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Liang Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Chen.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

Line-force driven wind from a thin disk in tidal disruption event

Winds from the accretion disk in tidal disruption events (TDEs) play a key role in determining the radiation of TDEs. The winds from the super-Eddington accretion phase in TDEs have recently been studied. However, properties of the winds from the sub-Eddington accretion disk in TDEs are not clear. We aim to investigate properties of winds from the circularized sub-Eddington accretion disk in TDEs. We study the line force driven accretion disk wind. We perform two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations using the PLUTO code to study the line force driven wind from the circularized accretion disk around a $10^6$ solar mass black hole in TDEs. We find that although the disk has a very small size in TDEs, strong wind can be driven by line force when the disk have luminosity higher than $20\%$ of the Eddington luminosity. The maximum velocity of wind can be as high as $0.3$ times the speed of light. The kinematic power of wind is in the range of $1\%-6\%$ times the Eddington luminosity. Strong wind can be driven by line force from the thin disk around a $10^6$ solar mass black hole in TDEs. We briefly discuss the possible radio emission from the shock when the wind collides with the surrounding medium.

astro-ph.HE↗

Dynamic Lasing of Axion Clusters

We examine high-density axion clusters under gravitational compression. These are transient events in which the majority of axions are rapidly converted into photons, with some configurations producing photon signals with distinctive and characteristic patterns. We estimated the mass of the remnant objects and note that some could be black holes while in some cases it may be possible to identify the emitted photons with a robust class of fast radio bursts.

hep-ph↗

Mitigating Overthinking through Reasoning Shaping

Large reasoning models (LRMs) boosted by Reinforcement Learning from Verifier Reward (RLVR) have shown great power in problem solving, yet they often cause overthinking: excessive, meandering reasoning that inflates computational cost. Prior designs of penalization in RLVR manage to reduce token consumption while often harming model performance, which arises from the oversimplicity of token-level supervision. In this paper, we argue that the granularity of supervision plays a crucial role in balancing efficiency and accuracy, and propose Group Relative Segment Penalization (GRSP), a step-level method to regularize reasoning. Since preliminary analyses show that reasoning segments are strongly correlated with token consumption and model performance, we design a length-aware weighting mechanism across segment clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GRSP achieves superior token efficiency without heavily compromising accuracy, especially the advantages with harder problems. Moreover, GRSP stabilizes RL training and scales effectively across model sizes.

cs.CL↗

SCI-Reason: A Dataset with Chain-of-Thought Rationales for Complex Multimodal Reasoning in Academic Areas

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) demonstrate impressive problem-solving skills in many tasks and domains. However, their ability to reason with complex images in academic domains has not been systematically investigated. To bridge this gap, we present SCI-Reason, a dataset for complex multimodel reasoning in academic areas. SCI-Reason aims to test and improve the reasoning ability of large multimodal models using real complex images in academic domains. The dataset contains 12,066 images and 12,626 question-answer pairs extracted from PubMed, divided into training, validation and test splits. Each question-answer pair also contains an accurate and efficient inference chain as a guide to improving the inference properties of the dataset. With SCI-Reason, we performed a comprehensive evaluation of 8 well-known models. The best performing model, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, only achieved an accuracy of 55.19%. Error analysis shows that more than half of the model failures are due to breakdowns in multi-step inference chains rather than errors in primary visual feature extraction. This finding underscores the inherent limitations in reasoning capabilities exhibited by current multimodal models when processing complex image analysis tasks within authentic academic contexts. Experiments on open-source models show that SCI-Reason not only enhances reasoning ability but also demonstrates cross-domain generalization in VQA tasks. We also explore future applications of model inference capabilities in this domain, highlighting its potential for future research.

cs.MM↗

SGNNBench: A Holistic Evaluation of Spiking Graph Neural Network on Large-scale Graph

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are exemplary deep models designed for graph data. Message passing mechanism enables GNNs to effectively capture graph topology and push the performance boundaries across various graph tasks. However, the trend of developing such complex machinery for graph representation learning has become unsustainable on large-scale graphs. The computational and time overhead make it imperative to develop more energy-efficient GNNs to cope with the explosive growth of real-world graphs. Spiking Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs), which integrate biologically plausible learning via unique spike-based neurons, have emerged as a promising energy-efficient alternative. Different layers communicate with sparse and binary spikes, which facilitates computation and storage of intermediate graph representations. Despite the proliferation of SGNNs proposed in recent years, there is no systematic benchmark to explore the basic design principles of these brain-inspired networks on the graph data. To bridge this gap, we present SGNNBench to quantify progress in the field of SGNNs. Specifically, SGNNBench conducts an in-depth investigation of SGNNs from multiple perspectives, including effectiveness, energy efficiency, and architectural design. We comprehensively evaluate 9 state-of-the-art SGNNs across 18 datasets. Regarding efficiency, we empirically compare these baselines w.r.t model size, memory usage, and theoretical energy consumption to reveal the often-overlooked energy bottlenecks of SGNNs. Besides, we elaborately investigate the design space of SGNNs to promote the development of a general SGNN paradigm.

cs.NE↗

Observatory Science with eXTP

Scheduled for launch in 2030, the enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarization (eXTP) telescope is a Chinese space-based mission aimed at studying extreme conditions and phenomena in astrophysics. eXTP will feature three main payloads: Spectroscopy Focusing Arrays (SFAs), Polarimetry Focusing Arrays (PFAs), and a Wide-field Camera (W2C). This white paper outlines observatory science, incorporating key scientific advances and instrumental changes since the publication of the previous white paper [1]. We will discuss perspectives of eXTP on the research domains of flare stars, supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulae, cataclysmic variables, X-ray binaries, ultraluminous X-ray sources, AGN, and pulsar-based positioning and timekeeping.

astro-ph.IM↗

VFM-Guided Semi-Supervised Detection Transformer under Source-Free Constraints for Remote Sensing Object Detection

Unsupervised domain adaptation methods have been widely explored to bridge domain gaps. However, in real-world remote-sensing scenarios, privacy and transmission constraints often preclude access to source domain data, which limits their practical applicability. Recently, Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) has emerged as a promising alternative, aiming at cross-domain adaptation without relying on source data, primarily through a self-training paradigm. Despite its potential, SFOD frequently suffers from training collapse caused by noisy pseudo-labels, especially in remote sensing imagery with dense objects and complex backgrounds. Considering that limited target domain annotations are often feasible in practice, we propose a Vision foundation-Guided DEtection TRansformer (VG-DETR), built upon a semi-supervised framework for SFOD in remote sensing images. VG-DETR integrates a Vision Foundation Model (VFM) into the training pipeline in a "free lunch" manner, leveraging a small amount of labeled target data to mitigate pseudo-label noise while improving the detector's feature-extraction capability. Specifically, we introduce a VFM-guided pseudo-label mining strategy that leverages the VFM's semantic priors to further assess the reliability of the generated pseudo-labels. By recovering potentially correct predictions from low-confidence outputs, our strategy improves pseudo-label quality and quantity. In addition, a dual-level VFM-guided alignment method is proposed, which aligns detector features with VFM embeddings at both the instance and image levels. Through contrastive learning among fine-grained prototypes and similarity matching between feature maps, this dual-level alignment further enhances the robustness of feature representations against domain gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VG-DETR achieves superior performance in source-free remote sensing detection tasks.

cs.CV↗

TaiBai: A fully programmable brain-inspired processor with topology-aware efficiency

Brain-inspired computing has emerged as a promising paradigm to overcome the energy-efficiency limitations of conventional intelligent systems by emulating the brain's partitioned architecture and event-driven sparse computation. However, existing brain-inspired chips often suffer from rigid network topology constraints and limited neuronal programmability, hindering their adaptability. To address these challenges, we present TaiBai, an event-driven, programmable many-core brain-inspired processor that leverages temporal and spatial spike sparsity to minimize bandwidth and computational overhead. TaiBai chip contains three key features: First, a brain-inspired hierarchical topology encoding scheme is designed to flexibly support arbitrary network architectures while slashing storage overhead for large-scale networks; Second, a multi-granularity instruction set enables programmability of brain-like spiking neuron or synapses with various dynamics and on-chip learning rules; Third, a co-designed compiler stack optimizes task mapping and resource allocation. After evaluating across various tasks, such as speech recognition, ECG classification, and cross-day brain-computer interface decoding, we found spiking neural networks embedded on the TaiBai chip could achieve more than 200 times higher energy efficiency than a standard NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU at a comparable accuracy. These results demonstrated its high potentiation as a scalable, programmable, and ultra-efficient solution for both multi-scale brain simulation and brain-inspired computation.

cs.AR↗

A Law of Emergence: Maximum Causal Power at the Mesoscale

Complex systems universally exhibit emergence, where macroscopic dynamics arise from local interactions, but a predictive law governing this process has been absent. We establish and verify such a law. We define a system's causal power at a spatial scale, $\ell$, as its Effective Information (EI$_\ell$), measured by the mutual information between a targeted, maximum-entropy intervention and its outcome. From this, we derive and prove a Middle-Scale Peak Theorem: for a broad class of systems with local interactions, EI$_\ell$ is not monotonic but exhibits a strict maximum at a mesoscopic scale $\ell^*$. This peak is a necessary consequence of a fundamental trade-off between noise-averaging at small scales and locality-limited response at large scales. We provide quantitative, reproducible evidence for this law in two distinct domains: a 2D Ising model near criticality and a model of agent-based collective behavior. In both systems, the predicted unimodal peak is decisively confirmed by statistical model selection. Our work establishes a falsifiable, first-principles law that identifies the natural scale of emergence, providing a quantitative foundation for the discovery of effective theories.

cs.IT↗

UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT

We present UI-Venus, a native UI agent that takes only screenshots as input based on a multimodal large language model. UI-Venus achieves SOTA performance on both UI grounding and navigation tasks using only several hundred thousand high-quality training samples through reinforcement finetune (RFT) based on Qwen2.5-VL. Specifically, the 7B and 72B variants of UI-Venus obtain 94.1% / 50.8% and 95.3% / 61.9% on the standard grounding benchmarks, i.e., Screenspot-V2 / Pro, surpassing the previous SOTA baselines including open-source GTA1 and closed-source UI-TARS-1.5. To show UI-Venus's summary and planing ability, we also evaluate it on the AndroidWorld, an online UI navigation arena, on which our 7B and 72B variants achieve 49.1% and 65.9% success rate, also beating existing models. To achieve this, we introduce carefully designed reward functions for both UI grounding and navigation tasks and corresponding efficient data cleaning strategies. To further boost navigation performance, we propose Self-Evolving Trajectory History Alignment & Sparse Action Enhancement that refine historical reasoning traces and balances the distribution of sparse but critical actions, leading to more coherent planning and better generalization in complex UI tasks. Our contributions include the publish of SOTA open-source UI agents, comprehensive data cleaning protocols and a novel self-evolving framework for improving navigation performance, which encourage further research and development in the community. Code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/UI-Venus.

cs.CV↗

Measuring Diversity in Synthetic Datasets

Large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted to generate synthetic datasets for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as text classification and summarization. However, accurately measuring the diversity of these synthetic datasets-an aspect crucial for robust model performance-remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce DCScore, a novel method for measuring synthetic dataset diversity from a classification perspective. Specifically, DCScore formulates diversity evaluation as a sample classification task, leveraging mutual relationships among samples. We further provide theoretical verification of the diversity-related axioms satisfied by DCScore, highlighting its role as a principled diversity evaluation method. Experimental results on synthetic datasets reveal that DCScore enjoys a stronger correlation with multiple diversity pseudo-truths of evaluated datasets, underscoring its effectiveness. Moreover, both empirical and theoretical evidence demonstrate that DCScore substantially reduces computational costs compared to existing methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/bluewhalelab/dcscore.

cs.CL↗

Vulnerability-Aware Alignment: Mitigating Uneven Forgetting in Harmful Fine-Tuning

Harmful fine-tuning (HFT), performed directly on open-source LLMs or through Fine-tuning-as-a-Service, breaks safety alignment and poses significant threats. Existing methods aim to mitigate HFT risks by learning robust representation on alignment data or making harmful data unlearnable, but they treat each data sample equally, leaving data vulnerability patterns understudied. In this work, we reveal that certain subsets of alignment data are consistently more prone to forgetting during HFT across different fine-tuning tasks. Inspired by these findings, we propose Vulnerability-Aware Alignment (VAA), which estimates data vulnerability, partitions data into "vulnerable" and "invulnerable" groups, and encourages balanced learning using a group distributionally robust optimization (Group DRO) framework. Specifically, VAA learns an adversarial sampler that samples examples from the currently underperforming group and then applies group-dependent adversarial perturbations to the data during training, aiming to encourage a balanced learning process across groups. Experiments across four fine-tuning tasks demonstrate that VAA significantly reduces harmful scores while preserving downstream task performance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.LG↗

ROD: RGB-Only Fast and Efficient Off-road Freespace Detection

Off-road freespace detection is more challenging than on-road scenarios because of the blurred boundaries of traversable areas. Previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods employ multi-modal fusion of RGB images and LiDAR data. However, due to the significant increase in inference time when calculating surface normal maps from LiDAR data, multi-modal methods are not suitable for real-time applications, particularly in real-world scenarios where higher FPS is required compared to slow navigation. This paper presents a novel RGB-only approach for off-road freespace detection, named ROD, eliminating the reliance on LiDAR data and its computational demands. Specifically, we utilize a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) to extract rich features from RGB images. Additionally, we design a lightweight yet efficient decoder, which together improve both precision and inference speed. ROD establishes a new SOTA on ORFD and RELLIS-3D datasets, as well as an inference speed of 50 FPS, significantly outperforming prior models.

cs.CV↗

A Game-Theoretic Foundation for Bitcoin's Price: A Security-Utility Equilibrium

This paper introduces a structural game-theoretic model to value decentralized digital assets like Bitcoin. Instead of relying on speculative beliefs, it frames the asset's price within a Rational-Expectations Security-Utility Nash Equilibrium (RESUNE). This equilibrium is a fixed point where the market-clearing price dictates the hash rate through a free-entry mining model, which in turn endogenously sets the network's security. The security, defined as one minus the probability of a 51% attack, is determined via a global games model of attacker coordination, providing a unique and continuous security function. We prove the existence of a RESUNE and offer conditions for its uniqueness and stability. The model predicts that the stabilizing direct effect of price on demand must outweigh the potentially destabilizing feedback from price to security. The framework generates testable predictions, such as a protocol halving causing a contraction in both hash rate and price. A structural Vector Autoregression (VAR) model is proposed to test this mechanism. The model decomposes Bitcoin's value into transactional utility, security, and speculative components and explains the observed unidirectional causality from price to hash rate.

cs.CR↗

Sub-Parsec Acceleration and Collimation of NGC 4261's Twin Jets

We report the first robust evidence for a co-spatial sub-parsec acceleration and collimation zone (ACZ) in the twin jets of the nearby low-luminosity active galactic nucleus (LLAGN) NGC 4261. This result is derived from multifrequency Very Long Baseline Array imaging, combined with the frequency-dependent properties of the radio core (core shift and core size) and jet kinematics determined from the jet-to-counterjet brightness ratio. By applying multiple analysis methods and incorporating results from the literature, we identify a parabolic-to-conical structural transition in both the jet and counterjet, with the transition occurring at $(1.23\pm0.24)$ pc or $(8.1\pm1.6)\times10^3 R_{\rm s}$ (Schwarzschild radii) for the jet and $(0.97\pm0.29)$ pc or $(6.4\pm1.9)\times10^3 R_{\rm s}$ for the counterjet. We also derive the jet velocity field at distances of $\sim (10^3-2\times10^4) R_{\rm s}$. While local kinematic variations are present, the jet shows an overall acceleration to relativistic speeds from $\sim 10^3$ to $\sim8\times10^3 R_{\rm s}$, with a maximum Lorentz factor of $Γ_{\rm max} \approx 2.6$. Beyond this region, the jet gradually decelerates to sub-relativistic speeds. These findings support the existence of a sub-parsec-scale ($\lesssim 1.5$ pc) ACZ in NGC 4261, where the jet is accelerated via magnetic-to-kinetic energy conversion while being confined by external pressure. A brief comparison with M 87 suggests that the ACZ in NGC 4261 may represent a scaled-down analogue of that in M 87. These results point towards a potential diversity in jet ACZ properties, emphasizing the importance of extending such studies to a broader AGN population to elucidate the physical mechanisms at play.

astro-ph.GA↗

A Stochastic Gradient Descent Method for Globally Minimizing Nearly Convex Functions

This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term, independent of the gradient, is determined by the difference between the current function value and a lower bound estimate of the optimal value. In both probability space and state space, we show that the proposed algorithm converges linearly to a neighborhood of the global optimal solution. The size of this neighborhood depends on the variance of the gradient and the deviation between the estimated lower bound and the optimal value. In particular, when full gradient information is available and a sharp lower bound of the objective function is provided, the algorithm achieves linear convergence to the global optimum. Furthermore, we introduce a double-loop scheme that alternately updates the lower bound estimate and the optimization sequence, enabling convergence to a neighborhood of the global optimum that depends solely on the gradient variance. Numerical experiments on several benchmark problems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

math.OC↗

From Equipartition to Curvature: The Spectral Evolution of 4FGL Blazars

We investigate the evolution of spectral energy distribution (SED) and underlying electron energy distribution (EED) by modeling the nearly simultaneous broadband spectra of selected bright 4FGL blazars, in the context of a combined cooling and stochastic acceleration scenario. We find that one-zone leptonic model with log-parabolic (LP) EED can successfully fit the GeV-TeV emission of blazars. The synchrotron frequency $ν_s$ of blazars mainly evolves due to variation of electron peak energy $γ_{3p}$. The BL Lac objects (BL Lacs) show a negative trend in the $ν_s- ν_s L_s$ SED plane, known as blazar sequence, that does not seem to be an artifact of Doppler boosting, but driven by the equipartition constraints. A positive correlation is found between the derived magnetic field $B$ and electron density $n_e$, whereas $n_e$ and $γ_{3p}$ negatively relate, as expected in an equipartition scenario. The flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) deviate significantly from such a scenario, indicating their jet parameters should be varying independently. The synchrotron peak frequency $ν_s$ and its spectral curvature $b_s$ negatively correlate for all blazars, confirming the stochastic particle acceleration in blazar jets. However, blazars do not show the signature of hard-sphere acceleration, indicating that magnetic turbulence in the jets might be soft and physical conditions might be near to steady state, consistent with equipartition. Furthermore, for BL Lacs, the SED curvature $b_s$ and the EED curvature $r$ and nearly meet the theoretical relationship $r=5b_s$, whereas the FSRQs show large deviation due to poor constrain on $b_s$ due to presence of thermal component.

astro-ph.HE↗

One Last Attention for Your Vision-Language Model

Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, achieve remarkable zero-shot performance, yet their downstream potential hinges on effective fine-tuning. Most adaptation methods typically focus on refining representation from separate modalities (text or vision) but neglect the critical role of their fused representations in the decision-making process, \emph{\ie} rational matrix that drives the final prediction. To bridge the gap, we propose a simple yet effective \textbf{R}ational \textbf{Ada}ptaion ({RAda}) to explicitly exploit the final fused representation during fine-tuning. RAda employs a learned mask, obtained from a lightweight attention layer attached at the end of a VLM, to dynamically calibrate the contribution of each element in the rational matrix, enabling targeted adjustments to the final cross-modal interactions without incurring costly modifications to intermediate features. Experiments in different settings (i.e., updating, or freezing pretrained encoders in adaptation, and test-time training that can only access the unlabeled test data) show that RAda serves as a versatile fine-tuning technique, improving the baseline with minimal code and performing comparably against current arts in most settings. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/khufia/RAda/tree/main}{github.com/khufia/RAda}.

cs.CV↗