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Xiaodong Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaodong Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Lyapunov spectrum scaling transition for quasiperiodic nonlinear unitaries

We study the Lyapunov spectrum scaling of thermal weakly-nonlinear unitary maps in the presence of quasiperiodic potentials. We search for the crossover from long-range to short-range scaling as the localization length ξ decreases and compare the details to the case of uncorrelated Anderson disorder [Phys. Rev. Res. 6 L012064 (2024)]. A comparative statistical analysis of the eigenstates for the linear case shows that quasiperiodicity has a stronger localization impact at the same value of ξ. Therefore we expect that the scaling crossover should be enhanced as well. However, the numerical analysis shows that it is strongly delayed as compared to Anderson disorder, and is observed at anomalously small values of ξ. These findings hint at the potential impact of long range correlations of quasiperiodic localized eigenstates, which persist in the presence of interactions even in the case of integrability breaking and thermalization.

nlin.CD

A Showcase of Using the Partial-Structure R1 to Assemble Small-Molecule Crystal Structures

Using a few concrete examples this paper has demonstrated a few observations on using the partial-structure R1 (pR1) to assemble small-molecule crystal structures. (1) Assembling can start with orienting and/or placing large fragments or small fragments containing heavy atom(s). (2) It is handy to attach a fragment to a partial model as only the orientation needs to be optimized. (3) In a structure containing heavy atoms it is impossible to directly calculate the orientations of a light-atom-only fragment. Instead, it is necessary to use residual reflection intensities in which the contribution of the partial model containing all heavy atoms is deducted away. These observations indicate that pR1 is a useful tool for solving some small-molecule crystal structures.

physics.comp-ph

FAVLA: A Force-Adaptive Fast-Slow VLA model for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Force/torque feedback can substantially improve Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on contact-rich manipulation, but most existing approaches fuse all modalities at a single operating frequency. This design ignores the mismatched sampling rates of real robot sensors, forcing downsampling of the high-frequency contact cues needed for reactive correction. Combined with common VLM-action-expert (AE) pipelines that execute action chunks largely open loop between expensive VLM updates, unified-frequency fusion often yields delayed responses to impacts, stick-slip, and force spikes. We propose FAVLA, a force-adaptive fast-slow VLA that decouples slow perception planning from fast contact-aware control. FAVLA runs a slow VLM at a fixed low frequency to encode modalities to produce latent representations and to predict near-future force variation. A fast AE then executes at a variable high frequency, conditioning on the latest force sequence data to generate reactive actions. We further introduce a force adapter that injects high-frequency force features into multiple AE layers, and adaptively schedules the AE's execution frequency based on the VLM's predicted force variation. Extensive experiments on contact-rich tasks demonstrate that FAVLA significantly outperforms baselines, achieving superior reactivity and success rates, especially with a smaller contact force during manipulation.

cs.RO

Interface Spin-orbit Coupling Induced Room-temperature Ferromagnetic Insulator

Fabricating room-temperature ferromagnetic insulators, which are crucial candidates for next-generation dissipation-free quantum and spintronic devices, remains a significant challenge. In this Letter, we report on the epitaxial synthesis of novel room-temperature ferromagnetic insulating thin films created through the precise construction of (111)-oriented 3d/5d interfaces. Our analysis indicates that, unlike conventional doping methods, the (111)-oriented SrIrO3/La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 (SIO/LSMO) interfaces exhibit markedly enhanced spin-orbit coupling. This enhanced interfacial spin-orbit coupling strengthens the electron-phonon coupling in LSMO, thereby shortening the electronic mean free path. As a result, the intrinsic metallicity of LSMO is suppressed, giving rise to a new ferromagnetic insulating phase that emerges between the ferromagnetic metal and paramagnetic insulator regimes of the LSMO phase diagram. Furthermore, the temperature window of the ferromagnetic insulating phase can be tuned by precisely controlling the thickness of the LSMO layers. Our Letter reveals a new strategy for developing ferromagnetic insulators by engineering 3d/5d interfaces and orientations, paving a way for the development of novel dissipation-free quantum and spintronic devices.

cond-mat.str-el

ROMAN: Reward-Orchestrated Multi-Head Attention Network for Autonomous Driving System Testing

Automated Driving System (ADS) acts as the brain of autonomous vehicles, responsible for their safety and efficiency. Safe deployment requires thorough testing in diverse real-world scenarios and compliance with traffic laws like speed limits, signal obedience, and right-of-way rules. Violations like running red lights or speeding pose severe safety risks. However, current testing approaches face significant challenges: limited ability to generate complex and high-risk law-breaking scenarios, and failing to account for complex interactions involving multiple vehicles and critical situations. To address these challenges, we propose ROMAN, a novel scenario generation approach for ADS testing that combines a multi-head attention network with a traffic law weighting mechanism. ROMAN is designed to generate high-risk violation scenarios to enable more thorough and targeted ADS evaluation. The multi-head attention mechanism models interactions among vehicles, traffic signals, and other factors. The traffic law weighting mechanism implements a workflow that leverages an LLM-based risk weighting module to evaluate violations based on the two dimensions of severity and occurrence. We have evaluated ROMAN by testing the Baidu Apollo ADS within the CARLA simulation platform and conducting extensive experiments to measure its performance. Experimental results demonstrate that ROMAN surpassed state-of-the-art tools ABLE and LawBreaker by achieving 7.91% higher average violation count than ABLE and 55.96% higher than LawBreaker, while also maintaining greater scenario diversity. In addition, only ROMAN successfully generated violation scenarios for every clause of the input traffic laws, enabling it to identify more high-risk violations than existing approaches.

cs.SE

DORA: Dataflow Oriented Robotic Architecture

Robotic middleware serves as the foundational infrastructure, enabling complex robotic systems to operate in a coordinated and modular manner. In data-intensive robotic applications, especially in industrial scenarios, communication efficiency directly impact system responsiveness, stability, and overall productivity. However, existing robotic middleware exhibit several limitations: (1) they rely heavily on (de)serialization mechanisms, introducing significant overhead for large-sized data; (2) they lack efficient and flexible support for heterogeneous data sizes, particularly in intra-robot communication and Python-based execution environments. To address these challenges, we propose Dataflow-Oriented Robotic Architecture (DORA) that enables explicit data dependency specification and efficient zero-copy data transmission. We implement the proposed framework as an open-source system and evaluate it through extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic environments. Experimental results demonstrate substantial reductions in latency and CPU overhead compared to state-of-the-art middleware.

cs.RO

STARS: Shared-specific Translation and Alignment for missing-modality Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal remote sensing technology significantly enhances the understanding of surface semantics by integrating heterogeneous data such as optical images, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and Digital Surface Models (DSM). However, in practical applications, the missing of modality data (e.g., optical or DSM) is a common and severe challenge, which leads to performance decline in traditional multimodal fusion models. Existing methods for addressing missing modalities still face limitations, including feature collapse and overly generalized recovered features. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{STARS} (\textbf{S}hared-specific \textbf{T}ranslation and \textbf{A}lignment for missing-modality \textbf{R}emote \textbf{S}ensing), a robust semantic segmentation framework for incomplete multimodal inputs. STARS is built on two key designs. First, we introduce an asymmetric alignment mechanism with bidirectional translation and stop-gradient, which effectively prevents feature collapse and reduces sensitivity to hyperparameters. Second, we propose a Pixel-level Semantic sampling Alignment (PSA) strategy that combines class-balanced pixel sampling with cross-modality semantic alignment loss, to mitigate alignment failures caused by severe class imbalance and improve minority-class recognition.

cs.CV

Experimental study of coupled quantum billiards with integrable and chaotic classical dynamics and test of a special Rosenzweig-Porter model

We report on the experimental study of the spectral properties of quantum systems consisting of two quantum billiards (QBs), one with chaotic, the other one with integrable classical dynamics, that are coupled to each other via an opening in a common wall. They are compared to those of a special case of the Rosenzweig-Porter model with random matrices composed of two diagonal blocks modeling the spectral properties of the QBs, that are coupled with a tunable parameter. We demonstrate that this model is suitable for the description of the experimental data and thus may be employed to determine the strength of the coupling. It results from the increasing overlap of eigenmodes in the QBs penetrating through the opening into the other one, leading to a mixing of their eigenstates, and the breaking of the symmetry present in the QB with integrable dynamics. This implicates deviations of the spectral properties from those of typical quantum systems with integrable and chaotic dynamics, respectively, and approaches those of a fully chaotic system for sufficiently large coupling strength. In contrast in previous studies the transition from integrable to chaotic dynamics was induced by introducing a random potential of increasing strength into such a QB and applicability of a variant of the Rosenzweig-Porter model was tested.

nlin.CD

Unusual strain relaxation and Dirac semimetallic behavior in epitaxial antiperovskite nitrides

Antiperovskite nitrides (X3AN) are the structural analogues to perovskite oxides, while their epitaxial growth and electronic properties remain largely unexplored. We report the successful synthesis of Ni3InN thin films on substrates with different lattice constants. First-principles phonon calculations confirm the dynamical stability of cubic phase Ni3InN, providing the basis for epitaxial synthesis. High-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy reveals coherent (001)-oriented interfaces when Ni3InN is grown on LaAlO3 and SrTiO3, while an unexpected (011)-orientation forms on DyScO3, aligning with surface-energy predictions. Transport measurements highlight a strain-controlled Fermi-liquid behavior, correlated with variations in the Ni-3d bandwidth and hybridization. Band structure calculations reveal a dual character near the Fermi level: a high-mobility Dirac-like band and a Ni-3d manifold that drives strange-metal transport with a reduced slope compared to oxide perovskites. The formal Ni valence (+2/3) places Ni3InN in an overdoped correlated-metal regime, distinguishing from most perovskite oxides. This positions antiperovskite nitrides as a promising platform for investigating overdoped Fermi liquids and strange-metal behavior.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

ComLQ: Benchmarking Complex Logical Queries in Information Retrieval

Information retrieval (IR) systems play a critical role in navigating information overload across various applications. Existing IR benchmarks primarily focus on simple queries that are semantically analogous to single- and multi-hop relations, overlooking \emph{complex logical queries} involving first-order logic operations such as conjunction ($\land$), disjunction ($\lor$), and negation ($\lnot$). Thus, these benchmarks can not be used to sufficiently evaluate the performance of IR models on complex queries in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel method leveraging large language models (LLMs) to construct a new IR dataset \textbf{ComLQ} for \textbf{Com}plex \textbf{L}ogical \textbf{Q}ueries, which comprises 2,909 queries and 11,251 candidate passages. A key challenge in constructing the dataset lies in capturing the underlying logical structures within unstructured text. Therefore, by designing the subgraph-guided prompt with the subgraph indicator, an LLM (such as GPT-4o) is guided to generate queries with specific logical structures based on selected passages. All query-passage pairs in ComLQ are ensured \emph{structure conformity} and \emph{evidence distribution} through expert annotation. To better evaluate whether retrievers can handle queries with negation, we further propose a new evaluation metric, \textbf{Log-Scaled Negation Consistency} (\textbf{LSNC@$K$}). As a supplement to standard relevance-based metrics (such as nDCG and mAP), LSNC@$K$ measures whether top-$K$ retrieved passages violate negation conditions in queries. Our experimental results under zero-shot settings demonstrate existing retrieval models' limited performance on complex logical queries, especially on queries with negation, exposing their inferior capabilities of modeling exclusion.

cs.IR

RSFuzz: A Robustness-Guided Swarm Fuzzing Framework Based on Behavioral Constraints

Multi-robot swarms play an essential role in complex missions including battlefield reconnaissance, agricultural pest monitoring, as well as disaster search and rescue. Unfortunately, given the complexity of swarm algorithms, logical vulnerabilities are inevitable and often lead to severe safety and security consequences. Although various methods have been presented for detecting logical vulnerabilities through software testing, when they are used in swarm environments, these techniques face significant challenges: 1) Due to the swarm's vast composable parameter space, it is extremely difficult to generate failure-triggering scenarios, which is crucial to effectively expose logical vulnerabilities; 2) Because of the swarm's high flexibility and dynamism, it is challenging to model and evaluate the global swarm state, particularly in terms of cooperative behaviors, which makes it difficult to detect logical vulnerabilities. In this work, we propose RSFuzz, a robustness-guided swarm fuzzing framework designed to detect logical vulnerabilities in multi-robot systems. It leverages the robustness of behavioral constraints to quantitatively evaluate the swarm state and guide the generation of failure-triggering scenarios. In addition, RSFuzz identifies and targets key swarm nodes for perturbations, effectively reducing the input space. Upon the RSFuzz framework, we construct two swarm fuzzing schemes, Single Attacker Fuzzing (SA-Fuzzing) and Multiple Attacker Fuzzing (MA-Fuzzing), which employ single and multiple attackers, respectively, during fuzzing to disturb swarm mission execution. We evaluated RSFuzz's performance with three popular swarm algorithms in simulated environments. The results show that RSFuzz outperforms the state-of-the-art with an average improvement of 17.75\% in effectiveness and a 38.4\% increase in efficiency. We validated some vulnerabilities in real world.

cs.CR

AMF-MedIT: An Efficient Align-Modulation-Fusion Framework for Medical Image-Tabular Data

Multimodal medical analysis combining image and tabular data has gained increasing attention. However, effective fusion remains challenging due to cross-modal discrepancies in feature dimensions and modality contributions, as well as the noise from high-dimensional tabular inputs. To address these problems, we present AMF-MedIT, an efficient Align-Modulation-Fusion framework for medical image and tabular data integration, particularly under data-scarce conditions. Built upon a self-supervised learning strategy, we introduce the Adaptive Modulation and Fusion (AMF) module, a novel, streamlined fusion paradigm that harmonizes dimension discrepancies and dynamically balances modality contributions. It integrates prior knowledge to guide the allocation of modality contributions in the fusion and employs feature masks together with magnitude and leakage losses to adjust the dimensionality and magnitude of unimodal features. Additionally, we develop FT-Mamba, a powerful tabular encoder leveraging a selective mechanism to handle noisy medical tabular data efficiently. Extensive experiments, including simulations of clinical noise, demonstrate that AMF-MedIT achieves superior accuracy, robustness, and data efficiency across multimodal classification tasks. Interpretability analyses further reveal how FT-Mamba shapes multimodal pretraining and enhances the image encoder's attention, highlighting the practical value of our framework for reliable and efficient clinical artificial intelligence applications.

cs.CV

Scaling Artificial Intelligence for Prostate Cancer Detection on MRI towards Organized Screening and Primary Diagnosis in a Global, Multiethnic Population (Study Protocol)

In this intercontinental, confirmatory study, we include a retrospective cohort of 22,481 MRI examinations (21,288 patients; 46 cities in 22 countries) to train and externally validate the PI-CAI-2B model, i.e., an efficient, next-generation iteration of the state-of-the-art AI system that was developed for detecting Gleason grade group $\geq$2 prostate cancer on MRI during the PI-CAI study. Of these examinations, 20,471 cases (19,278 patients; 26 cities in 14 countries) from two EU Horizon projects (ProCAncer-I, COMFORT) and 12 independent centers based in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, are used for training and internal testing. Additionally, 2010 cases (2010 patients; 20 external cities in 12 countries) from population-based screening (STHLM3-MRI, IP1-PROSTAGRAM trials) and primary diagnostic settings (PRIME trial) based in Europe, North and South Americas, Asia and Australia, are used for external testing. Primary endpoint is the proportion of AI-based assessments in agreement with the standard of care diagnoses (i.e., clinical assessments made by expert uropathologists on histopathology, if available, or at least two expert urogenital radiologists in consensus; with access to patient history and peer consultation) in the detection of Gleason grade group $\geq$2 prostate cancer within the external testing cohorts. Our statistical analysis plan is prespecified with a hypothesis of diagnostic interchangeability to the standard of care at the PI-RADS $\geq$3 (primary diagnosis) or $\geq$4 (screening) cut-off, considering an absolute margin of 0.05 and reader estimates derived from the PI-CAI observer study (62 radiologists reading 400 cases). Secondary measures comprise the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of the AI system stratified by imaging quality, patient age and patient ethnicity to identify underlying biases (if any).

eess.IV

SGAD: Semantic and Geometric-aware Descriptor for Local Feature Matching

Local feature matching remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recent Area to Point Matching (A2PM) methods have improved matching accuracy. However, existing research based on this framework relies on inefficient pixel-level comparisons and complex graph matching that limit scalability. In this work, we introduce the Semantic and Geometric-aware Descriptor Network (SGAD), which fundamentally rethinks area-based matching by generating highly discriminative area descriptors that enable direct matching without complex graph optimization. This approach significantly improves both accuracy and efficiency of area matching. We further improve the performance of area matching through a novel supervision strategy that decomposes the area matching task into classification and ranking subtasks. Finally, we introduce the Hierarchical Containment Redundancy Filter (HCRF) to eliminate overlapping areas by analyzing containment graphs. SGAD demonstrates remarkable performance gains, reducing runtime by 60x (0.82s vs. 60.23s) compared to MESA. Extensive evaluations show consistent improvements across multiple point matchers: SGAD+LoFTR reduces runtime compared to DKM, while achieving higher accuracy (0.82s vs. 1.51s, 65.98 vs. 61.11) in outdoor pose estimation, and SGAD+ROMA delivers +7.39% AUC@5° in indoor pose estimation, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

cs.CV

BrainSegDMlF: A Dynamic Fusion-enhanced SAM for Brain Lesion Segmentation

The segmentation of substantial brain lesions is a significant and challenging task in the field of medical image segmentation. Substantial brain lesions in brain imaging exhibit high heterogeneity, with indistinct boundaries between lesion regions and normal brain tissue. Small lesions in single slices are difficult to identify, making the accurate and reproducible segmentation of abnormal regions, as well as their feature description, highly complex. Existing methods have the following limitations: 1) They rely solely on single-modal information for learning, neglecting the multi-modal information commonly used in diagnosis. This hampers the ability to comprehensively acquire brain lesion information from multiple perspectives and prevents the effective integration and utilization of multi-modal data inputs, thereby limiting a holistic understanding of lesions. 2) They are constrained by the amount of data available, leading to low sensitivity to small lesions and difficulty in detecting subtle pathological changes. 3) Current SAM-based models rely on external prompts, which cannot achieve automatic segmentation and, to some extent, affect diagnostic efficiency.To address these issues, we have developed a large-scale fully automated segmentation model specifically designed for brain lesion segmentation, named BrainSegDMLF. This model has the following features: 1) Dynamic Modal Interactive Fusion (DMIF) module that processes and integrates multi-modal data during the encoding process, providing the SAM encoder with more comprehensive modal information. 2) Layer-by-Layer Upsampling Decoder, enabling the model to extract rich low-level and high-level features even with limited data, thereby detecting the presence of small lesions. 3) Automatic segmentation masks, allowing the model to generate lesion masks automatically without requiring manual prompts.

cs.CV

Measuring and Explaining the Effects of Android App Transformations in Online Malware Detection

It is well known that antivirus engines are vulnerable to evasion techniques (e.g., obfuscation) that transform malware into its variants. However, it cannot be necessarily attributed to the effectiveness of these evasions, and the limits of engines may also make this unsatisfactory result. In this study, we propose a data-driven approach to measure the effect of app transformations to malware detection, and further explain why the detection result is produced by these engines. First, we develop an interaction model for antivirus engines, illustrating how they respond with different detection results in terms of varying inputs. Six app transformation techniques are implemented in order to generate a large number of Android apps with traceable changes. Then we undertake a one-month tracking of app detection results from multiple antivirus engines, through which we obtain over 971K detection reports from VirusTotal for 179K apps in total. Last, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of antivirus engines based on these reports from the perspectives of signature-based, static analysis-based, and dynamic analysis-based detection techniques. The results, together with 7 highlighted findings, identify a number of sealed working mechanisms occurring inside antivirus engines and what are the indicators of compromise in apps during malware detection.

cs.CR

An Improved Boris Algorithm for Charge Particle Orbit in Tokamak Plasmas

An improved Boris algorithm for simulating the motion of charged particles in electromagnetic fields has been developed. This enhancement addresses the issue of inaccurate fast-scale cyclotron phase calculations present in the original Boris algorithm, while preserving its advantage in simulating slow-scale guiding center motion. As a result, it strikes a balance between low and high-frequency dynamics, overcoming the limitations of traditional second-order volume-preserving algorithms (VPAs) which are constrained to a single characteristic frequency. Test particle simulations indicate that, in most cases, the improved Boris algorithm achieves significantly higher accuracy than conventional VPAs when simulating cases involving various frequencies of electric field within a typical Tokamak magnetic field, highlighting its superior efficacy in handling problems across a wide range of characteristic frequencies.

physics.plasm-ph

Indeterminate Probability Theory

Complex continuous or mixed joint distributions (e.g., P(Y | z_1, z_2, ..., z_N)) generally lack closed-form solutions, often necessitating approximations such as MCMC. This paper proposes Indeterminate Probability Theory (IPT), which makes the following contributions: (1) An observer-centered framework in which experimental outcomes are represented as distributions combining ground truth with observation error; (2) The introduction of three independence candidate axioms that enable a two-phase probabilistic inference framework; (3) The derivation of closed-form solutions for arbitrary complex joint distributions under this framework. Both the Indeterminate Probability Neural Network (IPNN) model and the non-neural multivariate time series forecasting application demonstrate IPT's effectiveness in modeling high-dimensional distributions, with successful validation up to 1000 dimensions. Importantly, IPT is consistent with classical probability theory and subsumes the frequentist equation in the limit of vanishing observation error.

cs.LG