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Ying Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Ying Qin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Sharp Second-Best Welfare in Bilateral and Matching Markets

How much social welfare must a market lose because values are private? We determine the sharp ratio of second-best to first-best welfare under independent nonnegative types, Bayesian incentive compatibility, interim individual rationality, and no expected budget deficit. The ratio is approximately $0.8882516903$ for arbitrary priors and $0.9113893681$ when buyers have monotone hazard rates and sellers are unrestricted. The arbitrary-prior guarantee holds for every downward-closed family of feasible matchings; the MHR guarantee holds when every matching of a compatibility graph is feasible. Both constants are \revise{attained}{sharp} already in bilateral trade. The proof keeps the sellers' initial endowment inside the budget Lagrangian. For arbitrary priors, a common threshold decomposition reduces the problem to three-parameter power-law distributions. For monotone hazards, common transformations of buyer and seller scores reduce it to shifted capped exponential buyers; a typewise allocation certificate and an explicit worst-case seller satisfy the same boundary equation. The bilateral-to-matching framework, with a welfare endowment charge and an MHR-preserving packing argument, transfers these affine inequalities without loss. We give exact variational characterizations of both constants and reproducible interval certificates for their numerical evaluation. Unrestricted signed transfers also permit pointwise strong budget balance.

cs.GT↗

Testing Spin Prior Assumptions of Binary Black Hole Parameter Inference and Their Astrophysical Implications

With the growing number of binary black hole (BBH) candidates in the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog 5.0 (GWTC-5.0), an increasing number of BBH systems with distinct properties have been reported. The individual spins are relatively less constrained in the parameter estimations for most events. While the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration (LVK) adopts a uninformative spin prior by default, some binary evolution scenarios have strong predictions on component spins. In this work, we perform Bayesian parameter inference for a subset of BBH events spanning a broad range of properties in the chirp mass, mass ratio, and effective inspiral spin ($\mathcal{M}_{\rm c}$-$q$-$χ_{\rm eff}$) parameter space. We consider three different spin priors: the LVK spin prior and two astrophysically motivated priors, assuming a non-spinning primary BH ($χ_1 = 0$) or a non-spinning secondary BH ($χ_2 = 0$). We find that the non-spinning primary BH prior is disfavored by the data for several systems with high effective inspiral spins, including GW190517_055101, GW190412, GW241113_163507, and GW231028_153006. We suggest that standard common-envelope evolution represents a promising formation channel that can be tested with gravitational-wave observations, and propose a novel method for estimating the merger rate of systems formed through alternative evolutionary channels. We further suggest that the binary evolution involving mass-ratio reversal may provide a possible formation pathway for these systems.

astro-ph.HE↗

From Bilateral Trade to Matching Markets: Sharp Gains from Trade

We study gains from trade in matching markets with independent private values and costs, Bayesian incentive compatibility, interim individual rationality, and no expected budget deficit. A second-best guarantee for finite bilateral trade extends without loss to matching markets with independent Borel priors, arbitrary downward-closed feasibility, and finite expected first-best gains. For bounded buyers with monotone hazard rates and arbitrary bounded sellers, we determine the exact worst-case ratio of second-best to first-best gains, approximately $0.72490721$. For binary buyers and sellers with at most $m$ types, we determine the exact ratio for every $m$, including $8/9$ when $m=2$ and a limit of $4/5$ as $m$ grows. Both families of bounds are tight already in bilateral trade.

cs.GT↗

TRACE: Deployable Tree-Relational Structure Enhancement for Oncology LLMs

Large language models are increasingly used in oncology applications, but their predictions are often weakly grounded in explicit medical structure. We present TRACE, a deployable tree-relational enhancement framework for oncology LLMs. TRACE separates expensive offline structure learning from lightweight online inference: oncology concepts and relations are organized into an updatable tree-relational structure, refined using LM-loss-derived evidence, and retrieved at inference time as compact prompt evidence. This design supports task-adaptive evidence selection without requiring supervised labels in the zero-shot setting. Across ten oncology classification tasks and one MedQuAD CancerGov QA benchmark, TRACE improves both label-free evaluation and supervised fine-tuning. Additional analyses show that TRACE improves over vanilla RAG and generic GraphRAG, remains useful under leakage-controlled METABRIC inputs, and produces interpretable evidence paths aligned with clinical reasoning. These results suggest that explicit, updatable medical structure is a practical path toward more accurate and auditable oncology LLM deployment.

cs.CL↗

Mass-Ratio Reversal as an Alternative to Hierarchical Mergers for GW241011

Recent gravitational-wave (GW) observations have revealed binary black hole (BBH) mergers with both extreme mass ratios and large effective spin parameters ($χ_{\rm{eff}}$). GW241011 is a notable example that shows these properties. Although hierarchical mergers (second-generation + first-generation BHs) can naturally produce high spins and become more prevalent than first-generation + first-generation mergers at mass ratios $q \lesssim 0.6$, they are negligible at the extreme mass ratio $\sim 0.3$ and are further limited by gravitational recoil kicks that can eject the second-generation BH from the host environment. Moreover, recent studies have argued against a dynamical origin for GW241011. Here, we investigate the formation of GW241011-like systems through the mass-ratio reversal (MRR) channel in isolated binary evolution. By quantifying the probability of producing such systems across a range of binary-evolution models, we identify the key dependencies on stellar-evolution and binary-interaction physics. Our results demonstrate the conditions under which the MRR channel can provide a viable alternative to hierarchical mergers for GW241011-like events, although its predicted merger rate density remains relatively low.

astro-ph.HE↗

Key Coverage Matters: Semi-Structured Extraction of OCR Clinical Reports

Clinical reports are often fragmented across healthcare institutions because privacy regulations and data silos limit direct information sharing. When patients seek care at a different hospital, they often carry paper or scanned reports from prior visits. This hinders EHR integration and longitudinal review, and downstream applications that depend on more complete patient records, such as patient management, follow-up care, real-world studies, and clinical-trial matching. Although OCR can digitize such reports, reliable extraction remains challenging because clinical documents are heterogeneous, OCR text is noisy, and many healthcare settings require low-cost on-premise deployment. We formulate this problem as canonical key-conditioned extractive question answering over OCR-derived clinical reports. Because the key fields are neither fixed nor known in advance, the key space is open. We maintain a canonical key inventory through iterative key mining, normalization, clustering, and lightweight human verification, and introduce key coverage as a metric to quantify inventory completeness. Using a 0.2B BERT-based model, experiments on real-world reports from more than 20 hospitals show performance improves monotonically with key coverage. The model achieves F1 scores of 0.839 and 0.893 under exact match and boundary-tolerant matching, respectively, once the Top-90 canonical keys are covered. These results show that key coverage is a dominant factor for end-to-end performance. At Top-90 coverage, our model outperforms a fine-tuned Qwen3-0.6B baseline under exact match. Although our annotated corpus is Chinese, the method relies on the language-agnostic key-value organization of semi-structured clinical reports and can be adapted to other settings given an appropriate canonical key inventory and alias mapping.

cs.CL↗

Evolution of low-mass He stars and implications for electron-capture supernova formation in close binaries

The evolution of low-mass helium (He) stars ($\sim2.5$--$5\,M_\odot$) with neutron-star (NS) companions in close binaries has been extensively studied, but the combined effects of rotation and tidal interaction remain poorly understood. We investigate how rotation, mass transfer, and tidal interactions affect the evolution of low-mass He stars, the formation of electron-capture supernovae (ECSNe), and the properties of the resulting NSs. Using detailed stellar and binary evolution calculations that include mass loss, differential rotation, and tidal interactions, we systematically explore the initial binary parameter space leading to ECSNe. We find that rotation has only a modest effect on the evolution of low-mass He stars. ECSNe occur within a narrow initial He-star mass range of $2.42$--$2.67\,M_\odot$ at solar metallicity ($Z_\odot$) and $2.37$--$2.62\,M_\odot$ at $0.01\,Z_\odot$. The resulting NSs have spin periods of $7.7$--$83.8\,\mathrm{ms}$, magnetic fields of order $10^{12}\,\mathrm{G}$, and rotational energies of $2.6\times10^{48}$--$2.5\times10^{50}\,\mathrm{erg}$, although these values would be substantially reduced if efficient angular-momentum transport mechanisms, such as the Spruit--Tayler dynamo, were included. We further show that the evolutionary outcome is highly sensitive to the initial orbital period, with shorter-period systems undergoing Roche-lobe overflow at earlier evolutionary stages and experiencing stronger binary interactions. Finally, comparison with Galactic double NS systems indicates that most observed binaries can be reproduced in the eccentricity--orbital-period plane by adopting relatively large natal kick velocities.

astro-ph.HE↗

Algorithmic Information Design for Searchers with Uncertain Alternatives

Advertisements reveal information to consumers who decide on further information acquisition and eventual purchase. Anderson and Renault (2006) first modeled this problem using an information-design framework where the advertiser acts as a sender and the consumer as a receiver. Due to search frictions and the consumer's outside option, search for additional information is not always worthwhile for the receiver. Thus, the sender's information design is used to make further search attractive and ultimately induce purchase. Following Lyu (2023), we study the optimal information design for a sender who sells search goods to a consumer with uncertain alternatives. Instead of making relaxations to the sender's problem (as done in Lyu, 2023), we work directly on the joint distribution over realized values and signals. Our contributions are twofold. First, we give a method, based on duality arguments, to verify whether a given information strategy is optimal. We illustrate the value of this verification framework in a competitive extension, where it certifies a non-trivial symmetric equilibrium for two senders with a common convex prior. Second, on the algorithmic front, we develop an FPTAS that finds for the seller a signaling scheme whose utility differs from that of the optimal solution by at most an additive $ε$ error, for any $ε> 0$.

cs.GT↗

Second-Best Bilateral Trade is $1/2$ Efficient

The landmark Myerson-Satterthwaite Theorem establishes a fundamental impossibility in bilateral trade: no Bayesian incentive-compatible mechanism can simultaneously achieve ex-post efficiency, individual rationality, and strong budget balance. We resolve a long-standing open question regarding the efficiency loss imposed by these constraints. Specifically, we prove that the Bayesian-optimal (second-best) mechanism always captures at least half of the first-best gains from trade ($\mathrm{SB}\ge\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{FB}$). This result is tight, definitively closing the gap between the previously best-known bounds of $0.317$ and $0.736$.

cs.GT↗

The Importance of Galaxy-Wide Star Formation in Driving Winds at z~1

In this work, we study winds for a representative sample of 86 star-forming galaxies (SFGs) at z~1 with $M_\star = 10^{9.0}-10^{11.5} M_\odot$, by measuring the Mg II line profiles in deep Keck spectra. A total of 50 (58\%) are found to have winds. Unlike local starburst galaxies, the wind detection rate does not exhibit a threshold in star-formation rate (SFR) density $Σ_\mathrm{SFR}$ at 0.1 Msun/yr/kpc$^2$, but shows a gradual decline around this value. We find correlations between wind velocity $v_\mathrm{wind}$ and SFR, $Σ_\mathrm{SFR}$, and stellar mass, as per previous studies. Intriguingly, the z~1 SFGs appear to follow the same $v_\mathrm{wind}$-SFR relation as local starbursts. A combined fit gives: log $v_\mathrm{wind}$ = 0.16 log SFR + 2.4 (3-sigma significance). This unified relation spans over 4 dex in SFR and agrees with Illustris-TNG. No unified relation is found between $v_\mathrm{wind}$ and stellar mass, sSFR, or $Σ_\mathrm{SFR}$. This suggests winds might be most closely associated with SFR. We examine whether winds in z~1 SFGs are driven by their most compact star-forming regions. To do so, we consider whether the relation between $v_\mathrm{wind}$ and the $Σ_\mathrm{SFR}$ measured from only these regions is stronger than that for the galaxy-wide $Σ_\mathrm{SFR}$. We do not find a stronger correlation, suggesting that winds are most related to $Σ_\mathrm{SFR}$ of the entire galaxy. Collectively, these findings suggest a picture in which galaxy-wide star formation plays an important role in driving winds at z~1. Wind bubbles from all star-forming regions could combine momentum and help lift their entrained gas out of the galaxy.

astro-ph.GA↗

Foley-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Generation Model from Task-Level Audio Synthesis to Complete Video Soundtrack Generation

Recent unified audio generation models can support diverse tasks across speech, sound effects, and music, but most of them still focus on isolated task-level synthesis. However, real video production often requires multiple components of a complete audio track to be generated jointly and consistently for the same video. We present Foley-Omni, a unified multimodal audio generation model that extends isolated task-level synthesis to complete video soundtrack generation by jointly modeling speech, sound effects, and music within a shared latent generation process. To support training and reproducible evaluation, we develop an audiovisual data curation pipeline and introduce V2ST-Bench, a benchmark for holistic video soundtrack generation evaluation. Experiments show that Foley-Omni achieves competitive performance with expert systems on individual synthesis tasks, while improving speech intelligibility, audiovisual consistency and perceptual quality for mixed soundtrack generation.

cs.SD↗

How do the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's Heavy Black Holes Form? No evidence for core-collapse Intermediate-mass black holes in GWTC-4

We investigate the population properties of binary black holes (BBHs) from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, focusing especially on those in the high-mass range, using the newly released GWTC-4 catalog. For the first time, we search for a subpopulation of low-spin intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) that would indicate formation via stellar core collapse. With the currently available catalog, we find no evidence for such a subpopulation, and set a 90\% upper limit on the merger rate of collapse-formed IMBHs at $0.077~\mathrm{Gpc}^{-3}\,\mathrm{yr}^{-1}$. The mass distribution of low-spin (stellar-origin) black holes truncates at $65^{+23}_{-22}\,M_\odot$, consistent with the lower edge of the pair-instability mass gap (PIMG), although we cannot directly determine its upper boundary from current data. Informed by stellar evolution theory, we estimate the upper edge of the PIMG to be $150\pm24\,M_\odot$. We find that the observed IMBHs belong to a high-spin subpopulation, consistent with formation through successive hierarchical mergers.

astro-ph.HE↗

Forcing-KV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models adopt a streaming generation framework, enabling long-horizon video generation with real-time responsiveness, as exemplified by the Self Forcing training paradigm. However, existing AR video diffusion models still suffer from significant attention complexity and severe memory overhead due to the redundant key-value (KV) caches across historical frames, which limits scalability. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing KV cache compression into autoregressive video diffusion. We observe that attention heads in mainstream AR diffusion models exhibit markedly distinct attention patterns and functional roles that remain stable across samples and denoising steps. Building on our empirical study of head-wise functional specialization, we divide the attention heads into two categories: static heads, which focus on transitions across autoregressive chunks and intra-frame fidelity, and dynamic heads, which govern inter-frame motion and consistency. We then propose Forcing-KV, a hybrid KV cache compression strategy that performs structured static pruning for static heads and dynamic pruning based on segment-wise similarity for dynamic heads. While maintaining output quality, our method achieves a generation speed of over 29 frames per second on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU along with 30% cache memory reduction, delivering up to 1.35x and 1.50x speedups on LongLive and Self Forcing at 480P resolution, and further scaling to 2.82x speedup at 1080P resolution. Code and demo videos are provided at https://zju-jiyicheng.github.io/Forcing-KV-Page.

cs.CV↗

Diagnosing the Properties and Evolutionary Fates of Black Hole and Wolf-Rayet X-ray Binaries as Potential Gravitational Wave Sources for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Network

IC 10 X-1, NGC 300 X-1, and Cyg X-3 constitute a unique class of X-ray binaries in which a stellar-mass black hole (BH) accretes material from a Wolf-Rayet (WR). These systems are particularly intriguing because of their short orbital periods, which make them promising progenitors of gravitational-wave (GW) sources detectable by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network. Adopting a revised accretion efficiency within the standard Bondi-Hoyle-Lyttleton framework, we perform detailed binary evolution calculations using \texttt{MESA} to characterize their properties at different evolutionary stages and to assess their ultimate fates as potential LVK-detectable GW sources. By applying additional constraints from the observed properties of IC 10 X-1 and NGC 300 X-1, we find that the upper limits on the BH masses in these systems ($M_{\rm BH} \lesssim 25\, M_\odot$ for IC 10 X-1 and $M_{\rm BH} \lesssim 15\, M_\odot$ for NGC 300 X-1) are significantly lower than previous estimates. Both systems are expected to form binary black holes (BBHs) that will merge within a Hubble time, except in the case where the BH in NGC 300 X-1 has a mass of $9\,M_\odot$, corresponding to the lower limit inferred in a previous study using the continuum-fitting method with a relativistic slim-disc model. For Cyg X-3, we find that the BH spin magnitude is constrained to be $\lesssim$ 0.6. Moreover, the WR star in Cyg X-3 is likely to form a lower-mass-gap BH, and the resulting BBH system is also expected to merge within a Hubble time.

astro-ph.HE↗

Reassessing the Spin of Second-born Black Holes in Coalescing Binary Black Holes and Its Connection to the chi_eff-q Correlation

The mass ratio q and effective inspiral spin chi_eff of binary black hole (BBH) mergers in GWTC-4.0 show a weaker anti-correlation than in GWTC-3.0, motivating investigation of its physical origin. Within the isolated binary evolution framework, we adopt a recently proposed He-star wind prescription to study the spin of the second-born BH and its impact on the q-chi_eff relation. Using \texttt{MESA}, including the updated He-star wind, internal differential rotation, and tidal interactions, we examine how initial conditions and key processes determine the BH spin. We also perform rapid population synthesis with \texttt{COMPAS} to predict the population-level q-chi_eff correlation. The updated wind prescription is significantly weaker than the standard Dutch scheme, particularly at subsolar metallicity. Detailed binary models of He stars with BH companions show that the resulting BH spin is largely insensitive to the He star's evolutionary stage at the onset of tidal interaction and to the companion mass. Instead, wind mass loss dominates: more massive He-star progenitors produce lower-spinning BHs. Initial stellar rotation has only a minor effect, especially under strong tidal coupling. We provide a fitting formula for the spin of the second-born BH. Combining this formula with rapid population synthesis under default assumptions, we find that 85.8% of BBHs formed via stable mass transfer undergo mass-ratio reversal, compared to only 2.8% in the common-envelope channel. Notably, no correlation between q and chi_eff is found in either channel. Future work will explore alternative physical prescriptions and compare our predictions with BBH mergers reported by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration.

astro-ph.HE↗

Exploring the central engines of gamma-ray bursts from prompt light curves

Hyperaccreting stellar-mass black hole systems are leading candidates for the central engines of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Their jets are thought to be powered by either the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) process or neutrino-dominated accretion flows (NDAFs), but discriminating between these mechanisms remains challenging. To address this, we propose using the luminosity decay slope (parameter d) of GRB light curves to distinguish between the BZ and NDAF mechanisms, thereby linking the light-curve morphology to the central engine physics. By analysing 85 single-peaked GRBs with fast-rise, exponential-decay (FRED) profiles observed by Swift/BAT using 64 ms background-subtracted light curves, we fit the decay slope (parameter d) with the empirical Kocevski-Ryde-Liang (KRL) function and compare the results with theoretical predictions for the BZ (d approximately 1.67) and the NDAF (d approximately 3.7 to 7.8) mechanisms. We find that the decay slope (parameter d) can differentiate central engine mechanisms, with 15 GRBs consistent with the BZ mechanism and 22 supporting the NDAF mechanism. However, most events exhibit slopes within the range between 2 and 4, suggesting a hybrid of mechanisms, with NDAF being dominant.

astro-ph.HE↗

AnyTalker: Scaling Multi-Person Talking Video Generation with Interactivity Refinement

Recently, multi-person video generation has started to gain prominence. While a few preliminary works have explored audio-driven multi-person talking video generation, they often face challenges due to the high costs of diverse multi-person data collection and the difficulty of driving multiple identities with coherent interactivity. To address these challenges, we propose AnyTalker, a multi-person generation framework that features an extensible multi-stream processing architecture. Specifically, we extend Diffusion Transformer's attention block with a novel identity-aware attention mechanism that iteratively processes identity-audio pairs, allowing arbitrary scaling of drivable identities. Besides, training multi-person generative models demands massive multi-person data. Our proposed training pipeline depends solely on single-person videos to learn multi-person speaking patterns and refines interactivity with only a few real multi-person clips. Furthermore, we contribute a targeted metric and dataset designed to evaluate the naturalness and interactivity of the generated multi-person videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnyTalker achieves remarkable lip synchronization, visual quality, and natural interactivity, striking a favorable balance between data costs and identity scalability.

cs.CV↗

Simultaneous All-Pay Auctions with Budget Constraints

The all-pay auction, a classic competitive model, is widely applied in scenarios such as political elections, sports competitions, and research and development, where all participants pay their bids regardless of winning or losing. However, in the traditional all-pay auction, players have no budget constraints, whereas in real-world scenarios, players typically face budget constraints. This paper studies the Nash equilibrium of two players with budget constraints across multiple heterogeneous items in a complete-information framework. The main contributions are as follows: (1) a comprehensive characterization of the Nash equilibrium in single-item auctions with asymmetric budgets and valuations; (2) the construction of a joint distribution Nash equilibrium for the two-item scenario; and (3) the construction of a joint distribution Nash equilibrium for the three-item scenario. Unlike the unconstrained all-pay auction, which always has a Nash equilibrium, a Nash equilibrium may not exist when players have budget constraints. Our findings highlight the intricate effects of budget constraints on bidding strategies, providing new perspectives and methodologies for theoretical analysis and practical applications of all-pay auctions.

econ.TH↗