arXiv subjects

Zhiming Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiming Li.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Analysis of hypothesis tests for multiple uncertain finite populations with applications to normal uncertainty distributions

Hypothesis test plays a key role in uncertain statistics based on uncertain measure. This paper extends the parametric hypothesis of a single uncertain population to multiple cases, thereby addressing a broader range of scenarios. First, an uncertain family-wise error rate is defined to control the overall error in simultaneous testing. Subsequently, a hypothesis test of two uncertain populations is proposed, and the rejection region for the null hypothesis at a significance level is derived, laying the foundation for further analysis. Building on this, a homogeneity test for multiple populations is developed to assess whether the unknown population parameters differ significantly. When there is no significant difference in these parameters among finite populations or within a subset, a common test is used to determine whether they equal a fixed constant. Finally, homogeneity and common tests for normal uncertain populations with means and standard deviations are conducted under three cases: only means, only standard deviations, or both are unknown. Numerical simulations demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed methods, and a real example is provided to illustrate their effectiveness.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Towards Universal & Efficient Model Compression via Exponential Torque Pruning

The rapid growth in complexity and size of modern deep neural networks (DNNs) has increased challenges related to computational costs and memory usage, spurring a growing interest in efficient model compression techniques. Previous state-of-the-art approach proposes using a Torque-inspired regularization which forces the weights of neural modules around a selected pivot point. Whereas, we observe that the pruning effect of this approach is far from perfect, as the post-trained network is still dense and also suffers from high accuracy drop. In this work, we attribute such ineffectiveness to the default linear force application scheme, which imposes inappropriate force on neural module of different distances. To efficiently prune the redundant and distant modules while retaining those that are close and necessary for effective inference, in this work, we propose Exponential Torque Pruning (ETP), which adopts an exponential force application scheme for regularization. Experimental results on a broad range of domains demonstrate that, though being extremely simple, ETP manages to achieve significantly higher compression rate than the previous state-of-the-art pruning strategies with negligible accuracy drop.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Resolving Latency and Inventory Risk in Market Making with Reinforcement Learning

The latency of the exchanges in Market Making (MM) is inevitable due to hardware limitations, system processing times, delays in receiving data from exchanges, the time required for order transmission to reach the market, etc. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods for Market Making (MM) overlook the impact of these latency, which can lead to unintended order cancellations due to price discrepancies between decision and execution times and result in undesired inventory accumulation, exposing MM traders to increased market risk. Therefore, these methods cannot be applied in real MM scenarios. To address these issues, we first build a realistic MM environment with random delays of 30-100 milliseconds for order placement and market information reception, and implement a batch matching mechanism that collects orders within every 500 milliseconds before matching them all at once, simulating the batch auction mechanisms adopted by some exchanges. Then, we propose Relaver, an RL-based method for MM to tackle the latency and inventory risk issues. The three main contributions of Relaver are: i) we introduce an augmented state-action space that incorporates order hold time alongside price and volume, enabling Relaver to optimize execution strategies under latency constraints and time-priority matching mechanisms, ii) we leverage dynamic programming (DP) to guide the exploration of RL training for better policies, iii) we train a market trend predictor, which can guide the agent to intelligently adjust the inventory to reduce the risk. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on four real-world datasets demonstrate that \textsc{Relaver} significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art RL-based MM strategies across multiple metrics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Identifying weak critical fluctuations of intermittency in heavy-ion collisions with topological machine learning

Large density fluctuations of conserved charges have been proposed as a promising signature for exploring the QCD critical point in heavy-ion collisions. These fluctuations are expected to exhibit a fractal or scale-invariant behavior, which can be probed by intermittency analysis. Recent high-energy experimental studies reveal that the signal of critical fluctuations related to intermittency is very weak and thus could be easily obscured by the overwhelming background particles in the data sample. Employing a point cloud neural network with topological machine learning, we can successfully classify weak signal events from background noise by the extracted distinct topological features, and accurately determine the intermittency index for weak signal event samples.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2025

Exploring percolation phase transition in the three-dimensional Ising model with machine learning

The percolation study offers valuable insights into the characteristics of phase transition, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms that govern the formation of global connectivity within the system. We explore the percolation phase transition in the 3D cubic Ising model by employing two machine learning techniques. Our results demonstrate the capability of machine learning methods in distinguishing different phases during the percolation transition. Through the finite-size scaling analysis on the output of the neural networks, the percolation temperature and a correlation length exponent in the geometrical percolation transition are extracted and compared to those in the thermal magnetization phase transition within the 3D Ising model. These findings provide a valuable way essential for enhancing our understanding of the property of the QCD critical point, which belongs to the same universality class as the 3D Ising model.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2025

Measurability of Multifractal Topological Entropy and Its Role in Multifractal Theory

In this paper, we consider definitions including $(q, \vartheta)$-Bowen topological entropy and $(q, \vartheta)$-packing topological entropy. We systematically explore their properties and measurability and analyze the relationship between $(q, \vartheta)$-packing topological entropy and topological entropy on level sets. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the domain of $(q, \vartheta)$-packing topological entropy encompasses the domain of the multifractal spectrum of local entropies, providing new perspectives and tools for multifractal analysis.

math.DS↗

arXiv2025

Logic-Q: Improving Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Quantitative Trading via Program Sketch-based Tuning

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has revolutionized quantitative trading (Q-trading) by achieving decent performance without significant human expert knowledge. Despite its achievements, we observe that the current state-of-the-art DRL models are still ineffective in identifying the market trends, causing them to miss good trading opportunities or suffer from large drawdowns when encountering market crashes. To address this limitation, a natural approach is to incorporate human expert knowledge in identifying market trends. Whereas, such knowledge is abstract and hard to be quantified. In order to effectively leverage abstract human expert knowledge, in this paper, we propose a universal logic-guided deep reinforcement learning framework for Q-trading, called Logic-Q. In particular, Logic-Q adopts the program synthesis by sketching paradigm and introduces a logic-guided model design that leverages a lightweight, plug-and-play market trend-aware program sketch to determine the market trend and correspondingly adjusts the DRL policy in a post-hoc manner. Extensive evaluations of two popular quantitative trading tasks demonstrate that Logic-Q can significantly improve the performance of previous state-of-the-art DRL trading strategies.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

Several problems on the measured hyperorder cumulants of net-proton distributions in heavy-ion collisions

Hyperorder cumulants $C_5/C_1$ and $C_6/C_2$ are recommended as sensitive observables to explore the QCD phase transition in heavy-ion collisions. Precisely measuring their results remains a difficult task in experiments, when employing the Centrality Bin Width Correction (CBWC) to suppress the initial volume fluctuations. Various techniques within the CBWC formula can lead to notable differences in the results. We will systematically investigate the application of the CBWC method to the measured net-proton $C_5/C_1$ and $C_6/C_2$ using the UrQMD model and Skellam-based simulations at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 11.5 GeV in Au + Au collisions. A recommended approach is proposed to calculate $C_5/C_1$ and $C_6/C_2$ in 0-40\% centrality. With statistics comparable to the RHIC Beam Energy Scan phase II (BES-II), our studies provide a baseline for analyzing net-proton $C_5/C_1$ and $C_6/C_2$ in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

FairSkin: Fair Diffusion for Skin Disease Image Generation

Image generation is a prevailing technique for clinical data augmentation for advancing diagnostic accuracy and reducing healthcare disparities. Diffusion Model (DM) has become a leading method in generating synthetic medical images, but it suffers from a critical twofold bias: (1) The quality of images generated for Caucasian individuals is significantly higher, as measured by the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). (2) The ability of the downstream-task learner to learn critical features from disease images varies across different skin tones. These biases pose significant risks, particularly in skin disease detection, where underrepresentation of certain skin tones can lead to misdiagnosis or neglect of specific conditions. To address these challenges, we propose FairSkin, a novel DM framework that mitigates these biases through a three-level resampling mechanism, ensuring fairer representation across racial and disease categories. Our approach significantly improves the diversity and quality of generated images, contributing to more equitable skin disease detection in clinical settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

On the mean $Ψ$-intermediate dimensions

In this paper, we introduce the mean $Ψ$-intermediate dimension which has a value between the mean Hausdorff dimension and the metric mean dimension, and prove the equivalent definition of the mean Hausdorff dimension and the metric mean dimension. Furthermore, we delve into the core properties of the mean $Ψ$-intermediate dimensions. Additionally, we establish the mass distribution principle, a Frostman-type lemma, Hölder distortion, and derive the corresponding product formula. Finally, we provide illustrative examples of the mean $Ψ$-intermediate dimension, demonstrating its practical applications.

math.DS↗

arXiv2024

Dynamical behavior and optimal control of a stochastic SAIRS epidemic model with two saturated incidences

Stochastic models are widely used to investigate the spread of epidemics in a complex environment. This paper extends a deterministic SAIRS epidemic model to a stochastic case with limited patient capacity and exposure. We first study the dynamical properties of the model under certain conditions, including persistence, extinction, and ergodic. Then, we introduce vaccination and isolation into the model as control variables. The optimal control strategies are obtained based on the Pontryagin minimum principle. Finally, numerical simulations are given to illustrate our theoretical results.

math.PR↗

arXiv2024

Unveiling Project-Specific Bias in Neural Code Models

Deep learning has introduced significant improvements in many software analysis tasks. Although the Large Language Models (LLMs) based neural code models demonstrate commendable performance when trained and tested within the intra-project independent and identically distributed (IID) setting, they often struggle to generalize effectively to real-world inter-project out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this work, we show that this phenomenon is caused by the heavy reliance on project-specific shortcuts for prediction instead of ground-truth evidence. We propose a Cond-Idf measurement to interpret this behavior, which quantifies the relatedness of a token with a label and its project-specificness. The strong correlation between model behavior and the proposed measurement indicates that without proper regularization, models tend to leverage spurious statistical cues for prediction. Equipped with these observations, we propose a novel bias mitigation mechanism that regularizes the model's learning behavior by leveraging latent logic relations among samples. Experimental results on two representative program analysis tasks indicate that our mitigation framework can improve both inter-project OOD generalization and adversarial robustness, while not sacrificing accuracy on intra-project IID data.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Impact of Limited Statistics on the Measured Hyper-Order Cumulants of Net-Proton Distributions in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Hyper-order cumulants $C_5/C_1$ and $C_6/C_2$ of net-baryon distributions are anticipated to offer crucial insights into the phase transition from quark-gluon plasma to hadronic matter in heavy-ion collisions. However, the accuracy of $C_5$ and $C_6$ is highly contingent on the fine shape of the distribution's tail, the detectable range of which could be essentially truncated by low statistics. In this paper, we use the fast Skellam-based simulations, as well as the Ultrarelativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics model, to assess the impact of limited statistics on the measurements of $C_5/C_1$ and $C_6/C_2$ of net-proton distributions at lower RHIC energies. Both ratios decrease from the unity baseline as we reduce statistics, and could even turn negative without a pertinent physics mechanism. By incorporating statistics akin to experimental data, we can replicate the net-proton $C_5/C_1$ and $C_6/C_2$ values comparable to the corresponding measurements for Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} =$ 7.7, 11.5 and 14.5 GeV. Our findings underscore a caveat to the interpretation of the observed beam energy dependence of hyper-order cumulants.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2024

LLMs for Relational Reasoning: How Far are We?

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized many areas (e.g. natural language processing, software engineering, etc.) by achieving state-of-the-art performance on extensive downstream tasks. Aiming to achieve robust and general artificial intelligence, there has been a surge of interest in investigating the reasoning ability of the LLMs. Whereas the textual and numerical reasoning benchmarks adopted by previous works are rather shallow and simple, it is hard to conclude that the LLMs possess strong reasoning ability by merely achieving positive results on these benchmarks. Recent efforts have demonstrated that the LLMs are poor at solving sequential decision-making problems that require common-sense planning by evaluating their performance on the reinforcement learning benchmarks. In this work, we conduct an in-depth assessment of several state-of-the-art LLMs' reasoning ability based on the inductive logic programming (ILP) benchmark, which is broadly recognized as a representative and challenging measurement for evaluating logic program induction/synthesis systems as it requires inducing strict cause-effect logic to achieve robust deduction on independent and identically distributed (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) test samples. Our evaluations illustrate that compared with the neural program induction systems which are much smaller in model size, the state-of-the-art LLMs are much poorer in terms of reasoning ability by achieving much lower performance and generalization using either natural language prompting or truth-value matrix prompting.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

FAIRER: Fairness as Decision Rationale Alignment

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant progress, but often suffer from fairness issues, as deep models typically show distinct accuracy differences among certain subgroups (e.g., males and females). Existing research addresses this critical issue by employing fairness-aware loss functions to constrain the last-layer outputs and directly regularize DNNs. Although the fairness of DNNs is improved, it is unclear how the trained network makes a fair prediction, which limits future fairness improvements. In this paper, we investigate fairness from the perspective of decision rationale and define the parameter parity score to characterize the fair decision process of networks by analyzing neuron influence in various subgroups. Extensive empirical studies show that the unfair issue could arise from the unaligned decision rationales of subgroups. Existing fairness regularization terms fail to achieve decision rationale alignment because they only constrain last-layer outputs while ignoring intermediate neuron alignment. To address the issue, we formulate the fairness as a new task, i.e., decision rationale alignment that requires DNNs' neurons to have consistent responses on subgroups at both intermediate processes and the final prediction. To make this idea practical during optimization, we relax the naive objective function and propose gradient-guided parity alignment, which encourages gradient-weighted consistency of neurons across subgroups. Extensive experiments on a variety of datasets show that our method can significantly enhance fairness while sustaining a high level of accuracy and outperforming other approaches by a wide margin.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Machine learning phase transitions of the three-dimensional Ising universality class

Exploration of the QCD phase diagram and critical point is one of the main goals in current relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The QCD critical point is expected to belong to a three-dimensional (3D) Ising universality class. Machine learning techniques are found to be powerful in distinguishing different phases of matter and provide a new way to study the phase diagram. We investigate phase transitions in the 3D cubic Ising model using supervised learning methods. It is found that a 3D convolutional neural network can be trained to effectivelly predict physical quantities in different spin configurations. With a uniform neural network architecture, it can encode phases of matter and identify both second- and first-order phase transitions. The important features that discriminate different phases in the classification processes are investigated. These findings can help study and understand QCD phase transitions in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2022

Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Statistical Type Inference

Hitherto statistical type inference systems rely thoroughly on supervised learning approaches, which require laborious manual effort to collect and label large amounts of data. Most Turing-complete imperative languages share similar control- and data-flow structures, which make it possible to transfer knowledge learned from one language to another. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual transfer learning framework, PLATO, for statistical type inference, which allows us to leverage prior knowledge learned from the labeled dataset of one language and transfer it to the others, e.g., Python to JavaScript, Java to JavaScript, etc. PLATO is powered by a novel kernelized attention mechanism to constrain the attention scope of the backbone Transformer model such that the model is forced to base its prediction on commonly shared features among languages. In addition, we propose the syntax enhancement that augments the learning on the feature overlap among language domains. Furthermore, PLATO can also be used to improve the performance of the conventional supervised learning-based type inference by introducing cross-lingual augmentation, which enables the model to learn more general features across multiple languages. We evaluated PLATO under two settings: 1) under the cross-domain scenario that the target language data is not labeled or labeled partially, the results show that PLATO outperforms the state-of-the-art domain transfer techniques by a large margin, e.g., it improves the Python to TypeScript baseline by +5.40%@EM, +5.40%@weighted-F1, and 2) under the conventional monolingual supervised learning based scenario, PLATO improves the Python baseline by +4.40%@EM, +3.20%@EM (parametric).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Intermittency of charged particles in the hybrid UrQMD+CMC model at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Within the framework of intermittency analysis, a search for critical fluctuations is ongoing to locate the possible critical point in the quantum chromodynamics phase diagram. In this study, self-similar critical fluctuations from a critical Monte Carlo (CMC) model have been incorporated into the cascade ultrarelativistic quantum molecular dynamics (UrQMD) model. This hybrid UrQMD+CMC model exhibits a clear power-law behavior of scaled factorial moment for charged particles in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}}$ = 7.7-200 GeV. By comparing the UrQMD+CMC model results with those from the STAR experiment, it is found that the value of a calculated scaling exponent falls in the range of the experimental measurement when 1-2 \% signal of intermittency fluctuations is added into the UrQMD sample.

nucl-th↗