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Zhuang Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Zhuang Ma.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Activation Outliers Matter: Robust Recovery for Quantized Multimodal LLMs

Low-bit quantization offers a promising avenue for reducing the computational and memory demands of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Recent hardware support for low-precision formats, ranging from MXFP8 to ultra-low-bit formats such as MXFP4 and HiF4, has accelerated research into efficient MLLM training and deployment. In this work, we present a systematic study of these quantization schemes in representative MLLMs that span both video generation and reasoning tasks. Our analysis shows that MXFP8 achieves near-lossless performance, whereas aggressive 4-bit quantization leads to significant degradation. Through extensive ablations, we identify activation quantization as the primary source of this performance loss, contributing substantially more than weight quantization. Motivated by this observation, we propose Residual Fallback Quantization (RFQ), a lightweight activation reconstruction framework that supplements the primary ulta-low-bit activation representation with an auxiliary quantized residual pathway. By explicitly modeling and compensating for quantization errors, RFQ improves activation fidelity while preserving the efficiency advantages of ultra-low-bit computation. RFQ requires no architectural modifications and incurs negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments on Wan2.2 and Qwen3-VL demonstrate that RFQ consistently recovers a substantial portion of the performance lost under the quantization of MXFP4 and HiF4, significantly narrowing the gap to BF16 baselines across both generation and 4 reasoning benchmarks. Our findings establish activation quantization as the dominant bottleneck in ultra-low-bit MLLMs and highlight residual-based activation reconstruction as an effective and practical strategy for robust 4-bit deployment.

cs.LG

Fully compensated ferrimagnetic triferroics and multistate transport in hidden-phase wurtzite MnSe monolayer

Fully compensated ferrimagnets (fFIMs) have attracted interest due to their compensated moments and nonrelativistic spin splitting across the Brillouin zone. Known fFIMs, however, are mostly restricted to complex three-dimensional (3D) systems or require external fields in two-dimensional (2D) heterostructures, leaving intrinsic fFIM monolayers unexplored. We identify a hidden-phase MnSe monolayer, derived from the (001) planes of wurtzite, as an intrinsic fFIM featuring inequivalent sublattices not linked by any symmetry. It is a unipolar magnetic semiconductor (UMS) with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (528.60 * 10^-3 eV per unit cell) and simultaneously exhibits ferroelectricity (polarization 4.63 * 10^-10 C/m) and ferroelasticity (signal 61%), with barriers of 7.6 * 10^-3 and 0.10 eV/f.u., respectively, establishing a single-phase triferroic system. The ground fFIM UMS characteristics are robust against strain up to 3%. The In2Se3/MnSe heterostructure enables nonvolatile electrical control between semiconducting and metallic states. Constructed tunnel junctions exhibit giant tunneling magnetoresistance (2.98 * 10^5%), electroresistance (6.97 * 10^14%), elastoresistance (7.95 * 10^4%), and near-perfect spin filtering (~100%). Collectively, this spontaneous 2D fFIM with coexisting triferroic orders provides a promising platform for ultrahigh-density, low-power, and miniaturized memory devices.

physics.app-ph

DustNET: enabling machine learning and AI models of dusty plasmas

Dusty plasmas are ubiquitous throughout the universe, spanning laboratory and industrial plasmas, fusion devices, planetary environments, cometary comae, and interstellar media. Despite decades of research, many aspects of their behavior remain poorly understood within a unified framework. While numerous theoretical and numerical models describe specific phenomena, such as dust charging, transport, waves, and self-organization, fully predictive models across the wide range of spatial and temporal scales in both laboratory and natural systems remain elusive. Conventional plasma descriptions rely on coupled differential equations for particle densities, momenta, and energies, but their solutions are often limited by computational cost, numerical uncertainties, and incomplete knowledge of boundary conditions and transport processes. Recent advances in machine learning (ML), particularly deep neural networks, offer new opportunities to complement traditional physics-based modeling. Here we review ML and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, termed bottom-up data-driven methods, for dusty plasma research. Central to this effort is Dust Neural nEtworks Technology (DustNET), a community-driven dataset initiative inspired by ImageNet, integrating experimental, simulation, and synthetic data to enable predictive modeling, uncertainty quantification, and multi-scale analysis. DustNET-trained models may also be deployed in real-time experimental settings under edge computing constraints. Combined with emerging multi-modal AI foundation models and autonomous agents, this framework provides a pathway toward a unified, physics-informed understanding of dusty plasmas across laboratory, industrial, space, and astrophysical environments.

physics.plasm-ph

HiFloat4 Format for Language Model Pre-training on Ascend NPUs

Large foundation models have become central to modern machine learning, with performance scaling predictably with model size and data. However, training and deploying such models incur substantial computational and memory costs, motivating the development of low-precision training techniques. Recent work has demonstrated that 4-bit floating-point (FP4) formats--such as MXFP4 and NVFP4--can be successfully applied to linear GEMM operations in large language models (LLMs), achieving up to 4x improvements in compute throughput and memory efficiency compared to higher-precision baselines. In this work, we investigate the recently proposed HiFloat4 FP4 format for Huawei Ascend NPUs and systematically compare it with MXFP4 in large-scale training settings. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPU clusters, with linear and expert GEMM operations performed entirely in FP4 precision. We evaluate both dense architectures (e.g., Pangu and LLaMA-style models) and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, where both standard linear layers and expert-specific GEMMs operate in FP4. Furthermore, we explore stabilization techniques tailored to FP4 training that significantly reduce numerical degradation, maintaining relative error within 1% of full-precision baselines while preserving the efficiency benefits of 4-bit computation. Our results provide a comprehensive empirical study of FP4 training on NPUs and highlight the practical trade-offs between FP4 formats in large-scale dense and MoE models.

cs.LG

Demonstration of Discrete-Time Quantum Walks and Observation of Topological Edge States in a Superconducting Qutrit Chain

Quantum walk serves as a versatile tool for universal quantum computing and algorithmic research. However, the implementation of discrete-time quantum walks (DTQWs) with superconducting circuits is still constrained by some limitations such as operation precision, circuit depth and connectivity. With improved hardware efficiency by using superconducting qutrits (three-level systems), we experimentally demonstrate a scalable DTQW in a superconducting circuit, observing the ballistic spreading of quantum walk in a qutrit chain. The usage of qutrits in our implementation allows hardware efficiently encoding of the walker position and the coin degree of freedom. By exploiting the flexibility and intrinsic symmetries of qutrit-based DTQWs, we successfully prepare two topological phases in the chain. For the first time, particle-hole-symmetry-protected edge states, bounded at the interface between these two topological phases, are observed in the superconducting platform. Measured parameter dependencies further validate the properties of edge states. The scalability and gate-control compatibility of the demonstrated DTQWs enable a versatile tool for superconducting quantum computing and quantum simulation.

quant-ph

Exploring the Heterogeneity of Tabular Data: A Diversity-aware Data Generator via LLMs

Tabular data generation has become increasingly essential for enabling robust machine learning applications, which require large-scale, high-quality data. Existing solutions leverage generative models to learn original data distributions. However, real-world data are naturally heterogeneous with diverse distributions, making it challenging to obtain a universally good model for diverse data generation. To address this limitation, we introduce Diversity-Aware Tabular data gEnerator (DATE), a framework that (i) prepares high-quality and distributionally distinct examples for in-context learning by effectively partitioning the original heterogeneous data into multiple diverse subsets; (ii) harnesses Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the diversity of the partitioned distribution with decision tree reasoning as feedback, generating high-quality labeled data for each subset. However, the massive generated data inherently involves a trade-off between diversity and quality. To integrate this issue, existing solutions greedily select the validation-best data. However, we prove that the selection in heterogeneous settings does not possess the greedy-choice property, and design a Multi-Arm Bandit-based sampling algorithm that balances the diversity and quality of generated data. Extensive experiments on tabular classification and regression benchmarks demonstrate that DATE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GAN-based and LLM-based methods. On average, DATE achieves a 23.75% reduction in error rate with just 100 generated data. Empirically, we demonstrate that data generated by DATE can improve the accuracy of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and enhance the reasoning capability of LLMs on the target data. Code is available at https://github.com/windblow32/DATE.

cs.LG

Parametric phase modulation in superconducting circuits

Parametric modulation, valued for its versatility, is widely employed in superconducting circuits for quantum simulations and high-fidelity two-qubit gates. Conventionally, the qubit coupling strength is determined by the amplitude of the parametric flux pulse, which affects the qubit parameters dramatically. In this paper, we propose and implement a phase-modulation scheme to tune the interaction strength via adjustment of the relative phase between the parametric flux pulses applied to two coupled qubits. We characterize this modulation for sideband couplings, at both sweet and off-sweet spots, achieving a broad range of coupling strengths, as confirmed by both population dynamics and spectroscopy methods. This approach enables phase-controlled modulation of coupling strength, providing a promising candidate for parametrically driven quantum simulations and gate operations.

quant-ph

Analysis of Frequency Collisions in Parametrically Modulated Superconducting Circuits

Superconducting circuits are a leading platform for scalable quantum computing, where parametric modulation is a widely used technique for implementing high-fidelity multi-qubit operations. A critical challenge, however, is that this modulation can induce a dense landscape of parasitic couplings, leading to detrimental frequency collisions that constrain processor performance. In this work, we develop a comprehensive numerical framework, grounded in Floquet theory, to systematically analyze and mitigate these collisions. Our approach integrates this numerical analysis with newly derived analytical models for both qubit-modulated and coupler-modulated schemes, allowing us to characterize the complete map of parasitic sideband interactions and their distinct error budgets. This analysis forms the basis of a constraint-based optimization methodology designed to identify parameter configurations that satisfy the derived physical constraints, thereby avoiding detrimental parasitic interactions. We illustrate the utility of this framework with applications to analog quantum simulation and gate design. Our work provides a predictive tool for co-engineering device parameters and control protocols, enabling the systematic suppression of crosstalk and paving the way for large-scale, high-performance quantum processors.

quant-ph

OmniNWM: Omniscient Driving Navigation World Models

Autonomous driving world models are expected to work effectively across three core dimensions: state, action, and reward. However, existing methods are typically restricted to fragmented modality modeling, short-horizon drift, and imprecise action control, while lacking intrinsic mechanisms for policy evaluation. In this paper, we introduce OmniNWM, an Omniscient panoramic Navigation World Model that addresses all three dimensions within a consistent probabilistic framework. For State, OmniNWM generates panoramic videos of RGB, semantics, metric depth, and 3D occupancy, ensuring pixel-level alignment across modalities with joint distribution modeling. To mitigate autoregressive exposure bias, we propose a structured panoramic forcing strategy to stabilize long-horizon generation via stochastic manifold thickening. For Action, we introduce canonical geometric action encoding with normalized panoramic Pl\"ucker ray-maps. This representation decouples motion dynamics from sensor intrinsics, enabling precise, zero-shot trajectory control across heterogeneous datasets and camera configurations. For Reward, we derive intrinsic occupancy-grounded dense rewards directly from generated 3D volumes, establishing a reliable closed-loop simulation cycle for evaluating diverse planning agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniNWM achieves SOTA performance in generation fidelity and control precision, with remarkable zero-shot robustness to novel scenes on NuPlan and in-house datasets with distinct camera rigs. Project page is available at https://arlo0o.github.io/OmniNWM/.

cs.CV

4D Driving Scene Generation With Stereo Forcing

Current generative models struggle to synthesize dynamic 4D driving scenes that simultaneously support temporal extrapolation and spatial novel view synthesis (NVS) without per-scene optimization. Bridging generation and novel view synthesis remains a major challenge. We present PhiGenesis, a unified framework for 4D scene generation that extends video generation techniques with geometric and temporal consistency. Given multi-view image sequences and camera parameters, PhiGenesis produces temporally continuous 4D Gaussian splatting representations along target 3D trajectories. In its first stage, PhiGenesis leverages a pre-trained video VAE with a novel range-view adapter to enable feed-forward 4D reconstruction from multi-view images. This architecture supports single-frame or video inputs and outputs complete 4D scenes including geometry, semantics, and motion. In the second stage, PhiGenesis introduces a geometric-guided video diffusion model, using rendered historical 4D scenes as priors to generate future views conditioned on trajectories. To address geometric exposure bias in novel views, we propose Stereo Forcing, a novel conditioning strategy that integrates geometric uncertainty during denoising. This method enhances temporal coherence by dynamically adjusting generative influence based on uncertainty-aware perturbations. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both appearance and geometric reconstruction, temporal generation and novel view synthesis (NVS) tasks, while simultaneously delivering competitive performance in downstream evaluations. Homepage is at \href{https://jiangxb98.github.io/PhiGensis}{PhiGensis}.

cs.CV

OccScene: Semantic Occupancy-based Cross-task Mutual Learning for 3D Scene Generation

Recent diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in both 3D scene generation and perception tasks. Nevertheless, existing methods typically separate these two processes, acting as a data augmenter to generate synthetic data for downstream perception tasks. In this work, we propose OccScene, a novel mutual learning paradigm that integrates fine-grained 3D perception and high-quality generation in a unified framework, achieving a cross-task win-win effect. OccScene generates new and consistent 3D realistic scenes only depending on text prompts, guided with semantic occupancy in a joint-training diffusion framework. To align the occupancy with the diffusion latent, a Mamba-based Dual Alignment module is introduced to incorporate fine-grained semantics and geometry as perception priors. Within OccScene, the perception module can be effectively improved with customized and diverse generated scenes, while the perception priors in return enhance the generation performance for mutual benefits. Extensive experiments show that OccScene achieves realistic 3D scene generation in broad indoor and outdoor scenarios, while concurrently boosting the perception models to achieve substantial performance improvements in the 3D perception task of semantic occupancy prediction.

cs.CV

How Different AI Chatbots Behave? Benchmarking Large Language Models in Behavioral Economics Games

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in diverse applications requires a thorough understanding of their decision-making strategies and behavioral patterns. As a supplement to a recent study on the behavioral Turing test, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of five leading LLM-based chatbot families as they navigate a series of behavioral economics games. By benchmarking these AI chatbots, we aim to uncover and document both common and distinct behavioral patterns across a range of scenarios. The findings provide valuable insights into the strategic preferences of each LLM, highlighting potential implications for their deployment in critical decision-making roles.

cs.AI

Heavy quarkonium spectral function in the spinning black hole background

In this paper, we study the dissociation of heavy quarkonium in the spinning black hole background. Specifically, we analyze the spectral function of charmonium and bottomonium in the spinning black hole background and examine how the angular momentum affects the dissociation of $J/Ψ$ and $Υ(1S)$. From the results, we find that the angular momentum and temperature decreases the peak height and expands the peak width of the spectral function, thereby enhancing the dissociation of heavy vector mesons. Moreover, the angular momentum has a stronger dissociation effect in the transverse orientation, revealing the directional influence of angular momentum.

hep-ph

NeuroGauss4D-PCI: 4D Neural Fields and Gaussian Deformation Fields for Point Cloud Interpolation

Point Cloud Interpolation confronts challenges from point sparsity, complex spatiotemporal dynamics, and the difficulty of deriving complete 3D point clouds from sparse temporal information. This paper presents NeuroGauss4D-PCI, which excels at modeling complex non-rigid deformations across varied dynamic scenes. The method begins with an iterative Gaussian cloud soft clustering module, offering structured temporal point cloud representations. The proposed temporal radial basis function Gaussian residual utilizes Gaussian parameter interpolation over time, enabling smooth parameter transitions and capturing temporal residuals of Gaussian distributions. Additionally, a 4D Gaussian deformation field tracks the evolution of these parameters, creating continuous spatiotemporal deformation fields. A 4D neural field transforms low-dimensional spatiotemporal coordinates ($x,y,z,t$) into a high-dimensional latent space. Finally, we adaptively and efficiently fuse the latent features from neural fields and the geometric features from Gaussian deformation fields. NeuroGauss4D-PCI outperforms existing methods in point cloud frame interpolation, delivering leading performance on both object-level (DHB) and large-scale autonomous driving datasets (NL-Drive), with scalability to auto-labeling and point cloud densification tasks. The source code is released at https://github.com/jiangchaokang/NeuroGauss4D-PCI.

cs.CV

3DSFLabelling: Boosting 3D Scene Flow Estimation by Pseudo Auto-labelling

Learning 3D scene flow from LiDAR point clouds presents significant difficulties, including poor generalization from synthetic datasets to real scenes, scarcity of real-world 3D labels, and poor performance on real sparse LiDAR point clouds. We present a novel approach from the perspective of auto-labelling, aiming to generate a large number of 3D scene flow pseudo labels for real-world LiDAR point clouds. Specifically, we employ the assumption of rigid body motion to simulate potential object-level rigid movements in autonomous driving scenarios. By updating different motion attributes for multiple anchor boxes, the rigid motion decomposition is obtained for the whole scene. Furthermore, we developed a novel 3D scene flow data augmentation method for global and local motion. By perfectly synthesizing target point clouds based on augmented motion parameters, we easily obtain lots of 3D scene flow labels in point clouds highly consistent with real scenarios. On multiple real-world datasets including LiDAR KITTI, nuScenes, and Argoverse, our method outperforms all previous supervised and unsupervised methods without requiring manual labelling. Impressively, our method achieves a tenfold reduction in EPE3D metric on the LiDAR KITTI dataset, reducing it from $0.190m$ to a mere $0.008m$ error.

cs.CV

GEDepth: Ground Embedding for Monocular Depth Estimation

Monocular depth estimation is an ill-posed problem as the same 2D image can be projected from infinite 3D scenes. Although the leading algorithms in this field have reported significant improvement, they are essentially geared to the particular compound of pictorial observations and camera parameters (i.e., intrinsics and extrinsics), strongly limiting their generalizability in real-world scenarios. To cope with this challenge, this paper proposes a novel ground embedding module to decouple camera parameters from pictorial cues, thus promoting the generalization capability. Given camera parameters, the proposed module generates the ground depth, which is stacked with the input image and referenced in the final depth prediction. A ground attention is designed in the module to optimally combine ground depth with residual depth. Our ground embedding is highly flexible and lightweight, leading to a plug-in module that is amenable to be integrated into various depth estimation networks. Experiments reveal that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results on popular benchmarks, and more importantly, renders significant generalization improvement on a wide range of cross-domain tests.

cs.CV

iEDA: An Open-Source Intelligent Physical Implementation Toolkit and Library

Open-source EDA shows promising potential in unleashing EDA innovation and lowering the cost of chip design. This paper presents an open-source EDA project, iEDA, aiming for building a basic infrastructure for EDA technology evolution and closing the industrial-academic gap in the EDA area. iEDA now covers the whole flow of physical design (including Floorplan, Placement, CTS, Routing, Timing Optimization etc.), and part of the analysis tools (Static Timing Analysis and Power Analysis). To demonstrate the effectiveness of iEDA, we implement and tape out three chips of different scales (from 700k to 1.5M gates) on different process nodes (110nm and 28nm) with iEDA. iEDA is publicly available from the project home page http://ieda.oscc.cc.

cs.AR

Revealing the supercritical dynamics of dusty plasmas and their liquid-like to gas-like dynamical crossover

Dusty plasmas represent a powerful playground to study the collective dynamics of strongly coupled systems with important interdisciplinary connections to condensed matter physics. Due to the pure Yukawa repulsive interaction between dust particles, dusty plasmas do not display a traditional liquid-vapor phase transition, perfectly matching the definition of a supercritical fluid. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we verify the supercritical nature of dusty plasmas and reveal the existence of a dynamical liquid-like to gas-like crossover which perfectly matches the salient features of the Frenkel line in classical supercritical fluids. We present several diagnostics to locate this dynamical crossover spanning from local atomic connectivity, shear relaxation dynamics, velocity autocorrelation function, heat capacity, and various transport properties. All these different criteria well agree with each other and are able to successfully locate the Frenkel line in both 2D and 3D dusty plasmas. In addition, we propose the unity ratio of the instantaneous transverse sound speed $C_T$ to the average particle speed $\bar{v}_{p}$, i.e., $C_T / \bar{v}_{p} = 1$, as a new diagnostic to identify this dynamical crossover. Finally, we observe an emergent degree of universality in the collective dynamics and transport properties of dusty plasmas as a function of the screening parameter and dimensionality of the system. Intriguingly, the temperature of the dynamical transition is independent of the dimensionality, and it is found to be always $20$ times of the corresponding melting point. Our results open a new path for the study of single particle and collective dynamics in plasmas and their interrelation with supercritical fluids in general.

physics.plasm-ph