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Zhihao Ouyang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhihao Ouyang.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

Exceptional Gamma-Ray Flaring Activity of the Blazar S4 0954+65 in Early 2025

S4 0954+65 (4FGL J0958.7+6534) is a TeV-detected blazar at a redshift of $z = 0.3694 \pm 0.0011$, classified as an intermediate-synchrotron-peaked BL Lac object. In early 2025, it entered an exceptional $γ$-ray high state. We aim to investigate the origin and physical properties of the exceptional 2025 flare, and to constrain the emission processes responsible for this flaring activity. We performed a multi-wavelength analysis using $γ$-ray, X-ray, optical/UV, radio, and 43 GHz Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) observations. We examined multi-band correlations with the z-transformed discrete correlation function (zDCF), analyzed the spectral evolution and parsec-scale jet kinematics, and modeled the broadband spectral energy distributions (SEDs). The $γ$-ray variations lead the optical and radio emission by 3.22 days and possibly 18.26 days, respectively, while no significant correlation is found between the $γ$-ray and X-ray emission. The $γ$-ray spectra show a harder-when-brighter behavior, consistent with enhanced particle acceleration during the active state. A similar spectral trend is also observed in the X-ray band, where the photon index is anti-correlated with flux. During the major $γ$-ray flare, VLBA images reveal the emergence of a new superluminal radio knot from the core, whose extrapolated ejection time is consistent with the peak of the $γ$-ray flare. The temporal and structural evolution during the 2025 flare is consistent with a shock-in-jet scenario, in which a newly emerging disturbance propagates downstream and drives the flare. Broadband SED modeling shows that a leptonic synchrotron self-Compton plus external Compton model with dusty torus seed photons reproduces the multi-wavelength observations with physically plausible parameters. A lepto-hadronic interpretation remains possible but requires substantially higher jet power.

astro-ph.HE↗

A Helical Trajectory Interpretation of a Multi-wavelength Event in a Blazar S5 0716+714

Relativistic jets in blazars exhibit strong variability across multiple timescales, but the connection between temporal variability and the evolution of jet structures remains poorly understood. In this work, we investigate the $γ$-ray variability of the BL Lac object S5 0716+714 from July 2014 to June 2015 and explore its possible connection with the parsec-scale jet evolution. We identify an escalating periodic oscillation (EPO) in the $γ$-ray light curve, characterized by a sequence of successive flux enhancements with progressively increasing temporal separations. Combining \textit{Fermi}-LAT data with contemporaneous 43 GHz Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) observations, we find a temporal association between the EPO and the downstream propagation of a superluminal knot. A helical trajectory model simultaneously fitting the $γ$-ray variability and the two-dimensional VLBA component positions reproduces the observed flux modulation and component motion. These results suggest that geometric Doppler modulation caused by the changing viewing angle of a moving jet component provides a possible explanation for the observed EPO. This work provides a framework of connecting blazar variability to the knot evolution of relativistic jets.

astro-ph.HE↗

WAVE-Go: World-Model Navigation with Adaptive Execution for Wheel-Legged Robots

World models can anticipate the consequences of navigation actions, but predicted action sequences may become invalid during execution, especially when wheel-legged robots encounter dynamic obstacles or change locomotion modes. We propose WAVE-Go, an image-goal navigation framework that separates world-action prediction from interruptible command execution. Its executor adaptively selects an action prefix and cancels pending commands when updated observations invalidate execution. A conditional-risk formulation specifies prefix selection under an estimated cumulative failure budget, while posture and locomotion-mode transitions require clearance, stability, and task-evidence checks. In the reported navigation evaluation, WAVE-Go achieves 74.1% in-distribution success and 63.3% dynamic out-of-distribution success, exceeding the strongest baseline by 4.7 and 7.7 percentage points, respectively, while reducing collisions from 4.4 to 2.9 per 100 m. Compared with interruptible fixed four-command execution, WAVE-Go raises success by 4.0 percentage points while reducing replanning frequency by 51.2% and collision rate by 6.5%. Execution ablations also show that runtime interruption improves success, collision rate, and reaction latency at the cost of additional replanning. These results support adaptive, interruptible execution as a means of balancing navigation performance and planning overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/vigorlee/wave-go.

cs.RO↗

Chasing the neutrino blazar candidates II: SED modeling with hadronic model

Blazars are promising candidates for high energy neutrino sources, yet the physical origin of their neutrino emission remains uncertain. In this work, we extend our previous study by modeling the broadband spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of 103 neutrino blazar candidates (NBCs) within a hadronic framework. To estimate the maximum possible neutrino output, we adopt an assumption in which the high energy emission is dominated by p gamma interactions and the contribution from leptonic inverse Compton scattering is strongly suppressed. From the SED modeling, we constrain nine key parameters describing the emission region and particle energy distributions. We perform a partial correlation analysis to investigate the relationship between neutrino luminosity and electromagnetic emission, and we found a weak or moderate correlation between optical R band and neutrino emission. Our model predicts prominent proton synchrotron emission peaking in the MeV band for most sources, with 99 out of 103 NBCs exhibiting proton synchrotron peaks within 0.1 to 100 MeV, highlighting the MeV band as a key window for distinguishing between leptonic and hadronic scenarios. Based on the model-predicted maximum neutrino fluxes, we find that three NBCs are potentially detectable by IceCube, while up to 22, 45, and 62 sources may be detectable by KM3NeT, NEON, and TRIDENT, respectively. These results provide testable predictions for future multi-messenger observations and offer new insights into the composition and radiation mechanisms of blazar jets.

astro-ph.HE↗

Detection of Quasi-periodic Oscillations in the $γ$-Ray Light Curve of 4FGL J0309.9-6058

In this work, we report, for the first time, a quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) in the $γ$-ray band of 4FGL J0309.9-6058, also known as PKS 0308-611. We employed three analytical methods (the Lomb-Scargle periodogram, REDFIT, and the weighted wavelet Z-transform) to analyze the QPO signal using \textit{Fermi} $γ$-ray light curve data. The analysis reveals a potential QPO during MJD 57983$-$60503, with a period of approximately 550 days and a maximum local significance of 3.72$σ$ and global significance of 2.72$σ$ derived from the WWZ analysis. To validate this result, we applied Gaussian Process (GP) to the same light curve, which independently confirms the presence of QPO signal consistent with our Fourier-based results. We further extended the analysis to the full duration of the \textit{Fermi} observations, and the results consistently support and strengthen the presence of this QPO signal. Additionally, a time lag between the optical and $γ$-ray bands indicates separate emission regions for these two bands. Given the year-like timescale of the QPO signal and the fact that a QPO signal with local significance over 3$σ$ for full \textit{Fermi}-LAT observed time, we suggest that the QPO is most likely caused by a precessing jet.

astro-ph.HE↗

The averaged broadband spectral energy distribution study of Fermi bright BL Lac objects

The physics-determined broadband spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of blazars have been widely used to study the property during their flaring/outburst states, while the non-flaring state takes up most of their lifetime and the general property of blazars has been barely discussed. In this work, for the first time, we used the archival data and employed the physics-determined SED processing method to form approximately average-state SEDs for 513 \textit{Fermi} bright BL Lacs. In general, we found that the magnetic field ($B$) is weaker than those obtained for flaring/outburst state by nearly one order of magnitude, and the dissipation region size ($R$) is larger than those obtained for flaring/outburst state, suggesting that the dissipation region could be more extend and less magnetized. A correlation between the synchrotron-self Compton (SSC) peak frequency ($\log ν_{\rm ssc}$) against the synchrotron peak frequency ($\log ν_{\rm sy}$) suggest that the inverse Compton scattering of HBLs suffer a significant Klein-Nishina (KN) suppression, we quantified the condition of KN suppression by determining the critical synchrotron peak frequency ($ν_{\rm sy}^{\rm c}$) and found 359 out of 513 sources in our sample suffer KN suppression. Furthermore, our analysis of the relationship between synchrotron curvature ($1/b_{\rm sy}$) and $\log ν_{\rm sy}$ indicates that the energy-dependent probability acceleration (EDPA) mechanism may dominate the particle acceleration in BL Lac jets.

astro-ph.HE↗

MQAD: A Large-Scale Question Answering Dataset for Training Music Large Language Models

Question-answering (QA) is a natural approach for humans to understand a piece of music audio. However, for machines, accessing a large-scale dataset covering diverse aspects of music is crucial, yet challenging, due to the scarcity of publicly available music data of this type. This paper introduces MQAD, a music QA dataset built on the Million Song Dataset (MSD), encompassing a rich array of musical features, including beat, chord, key, structure, instrument, and genre -- across 270,000 tracks, featuring nearly 3 million diverse questions and captions. MQAD distinguishes itself by offering detailed time-varying musical information such as chords and sections, enabling exploration into the inherent structure of music within a song. To compile MQAD, our methodology leverages specialized Music Information Retrieval (MIR) models to extract higher-level musical features and Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate natural language QA pairs. Then, we leverage a multimodal LLM that integrates the LLaMA2 and Whisper architectures, along with novel subjective metrics to assess the performance of MQAD. In experiments, our model trained on MQAD demonstrates advancements over conventional music audio captioning approaches. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/oyzh888/MQAD.

cs.SD↗

PMA: Towards Parameter-Efficient Point Cloud Understanding via Point Mamba Adapter

Applying pre-trained models to assist point cloud understanding has recently become a mainstream paradigm in 3D perception. However, existing application strategies are straightforward, utilizing only the final output of the pre-trained model for various task heads. It neglects the rich complementary information in the intermediate layer, thereby failing to fully unlock the potential of pre-trained models. To overcome this limitation, we propose an orthogonal solution: Point Mamba Adapter (PMA), which constructs an ordered feature sequence from all layers of the pre-trained model and leverages Mamba to fuse all complementary semantics, thereby promoting comprehensive point cloud understanding. Constructing this ordered sequence is non-trivial due to the inherent isotropy of 3D space. Therefore, we further propose a geometry-constrained gate prompt generator (G2PG) shared across different layers, which applies shared geometric constraints to the output gates of the Mamba and dynamically optimizes the spatial order, thus enabling more effective integration of multi-layer information. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging point cloud datasets across various tasks demonstrate that our PMA elevates the capability for point cloud understanding to a new level by fusing diverse complementary intermediate features. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/PMA.

cs.CV↗

Revisiting the flaring activity in early 2015 of BL Lacertae object S5 0716+714

In this work, we analyzed multi-wavelength data of the BL Lac object S5 0716+714 to investigate its emission mechanisms during a flaring state observed in early 2015. We examined the temporal behavior and broadband spectral energy distributions (SEDs) during the flare. The size of the $γ$-ray emission region was estimated based on the variability timescale. To explore the multi-wavelength properties of S5 0716+714, we employed three one-zone models: the SSC model, the SSC plus EC model, and the SSC plus pp interactions model, to reproduce the SEDs. Our findings indicate that while the SSC model can describe the SEDs, it requires an extreme Doppler factor. In contrast, the SSC plus EC model successfully fits the SEDs under the assumption of weak external photon fields but requires a high Doppler factor. Additionally, the SSC plus interactions model also reproduces the SEDs, with $γ$-ray emission originating from $π^{0}$ decay. However, this model leads to a jet power that exceeds the Eddington luminosity, which remains plausible due to the flaring state or the presence of a highly collimated jet.

astro-ph.HE↗

The Study of Jet Formation Mechanism in Fermi Blazars

The origin of jet launching mainly comes from two mechanisms: the BZ mechanism and the BP mechanism. However, it is in debate which one is dominating in blazars. In this work, we used a sample of 937 Fermi blazars to study the jet formation mechanism. We studied the correlation between the jet power and the accretion rate, as well as the comparison between jet power estimated by spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting and that estimated by theoretical formula and radio flux density. Our results suggest that there is no correlation between jet power estimated by SED fitting and the accretion rate for BL Lacs, while a positive and weak correlation exists for flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs). Meanwhile, to confirm whether the BP and BZ mechanism is sufficient to launch the jet for FSRQs and BL Lacs, we compare the theoretical jet power with that estimated by SED fitting, as well as that by radio emission. We found that the jet power for most of the two subclasses estimated by SED fitting cannot be explained by either the BP or BZ mechanism. While the jet power for most FSRQs estimated by radio flux density can be explained by the BP mechanism, and most BL Lacs can be explained by the BZ mechanism. We also found that FSRQs have higher accretion rates than BL Lacs, implying different accretion disks around their central black holes: FSRQs typically have standard disks, while BL Lacs usually have advection-dominated accretion flow disks.

astro-ph.HE↗

LCM: Locally Constrained Compact Point Cloud Model for Masked Point Modeling

The pre-trained point cloud model based on Masked Point Modeling (MPM) has exhibited substantial improvements across various tasks. However, these models heavily rely on the Transformer, leading to quadratic complexity and limited decoder, hindering their practice application. To address this limitation, we first conduct a comprehensive analysis of existing Transformer-based MPM, emphasizing the idea that redundancy reduction is crucial for point cloud analysis. To this end, we propose a Locally constrained Compact point cloud Model (LCM) consisting of a locally constrained compact encoder and a locally constrained Mamba-based decoder. Our encoder replaces self-attention with our local aggregation layers to achieve an elegant balance between performance and efficiency. Considering the varying information density between masked and unmasked patches in the decoder inputs of MPM, we introduce a locally constrained Mamba-based decoder. This decoder ensures linear complexity while maximizing the perception of point cloud geometry information from unmasked patches with higher information density. Extensive experimental results show that our compact model significantly surpasses existing Transformer-based models in both performance and efficiency, especially our LCM-based Point-MAE model, compared to the Transformer-based model, achieved an improvement of 1.84%, 0.67%, and 0.60% in average accuracy on the three variants of ScanObjectNN while reducing parameters by 88% and computation by 73%. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/LCM.

cs.CV↗

MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model

Recent years have seen significant advancements in image restoration, largely attributed to the development of modern deep neural networks, such as CNNs and Transformers. However, existing restoration backbones often face the dilemma between global receptive fields and efficient computation, hindering their application in practice. Recently, the Selective Structured State Space Model, especially the improved version Mamba, has shown great potential for long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity, which offers a way to resolve the above dilemma. However, the standard Mamba still faces certain challenges in low-level vision such as local pixel forgetting and channel redundancy. In this work, we introduce a simple but effective baseline, named MambaIR, which introduces both local enhancement and channel attention to improve the vanilla Mamba. In this way, our MambaIR takes advantage of the local pixel similarity and reduces the channel redundancy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method, for example, MambaIR outperforms SwinIR by up to 0.45dB on image SR, using similar computational cost but with a global receptive field. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/csguoh/MambaIR}.

cs.CV↗

ReFIR: Grounding Large Restoration Models with Retrieval Augmentation

Recent advances in diffusion-based Large Restoration Models (LRMs) have significantly improved photo-realistic image restoration by leveraging the internal knowledge embedded within model weights. However, existing LRMs often suffer from the hallucination dilemma, i.e., producing incorrect contents or textures when dealing with severe degradations, due to their heavy reliance on limited internal knowledge. In this paper, we propose an orthogonal solution called the Retrieval-augmented Framework for Image Restoration (ReFIR), which incorporates retrieved images as external knowledge to extend the knowledge boundary of existing LRMs in generating details faithful to the original scene. Specifically, we first introduce the nearest neighbor lookup to retrieve content-relevant high-quality images as reference, after which we propose the cross-image injection to modify existing LRMs to utilize high-quality textures from retrieved images. Thanks to the additional external knowledge, our ReFIR can well handle the hallucination challenge and facilitate faithfully results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFIR can achieve not only high-fidelity but also realistic restoration results. Importantly, our ReFIR requires no training and is adaptable to various LRMs.

cs.CV↗

The `blazar sequence' in TeV band

The `blazar sequence' has been proposed for more than 20 years, yet its nature is still unclear. In this work, for the first time, we expand this topic to the TeV band by using a sample of 58 TeV blazars including 48 blazars in the quiescent state and 21 blazars in the flaring state. We investigate the correlation between the TeV luminosity, which has been compensated for attenuation from extragalactic background light, and the synchrotron peak frequency. We note that there is no correlation between TeV luminosity and peak frequency in the quiescent state and a strong anti-correlation in the flaring state for the observed value. However, there is a strong positive correlation in both the quiescent state and the flaring state for the intrinsic value. This indicates that the blazar sequence is shown in the flaring state rather than in the quiescent state for the observed value and the blazar sequence is not present in both two states after removing the beaming effect. In addition, to confirm whether the beaming effect results in the blazar sequence, we compare the \textit{Fermi} $γ$-ray luminosity between the quiescent state and the flaring state. We find the \textit{Fermi} $γ$-ray luminosity in the flaring state is greater than that in the quiescent state and the Doppler factor in the flaring state is greater. We suggest the blazar sequence in the flaring state may be due to the stronger beaming effect.

astro-ph.HE↗

An extensive study of blazar broad emission line: Changing-look blazars and Baldwin effect

It is known that the blazar jet emissions are dominated by non-thermal radiation while the accretion disk jets are normally dominated by thermal emission. In this work, our aim is to study the connection between the two types of emission by investigating the correlation between the blazar emission line intensity property, which embodies the nature of accretion disk, and the $γ$-ray flux property, which is the representative of jet emission. We compiled a sample of 656 blazars with available emission line equivalent widths ($EW$), the GeV $γ$-ray flux, and the SED information from the literature. In this work, we found 55 previous BCUs are now identified as FSRQs, and found 52 Changing-look blazars based on their $EW$ and 45 of them are newly confirmed. These Changing-look blazars have a larger accretion ratio (${\dot M}/{\dot M}_{\rm Edd}$) than BL Lac objects. In addition, we suggest that the lower synchrotron peak blazars (LSPs) could be the source of Changing-look blazars because 90.7\% of the Changing-look blazars in this work are confirmed as LSPs. An anti-correlation between $EW$ and continuum intensity, the so-called global Baldwin effect (BEff) has been confirmed. We suggest the steeper global BEff observed for blazar than for radio-quiet active galactic nuclei (RQ-AGNs) is caused by the inverse Compton scattering of broad-emission-line photons. This interpretation is further supported by the positive correlation between the emission line $EW$ and intrinsic inverse Compton luminosity.

astro-ph.HE↗

Training Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks by Differentiating Class-specific Filters

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully used in a range of tasks. However, CNNs are often viewed as "black-box" and lack of interpretability. One main reason is due to the filter-class entanglement -- an intricate many-to-many correspondence between filters and classes. Most existing works attempt post-hoc interpretation on a pre-trained model, while neglecting to reduce the entanglement underlying the model. In contrast, we focus on alleviating filter-class entanglement during training. Inspired by cellular differentiation, we propose a novel strategy to train interpretable CNNs by encouraging class-specific filters, among which each filter responds to only one (or few) class. Concretely, we design a learnable sparse Class-Specific Gate (CSG) structure to assign each filter with one (or few) class in a flexible way. The gate allows a filter's activation to pass only when the input samples come from the specific class. Extensive experiments demonstrate the fabulous performance of our method in generating a sparse and highly class-related representation of the input, which leads to stronger interpretability. Moreover, comparing with the standard training strategy, our model displays benefits in applications like object localization and adversarial sample detection. Code link: https://github.com/hyliang96/CSGCNN.

cs.CV↗