arXiv subjects

Zhu Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Zhu Cao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Low-light Image Enhancement via Multi-scale Attention combined with Fourier Transform

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to improve image quality and clarity in diverse and demanding low-illumination environments. However, existing deep learning-based LLIE methods struggle to accurately capture real-world illumination and restore texture details, largely because their algorithmic strengths remain underutilized. To address these issues, we present a supervised frequency domain deep learning network for LLIE, named multi-scale attention combined with the Fourier transform (MSFT) which adopts a U-shaped, one-stage architecture that infuses guidance from low-light images into the network by channeling it through multi-scale attention. We further fuse the amplitude information from priori channels with that of the low-light image in MSFT's self-created module, and carry out multi-scale guidance along with the network. Subsequently, to better enhance the faint feature, such as fine content and textures, and to better fuse global context confidence in the decoding stage, we separately introduce a multi-shape synergistic attention and a lightweight network that effectively integrate information in high-dimensional space to embed into the superlative feature space channel containing rich texture information. Extensive experiments conducted on LOL, SID, SMID, and SDSD datasets demonstrate that MSFT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competitors. For example, compared with Retinexformer, our method achieves a peak signal-to-noise ratio of up to 41.76 decibels on the SDSD-outdoor dataset with an increase of 11.92 decibels and a structural similarity index of 0.988 with a 13.80% improvement.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Sensitivity Bounds of Multiparameter Metrology at Thermal Equilibrium

Quantum metrology aims to enhance measurement precision beyond the classical limit by leveraging quantum resources. Unlike multi-parameter dynamic quantum metrology, many questions regarding multiparameter quantum metrology at thermal equilibrium remain elusive. In particular, the ultimate precision limits achievable in this equilibrium setting are not yet well understood. In this work, we examine the fundamental limits of estimating multiple parameters with a quantum probe at thermal equilibrium. We first show that the Heisenberg limit with respect to the number of probes can be achieved, and our bound coincides with the known single-parameter bound when only one parameter is estimated. We then consider the low temperature limit, revealing a qualitatively different behavior compared to the finite temperature case. We give an example to illustrate the usage of our main results. Finally, we show the conditions under which the sensitivity bound can be attained and the optimal measurements to achieve it.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Discrete-phase-randomized mode-pairing quantum key distribution

Mode-pairing quantum key distribution (MP-QKD) protocol achieves performance beyond the repeaterless rate-transmittance bound and exhibits excellent practicality by avoiding the requirement for difficult global phase locking. However, the source side of MP-QKD still relies on the assumption of continuous phase randomization, an experimentally infeasible requirement in practice. Therefore, the practical security of the protocol cannot be fully guaranteed. In this work, we propose a discrete-phase-randomized mode-pairing quantum key distribution (DPR-MP-QKD) protocol and analyze the basis-dependence of the source side. Then, we introduce a concrete discrete version of the decoy state method that ensures the security of the DPR-MP-QKD protocol. Finally, simulation results indicate that as the number of discrete phases increases, the key rate performance of DPR-MP-QKD progressively approaches that of the continuous case, with convergence achieved at approximately 14 discrete phases. Moreover, our approach drastically lowers the demand for randomness. While conventional continuous phase randomization demands an unlimited supply of random bits, we show that merely a few bits (e.g., 4) are adequate.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Pooling Engram Conditional Memory in Large Language Models using CXL

Engram conditional memory has emerged as a promising component for LLMs by decoupling static knowledge lookup from dynamic computation. Since Engram exhibits sparse access patterns and supports prefetching, its massive embedding tables are well-suited for offloading to lower-tier memory. In this paper, we propose using Compute Express Link (CXL) memory pool for Engram storage. Compared to RDMA, CXL provides fine-grained and low-latency access required by minimal and discrete retrieval patterns of Engram. We integrate the CXL-based Engram pool into SGLang, achieving near-DRAM end-to-end performance. This provides a scalable and cost-efficient storage solution for future Engram-integrated LLMs without compromising inference performance.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

Multipartite steering verification with imprecise measurements

Quantum steering is a fundamental quantum correlation that plays a pivotal role in quantum technologies, but its verification crucially relies on precise measurements -- an assumption often undermined by practical imperfections. Here, we investigate multipartite steering verification under imprecise measurements and develop a quantitative method that effectively eliminates false positives induced by measurement imprecision. A comparison with a device-independent approach demonstrates that our method accurately delineates the scope of valid verification. In a special case, our method also enables the verification of multipartite entanglement under nonideal conditions. These results substantially enhance the robustness of multipartite steering and entanglement verification against measurement imprecision, thereby promoting their applicability in realistic quantum technologies.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Fast Revocable Attribute-Based Encryption with Data Integrity for Internet of Things

Efficient and secure revocable attribute-based encryption (RABE) is vital for ensuring flexible and fine-grained access control and data sharing in cloud storage and outsourced data environments within the Internet of Things (IoT). However, current RABE schemes often struggle to achieve an optimal balance between efficiency, security, dynamic scalability, and other important features, which hampers their practical application. To overcome these limitations, we propose a fast RABE scheme with data integrity for IoT that achieves adaptive security with multiple challenge ciphertexts. Our scheme supports the revocation of authorized users and transfers the computationally heavy revocation processes to the cloud, thereby easing the computational burden on IoT devices. Moreover, it consistently guarantees the integrity and correctness of data. We have demonstrated its adaptive security within the defined security model with multiple challenge ciphertexts and optimized its performance. Experimental results indicate that our scheme provides better performance than existing solutions. Under the same access policy, our scheme reduces computational consumption by 7 to 9 times compared to previous schemes.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Large Model Driven Solar Activity AI Forecaster: A Scalable Dual Data-Model Framework

Solar activity drives space weather, affecting Earth's magnetosphere and technological infrastructure, which makes accurate solar flare forecasting critical. Current space weather models under-utilize multi-modal solar data, lack iterative enhancement via expert knowledge, and rely heavily on human forecasters under the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) paradigm. Here we present the "Solar Activity AI Forecaster", a scalable dual data-model driven framework built on foundational models, integrating expert knowledge to autonomously replicate human forecasting tasks with quantifiable outputs. It is implemented in the OODA paradigm and comprises three modules: a Situational Perception Module that generates daily solar situation awareness maps by integrating multi-modal observations; In-Depth Analysis Tools that characterize key solar features (active regions, coronal holes, filaments); and a Flare Prediction Module that forecasts strong flares for the full solar disk and active regions. Executed within a few minutes, the model outperforms or matches human forecasters in generalization across multi-source data, forecast accuracy, and operational efficiency. This work establishes a new paradigm for AI-based space weather forecasting, demonstrating AI's potential to enhance forecast accuracy and efficiency, and paving the way for autonomous operational forecasting systems.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

Quadratic Forms, Exact Covering Systems, and Product Identities for Theta Functions

In this paper, we establish a connection between integral quadratic forms and exact covering systems (ECS) and present a structural framework for a class of product identities involving Ramanujan's theta functions. This approach yields infinitely many such identities. As applications, we provide a unified interpretation for twenty-two of Ramanujan's forty identities for the Rogers-Ramanujan functions. Many identities analogous to the forty identities can be naturally explained from this perspective. In addition, we discuss ternary quadratic forms and derive new identities involving products of three or more theta functions. We conclude by unifying several previous approaches and providing a summary.

math.NT↗

arXiv2025

AutoMedEval: Harnessing Language Models for Automatic Medical Capability Evaluation

With the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in the medical domain, there is increasing demand for improved evaluation techniques to assess their capabilities. However, traditional metrics like F1 and ROUGE, which rely on token overlaps to measure quality, significantly overlook the importance of medical terminology. While human evaluation tends to be more reliable, it can be very costly and may as well suffer from inaccuracies due to limits in human expertise and motivation. Although there are some evaluation methods based on LLMs, their usability in the medical field is limited due to their proprietary nature or lack of expertise. To tackle these challenges, we present AutoMedEval, an open-sourced automatic evaluation model with 13B parameters specifically engineered to measure the question-answering proficiency of medical LLMs. The overarching objective of AutoMedEval is to assess the quality of responses produced by diverse models, aspiring to significantly reduce the dependence on human evaluation. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical training method involving curriculum instruction tuning and an iterative knowledge introspection mechanism, enabling AutoMedEval to acquire professional medical assessment capabilities with limited instructional data. Human evaluations indicate that AutoMedEval surpasses other baselines in terms of correlation with human judgments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Information entropy of complex probability

Probability theory is fundamental for modeling uncertainty, with traditional probabilities being real and non-negative. Complex probability extends this concept by allowing complex-valued probabilities, opening new avenues for analysis in various fields. This paper explores the information-theoretic aspects of complex probability, focusing on its definition, properties, and applications. We extend Shannon entropy to complex probability and examine key properties, including maximum entropy, joint entropy, conditional entropy, equilibration, and cross entropy. These results offer a framework for understanding entropy in complex probability spaces and have potential applications in fields such as statistical mechanics and information theory.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Pseudolabel guided pixels contrast for domain adaptive semantic segmentation

Semantic segmentation is essential for comprehending images, but the process necessitates a substantial amount of detailed annotations at the pixel level. Acquiring such annotations can be costly in the real-world. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation is a technique that uses virtual data with labels to train a model and adapts it to real data without labels. Some recent works use contrastive learning, which is a powerful method for self-supervised learning, to help with this technique. However, these works do not take into account the diversity of features within each class when using contrastive learning, which leads to errors in class prediction. We analyze the limitations of these works and propose a novel framework called Pseudo-label Guided Pixel Contrast (PGPC), which overcomes the disadvantages of previous methods. We also investigate how to use more information from target images without adding noise from pseudo-labels. We test our method on two standard UDA benchmarks and show that it outperforms existing methods. Specifically, we achieve relative improvements of 5.1% mIoU and 4.6% mIoU on the Grand Theft Auto V (GTA5) to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes tasks based on DAFormer, respectively. Furthermore, our approach can enhance the performance of other UDA approaches without increasing model complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/embar111/pgpc

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ACE-$M^3$: Automatic Capability Evaluator for Multimodal Medical Models

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) gain prominence in the medical field, the need for precise evaluation methods to assess their effectiveness has become critical. While benchmarks provide a reliable means to evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs, traditional metrics like ROUGE and BLEU employed for open domain evaluation only focus on token overlap and may not align with human judgment. Although human evaluation is more reliable, it is labor-intensive, costly, and not scalable. LLM-based evaluation methods have proven promising, but to date, there is still an urgent need for open-source multimodal LLM-based evaluators in the medical field. To address this issue, we introduce ACE-$M^3$, an open-sourced \textbf{A}utomatic \textbf{C}apability \textbf{E}valuator for \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{M}edical \textbf{M}odels specifically designed to assess the question answering abilities of medical MLLMs. It first utilizes a branch-merge architecture to provide both detailed analysis and a concise final score based on standard medical evaluation criteria. Subsequently, a reward token-based direct preference optimization (RTDPO) strategy is incorporated to save training time without compromising performance of our model. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our ACE-$M^3$ model\footnote{\url{https://huggingface.co/collections/AIUSRTMP/ace-m3-67593297ff391b93e3e5d068}} in evaluating the capabilities of medical MLLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Gait-Based Privacy Protection for Smart Wearable Devices

Smart wearable devices (SWDs) collect and store sensitive daily information of many people. Its primary method of identification is still the password unlocking method. However, several studies have shown serious security flaws in that method, which makes the privacy and security concerns of SWDs particularly urgent. Gait identification is well suited for SWDs because its built-in sensors can provide data support for identification. However, existing gait identification methods have low accuracy and neglect to protect the privacy of gait features. In addition, the SWD can be used as an internet of things device for users to share data. But few studies have used gait feature-based encryption schemes to protect the privacy of message interactions between SWDs and other devices. In this paper, we propose a gait identification network, a bi-directional long short-term memory network with an attention mechanism (ABLSTM), to improve the identification accuracy and a stochastic orthogonal transformation (SOT) scheme to protect the extracted gait features from leakage. In the experiments, ABLSTM achieves an accuracy of 95.28%, reducing previous error rate by 19.3%. The SOT scheme is proved to be resistant to the chosen plaintext attack (CPA) and is 30% faster than previous methods. A biometric-based encryption scheme is proposed to enable secure message interactions using gait features as keys after the gait identification stage is passed, and offers better protection of the gait features compared to previous schemes.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Distributed Partial Quantum Consensus of Qubit Networks with Connected Topologies

In this paper, we consider the partial quantum consensus problem of a qubit network in a distributed view. The local quantum operation is designed based on the Hamiltonian by using the local information of each quantum system in a network of qubits. We construct the unitary transformation for each quantum system to achieve the partial quantum consensus, i.e., the directions of the quantum states in the Bloch ball will reach an agreement. A simple case of two-qubit quantum systems is considered first, and a minimum completing time of reaching partial consensus is obtained based on the geometric configuration of each qubit. Furthermore, we extend the approaches to deal with the more general N-qubit networks. Two partial quantum consensus protocols, based on the Lyapunov method for chain graphs and the geometry method for connected graphs, are proposed. The geometry method can be utilized to deal with more general connected graphs, while for the Lyapunov method, the global consensus can be obtained. The numerical simulation over a qubit network is demonstrated to verify the validity and the effectiveness of the theoretical results.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Asymmetric mode-pairing quantum key distribution

Mode-pairing quantum key distribution (MP-QKD) can surpass the repeaterless rate-transmittance bound (Pirandola-Laurenza-Ottaviani-Banchi bound) without requiring global phase locking, exhibiting remarkable flexibility. However, MP-QKD necessitates equal communication distances in two channels, which is a challenging requirement in practical applications. To address this limitation, we extend the original MP-QKD to asymmetric cases. Our decoy-state estimation confirms that asymmetric channel transmittances and asymmetric intensities do not compromise the security of the protocol. We focus on the pulse-intensity relationship, a key factor for optimizing the performance of asymmetric MP-QKD. Unlike previous asymmetric protocols, the intensities of different bases in asymmetric MP-QKD cannot be decoupled. We introduce an optimal-pulse-intensity method, adaptable to various scenarios, to enhance key rates by calculating ideal pulse intensities. Simulation results in various representative scenarios indicate that our method effectively reduces the impact of asymmetric channel distances on MP-QKD performance, enhancing its practical applicability.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Quantum Private Function Evaluation

Private function evaluation is a task that aims to obtain the output of a function while keeping the function secret. So far its quantum analogue has not yet been articulated. In this study, we initiate the study of quantum private function evaluation, the quantum analogue of classical private function evaluation. We give a formal definition of quantum private function evaluation and present two schemes together with their security proofs. We then give an experimental demonstration of the scheme. Finally we apply quantum private function evaluation to quantum copy protection to illustrate its usage.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Sequential device-independent certification of indefinite causal order

Indefinite causal order has found numerous applications in quantum computation, quantum communication, and quantum metrology. Before its usage, the quality of the indefinite causal order needs to be first certified, and the certification should ideally be device-independent (DI) to avoid the impact of device imperfections. In this work, we initiate the study of the sequential DI certification of an indefinite causal order. This can be useful in experimental platforms where the generation of an indefinite causal order is difficult. We show that an arbitrary number of sequential DI certifications of an indefinite causal order can be achieved with a quantum switch and also analyze practical requirements for experimental implementations of the certifications. Our work opens the possibility of reusing the resource of an indefinite causal order multiple times in device-independent quantum information processing.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Deep Ising Born Machine

A quantum neural network (QNN) is a method to find patterns in quantum data and has a wide range of applications including quantum chemistry, quantum computation, quantum metrology, and quantum simulation. Efficiency and universality are two desirable properties of a QNN but are unfortunately contradictory. In this work, we examine a deep Ising Born machine (DIBoM), and show it has a good balance between efficiency and universality. More precisely, the DIBoM has a flexible number of parameters to be efficient, and achieves provable universality with sufficient parameters. The architecture of the DIBoM is based on generalized controlled-Z gates, conditional gates, and some other ingredients. To compare the universality of the DIBoM with other QNNs, we propose a fidelity-based expressivity measure, which may be of independent interest. Extensive empirical evaluations corroborate that the DIBoM is both efficient and expressive.

quant-ph↗