Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xin Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Xin Liu.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Quantum enhanced metrology based on flipping trajectory of cold Rydberg gases

The dynamical trajectory of a dissipative Rydberg many-body system could be flipped under a microwave field driving, displaying an enhanced sensitivity. This is because the intersection of the folded hysteresis trajectories exhibits a sharp peak near the phase transition, amplifying the response to small changes in the microwave field. Here, we demonstrate an experiment of enhanced metrology through flipping the hysteresis trajectory in a cold atomic system, displaying an approach to improve sensitivity near the gap-closing points. By measuring the intersection points of hysteresis trajectories versus Rabi frequency of the microwave field, we quantify the equivalent sensitivity to be 1.6(5) nV cm-1 Hz-1/2. The measurement is also dependent on the interaction time, optical depth and principal quantum number since the long-range interaction between Rydberg atoms could dramatically change the shape of hysteresis trajectories. The reported results suggest that flipping trajectory features in cold Rydberg many-body systems could advance sensing and metrology applications.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

VIPER-MCP: Detecting and Exploiting Taint-Style Vulnerabilities in Model Context Protocol Servers

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standard interface for connecting LLM agents to external tools. Because MCP servers expose privileged operations such as shell execution, network access, and file-system manipulation to agent-driven invocation, implementation flaws in tool handlers can create a direct path from natural-language input to security-sensitive sinks, potentially granting attackers remote code execution or full system compromise. Existing approaches either produce unconfirmed static alerts without dynamic validation, or rely on fixed template libraries that lack code-level guidance and fail to trigger vulnerabilities requiring specific parameter shapes or multi-step taint paths. In this paper, we present VIPER-MCP, the first end-to-end automated vulnerability auditing framework for MCP servers that not only detects taint-style vulnerabilities but also dynamically confirms their exploitability by producing concrete proof-of-concept prompts. VIPER-MCP introduces two novel techniques: (1) an anchor-query pass in a two-pass static analysis strategy that augments standard taint alerts with function-level structural context, resolving file-level static artifacts to specific MCP tool handlers and producing vulnerability-anchored call chains; and (2) a feedback-driven prompt evolution mechanism that employs dual-mutator scheduling that independently corrects tool-selection drift and deepens parameter penetration, together with fitness-scored seed selection to iteratively refine natural-language prompts toward vulnerable sinks. In a large-scale scan of 39,884 real-world open-source MCP server repositories, VIPER-MCP discovered 106 0-day vulnerabilities, all of which were confirmed through end-to-end exploit traces, with 67 CVE IDs assigned to date.

cs.CR↗

The traveling wave solutions of the 1D hyperbolic Keller-Segel equations

The goal of this paper is to investigate the traveling wave solutions with one-sided far field conditions for the one-dimensional hyperbolic Keller-Segel equations with quorum sensitivity. The traveling wave solutions are piece-wise smooth in the moving coordinate, and satisfy the entropy inequality at the discontinuity.

math.AP↗

BASC : Behavior-Aligned Quantization and Pruning for Low-Bit Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) encode information through binary spikes and compute in an event-driven manner, offering an energy-efficient paradigm for machine intelligence. However, high-performance SNNs incur substantial memory and timestep-wise computation costs that hinder deployment on resource-constrained devices. Quantization and pruning provide complementary routes to reducing these costs, yet both make their decisions with local criteria that overlook temporal task feedback in quantization and inter-channel dependencies in pruning. Consequently, optimizing either criterion can still yield suboptimal compression performance. We refer to this discrepancy as criterion-behavior mismatch and propose Behavior-Aligned SNN Compression (BASC), a unified framework with two lightweight modules. For quantization, the scale is applied to synaptic current at every timestep and therefore shifts spike timing. Temporal-Behavior Scale Correction (TSC) makes the scale learnable under a temporal loss, allowing firing behavior to inform scale optimization. For pruning, channel importance depends on how channels jointly drive the membrane potential across the firing threshold. Boundary-Level Inter-Channel Correction (BIC) uses channelwise importance scores for initial selection and inter-channel information to re-evaluate only channels near the pruning threshold. Extensive experiments on static and neuromorphic benchmarks show that lower-bit BASC models match or outperform higher-bit baselines and retain this accuracy advantage after structured pruning, while further reducing model storage and synaptic operations.

cs.NE↗

Empowering Credit Risk Detection in Weixin Pay with Billion-Scale Deep Graph Learning

Credit risk detection, particularly mitigating individual fraud, is crucial for maintaining the stability of digital financial ecosystems. Accurately identifying credit fraud among billions of users is critical for minimizing financial losses and safeguarding the sustainability of inclusive financial services. Given that credit fraud risks are often concealed within heterogeneous user-risk graphs, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as an effective tool for risk mining by capturing complex dependencies. To address the scalability bottleneck of industrial GNNs, distributed training based on subgraphs is indispensable. However, existing strategies often compromise topological integrity for load balancing. This can be catastrophic for risk detection, as it indiscriminately severs the long-tail evidence chains essential for risk propagation. Overlapping subgraphs can restore severed risk contexts but inevitably introduce redundancy and noise, while overlooking the representation alignment across different local subgraphs. In this paper, we propose a risk-aware overlapping subgraph learning framework for large-scale credit risk detection. We first construct base partitions to ensure load balance. Then, we perform budget-constrained sampling that selects informative long-tail nodes, thereby preserving critical risk diffusion patterns while filtering out noise. To mitigate representation inconsistency, we design a cross-subgraph consistency alignment mechanism. By enforcing alignment constraints on the overlapping nodes, we harmonize the local representations into a globally consistent latent space. Extensive experiments on Weixin Pay's production dataset demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing strategies for risk detection, offering a scalable and effective solution for industrial graph learning.

cs.LG↗

CAP: A Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-Site Browser Agents with Complex Actions and Perception

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that interact with the web through browsers. While recent progress has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate end-to-end task success, these evaluations largely overlook two fundamental sources of difficulty in real web browsing: complex actions over rich user interfaces and visual perception of dynamically rendered content, especially in workflows that span multiple websites. We introduce CAP, a scalable benchmark for evaluating browser agents on cross-site, human-like web tasks that require non-trivial UI interactions and visual understanding. Specifically, we adopt a decomposition-and-recomposition pipeline that first abstracts each website into a structured site card capturing user-facing functions, complex execution operations, and perceptual requirements, and then recomposes these components into realistic cross-site workflows. Each task is therefore grounded in multiple specific operations on each website, enabling fine-grained diagnosis. Built on this framework, we construct 420 tasks across 108 real-world websites and 24 domains under careful quality control. Experiments on state-of-the-art browser agents using our verifiable agent-as-a-judge evaluation framework show low success rates and reveal that perception-heavy interactions remain a major bottleneck, exposing substantial gaps between current agents and real-world web browsing demands.

cs.AI↗

OpenMHC: Accelerating the Science of Wearable Foundation Models

Mobile and wearable devices offer an unprecedented opportunity for continuous, passive health monitoring and active health coaching. However, the largest wearable datasets are not publicly available for research, and leading wearable foundation models trained on such datasets are rarely open-weight or come with reproducible training code. To accelerate open science in wearable health, we release OpenMyHeartCounts (OpenMHC), the largest and most comprehensive broadly accessible wearable health dataset to date, released to qualified researchers, alongside open-source implementations of recent wearable foundation models. OpenMHC, derived from over a decade of data collected through the My Heart Counts study app, includes >60 million hours of wearable data across 19 sensor channels (e.g., step count, heart rate, sleep, workouts) and up to 169 linked variables, including health, lifestyle, mood, and behavior from 11,894 consenting participants. Furthermore, we introduce a unified, open benchmark that enables standardized comparison of wearable health models across three tracks: health and behavior downstream prediction, multivariate data imputation, and time-series forecasting. We benchmark classical methods alongside recent wearable and multivariate time series foundation models. By releasing data under broad research access, alongside open-source code and model weights, at this unprecedented scale, we aim to democratize wearable health AI research and enable the community to drive open progress in this domain.

cs.LG↗

Control-Anchored Residual Flow Matching Conditioned on Gene Geometry for Virtual Cell Perturbation Modeling

A central task in virtual cell modeling is predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to unseen genetic perturbations and drug combinations, and biological networks provide valuable priors on gene relationships. Existing graph-based models commonly use the same network to structure gene representations and mediate intergene interactions, thereby implicitly treating stable associations as perturbation-response pathways. Gene Ontology and control-derived coexpression networks encode relatively stable relationships rather than intervention-specific response directions or magnitudes. We therefore propose GeneGeoFlow, which conditions a control-anchored residual flow on gene-wise geometry derived from biological networks to learn intervention-specific transcriptional responses. GeneGeoFlow derives multi-scale spectral coordinates from Gene Ontology and control-derived coexpression networks. A perturbation-conditioned, gene-wise gating module selects relevant structural scales and network sources, yielding intervention-specific gene geometry. The resulting geometry conditions a control-anchored residual flow without explicitly propagating target-derived signals along the graph. Condition-wise optimal transport couples unpaired control and perturbed populations for training, while a Delta-correlation objective aligns the predicted and observed condition-level expression-shift directions. GeneGeoFlow achieves Pearson Delta scores of 0.8979 on the Norman additive benchmark and 0.9088 on five held-out drug combinations in the fixed ComboSciPlex test split. These results support perturbation-conditioned gene geometry as an effective structural prior for intervention-specific response prediction, without conflating stable gene relationships with response propagation.

q-bio.MN↗

MUGEN: A Unified Framework for Efficient Motion Understanding and Generation

Grounding human motion in language, and language in motion, is a central step toward physical AI systems that can understand, generate, and communicate human behavior. Unified motion--language systems first coupled the two directions through a shared discrete motion codebook, but quantization limits generation quality. The strongest generators buy quality back at growing cost: stacked residual codebooks enlarge the representation; masked decoding stages, long autoregressive rollouts, and denoising chains of tens to hundreds of steps stretch inference; even the continuous-latent designs among them reach their latent only through an iterative diffusion head; and none of this decoding machinery serves understanding. We therefore propose MUGEN, a unified motion--language framework that pays neither cost: no codebook, one draw. A single adaptive-length autoencoder compresses any-length motion into a few continuous latent slots, the system's only motion representation: the language model generates them for text-to-motion and reads them back for motion understanding. Depth-routed hidden states let each slot read from the transformer depth it needs, and a calibrated head predicts a joint distribution over the full latent set, so a single draw carries the text-conditional, cross-slot variation a description permits. At a decoding cost of K language-model steps, one draw, and one decoder pass, MUGEN leads language-model baselines on FID on HumanML3D while raising retrieval precision above the real-motion reference under the standard evaluator, achieves the best CIDEr and BLEU@4 scores, and surpasses the discrete-token state of the art on every retrieval and alignment metric on SnapMoGen.

cs.LG↗

A Damped Subspace Splitting Algorithm for Constrained Density Functional Theory

Constrained density functional theory (CDFT) provides a powerful framework for describing electronically excited and charge-localized states, which underlie a broad range of physical and chemical phenomena. However, the discretized optimization problems arising from CDFT calculations remain challenging, owing to the presence of both the Stiefel manifold constraint and additional nonconvex quadratic constraints. Existing algorithms either fail to enforce the quadratic constraints with high accuracy or face convergence issues due to double-loop iterative structures. In this paper, we first derive a subspace-splitting reformulation that decouples the two groups of constraints, by exploiting the inherent rotation invariance and introducing a nonlinear subspace alignment constraint. Based on this reformulation, we propose a single-loop damped alternating direction method of multipliers, called DASSP. To the best of our knowledge, DASSP is the first algorithm for CDFT calculations with rigorous convergence guarantees. Each iteration of DASSP comprises a spectral minimization step, a projected gradient step, and a damped dual ascent step, all of which admit efficient implementations. Numerical results on synthetic and realistic CDFT problems demonstrate that DASSP attains high feasibility accuracy and exhibits favorable efficiency without compromising robustness. We expect that this work will pave the way toward reliable and efficient large-scale CDFT applications.

math.OC↗

New Statistical Topology Theory Predicts Turbulent Magnetic Emergence from the Sun's Interior

We propose and verify a new statistical topology framework to study the complex magnetic field evolution of Sun-like stars. The Sun, as the star we are most familiar with, exhibits chaotic behaviors such as solar flares and mass ejections that are crucial to the Earth. While these phenomena are mainly driven by the magnetic field, it has been challenging to understand the complex magnetic field. In this paper, we propose a new model to understand the helicity behavior of magnetic loops before their emergence from the interior by advancing the loop ensemble theory from statistical physics. We derive several new power-law scalings that are essential to the Sun's magnetic field, including magnetic flux, magnetic helicity, and linking number. We examine our prediction by a large data analysis through long-term continuous observation over 32 yr. These results not only provide evidence for the new statistical topology framework but also systematically explain the intrinsic unpredictability on the emergence of extreme solar activities. This new discovery on the critical structure of loop ensemble can also be applied to a wide range of turbulence systems.

astro-ph.SR↗

Towards a new paradigm of scientific discovery with socialized artificial intelligence

Scientific discovery has advanced through successive transformations in the organization of knowledge. Observation and experimentation established the empirical foundations of science. Theory made it possible to derive general principles from particular phenomena. Computation extended inquiry into systems beyond direct observation, while data-intensive methods opened new spaces of pattern and prediction. Science now confronts a different frontier. The central challenge is no longer simply to produce more information, but to organize expanding knowledge, reasoning, and evidence into a coherent process of discovery. Here, we introduce Bridging Literature, Agents, and Zero-gap Experimentation (BLAZE), a paradigm of socialized scientific intelligence. BLAZE conceives AI not as an assistant for isolated research tasks, but as an organizational infrastructure for scientific discovery. It connects persistent knowledge, collective reasoning, empirical validation, and human judgment within a continuous research lifecycle, transforming fragmented activities into a cumulative process of inquiry, criticism, and revision. The central premise of BLAZE is that scientific intelligence does not arise from computation alone. It emerges from the sustained interaction among knowledge, hypotheses, experiments, and collective verification. By organizing humans and machines within a shared scientific process, BLAZE makes discovery more traceable, reproducible, and cumulative while preserving human creativity, judgment, and responsibility. Socialized scientific intelligence may provide a foundation for the next era of science. Its purpose is not to replace human discovery, but to extend the scale, depth, and continuity of collective scientific inquiry.

cs.AI↗

D$_4$CNN$\times$AnaCal: Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Accurate and Precise Weak Lensing Shear Estimation

Traditional weak gravitational lensing shear estimators are carefully calibrated but struggle to fully capture realistic galaxy morphologies, point-spread-function (PSF) effects, blending, and noise in deep surveys, while blindly trained machine learning (ML) models can introduce significant calibration biases. Here we construct a fully D$_4$-equivariant deep neural network for galaxy shape measurement whose architecture enforces symmetry under 90$^{\circ}$ rotations and mirror transformations, and adopt the Analytical Calibration framework (AnaCal) to calibrate the model using its backpropagated gradients. For isolated galaxies in LSST-like single-band simulations, we demonstrate that our approach achieves $\sim$10% lower shape noise than the traditional moment-based Fourier Power Function Shapelets estimator in the high-noise regime, equivalent to a $\sim$20% gain in effective galaxy number density, while simultaneously achieving multiplicative biases consistent with zero across a wide range of noise levels, PSF sizes and ellipticities, and magnitude selection cuts, with all measurements satisfying $|m| {<} 2 \times 10^{-3}$ (i.e., within the 0.2% LSST requirement) and most at the ${\sim}10^{-4}$ level. We demonstrate this framework on isolated single-band galaxy images with Gaussian noise and known PSF, establishing a rigorous, physics-informed foundation for future extensions of ML-based shear estimation to blended sources and multi-band observations in Stage-IV surveys. All codes and data products will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

astro-ph.IM↗

DB-Bench: Benchmarking Deblenders for LSST DESC Using the Blending ToolKit

Blending will be a major source of systematic uncertainty in downstream science analyses of LSST data. We benchmark the performance of several deblenders, leveraging the Blending ToolKit (BTK) to perform rigorous, end-to-end testing. This benchmark incorporates key deblending algorithms, including SourceExtractor, SCARLET, and DeepDISC, with the goal of comparing their effectiveness in handling blended galaxy images from LSST/Rubin simulations. A key focus is characterizing algorithm performance in the regime of unrecognized blends, where multiple galaxies are misidentified as a single object, as these cases introduce systematic biases that propagate into downstream cosmological analyses for galaxy surveys. By utilizing BTK's ability to create customized, reproducible blends, we systematically test these deblenders against different blending conditions, such as source separation and brightness. The toolkit's standardized evaluation metrics, including detection precision, segmentation accuracy, and source reconstruction, are comprehensive assessments of each algorithm's strengths and limitations. Each deblender has performance caveats that may impact their true performance in real survey conditions. We find that SCARLET has high segmentation and reconstruction performance, whereas DeepDISC has strong detection recall for faint and low-SNR sources, and SourceExtractor has accurate peak finding abilities but low segmentation and reconstruction performance. This benchmark provides valuable insights into the performance of existing deblenders and highlights areas for future development.

astro-ph.IM↗

When Fish Look Alike: Tracking Identities with Dual-branch Elasticity

Tracking dense, homogeneous targets like schooling fish remains a major challenge for multiple object tracking due to extreme inter-individual homogeneity, severe physical clustering, and rapid non-rigid deformations. While heavy-backbone separated detection and embedding trackers like SU-T push accuracy boundaries using complex Re-Identification networks, their computational overhead prohibits edge deployment. Furthermore, these modules often fail when appearance features degrade under severe occlusions. To overcome this, we propose Tracking Identities with Dual-branch Elasticity (TIDE). Bypassing expensive appearance cues, TIDE utilizes the Adaptive Geometric Correspondence IoU, an association mechanism leveraging spatial and structural consistency to robustly handle complex morphological variations. Crucially, TIDE introduces system-level deployment elasticity, decoupling the algorithmic pipeline from strict hardware constraints. Evaluations on the MFT-Edge benchmark demonstrate that our Lightweight L-branch achieves a competitive HOTA of 28.43 using merely 20.47G FLOPs. This represents a 38.7-fold computational reduction compared to upper bounds like SU-T, directly facilitating real-time edge deployment. Concurrently, our Scalable S-branch establishes a 29.98 HOTA, successfully bridging the gap between high-precision cloud analysis and efficient edge tracking. The dataset and codes are released at https://vranlee.github.io/TIDE/.

cs.CV↗

Rigorous justification of the hydrostatic-incompressible approximation for weakly stratified isothermal flow

We consider the limit of small Mach number and small vertical-to-horizontal aspect ratio for the isothermal compressible Navier-Stokes system. In addition, we consider the scale in which the stratification is weak. Owing to the anisotropic nature of the problem, the dynamics exhibit a three-wave separation phenomenon, consistent of a slow wave, a fast horizontal acoustic wave, and an even faster vertical acoustic wave. These three waves, unfortunately, are not mutually orthogonal, and the corresponding projections are parametrized by the small parameter, which significantly complicates the nonlinear analysis. Without any restriction on the size of the initial waves, we establish the uniform existence and uniqueness of solutions to the compressible Navier-Stokes system for any fixed small parameter, by carefully analyzing the evolutions of both the energy and the acoustic waves. Moreover, we prove that, as the small parameter tends to zero, the solutions converge to that of the incompressible primitive equations governing atmospheric and oceanic flows.

math.AP↗

A Support-Set Algorithm for Optimization Problems with Nonnegative and Orthogonal Constraints

In this paper, we investigate optimization problems with nonnegative and orthogonal constraints, where any feasible matrix of size $n \times p$ exhibits a sparsity pattern such that each row accommodates at most one nonzero entry. Our analysis demonstrates that, by fixing the support set, the global solution of the minimization subproblem for the proximal linearization of the objective function can be computed in closed form with at most $n$ nonzero entries. Exploiting this structural property offers a powerful avenue for dramatically enhancing computational efficiency. Guided by this insight, we propose a support-set algorithm preserving strictly the feasibility of iterates. A central ingredient is a strategically devised update scheme for support sets that adjusts the placement of nonzero entries. We establish the convergence of the support-set algorithm to a first-order stationary point, and show that its iteration complexity required to reach an $ε$-approximate first-order stationary point is $O (ε^{-2})$. Numerical results are strongly in favor of our algorithm in real-world applications, including nonnegative PCA, clustering, and community detection.

math.OC↗

Experimental Observation of Ghost Image Revivals via Structured Coherence

Ghost imaging retrieves an object's image from intensity correlations between two light beams, neither of which independently carries information about the object. However, conventional ghost imaging critically relies on precise object positioning and conjugate matching between the two arms, causing the image to disappear when these conditions are violated and the object is accessible from one plane only. In this Letter, we break this fundamental limitation by reporting the first experimental observation of revivals of ghost images of arbitrary objects via engineering the longitudinal intensity autocorrelation of a structured thermal light field into a coherence comb. With the reference arm fixed, translating the object produces periodic revivals of the ghost image whenever the object position matches a comb-tooth position, reminiscent of the Talbot effect. This capability enhances the flexibility of correlation imaging, enabling robust tomographic imaging of moving and non-periodic complex objects.

physics.optics↗