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Zhen Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Zhen Cao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

From DAMPE to LHAASO: Rigidity Scales and Composition Changes in Galactic Cosmic Rays

This commentary briefly reviews recent measurements from DAMPE and LHAASO on cosmic rays to explore why the spectra of different species change shape across the TeV-PeV energy range. DAMPE finds that several primary nuclei show spectral softening at a similar magnetic rigidity, while the combined proton and helium data from DAMPE and LHAASO reveal a more complex evolution at higher energies. By comparing these spectral features and composition changes, we discuss what they may tell us about the sources of Galactic cosmic rays and how these particles propagate through the Galaxy.

astro-ph.HE

WeAgent-MMGenEdit: A Full-Stack Recipe for Multimodal Agentic Image Generation and Editing

Image generation and editing models have advanced rapidly, yet remain unreliable when prompts require external world knowledge. Bounded and long-tail parametric knowledge prevents direct or reason-then-generate approaches from recovering the required facts and visual appearances. Existing agentic generation and editing methods mitigate this limitation with retrieval tools, yet remain constrained by insufficient visual verification, overloaded policy models, and weak integration of retrieved textual and visual evidence. To address these limitations, we present WeAgent-MMGenEdit, a full-stack recipe including a multimodal harness, a scalable data construction pipeline, a comprehensive benchmark, and post-training methods for the agent policy and image backend. We first introduce WeAgent-Harness, a multimodal runtime with persistent evidence management and dedicated verification and integration tools that organize retrieved multimodal evidence into a dense carrier. Upon this, we develop a scalable pipeline for prompt synthesis and agentic trajectory collection, yielding 23K supervised trajectories and 14.7K RL tasks with three-layer verifiable checklists. We further introduce WeBench-MMGenEdit, a bilingual benchmark covering both knowledge-intensive image generation and multi-image editing. Finally, a two-sided post-training recipe based on SFT and RL improves the agent policy and image backend. Together, WeAgent-MMGenEdit enables a 30B-total/3B-active policy to outperform similarly sized policy models and approach the performance of a 1T-parameter agent.

cs.CV

LHAASO-WCDA observed a $\sim$ 5 days TeV-delayed flaring event in blazar 1ES 1959+650

We report a day-scale hard lag between GeV and TeV $\gamma$-ray emission from the HBL 1ES~1959+650 in early 2024. Since the LHAASO-WCDA real-time monitoring system began operation in late 2023, multiple TeV flares from this source have been triggered, including the 1st trigger flare on 2024 February 9. A Bayesian-block analysis of the WCDA light curve identifies three TeV flares in 2024. For the second triggered flare, a discrete cross-correlation analysis reveals a $>3\,\sigma$ correlation (relative to uncorrelated red-noise simulations) at a time delay of $\Delta t = 5.0_{-2.1}^{+2.1}$ days, with the TeV emission lagging the GeV. Time-resolved spectroscopy shows that this flare has the softest TeV spectrum among these flares (intrinsic spectral index $\Gamma=3.16\pm0.18$), while the 1st trigger flare is harder ($\Gamma=2.48\pm0.21$). The observed five-day hard lag is difficult to reconcile with a purely cooling-driven temporal ordering and is consistent with scenarios in which particle energization and/or transport may contribute to the evolution. However, the current data do not uniquely identify the underlying mechanism.

astro-ph.HE

WeAgent-MMSearch: Native Text-Vision Interaction for Multimodal Search Agents

Multimodal search agents extend parametric knowledge with newly emerging and long-tail evidence from the open web. Yet many existing agentic search environments often expose retrieved evidence only as text and omit tool-returned images from subsequent context, reducing visually grounded trajectories to text-only reasoning. Long-horizon interaction also compounds tool-call, response-length, timeout, and budget failures, which can discard salvageable trajectories, waste rollout computation, and disturb policy updates. To address these issues, we introduce WeAgent-Harness, a multimodal agentic harness that supports native text-vision interaction and runtime recovery. Retrieved images receive persistent disk references, allowing the model to inspect, process, and cite them throughout the trajectory. Based on this harness, we develop WeAgent-MMSearch, an integrated system spanning data construction, agentic post-training, and multimodal rollout. For data construction, a strong MLLM uses WeAgent-Harness to discover, synthesize, and verify MMSearch-style tasks and collect expert trajectories. During post-training, our Failure-Aware GSPO (FA-GSPO) recovers salvageable abnormal rollouts and filters invalid ones to improve bounded multimodal planning and search. We also introduce VisTarget-Bench, a 150-task human-verified benchmark that pairs each question with a held-out target image, distinguishing image-retrieval failures from visual-perception failures. Evaluation on VisTarget-Bench and seven public benchmarks shows that agentic post-training improves the average score by 19.22 points, enabling our model to outperform similarly sized open-source models and rival models with roughly ten times its parameter count.

cs.AI

Anisotropic Particle Transport from a Pulsar Wind Nebula Revealed by Einstein Probe and LHAASO

Pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are major cosmic ray accelerators, yet the mechanisms transporting high-energy particles into the interstellar medium remain elusive. Building on the LHAASO discovery of an ultra-high-energy (UHE) $\gamma$-ray source near the bow-shock PWN powered by the pulsar PSR J1740+1000, we present a joint Einstein Probe (EP) and LHAASO study of this system. EP observations reveal an extended X-ray tail far exceeding the structure previously seen by XMM-Newton. Updated LHAASO observations show that the $\gamma$-ray emission is elongated, with its major axis aligned with the extended X-ray tail revealed by EP. This is the first detection of an X-ray pulsar tail associated with a spatially coincident extended UHE $\gamma$-ray emission. The X-ray and $\gamma$-ray spectrum can be well explained with a single population of relativistic electrons via synchrotron and inverse Compton radiation, respectively, removing the need for particle re-acceleration during propagation. The results unambiguously show that electrons/positrons above 100 TeV are escaping from the PWN. Instead of the immediate, isotropic diffusion into ambient interstellar medium that is typically assumed, these particles are transported anisotropically over at least $\sim$10 pc, either guided by the background magnetic field or carried by an advective outflow.

astro-ph.HE

The Extended Ultrahigh-energy Gamma-Ray Emission in the Vicinity of PSR J2238+5903

We present a comprehensive analysis of the recently discovered TeV gamma-ray source, LHAASO J2238+5900. Based on data collected from the LHAASO, our fitting results suggest that the source is significantly extended with an angular extension of 0.54{\deg} \pm 0.01{\deg} and is spatially coincident with the pulsar PSR J2238+5903. Its spectrum is characterized by a power-law with a cutoff at 41.0\pm 3.5 TeV. Additionally, the source exhibits a significant signal of 7.9\sigma above 100 TeV, implying that it is a PeVatron candidate. While the gamma-ray emission is consistent with a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) scenario, the relatively large extension size also allows for a halo interpretation, potentially caused by electron-positron pairs escaping from the PWN.

astro-ph.HE

Extreme PeV accelerator associated with GRS 1915+105

Microquasars, binary systems featuring relativistic jets, have emerged as sources for particle acceleration beyond PeV energies. We present a study of the broadband $\gamma$-ray emission from one of the most prominent Galactic microquasars GRS 1915+105 based on data accumulated by LHAASO and Fermi-LAT over 4 and 17 years, respectively. A joint analysis of LHAASO-WCDA and LHAASO-KM2A data reveals extended $\gamma$-ray emission whose centroid appears significantly shifted, by ~ 0.13{\deg}, from the binary system and its jets. The spectral energy distribution is well described by a curved spectrum with progressive steepening that can be described by a log-parabola function with no evidence for a sharp cutoff, consistent with parent particles reaching multi-PeV energies and an extreme acceleration efficiency approaching the limit set by the available potential drop across the source. Several features, most notably the shift of the emission and single-power-law spectrum down to GeV band, favor radiation by cosmic rays accelerated in the source interacting with the dense ambient medium. Our spectral modeling implies that at least a few percent of the jet mechanical power is transferred to protons, whose maximum energy reaches beyond 5 PeV. These results strengthen the case for microquasars as exceptionally efficient accelerators in our Galaxy.

astro-ph.HE

From Spatial to Spectral: An Efficient, Frequency-Guided Feature Representation Learner for Small Object Detection

Efficient small object detection is bottlenecked by the inherent feature scarcity of tiny targets, which is further aggravated by operations of spatial-domain detectors that indiscriminately discard critical high-frequency details. Recovering these fragile cues within the spatial domain is notoriously difficult, as it often requires computationally expensive architectural upscaling that inadvertently amplifies background noise. To bridge this gap, we propose a paradigm \textbf{shift from spatial to spectral} feature processing, introducing a holistic solution with the following novelty: (1) A versatile \textbf{Frequency-Guided Feature Representation framework} that generalizes across diverse detector architectures (both CNN and Transformer-based), offering a robust alternative to spatial-only feature extraction; (2) The unified \textbf{Decompose--Enhance--Reconstruct (DER)} operator, instantiated via three \textbf{lightweight, plug-and-play} modules -- Wavelet-Difference Gate (WDG), Log-Gabor Enhancer (LGE), and Frequency-Driven Head (FDHead) -- to systematically inject frequency-aware modulation into the backbone, neck, and head. This mechanism decouples feature modeling from resolution reduction, capturing discriminative high-frequency components to enable accurate localization with significantly reduced parameter redundancy; (3) Extensive validation on multi-domain benchmarks (VisDrone2019, UAVDT, TinyPerson, DOTAv1) demonstrating consistent gains. Notably, our proposed \textbf{DERNet} series outperforms YOLOv11 models under the same scale while requiring \textbf{only 1/6 of the parameters}, backed by rigorous spectral diagnostics and error decomposition analysis.

cs.CV

Scaling Learning-based AEB with Massive Unlabeled Data

This paper studies how to scale learning-based automatic emergency braking (AEB) with massive unlabeled fleet data under production constraints. Our approach is based on meta-feedback semi-supervised learning (MF-SSL), where a teacher generates pseudo labels for unlabeled driving data and is updated using a small labeled anchor set as safety-critical feedback. In production, anchor ambiguity and labeled-unlabeled mismatch can amplify systematic pseudo-label errors, leading to spurious triggers. We propose a stabilized MF-SSL framework with (i) Noise-Aware Decoupling, which removes ambiguity-prone anchors from the teacher's supervised update path, and (ii) kinematics-gated pseudo-labeling with a teacher conflict penalty to suppress mismatch-induced risk hallucinations on unlabeled data while maintaining broad coverage. Extensive experiments show consistent gains as unlabeled data scale from 1M to 1B windows, improving safety while keeping comfort stable. The 1B-trained student model is deployed to hundreds of thousands of vehicles and validated over \$10^9$ km of driving, achieving a positive-to-false activation ratio exceeding 100:1 and a 35% improvement in accident-free driving mileage over a production rule-only baseline.

cs.LG

Enhancing the Angular Resolution of Large Array of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope (LACT) at Ultra-High Energies

The Large Array of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (LACT) is dedicated to high-resolution morphological studies of PeVatrons. In this work, we present a fundamental investigation into stereoscopic direction reconstruction for the LACT array, specifically addressing the challenges of ultra-high-energy observations. We demonstrate that the standard Hillas parameterization introduces a significant reconstruction bias under severe image leakage. To mitigate this, we introduce an approach utilizing a 2D Gaussian fit, achieving an exceptional angular resolution of better than $0.06^\circ$ at $100\text{ TeV}$ within the central $0^\circ\text{--}1^\circ$ offset bin, and maintaining better than $0.12^\circ$ across offsets up to $4^{\circ}$. Building on this robust baseline, we evaluate advanced weighting schemes by utilizing a LightGBM-based quantile regression model to independently estimate single-image quality. Applying these quality-based weights yields a consistent improvement of $0.02^\circ$ to $0.03^\circ$ for high-energy, large-offset events using both the \textit{HillasWeightedSum} and \textit{HillasWeightedDisp} methods. Finally, to establish a theoretical performance ceiling, we explore a pixel-wise likelihood reconstruction technique utilizing Neural Ratio Estimation. While its practical realization depends heavily on minimizing the gap between Monte Carlo simulations and observational data, this exploratory approach demonstrates the potential to yield an overall improvement of approximately 15\% to 40\% at $100~\rm TeV$ across the entire field of view. Such high angular resolution is critical for disentangling complex emission regions and mapping the internal structures of PeVatrons.

astro-ph.HE

Shapley Context Pruning: A Cooperative Game Perspective for Context Reranking and Pruning

Context reranking and pruning have become essential for improving the efficiency of modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, yet an interpretable and unified framework remains underexplored. Previous work has primarily emphasized lexical retrieval, cross-encoder architectures, model distillation, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), mostly relying on heuristic loss functions and empirical attribution. This paper presents Shapley Context Pruning (SCP), a novel framework for context reranking that establishes a cooperative-game-theory perspective for importance attribution by modeling the context as a cooperative game. Balancing the trade-off between fine-grained and coarse-grained representations, we employ a Deep Sets architecture to approximate a permutation-invariant value function at the sentence level, utilizing pre-trained language models as sentence embedders and optimizing via a pairwise margin ranking loss. To ensure practical scalability without sacrificing mathematical rigor, we leverage Monte-Carlo sampling for efficient training and inference, providing formal theoretical error bounds and sample complexity guarantees for preserving Top-K subset rankings. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive experiments-spanning supporting-sentence recall, Needle-in-the-Haystack (NIAH) evaluations, long-context QA, and multi-hop reasoning-alongside rigorous ablation studies on embedding quality and attribution strategies. The model achieves competitive downstream QA performance against robust baselines.

cs.AI

Contour-Native Bridge Defect Detection and Compact Digital Archiving with Frequency-Supervised Fourier Contours

AI-assisted bridge defect inspection often produces bounding boxes with crude geometry or raster masks that are costly to store, transmit, and reuse. This study investigates how detected defects can be represented as compact, recoverable contour-level vector records in image space. We propose Frequency-Supervised Fourier Series Detection (FS-FSD), which directly regresses Fourier contour descriptors and evaluates boxes, masks, and contours under a unified polygon-space protocol. On 3,767 UAV-collected bridge images with 42,346 defect instances, FS-FSD achieves higher polygon-space accuracy and better matched-TP geometric quality than representative detection, segmentation, and contour baselines. These results show that, compared with bounding boxes and raster masks, Fourier contour records preserve defect-boundary geometry in a more compact, recoverable, and shareable form for engineering review and downstream information workflows. Future work will study the modeling of multi-region, fragmented, and adjacent bridge-defect boundaries and extend the framework toward long-term bridge-defect tracking and lifecycle-oriented management.

cs.CV

Ultra-high-energy $\gamma$-ray imprints from PeV particles accelerated by supernova remnants

The quest for the origin of cosmic ray (CRs) is a fundamental issue in astrophysics. Shocks of supernova remnants (SNRs) have been considered as the dominant contributors to Galactic CRs below the spectral knee near $\sim 3$ petaelectronvolt (PeV). Whether SNRs are efficient accelerators of particles beyond PeV energies has long been debated. Here we report observations of very-high-energy $\gamma$-ray emission up to hundreds of TeV from two middle age shell-type SNRs, G150.3$+$4.5 and $\gamma$-Cygni, with the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). Two (or three) distinct morphological/spectral components with convex spectral shapes are observed in both sources, with the low-energy one being more extended than the high-energy one. %Although it is possible that these high-energy components may be driven by powerful pulsars, The likely association of the high-energy component with molecular clouds at similar distances, and the weakness/absence of pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) inside these SNRs clearly indicate for the first time that the highest energy emission is produced by collision of hadronic CRs up to PeV energies with the clouds. These results are compatible with the classic model prediction that PeV particles accelerated near the end of the free expansion phase of SNR evolution can illuminate nearby molecular clouds (MCs) to produce strong $\gamma$-ray emission.

astro-ph.HE

Denoise and Align: Towards Source-Free UDA for Robust Panoramic Semantic Segmentation

Panoramic semantic segmentation is pivotal for comprehensive 360{\deg} scene understanding in critical applications like autonomous driving and virtual reality. However, progress in this domain is constrained by two key challenges: the severe geometric distortions inherent in panoramic projections and the prohibitive cost of dense annotation. While Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) from label-rich pinhole-camera datasets offers a viable alternative, many real-world tasks impose a stricter source-free (SFUDA) constraint where source data is inaccessible for privacy or proprietary reasons. This constraint significantly amplifies the core problems of domain shift, leading to unreliable pseudo-labels and dramatic performance degradation, particularly for minority classes. To overcome these limitations, we propose the DAPASS framework. DAPASS introduces two synergistic modules to robustly transfer knowledge without source data. First, our Panoramic Confidence-Guided Denoising (PCGD) module generates high-fidelity, class-balanced pseudo-labels by enforcing perturbation consistency and incorporating neighborhood-level confidence to filter noise. Second, a Contextual Resolution Adversarial Module (CRAM) explicitly addresses scale variance and distortion by adversarially aligning fine-grained details from high-resolution crops with global semantics from low-resolution contexts. DAPASS achieves state-of-the-art performances on outdoor (Cityscapes-to-DensePASS) and indoor (Stanford2D3D) benchmarks, yielding 55.04% (+2.05%) and 70.38% (+1.54%) mIoU, respectively.

cs.CV

LHAASO observation of Mrk 421 during 2021 March - 2024 March: a comprehensive VHE catalog of multi-timescale outbursts and its time average behavior

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) monitors sources within its field of view for up to 7 hours daily, achieving a duty cycle exceeding 98% and an annual point-source sensitivity of 1.5% Crab Units (CU) in the very high energy (VHE) band. This unbiased sky-survey mode facilitates systematic monitoring and investigation of outburst phenomena. In this paper, we present results from an unprecedented three-year monitoring campaign (March 2021--March 2024) of Mrk421 using LHAASO, spanning energies from 0.4 TeV to 20 TeV. We find that the blazar stayed in a quiescent state in 2021 and became active starting in 2022 with a total of 23 VHE outburst events identified, where the highest observed daily significance reaches $20\,\sigma$ with a flux equivalent to approximately 3.3~CU. LHAASO's continuous monitoring suggests the flaring occupancy of Mrk~421 to be around 14%. During long-term monitoring, multiwavelength (MWL) variability and correlation analyses are conducted using complementary data from Fermi-LAT, MAXI-GSC, Swift-XRT, and ZTF. A significant correlation ($>3\,\sigma$) is observed between X-ray and VHE bands with no detectable time lag, while the correlation between GeV and TeV bands is weaker. The flux distribution of the TeV emission during the quiescent state is different from that in the active state, implying the existence of two modes of energy dissipation in the blazar jet. Using simultaneous MWL data, we also analyzed both the long-term and outburst-period SEDs, and discussed the possible origin of the outburst events.

astro-ph.HE

Transient Large-Scale Anisotropy in TeV Cosmic Rays due to an Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection

Large- or medium-scale cosmic ray anisotropy at TeV energies has not previously been confirmed to vary with time. Transient anisotropy changes have been observed below 150 GeV, especially near the passage of an interplanetary shock and coronal mass ejection containing a magnetic flux rope ejected by a solar storm, which can trigger a geomagnetic storm with practical consequences. In such events, cosmic rays provide remote sensing of the magnetic field properties. Here we report the observation of transient large-scale anisotropy in TeV cosmic ray ions using data from the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). We analyze hourly skymaps of the transient cosmic ray intensity excess or deficit, the gradient of which indicates the direction and magnitude of transient large-scale anisotropy across the field of view. We observe enhanced anisotropy above typical hourly fluctuations with $>$5$\sigma$ significance during some hours of November 4, 2021, in separate data sets for four primary cosmic ray energy ranges of median energy from $E$=0.7 to 3.1 TeV. The gradient varies with energy as $E^{\gamma}$, where $\gamma\approx-0.5$. At a median energy $\leq$1.0 TeV, this gradient corresponds to a dipole anisotropy of at least 1\%, or possibly a weaker anisotropy of higher order. This new type of observation opens the opportunity to study interplanetary magnetic structures using air shower arrays around the world, complementing existing in situ and remote measurements of plasma properties.

astro-ph.HE

Energy-Dependent Shifts of Medium-Scale Anisotropies in Very-High-Energy Cosmic Rays Observed by LHAASO-KM2A

Small deviations from isotropy in the arrival directions of Galactic cosmic rays serve as a unique probe of the local magnetic environment. In this Letter, we report observations of medium-scale anisotropies (MSA) at energies above 10 TeV using the LHAASO-KM2A array. Our analysis identifies four regions of excess and four regions of deficit, each spanning angular scales of approximately ten degrees. Crucially, we detect significant energy-dependent shifts in the centroids of two excess regions: Region B and the newly identified Region $\mathrm{\widetilde{D}}$. We also characterize the energy evolution of the fractional relative intensity across both excess and deficit regions. These findings imply that the observed anisotropies are shaped by the specific realization of the local turbulent magnetic field within the cosmic ray scattering length. Such energy-dependent behaviors impose strict constraints on local turbulence models and cosmic ray propagation theories.

astro-ph.HE

Cygnus X-3: A variable petaelectronvolt gamma-ray source

We report the discovery of variable $\gamma$-rays up to petaelectronvolt from Cygnus X-3, an iconic X-ray binary. The $\gamma$-ray signal was detected with a statistical significance of approximately 10 $\sigma$ by the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). Its intrinsic spectral energy distribution (SED), extending from 0.06 to 3.7 PeV, shows a pronounced rise toward 1 PeV after accounting for absorption by the cosmic microwave background radiation. We find variability on month-long timescales at a significance of $8.6 \sigma$, coinciding with a high state of the GeV gamma-ray flux detected by the Fermi-LAT. This,together with a 3.2$\sigma$ evidence for orbital modulation, suggests that the PeV $\gamma$-rays originate within, or in close proximity to, the binary system itself. The observed energy spectrum and temporal modulation can be naturally explained by $\gamma$-ray production through photomeson processes in the innermost region of the relativistic jet, where protons need to be accelerated to tens of PeV energies.

astro-ph.HE