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Kuan-Yi Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Kuan-Yi Lee.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Generalised quantum Stein's lemma more robust than ever

The generalised quantum Stein's lemma is a key result in quantum hypothesis testing, and connects this fundamental primitive of quantum information processing with quantum resource manipulation, a task that is central for technological applications. Prior works have proved this statement in the idealised setting of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) sequences of quantum states, and recent extensions consider also sources that are 'close' to i.i.d., according to the strict notion put forth by Mazzola, Sutter, and Renner. For several applications, however, one would need to consider yet more general sources. We establish a version of the generalised quantum Stein's lemma that is conceptually much simpler and general, as it applies to any source that is asymptotically close to an i.i.d. state with respect to the normalised quantum Wasserstein distance of order 1. As an immediate consequence, we solve the Stein exponent of a scenario where the null hypothesis is arbitrarily varying, expressing it in terms of i.i.d. Stein exponents corresponding to arbitrary states in the convex hull of the null hypothesis base set.

quant-ph

Audio-Maestro: Enhancing Large Audio-Language Models with Tool-Augmented Reasoning

Recent advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown strong capabilities in audio understanding. However, most systems rely solely on end-to-end reasoning, limiting interpretability and accuracy for tasks that require structured knowledge or specialized signal analysis. In this work, we present Audio-Maestro -- a tool-augmented audio reasoning framework that enables audio-language models to autonomously call external tools and integrate their timestamped outputs into the reasoning process. This design allows the model to analyze, transform, and interpret audio signals through specialized tools rather than relying solely on end-to-end inference. Experiments show that Audio-Maestro consistently improves general audio reasoning performance: Gemini-2.5-flash's average accuracy on MMAU-Test rises from 67.4% to 72.1%, DeSTA-2.5 from 58.3% to 62.8%, and GPT-4o from 60.8% to 63.9%. To our knowledge, Audio-Maestro is the first framework to integrate structured tool output into the large audio language model reasoning process.

cs.SD

Silence is Golden: Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Audio-Language Models via Layer-Weighted Vector Steering

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel in Audio QA but often suffer from hallucinations ungrounded in the audio. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose applying vector steering to the audio domain to mitigate this. Unlike text-based steering, our silence-anchored contrastive approach steers the model away from hallucinations by contrasting active audio against a silent baseline. Probing internal states reveals a strong correlation between specific layer representations and output correctness. Leveraging this, we introduce Layer-Weighted Vector Steering (LWVS), a training-free intervention that increases steering strength at influential layers. On the Audio Hallucination QA dataset, LWVS significantly outperforms baselines, boosting Recall on the Gemma model by 15.6% (53.4% to 69.0%). Crucially, MMAU benchmark tests confirm LWVS preserves and even enhances general audio understanding, achieving an 8% relative accuracy increase on the Qwen model (54.8% to 59.2%).

cs.SD

TASTE: Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization and Embedding for Spoken Language Modeling

Recent efforts target spoken language models (SLMs) that not only listen but also speak for more natural human-LLM interaction. Joint speech-text modeling is a promising direction to achieve this. However, the effectiveness of recent speech tokens for joint modeling remains underexplored. To address this, we introduce Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization and Embedding (TASTE), a method that directly addresses the modality gap by aligning speech token with the corresponding text transcription during the tokenization stage. We propose a method that can achieve this through a attention-based aggregation mechanism and with speech reconstruction as the training objective. We conduct extensive experiments and show that TASTE can preserve essential paralinguistic information while dramatically reducing the token sequence length. With TASTE, we perform straightforward joint spoken language modeling by using Low-Rank Adaptation on the pre-trained text LLM. Experimental results show that TASTE-based SLMs perform comparable to previous work on SALMON and StoryCloze; while significantly outperform other pre-trained SLMs on speech continuation across subjective and objective evaluations. To our knowledge, TASTE is the first end-to-end approach that utilizes a reconstruction objective to automatically learn a text-aligned speech tokenization and embedding suitable for spoken language modeling. Our demo, code, and model are available at https://mtkresearch.github.io/TASTE-SpokenLM.github.io.

cs.CL

A General Class of Functionals for Certifying Quantum Incompatibility

Quantum steering, measurement incompatibility, and instrument incompatibility have recently been recognized as unified manifestations of quantum incompatibility. Building on this perspective, we develop a general framework for constructing optimization-free, nonlinear incompatibility witnesses based on convex functionals, valid in arbitrary dimensions. We prove that these witnesses are nontrivial precisely when the underlying functional is non-affine on extremal points (e.g., pure states for ensembles). For pure bipartite states, the witnesses yield lower bounds on entanglement measures, thereby outperforming most linear steering inequalities in the pure-state regime. Moreover, the construction extends in full generality to certify measurement and instrument incompatibility, where the witnesses act as genuine incompatibility monotones. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach with two operationally relevant functionals: the Wigner-Yanase skew information and an $\ell_{2}$-type coherence functional.

quant-ph

Resource efficient certification of system environment entanglement solely from reduced system dynamics

Certifying nonclassical correlations typically requires access to all subsystems, presenting a major challenge in open quantum systems coupled to inaccessible environments. Recent works have shown that, in autonomous pure dephasing scenarios, quantum discord with the environment can be certified from system-only dynamics via the Hamiltonian ensemble formulation. However, this approach leaves open whether stronger correlations, such as entanglement, can be certified. Moreover, its reliance on Fourier analysis requires full-time dynamics, which is experimentally resource-intensive and provides limited information about when such correlations are established during evolution. In this work, we present a method that enables the certification of system-environment quantum entanglement solely from the reduced dynamics of the system. The method is based on the theory of mixed-unitary channels and applies to general non-autonomous pure dephasing scenarios. Crucially, it relaxes the need for full-time dynamics, offering a resource-efficient approach that also reveals the precise timing of entanglement generation. We experimentally validate this method on a Quantinuum trapped-ion quantum processor with a controlled-dephasing model. Finally, we highlight its potential as a tool for certifying gravitationally induced entanglement.

quant-ph

AEGIS : Automated Co-Evolutionary Framework for Guarding Prompt Injections Schema

Prompt injection attacks pose a significant challenge to the safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-world applications. While prompt-based detection offers a lightweight and interpretable defense strategy, its effectiveness has been hindered by the need for manual prompt engineering. To address this issue, we propose AEGIS , an Automated co-Evolutionary framework for Guarding prompt Injections Schema. Both attack and defense prompts are iteratively optimized against each other using a gradient-like natural language prompt optimization technique. This framework enables both attackers and defenders to autonomously evolve via a Textual Gradient Optimization (TGO) module, leveraging feedback from an LLM-guided evaluation loop. We evaluate our system on a real-world assignment grading dataset of prompt injection attacks and demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving superior robustness in both attack success and detection. Specifically, the attack success rate (ASR) reaches 1.0, representing an improvement of 0.26 over the baseline. For detection, the true positive rate (TPR) improves by 0.23 compared to the previous best work, reaching 0.84, and the true negative rate (TNR) remains comparable at 0.89. Ablation studies confirm the importance of co-evolution, gradient buffering, and multi-objective optimization. We also confirm that this framework is effective in different LLMs. Our results highlight the promise of adversarial training as a scalable and effective approach for guarding prompt injections.

cs.CR

Unveiling quantum steering by quantum-classical uncertainty complementarity

One of the remarkable aspects of quantum steering is its ability to violate local uncertainty complementarity relations. In this vein of study, various steering witnesses have been developed. Here, we introduce a novel complementarity relation between system's quantum and classical uncertainties corresponding to the distillable coherence and the von-Neumann entropy, respectively. We show that the proposed complementarity relation is tighter than the entropic uncertainty relation (EUR). Leveraging this result, we propose a steering witness that is more efficient than the EUR. From the operational perspective, the steering witness quantifies the amount of extra distillable coherence facilitated by quantum steerability. Notably, the proposed steering witness serves as a full entanglement measure for pure bipartite states--an ability that the EUR lacks. We also experimentally validate such a property through a photonic system. Furthermore, a deeper connection to the uncertainty principle is revealed by showcasing the steering-induced distillable coherence can quantifies measurement incompatibility and quantum steerability under genuine incoherent operations. Our work establishes a clear quantitative and operational link between coherence and steering, which are vital resources of quantum technologies, and underscores our efforts in bridging the uncertainty principle with quantum coherence.

quant-ph

Steering-enhanced quantum metrology using superpositions of noisy phase shifts

Quantum steering is an important correlation in quantum information theory. A recent work [Nat. Commun. 12, 2410 (2021)] showed that quantum steering is also useful for quantum metrology. Here, we extend the exploration of steering-enhanced quantum metrology from single noiseless phase shifts to superpositions of noisy phase shifts. As concrete examples, we consider a control system that manipulates a target system to pass through a superposition of either dephased or depolarized phase shifts channels. We show that using such superpositions of noisy phase shifts can suppress the effects of noise and improve metrology. Furthermore, we also implemented proof-of-principle experiments for a superposition of dephased phase shifts on the IBM Quantum Experience, demonstrating a clear improvement on metrology.

quant-ph