arXiv subjects

Xiao Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiao Liang.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Robust Safety Critical Control Under Multiple State and Input Constraints: Volume Control Barrier Function Method

In this paper, the safety-critical control problem for uncertain systems under multiple control barrier function (CBF) constraints and input constraints is investigated. A novel framework is proposed to generate a safety filter that minimizes changes to reference inputs when safety risks arise, ensuring a balance between safety and performance. A nonlinear disturbance observer (DOB) based on the robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) is used to estimate system uncertainties, ensuring that the estimation error converges to zero exponentially. This error bound is integrated into the safety-critical controller to reduce conservativeness while ensuring safety. To further address the challenges arising from multiple CBF and input constraints, a novel Volume CBF (VCBF) is proposed by analyzing the feasible space of the quadratic programming (QP) problem. % ensuring solution feasibility by keeping the volume as a positive value. To ensure that the feasible space does not vanish under disturbances, a DOB-VCBF-based method is introduced, ensuring system safety while maintaining the feasibility of the resulting QP. Subsequently, several groups of simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Thermal-induced ion magnetic moment in H$_4$O superionic state

The hydrogen ions in the superionic ice can move freely, playing the role of electrons in metals. Its electromagnetic behavior is the key to explaining the anomalous magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune. Based on the ab initio evolutionary algorithm, we searched for the stable H4O crystal structure under pressures of 500-5000 GPa and discovered a new layered chain $Pmn2_1$-H$_4$O structure with H$_3$ ion clusters. Interestingly, H3 ion clusters rotate above 900 K (with an instantaneous speed of 3000 m/s at 900 K), generating an instantaneous magnetic moment ($10^{-26}$ Am$^2 \approx 0.001 μ_B$). Moreover, H ions diffuse in a direction perpendicular to the H-O atomic layer at 960-1000 K. This is because the hydrogen oxygen covalent bonds within the hydrogen oxygen plane hinder the diffusion behavior of H$_3$ ion clusters within the plane, resulting in the diffusion of H$_3$ ion clusters between the hydrogen oxygen planes and the formation of a one-dimensional conductive superionic state. One-dimensional diffusion of ions may generate magnetic fields. We refer to these two types of magnetic moments as "thermal-induced ion magnetic moments". When the temperature exceeds 1000 K, H ions diffuse in three directions. When the temperature exceeds 6900 K, oxygen atoms diffuse and the system becomes fluid. These findings provide important references for people to re-recognize the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen and oxygen under high pressure, as well as the sources of abnormal magnetic fields in Uranus and Neptune.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

The Round Complexity of Black-Box Post-Quantum Secure Computation

We study the round complexity of secure multi-party computation (MPC) in the post-quantum regime. Our focus is on the fully black-box setting, where both the construction and security reduction are black-box. Chia, Chung, Liu, and Yamakawa [FOCS'22] demonstrated the infeasibility of achieving standard simulation-based security within constant rounds unless $\mathbf{NP} \subseteq \mathbf{BQP}$. This leaves crucial feasibility questions unresolved. Specifically, it remains unknown whether black-box constructions are achievable within polynomial rounds; also, the existence of constant-round constructions with respect to $ε$-simulation, a relaxed yet useful alternative to standard simulation, remains unestablished. This work provides positive answers. We introduce the first black-box construction for PQ-MPC in polynomial rounds, from the minimal assumption of post-quantum semi-honest oblivious transfers. In the two-party scenario, our construction requires only $ω(1)$ rounds. These results have already been applied in the oracle separation between classical-communication quantum MPC and $\mathbf{P} = \mathbf{NP}$ in Kretschmer, Qian, and Tal [STOC'25]. As for $ε$-simulation, Chia, Chung, Liang, and Yamakawa [CRYPTO'22] resolved the issue for the two-party setting, leaving the multi-party case open. We complete the picture by presenting the first black-box, constant-round construction in the multi-party setting, instantiable using various standard post-quantum primitives. En route, we obtain a black-box, constant-round post-quantum commitment achieving a weaker version of 1-many non-malleability, from post-quantum one-way functions. Besides its role in our MPC construction, this commitment also reduces the assumption used in the quantum parallel repetition lower bound by Bostanci, Qian, Spooner, and Yuen [STOC'24]. We anticipate further applications in the future.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Einstein-Horndeski gravity and the ultra slowly evaporating black hole

In this work, we study the evaporation behaviors of asymptotically flat charged black holes in the Einstein-Horndeski gravity theory. Based on the thermodynamics of the Horndeski black hole, we present a physical understanding of the scalar charge of the Horndeski black hole and also clarify its connection to the Einstein vector theory. As the presence of non-minimal coupling, the evaporating behaviors of the Horndeski black hole are vastly different from the Reissner-Nordstrom (RN) black hole case. Due to the different spacetime and electric field structures, the evaporation rate of the Horndeski black hole will slow down at the late stage of evaporation and thus gain a lifetime much longer than the RN black hole. These results illuminate the effect of non-minimally coupled matters on the black hole evaporation and provide clues to search for these matter fields in future observations.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2025

Sigma: Differential Rescaling of Query, Key and Value for Efficient Language Models

We introduce Sigma, an efficient large language model specialized for the system domain, empowered by a novel architecture including DiffQKV attention, and pre-trained on our meticulously collected system domain data. DiffQKV attention significantly enhances the inference efficiency of Sigma by optimizing the Query (Q), Key (K), and Value (V) components in the attention mechanism differentially, based on their varying impacts on the model performance and efficiency indicators. Specifically, we (1) conduct extensive experiments that demonstrate the model's varying sensitivity to the compression of K and V components, leading to the development of differentially compressed KV, and (2) propose augmented Q to expand the Q head dimension, which enhances the model's representation capacity with minimal impacts on the inference speed. Rigorous theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that DiffQKV attention significantly enhances efficiency, achieving up to a 33.36% improvement in inference speed over the conventional grouped-query attention (GQA) in long-context scenarios. We pre-train Sigma on 6T tokens from various sources, including 19.5B system domain data that we carefully collect and 1T tokens of synthesized and rewritten data. In general domains, Sigma achieves comparable performance to other state-of-arts models. In the system domain, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark AIMicius, where Sigma demonstrates remarkable performance across all tasks, significantly outperforming GPT-4 with an absolute improvement up to 52.5%.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Integrative Decoding: Improve Factuality via Implicit Self-consistency

Self-consistency-based approaches, which involve repeatedly sampling multiple outputs and selecting the most consistent one as the final response, prove to be remarkably effective in improving the factual accuracy of large language models. Nonetheless, existing methods usually have strict constraints on the task format, largely limiting their applicability. In this paper, we present Integrative Decoding (ID), to unlock the potential of self-consistency in open-ended generation tasks. ID operates by constructing a set of inputs, each prepended with a previously sampled response, and then processes them concurrently, with the next token being selected by aggregating of all their corresponding predictions at each decoding step. In essence, this simple approach implicitly incorporates self-consistency in the decoding objective. Extensive evaluation shows that ID consistently enhances factuality over a wide range of language models, with substantial improvements on the TruthfulQA (+11.2%), Biographies (+15.4%) and LongFact (+8.5%) benchmarks. The performance gains amplify progressively as the number of sampled responses increases, indicating the potential of ID to scale up with repeated sampling.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

TopoLa: A Universal Framework to Enhance Cell Representations for Single-cell and Spatial Omics through Topology-encoded Latent Hyperbolic Geometry

Recent advances in cellular research demonstrate that scRNA-seq characterizes cellular heterogeneity, while spatial transcriptomics reveals the spatial distribution of gene expression. Cell representation is the fundamental issue in the two fields. Here, we propose Topology-encoded Latent Hyperbolic Geometry (TopoLa), a computational framework enhancing cell representations by capturing fine-grained intercellular topological relationships. The framework introduces a new metric, TopoLa distance (TLd), which quantifies the geometric distance between cells within latent hyperbolic space, capturing the network's topological structure more effectively. With this framework, the cell representation can be enhanced considerably by performing convolution on its neighboring cells. Performance evaluation across seven biological tasks, including scRNA-seq data clustering and spatial transcriptomics domain identification, shows that TopoLa significantly improves the performance of several state-of-the-art models. These results underscore the generalizability and robustness of TopoLa, establishing it as a valuable tool for advancing both biological discovery and computational methodologies.

q-bio.GN↗

arXiv2024

Pseudoscalar heavy quarkonium production in heavy ion ultraperipheral collision

The inclusive production of pseudoscalar heavy quarkoniua ($η_c,~η_b$ and $B_c$) via photon-photon fusion in heavy ion ultraperipheral collision (UPC) are calculated to QCD next-to-leading order in the framework of non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD). The total cross section of $η_c$ produced in Pb-Pb UPC is 194 $\mathrm{nb}$ and 1275 $\mathrm{nb}$ at nucleon-nucleon c.m. energies $\sqrt{S_{\mathrm{NN}}}=$ 5.52 TeV and 39.4 TeV, respectively. The cross sections for $η_b$ and $B_c$ mesons are more than two to three orders of magnitude smaller. We make a detailed phenomenological analysis on the $η_c$ production; the uncertainties caused by the renormalization scale and the charm quark mass, the cross sections in other ultraperipheral nucleon-nucleon colliding systems, and the transverse momentum distribution are discussed. At the coming HL-LHC and future FCC, the heavy ion UPC opens another door of the study on the production of heavy quarkonium.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

AutoPeel: Adhesion-aware Safe Peeling Trajectory Optimization for Robotic Wound Care

Chronic wounds, including diabetic ulcers, pressure ulcers, and ulcers secondary to venous hypertension, affects more than 6.5 million patients and a yearly cost of more than $25 billion in the United States alone. Chronic wound treatment is currently a manual process, and we envision a future where robotics and automation will aid in this treatment to reduce cost and improve patient care. In this work, we present the development of the first robotic system for wound dressing removal which is reported to be the worst aspect of living with chronic wounds. Our method leverages differentiable physics-based simulation to perform gradient-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) for optimized trajectory planning. By integrating fracture mechanics of adhesion, we are able to model the peeling effect inherent to dressing adhesion. The system is further guided by carefully designed objective functions that promote both efficient and safe control, reducing the risk of tissue damage. We validated the efficacy of our approach through a series of experiments conducted on both synthetic skin phantoms and real human subjects. Our results demonstrate the system's ability to achieve precise and safe dressing removal trajectories, offering a promising solution for automating this essential healthcare procedure.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

MEDiC: Autonomous Surgical Robotic Assistance to Maximizing Exposure for Dissection and Cautery

Surgical automation has the capability to improve the consistency of patient outcomes and broaden access to advanced surgical care in underprivileged communities. Shared autonomy, where the robot automates routine subtasks while the surgeon retains partial teleoperative control, offers great potential to make an impact. In this paper we focus on one important skill within surgical shared autonomy: Automating robotic assistance to maximize visual exposure and apply tissue tension for dissection and cautery. Ensuring consistent exposure to visualize the surgical site is crucial for both efficiency and patient safety. However, achieving this is highly challenging due to the complexities of manipulating deformable volumetric tissues that are prevalent in surgery.To address these challenges we propose \methodname, a framework for autonomous surgical robotic assistance to \methodfullname. We integrate a differentiable physics model with perceptual feedback to achieve our two key objectives: 1) Maximizing tissue exposure and applying tension for a specified dissection site through visual-servoing conrol and 2) Selecting optimal control positions for a dissection target based on deformable Jacobian analysis. We quantitatively assess our method through repeated real robot experiments on a tissue phantom, and showcase its capabilities through dissection experiments using shared autonomy on real animal tissue.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Bayesian-Optimized One-Step Diffusion Model with Knowledge Distillation for Real-Time 3D Human Motion Prediction

Human motion prediction is a cornerstone of human-robot collaboration (HRC), as robots need to infer the future movements of human workers based on past motion cues to proactively plan their motion, ensuring safety in close collaboration scenarios. The diffusion model has demonstrated remarkable performance in predicting high-quality motion samples with reasonable diversity, but suffers from a slow generative process which necessitates multiple model evaluations, hindering real-world applications. To enable real-time prediction, in this work, we propose training a one-step multi-layer perceptron-based (MLP-based) diffusion model for motion prediction using knowledge distillation and Bayesian optimization. Our method contains two steps. First, we distill a pretrained diffusion-based motion predictor, TransFusion, directly into a one-step diffusion model with the same denoiser architecture. Then, to further reduce the inference time, we remove the computationally expensive components from the original denoiser and use knowledge distillation once again to distill the obtained one-step diffusion model into an even smaller model based solely on MLPs. Bayesian optimization is used to tune the hyperparameters for training the smaller diffusion model. Extensive experimental studies are conducted on benchmark datasets, and our model can significantly improve the inference speed, achieving real-time prediction without noticeable degradation in performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Novel Model of Charged Leptons

A novel model of charged leptons is presented, which contains two basics hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the Yukawa coupling between Higgs field and charged leptons is the weak interaction, the Higgs field is a scalar intermediate boson which changes the chirality of charged leptons in the weak interaction. The other hypothesis is that the flavor eigenstates of charged leptons are the superposition states of left-handed and right-handed elementary Weyl spinors before the electroweak symmetry breaking. According to this model, the Yukawa coupling constants between Higgs field and three generations of charged leptons are considered to be a universal constant, and the difference of the masses of different charged leptons is due to the different left-right mixing angles of their flavor eigenstates.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

Grasping Force Control and Adaptation for a Cable-Driven Robotic Hand

This paper introduces a unique force control and adaptation algorithm for a lightweight and low-complexity five-fingered robotic hand, namely an Integrated-Finger Robotic Hand (IFRH). The force control and adaptation algorithm is intuitive to design, easy to implement, and improves the grasping functionality through feedforward adaptation automatically. Specifically, we have extended Youla-parameterization which is traditionally used in feedback controller design into a feedforward iterative learning control algorithm (ILC). The uniqueness of such an extension is that both the feedback and feedforward controllers are parameterized over one unified design parameter which can be easily customized based on the desired closed-loop performance. While Youla-parameterization and ILC have been explored in the past on various applications, our unique parameterization and computational methods make the design intuitive and easy to implement. This provides both robust and adaptive learning capabilities, and our application rivals the complexity of many robotic hand control systems. Extensive experimental tests have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Chunk, Align, Select: A Simple Long-sequence Processing Method for Transformers

Although dominant in natural language processing, transformer-based models remain challenged by the task of long-sequence processing, because the computational cost of self-attention operations in transformers swells quadratically with the input sequence length. To alleviate the complexity of long-sequence processing, we propose a simple framework to enable the offthe-shelf pre-trained transformers to process much longer sequences, while the computation and memory costs remain growing linearly with the input sequence lengths. More specifically, our method divides each long-sequence input into a batch of chunks, then aligns the interchunk information during the encoding steps, and finally selects the most representative hidden states from the encoder for the decoding process. To extract inter-chunk semantic information, we align the start and end token embeddings among chunks in each encoding transformer block. To learn an effective hidden selection policy, we design a dual updating scheme inspired by reinforcement learning, which regards the decoders of transformers as environments, and the downstream performance metrics as the rewards to evaluate the hidden selection actions. Our empirical results on real-world long-text summarization and reading comprehension tasks demonstrate effective improvements compared to prior longsequence processing baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

PianoBART: Symbolic Piano Music Generation and Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training

Learning musical structures and composition patterns is necessary for both music generation and understanding, but current methods do not make uniform use of learned features to generate and comprehend music simultaneously. In this paper, we propose PianoBART, a pre-trained model that uses BART for both symbolic piano music generation and understanding. We devise a multi-level object selection strategy for different pre-training tasks of PianoBART, which can prevent information leakage or loss and enhance learning ability. The musical semantics captured in pre-training are fine-tuned for music generation and understanding tasks. Experiments demonstrate that PianoBART efficiently learns musical patterns and achieves outstanding performance in generating high-quality coherent pieces and comprehending music. Our code and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/RS2002/PianoBart.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Task Oriented In-Domain Data Augmentation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior performance in various applications and fields. To achieve better performance on specialized domains such as law and advertisement, LLMs are often continue pre-trained on in-domain data. However, existing approaches suffer from two major issues. First, in-domain data are scarce compared with general domain-agnostic data. Second, data used for continual pre-training are not task-aware, such that they may not be helpful to downstream applications. We propose TRAIT, a task-oriented in-domain data augmentation framework. Our framework is divided into two parts: in-domain data selection and task-oriented synthetic passage generation. The data selection strategy identifies and selects a large amount of in-domain data from general corpora, and thus significantly enriches domain knowledge in the continual pre-training data. The synthetic passages contain guidance on how to use domain knowledge to answer questions about downstream tasks. By training on such passages, the model aligns with the need of downstream applications. We adapt LLMs to two domains: advertisement and math. On average, TRAIT improves LLM performance by 8% in the advertisement domain and 7.5% in the math domain.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

GAN Based Near-Field Channel Estimation for Extremely Large-Scale MIMO Systems

Extremely large-scale multiple-input-multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is a promising technique to achieve ultra-high spectral efficiency for future 6G communications. The mixed line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) XL-MIMO near-field channel model is adopted to describe the XL-MIMO near-field channel accurately. In this paper, a generative adversarial network (GAN) variant based channel estimation method is proposed for XL-MIMO systems. Specifically, the GAN variant is developed to simultaneously estimate the LoS and NLoS path components of the XL-MIMO channel. The initially estimated channels instead of the received signals are input into the GAN variant as the conditional input to generate the XL-MIMO channels more efficiently. The GAN variant not only learns the mapping from the initially estimated channels to the XL-MIMO channels but also learns an adversarial loss. Moreover, we combine the adversarial loss with a conventional loss function to ensure the correct direction of training the generator. To further enhance the estimation performance, we investigate the impact of the hyper-parameter of the loss function on the performance of our method. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing channel estimation approaches in the adopted channel model. In addition, the proposed method surpasses the Cram$\acute{\mathbf{e}}$r-Rao lower bound (CRLB) under low pilot overhead.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

AdaViPro: Region-based Adaptive Visual Prompt for Large-Scale Models Adapting

Recently, prompt-based methods have emerged as a new alternative `parameter-efficient fine-tuning' paradigm, which only fine-tunes a small number of additional parameters while keeping the original model frozen. However, despite achieving notable results, existing prompt methods mainly focus on `what to add', while overlooking the equally important aspect of `where to add', typically relying on the manually crafted placement. To this end, we propose a region-based Adaptive Visual Prompt, named AdaViPro, which integrates the `where to add' optimization of the prompt into the learning process. Specifically, we reconceptualize the `where to add' optimization as a problem of regional decision-making. During inference, AdaViPro generates a regionalized mask map for the whole image, which is composed of 0 and 1, to designate whether to apply or discard the prompt in each specific area. Therefore, we employ Gumbel-Softmax sampling to enable AdaViPro's end-to-end learning through standard back-propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AdaViPro yields new efficiency and accuracy trade-offs for adapting pre-trained models.

cs.CV↗