arXiv subjects

En Xu

Publications and source records attributed to En Xu.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BER-PEF: Unified Human Mobility Predictability Evaluation via Bayes Error Rate Estimation

Human mobility predictability concerns the best prediction performance attainable from a given target and input information, but its ground truth is not directly observable on real mobility data. We present BER-PEF, a Bayes-error-rate-based framework that converts BER estimation into mobility predictability estimation and provides a unified protocol for comparing estimators without observable ground truth. The framework maps symbolic sequences, numeric trajectories, contextual features, and learned representations into a common feature--label space, then evaluates estimator outputs along controlled perturbation curves against a shared predictability reference interval by measuring deviations below the interval, above the interval, and across the full interval. Experiments on Foursquare NYC and TKY, GeoLife, and T-Drive show that several BER-based estimators achieve lower reference discrepancy than existing predictability methods on symbolic sequences and numeric trajectories, while their estimates track changes in empirical prediction performance under perturbation. Additional analyses show that contextual inputs and multiple structured representations can be evaluated under the same protocol, and that aggregating evidence across multiple perturbation levels provides a more reliable basis for estimator selection than relying on a single unperturbed observation. BER-PEF therefore offers a unified and verifiable path for evaluating predictability estimators on heterogeneous mobility data when ground-truth predictability is unavailable.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

STEM: Structure-Tracing Evidence Mining for Knowledge Graphs-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Knowledge Graph-based Question Answering (KGQA) plays a pivotal role in complex reasoning tasks but remains constrained by two persistent challenges: the structural heterogeneity of Knowledge Graphs(KGs) often leads to semantic mismatch during retrieval, while existing reasoning path retrieval methods lack a global structural perspective. To address these issues, we propose Structure-Tracing Evidence Mining (STEM), a novel framework that reframes multi-hop reasoning as a schema-guided graph search task. First, we design a Semantic-to-Structural Projection pipeline that leverages KG structural priors to decompose queries into atomic relational assertions and construct an adaptive query schema graph. Subsequently, we execute globally-aware node anchoring and subgraph retrieval to obtain the final evidence reasoning graph from KG. To more effectively integrate global structural information during the graph construction process, we design a Triple-Dependent GNN (Triple-GNN) to generate a Global Guidance Subgraph (Guidance Graph) that guides the construction. STEM significantly improves both the accuracy and evidence completeness of multi-hop reasoning graph retrieval, and achieves State-of-the-Art performance on multiple multi-hop benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

On the Accuracy Limits of Sequential Recommender Systems: An Entropy-Based Approach

Sequential recommender systems have achieved steady gains in offline accuracy, yet it remains unclear how close current models are to the intrinsic accuracy limit imposed by the data. A reliable, model-agnostic estimate of this ceiling would enable principled difficulty assessment and headroom estimation before costly model development. Existing predictability analyses typically combine entropy estimation with Fano's inequality inversion; however, in recommendation they are hindered by sensitivity to candidate-space specification and distortion from Fano-based scaling in low-predictability regimes. We develop an entropy-induced, training-free approach for quantifying accuracy limits in sequential recommendation, yielding a candidate-size-agnostic estimate. Experiments on controlled synthetic generators and diverse real-world benchmarks show that the estimator tracks oracle-controlled difficulty more faithfully than baselines, remains insensitive to candidate-set size, and achieves high rank consistency with best-achieved offline accuracy across state-of-the-art sequential recommenders (Spearman rho up to 0.914). It also supports user-group diagnostics by stratifying users by novelty preference, long-tail exposure, and activity, revealing systematic predictability differences. Furthermore, predictability can guide training data selection: training sets constructed from high-predictability users yield strong downstream performance under reduced data budgets. Overall, the proposed estimator provides a practical reference for assessing attainable accuracy limits, supporting user-group diagnostics, and informing data-centric decisions in sequential recommendation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Inferring Network Evolutionary History via Structure-State Coupled Learning

Inferring a network's evolutionary history from a single final snapshot with limited temporal annotations is fundamental yet challenging. Existing approaches predominantly rely on topology alone, which often provides insufficient and noisy cues. This paper leverages network steady-state dynamics -- converged node states under a given dynamical process -- as an additional and widely accessible observation for network evolution history inference. We propose CS$^2$, which explicitly models structure-state coupling to capture how topology modulates steady states and how the two signals jointly improve edge discrimination for formation-order recovery. Experiments on six real temporal networks, evaluated under multiple dynamical processes, show that CS$^2$ consistently outperforms strong baselines, improving pairwise edge precedence accuracy by 4.0% on average and global ordering consistency (Spearman-$\rho$) by 7.7% on average. CS$^2$ also more faithfully recovers macroscopic evolution trajectories such as clustering formation, degree heterogeneity, and hub growth. Moreover, a steady-state-only variant remains competitive when reliable topology is limited, highlighting steady states as an independent signal for evolution inference.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

Predictability of Complex Systems

The study of complex systems has attracted widespread attention from researchers in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, and engineering. Prediction is one of the central issues in this field. Although most related studies have focused on prediction methods, research on the predictability of complex systems has received increasing attention across disciplines--aiming to provide theories and tools to address a key question: What are the limits of prediction accuracy? Predictability itself can serve as an important feature for characterizing complex systems, and accurate estimation of predictability can provide a benchmark for the study of prediction algorithms. This allows researchers to clearly identify the gap between current prediction accuracy and theoretical limits, thereby helping them determine whether there is still significant room to improve existing algorithms. More importantly, investigating predictability often requires the development of new theories and methods, which can further inspire the design of more effective algorithms. Over the past few decades, this field has undergone significant evolution. In particular, the rapid development of data science has introduced a wealth of data-driven approaches for understanding and quantifying predictability. This review summarizes representative achievements, integrating both data-driven and mechanistic perspectives. After a brief introduction to the significance of the topic in focus, we will explore three core aspects: the predictability of time series, the predictability of network structures, and the predictability of dynamical processes. Finally, we will provide extensive application examples across various fields and outline open challenges for future research.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

QZhou-Embedding Technical Report

We present QZhou-Embedding, a general-purpose contextual text embedding model with exceptional text representation capabilities. Built upon the Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct foundation model, we designed a unified multi-task framework comprising specialized data transformation and training strategies. The data transformation scheme enables the incorporation of more diverse textual training datasets, while the task-specific training strategies enhance model learning efficiency. We developed a data synthesis pipeline leveraging LLM API, incorporating techniques such as paraphrasing, augmentation, and hard negative example generation to improve the semantic richness and sample difficulty of the training set. Additionally, we employ a two-stage training strategy, comprising initial retrieval-focused pretraining followed by full-task fine-tuning, enabling the embedding model to extend its capabilities based on robust retrieval performance. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the MTEB and CMTEB benchmarks, ranking first on both leaderboards (August 27 2025), and simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art performance on tasks including reranking, clustering, etc. Our findings demonstrate that higher-quality, more diverse data is crucial for advancing retrieval model performance, and that leveraging LLMs generative capabilities can further optimize data quality for embedding model breakthroughs. Our model weights are released on HuggingFace under Apache 2.0 license. For reproducibility, we provide evaluation code and instructions on GitHub.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

A Survey of Physics-Informed AI for Complex Urban Systems

Urban systems are typical examples of complex systems, where the integration of physics-based modeling with artificial intelligence (AI) presents a promising paradigm for enhancing predictive accuracy, interpretability, and decision-making. In this context, AI excels at capturing complex, nonlinear relationships, while physics-based models ensure consistency with real-world laws and provide interpretable insights. We provide a comprehensive review of physics-informed AI methods in urban applications. The proposed taxonomy categorizes existing approaches into three paradigms - Physics-Integrated AI, Physics-AI Hybrid Ensemble, and AI-Integrated Physics - and further details seven representative methods. This classification clarifies the varying degrees and directions of physics-AI integration, guiding the selection and development of appropriate methods based on application needs and data availability. We systematically examine their applications across eight key urban domains: energy, environment, economy, transportation, information, public services, emergency management, and the urban system as a whole. Our analysis highlights how these methodologies leverage physical laws and data-driven models to address urban challenges, enhancing system reliability, efficiency, and adaptability. By synthesizing existing methodologies and their urban applications, we identify critical gaps and outline future research directions, paving the way toward next-generation intelligent urban system modeling.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

A Diffusive Data Augmentation Framework for Reconstruction of Complex Network Evolutionary History

The evolutionary processes of complex systems contain critical information regarding their functional characteristics. The generation time of edges provides insights into the historical evolution of various networked complex systems, such as protein-protein interaction networks, ecosystems, and social networks. Recovering these evolutionary processes holds significant scientific value, including aiding in the interpretation of the evolution of protein-protein interaction networks. However, existing methods are capable of predicting the generation times of remaining edges given a partial temporal network but often perform poorly in cross-network prediction tasks. These methods frequently fail in edge generation time recovery tasks for static networks that lack timestamps. In this work, we adopt a comparative paradigm-based framework that fuses multiple networks for training, enabling cross-network learning of the relationship between network structure and edge generation times. Compared to separate training, this approach yields an average accuracy improvement of 16.98%. Furthermore, given the difficulty in collecting temporal networks, we propose a novel diffusion-model-based generation method to produce a large number of temporal networks. By combining real temporal networks with generated ones for training, we achieve an additional average accuracy improvement of 5.46% through joint training.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Comparing discriminating abilities of evaluation metrics in link prediction

Link prediction aims to predict the potential existence of links between two unconnected nodes within a network based on the known topological characteristics. Evaluation metrics are used to assess the effectiveness of algorithms in link prediction. The discriminating ability of these evaluation metrics is vitally important for accurately evaluating link prediction algorithms. In this study, we propose an artificial network model, based on which one can adjust a single parameter to monotonically and continuously turn the prediction accuracy of the specifically designed link prediction algorithm. Building upon this foundation, we show a framework to depict the effectiveness of evaluating metrics by focusing on their discriminating ability. Specifically, a quantitative comparison in the abilities of correctly discerning varying prediction accuracies was conducted encompassing nine evaluation metrics: Precision, Recall, F1-Measure, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), Balanced Precision (BP), the Area Under the receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC), the Area Under the Precision-Recall curve (AUPR), Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), and the Area Under the magnified ROC (AUC-mROC). The results indicate that the discriminating abilities of the three metrics, AUC, AUPR, and NDCG, are significantly higher than those of other metrics.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Limits of Predictability in Top-N Recommendation

Top-N recommendation aims to recommend each consumer a small set of N items from a large collection of items, and its accuracy is one of the most common indexes to evaluate the performance of a recommendation system. While a large number of algorithms are proposed to push the Top-N accuracy by learning the user preference from their history purchase data, a predictability question is naturally raised - whether there is an upper limit of such Top-N accuracy. This work investigates such predictability by studying the degree of regularity from a specific set of user behavior data. Quantifying the predictability of Top-N recommendations requires simultaneously quantifying the limits on the accuracy of the N behaviors with the highest probability. This greatly increases the difficulty of the problem. To achieve this, we firstly excavate the associations among N behaviors with the highest probability and describe the user behavior distribution based on the information theory. Then, we adopt the Fano inequality to scale and obtain the Top-N predictability. Extensive experiments are conducted on the real-world data where significant improvements are observed compared to the state-of-the-art methods. We have not only completed the predictability calculation for N targets but also obtained predictability that is much closer to the true value than existing methods. We expect our results to assist these research areas where the quantitative requirement of Top-N predictability is required.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Equivalence between Time Series Predictability and Bayes Error Rate

Predictability is an emerging metric that quantifies the highest possible prediction accuracy for a given time series, being widely utilized in assessing known prediction algorithms and characterizing intrinsic regularities in human behaviors. Lately, increasing criticisms aim at the inaccuracy of the estimated predictability, caused by the original entropy-based method. In this brief report, we strictly prove that the time series predictability is equivalent to a seemingly unrelated metric called Bayes error rate that explores the lowest error rate unavoidable in classification. This proof bridges two independently developed fields, and thus each can immediately benefit from the other. For example, based on three theoretical models with known and controllable upper bounds of prediction accuracy, we show that the estimation based on Bayes error rate can largely solve the inaccuracy problem of predictability.

cs.IT↗