Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Tao Xiang

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Xiang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Efficient conversion from fermionic Gaussian states to matrix product states

Fermionic Gaussian states are eigenstates of quadratic Hamiltonians and are widely used in quantum many-body problems. We propose a highly efficient algorithm that converts fermionic Gaussian states to matrix product states. It can be formulated for finite-size systems without translation invariance, but becomes particularly appealing when applied to infinite systems with translation invariance. If the ground states of a topologically ordered system on infinite cylinders are expressed as matrix product states, then the fixed points of the transfer matrix can be harnessed to filter out the anyon eigenbasis, also known as minimally entangled states. This allows for efficient computation of universal properties, such as the entanglement spectrum and modular matrices. The potential of our method is demonstrated by numerical calculations in two chiral spin liquids that have the same topological orders as the bosonic Laughlin and Moore-Read states, respectively. The anyon eigenbasis for the first one has been worked out before and serves as a useful benchmark. The anyon eigenbasis of the second one is, however, not transparent, and its successful construction provides a nontrivial corroboration of our method.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Light as Deception: GPT-driven Natural Relighting Against Vision-Language Pre-training Models

While adversarial attacks on vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) models have been explored, generating natural adversarial samples crafted through realistic and semantically meaningful perturbations remains an open challenge. Existing methods, primarily designed for classification tasks, struggle when adapted to VLP models due to their restricted optimization spaces, leading to ineffective attacks or unnatural artifacts. To address this, we propose \textbf{LightD}, a novel framework that generates natural adversarial samples for VLP models via semantically guided relighting. Specifically, LightD leverages ChatGPT to propose context-aware initial lighting parameters and integrates a pretrained relighting model (IC-light) to enable diverse lighting adjustments. LightD expands the optimization space while ensuring perturbations align with scene semantics. Additionally, gradient-based optimization is applied to the reference lighting image to further enhance attack effectiveness while maintaining visual naturalness. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed LightD have been demonstrated across various VLP models in tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering.

cs.CV↗

Superconducting phase interference effect in momentum space

Detecting the phases of the superconducting order parameter is pivotal for unraveling the pairing symmetry of superconducting electrons. Conventional methods for probing these phases have focused on macroscopic interference effects, such as the Josephson effect. However, at the microscopic level, phase interference effects within momentum space have remained elusive due to the inherent difficulty of extracting phase information from individual momentum points. By introducing the hybridization effect between a primary band and its replica bands arising from density wave orders or other interactions, we uncover a novel superconducting phase interference effect at the intersection points on the Fermi surfaces of these bands. This effect elucidates the remarkable anomalies recently observed in the single-particle spectral function through angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) in $Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+δ}$ (Bi2212) superconductors. It can also emerge in twisted junctions of superconductors with coherent tunneling, offering an alternative framework for probing the relative superconducting phase through twisted superstructures.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Disrupting Vision-Language Model-Driven Navigation Services via Adversarial Object Fusion

We present Adversarial Object Fusion (AdvOF), a novel attack framework targeting vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents in service-oriented environments by generating adversarial 3D objects. While foundational models like Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have enhanced service-oriented navigation systems through improved perception and decision-making, their integration introduces vulnerabilities in mission-critical service workflows. Existing adversarial attacks fail to address service computing contexts, where reliability and quality-of-service (QoS) are paramount. We utilize AdvOF to investigate and explore the impact of adversarial environments on the VLM-based perception module of VLN agents. In particular, AdvOF first precisely aggregates and aligns the victim object positions in both 2D and 3D space, defining and rendering adversarial objects. Then, we collaboratively optimize the adversarial object with regularization between the adversarial and victim object across physical properties and VLM perceptions. Through assigning importance weights to varying views, the optimization is processed stably and multi-viewedly by iterative fusions from local updates and justifications. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate AdvOF can effectively degrade agent performance under adversarial conditions while maintaining minimal interference with normal navigation tasks. This work advances the understanding of service security in VLM-powered navigation systems, providing computational foundations for robust service composition in physical-world deployments.

cs.CR↗

Implementing advanced trial wave functions in fermion quantum Monte Carlo via stochastic sampling

We introduce an efficient approach to implement correlated many-body trial wave functions in auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC). To control the sign/phase problem in AFQMC, a constraint is derived from an exact gauge condition but is typically imposed approximately through a trial wave function or trial density matrix, whose quality can affect the accuracy of the method. Furthermore, the trial wave function can also affect the efficiency through importance sampling. The most natural form of the trial wave function has been single Slater determinants or their linear combinations. More sophisticated forms, for example, with the inclusion of a Jastrow factor or other explicit correlations, have been challenging to use and their implementation is often assumed to require a quantum computer. In this work, we demonstrate that a large class of correlated wave functions, written in the general form of multi-dimensional integrals over hidden or auxiliary variables times Slater determinants, can be implemented as trial wave function by coupling the random walkers to a generalized Metropolis sampling. We discuss the fidelity of AFQMC with stochastically sampled trial wave functions, which are relevant to both quantum and classical algorithms. We illustrate the method and show that an efficient implementation can be achieved which preserves the low-polynomial computational scaling of AFQMC. We test our method in molecules under bond stretching and in transition metal diatomics. Significant improvements are seen in both accuracy and efficiency over typical trial wave functions, and the method yields total ground-state energies systematically within chemical accuracy. The method can be useful for incorporating other advanced wave functions, for example, neural quantum state wave functions optimized from machine learning techniques, or for other forms of fermion quantum Monte Carlo.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Superconducting susceptibility signal captured in a record wide pressure range

In recent years, the resistance signature of the high temperature superconductivity above 250 K in highly compressed hydrides (more than 100 GPa) has garnered significant attention within the condensed matter physics community. This has sparked renewed optimism for achieving superconductivity under room-temperature conditions. However, the superconducting diamagnetism, another crucial property for confirming the superconductivity, has yet to be conclusively observed. The primary challenge arises from the weak diamagnetic signals detected from the small samples compressed in diamond anvil cells. Therefore, the reported results of superconducting diamagnetism in hydrides have sparked intense debate, highlighting the urgent need for workable methodology to assess the validity of the experimental results. Here, we are the first to report the ultrahigh pressure measurements of the superconducting diamagnetism on Nb0.44Ti0.56, a commercial superconducting alloy, in a record-wide pressure range from 5 GPa to 160 GPa. We present detailed results on factors such as sample size, the diamagnetic signal intensity, the signal-to-noise ratio and the superconducting transition temperature across various pressures and different pressure transmitting media. These comprehensive results clearly demonstrate that this alloy is an ideal reference sample for evaluating superconductivity in compressed hydrides,validating the credibility of the experimental systems and superconducting diamagnetic results, as well as determining the nature of the superconductivity of the investigated sample. In addition, these results also provide a valuable benchmark for studying the pressure-induced superconductivity in other material families.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

SketchYourSeg: Mask-Free Subjective Image Segmentation via Freehand Sketches

We introduce SketchYourSeg, a novel framework that establishes freehand sketches as a powerful query modality for subjective image segmentation across entire galleries through a single exemplar sketch. Unlike text prompts that struggle with spatial specificity or interactive methods confined to single-image operations, sketches naturally combine semantic intent with structural precision. This unique dual encoding enables precise visual disambiguation for segmentation tasks where text descriptions would be cumbersome or ambiguous -- such as distinguishing between visually similar instances, specifying exact part boundaries, or indicating spatial relationships in composed concepts. Our approach addresses three fundamental challenges: (i) eliminating the need for pixel-perfect annotation masks during training with a mask-free framework; (ii) creating a synergistic relationship between sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) models and foundation models (CLIP/DINOv2) where the former provides training signals while the latter generates masks; and (iii) enabling multi-granular segmentation capabilities through purpose-made sketch augmentation strategies. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate superior performance over existing approaches across diverse benchmarks, establishing a new paradigm for user-guided image segmentation that balances precision with efficiency.

cs.CV↗

Thermodynamics of the Hubbard Model on the Bethe Lattice

We investigate the thermodynamic properties of the Hubbard model on the Bethe lattice with a coordination number of 3 using the thermal canonical tree tensor network method. Our findings reveal two distinct thermodynamic phases: a low-temperature antiferromagnetic phase, where spin SU(2) symmetry is broken, and a high-temperature paramagnetic phase. A key feature of the system is the separation of energy scales for charge and spin excitations, which is reflected in the temperature dependence of thermodynamic quantities and the disparity between spin and charge gaps extracted from their respective susceptibilities. At the critical point, both spin and charge susceptibilities exhibit singularities, suggesting that charge excitations are not fully decoupled from their spin counterparts. Additionally, the double occupancy number exhibits a non-monotonic temperature dependence, indicative of an entropy-driven Pomeranchuk effect. These results demonstrate that the loopless Bethe lattice effectively captures the essential physics of the Hubbard model while providing a computationally efficient framework for studying strongly correlated electronic systems.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Emergent quantum Majorana metal from a chiral spin liquid

We propose a mechanism to explain the emergence of an intermediate gapless spin liquid phase in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model in an externally applied magnetic field, sandwiched between the well-known gapped chiral spin liquid and the gapped partially polarized phase. We propose that, in moderate fields, $π$-fluxes nucleate in the ground state and trap Majorana zero modes. As these fluxes proliferate with increasing field, the Majorana zero modes overlap creating an emergent $\mathbb{Z}_2$ quantum Majorana metallic state with a `Fermi surface' at zero energy. We further show that the Majorana spectral function captures the dynamical spin and dimer correlations obtained by the infinite Projected Entangled Pair States method, thereby validating our variational approach.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Fractionalization Signatures in the Dynamics of Quantum Spin Liquids

We investigate the signatures of fractionalization in quantum spin liquids by studying different phases of the Kitaev honeycomb model in the presence of an out-of-plane magnetic field through which the model becomes non-integrable. Using the infinite projected entangled pair states (iPEPS) ansatz, along with analytical calculations and exact diagonalization, we calculate dynamical signatures of fractionalized particles through spin-spin and dimer-dimer correlations. Our analysis demonstrates the ability of these correlations to discern distinct fractionalized quantum sectors, namely Majorana fermions and the emergent $Z_2$ fluxes, in both the chiral spin liquid (CSL) phase under weak field and the emergent intermediate gapless phase (IGP) under moderate field. Importantly, our calculation reveals the nature of IGP observed at moderate fields, a region of ongoing debate, indicating that this phase is a Majorana metal induced by strong flux fluctuations.

cond-mat.str-el↗

MI-DETR: An Object Detection Model with Multi-time Inquiries Mechanism

Based on analyzing the character of cascaded decoder architecture commonly adopted in existing DETR-like models, this paper proposes a new decoder architecture. The cascaded decoder architecture constrains object queries to update in the cascaded direction, only enabling object queries to learn relatively-limited information from image features. However, the challenges for object detection in natural scenes (e.g., extremely-small, heavily-occluded, and confusingly mixed with the background) require an object detection model to fully utilize image features, which motivates us to propose a new decoder architecture with the parallel Multi-time Inquiries (MI) mechanism. MI enables object queries to learn more comprehensive information, and our MI based model, MI-DETR, outperforms all existing DETR-like models on COCO benchmark under different backbones and training epochs, achieving +2.3 AP and +0.6 AP improvements compared to the most representative model DINO and SOTA model Relation-DETR under ResNet-50 backbone. In addition, a series of diagnostic and visualization experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, rationality, and interpretability of MI.

cs.CV↗

Faster Diffusion via Temporal Attention Decomposition

We explore the role of attention mechanism during inference in text-conditional diffusion models. Empirical observations suggest that cross-attention outputs converge to a fixed point after several inference steps. The convergence time naturally divides the entire inference process into two phases: an initial phase for planning text-oriented visual semantics, which are then translated into images in a subsequent fidelity-improving phase. Cross-attention is essential in the initial phase but almost irrelevant thereafter. However, self-attention initially plays a minor role but becomes crucial in the second phase. These findings yield a simple and training-free method known as temporally gating the attention (TGATE), which efficiently generates images by caching and reusing attention outputs at scheduled time steps. Experimental results show when widely applied to various existing text-conditional diffusion models, TGATE accelerates these models by 10%-50%. The code of TGATE is available at https://github.com/HaozheLiu-ST/T-GATE.

cs.CV↗

Semantic Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation

Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) for Sequential Recommendation (SR), which learns a continuous distribution for each user-item interaction sequence rather than a determinate embedding, is robust against data deficiency and achieves significant performance. However, existing VAE-based SR models assume a unimodal Gaussian distribution as the prior distribution of sequence representations, leading to restricted capability to capture complex user interests and limiting recommendation performance when users have more than one interest. Due to that it is common for users to have multiple disparate interests, we argue that it is more reasonable to establish a multimodal prior distribution in SR scenarios instead of a unimodal one. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel VAE-based SR model named SIGMA. SIGMA assumes that the prior of sequence representation conforms to a Gaussian mixture distribution, where each component of the distribution semantically corresponds to one of multiple interests. For multi-interest elicitation, SIGMA includes a probabilistic multi-interest extraction module that learns a unimodal Gaussian distribution for each interest according to implicit item hyper-categories. Additionally, to incorporate the multimodal interests into sequence representation learning, SIGMA constructs a multi-interest-aware ELBO, which is compatible with the Gaussian mixture prior. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SIGMA. The code is available at https://github.com/libeibei95/SIGMA.

cs.IR↗

Superconductivity Favored Anisotropic Phase Stiffness in Infinite-Layer Nickelates

In unconventional superconductors such as cuprates and iron pnictides and chalcogenides, phase stiffness - a measure of the energy cost associated with superconducting phase variations - is on the same order of magnitude as the strength of Cooper pairing, translating to superconductivity governed by phase fluctuations. However, due to a lack of a direct experimental probe, there remains a fundamental gap in establishing microscopic picture between unconventional superconductivity and phase fluctuations. Here we show a vector current technique that allows for in-situ angle-resolved transport measurements, providing exclusive evidence suggesting an anisotropic nature of phase stiffness in infinite-layer nickelate superconductors. Pronounced anisotropy of in-plane resistance manifests itself in both normal and superconducting transition states, indicating crystal symmetry breaking. Remarkably, the electric conductivity of Nd0.8Sr0.2NiO2 peaks at 125° between the direction of the current and crystal principal axis, but this angle evolves to 160° near zero-resistance temperature. Further measurements reveal that the superconductivity is favored along a direction with minimized phase fluctuations, an orientation strikingly deviating from the symmetric direction imposed by both electronic anisotropy and the underlying crystal lattice. Identical measurements conducted on a prototypical cuprate superconductor yield consistent results, suggesting that this previously unknown behavior could be ubiquitous. By shielding insight into the contrasting anisotropy between electron fluid and superfluid, our findings provide clues for a unified framework for understanding unconventional superconductors

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Disentangling critical quantum spin chains with Clifford circuits

Clifford circuits can be utilized to disentangle quantum states with polynomial cost, thanks to the Gottesman-Knill theorem. Based on this idea, the Clifford circuits augmented matrix product states (CAMPS) method, which is a seamless integration of Clifford circuits within the density-matrix renormalization group algorithm, was proposed recently and was shown to be able to reduce entanglement in various quantum systems. In this work, we further explore the power of the CAMPS method in critical spin chains described by conformal field theories (CFTs) in the scaling limit. We find that the optimized disentanglers correspond to {\it duality} transformations, which significantly reduce the entanglement entropy in the ground state. For the critical quantum Ising spin chain governed by the Ising CFT with self-duality, the Clifford circuits found by CAMPS coincide with the duality transformation, i.e., the Kramers-Wannier self-duality in the critical Ising chain. It reduces the entanglement entropy by mapping the free conformal boundary condition to the fixed one. In the more general case of the XXZ chain, the CAMPS gives rise to a duality transformation mapping the model to the quantum Ashkin-Teller spin chain. Our results highlight the potential of the framework as a versatile tool for uncovering hidden dualities and simplifying the entanglement structure of critical quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

Superconducting-insulating phase transition in pressurized Ba1-xKxBiO3

We report the first observation of a pressure-induced transition from a superconducting (SC) to an insulating (I) phase in single-crystal Ba1-xKxBiO3 (x = 0.4, 0.43, 0.52, and 0.58) superconductors. X-ray diffraction measurements conducted at 20 K reveal a direct relationship between this SC-I transition and a pressure-induced distortion of crystal structure. With increasing pressure, the lattice parameters a and c of the ambient-pressure superconducting tetragonal (T) phase are compressed continuously below a critical pressure (Pc1), wherein the pressure (P) dependence of superconducting transition temperature (Tc) displays a small variation. However, upon further compression, the lattice of the compressed T phase displays an anisotropic change, and Tc shows a monotonous decrease. When the pressure reaches Pc2 (Pc2 > Pc1), the compressed T phase collapses along the c axis, followed by the disappearance of superconductivity and the appearance of the insulating phase. This SC-I transition is fully reversible, with the critical pressure increasing alongside K doping concentration. These findings are strikingly similar to the SC-I transition observed in hole-doped high-Tc cuprate superconductors under pressure. Identifying their commonalities could deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie high- Tc superconductivity in these two oxide superconductors with a perovskite structure.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Investigations of key issues on the reproducibility of high-Tc superconductivity emerging from compressed La3Ni2O7

Recently, the signatures of superconductivity near 80 K have been discovered in the single crystal of La3Ni2O7 under pressure, which makes it a new candidate of the high-temperature superconductors dominated by 3d transition elements after the cuprate and iron-pnictide superconductors. However, there are several critical questions that have been perplexing the scientific community. These questions include (1) what factors contribute to the inconsistent reproducibility of the experimental results? (2) what is the fundamental nature of pressure-induced superconductivity: bulk or non-bulk (filamentary-like)? (3) where does the superconducting phase locate within the sample if it is filamentary-like? (4) is the oxygen content important for developing and stabilizing its superconductivity? In this study, we employ comprehensive high-pressure techniques to address these crucial issues. Through our modulated ac susceptibility measurements, we are the first to find that the superconductivity in this nickelate is filamentary-like. Our scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) investigations suggest that the filamentary-like superconductivity most likely emerges at the interface between the La3Ni2O7 and La4Ni3O10 phases. By tuning the oxygen content on the polycrystalline La3Ni2O7, we also find that the oxygen content plays vital role for developing and stabilizing its superconductivity. The upper and lower bounds of the oxygen content are 7.35 and 6.89, respectively. Our results provide not only new insights into understanding the puzzling issues in this material, but also significant information for achieving a better understanding on the superconductivity of this material.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Model Supply Chain Poisoning: Backdooring Pre-trained Models via Embedding Indistinguishability

Pre-trained models (PTMs) are widely adopted across various downstream tasks in the machine learning supply chain. Adopting untrustworthy PTMs introduces significant security risks, where adversaries can poison the model supply chain by embedding hidden malicious behaviors (backdoors) into PTMs. However, existing backdoor attacks to PTMs can only achieve partially task-agnostic and the embedded backdoors are easily erased during the fine-tuning process. This makes it challenging for the backdoors to persist and propagate through the supply chain. In this paper, we propose a novel and severer backdoor attack, TransTroj, which enables the backdoors embedded in PTMs to efficiently transfer in the model supply chain. In particular, we first formalize this attack as an indistinguishability problem between poisoned and clean samples in the embedding space. We decompose embedding indistinguishability into pre- and post-indistinguishability, representing the similarity of the poisoned and reference embeddings before and after the attack. Then, we propose a two-stage optimization that separately optimizes triggers and victim PTMs to achieve embedding indistinguishability. We evaluate TransTroj on four PTMs and six downstream tasks. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms SOTA task-agnostic backdoor attacks -- achieving nearly 100% attack success rate on most downstream tasks -- and demonstrates robustness under various system settings. Our findings underscore the urgent need to secure the model supply chain against such transferable backdoor attacks. The code is available at https://github.com/haowang-cqu/TransTroj .

cs.CR↗