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Liang Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Sun.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Single-crystal X-ray diffraction of BC8 carbon near terapascal pressures

Whether carbon forms crystalline structures beyond diamond at terapascal pressures remains unresolved. Predicted for nearly four decades, the denser BC8 phase has lacked direct crystallographic evidence. Here we report the first direct crystallographic identification of BC8 carbon, formed as a single crystal from molten carbon during laser-driven decaying-shock compression of [100]-oriented diamond following loading above 1.1 TPa. Using in situ orientation-resolved single-crystal X-ray diffraction, we observe discrete Bragg spots whose spacings and angular relationships are reproduced by a common orientation matrix within each indexed BC8 reflection group, providing constraints beyond powder peak matching. Our single-crystal formation strategy and direct diffraction evidence resolve the decades-long quest for a post-diamond carbon structure, demonstrating how dynamic loading pathways can make predicted high-pressure phases experimentally accessible.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

What Do Tabular Foundation Models Compute In Context? In-Situ Representation Refinement through Attention-Gated Updates

A tabular foundation model must discover which distinctions matter for each new table without updating its parameters. We develop in-situ representation refinement: support labels guide changes to the episode's representations, improving the information available to later queries. A regularized leave-one-out objective yields a support correction and its query extension. The leading term separates attention-based reading from state-dependent scaling, motivating RefineICL: an attention-gated, FFN-free contextual stack with selected low-rank feature interaction and typed memory. A direct intervention tests the role of evolving support states: removing one intermediate support update while preserving the block's query output increases final query cross-entropy in all 72 tested episodes. RefineICL-L24 reaches 0.93836 OVR-AUC and 0.87173 accuracy on AMLB29. A benchmark-informed continuation reaches 1644.8 Elo on the 38-dataset TabArena snapshot, 31.4 Elo above TabPFN-3 under the same evaluation. It also improves all four reported metrics over TabPFN-v3 on both TabZilla views. In a matched 100K-update depth grid, an expanded FFN gives no consistent validation benefit and uses 60.2% more peak inference memory at L8. These results connect learning within a forward pass to representation refinement and show how this view guides a competitive, memory-efficient model.

cs.LG↗

Transferable Evidence Reconstruction for Longitudinal Glucose Representations

Long physiological recordings contain many routine measurements, while predictive information often lies in rare events, sustained burden, and recurring patterns. These properties can be computed as label-free evidence, but directly using them as features leaves limited labeled data to separate reproducible associations from sample-specific ones. Learning to reconstruct evidence can exploit unlabeled recordings, yet joint reconstruction does not explicitly require the decoding rule to transfer across individuals. We introduce transferable evidence reconstruction (TER): a Ridge regressor fits evidence from representations in one group and predicts it in an identity-disjoint group without refitting. The transfer error trains the encoder through the differentiable fit. For continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), clock-aware encoding preserves the multi-day content and timing needed for evidence recovery. Matched interventions connect the gains to reduced fitting-group sensitivity, with structured targets improving on raw recovery. Across ten leading CGM and time-series baselines, TER sets a new best metric on 12/14 phenotype tasks and exceeds the strongest prior overall PR-AUC/ROC-AUC/Macro-F1 by 4.95/4.43/0.66 percentage points; the PR-AUC and ROC-AUC gains are $2.6\times$ and $2.2\times$ the respective gaps between the two strongest baselines. Meal-response and future-CGM studies further demonstrate predictive utility. TER thus uses meaningful signal properties to supervise not only what a representation preserves, but how reliably it can be read across individuals.

cs.LG↗

Support-Compiled Feature Folding: More Evidence at Lower Memory Across Tabular Foundation Models

Wide tables offer tabular foundation models more evidence, but accessing it can exhaust their memory: full-width pairwise mixing grows quadratically with the number of columns, while feature selection makes inputs affordable by discarding evidence. We ask whether using more features requires interacting over all of them at once. We introduce Support-Compiled Feature Folding (SCFF), a training-free inference framework that encodes wide tables through bounded calls to a frozen backbone. SCFF organizes support-ranked features into a strong Core and a candidate Tail, folds them into narrow feature groups, and support-checks the Tail's added evidence before a single contextual prediction. This converts quadratic feature-interaction work into linear-in-width work with a bounded local working set, without ensembling predictions or training new parameters. On the exhaustive 18-dataset wide-table slice of fixed AMLB-29, TabZilla, and TabArena snapshots, SCFF improves dataset-macro accuracy and NLL on all six evaluated backbones. All four matched-width comparisons retain favorable 95% dataset-bootstrap intervals on locked folds, with relative error reductions up to 26.1%. Median paired GPU-memory savings are 2.09-2.36x, and the ratio of separately observed maximum peaks reaches 34.3x. Under a measured peak-memory ceiling, SCFF uses the saved budget to preserve more support-selected evidence, improving accuracy by 4.06 and 3.72 points over the widest feasible single leaf on predeclared wide-Core strata of TabICLv2 and TabPFN-3.

cs.LG↗

Pushing the Limits of High-Resolution Weather Forecasting through Data Scaling

The development of 0.1$^{\circ}$ global weather forecasting models based on machine learning (ML) is constrained by the limited availability of high-resolution data, as decades of reanalysis are only available at 0.25$^{\circ}$ resolution. While existing approaches fine-tune 0.25$^{\circ}$ forecast models on limited 0.1$^{\circ}$ samples, we show that this transfer is hindered by the irreversible information loss inherent in coarse-resolution forecasting. Therefore, we propose BaguanHR, a framework that shifts the focus from transferring models to transferring data. We first show that super-resolution (SR) has lower conditional entropy and input amplification than forecasting, making it a more robust vehicle for resolution transfer. By leveraging this advantage through variable-wise SR, we synthesize extensive 0.1$^{\circ}$ data from ERA5. BaguanHR's performance on the synthetic-plus-real dataset exceeds both ML-based methods and IFS-HRES, achieving superior performance across over 85% of the lead times within 72 hours. Furthermore, our findings highlight a power-law scaling effect, as a twofold increase in data reduces RMSE by 4.6% for 72-hour forecasting and 4.9% for 120-hour forecasting. Our results demonstrate that scaling high resolution ML-based forecasting is primarily a data bottleneck, and that variable-wise super-resolution provides a simple yet general solution to unlock long coarse-resolution reanalyses for high-resolution training.

cs.LG↗

Bridging AI and Energy Forecasting: An Autonomous Workflow with Customized Toolkit

Energy forecasting is crucial for the power grid, but fundamentally different from general time series analysis: it highly relies on covariates like meteorological factors, and its goals must align with actual power grid operations, such as risk assessment and system reliability. In order to bridge the huge gap between advanced machine learning forecasting models and actual power grid demand, this paper proposes an autonomous forecasting workflow based on LLMs. As a virtual analyst, the agent replaces tedious manual adjustments by autonomously analyzing data features, dynamically orchestrating optimal forecasting pipelines, and generating actionable analysis reports for decision-makers. The carefully arranged pipeline directly addresses the demand of the power grid through probabilistic forecasting for uncertainty quantification. Furthermore, the framework acts as an automated testbed, enabling seamless A/B testing of specific algorithmic plugins across various architectures to evaluate their empirical effectiveness. As the foundation of the algorithm, the underlying toolkit integrates 31 advanced temporal architectures and 6 customized exogenous modules, resulting in 146 highly configurable variants. In addition, to provide experience references for the agents, we established a large-scale benchmark on 21 energy datasets and released new high-quality renewable energy datasets with meteorological factors.

cs.LG↗

GPU-accelerated spectrum reweighting for new-physics searches in solar neutrino--electron scattering

Precision measurements of neutrino--electron elastic scattering provide low-energy tests of weak interactions and beyond-the-Standard-Model effects. Non-standard interactions (NSIs) and an anomalous neutrino magnetic moment modify the differential cross section through different kinematic terms, but both can alter the normalization and shape of the recoil-electron spectrum. Likelihood tests are computationally costly when each parameter point requires the recoil spectrum to be propagated through a detector response obtained from Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. We present a GPU-accelerated spectrum-reweighting framework that avoids regenerating detector MC samples for each new-physics parameter point. Bin-to-bin weights are applied at the recoil-spectrum level and folded with a fixed two-dimensional response model in recoil and reconstructed energy. This keeps the detector response inside the likelihood calculation while reducing each parameter update to operations on precomputed spectra and response kernels. The implementation uses NVIDIA Thrust transformation--reduction primitives and is compiled from a common source for CUDA and OpenMP back ends. In the benchmarks considered here, one likelihood evaluation takes ${\sim}87$ ms on an NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti and ${\sim}52$ ms on an NVIDIA A30X; the latter gives a $58\times$ speedup over a single CPU thread and ${\sim}2.5\times$ over a fully loaded 64-thread CPU. The consumer-GPU result demonstrates that interactive parameter scans are feasible on a single workstation. The main acceleration, however, comes from avoiding detector-MC regeneration at each parameter point rather than from GPU execution alone. The framework applies to neutrino--electron scattering analyses in which the new-physics dependence can be represented by reweighting an existing recoil spectrum, including flavor NSI and magnetic-moment cases studied here.

hep-ex↗

Learning Video Dynamics with Predictive Differentiable Rendering

How to accurately predict a high-fidelity future world? While the visual world is inherently continuous, existing deterministic video prediction models operate in discrete pixel space and are mainly optimized with pixel-wise mean squared error (MSE), which often leads to over-smoothed predictions and a lack of fine-grained visual details. To address these limitations, we propose Predictive Differentiable Rendering (PDR), a novel end-to-end video prediction paradigm that bridges the gap between discrete and continuous representations. Inspired by recent progress in 3D reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting, we introduce PredGS, a lightweight and plug-and-play adapter based on 2D Gaussian representation, which could be seamlessly integrated with existing pixel space predictors, significantly improving spatial detail preservation with negligible computational overhead. Furthermore, we develop predgsplat, a CUDA-accelerated differentiable 2D Gaussian renderer supporting arbitrary channels. Each Gaussian is defined by 5 + C learnable parameters (position, scale, rotation, and C channel amplitudes) and achieves up to 10x faster rendering than the baseline. Optimized by a combined L1 and SSIM loss, PDR overcomes the inherent blurring tendencies of MSE Loss, significantly enhancing the prediction performance. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world benchmarks, including TaxiBJ, WeatherBench, KTH, and Human3.6M, demonstrate that PDR consistently surpasses existing methods, delivering superior detail preservation, visual fidelity, and predictive accuracy.

cs.CV↗

LLM-Oriented Information Retrieval: A Denoising-First Perspective

Modern information retrieval (IR) is no longer consumed primarily by humans but increasingly by large language models (LLMs) via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic search. Unlike human users, LLMs are constrained by limited attention budgets and are uniquely vulnerable to noise; misleading or irrelevant information is no longer just a nuisance, but a direct cause of hallucinations and reasoning failures. In this perspective paper, we argue that denoising-maximizing usable evidence density and verifiability within a context window-is becoming the primary bottleneck across the full information access pipeline. We conceptualize this paradigm shift through a four-stage framework of IR challenges: from inaccessible to undiscoverable, to misaligned, and finally to unverifiable. Furthermore, we provide a pipeline-organized taxonomy of signal-to-noise optimization techniques, spanning indexing, retrieval, context engineering, verification, and agentic workflow. We also present research works on information denoising in domains that rely heavily on retrieval such as lifelong assistant, coding agent, deep research, and multimodal understanding.

cs.IR↗

Integrating Weather Foundation Model and Satellite to Enable Fine-Grained Solar Irradiance Forecasting

Accurate day-ahead solar irradiance forecasting is essential for integrating solar energy into the power grid. However, it remains challenging due to the pronounced diurnal cycle and inherently complex cloud dynamics. Current methods either lack fine-scale resolution (e.g., numerical weather prediction, weather foundation models) or degrade at longer lead times (e.g., satellite extrapolation). We propose Baguan-solar, a two-stage multimodal framework that fuses forecasts from Baguan, a global weather foundation model, with high-resolution geostationary satellite imagery to produce 24-hour irradiance forecasts at kilometer scale. Its decoupled two-stage design first forecasts day-night continuous intermediates (e.g., cloud cover) and then infers irradiance, while its modality fusion jointly preserves fine-scale cloud structures from satellite and large-scale constraints from Baguan forecasts. Evaluated over East Asia using CLDAS as ground truth, Baguan-solar outperforms strong baselines (including ECMWF IFS, vanilla Baguan, and SolarSeer), reducing RMSE by 16.08% and better resolving cloud-induced transients. An operational deployment of Baguan-solar has supported solar power forecasting in an eastern province in China, since July 2025. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/DAMO-DI-ML/Baguan-solar.git.

cs.LG↗

Sensitivity study of $\bar{K}_1(1270)$ decay dynamics using four $D\to \bar{K}_1(1270)(\to \bar Kππ)e^+ν$ decay channels

A sensitivity study for the measurement of $\bar{K}_1(1270)$ decay modes is performed using semileptonic $D$-meson decays. The BESIII experiment is taken as a case study, where a simultaneous analysis of $\bar{K}_1(1270)$ decays to the four thee-body final states $K^-π^+π^-$, $K^-π^+π^0$, $K_S^0π^+π^-$, and $K_S^0π^-π^0$ is presented and a model-independent determination of \mbox{$\mathcal{B}(\bar{K}_1(1270)\to \bar Kππ)$}, without requiring detailed knowledge of intermediate resonant contributions, is proposed.

hep-ex↗

Object Detection Based on Distributed Convolutional Neural Networks

Based on the Distributed Convolutional Neural Network(DisCNN), a straightforward object detection method is proposed. The modules of the output vector of a DisCNN with respect to a specific positive class are positively monotonic with the presence probabilities of the positive features. So, by identifying all high-scoring patches across all possible scales, the positive object can be detected by overlapping them to form a bounding box. The essential idea is that the object is detected by detecting its features on multiple scales, ranging from specific sub-features to abstract features composed of these sub-features. Training DisCNN requires only object-centered image data with positive and negative class labels. The detection process for multiple positive classes can be conducted in parallel to significantly accelerate it, and also faster for single-object detection because of its lightweight model architecture.

cs.CV↗

Skillful Kilometer-Scale Regional Weather Forecasting via Global and Regional Coupling

Data-driven weather models have advanced global medium-range forecasting, yet high-resolution regional prediction remains challenging due to unresolved multiscale interactions between large-scale dynamics and small-scale processes such as terrain-induced circulations and coastal effects. This paper presents a global-regional coupling framework for kilometer-scale regional weather forecasting that synergistically couples a pretrained Transformer-based global model with a high-resolution regional network via a novel bidirectional coupling module, ScaleMixer. ScaleMixer dynamically identifies meteorologically critical regions through adaptive key-position sampling and enables cross-scale feature interaction through dedicated attention mechanisms. The framework produces forecasts at $0.05^\circ$ ($\sim 5 \mathrm{km}$ ) and 1-hour resolution over China, significantly outperforming operational NWP and AI baselines on both gridded reanalysis data and real-time weather station observations. It exhibits exceptional skill in capturing fine-grained phenomena such as orographic wind patterns and Foehn warming, demonstrating effective global-scale coherence with high-resolution fidelity. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ScaleMixer-6B66.

cs.LG↗

Bridging Past and Future: Distribution-Aware Alignment for Time Series Forecasting

Although contrastive and other representation-learning methods have long been explored in vision and NLP, their adoption in modern time series forecasters remains limited. We believe they hold strong promise for this domain. To unlock this potential, we explicitly align past and future representations, thereby bridging the distributional gap between input histories and future targets. To this end, we introduce TimeAlign, a lightweight, plug-and-play framework that establishes a new representation paradigm, distinct from contrastive learning, by aligning auxiliary features via a simple reconstruction task and feeding them back into any base forecaster. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks verify its superior performance. Further studies indicate that the gains arise primarily from correcting frequency mismatches between historical inputs and future outputs. Additionally, we provide two theoretical justifications for how reconstruction improves forecasting generalization and how alignment increases the mutual information between learned representations and predicted targets. The code is available at https://github.com/TROUBADOUR000/TimeAlign.

cs.LG↗

Enhancing AI-Based Tropical Cyclone Track and Intensity Forecasting via Systematic Bias Correction

Tropical cyclones (TCs) pose severe threats to life, infrastructure, and economies in tropical and subtropical regions, underscoring the critical need for accurate and timely forecasts of both track and intensity. Recent advances in AI-based weather forecasting have shown promise in improving TC track forecasts. However, these systems are typically trained on coarse-resolution reanalysis data (e.g., ERA5 at 0.25 degree), which constrains predicted TC positions to a fixed grid and introduces significant discretization errors. Moreover, intensity forecasting remains limited especially for strong TCs by the smoothing effect of coarse meteorological fields and the use of regression losses that bias predictions toward conditional means. To address these limitations, we propose BaguanCyclone, a novel, unified framework that integrates two key innovations: (1) a probabilistic center refinement module that models the continuous spatial distribution of TC centers, enabling finer track precision; and (2) a region-aware intensity forecasting module that leverages high-resolution internal representations within dynamically defined sub-grid zones around the TC core to better capture localized extremes. Evaluated on the global IBTrACS dataset across six major TC basins, our system consistently outperforms both operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) models and most AI-based baselines, delivering a substantial enhancement in forecast accuracy. Remarkably, BaguanCyclone excels in navigating meteorological complexities, consistently delivering accurate forecasts for re-intensification, sweeping arcs, twin cyclones, and meandering events. Our code is available at https://github.com/DAMO-DI-ML/Baguan-cyclone.

cs.LG↗

Baguan-TS: A Sequence-Native In-Context Learning Model for Time Series Forecasting with Covariates

Transformers enable in-context learning (ICL) for rapid, gradient-free adaptation in time series forecasting, yet most ICL-style approaches rely on tabularized, hand-crafted features, while end-to-end sequence models lack inference-time adaptation. We bridge this gap with a unified framework, Baguan-TS, which integrates the raw-sequence representation learning with ICL, instantiated by a 3D Transformer that attends jointly over temporal, variable, and context axes. To make this high-capacity model practical, we tackle two key hurdles: (i) calibration and training stability, improved with a feature-agnostic, target-space retrieval-based local calibration; and (ii) output oversmoothing, mitigated via context-overfitting strategy. On public benchmark with covariates, Baguan-TS consistently outperforms established baselines, achieving the highest win rate and significant reductions in both point and probabilistic forecasting metrics. Further evaluations across diverse real-world energy datasets demonstrate its robustness, yielding substantial improvements.

cs.LG↗

Target Concept Tuning Improves Extreme Weather Forecasting

Deep learning models for meteorological forecasting often fail in rare but high-impact events such as typhoons, where relevant data is scarce. Existing fine-tuning methods typically face a trade-off between overlooking these extreme events and overfitting them at the expense of overall performance. We propose TaCT, an interpretable concept-gated fine-tuning framework that solves the aforementioned issue by selective model improvement: models are adapted specifically for failure cases while preserving performance in common scenarios. To this end, TaCT automatically discovers failure-related internal concepts using Sparse Autoencoders and counterfactual analysis, and updates parameters only when the corresponding concepts are activated, rather than applying uniform adaptation. Experiments show consistent improvements in typhoon forecasting across different regions without degrading other meteorological variables. The identified concepts correspond to physically meaningful circulation patterns, revealing model biases and supporting trustworthy adaptation in scientific forecasting tasks. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Concept-Gated-Fine-tune-62AC.

cs.LG↗

Extending Nonlocal Kinetic Energy Density Functionals to Isolated Systems via a Density-Functional-Dependent Kernel

The Wang-Teter-like nonlocal kinetic energy density functional (KEDF) in the framework of orbital-free density functional theory, while successful in some bulk systems, exhibits a critical Blanc-Cances instability [J. Chem. Phys. 122, 214106 (2005)] when applied to isolated systems, where the total energy becomes unbounded from below. We trace this instability to the use of an ill-defined average charge density, which causes the functional to simultaneously violate the scaling law and the positivity of the Pauli energy. By rigorously constructing a density-functional-dependent kernel, we resolve these pathologies while preserving the formal exactness of the original framework. By systematically benchmarking single-atom systems of 56 elements, we find the resulting KEDF retains computational efficiency while achieving an order-of-magnitude accuracy enhancement over the WT KEDF. In addition, the new KEDF preserves WT's superior accuracy in bulk metals, outperforming the semilocal functionals in both regimes.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗