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Dong An

Publications and source records attributed to Dong An.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

InfoQuant: Shaping Activation Distributions for Low-Bit LLM Quantization

Low-bit activation quantization remains a major bottleneck in efficient large language model (LLM) deployment. The difficulty is not only that activations contain outliers, but that their distributions are often poorly matched to a low-bit uniform quantizer. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods suppress peaks, balance channels, or minimize reconstruction error, yet they rarely specify what activation distribution is actually easy to discretize. As a result, activations may appear numerically smoother while still incurring large quantization error because the quantization range remains wide or most values collapse into a few levels near the mean. We recast activation transformation as quantizer-facing distribution design and analyze quantization error from an information-theoretic perspective. Our analysis shows that quantization-friendly activations should jointly have a smaller numerical range and sufficient dispersion within that range. Guided by this analysis, we propose InfoQuant, a train-free method that employs Peak Suppression Orthogonal Transformation (PSOT) to shape activations into more quantization-friendly distributions. We further introduce adaptive outlier-token selection to improve the robustness of PSOT during optimization. Across multiple LLM families, InfoQuant consistently outperforms prior PTQ and end-to-end training baselines. Under W4A4KV4, it preserves 97% of floating-point accuracy on average and reduces the LLaMA-2 13B performance gap by 42% over the previous state of the art. Code is available at [https://github.com/LLIKKE/InfoQuant](https://github.com/LLIKKE/InfoQuant)

cs.LG↗

Exponential Lindbladian fast forwarding and exponential amplification of certain Gibbs state properties

Fast-forwarding refers to the ability to simulate a system of time $t$ using significantly fewer than $t$ queries or circuit depth. While various Hamiltonian systems are known to circumvent the no fast-forwarding theorem, analogous results for dissipative dynamics, governed by Lindbladians, remain largely unexplored. We first present a quantum algorithm for simulating purely dissipative Lindbladians with unitary jump operators, achieving additive query complexity $\mathcal{O}\left(t + \log(\varepsilon^{-1})\right)$ up to error~$\varepsilon$, improving previous algorithms. When the jump operators have certain structures (i.e., block-diagonal Paulis), the algorithm can be modified to achieve exponential fast-forwarding, attaining circuit depth $\mathcal{O}\left(\log\left(t + \log(\varepsilon^{-1})\right)\right)$, while preserving query complexity via parallel access. Using these fast-forwarding techniques, we develop a quantum algorithm for estimating Gibbs state properties of the form $\langle ψ_1 | e^{-β(H + I)} | ψ_2 \rangle$, up to additive error $ε$, with $H$ the Hamiltonian and $β$ the inverse temperature. For input states exhibiting certain coherence conditions -- e.g.,~$\langle 0|^{\otimes n} e^{-β(H + I)} |+\rangle^{\otimes n}$ -- our method achieves exponential improvement in complexity (measured by circuit depth), $\mathcal{O} (2^{-n/2} ε^{-1} \log β),$ compared to the quantum singular value transformation-based approach, with complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} (ε^{-1} \sqrtβ )$. We show how to apply this exponential improvement to applications such as the ground state overlap testing and amplitude estimation. For general $| ψ_1 \rangle$ and $| ψ_2 \rangle$, we also show how the level of improvement is changed with the coherence resource in $| ψ_1 \rangle$ and $| ψ_2 \rangle$.

quant-ph↗

Constant Factor Analysis of Optimal Quantum Linear Solvers in Practice

Optimal quantum linear equation solvers provide complexity $O(κ\log(1/ε))$, where $κ$ is the condition number and $ε$ is the allowable error. The optimal solver using a discrete adiabatic approach [PRX Quantum 3, 040303 (2022)] has large analytically proven constant factors for the upper bound on the complexity. The constant factors were later found to be about 1,200 times smaller in numerical testing [Quantum 9, 1887 (2025)]. This meant it is about an order of magnitude more efficient than using a randomised approach from [PRX Quantum 6, 040373 (2025)], which has far smaller analytically proven constant factors. Recently, a ``Shortcut'' method has been found to provide an optimal solver which also has small proven constant factors. In the present work, we conduct a comprehensive numerical analysis comparing this method with the adiabatic solver for two families of random linear systems. We find that, in the case where the solution norm is unknown, the adiabatic solver provides slightly better performance. If the solution norm is known, then the shortcut method provides significantly better performance for non-Hermitian matrices.

quant-ph↗

LatentPilot: Scene-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation by Dreaming Ahead with Latent Visual Reasoning

Existing vision-and-language navigation (VLN) models primarily reason over past and current visual observations, while largely ignoring the future visual dynamics induced by actions. As a result, they often lack an effective understanding of the causal relationship between actions and how the visual world changes, limiting robust decision-making. Humans, in contrast, can imagine the near future by leveraging action-dynamics causality, which improves both environmental understanding and navigation choices. Inspired by this capability, we propose LatentPilot, a new paradigm that exploits future observations during training as a valuable data source to learn action-conditioned visual dynamics, while requiring no access to future frames at inference. Concretely, we propose a flywheel-style training mechanism that iteratively collects on-policy trajectories and retrains the model to better match the agent's behavior distribution, with an expert takeover triggered when the agent deviates excessively. LatentPilot further learns visual latent tokens without explicit supervision; these latent tokens attend globally in a continuous latent space and are carried across steps, serving as both the current output and the next input, thereby enabling the agent to dream ahead and reason about how actions will affect subsequent observations. Experiments on R2R-CE, RxR-CE, and R2R-PE benchmarks achieve new SOTA results, and real-robot tests across diverse environments demonstrate LatentPilot's superior understanding of environment-action dynamics in scene. Project page:https://abdd.top/latentpilot/

cs.CV↗

FloorPlan-VLN: A New Paradigm for Floor Plan Guided Vision-Language Navigation

Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task requires agents to follow verbose instructions, ignoring some potentially useful global spatial priors, limiting their capability to reason about spatial structures. Although human-readable spatial schematics (e.g., floor plans) are ubiquitous in real-world buildings, current agents lack the cognitive ability to comprehend and utilize them. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{FloorPlan-VLN}, a new paradigm that leverages structured semantic floor plans as global spatial priors to enable navigation with only concise instructions. We first construct the FloorPlan-VLN dataset, which comprises over 10k episodes across 72 scenes. It pairs more than 100 semantically annotated floor plans with Matterport3D-based navigation trajectories and concise instructions that omit step-by-step guidance. Then, we propose a simple yet effective method \textbf{FP-Nav} that uses a dual-view, spatio-temporally aligned video sequence, and auxiliary reasoning tasks to align observations, floor plans, and instructions. When evaluated under this new benchmark, our method significantly outperforms adapted state-of-the-art VLN baselines, achieving more than a 60\% relative improvement in navigation success rate. Furthermore, comprehensive noise modeling and real-world deployments demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of FP-Nav to actuation drift and floor plan distortions. These results validate the effectiveness of floor plan guided navigation and highlight FloorPlan-VLN as a promising step toward more spatially intelligent navigation.

cs.RO↗

Efficient Quantum Simulation for Nonlinear Stochastic Differential Equations

Nonlinear stochastic differential equations (NSDEs) are a pillar of mathematical modeling for scientific and engineering applications. Accurate and efficient simulation of large-scale NSDEs is prohibitive on classical computers due to the large number of degrees of freedom, and it is challenging on quantum computers due to the linear and unitary nature of quantum mechanics. We develop a quantum algorithm to tackle nonlinear differential equations driven by the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) stochastic process. The query complexity of our algorithm scales logarithmically with the error tolerance and nearly quadratically with the simulation time. Our algorithmic framework comprises probabilistic Carleman linearization (PCL) to tackle nonlinearity coupled with stochasticity, and stochastic linear combination of Hamiltonian simulations (SLCHS) to simulate stochastic non-unitary dynamics. We obtain probabilistic exponential convergence for the Carleman linearization of Liu et al. [1], provided the NSDE is stable and reaches a steady state. We extend deterministic LCHS to stochastic linear differential equations, retaining near-optimal parameter scaling from An et al. [2] except for the nearly quadratic time scaling. This is achieved by using Monte Carlo integration for time discretization of both the stochastic inhomogeneous term in LCHS and the truncated Dyson series for each Hamiltonian simulation.

quant-ph↗

Quantum circuit design from a retraction-based Riemannian optimization framework

Designing quantum circuits for ground state preparation is a fundamental task in quantum information science. However, standard Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are often constrained by limited ansatz expressivity and difficult optimization landscapes. To address these issues, we adopt a geometric perspective, formulating the problem as the minimization of an energy cost function directly over the unitary group. We establish a retraction-based Riemannian optimization framework for this setting, ensuring that all algorithmic procedures are implementable on quantum hardware. Within this framework, we unify existing randomized gradient approaches under a Riemannian Random Subspace Gradient Projection (RRSGP) method. While recent geometric approaches have predominantly focused on such first-order gradient descent techniques, efficient second-order methods remain unexplored. To bridge this gap, we derive explicit expressions for the Riemannian Hessian and show that it can be estimated directly on quantum hardware via parameter-shift rules. Building on this, we propose the Riemannian Random Subspace Newton (RRSN) method, a scalable second-order algorithm that constructs a Newton system from measurement data. Numerical simulations indicate that RRSN achieves quadratic convergence, yielding high-precision ground states in significantly fewer iterations compared to both existing first-order approaches and standard VQA baselines. Ultimately, this work provides a systematic foundation for applying a broader class of efficient Riemannian algorithms to quantum circuit design.

quant-ph↗

Lemon Agent Technical Report

Recent advanced LLM-powered agent systems have exhibited their remarkable capabilities in tackling complex, long-horizon tasks. Nevertheless, they still suffer from inherent limitations in resource efficiency, context management, and multimodal perception. Based on these observations, Lemon Agent is introduced, a multi-agent orchestrator-worker system built on a newly proposed AgentCortex framework, which formalizes the classic Planner-Executor-Memory paradigm through an adaptive task execution mechanism. Our system integrates a hierarchical self-adaptive scheduling mechanism that operates at both the overall orchestrator layer and workers layer. This mechanism can dynamically adjust computational intensity based on task complexity. It enables orchestrator to allocate one or more workers for parallel subtask execution, while workers can further improve operational efficiency by invoking tools concurrently. By virtue of this two-tier architecture, the system achieves synergistic balance between global task coordination and local task execution, thereby optimizing resource utilization and task processing efficiency in complex scenarios. To reduce context redundancy and increase information density during parallel steps, we adopt a three-tier progressive context management strategy. To make fuller use of historical information, we propose a self-evolving memory system, which can extract multi-dimensional valid information from all historical experiences to assist in completing similar tasks. Furthermore, we provide an enhanced MCP toolset. Empirical evaluations on authoritative benchmarks demonstrate that our Lemon Agent can achieve a state-of-the-art 91.36% overall accuracy on GAIA and secures the top position on the xbench-DeepSearch leaderboard with a score of 77+.

cs.MA↗

Ensemble-Based Quantum Signal Processing for Error Mitigation

Despite rapid advances in quantum hardware, noise remains a central obstacle to deploying quantum algorithms on near-term devices. In particular, random coherent errors that accumulate during circuit execution constitute a dominant and fundamentally challenging noise source. We introduce a noise-resilient framework for Quantum Signal Processing (QSP) that mitigates such coherent errors without increasing circuit depth or ancillary qubit requirements. Our approach uses ensembles of noisy QSP circuits combined with measurement-level averaging to suppress random phase errors in Z rotations. Building on this framework, we develop robust QSP algorithms for implementing polynomial functions of Hermitian matrices and for estimating observables, with applications to Hamiltonian simulation, quantum linear systems, and ground-state preparation. We analyze the trade-off between approximation error and hardware noise, which is essential for practical implementation under the stringent depth and coherence constraints of current quantum hardware. Our results establish a practical pathway for integrating error mitigation seamlessly into algorithmic design, advancing the development of robust quantum computing, and enabling the discovery of scientific applications with near- and mid-term quantum devices.

quant-ph↗

Fast-forwarding quantum algorithms for linear dissipative differential equations

We establish improved complexity estimates of quantum algorithms for linear dissipative ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and show that the time dependence can be fast-forwarded to be sub-linear. Specifically, we show that a quantum algorithm based on truncated Dyson series can prepare history states of dissipative ODEs up to time $T$ with cost $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\log(T) (\log(1/ε))^2 )$, which is an exponential speedup over the best previous result. For final state preparation at time $T$, we show that its complexity is $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T} (\log(1/ε))^2 )$, achieving a polynomial speedup in $T$. We also analyze the complexity of simpler lower-order quantum algorithms, such as the forward Euler method and the trapezoidal rule, and find that even lower-order methods can still achieve $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ cost with respect to time $T$ for preparing final states of dissipative ODEs. As applications, we show that quantum algorithms can simulate dissipative non-Hermitian quantum dynamics and heat processes with fast-forwarded complexity sub-linear in time.

quant-ph↗

Quantum algorithm for linear non-unitary dynamics with near-optimal dependence on all parameters

We introduce a family of identities that express general linear non-unitary evolution operators as a linear combination of unitary evolution operators, each solving a Hamiltonian simulation problem. This formulation can exponentially enhance the accuracy of the recently introduced linear combination of Hamiltonian simulation (LCHS) method [An, Liu, and Lin, Physical Review Letters, 2023]. For the first time, this approach enables quantum algorithms to solve linear differential equations with both optimal state preparation cost and near-optimal scaling in matrix queries on all parameters.

quant-ph↗

Quantum algorithms for linear and non-linear fractional reaction-diffusion equations

High-dimensional fractional reaction-diffusion equations have numerous applications in the fields of biology, chemistry, and physics, and exhibit a range of rich phenomena. While classical algorithms have an exponential complexity in the spatial dimension, a quantum computer can produce a quantum state that encodes the solution with only polynomial complexity, provided that suitable input access is available. In this work, we investigate efficient quantum algorithms for linear and nonlinear fractional reaction-diffusion equations with periodic boundary conditions. For linear equations, we analyze and compare the complexity of various methods, including the second-order Trotter formula, time-marching method, and truncated Dyson series method. We also present a novel algorithm that combines the linear combination of Hamiltonian simulation technique with the interaction picture formalism, resulting in optimal scaling in the spatial dimension. For nonlinear equations, we employ the Carleman linearization method and propose a block-encoding version that is appropriate for the dense matrices that arise from the spatial discretization of fractional reaction-diffusion equations.

quant-ph↗

Improved gap dependence in adiabatic state preparation by adaptive schedule

Adiabatic quantum computing is a powerful framework for state preparation, while its evolution time often scales quadratically in the inverse Hamiltonian spectral gap, leading to sub-optimal computational complexity. In this work, we introduce a nonlinear adaptive strategy for finding the time scheduling function, and show that the gap dependence can be quadratically improved to be inverse linear for a wide range of systems under a mild gap measure condition. Through variational analysis, we further demonstrate the optimality of our schedule for systems with linear gap and the partial optimality for general systems, while we also rigorously show that the commonly used linear schedule is never optimal.

quant-ph↗

Seeing through Imagination: Learning Scene Geometry via Implicit Spatial World Modeling

Spatial reasoning, the ability to understand and interpret the 3D structure of the world, is a critical yet underdeveloped capability in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Current methods predominantly rely on verbal descriptive tuning, which suffers from visual illiteracy, i.e., they learn spatial concepts through textual symbols alone, devoid of connection to their visual manifestations. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces MILO, an Implicit spatIaL wOrld modeling paradigm that simulates human-like spatial imagination. MILO integrates a visual generator to provide geometry-aware feedback, thereby implicitly grounding the MLLM's symbolic reasoning in perceptual experience. Complementing this paradigm, we propose RePE (Relative Positional Encoding), a novel encoding scheme that captures relative camera-pose transformations, offering superior performance over absolute coordinate systems. To support the training, we construct GeoGen, a large-scale Geometry-aware Generative dataset with approximately 2,241 videos and 67,827 observation-action-outcome triplets. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances spatial reasoning capabilities across multiple baselines and benchmarks, offering a more holistic understanding of 3D space.

cs.CV↗

Extended parameter shift rules with minimal derivative variance for parameterized quantum circuits

Parameter shift rules (PSRs) are useful methods for computing arbitrary-order derivatives of the cost function in parameterized quantum circuits. The basic idea of PSRs is to evaluate the cost function at different parameter shifts, then use specific coefficients to combine them linearly to obtain the exact derivatives. In this work, we propose an extended parameter shift rule (EPSR) which generalizes a broad range of existing PSRs and has the following two advantages. First, EPSR offers an infinite number of possible parameter shifts, allowing the selection of the optimal parameter shifts to minimize the final derivative variance and thereby obtaining the more accurate derivative estimates with limited quantum resources. Second, EPSR extends the scope of the PSRs in the sense that EPSR can handle arbitrary Hermitian operator $H$ in gate $U(x) = \exp (iHx)$ in the parameterized quantum circuits, while existing PSRs are valid only for simple Hermitian generators $H$ such as simple Pauli words. Additionally, we show that the widely used ``general PSR'', introduced by Wierichs et al. (2022), is a special case of our EPSR, and we prove that it yields globally optimal shifts for minimizing the derivative variance under the weighted-shot scheme. Finally, through numerical simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EPSR and show that the usage of the optimal parameter shifts indeed leads to more accurate derivative estimates.

quant-ph↗

Interpolation-based coordinate descent method for parameterized quantum circuits

Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) are ubiquitous in the design of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. In this work, we propose an interpolation-based coordinate descent (ICD) method to address the parameter optimization problem in PQCs. The ICD method provides a unified framework for existing structure optimization techniques such as Rotosolve, sequential minimal optimization, ExcitationSolve, and others. ICD employs interpolation to approximate the PQC cost function, effectively recovering its underlying trigonometric structure, and then performs an argmin update on a single parameter in each iteration. In contrast to previous studies on structure optimization, we determine the optimal interpolation nodes to mitigate statistical errors arising from quantum measurements. Moreover, in the common case of $r$ equidistant frequencies, we show that the optimal interpolation nodes are equidistant nodes with spacing $2π/(2r+1)$ (under constant variance assumption), and that our ICD method simultaneously minimizes the mean squared error, the condition number of the interpolation matrix, and the average variance of the approximated cost function. We perform numerical simulations and test on the MaxCut problem, the transverse field Ising model, and the XXZ model. Numerical results imply that our ICD method is more efficient than the commonly used gradient descent and random coordinate descent method.

quant-ph↗

Action Tokenizer Matters in In-Context Imitation Learning

In-context imitation learning (ICIL) is a new paradigm that enables robots to generalize from demonstrations to unseen tasks without retraining. A well-structured action representation is the key to capturing demonstration information effectively, yet action tokenizer (the process of discretizing and encoding actions) remains largely unexplored in ICIL. In this work, we first systematically evaluate existing action tokenizer methods in ICIL and reveal a critical limitation: while they effectively encode action trajectories, they fail to preserve temporal smoothness, which is crucial for stable robotic execution. To address this, we propose LipVQ-VAE, a variational autoencoder that enforces the Lipschitz condition in the latent action space via weight normalization. By propagating smoothness constraints from raw action inputs to a quantized latent codebook, LipVQ-VAE generates more stable and smoother actions. When integrating into ICIL, LipVQ-VAE improves performance by more than 5.3% in high-fidelity simulators, with real-world experiments confirming its ability to produce smoother, more reliable trajectories. Code and checkpoints are available at https://action-tokenizer-matters.github.io/

cs.RO↗

Multimodal Fusion and Vision-Language Models: A Survey for Robot Vision

Robot vision has greatly benefited from advancements in multimodal fusion techniques and vision-language models (VLMs). We adopt a task-oriented perspective to systematically review the applications and advancements of multimodal fusion methods and VLMs in the field of robot vision. For semantic scene understanding tasks, we categorize fusion approaches into encoder-decoder frameworks, attention-based architectures, and graph neural networks. Meanwhile, we also analyze the architectural characteristics and practical implementations of these fusion strategies in key tasks such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), 3D object detection, navigation, and manipulation. We compare the evolutionary paths and applicability of VLMs based on large language models (LLMs) with traditional multimodal fusion methods.Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of commonly used datasets, evaluating their applicability and challenges in real-world robotic scenarios. Building on this analysis, we identify key challenges in current research, including cross-modal alignment, efficient fusion, real-time deployment, and domain adaptation. We propose future directions such as self-supervised learning for robust multimodal representations, structured spatial memory and environment modeling to enhance spatial intelligence, and the integration of adversarial robustness and human feedback mechanisms to enable ethically aligned system deployment. Through a comprehensive review, comparative analysis, and forward-looking discussion, we provide a valuable reference for advancing multimodal perception and interaction in robotic vision. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-Han-Res/MF-RV.

cs.RO↗