atoms and realizing hybrid nanophotonic-atomic systems for quantum applications.

quant-ph↗