arXiv subjects

Tao Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Zhang.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Search for Solar Boosted Dark Matter Particles at the PandaX-4T Experiment

We present a novel constraint on light dark matter utilizing $1.54$ tonne$\cdot$year of data acquired from the PandaX-4T dual-phase xenon time projection chamber. This constraint is derived through detecting electronic recoil signals resulting from the interaction with solar-enhanced dark matter flux. Low-mass dark matter particles, lighter than a few MeV/$c^2$, can scatter with the thermal electrons in the Sun. Consequently, with higher kinetic energy, the boosted dark matter component becomes detectable via contact scattering with xenon electrons, resulting in a few keV energy deposition that exceeds the threshold of PandaX-4T. We calculate the expected recoil energy in PandaX-4T considering the Sun's acceleration and the detection capabilities of the xenon detector. The first experimental search results using the xenon detector yield the most stringent cross-section of $3.51 \times 10^{-39}~\mathrm{cm}^2$ at $0.08~\mathrm{MeV}$/$c^2$ for a solar boosted dark matter mass ranging from $0.02$ to $10~ \mathrm{MeV}$/$c^2$, achieving a 23 fold improvement compared with earlier experimental studies.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2025

Observation of Near-Critical Kibble-Zurek Scaling in Rydberg Atom Arrays

The Kibble-Zurek scaling reveals the universal dynamics when a system is linearly ramped across a symmetry-breaking phase transition. However, in reality, inevitable finite-size effects or symmetrybreaking perturbations can often smear out the critical point and render the phase transition into a smooth crossover. In this letter, we show experimentally that the precise Kibble-Zurek scaling can be retained in the near-critical crossover regime, not necessarily crossing the critical point strictly. The key ingredient to achieving this near-critical Kibble-Zurek scaling is that the system size and the symmetry-breaking field must be appropriately scaled following the variation of ramping speeds. The experiment is performed in a reconfigurable Rydberg atom array platform, where the Rydberg blockade effect induces a Z2 symmetry-breaking transition. The atom array platform enables precise control of the system size and the zigzag geometry as a symmetry-breaking field. Therefore, we can demonstrate notable differences in the precision of the Kibble-Zurek scaling with or without properly scaling the system size and the zigzag geometry. Our results strengthen the Kibble-Zurek scaling as an increasingly valuable tool for investigating phase transition in quantum simulation platforms.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2025

M2PDE: Compositional Generative Multiphysics and Multi-component PDE Simulation

Multiphysics simulation, which models the interactions between multiple physical processes, and multi-component simulation of complex structures are critical in fields like nuclear and aerospace engineering. Previous studies use numerical solvers or ML-based surrogate models for these simulations. However, multiphysics simulations typically require integrating multiple specialized solvers-each for a specific physical process-into a coupled program, which introduces significant development challenges. Furthermore, existing numerical algorithms struggle with highly complex large-scale structures in multi-component simulations. Here we propose compositional Multiphysics and Multi-component PDE Simulation with Diffusion models (M2PDE) to overcome these challenges. During diffusion-based training, M2PDE learns energy functions modeling the conditional probability of one physical process/component conditioned on other processes/components. In inference, M2PDE generates coupled multiphysics and multi-component solutions by sampling from the joint probability distribution. We evaluate M2PDE on two multiphysics tasks-reaction-diffusion and nuclear thermal coupling-where it achieves more accurate predictions than surrogate models in challenging scenarios. We then apply it to a multi-component prismatic fuel element problem, demonstrating that M2PDE scales from single-component training to a 64-component structure and outperforms existing domain-decomposition and graph-based approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/M2PDE.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Buckling of residually stressed cylindrical tubes under compression

We evaluate the loss of stability of axially compressed slender and thick-walled tubes subject to a residual stress distribution. The nonlinear theory of elasticity, when used to analyze the underlying deformation, shows that the residual stress induces preferred directions in the reference configuration. The incremental theory, given in Stroh form, is used to derive an exact bifurcation condition. The critical stretch and the associated critical buckling mode are identified for axisymmetric and asymmetric increments in the deformation. Mode transitions are illustrated as the tube slenderness varies. For slender tubes, Euler buckling is energetically favorable, and the effect of residual stress is negligible. However, for short and thick-walled tubes where barreling mode is dominant, the residual stress significantly affects the buckling behavior and may eliminate barreling instability. We show that, depending on its magnitude and direction, residual stress can either accelerate or delay instability. Phase diagrams for various modes are obtained and provide insight into pattern selection across different tube geometries.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2025

On Path to Multimodal Generalist: General-Level and General-Bench

The Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) is currently experiencing rapid growth, driven by the advanced capabilities of LLMs. Unlike earlier specialists, existing MLLMs are evolving towards a Multimodal Generalist paradigm. Initially limited to understanding multiple modalities, these models have advanced to not only comprehend but also generate across modalities. Their capabilities have expanded from coarse-grained to fine-grained multimodal understanding and from supporting limited modalities to arbitrary ones. While many benchmarks exist to assess MLLMs, a critical question arises: Can we simply assume that higher performance across tasks indicates a stronger MLLM capability, bringing us closer to human-level AI? We argue that the answer is not as straightforward as it seems. This project introduces General-Level, an evaluation framework that defines 5-scale levels of MLLM performance and generality, offering a methodology to compare MLLMs and gauge the progress of existing systems towards more robust multimodal generalists and, ultimately, towards AGI. At the core of the framework is the concept of Synergy, which measures whether models maintain consistent capabilities across comprehension and generation, and across multiple modalities. To support this evaluation, we present General-Bench, which encompasses a broader spectrum of skills, modalities, formats, and capabilities, including over 700 tasks and 325,800 instances. The evaluation results that involve over 100 existing state-of-the-art MLLMs uncover the capability rankings of generalists, highlighting the challenges in reaching genuine AI. We expect this project to pave the way for future research on next-generation multimodal foundation models, providing a robust infrastructure to accelerate the realization of AGI. Project page: https://generalist.top/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs

The adeptness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in comprehending and following natural language instructions is critical for their deployment in sophisticated real-world applications. Existing evaluations mainly focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user's perspective. To bridge this gap, we propose CFBench, a large-scale Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs, featuring 1,000 curated samples that cover more than 200 real-life scenarios and over 50 NLP tasks. CFBench meticulously compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs an innovative systematic framework for constraint types, which includes 10 primary categories and over 25 subcategories, and ensures each constraint is seamlessly integrated within the instructions. To make certain that the evaluation of LLM outputs aligns with user perceptions, we propose an advanced methodology that integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment. Evaluating current leading LLMs on CFBench reveals substantial room for improvement in constraints following, and we further investigate influencing factors and enhancement strategies. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/PKU-Baichuan-MLSystemLab/CFBench

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Unaligned RGB Guided Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution with Spatial-Spectral Concordance

Hyperspectral images super-resolution aims to improve the spatial resolution, yet its performance is often limited at high-resolution ratios. The recent adoption of high-resolution reference images for super-resolution is driven by the poor spatial detail found in low-resolution HSIs, presenting it as a favorable method. However, these approaches cannot effectively utilize information from the reference image, due to the inaccuracy of alignment and its inadequate interaction between alignment and fusion modules. In this paper, we introduce a Spatial-Spectral Concordance Hyperspectral Super-Resolution (SSC-HSR) framework for unaligned reference RGB guided HSI SR to address the issues of inaccurate alignment and poor interactivity of the previous approaches. Specifically, to ensure spatial concordance, i.e., align images more accurately across resolutions and refine textures, we construct a Two-Stage Image Alignment with a synthetic generation pipeline in the image alignment module, where the fine-tuned optical flow model can produce a more accurate optical flow in the first stage and warp model can refine damaged textures in the second stage. To enhance the interaction between alignment and fusion modules and ensure spectral concordance during reconstruction, we propose a Feature Aggregation module and an Attention Fusion module. In the feature aggregation module, we introduce an Iterative Deformable Feature Aggregation block to achieve significant feature matching and texture aggregation with the fusion multi-scale results guidance, iteratively generating learnable offset. Besides, we introduce two basic spectral-wise attention blocks in the attention fusion module to model the inter-spectra interactions. Extensive experiments on three natural or remote-sensing datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

On-chip Non-Hermitian Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics

Exceptional points (EPs) promise revolutionary control over quantum light-matter interactions. Here, we experimentally demonstrate flexible and reversible engineering of quantum vacuum fluctuation in an integrated microcavity supporting chiral Eps. We develop a hybrid lithium niobate (LN)-GaAs quantum photonic platform, seamlessly combining high-quality quantum emitters, a low-loss photonic circuit, efficient electro-optic (EO) effect, and local strain actuator in a single device. Chiral EPs are implemented by dynamically tuning the coupling between the modes associated with a micro-ring resonator, resulting in anomalous spontaneous emission dynamic with a 7-fold modulation of the lifetime (120 ps to 850 ps). Meanwhile, we reshape single-photon spectra via cavity local density of states (LDOS) engineering and generate non-Lorentzian spectral profiles: squared-Lorentzian, Fano-like, and EP-induced transparency (EPIT), a suppression of emission at zero detuning. This work unveils exotic cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED) effects unique to EPs and establishes a universal paradigm for non-Hermitian quantum photonics.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Differential Confounding Privacy and Inverse Composition

Differential privacy (DP) has become the gold standard for privacy-preserving data analysis, but its applicability can be limited in scenarios involving complex dependencies between sensitive information and datasets. To address this, we introduce \textit{differential confounding privacy} (DCP), a specialized form of the Pufferfish privacy (PP) framework that generalizes DP by accounting for broader relationships between sensitive information and datasets. DCP adopts the $(ε, δ)$-indistinguishability framework to quantify privacy loss. We show that while DCP mechanisms retain privacy guarantees under composition, they lack the graceful compositional properties of DP. To overcome this, we propose an \textit{Inverse Composition (IC)} framework, where a leader-follower model optimally designs a privacy strategy to achieve target guarantees without relying on worst-case privacy proofs, such as sensitivity calculation. Experimental results validate IC's effectiveness in managing privacy budgets and ensuring rigorous privacy guarantees under composition.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

PreCM: The Padding-based Rotation Equivariant Convolution Mode for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is an important branch of image processing and computer vision. With the popularity of deep learning, various convolutional neural networks have been proposed for pixel-level classification and segmentation tasks. In practical scenarios, however, imaging angles are often arbitrary, encompassing instances such as water body images from remote sensing and capillary and polyp images in the medical domain, where prior orientation information is typically unavailable to guide these networks to extract more effective features. In this case, learning features from objects with diverse orientation information poses a significant challenge, as the majority of CNN-based semantic segmentation networks lack rotation equivariance to resist the disturbance from orientation information. To address this challenge, this paper first constructs a universal convolution-group framework aimed at more fully utilizing orientation information and equipping the network with rotation equivariance. Subsequently, we mathematically design a padding-based rotation equivariant convolution mode (PreCM), which is not only applicable to multi-scale images and convolutional kernels but can also serve as a replacement component for various types of convolutions, such as dilated convolutions, transposed convolutions, and asymmetric convolution. To quantitatively assess the impact of image rotation in semantic segmentation tasks, we also propose a new evaluation metric, Rotation Difference (RD). The replacement experiments related to six existing semantic segmentation networks on three datasets show that, the average Intersection Over Union (IOU) of their PreCM-based versions respectively improve 6.91%, 10.63%, 4.53%, 5.93%, 7.48%, 8.33% compared to their original versions in terms of random angle rotation. And the average RD values are decreased by 3.58%, 4.56%, 3.47%, 3.66%, 3.47%, 3.43% respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Exploring the Role of Large Language Models in Cybersecurity: A Systematic Survey

With the rapid development of technology and the acceleration of digitalisation, the frequency and complexity of cyber security threats are increasing. Traditional cybersecurity approaches, often based on static rules and predefined scenarios, are struggling to adapt to the rapidly evolving nature of modern cyberattacks. There is an urgent need for more adaptive and intelligent defence strategies. The emergence of Large Language Model (LLM) provides an innovative solution to cope with the increasingly severe cyber threats, and its potential in analysing complex attack patterns, predicting threats and assisting real-time response has attracted a lot of attention in the field of cybersecurity, and exploring how to effectively use LLM to defend against cyberattacks has become a hot topic in the current research field. This survey examines the applications of LLM from the perspective of the cyber attack lifecycle, focusing on the three phases of defense reconnaissance, foothold establishment, and lateral movement, and it analyzes the potential of LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) tasks. Meanwhile, we investigate how LLM-based security solutions are deployed and applied in different network scenarios. It also summarizes the internal and external risk issues faced by LLM during its application. Finally, this survey also points out the facing risk issues and possible future research directions in this domain.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Analysis of Broken Randomized Experiments by Principal Stratification

Although randomized controlled trials have long been regarded as the ``gold standard'' for evaluating treatment effects, there is no natural prevention from post-treatment events. For example, non-compliance makes the actual treatment different from the assigned treatment, truncation-by-death renders the outcome undefined or ill-defined, and missingness prevents the outcomes from being measured. In this paper, we develop a statistical analysis framework using principal stratification to investigate the treatment effect in broken randomized experiments. The average treatment effect in compliers and always-survivors is adopted as the target causal estimand. We establish the asymptotic property for the estimator. To relax the identification assumptions, we also propose an interventionist estimand defined in compliers by adjusting for baseline covariates. We apply the framework to study the effect of training on earnings in the Job Corps study and find that the training program improves employment and earnings in the long term.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

MCGMark: An Encodable and Robust Online Watermark for Tracing LLM-Generated Malicious Code

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), numerous software service providers (SSPs) are dedicated to developing LLMs customized for code generation tasks, such as CodeLlama and Copilot. However, these LLMs can be leveraged by attackers to create malicious software, which may pose potential threats to the software ecosystem. For example, they can automate the creation of advanced phishing malware. To address this issue, we first conduct an empirical study and design a prompt dataset, MCGTest, which involves approximately 400 person-hours of work and consists of 406 malicious code generation tasks. Utilizing this dataset, we propose MCGMark, the first robust, code structure-aware, and encodable watermarking approach to trace LLM-generated code. We embed encodable information by controlling the token selection and ensuring the output quality based on probabilistic outliers. Additionally, we enhance the robustness of the watermark by considering the structural features of malicious code, preventing the embedding of the watermark in easily modified positions, such as comments. We validate the effectiveness and robustness of MCGMark on the DeepSeek-Coder. MCGMark achieves an embedding success rate of 88.9% within a maximum output limit of 400 tokens. Furthermore, it also demonstrates strong robustness and has minimal impact on the quality of the output code. Our approach assists SSPs in tracing and holding responsible parties accountable for malicious code generated by LLMs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

PVUW 2025 Challenge Report: Advances in Pixel-level Understanding of Complex Videos in the Wild

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the 4th Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild (PVUW) Challenge, held in conjunction with CVPR 2025. It summarizes the challenge outcomes, participating methodologies, and future research directions. The challenge features two tracks: MOSE, which focuses on complex scene video object segmentation, and MeViS, which targets motion-guided, language-based video segmentation. Both tracks introduce new, more challenging datasets designed to better reflect real-world scenarios. Through detailed evaluation and analysis, the challenge offers valuable insights into the current state-of-the-art and emerging trends in complex video segmentation. More information can be found on the workshop website: https://pvuw.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

LL-Gaussian: Low-Light Scene Reconstruction and Enhancement via Gaussian Splatting for Novel View Synthesis

Novel view synthesis (NVS) in low-light scenes remains a significant challenge due to degraded inputs characterized by severe noise, low dynamic range (LDR) and unreliable initialization. While recent NeRF-based approaches have shown promising results, most suffer from high computational costs, and some rely on carefully captured or pre-processed data--such as RAW sensor inputs or multi-exposure sequences--which severely limits their practicality. In contrast, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering with competitive visual fidelity; however, existing 3DGS-based methods struggle with low-light sRGB inputs, resulting in unstable Gaussian initialization and ineffective noise suppression. To address these challenges, we propose LL-Gaussian, a novel framework for 3D reconstruction and enhancement from low-light sRGB images, enabling pseudo normal-light novel view synthesis. Our method introduces three key innovations: 1) an end-to-end Low-Light Gaussian Initialization Module (LLGIM) that leverages dense priors from learning-based MVS approach to generate high-quality initial point clouds; 2) a dual-branch Gaussian decomposition model that disentangles intrinsic scene properties (reflectance and illumination) from transient interference, enabling stable and interpretable optimization; 3) an unsupervised optimization strategy guided by both physical constrains and diffusion prior to jointly steer decomposition and enhancement. Additionally, we contribute a challenging dataset collected in extreme low-light environments and demonstrate the effectiveness of LL-Gaussian. Compared to state-of-the-art NeRF-based methods, LL-Gaussian achieves up to 2,000 times faster inference and reduces training time to just 2%, while delivering superior reconstruction and rendering quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on a variety of natural language tasks based on just a few examples of natural language instructions, reducing the need for extensive feature engineering. However, most powerful LLMs are closed-source or limited in their capability for languages other than English. In this technical report, we present Baichuan 2, a series of large-scale multilingual language models containing 7 billion and 13 billion parameters, trained from scratch, on 2.6 trillion tokens. Baichuan 2 matches or outperforms other open-source models of similar size on public benchmarks like MMLU, CMMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Furthermore, Baichuan 2 excels in vertical domains such as medicine and law. We will release all pre-training model checkpoints to benefit the research community in better understanding the training dynamics of Baichuan 2.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Pixel-SAIL: Single Transformer For Pixel-Grounded Understanding

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve remarkable performance for fine-grained pixel-level understanding tasks. However, all the works rely heavily on extra components, such as vision encoder (CLIP), segmentation experts, leading to high system complexity and limiting model scaling. In this work, our goal is to explore a highly simplified MLLM without introducing extra components. Our work is motivated by the recent works on Single trAnsformer as a unified vIsion-Language Model (SAIL) design, where these works jointly learn vision tokens and text tokens in transformers. We present Pixel-SAIL, a single transformer for pixel-wise MLLM tasks. In particular, we present three technical improvements on the plain baseline. First, we design a learnable upsampling module to refine visual token features. Secondly, we propose a novel visual prompt injection strategy to enable the single transformer to understand visual prompt inputs and benefit from the early fusion of visual prompt embeddings and vision tokens. Thirdly, we introduce a vision expert distillation strategy to efficiently enhance the single transformer's fine-grained feature extraction capability. In addition, we have collected a comprehensive pixel understanding benchmark (PerBench), using a manual check. It includes three tasks: detailed object description, visual prompt-based question answering, and visual-text referring segmentation. Extensive experiments on four referring segmentation benchmarks, one visual prompt benchmark, and our PerBench show that our Pixel-SAIL achieves comparable or even better results with a much simpler pipeline. Code and model will be released at https://github.com/magic-research/Sa2VA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Generative Regression Based Watch Time Prediction for Short-Video Recommendation

Watch time prediction (WTP) has emerged as a pivotal task in short video recommendation systems, designed to quantify user engagement through continuous interaction modeling. Predicting users' watch times on videos often encounters fundamental challenges, including wide value ranges and imbalanced data distributions, which can lead to significant estimation bias when directly applying regression techniques. Recent studies have attempted to address these issues by converting the continuous watch time estimation into an ordinal regression task. While these methods demonstrate partial effectiveness, they exhibit notable limitations: (1) the discretization process frequently relies on bucket partitioning, inherently reducing prediction flexibility and accuracy and (2) the interdependencies among different partition intervals remain underutilized, missing opportunities for effective error correction. Inspired by language modeling paradigms, we propose a novel Generative Regression (GR) framework that reformulates WTP as a sequence generation task. Our approach employs \textit{structural discretization} to enable nearly lossless value reconstruction while maintaining prediction fidelity. Through carefully designed vocabulary construction and label encoding schemes, each watch time is bijectively mapped to a token sequence. To mitigate the training-inference discrepancy caused by teacher-forcing, we introduce a \textit{curriculum learning with embedding mixup} strategy that gradually transitions from guided to free-generation modes. We evaluate our method against state-of-the-art approaches on two public datasets and one industrial dataset. We also perform online A/B testing on the Kuaishou App to confirm the real-world effectiveness. The results conclusively show that GR outperforms existing techniques significantly.

cs.LG↗