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Cheng Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Cheng Xu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

InterSing: Explicit Interaction Dynamics for 3D Duet Singing Animation and Beyond

We present InterSing, a framework for generating realistic 3D head animations for duet singing performances. Unlike solo singing, duet performance requires each singer to balance individual expressiveness with intermittent interaction at musically salient moments, such as phrase boundaries, synchronized rhythms, and call-and-response passages. Because these interactions are sparse and rhythm-dependent, existing audio-driven animation methods and conversational interaction models do not adequately capture their structure. Our key insight is that duet coordination can be represented as a time-varying signal that reflects how strongly performers engage with one another throughout a song. Based on this observation, we introduce interaction logits, an interpretable latent representation that models the degree of cross-performer engagement at each time step. We learn these logits using weak supervision and use them to condition an interaction-aware diffusion model jointly driven by audio features and interaction dynamics. This formulation enables unified multi-mode generation, spanning independent motion, coordinated behavior, and smooth transitions between them. Experiments show that InterSing generates realistic and expressive singing head animations with stronger coordination and musical alignment than existing methods, while preserving each performer's characteristic motion style. We further demonstrate that the same formulation generalizes to multi-singer performances and provides intuitive control over when and how performers engage.

cs.CV

A multicenter benchmark and clinically structured metric for coronary CTA report generation

Reliable evaluation of automated coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) report generation requires standardized multicentre benchmarks and clinically structured metrics. We established a four-centre benchmark comprising 3,021 CCTA series from 818 patient-report pairs to evaluate seven open-source three-dimensional vision-language models. We developed CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$, a clinically structured metric for CCTA report evaluation, with patient-, vessel-, and segment-level variables defined according to clinical guidelines. Report pairs are compared at the finest shared anatomical level, and the contributions of different clinical components are weighted based on expert assessments. We estimated these weights using 70 expert-scored cases and evaluated clinical alignment in a non-overlapping set of 30 cases. CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ showed a strong correlation with radiologist scores (Pearson's $r=0.97$, $p<0.001$), exceeding the next-best metric, FORTE ($r=0.70$), by 0.27, and agreed with expert preferences in 115 of 160 pairwise comparisons (71.9\%). Under controlled perturbations, CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ remained stable to clinically equivalent wording and decreased monotonically with progressive information omission. In the multicenter benchmark, the CCTA-trained C2RG model achieved the highest CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ scores across all four hospitals, although its performance remained far from optimal. In contrast, CCTA-irrelevant reports accounted for up to 98.7\% of the outputs from generalist models. Together, the benchmark provides a standardized setting for model comparison, while CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ enables clinically structured evaluation of finding agreement and anatomical specificity. These results support a more clinically aligned and anatomically resolved approach to evaluating CCTA report generation. Code is available at https://openi.pcl.ac.cn/OpenMedIA/CSM_CCTA.

cs.CV

Chiral superconductors and competing states across a Lifshitz transition in rhombohedral pentalayer graphene

Rhombohedral multilayer graphene hosts a distinctive low-energy electronic structure in which strong Coulomb interactions and nontrivial quantum geometry intertwine to generate exotic quantum states. Recent experiments reported signatures of chiral superconductivity in electron-doped rhombohedral multilayer graphene within the spin- and valley-polarized regime. Here we map the normal-state fermiology surrounding chiral superconductivity in rhombohedral pentalayer graphene. Quantum oscillation measurements reveal an electrically controlled Lifshitz transition between a simply-connected circular quarter-metal Fermi surface and an annular quarter-metal Fermi surface. The Lifshitz boundary itself shifts with perpendicular magnetic field, consistent with the strongly momentum-dependent orbital magnetic moment of the low-energy band. Approaching the transition from either side, the electron effective mass becomes strongly enhanced, implying the formation of a nearly dispersionless band bottom and a strongly reduced kinetic-energy scale. This singular electronic structure produces a regime of exceptionally strong instability in which chiral superconductivity competes with Wigner crystalline phases and reentrant quantum Hall states. In particular, two superconducting regions with signatures of orbital time-reversal-symmetry breaking lie on opposite sides of the Lifshitz boundary and have comparable transition temperatures, yet the annular-side state is suppressed by a substantially smaller perpendicular magnetic field. Our calculation finds comparable chiral pairing tendencies on the two parent Fermi surfaces while producing a much lower orbital-Zeeman pair-breaking scale and an additional finite-momentum pairing tendency for the annular state. These results identify Fermi-surface topology as a key control parameter for chiral superconductivity in rhombohedral graphene.

cond-mat.mes-hall

Phantom Gains: Auditing Self-Improvement Against a Measured Null

Whether a language model has improved itself is increasingly judged not by mean accuracy but by which individual problems it gains and loses. Tracking these transitions means differencing two noisy estimates, leaving them vulnerable to measurement artifacts. Auditing three rounds of rank-$32$ LoRA self-training on Qwen3-8B against a frozen control pushed through the identical pipeline, we identify seven measurement failures, each of which inverts a reported finding when its control is absent. Several are standard practice. A ledger built on a single greedy decode manufactures capability changes on an untrained model, largely an artifact of inference batching; the expansion statistic separating acquisition from sharpening assigns that same model a rate of $0.280$. The natural threshold repair does not survive replication: estimated across the frozen comparisons such a design already contains, its null stays non-zero. We replace it with a per-problem exact test against a pooled baseline under false-discovery-rate control, which detects nothing on any held-out replicate and is unchanged under the multiple-testing rule, error rate and pool size. Applied to a ladder of arms matched in stream, volume and evaluation, the audit finds that external distillation improves problems the base model rarely reaches while three forms of self-training do not; a regression rejects this asymmetry as a by-product of distillation's larger overall gain ($p < 10^{-8}$). On the far smaller set of problems the base model never reaches, the evidence is inconclusive, while self-training corrupts problems solved at baseline at rates well above the measured floor. Transition-level auditing therefore requires a separately measured null for every statistic it reports: nulls that cost no new experiments, built from baseline replicates a multi-arm study already owns, though not from as few as most possess.

cs.AI

A fractional quantum Hall factory on quantum processors: constant-depth preparation of clustered non-Abelian states

Non-Abelian anyons arise as exotic excitations in fractional quantum Hall (FQH) matter and have proved very elusive to realize in conventional platforms. In this work, we show that on a programmable quantum hardware platform, the more exotic FQH excitations are the less costly ones to prepare: clustered non-Abelian FQH states admit parallel quantum preparation circuits whose two-qubit depth is independent of system size, while constructing the more common Abelian Laughlin state requires a sequential circuit chain with linear depth. The centerpiece of this work is our new systematic framework for cataloging possible FQH states and preparing them on quantum circuits at unprecedented scale and variety. Our prepared parafermionic Read--Rezayi $\mathbb{Z}_3$ state holds depth 3 from 8 to 118 qubits, and full root sampling extends to a 154-qubit, 104-electron Read--Rezayi $\mathbb{Z}_4$ state. In all, our demonstrated 18-family catalog of prepared FQH states extends to all 156 qubits of an IBM Heron processor, limited only by existing hardware scale. Measurements on the prepared states recover the expected fractional quasihole charges, with the charge estimator exact in every symmetry-selected shot for the clustered states, and braiding data of the non-Abelian $e/4$ quasihole measured via interferometric extensions. Our work establishes a scalable route to studying FQH physics on quantum processors and opens new avenues for preparing and probing non-Abelian topological matter far beyond the reach of conventional platforms.

cond-mat.str-el

Chemical Abundances and Globular Clusters of Milky Way Dwarf Galaxies

We present an overview of our ongoing GASTRONOMI project, which investigates the coevolution of the Milky Way (MW), its satellite dwarf galaxies, and their star clusters through chemo-dynamical analysis. We derive precise chemical abundances for stars in five classical dwarf galaxies, which reveal mass-dependent chemical evolution, particularly in alpha elements, such as [Si/Fe]. A distinct dichotomy in [Al/Fe] is found between metal-rich ([Fe/H]>-1.5) stars formed in-situ in the MW and those originating in dwarf galaxies. Star clusters act as sensitive environmental probes. The presence of multiple populations correlates with galactic evolution, and nitrogen-rich stars in Fornax are likely relics of disrupted globular clusters (GCs). We developed a chemical classification for Galactic GCs, isolating primordial populations by their low [Al/Fe]. This places in-situ and accreted GCs in distinct regions of the [Al/Fe]-[Fe/H] plane, providing a new tool to reconstruct the Galaxy's accretion history.

astro-ph.GA

Interference-Enhanced Large Electron-Phonon Coupling from Raman-active Breathing Modes in Moir\'e Semiconductors

Superconductivity was recently observed in twisted WSe2 and MoTe2, raising a central question: is the pairing driven by electronic correlations, by phonons, or by both? Answering it requires determining the electron-phonon coupling (EPC) in these moir\'e semiconductors, whose calculation in realistic supercells of thousands of atoms lies beyond the reach of direct first-principles methods. Here we combine filling-dependent Raman spectroscopy with machine-learning first-principles calculations to obtain the EPC mode by mode in supercells of up to tens of thousands of atoms. Raman reveals only a few moir\'e phonons whose frequencies shift strongly with filling; we trace this to an interference selection rule: a phonon couples strongly only when its displacement texture matches the static lattice-reconstruction pattern, and is otherwise suppressed by destructive interference. The rule selects the low- and high-frequency breathing modes seen in Raman and makes the coupling peak at large twist angles, near those at which superconductivity appears. Lattice-reconstruction interference thus emerges as an organizing principle for moir\'e EPC, pointing to a substantial, potentially dominant, phonon contribution to large-angle pairing.

cond-mat.supr-con

Learn2Chat: Rethinking Dyadic Talking Heads via Interaction-Modulated Monologic Priors

Dyadic conversational motion generation is essential for realistic interactive digital humans. Existing approaches typically model conversational behaviors within unified dyadic generators. However, such holistic formulations tend to couple self-speech-driven motion with partner-responsive social feedback, leaving the interaction-specific component implicit and underutilizing the speech-motion correspondence already learned by pretrained monologic motion models. We propose Learn2Chat, a unified framework that models dyadic motion as interaction modulation over pretrained monologic motion priors. This design separates intrinsic speech-driven motion from social interaction effects and enables more structured interaction modeling. Specifically, we introduce a Monologic-Anchored Motion Factorization scheme that leverages the semantic motion manifold learned from monologic data to disentangle audio-driven motion dynamics from interaction-induced modulation, yielding clean interaction representations from dyadic sequences. On top of this representation space, a Cross-Attentive Interaction Latent Prediction module maps paired speech signals to interaction latents through cross-branch attention and interaction alignment. During inference, the predicted interaction latents modulate canonical monologic motion to generate coherent and synchronized dyadic behaviors in a data-efficient manner. Extensive experiments on the DualTalk benchmark demonstrate that Learn2Chat achieves state-of-the-art performance across both quantitative metrics and perceptual evaluations. Moreover, the framework is model-agnostic and seamlessly integrates with diverse pretrained monologic motion backbones, highlighting the effectiveness of prior reuse and interaction adaptation for scalable conversational motion generation. More visual results are available on the project page.

cs.GR

FARS: A Fully Automated Research System Deployed at Scale

Recent automated research systems show that language-model agents can generate hypotheses, run experiments, and write complete manuscripts, but most evidence still comes from selected examples, human-framed topics, or a few pre-defined research tasks. We present FARS (Fully Automated Research System), a fully automated AI-for-AI research system designed to operate across research topics at scale. FARS autonomously generates and advances projects through ideation, planning, experimentation, and writing, using stage-specific agents coordinated through a shared workspace that records proposals, code, logs, results, and manuscripts. In its first public deployment, FARS produced 166 complete research papers spanning 67 fine-grained AI/ML topics while preserving intermediate artifacts as an auditable corpus rather than a curated set of successes. We evaluate this corpus with 282 structured reviews from volunteer reviewers covering 140 papers, including overall ratings, sub-scores, integrity checks, and LLM-use disclosure. The reviews indicate that FARS can produce review-worthy and occasionally strong AI/ML research artifacts in a large-scale public deployment, while also exposing recurring failure modes in narrow experimental scope, methodological limitations, and integrity issues.

cs.AI

Kohn--Luttinger Superconductivity in Flat Chern Bands

Recent observations of superconductivity near correlated topological phases in flat bands suggest a facile link between flat-band geometry and electron pairing. In this work, we reveal a geometry-driven Kohn--Luttinger mechanism in which Landau-level-like form factors align the attractive lobe of the RPA-screened Coulomb interaction with the form-factor peak, generating an anomalously strong attractive channel near local band extrema. Using the Skyrmion lattice model as a minimal realization, we show that for spin-unpolarized pairing the form-factor magnitude enforces an emergent momentum-space translational symmetry and selects an extended-$s$ instability concentrated at small Fermi pockets, while for spin-polarized pairing the form-factor phase drives chiral $p$- and $f$-wave order without invoking spin fluctuations. The band-extrema enhancement persists in higher Landau-level analogs and survives finite-temperature screening and Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless phase fluctuations. Our work establishes quantum geometry as a key organizing principle for unconventional pairing in flat Chern bands.

cond-mat.mes-hall

Physics-Informed Modeling and Control of Emergent Behaviors in Robot Swarms

Robot swarms can exhibit coherent collective behaviors through local perception, limited communication and decentralized decision-making, yet modeling and controlling such emergence remains challenging when behaviors unfold over multiple phases. Here we introduce PhySwarm, a physics-informed micro--macro framework that represents multi-stage swarm emergence as physically constrained density-field evolution coupled to executable robot motion. At the macroscopic level, a multi-phase advection--diffusion--reaction model (Macro-ADR) describes phase-dependent swarm-density evolution through directed transport, diffusion-based spatial regulation and behavioral phase transitions. At the microscopic level, an equivalent deterministic motion model (Micro-EDM) realizes these mechanisms through potential-field advection, density-gradient compensation and rate- or event-gated phase switching. A neural-physics controller (NPC) maps local observations and temporal memory to bounded physical parameters, and is trained with a reinforcement learning--PINN objective that combines task rewards with macro-scale density residuals and micro-scale motion-consistency constraints. In several proof-of-concept swarm missions -- including trail-guided foraging, formation-reconfigurable navigation and role-adaptive search and rescue -- we demonstrate that PhySwarm can generate distinct multi-stage emergent behaviors within a unified physics-informed modeling framework. The learned density fields and physical parameters provide interpretable evidence of how advection, diffusion and reaction jointly regulate multi-stage swarm organization. These results establish a physics-informed route for learning, interpreting and controlling emergent behaviors in robot swarms.

cs.RO

VisMMOE: Exploiting Visual-Expert Affinity for Efficient Visual-Language MoE Offloading

Large-scale vision-language mixture-of-experts (VL-MoE) models provide strong multimodal capability, but efficient deployment on memory-constrained platforms remains difficult. Existing MoE offloading systems are largely designed for text-centric workloads and become much less effective for visual-heavy inputs, where large numbers of visual tokens induce broader and less predictable expert accesses. We present VisMMoE, a VL-MoE offloading system built on a single systems insight: pruning redundant visual tokens can improve offloading not only by reducing computation, but also by reshaping expert demand. We refer to this effect as \textit{visual-expert affinity}: token pruning makes expert accesses more concentrated within layers and more stable across layers, producing a smaller and more predictable expert working set. Guided by this insight, VisMMoE combines affinity-aware token compression, lookahead expert prediction, and cache/pipeline orchestration to improve expert locality and prefetch effectiveness under tight memory budgets. We implement VisMMoE on multiple frameworks and evaluate it on representative VL-MoE models and benchmarks. VisMMoE improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 2.68x and 1.61x, respectively, over strong baselines for today's VL-MoE deployments while maintaining competitive accuracy.

cs.LG

LiveFact: A Dynamic, Time-Aware Benchmark for LLM-Driven Fake News Detection

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed fake news detection and fact-checking tasks from simple classification to complex reasoning. However, evaluation frameworks have not kept pace. Current benchmarks are static, making them vulnerable to benchmark data contamination (BDC) and ineffective at assessing reasoning under temporal uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveFact a continuously updated benchmark that simulates the real-world "fog of war" in misinformation detection. LiveFact uses dynamic, temporal evidence sets to evaluate models on their ability to reason with evolving, incomplete information rather than on memorized knowledge. We propose a dual-mode evaluation: Classification Mode for final verification and Inference Mode for evidence-based reasoning, along with a component to monitor BDC explicitly. Tests with 22 LLMs show that open-source Mixture-of-Experts models, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B, now match or outperform proprietary state-of-the-art systems. More importantly, our analysis finds a significant "reasoning gap." Capable models exhibit epistemic humility by recognizing unverifiable claims in early data slices-an aspect traditional static benchmarks overlook. LiveFact sets a sustainable standard for evaluating robust, temporally aware AI verification.

cs.CL

Twist-angle evolution from valley-polarized fractional topological phases to valley-degenerate superconductivity in twisted bilayer MoTe2

Moir\'e superlattices formed by semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) provide a highly tunable platform for investigating strongly correlated and topological quantum phases. As a prototypical example, twisted bilayer MoTe2 (tMoTe2) has been shown to host fractional topological phases, such as zero-field fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) exhibiting fractional quantum anomalous Hall (FQAH) effects. However, how these correlated topological phases evolve with twist angle and compete with other quantum phases in tMoTe2 remains largely unexplored. Here we report a systematic transport study of twist-angle-dependent phase diagrams in tMoTe2 across a range of 3.8{\deg}-5.78{\deg}, revealing an evolution from fractionalized states of matter with spontaneous valley polarization to valley-degenerate superconductivity. At relatively small twist angles, partially-filled Chern bands of tMoTe2 host FQAH states following the Jain sequence, together with signatures of an anomalous composite Fermi liquid at moir\'e hole filling factor {\nu}h = 1/2. Increasing twist angle progressively suppresses fractional topological phases and reconstructs the half-filled Chern band into symmetry-breaking integer Chern insulating states. At {\nu}h = 1, we observe a transition from robust integer quantum anomalous Hall (IQAH) insulators at small angles to displacement-field-tuned, topologically trivial correlated insulators at larger angles. Remarkably, at a twist angle of 5.78{\deg}, superconductivity emerges adjacent to the correlated insulating phase, with a phase diagram closely resembling that recently reported in twisted bilayer WSe2 (tWSe2). Our results uncover a unified twist-angle-driven phase evolution linking fractional topology, symmetry breaking, magnetic order, and superconductivity, providing new insight into the emergent quantum phenomena in moir\'e systems.

cond-mat.mes-hall

COLE$^+$: Towards Practical Column-based Learned Storage for Blockchain Systems

Blockchain provides a decentralized and tamper-resistant ledger for securely recording transactions across a network of untrusted nodes. While its transparency and integrity are beneficial, the substantial storage requirements for maintaining a complete transaction history present significant challenges. For example, Ethereum nodes require around 23TB of storage, with an annual growth rate of 4TB. Prior studies have employed various strategies to mitigate the storage challenges. Notably, COLE significantly reduces storage size and improves throughput by adopting a column-based design that incorporates a learned index, effectively eliminating data duplication in the storage layer. However, this approach has limitations in supporting chain reorganization during blockchain forks and state pruning to minimize storage overhead. In this paper, we propose COLE$^+$, an enhanced storage solution designed to address these limitations. COLE$^+$ incorporates a novel rewind-supported in-memory tree structure for handling chain reorganization, leveraging content-defined chunking (CDC) to maintain a consistent hash digest for each block. For on-disk storage, a new two-level Merkle Hash Tree (MHT) structure, called prunable version tree, is developed to facilitate efficient state pruning. Both theoretical and empirical analyses show the effectiveness of COLE$^+$ and its potential for practical application in real-world blockchain systems.

cs.DB

Hydrostatic Pressure-enhanced correlated magnetism and Chern insulator in moir'e WSe2

Moir\'e semiconductors offer flat bands where Coulomb interactions and band topology intertwine, while interlayer coupling plays a central role in forming the moir\'e potential. However, limited interlayer coupling strength and the lack of efficient tuning methods hinder further exploration of correlated phenomena in moir\'e semiconductors. Here we introduce a cryogenic dual-gated diamond-anvil platform using helium as a pressure medium, enabling reversible hydrostatic tuning together with magneto-optical spectroscopy in twisted bilayer WSe2. Pressure enhances the moir\'e potential, redshifts excitons, and stabilizes Stoner ferromagnetism otherwise absent at a 3.1-degree twist. Simultaneously, the half-filled C = 1 Chern insulating state strengthens, exhibiting a reduced saturation field. Moreover, we observe a topological phase transition from a Chern insulator to a Mott insulator at around 2 GPa. First-principles calculations reveal that a Gamma-to-K valence-band-maximum switching drives this transition by converting an Ising-like topological K-valley miniband into a spin-degenerate trivial Gamma miniband. Our findings demonstrate hydrostatic pressure as a powerful, continuous control axis for correlated magnetism and topological band engineering in moir\'e materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

From fractional Chern insulators to topological electronic crystals in moir\'e MoTe2: quantum geometry tuning via remote layer

The quantum geometry of Bloch wavefunctions,encoded in the Berry curvature and quantum metric, is believed to be a decisive ingredient in stabilizing fractional quantum anomalous Hall (FQAH) effect(i.e., fractional Chern insulator, FCI, at zero magnetic field), against competing symmetry-breaking phases.A direct experimental demonstration of quantum geometry-driven switching between distinct correlated topological phases, however, has been lacking. Here, we report experimental evidence of such a switch in a high-quality 3.7 twisted MoTe2 (tMoTe2) device consisting of both A-A bilayer and A-AB trilayer regions. While composite Fermi liquid CFL/FQAH phases are established in A-A tMoTe2,the A-AB region-effectively an A-A moire bilayer proximitized by a remote B layer-develops a series of topological electronic crystal (TEC, also referred to as generalized QAH crystal, QAHC) states with integer quantized Hall conductance at commensurate fractional fillings v=1/2, 2/3, and an incommensurate filling factor v=0.53.The electrostatic phase diagram is mapped out by combined transport and optical measurements, showing that these TEC states emerge within the first moir'e valence band prior to any charge transfer to the B layer. Exact diagonalization (ED) incorporating the remote-layer-induced intralayer potential demonstrates a transition from a CFL-like manifold in the A-A limit to a Chern number C=1 ground-state consistent with a TEC at v=1/2 , accompanied by the further breakdown of ideal band geometry. Our results provide experimental evidence of quantum geometry-tuned competition between FQAH/CFL and TEC phases in a moir\'e Chern band and pave the way for further exploring correlation-driven topological phenomena by tuning quantum geometry.

cond-mat.mes-hall

APOGEE chemical abundances of stars in the MW satellites Fornax, Sextans, Draco and Carina

During its evolution, the Milky Way (MW) incorporated numerous dwarf galaxies, particularly low-mass systems. The surviving dwarf galaxies orbiting the MW serve as exceptional laboratories for studying the unique properties of these systems. Their metal-poor environments and shallow gravitational potentials likely drive significant differences in star formation and star cluster properties compared to those in the MW. Using high-quality near-infrared spectra from the APOGEE survey, we determined abundances of Fe, C, N, O, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti, Cr, Mn, Ni, and Ce for 74 stars in four MW satellite dwarf galaxies: Fornax, Sextans, Draco, and Carina. Our analysis reveals that the distribution of $\alpha$ elements (e.g., [Si/Fe]) strongly correlates with galaxy luminosity (and hence mass), underscoring the critical role of galaxy mass in shaping chemical evolution. These dwarf galaxies exhibit [Al/Fe$]\sim -0.5$, which is comparable to those of the metal-poor stars in the MW. Additionally, we identified nitrogen-rich field stars in the Fornax dwarf galaxy, which display distinct metallicities compared to its known globular clusters (GCs). If these stars originated in GCs and subsequently escaped, their presence suggests we are observing relics of destroyed GCs, offering possible evidence of cluster disruption.

astro-ph.GA