arXiv subjects

Zhaoqi Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhaoqi Liu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Iterative Neural Variational Solver of Committor Function in Under-damped Langevin Dynamics

The committor function describes the probability that a stochastic dynamical system, while transitioning between two metastable states, will first reach one state rather than the other. It is a central object in transition path theory, providing the accurate reaction rate and the characterization of the transition mechanism through reactive probability flux and the transition state ensemble. While the numerical methods for this function are well studied for over-damped Langevin dynamics where the friction damping coefficient goes to infinity, its computation in the general under-damped case remains an open challenge due to the lack of a variational structure in the underlying backward Kolmogorov equation. This restricts the quantitative investigation of the impact of the finite damping coefficient on rare transitions in real systems. In this work, by decomposing the infinitesimal generator of the underdamped Langevin dynamics into a self-adjoint and a skew-adjoint part, we develop an iterative scheme in which each subproblem has a variational form and can be solved efficiently using neural networks. Fundamentally, this approach can be viewed as a generalized Concus-Golub-Widlund (CGW) splitting method and each subproblem has a variational form, which can be solved efficiently. This iterative scheme also has the flexibility of introducing a preconditioning operator associated with a new overdamped Langevin dynamics, which naturally leads to the design of enhanced adaptive sampling for the subproblems. We validate the efficiency and accuracy of our method on benchmark systems including a one-dimensional double-well potential, the Muller-Brown potential, and alanine dipeptide. The proposed iterative variational framework provides a practical and extensible numerical tool for probing rare transition events in Langevin dynamics across varying damping coefficients.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

Semantic Sensitivities and Inconsistent Predictions: Measuring the Fragility of NLI Models

Recent studies of the emergent capabilities of transformer-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models have indicated that they have an understanding of lexical and compositional semantics. We provide evidence that suggests these claims should be taken with a grain of salt: we find that state-of-the-art Natural Language Inference (NLI) models are sensitive towards minor semantics preserving surface-form variations, which lead to sizable inconsistent model decisions during inference. Notably, this behaviour differs from valid and in-depth comprehension of compositional semantics, however does neither emerge when evaluating model accuracy on standard benchmarks nor when probing for syntactic, monotonic, and logically robust reasoning. We propose a novel framework to measure the extent of semantic sensitivity. To this end, we evaluate NLI models on adversarially generated examples containing minor semantics-preserving surface-form input noise. This is achieved using conditional text generation, with the explicit condition that the NLI model predicts the relationship between the original and adversarial inputs as a symmetric equivalence entailment. We systematically study the effects of the phenomenon across NLI models for $\textbf{in-}$ and $\textbf{out-of-}$ domain settings. Our experiments show that semantic sensitivity causes performance degradations of $12.92\%$ and $23.71\%$ average over $\textbf{in-}$ and $\textbf{out-of-}$ domain settings, respectively. We further perform ablation studies, analysing this phenomenon across models, datasets, and variations in inference and show that semantic sensitivity can lead to major inconsistency within model predictions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2015

Local community extraction in directed networks

Network is a simple but powerful representation of real-world complex systems. Network community analysis has become an invaluable tool to explore and reveal the internal organization of nodes. However, only a few methods were directly designed for community-detection in directed networks. In this article, we introduce the concept of local community structure in directed networks and provide a generic criterion to describe a local community with two properties. We further propose a stochastic optimization algorithm to rapidly detect a local community, which allows for uncovering the directional modular characteristics in directed networks. Numerical results show that the proposed method can resolve detailed local communities with directional information and provide more structural characteristics of directed networks than previous methods.

cs.SI↗