arXiv subjects

Li Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Li Zhang.

At least 325 records · Page 18Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Chiral solitons in quadratic quasi-phase-matched photonic crystals

We introduce a quasi-phase-matched technique in quadratic nonlinear crystals, constructing an artificial gauge field by changing the inclination angle of stripes, which is realized by the positive and negative polarization directions of nonlinear susceptibility along the crystal. Unlike the artificial gauge field constructed through linear coupling in other settings, the gauge field in this system is realized by nonlinear coupling. We demonstrate that this gauge field can generate stable chiral solitons with chiral energy flow rotating around the solitons. In contrast to conventional chiral currents generated with the same specie or frequency, the chiral currents in the present system are formed by mutual coupling between fundamental frequency and second harmonic components. We derive the semi-analytical solution for the chiral energy flow in this system. It is found that there exists an optimal inclination angle that can maximize the chiral energy flow under different parameters, and this optimal inclination shows a positive correlation with the power and detuning. The mobility and collisions of the chiral solitons are also discussed. The results show that chiral solitons move in response to kicking and undergo fully elastic collisions with each other. In addition, the possibility of experimentally generating chiral solitons and chiral currents is outlined.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Are They All Good? Evaluating the Quality of CoTs in LLM-based Code Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in code generation, particularly when augmented with chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting techniques. They break down requirements into intermediate reasoning steps, which act as design rationales to guide LLMs in writing code like human programmers. Thus, the quality of these steps is crucial for ensuring the correctness and reliability of the generated code. However, little is known about the quality of CoT generated by LLMs. To what extent can we trust the thoughts generated by LLMs? How good are they? This paper empirically explores the external and internal factors of why LLMs generate unsatisfactory CoTs by analyzing 1,023 failed code samples on two widely used code generation benchmarks. We also evaluate their impact on code generation performance by analyzing 210 CoT-code pairs and refining the unsatisfied CoTs by prompting LLMs. Our study reveals three key findings: (1) External factors (53.60%), such as unclear requirements and lack of context, mainly affect CoT quality, while internal factors (40.10%) stem from LLMs' misunderstanding prompts. (2) Even when CoTs are correct, 18.5% of the generated code contains errors due to instruction-following issues; conversely, 11.90% of correct code is paired with flawed CoTs. (3) Refining low-quality CoTs is feasible, i.e., LLMs improve when given detailed problem descriptions. These findings highlight key challenges in CoT-based code generation and suggest directions for improving LLM reasoning and reliability.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Driving View Synthesis on Free-form Trajectories with Generative Prior

Driving view synthesis along free-form trajectories is essential for realistic driving simulations, enabling closed-loop evaluation of end-to-end driving policies. Existing methods excel at view interpolation along recorded paths but struggle to generalize to novel trajectories due to limited viewpoints in driving videos. To tackle this challenge, we propose DriveX, a novel free-form driving view synthesis framework, that progressively distills generative prior into the 3D Gaussian model during its optimization. Within this framework, we utilize a video diffusion model to refine the degraded novel trajectory renderings from the in-training Gaussian model, while the restored videos in turn serve as additional supervision for optimizing the 3D Gaussian. Concretely, we craft an inpainting-based video restoration task, which can disentangle the identification of degraded regions from the generative capability of the diffusion model and remove the need of simulating specific degraded pattern in the training of the diffusion model. To further enhance the consistency and fidelity of generated contents, the pseudo ground truth is progressively updated with gradually improved novel trajectory rendering, allowing both components to co-adapt and reinforce each other while minimizing the disruption on the optimization. By tightly integrating 3D scene representation with generative prior, DriveX achieves high-quality view synthesis beyond recorded trajectories in real time--unlocking new possibilities for flexible and realistic driving simulations on free-form trajectories.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

BézierGS: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction with Bézier Curve Gaussian Splatting

The realistic reconstruction of street scenes is critical for developing real-world simulators in autonomous driving. Most existing methods rely on object pose annotations, using these poses to reconstruct dynamic objects and move them during the rendering process. This dependence on high-precision object annotations limits large-scale and extensive scene reconstruction. To address this challenge, we propose Bézier curve Gaussian splatting (BézierGS), which represents the motion trajectories of dynamic objects using learnable Bézier curves. This approach fully leverages the temporal information of dynamic objects and, through learnable curve modeling, automatically corrects pose errors. By introducing additional supervision on dynamic object rendering and inter-curve consistency constraints, we achieve reasonable and accurate separation and reconstruction of scene elements. Extensive experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and the nuPlan benchmark demonstrate that BézierGS outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in both dynamic and static scene components reconstruction and novel view synthesis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Rethinking Layered Graphic Design Generation with a Top-Down Approach

Graphic design is crucial for conveying ideas and messages. Designers usually organize their work into objects, backgrounds, and vectorized text layers to simplify editing. However, this workflow demands considerable expertise. With the rise of GenAI methods, an endless supply of high-quality graphic designs in pixel format has become more accessible, though these designs often lack editability. Despite this, non-layered designs still inspire human designers, influencing their choices in layouts and text styles, ultimately guiding the creation of layered designs. Motivated by this observation, we propose Accordion, a graphic design generation framework taking the first attempt to convert AI-generated designs into editable layered designs, meanwhile refining nonsensical AI-generated text with meaningful alternatives guided by user prompts. It is built around a vision language model (VLM) playing distinct roles in three curated stages. For each stage, we design prompts to guide the VLM in executing different tasks. Distinct from existing bottom-up methods (e.g., COLE and Open-COLE) that gradually generate elements to create layered designs, our approach works in a top-down manner by using the visually harmonious reference image as global guidance to decompose each layer. Additionally, it leverages multiple vision experts such as SAM and element removal models to facilitate the creation of graphic layers. We train our method using the in-house graphic design dataset Design39K, augmented with AI-generated design images coupled with refined ground truth created by a customized inpainting model. Experimental results and user studies by designers show that Accordion generates favorable results on the DesignIntention benchmark, including tasks such as text-to-template, adding text to background, and text de-rendering, and also excels in creating design variations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Integrating Biological and Machine Intelligence: Attention Mechanisms in Brain-Computer Interfaces

With the rapid advancement of deep learning, attention mechanisms have become indispensable in electroencephalography (EEG) signal analysis, significantly enhancing Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) applications. This paper presents a comprehensive review of traditional and Transformer-based attention mechanisms, their embedding strategies, and their applications in EEG-based BCI, with a particular emphasis on multimodal data fusion. By capturing EEG variations across time, frequency, and spatial channels, attention mechanisms improve feature extraction, representation learning, and model robustness. These methods can be broadly categorized into traditional attention mechanisms, which typically integrate with convolutional and recurrent networks, and Transformer-based multi-head self-attention, which excels in capturing long-range dependencies. Beyond single-modality analysis, attention mechanisms also enhance multimodal EEG applications, facilitating effective fusion between EEG and other physiological or sensory data. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and emerging trends in attention-based EEG modeling, highlighting future directions for advancing BCI technology. This review aims to provide valuable insights for researchers seeking to leverage attention mechanisms for improved EEG interpretation and application.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Gaussian Process Modeling Coronal X-ray Variability of Active Galactic Nuclei

The corona is an integral component of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) which can produce the X-ray emission. However, many of its physical properties and the mechanisms powering this emission remain a mystery. In this work, we study the coronal X-ray variabilities of 13 AGNs by Gaussian Process. 2-10 keV light curves of 13 AGNs can be successfully described by the damped-random walk (DRW) model. The extracted coronal X-ray timescales range from 3 to 50 days. In the plot of variability timescale versus black hole mass, the coronal X-ray timescales of four sources occupy almost the same region as the optical timescales of the accretion disk, with the latter matching the predicted thermal instability timescale of the disk. In contrast, the X-ray timescales of the remaining sources exhibit a systematic offset toward lower values. We propose that the coronal X-ray variability may be driven by internal processes within the corona itself (such as thermal conduction). On the other hand, it may also be triggered by local thermal instabilities occurring in different regions (close to the central black hole) of the accretion disk, which propagate to the corona via disk-corona coupling.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

BiFair: A Fairness-aware Training Framework for LLM-enhanced Recommender Systems via Bi-level Optimization

Large Language Model-enhanced Recommender Systems (LLM-enhanced RSs) have emerged as a powerful approach to improving recommendation quality by leveraging LLMs to generate item representations. Despite these advancements, the integration of LLMs raises severe fairness concerns. Existing studies reveal that LLM-based RSs exhibit greater unfairness than traditional RSs, yet fairness issues in LLM-enhanced RSs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, our empirical study reveals that while LLM-enhanced RSs improve fairness across item groups, a significant fairness gap persists. Further enhancement remains challenging due to the architectural differences and varying sources of unfairness inherent in LLM-enhanced RSs. To bridge this gap, we first decompose unfairness into i) \textit{prior unfairness} in LLM-generated representations and ii) \textit{training unfairness} in recommendation models. Then, we propose BiFair, a bi-level optimization-based fairness-aware training framework designed to mitigate both prior and training unfairness simultaneously. BiFair optimizes two sets of learnable parameters: LLM-generated representations and a trainable projector in the recommendation model, using a two-level nested optimization process. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive inter-group balancing mechanism, leveraging multi-objective optimization principles to dynamically balance fairness across item groups. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that BiFair significantly mitigates unfairness and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Vortex solitons in quasi-phase-matched photonic crystals with the third harmonic generation

We report stable composite vortex solitons in the model of a three-dimensional photonic crystal with the third-harmonic (TH) generation provided by the quasi-phase-matched quadratic nonlinearity. The photonic crystal is designed with a checkerboard structure in the $\left( x\text{,}% y\right) $ plane, while the second-order nonlinear susceptibility, $d(z)$, is modulated along the propagation direction as a chains of rectangles with two different periods. This structure can be fabricated by means of available technologies. The composite vortex solitons are built of fundamental-frequency (FF), second-harmonic (SH), and TH components, exhibiting spatial patterns which correspond to vortex with topological charges $s=1$, a quadrupole with $s=2$, and an anti-vortex structure with $s = -1$, respectively. The soliton profiles feature rhombic or square patterns, corresponding to phase-matching conditions $φ=0$ or $π$, respectively, the rhombic solitons possessing a broader stability region. From the perspective of the experimental feasibility, we show that both the rhombic and square-shaped composite vortex solitons may readily propagate in the photonic crystals over distances up to $\sim 1$ m. The TH component of the soliton with $s=\mp 1$ is produced by the cascaded nonlinear interactions, starting from the FF vortex component with $s=\pm 1$ and proceeding through the quadrupole SH one with $s=2$. These findings offer a novel approach for the creation and control of stable vortex solitons in nonlinear optics.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Spatial Degradation-Aware and Temporal Consistent Diffusion Model for Compressed Video Super-Resolution

Due to storage and bandwidth limitations, videos transmitted over the Internet often exhibit low quality, characterized by low-resolution and compression artifacts. Although video super-resolution (VSR) is an efficient video enhancing technique, existing VSR methods focus less on compressed videos. Consequently, directly applying general VSR approaches fails to improve practical videos with compression artifacts, especially when frames are highly compressed at a low bit rate. The inevitable quantization information loss complicates the reconstruction of texture details. Recently, diffusion models have shown superior performance in low-level visual tasks. Leveraging the high-realism generation capability of diffusion models, we propose a novel method that exploits the priors of pre-trained diffusion models for compressed VSR. To mitigate spatial distortions and refine temporal consistency, we introduce a Spatial Degradation-Aware and Temporal Consistent (SDATC) diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a distortion control module (DCM) to modulate diffusion model inputs, thereby minimizing the impact of noise from low-quality frames on the generation stage. Subsequently, the diffusion model performs a denoising process to generate details, guided by a fine-tuned compression-aware prompt module (CAPM) and a spatio-temporal attention module (STAM). CAPM dynamically encodes compression-related information into prompts, enabling the sampling process to adapt to different degradation levels. Meanwhile, STAM extends the spatial attention mechanism into the spatio-temporal dimension, effectively capturing temporal correlations. Additionally, we utilize optical flow-based alignment during each denoising step to enhance the smoothness of output videos. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed modules in restoring compressed videos.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Training Language Model to Critique for Better Refinement

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable evaluation and critique capabilities, providing insightful feedback and identifying flaws in various tasks. However, limited research has explored which types of critiques are most effective for improving model responses or how to generate such critiques. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{R}efinement-oriented \textbf{C}ritique \textbf{O}ptimization (RCO), a novel framework designed to train critic models using refinement signals. RCO uses a feedback loop where critiques, generated by the critic model, guide the actor model in refining its responses. The critique utility (CU) quantifies the effectiveness of these refinements, serving as the reward signal for training the critic model. By focusing on critiques that lead to better refinements, RCO eliminates the need for direct critique preference assessment, ensuring that critiques driving meaningful improvements are rewarded. We evaluate RCO across five tasks, i.e., dialog generation, summarization, question answering, mathematical reasoning, and code generation, and show that it significantly outperforms traditional methods and open-source models in terms of critique quality and refinement outcomes. Our contributions include the introduction of RCO, a novel supervision scheme based on refined response preferences, and comprehensive experimental results that highlight the method's effectiveness in enhancing LLM critique-refinement loops.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

M3D: Manifold-based Domain Adaptation with Dynamic Distribution for Non-Deep Transfer Learning in Cross-subject and Cross-session EEG-based Emotion Recognition

Emotion decoding using Electroencephalography (EEG)-based affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs) plays a crucial role in affective computing but is limited by challenges such as EEG's non-stationarity, individual variability, and the high cost of large labeled datasets. While deep learning methods are effective, they require extensive computational resources and large data volumes, limiting their practical application. To overcome these issues, we propose Manifold-based Domain Adaptation with Dynamic Distribution (M3D), a lightweight, non-deep transfer learning framework. M3D consists of four key modules: manifold feature transformation, dynamic distribution alignment, classifier learning, and ensemble learning. The data is mapped to an optimal Grassmann manifold space, enabling dynamic alignment of source and target domains. This alignment is designed to prioritize both marginal and conditional distributions, improving adaptation efficiency across diverse datasets. In classifier learning, the principle of structural risk minimization is applied to build robust classification models. Additionally, dynamic distribution alignment iteratively refines the classifier. The ensemble learning module aggregates classifiers from different optimization stages to leverage diversity and enhance prediction accuracy. M3D is evaluated on two EEG emotion recognition datasets using two validation protocols (cross-subject single-session and cross-subject cross-session) and a clinical EEG dataset for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Experimental results show that M3D outperforms traditional non-deep learning methods with a 4.47% average improvement and achieves deep learning-level performance with reduced data and computational requirements, demonstrating its potential for real-world aBCI applications.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

VQ-Insight: Teaching VLMs for AI-Generated Video Quality Understanding via Progressive Visual Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in AI-generated content (AIGC) have led to the emergence of powerful text-to-video generation models. Despite these successes, evaluating the quality of AIGC-generated videos remains challenging due to limited generalization, lack of temporal awareness, heavy reliance on large-scale annotated datasets, and the lack of effective interaction with generation models. Most current approaches rely on supervised finetuning of vision-language models (VLMs), which often require large-scale annotated datasets and tend to decouple understanding and generation. To address these shortcomings, we propose VQ-Insight, a novel reasoning-style VLM framework for AIGC video quality assessment. Our approach features: (1) a progressive video quality learning scheme that combines image quality warm-up, general task-specific temporal learning, and joint optimization with the video generation model; (2) the design of multi-dimension scoring rewards, preference comparison rewards, and temporal modeling rewards to enhance both generalization and specialization in video quality evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQ-Insight consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in preference comparison, multi-dimension scoring, and natural video scoring, bringing significant improvements for video generation tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Cross from Left to Right Brain: Adaptive Text Dreamer for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires the agent to navigate by following natural instructions under partial observability, making it difficult to align perception with language. Recent methods mitigate this by imagining future scenes, yet they rely on vision-based synthesis, leading to high computational cost and redundant details. To this end, we propose to adaptively imagine key environmental semantics via \textit{language} form, enabling a more reliable and efficient strategy. Specifically, we introduce a novel Adaptive Text Dreamer (ATD), a dual-branch self-guided imagination policy built upon a large language model (LLM). ATD is designed with a human-like left-right brain architecture, where the left brain focuses on logical integration, and the right brain is responsible for imaginative prediction of future scenes. To achieve this, we fine-tune only the Q-former within both brains to efficiently activate domain-specific knowledge in the LLM, enabling dynamic updates of logical reasoning and imagination during navigation. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-interaction mechanism to regularize the imagined outputs and inject them into a navigation expert module, allowing ATD to jointly exploit both the reasoning capacity of the LLM and the expertise of the navigation model. We conduct extensive experiments on the R2R benchmark, where ATD achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters. The code is \href{https://github.com/zhangpingrui/Adaptive-Text-Dreamer}{here}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Pattern and Origin for the Extreme $γ$-ray Flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279: An Astrophysical Critical Damper?

We apply a Gaussian process method to the extreme $γ$-ray flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 to discover the variable patterns and then to investigate the physical origins of the giant flares. The kernels of stochastically driven damped simple harmonic oscillator (SHO), the damped random-walk (DRW), and Mat$\acute{\rm e}$rn-3/2 are respectively used to describe the adaptive-binning $γ$-ray light curves of the two flares. Our findings show that both the extreme $γ$-ray flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 clearly prefer the SHO kernel in the over-damped mode and the Mat$\acute{\rm e}$rn-3/2 kernel over the DRW kernel. The resulted SHO and Mat$\acute{\rm e}$rn-3/2 power spectral densities (PSDs) are the same for each object, with the index changing from -4 at high frequencies to 0 at low frequencies. The patterns of the two flares are both approaching the critical damping mode with the quality factor Q $\approx$ 0.4 (i.e., the damping ratio $η\approx$ 1.25), but with slightly different damping timescales. The characteristic timescale (corresponding to the broken frequency in the PSD) for 3C 454.3 is 2-3 days and 3-5 days for 3C 279. The variable patterns found here suggest that once the system responds to the energy injection disturbance, the release of the energy in the system is finished abruptly. The obtained timescale provides a constraint on the size of energy dissipation region for each source.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

CKD-EHR:Clinical Knowledge Distillation for Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHR)-based disease prediction models have demonstrated significant clinical value in promoting precision medicine and enabling early intervention. However, existing large language models face two major challenges: insufficient representation of medical knowledge and low efficiency in clinical deployment. To address these challenges, this study proposes the CKD-EHR (Clinical Knowledge Distillation for EHR) framework, which achieves efficient and accurate disease risk prediction through knowledge distillation techniques. Specifically, the large language model Qwen2.5-7B is first fine-tuned on medical knowledge-enhanced data to serve as the teacher model.It then generates interpretable soft labels through a multi-granularity attention distillation mechanism. Finally, the distilled knowledge is transferred to a lightweight BERT student model. Experimental results show that on the MIMIC-III dataset, CKD-EHR significantly outperforms the baseline model:diagnostic accuracy is increased by 9%, F1-score is improved by 27%, and a 22.2 times inference speedup is achieved. This innovative solution not only greatly improves resource utilization efficiency but also significantly enhances the accuracy and timeliness of diagnosis, providing a practical technical approach for resource optimization in clinical settings. The code and data for this research are available athttps://github.com/209506702/CKD_EHR.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Realization of Weyl elastic metamaterials with spin skyrmions

Topological elastic metamaterials provide a topologically robust way to manipulate the phononic energy and information beyond the conventional approaches. Among various topological elastic metamaterials, Weyl elastic metamaterials stand out, as they are unique to three dimensions and exhibit numerous intriguing phenomena and potential applications. To date, however, the realization of Weyl elastic metamaterials remains elusive, primarily due to the full-vectoral nature of elastic waves and the complicated couplings between polarizations, leading to complicated and tangled three-dimensional (3D) bandstructures that unfavorable for experimental demonstration. Here, we overcome the challenge and realize an ideal, 3D printed, all-metallic Weyl elastic metamaterial with low dissipation losses. Notably, the elastic spin of the excitations around the Weyl points exhibits skyrmion textures, a topologically stable structure in real space. Utilizing 3D laser vibrometry, we reveal the projection of the Weyl points, the Fermi arcs and the unique spin characteristics of the topological surface states. Our work extends the Weyl metamaterials to elastic waves and paves a topological way to robust manipulation of elastic waves in 3D space.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2025

AdaptiveLLM: A Framework for Selecting Optimal Cost-Efficient LLM for Code-Generation Based on CoT Length

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced code generation efficiency, they face inherent challenges in balancing performance and inference costs across diverse programming tasks. Dynamically selecting the optimal LLM based on task difficulty and resource constraints offers a promising approach to achieve an optimal balance between efficiency and performance. However, existing model selection methods are resource-intensive and often neglect cost efficiency. Moreover, these approaches rely on human-annotated difficulty labels that are frequently inaccessible in real-world settings and may not align with the LLM's own assessment of task difficulty. In this paper, we introduce AdaptiveLLM, a framework that dynamically selects optimal LLMs for a given coding task by automatically assessing task difficulty. Our framework first estimates task difficulty using Chain-of-Thought lengths generated by reasoning model, clusters these into three difficulty levels via k-means, and fine-tunes CodeBERT to embed difficulty-aware features. A trained XGBoost classifier then selects the best model for each problem, optimizing the performance-cost trade-off. Experimental results show that AdaptiveLLM achieves a 7.86% improvement in pass@1 score while reducing resource consumption by 88.9% compared to baseline method ComplexityNet. When compared to a single model, AdaptiveLLM demonstrates an approximately 15% accuracy improvement, while maintaining the same level of cost consumption. Apart from that, the difficulty assessment using CoT provides more reliable selection criteria than human evaluation. Our replication package is available at https://github.com/cjhCoder7/AdaptiveLLM.

cs.SE↗