Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xinyu Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xinyu Zhang.

At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

A novel and efficient parameter estimation of the Lognormal-Rician turbulence model based on k-Nearest Neighbor and data generation method

In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient parameter estimator based on $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$NN) and data generation method for the Lognormal-Rician turbulence channel. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) goodness-of-fit statistical tools are employed to investigate the validity of $k$NN approximation under different channel conditions and it is shown that the choice of $k$ plays a significant role in the approximation accuracy. We present several numerical results to illustrate that solving the constructed objective function can provide a reasonable estimate for the actual values. The accuracy of the proposed estimator is investigated in terms of the mean square error. The simulation results show that increasing the number of generation samples by two orders of magnitude does not lead to a significant improvement in estimation performance when solving the optimization problem by the gradient descent algorithm. However, the estimation performance under the genetic algorithm (GA) approximates to that of the saddlepoint approximation and expectation-maximization estimators. Therefore, combined with the GA, we demonstrate that the proposed estimator achieves the best tradeoff between the computation complexity and the accuracy.

eess.SP↗

Robust Watermarks Leak: Channel-Aware Feature Extraction Enables Adversarial Watermark Manipulation

Watermarking plays a key role in the provenance and detection of AI-generated content. While existing methods prioritize robustness against real-world distortions (e.g., JPEG compression and noise addition), we reveal a fundamental tradeoff: such robust watermarks inherently improve the redundancy of detectable patterns encoded into images, creating exploitable information leakage. To leverage this, we propose an attack framework that extracts leakage of watermark patterns through multi-channel feature learning using a pre-trained vision model. Unlike prior works requiring massive data or detector access, our method achieves both forgery and detection evasion with a single watermarked image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a 60\% success rate gain in detection evasion and 51\% improvement in forgery accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining visual fidelity. Our work exposes the robustness-stealthiness paradox: current "robust" watermarks sacrifice security for distortion resistance, providing insights for future watermark design.

cs.CV↗

Effects of skull properties on long-pulsed transcranial focused ultrasound transmission

Transcranial low-intensity focused ultrasound can deliver energy to the brain in a minimally invasive manner for neuromodulation applications. However, continuous sonication through the skull introduces significant wave interactions, complicating precise energy delivery to the target. We present a comprehensive examination of intracranial acoustic fields generated by focused ultrasound transducers and assess the characteristics of cranial bone that affect acoustic transmission. Acoustic field maps were generated at 88 regions of interest across 10 historical and 2 Thiel-embalmed human skull specimens with sonication at frequencies of 220 kHz, 650 kHz, and 1000 kHz. The average peak pressure insertion losses for historical were 3.6$\pm$3.4 dB, 9.3$\pm$3.3 dB, and 14.8$\pm$5.8 dB, respectively, and for Thiel skulls, the respective losses were 2.9$\pm$1.8 dB, 9.4$\pm$2.6 dB, and 17.0$\pm$5.5 dB. The effect of skull thickness, skull density ratio, and skull curvature on intracranial peak pressure, power and focal area was investigated and linear fits produced. Several unfavorable focusing performances were observed in regions with excessive thickness variation. The effects of angulation and spacing between the transducer and the skull were also investigated. Preliminary findings indicate that wave superposition resulting from skull and transducer spacing could lead to a 30-40% uncertainty in peak recorded intracranial pressure.

physics.med-ph↗

Classroom Simulacra: Building Contextual Student Generative Agents in Online Education for Learning Behavioral Simulation

Student simulation supports educators to improve teaching by interacting with virtual students. However, most existing approaches ignore the modulation effects of course materials because of two challenges: the lack of datasets with granularly annotated course materials, and the limitation of existing simulation models in processing extremely long textual data. To solve the challenges, we first run a 6-week education workshop from N = 60 students to collect fine-grained data using a custom built online education system, which logs students' learning behaviors as they interact with lecture materials over time. Second, we propose a transferable iterative reflection (TIR) module that augments both prompting-based and finetuning-based large language models (LLMs) for simulating learning behaviors. Our comprehensive experiments show that TIR enables the LLMs to perform more accurate student simulation than classical deep learning models, even with limited demonstration data. Our TIR approach better captures the granular dynamism of learning performance and inter-student correlations in classrooms, paving the way towards a ''digital twin'' for online education.

cs.HC↗

Into the Void: Mapping the Unseen Gaps in High Dimensional Data

We present a comprehensive pipeline, augmented by a visual analytics system named ``GapMiner'', that is aimed at exploring and exploiting untapped opportunities within the empty areas of high-dimensional datasets. Our approach begins with an initial dataset and then uses a novel Empty Space Search Algorithm (ESA) to identify the center points of these uncharted voids, which are regarded as reservoirs containing potentially valuable novel configurations. Initially, this process is guided by user interactions facilitated by GapMiner. GapMiner visualizes the Empty Space Configurations (ESC) identified by the search within the context of the data, enabling domain experts to explore and adjust ESCs using a linked parallel-coordinate display. These interactions enhance the dataset and contribute to the iterative training of a connected deep neural network (DNN). As the DNN trains, it gradually assumes the task of identifying high-potential ESCs, diminishing the need for direct user involvement. Ultimately, once the DNN achieves adequate accuracy, it autonomously guides the exploration of optimal configurations by predicting performance and refining configurations, using a combination of gradient ascent and improved empty-space searches. Domain users were actively engaged throughout the development of our system. Our findings demonstrate that our methodology consistently produces substantially superior novel configurations compared to conventional randomization-based methods. We illustrate the effectiveness of our method through several case studies addressing various objectives, including parameter optimization, adversarial learning, and reinforcement learning.

cs.LG↗

Model Averaging Under Flexible Loss Functions

To address model uncertainty under flexible loss functions in prediction problems, we propose a model averaging method that accommodates various loss functions, including asymmetric linear and quadratic loss functions, as well as many other asymmetric/symmetric loss functions as special cases. The flexible loss function allows the proposed method to average a large range of models, such as the quantile and expectile regression models. To determine the weights of the candidate models, we establish a J-fold cross-validation criterion. Asymptotic optimality and weights convergence are proved for the proposed method. Simulations and an empirical application show the superior performance of the proposed method, compared with other methods of model selection and averaging.

stat.ME↗

Two-way Matrix Autoregressive Model with Thresholds

Recently, matrix-valued time series data have attracted significant attention in the literature with the recognition of threshold nonlinearity representing a significant advance. However, given the fact that a matrix is a two-array structure, it is unfortunate, perhaps even unusual, for the threshold literature to focus on using the same threshold variable for the rows and the columns. In fact, evidence in economic, financial, environmental and other data shows advantages of allowing the possibilities of two different threshold variables (with possibly different threshold parameters for rows and columns), hence the need for a Two-way Matrix AutoRegressive model with Thresholds (2-MART). Naturally, two threshold variables pose new and perhaps even fierce challenges, which might be the reason behind the adoption of only one threshold variable in the literature up to now. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive methodology for the 2-MART model, by overcoming various challenges. Compared with existing models in the literature, the new model can achieve greater dimension reduction, much better model fitting, more accurate predictions, and more plausible interpretations.

stat.ME↗

Functional Data-Driven Quantile Model Averaging with Application to Cryptocurrencies

Given the high volatility and susceptibility to extreme events in the cryptocurrency market, forecasting tail risk is of paramount importance. Value-at-Risk (VaR), a quantile-based risk measure, is widely used for assessing tail risk and is central to monitoring financial market stability. In data-rich environments, functional data from various domains are employed to forecast conditional quantiles. However, the infinite-dimensional nature of functional data introduces uncertainty. This paper addresses this uncertainty problem by proposing a novel data-driven conditional quantile model averaging (MA) approach. With a set of candidate models varying by the number of components, MA assigns weights to each model determined by a K-fold cross-validation criterion. We prove the asymptotic optimality of the selected weights in terms of minimizing the excess final prediction error when all candidate models are misspecified. Additionally, when the true regression relationship belongs to the set of candidate models, we provide consistency results for the averaged estimators. Numerical studies indicate that, in most cases, the proposed method outperforms other model selection and averaging methods, particularly for extreme quantiles in cryptocurrency markets.

math.ST↗

Towards an Information Theoretic Framework of Context-Based Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning

As a marriage between offline RL and meta-RL, the advent of offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) has shown great promise in enabling RL agents to multi-task and quickly adapt while acquiring knowledge safely. Among which, context-based OMRL (COMRL) as a popular paradigm, aims to learn a universal policy conditioned on effective task representations. In this work, by examining several key milestones in the field of COMRL, we propose to integrate these seemingly independent methodologies into a unified framework. Most importantly, we show that the pre-existing COMRL algorithms are essentially optimizing the same mutual information objective between the task variable $M$ and its latent representation $Z$ by implementing various approximate bounds. Such theoretical insight offers ample design freedom for novel algorithms. As demonstrations, we propose a supervised and a self-supervised implementation of $I(Z; M)$, and empirically show that the corresponding optimization algorithms exhibit remarkable generalization across a broad spectrum of RL benchmarks, context shift scenarios, data qualities and deep learning architectures. This work lays the information theoretic foundation for COMRL methods, leading to a better understanding of task representation learning in the context of reinforcement learning. Given its generality, we envision our framework as a promising offline pre-training paradigm of foundation models for decision making.

cs.LG↗

Training-Free Motion-Guided Video Generation with Enhanced Temporal Consistency Using Motion Consistency Loss

In this paper, we address the challenge of generating temporally consistent videos with motion guidance. While many existing methods depend on additional control modules or inference-time fine-tuning, recent studies suggest that effective motion guidance is achievable without altering the model architecture or requiring extra training. Such approaches offer promising compatibility with various video generation foundation models. However, existing training-free methods often struggle to maintain consistent temporal coherence across frames or to follow guided motion accurately. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective solution that combines an initial-noise-based approach with a novel motion consistency loss, the latter being our key innovation. Specifically, we capture the inter-frame feature correlation patterns of intermediate features from a video diffusion model to represent the motion pattern of the reference video. We then design a motion consistency loss to maintain similar feature correlation patterns in the generated video, using the gradient of this loss in the latent space to guide the generation process for precise motion control. This approach improves temporal consistency across various motion control tasks while preserving the benefits of a training-free setup. Extensive experiments show that our method sets a new standard for efficient, temporally coherent video generation.

cs.CV↗

Enabling Cardiac Monitoring using In-ear Ballistocardiogram on COTS Wireless Earbuds

The human ear offers a unique opportunity for cardiac monitoring due to its physiological and practical advantages. However, existing earable solutions require additional hardware and complex processing, posing challenges for commercial True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds which are limited by their form factor and resources. In this paper, we propose TWSCardio, a novel system that repurposes the IMU sensors in TWS earbuds for cardiac monitoring. Our key finding is that these sensors can capture in-ear ballistocardiogram (BCG) signals. TWSCardio reuses the unstable Bluetooth channel to stream the IMU data to a smartphone for BCG processing. It incorporates a signal enhancement framework to address issues related to missing data and low sampling rate, while mitigating motion artifacts by fusing multi-axis information. Furthermore, it employs a region-focused signal reconstruction method to translate the multi-axis in-ear BCG signals into fine-grained seismocardiogram (SCG) signals. We have implemented TWSCardio as an efficient real-time app. Our experiments on 100 subjects verify that TWSCardio can accurately reconstruct cardiac signals while showing resilience to motion artifacts, missing data, and low sampling rates. Our case studies further demonstrate that TWSCardio can support diverse cardiac monitoring applications.

cs.HC↗

EvoChart: A Benchmark and a Self-Training Approach Towards Real-World Chart Understanding

Chart understanding enables automated data analysis for humans, which requires models to achieve highly accurate visual comprehension. While existing Visual Language Models (VLMs) have shown progress in chart understanding, the lack of high-quality training data and comprehensive evaluation benchmarks hinders VLM chart comprehension. In this paper, we introduce EvoChart, a novel self-training method for generating synthetic chart data to enhance VLMs' capabilities in real-world chart comprehension. We also propose EvoChart-QA, a noval benchmark for measuring models' chart comprehension abilities in real-world scenarios. Specifically, EvoChart is a unique self-training data synthesis approach that simultaneously produces high-quality training corpus and a high-performance chart understanding model. EvoChart-QA consists of 650 distinct real-world charts collected from 140 different websites and 1,250 expert-curated questions that focus on chart understanding. Experimental results on various open-source and proprietary VLMs tested on EvoChart-QA demonstrate that even the best proprietary model, GPT-4o, achieves only 49.8% accuracy. Moreover, the EvoChart method significantly boosts the performance of open-source VLMs on real-world chart understanding tasks, achieving 54.2% accuracy on EvoChart-QA.

cs.CV↗

A Survey on Large Language Models with Multilingualism: Recent Advances and New Frontiers

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable multilingual capabilities in natural language processing, attracting global attention in both academia and industry. To mitigate potential discrimination and enhance the overall usability and accessibility for diverse language user groups, it is important for the development of language-fair technology. Despite the breakthroughs of LLMs, the investigation into the multilingual scenario remains insufficient, where a comprehensive survey to summarize recent approaches, developments, limitations, and potential solutions is desirable. To this end, we provide a survey with multiple perspectives on the utilization of LLMs in the multilingual scenario. We first rethink the transitions between previous and current research on pre-trained language models. Then we introduce several perspectives on the multilingualism of LLMs, including training and inference methods, information retrieval, model security, multi-domain with language culture, and usage of datasets. We also discuss the major challenges that arise in these aspects, along with possible solutions. Besides, we highlight future research directions that aim at further enhancing LLMs with multilingualism. The survey aims to help the research community address multilingual problems and provide a comprehensive understanding of the core concepts, key techniques, and latest developments in multilingual natural language processing based on LLMs.

cs.CL↗

Security Attacks on LLM-based Code Completion Tools

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced code completion capabilities, giving rise to a new generation of LLM-based Code Completion Tools (LCCTs). Unlike general-purpose LLMs, these tools possess unique workflows, integrating multiple information sources as input and prioritizing code suggestions over natural language interaction, which introduces distinct security challenges. Additionally, LCCTs often rely on proprietary code datasets for training, raising concerns about the potential exposure of sensitive data. This paper exploits these distinct characteristics of LCCTs to develop targeted attack methodologies on two critical security risks: jailbreaking and training data extraction attacks. Our experimental results expose significant vulnerabilities within LCCTs, including a 99.4% success rate in jailbreaking attacks on GitHub Copilot and a 46.3% success rate on Amazon Q. Furthermore, We successfully extracted sensitive user data from GitHub Copilot, including 54 real email addresses and 314 physical addresses associated with GitHub usernames. Our study also demonstrates that these code-based attack methods are effective against general-purpose LLMs, such as the GPT series, highlighting a broader security misalignment in the handling of code by modern LLMs. These findings underscore critical security challenges associated with LCCTs and suggest essential directions for strengthening their security frameworks. The example code and attack samples from our research are provided at https://github.com/Sensente/Security-Attacks-on-LCCTs.

cs.CL↗

Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects via Sufficient Representation Learning

Estimating the conditional average treatment effects (CATE) is very important in causal inference and has a wide range of applications across many fields. In the estimation process of CATE, the unconfoundedness assumption is typically required to ensure the identifiability of the regression problems. When estimating CATE using high-dimensional data, there have been many variable selection methods and neural network approaches based on representation learning, while these methods do not provide a way to verify whether the subset of variables after dimensionality reduction or the learned representations still satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption during the estimation process, which can lead to ineffective estimates of the treatment effects. Additionally, these methods typically use data from only the treatment or control group when estimating the regression functions for each group. This paper proposes a novel neural network approach named \textbf{CrossNet} to learn a sufficient representation for the features, based on which we then estimate the CATE, where cross indicates that in estimating the regression functions, we used data from their own group as well as cross-utilized data from another group. Numerical simulations and empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms the competitive approaches.

cs.LG↗

Unified optimal model averaging with a general loss function based on cross-validation

Studying unified model averaging estimation for situations with complicated data structures, we propose a novel model averaging method based on cross-validation (MACV). MACV unifies a large class of new and existing model averaging estimators and covers a very general class of loss functions. Furthermore, to reduce the computational burden caused by the conventional leave-subject/one-out cross validation, we propose a SEcond-order-Approximated Leave-one/subject-out (SEAL) cross validation, which largely improves the computation efficiency. In the context of non-independent and non-identically distributed random variables, we establish the unified theory for analyzing the asymptotic behaviors of the proposed MACV and SEAL methods, where the number of candidate models is allowed to diverge with sample size. To demonstrate the breadth of the proposed methodology, we exemplify four optimal model averaging estimators under four important situations, i.e., longitudinal data with discrete responses, within-cluster correlation structure modeling, conditional prediction in spatial data, and quantile regression with a potential correlation structure. We conduct extensive simulation studies and analyze real-data examples to illustrate the advantages of the proposed methods.

stat.ME↗

Seeing Beyond Views: Multi-View Driving Scene Video Generation with Holistic Attention

Generating multi-view videos for autonomous driving training has recently gained much attention, with the challenge of addressing both cross-view and cross-frame consistency. Existing methods typically apply decoupled attention mechanisms for spatial, temporal, and view dimensions. However, these approaches often struggle to maintain consistency across dimensions, particularly when handling fast-moving objects that appear at different times and viewpoints. In this paper, we present CogDriving, a novel network designed for synthesizing high-quality multi-view driving videos. CogDriving leverages a Diffusion Transformer architecture with holistic-4D attention modules, enabling simultaneous associations across the spatial, temporal, and viewpoint dimensions. We also propose a lightweight controller tailored for CogDriving, i.e., Micro-Controller, which uses only 1.1% of the parameters of the standard ControlNet, enabling precise control over Bird's-Eye-View layouts. To enhance the generation of object instances crucial for autonomous driving, we propose a re-weighted learning objective, dynamically adjusting the learning weights for object instances during training. CogDriving demonstrates strong performance on the nuScenes validation set, achieving an FVD score of 37.8, highlighting its ability to generate realistic driving videos. The project can be found at https://luhannan.github.io/CogDrivingPage/.

cs.CV↗