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Yao Fu

Publications and source records attributed to Yao Fu.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

ResBos2 and the CDF W Mass Measurement

The recent CDF $W$ mass measurement of 80,433 $\pm$ 9 MeV is the most precise direct measurement. However, this result deviates from the Standard Model predicted mass of 80,359.1 $\pm$ 5.2 MeV by $7σ$. The CDF experiment used an older version of the ResBos code that was only accurate at NNLL+NLO, while the ResBos2 code is able to make predictions at N${}^3$LL+NNLO accuracy. We determine that the data-driven techniques used by CDF capture most of the higher order corrections, and using higher order corrections would result in a decrease in the value reported by CDF by at most 10 MeV.

hep-ph↗

Boost Asymmetry of the diboson productions in pp collisions

We propose the boost asymmetry of the diboson productions in pp collisions as a new experimental observable, which can provide unique information on the proton structure. The boost asymmetry rises as the difference in the kinematics of the two bosons, that are coupled to the two different quark and antiquark initial states, respectively, and thus reflects different features of the quark and antiquark parton densities. By comparing the kinematics of the two bosons, such as the boson energy or rapidity, the diboson events with antiquark having higher energy than quark can be distinguished from those with quark having higher energy than antiquark. This would provide unique information in some special parton momentum fraction regions, which cannot be directly proved by current W and Z measurements at the Large Hadron Collider or other deep inelastic scattering experients.

hep-ph↗

Factorization of the forward-backward charge asymmetry and measurements of the weak mixing angle and proton structure at hadron colliders

The forward-backward charge asymmetry (AFB) at hadron colliders is sensitive to both the electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking represented by the effective weak mixing angle, and the proton structure information in the initial state modeled by the parton distribution functions (PDFs). Due to their strong correlation, the precisions of the determination on the weak mixing angle and PDFs using the measured AFB spectrum are limited. In this paper, we define a set of structure parameters which factorize the unique proton information of the relative difference between quarks and antiquarks in the AFB observation. Other than the conventional way of extracting the weak mixing angle fro the convolution of PDF and EW calculations, we propose a new method to simultaneously determine the value of the weak mixing angle and the proton structure terms by fitting to the observed AFB distribution, and point out the necessity of specifying additional observations to further reduce the uncertainties on the proton structure terms respectively, so that the model-independent high precision measurements can be achieved at the future LHC experiments.

hep-ph↗

Experimental quantum secure network with digital signatures and encryption

Cryptography promises four information security objectives, namely, confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation, to support trillions of transactions annually in the digital economy. Efficient digital signatures, ensuring the integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation of data with information-theoretical security are highly urgent and intractable open problems in cryptography. Here, we propose a protocol of high-efficiency quantum digital signatures using secret sharing, one-time universal$_2$ hashing, and the one-time pad. We just need to use a 384-bit key to sign documents of up to $2^{64}$ lengths with a security bound of $10^{-19}$. If one-megabit document is signed, the signature efficiency is improved by more than $10^8$ times compared with previous quantum digital signature protocols. Furthermore, we build the first all-in-one quantum secure network integrating information-theoretically secure communication, digital signatures, secret sharing, and conference key agreement and experimentally demonstrate this signature efficiency advantage. Our work completes the cryptography toolbox of the four information security objectives.

quant-ph↗

Latent Topology Induction for Understanding Contextualized Representations

In this work, we study the representation space of contextualized embeddings and gain insight into the hidden topology of large language models. We show there exists a network of latent states that summarize linguistic properties of contextualized representations. Instead of seeking alignments to existing well-defined annotations, we infer this latent network in a fully unsupervised way using a structured variational autoencoder. The induced states not only serve as anchors that mark the topology (neighbors and connectivity) of the representation manifold but also reveal the internal mechanism of encoding sentences. With the induced network, we: (1). decompose the representation space into a spectrum of latent states which encode fine-grained word meanings with lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic information; (2). show state-state transitions encode rich phrase constructions and serve as the backbones of the latent space. Putting the two together, we show that sentences are represented as a traversal over the latent network where state-state transition chains encode syntactic templates and state-word emissions fill in the content. We demonstrate these insights with extensive experiments and visualizations.

cs.CL↗

Neural network-based prediction of the secret-key rate of quantum key distribution

Numerical methods are widely used to calculate the secure key rate of many quantum key distribution protocols in practice, but they consume many computing resources and are too time-consuming. In this work, we take the homodyne detection discrete-modulated continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) as an example, and construct a neural network that can quickly predict the secure key rate based on the experimental parameters and experimental results. Compared to traditional numerical methods, the speed of the neural network is improved by several orders of magnitude. Importantly, the predicted key rates are not only highly accurate but also highly likely to be secure. This allows the secure key rate of discrete-modulated CV-QKD to be extracted in real time on a low-power platform. Furthermore, our method is versatile and can be extended to quickly calculate the complex secure key rates of various other unstructured quantum key distribution protocols.

quant-ph↗

Few-shot Subgoal Planning with Language Models

Pre-trained large language models have shown successful progress in many language understanding benchmarks. This work explores the capability of these models to predict actionable plans in real-world environments. Given a text instruction, we show that language priors encoded in pre-trained language models allow us to infer fine-grained subgoal sequences. In contrast to recent methods which make strong assumptions about subgoal supervision, our experiments show that language models can infer detailed subgoal sequences from few training sequences without any fine-tuning. We further propose a simple strategy to re-rank language model predictions based on interaction and feedback from the environment. Combined with pre-trained navigation and visual reasoning components, our approach demonstrates competitive performance on subgoal prediction and task completion in the ALFRED benchmark compared to prior methods that assume more subgoal supervision.

cs.CL↗

Experimental quantum advantage with quantum coupon collector

An increasing number of communication and computational schemes with quantum advantages have recently been proposed, which implies that quantum technology has fertile application prospects. However, demonstrating these schemes experimentally continues to be a central challenge because of the difficulty in preparing high-dimensional states or highly entangled states. In this study, we introduce and analyse a quantum coupon collector protocol by employing coherent states and simple linear optical elements, which was successfully demonstrated using realistic experimental equipment. We showed that our protocol can significantly reduce the number of samples needed to learn a specific set compared with the classical limit of the coupon collector problem. We also discuss the potential values and expansions of the quantum coupon collector by constructing a quantum blind box game. The information transmitted by the proposed game also broke the classical limit. These results strongly prove the advantages of quantum mechanics in machine learning and communication complexity.

quant-ph↗

Breaking the Rate-Loss Bound of Quantum Key Distribution with Asynchronous Two-Photon Interference

Twin-field quantum key distribution can overcome the secret key capacity of repeaterless quantum key distribution via single-photon interference. However, to compensate for the channel fluctuations and lock the laser fluctuations, the techniques of phase tracking and phase locking are indispensable in experiment, which drastically increase experimental complexity and hinder free-space realization. Inspired by the duality in entanglement, we herein present an asynchronous measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution protocol that can surpass the secret key capacity even without phase tracking and phase locking. Leveraging the concept of time multiplexing, asynchronous two-photon Bell-state measurement is realized by postmatching two interference detection events. For a 1 GHz system, the new protocol reaches a transmission distance of 450 km without phase tracking. After further removing phase locking, our protocol is still capable of breaking the capacity at 270 km. Intriguingly, when using the same experimental techniques, our protocol has a higher key rate than the phase-matching-type twin-field protocol. In the presence of imperfect intensity modulation, it also has a significant advantage in terms of the transmission distance over the sending-or-not-sending type twin-field protocol. With high key rates and accessible technology, our work provides a promising candidate for practical scalable quantum communication networks.

quant-ph↗

Data-to-text Generation with Variational Sequential Planning

We consider the task of data-to-text generation, which aims to create textual output from non-linguistic input. We focus on generating long-form text, i.e., documents with multiple paragraphs, and propose a neural model enhanced with a planning component responsible for organizing high-level information in a coherent and meaningful way. We infer latent plans sequentially with a structured variational model, while interleaving the steps of planning and generation. Text is generated by conditioning on previous variational decisions and previously generated text. Experiments on two data-to-text benchmarks (RotoWire and MLB) show that our model outperforms strong baselines and is sample efficient in the face of limited training data (e.g., a few hundred instances).

cs.CL↗

Reduction of the electroweak correlation in the PDF updating by using the forward-backward asymmetry of Drell-Yan process

We propose a new observable for the measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry $(A_{FB})$ in Drell-Yan lepton production. At hadron colliders, the $A_{FB}$ distribution is sensitive to both the electroweak (EW) fundamental parameter $\sin^2 θ_{W}$, the weak mixing angle, and the parton distribution functions (PDFs). Hence, the determination of $\sin^2 θ_{W}$ and the updating of PDFs by directly using the same $A_{FB}$ spectrum are strongly correlated. This correlation would introduce large bias or uncertainty into both precise measurements of EW and PDF sectors. In this article, we show that the sensitivity of $A_{FB}$ on $\sin^2 θ_{W}$ is dominated by its average value around the $Z$ pole region, while the shape (or gradient) of the $A_{FB}$ spectrum is insensitive to $\sin^2 θ_{W}$ and contains important information on the PDF modeling. Accordingly, a new observable related to the gradient of the spectrum is introduced, and demonstrated to be able to significantly reduce the potential bias on the determination of $\sin^2 θ_{W}$ when updating the PDFs using the same $A_{FB}$ data.

hep-ph↗

Secure Quantum Secret Sharing without Signal Disturbance Monitoring

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is an essential primitive for the future quantum internet, which promises secure multiparty communication. However, developing a large-scale QSS network is a huge challenge due to the channel loss and the requirement of multiphoton interference or high-fidelity multipartite entanglement distribution. Here, we propose a three-user QSS protocol without monitoring signal disturbance, which is capable of ensuring the unconditional security. The final key rate of our protocol can be demonstrated to break the Pirandola-Laurenza-Ottaviani-Banchi bound of quantum channel and its simulated transmission distance can approach over 600 km using current techniques. Our results pave the way to realizing high-rate and large-scale QSS networks.

quant-ph↗

Optimizing the Numbers of Queries and Replies in Federated Learning with Differential Privacy

Federated learning (FL) empowers distributed clients to collaboratively train a shared machine learning model through exchanging parameter information. Despite the fact that FL can protect clients' raw data, malicious users can still crack original data with disclosed parameters. To amend this flaw, differential privacy (DP) is incorporated into FL clients to disturb original parameters, which however can significantly impair the accuracy of the trained model. In this work, we study a crucial question which has been vastly overlooked by existing works: what are the optimal numbers of queries and replies in FL with DP so that the final model accuracy is maximized. In FL, the parameter server (PS) needs to query participating clients for multiple global iterations to complete training. Each client responds a query from the PS by conducting a local iteration. Our work investigates how many times the PS should query clients and how many times each client should reply the PS. We investigate two most extensively used DP mechanisms (i.e., the Laplace mechanism and Gaussian mechanisms). Through conducting convergence rate analysis, we can determine the optimal numbers of queries and replies in FL with DP so that the final model accuracy can be maximized. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted with publicly available datasets: MNIST and FEMNIST, to verify our analysis and the results demonstrate that properly setting the numbers of queries and replies can significantly improve the final model accuracy in FL with DP.

cs.LG↗

Noisy-Labeled NER with Confidence Estimation

Recent studies in deep learning have shown significant progress in named entity recognition (NER). Most existing works assume clean data annotation, yet a fundamental challenge in real-world scenarios is the large amount of noise from a variety of sources (e.g., pseudo, weak, or distant annotations). This work studies NER under a noisy labeled setting with calibrated confidence estimation. Based on empirical observations of different training dynamics of noisy and clean labels, we propose strategies for estimating confidence scores based on local and global independence assumptions. We partially marginalize out labels of low confidence with a CRF model. We further propose a calibration method for confidence scores based on the structure of entity labels. We integrate our approach into a self-training framework for boosting performance. Experiments in general noisy settings with four languages and distantly labeled settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code can be found at https://github.com/liukun95/Noisy-NER-Confidence-Estimation

cs.CL↗

Probing BERT in Hyperbolic Spaces

Recently, a variety of probing tasks are proposed to discover linguistic properties learned in contextualized word embeddings. Many of these works implicitly assume these embeddings lay in certain metric spaces, typically the Euclidean space. This work considers a family of geometrically special spaces, the hyperbolic spaces, that exhibit better inductive biases for hierarchical structures and may better reveal linguistic hierarchies encoded in contextualized representations. We introduce a Poincare probe, a structural probe projecting these embeddings into a Poincare subspace with explicitly defined hierarchies. We focus on two probing objectives: (a) dependency trees where the hierarchy is defined as head-dependent structures; (b) lexical sentiments where the hierarchy is defined as the polarity of words (positivity and negativity). We argue that a key desideratum of a probe is its sensitivity to the existence of linguistic structures. We apply our probes on BERT, a typical contextualized embedding model. In a syntactic subspace, our probe better recovers tree structures than Euclidean probes, revealing the possibility that the geometry of BERT syntax may not necessarily be Euclidean. In a sentiment subspace, we reveal two possible meta-embeddings for positive and negative sentiments and show how lexically-controlled contextualization would change the geometric localization of embeddings. We demonstrate the findings with our Poincare probe via extensive experiments and visualization. Our results can be reproduced at https://github.com/FranxYao/PoincareProbe.

cs.CL↗

Prototypical Representation Learning for Relation Extraction

Recognizing relations between entities is a pivotal task of relational learning. Learning relation representations from distantly-labeled datasets is difficult because of the abundant label noise and complicated expressions in human language. This paper aims to learn predictive, interpretable, and robust relation representations from distantly-labeled data that are effective in different settings, including supervised, distantly supervised, and few-shot learning. Instead of solely relying on the supervision from noisy labels, we propose to learn prototypes for each relation from contextual information to best explore the intrinsic semantics of relations. Prototypes are representations in the feature space abstracting the essential semantics of relations between entities in sentences. We learn prototypes based on objectives with clear geometric interpretation, where the prototypes are unit vectors uniformly dispersed in a unit ball, and statement embeddings are centered at the end of their corresponding prototype vectors on the surface of the ball. This approach allows us to learn meaningful, interpretable prototypes for the final classification. Results on several relation learning tasks show that our model significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models. We further demonstrate the robustness of the encoder and the interpretability of prototypes with extensive experiments.

cs.CL↗

On the Practicality of Differential Privacy in Federated Learning by Tuning Iteration Times

In spite that Federated Learning (FL) is well known for its privacy protection when training machine learning models among distributed clients collaboratively, recent studies have pointed out that the naive FL is susceptible to gradient leakage attacks. In the meanwhile, Differential Privacy (DP) emerges as a promising countermeasure to defend against gradient leakage attacks. However, the adoption of DP by clients in FL may significantly jeopardize the model accuracy. It is still an open problem to understand the practicality of DP from a theoretic perspective. In this paper, we make the first attempt to understand the practicality of DP in FL through tuning the number of conducted iterations. Based on the FedAvg algorithm, we formally derive the convergence rate with DP noises in FL. Then, we theoretically derive: 1) the conditions for the DP based FedAvg to converge as the number of global iterations (GI) approaches infinity; 2) the method to set the number of local iterations (LI) to minimize the negative influence of DP noises. By further substituting the Laplace and Gaussian mechanisms into the derived convergence rate respectively, we show that: 3) The DP based FedAvg with the Laplace mechanism cannot converge, but the divergence rate can be effectively prohibited by setting the number of LIs with our method; 4) The learning error of the DP based FedAvg with the Gaussian mechanism can converge to a constant number finally if we use a fixed number of LIs per GI. To verify our theoretical findings, we conduct extensive experiments using two real-world datasets. The results not only validate our analysis results, but also provide useful guidelines on how to optimize model accuracy when incorporating DP into FL

cs.CR↗

Nested Named Entity Recognition with Partially-Observed TreeCRFs

Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing. However, the widely-used sequence labeling framework is difficult to detect entities with nested structures. In this work, we view nested NER as constituency parsing with partially-observed trees and model it with partially-observed TreeCRFs. Specifically, we view all labeled entity spans as observed nodes in a constituency tree, and other spans as latent nodes. With the TreeCRF we achieve a uniform way to jointly model the observed and the latent nodes. To compute the probability of partial trees with partial marginalization, we propose a variant of the Inside algorithm, the \textsc{Masked Inside} algorithm, that supports different inference operations for different nodes (evaluation for the observed, marginalization for the latent, and rejection for nodes incompatible with the observed) with efficient parallelized implementation, thus significantly speeding up training and inference. Experiments show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) F1 scores on the ACE2004, ACE2005 dataset, and shows comparable performance to SOTA models on the GENIA dataset. Our approach is implemented at: \url{https://github.com/FranxYao/Partially-Observed-TreeCRFs}.

cs.CL↗