arXiv subjects

Shaohua Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Shaohua Yang.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Polymeric Solvents Control Swelling-Induced Surface Creasing

Surface creasing in swelling polymer gels is commonly attributed to compressive strain or interlayer mismatch, yet its general control remains unclear. Here we show that solvent polymerization degree $N_{\rm s}$ provides an independent control parameter for crease onset in surface-bound polydimethylsiloxane gels swollen by silicone oils. Despite nearly identical swelling kinetics and through-thickness solvent concentration profiles, we observe a transition from creased to stable surfaces with increasing $N_{\rm s}$. A theory coupling swelling thermodynamics and mechanical stability reveals that polymeric solvents reduce the mixing entropy and thereby modify the osmotic pressure, allowing $N_{\rm s}$ to tune separately the equilibrium swelling and the crease threshold. This framework captures the stability boundary across solvent polymerization degree and network elasticity. These results identify polymeric solvents as active thermodynamic-mechanical regulators of swelling-induced surface.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2025

A chemical avenue to manipulate field-reentrant superconducting rivalries in infinite layer nickelates

Recently, preliminary magnetic field-reentrant superconductivity manifested in high-temperature (Tc) Eu-doped infinite-layer (IL) nickelates, beyond analogous discoveries exclusively in low-Tc systems. This evokes intriguing fundamental issues about potential quantum-phase boundary and criticality between unconventional superconductivity and field-reentrant-one, which are inexplicable owing to formidable challenges in growing IL-nickelates towards later-series rare-earths. Herein, we open up chemical avenues to enable effective growth of (RE1-yRE'y)1-xEuxNiO2 (RE/RE': Pr, Nd, Sm, Gd, Dy), giving rise to discoveries of RE-4f-related quantum competition between high-Tc and reentrant superconductivity. Robust magnetic-field-reentrant superconductivity with uniaxial anisotropy is observed at superconducting-dome boundaries, stemming from Eu2+-4f7 associated competition between magnetic-fluctuation promoted pairing and exchange-field interactions. Their quantum-criticality is further modulable via RE(RE')-magnetism, which either reinforces reentrancy or elevates Tc (40.1 K) with more robust critical-current-density (~266 kA/cm2 at 2 K) beyond Sr-/Ca-doped counterparts. Our synthetic route enables the establishment of an ideal platform via IL-nickelates for studying 4f-related unconventional superconductivity and quantum-criticality.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2025

Auto-Drafting Police Reports from Noisy ASR Outputs: A Trust-Centered LLM Approach

Achieving a delicate balance between fostering trust in law enforcement and protecting the rights of both officers and civilians continues to emerge as a pressing research and product challenge in the world today. In the pursuit of fairness and transparency, this study presents an innovative AI-driven system designed to generate police report drafts from complex, noisy, and multi-role dialogue data. Our approach intelligently extracts key elements of law enforcement interactions and includes them in the draft, producing structured narratives that are not only high in quality but also reinforce accountability and procedural clarity. This framework holds the potential to transform the reporting process, ensuring greater oversight, consistency, and fairness in future policing practices. A demonstration video of our system can be accessed at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kBrsGGR8e3B5xPSblrchRGj-Y-kpCHNO/view?usp=sharing

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Superconductivity of the hybrid Ruddlesden-Popper La5Ni3O11 single crystals under high pressure

The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in La3Ni2O7 and La4Ni3O10 under high pressure indicates that the Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) phase nickelates Rn+1NinO3n+1 (R = rare earth) is a new material family for high-temperature superconductivity. Exploring the superconductivity of other RP or hybrid RP phase nickelates under high pressure has become an urgent and interesting issue. Here, we report a novel hybrid RP nickelate superconductor of La5Ni3O11. The hybrid RP nickelate La5Ni3O11 is formed by alternative stacking of La3Ni2O7 with n=2 and La2NiO4 with n=1 along the c axis. The transport and magnetic torque measurements indicate a density-wave transition at approximately 170 K near ambient pressure, which is highly similar to both La3Ni2O7 and La4Ni3O10. With increasing pressure, high-pressure transport measurements reveal that the density-wave transition temperature (TDW) continuously increases to approximately 210 K with increasing pressure up to 12 GPa before the appearance of pressure-induced superconductivity, and the density-wave transition abruptly fades out in a first-order manner at approximately 12 GPa. The optimal superconductivity with Tconset = 64 K and Tczero = 54 K is achieved at approximately 21 GPa. On the other hand, high-pressure X-ray diffraction experiments reveal a structural phase transition from an orthorhombic structure to a tetragonal structure at approximately 4.5 GPa. In contrast to La3Ni2O7 and La4Ni3O10, the pressure-induced structural transition has no significant effect on either the density-wave transition or the superconductivity, suggesting a minor role of lattice degree of freedom in La5Ni3O11. The present discovery extends the superconducting member in the RP nickelate family and sheds new light on the superconducting mechanism.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2025

Absence of superconductivity and density-wave transition in ambient-pressure tetragonal La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$

The recent discovery of superconductivity in La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ and La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$ under high pressure stimulates intensive research interests. These nickelates crystallize in an orthogonal/monoclinic structure with tilted NiO$_6$ octahedra at ambient pressure and enter a density-wave-like phase at low temperatures. The application of pressure suppresses the octahedral tilting and triggers a transition to tetragonal structure (I4/mmm), which is believed to be a key prerequisite for the emergence of superconducting state. Here, by developing a high oxidative environment growth technology, we report the first tetragonal nickelates La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$ microcrystals without octahedral tilting at ambient pressure. In tetragonal La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$, transport measurements find that both density-wave and superconducting transitions are absent up to 160 GPa, indicating a robust tetragonal metallic ground state. Density functional theory calculations reveal that the band structure of ambient-pressure tetragonal La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$ involves more $d_{z2}$ orbital contribution to the Fermi surface, compared to the monoclinic phase or the high-pressure superconducting tetragonal phase. The concurrent absence of density-wave state and high-pressure superconductivity in our ambient-pressure tetragonal crystals of La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$ suggests an underlying correlation between these two orders. It suggests that the tetragonal structure is not necessary, while the density-wave state is crucial for the superconductivity in nickelates. Our findings impose important constraints on the mechanism of pressure-induced superconductivity in nickelates and sheds new light on exploring ambient pressure high-temperature Ni-based superconductors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2024

Dehydration drives damage in the freezing of brittle hydrogels

It is widely known that freezing breaks soft, wet materials. However, the mechanism underlying this damage is still not clear. To understand this process, we freeze model, brittle hydrogel samples, while observing the growth of ice-filled cracks that break these apart. We show that damage is not caused by the expansion of water upon freezing, or the growth of ice-filled cavities in the hydrogel. Instead, local ice growth dehydrates the surrounding hydrogel, leading to drying-induced fracture. This dehydration is driven by the process of cryosuction, whereby undercooled ice sucks nearby water towards itself, feeding its growth. Our results highlight the strong analogy between freezing damage and desiccation cracking, which we anticipate being useful for developing an understanding of both topics. Our results should also give useful insights into a wide range of freezing processes, including cryopreservation, food science and frost heave.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2018

On Evaluating and Comparing Open Domain Dialog Systems

Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to deliver the best social conversational experience. Alexa Prize provided the academic community with the unique opportunity to perform research with a live system used by millions of users. The subjectivity associated with evaluating conversations is key element underlying the challenge of building non-goal oriented dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive evaluation strategy with multiple metrics designed to reduce subjectivity by selecting metrics which correlate well with human judgement. The proposed metrics provide granular analysis of the conversational agents, which is not captured in human ratings. We show that these metrics can be used as a reasonable proxy for human judgment. We provide a mechanism to unify the metrics for selecting the top performing agents, which has also been applied throughout the Alexa Prize competition. To our knowledge, to date it is the largest setting for evaluating agents with millions of conversations and hundreds of thousands of ratings from users. We believe that this work is a step towards an automatic evaluation process for conversational AIs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2012

A Simplified Min-Sum Decoding Algorithm for Non-Binary LDPC Codes

Non-binary low-density parity-check codes are robust to various channel impairments. However, based on the existing decoding algorithms, the decoder implementations are expensive because of their excessive computational complexity and memory usage. Based on the combinatorial optimization, we present an approximation method for the check node processing. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme has small performance loss over the additive white Gaussian noise channel and independent Rayleigh fading channel. Furthermore, the proposed reduced-complexity realization provides significant savings on hardware, so it yields a good performance-complexity tradeoff and can be efficiently implemented.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2007

On the Feedback Capacity of Power Constrained Gaussian Noise Channels with Memory

For a stationary additive Gaussian-noise channel with a rational noise power spectrum of a finite-order $L$, we derive two new results for the feedback capacity under an average channel input power constraint. First, we show that a very simple feedback-dependent Gauss-Markov source achieves the feedback capacity, and that Kalman-Bucy filtering is optimal for processing the feedback. Based on these results, we develop a new method for optimizing the channel inputs for achieving the Cover-Pombra block-length-$n$ feedback capacity by using a dynamic programming approach that decomposes the computation into $n$ sequentially identical optimization problems where each stage involves optimizing $O(L^2)$ variables. Second, we derive the explicit maximal information rate for stationary feedback-dependent sources. In general, evaluating the maximal information rate for stationary sources requires solving only a few equations by simple non-linear programming. For first-order autoregressive and/or moving average (ARMA) noise channels, this optimization admits a closed form maximal information rate formula. The maximal information rate for stationary sources is a lower bound on the feedback capacity, and it equals the feedback capacity if the long-standing conjecture, that stationary sources achieve the feedback capacity, holds.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2007

Delayed Feedback Capacity of Stationary Sources over Linear Gaussian Noise Channels

We consider a linear Gaussian noise channel used with delayed feedback. The channel noise is assumed to be a ARMA (autoregressive and/or moving average) process. We reformulate the Gaussian noise channel into an intersymbol interference channel with white noise, and show that the delayed-feedback of the original channel is equivalent to the instantaneous-feedback of the derived channel. By generalizing results previously developed for Gaussian channels with instantaneous feedback and applying them to the derived intersymbol interference channel, we show that conditioned on the delayed feedback, a conditional Gauss-Markov source achieves the feedback capacity and its Markov memory length is determined by the noise spectral order and the feedback delay. A Kalman-Bucy filter is shown to be optimal for processing the feedback. The maximal information rate for stationary sources is derived in terms of channel input power constraint and the steady state solution of the Riccati equation of the Kalman-Bucy filter used in the feedback loop.

cs.IT↗