arXiv subjects

Zijian Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Zijian Liang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Synonymous Variational Perspective on the Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff

The fundamental limit of natural signal compression has traditionally been characterized by classical rate-distortion (RD) theory through the tradeoff between coding rate and reconstruction distortion, while the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) framework introduces a divergence-based measure of perceptual quality as a modeling principle, leaving its theoretical origin unclear. In this paper, motivated by a synonymity-based semantic information perspective, we reformulate perceptual reconstruction as recovering any admissible sample within an ideal synonymous set (synset) associated with the source, rather than the source sample itself, and establish a synonymous source coding architecture. On this basis, we develop a synonymous variational inference (SVI) analysis framework with a synonymous variational lower bound (SVLBO) for tractable analysis of synset-oriented compression. Within this framework, we establish a synonymity-perception consistency principle, showing that optimal identification of semantic information is theoretically consistent with perceptual optimization. Based on this result, we further derive a tight-bound synonymous source coding rate characterization and show that its Jensen-limit relaxation leads to a synonymous rate-distortion-perception form for practical optimization. These analytical results show that the distributional divergence term arises naturally from the synset-based reconstruction objective, clarify its compatibility with existing RDP formulations and classical RD theory, and suggest the potential advantages of synonymous source coding.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim for general robot learning by aligning action as a modality within powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VLAs rely on end-to-end supervision to implicitly enable the action decoding process to learn task-relevant features. However, without explicit guidance, these models often overfit to spurious correlations, such as visual shortcuts or environmental noise, limiting their generalization. In this paper, we introduce GuidedVLA, a framework designed to manually guide the action generation to focus on task-relevant factors. Our core insight is to treat the action decoder not as a monolithic learner, but as an assembly of functional components. Individual attention heads are supervised by manually defined auxiliary signals to capture distinct factors. As an initial study, we instantiate this paradigm with three specialized heads: object grounding, spatial geometry, and temporal skill logic. Across simulation and real-robot experiments, GuidedVLA improves success rates in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings compared to strong VLA baselines. Finally, we show that the quality of these specialized factors correlates positively with task performance and that our mechanism yields decoupled, high-quality features. Our results suggest that explicitly guiding action-decoder learning is a promising direction for building more robust and general VLA models.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Operator algebra and algorithmic construction of boundaries and defects in (2+1)D topological Pauli stabilizer codes

Quantum low-density parity-check codes, such as the Kitaev toric code and bivariate bicycle codes, are often defined with periodic boundary conditions, which are difficult to realize in physical systems. In this paper, we present an algorithm for constructing all gapped boundaries and defects of two-dimensional Pauli stabilizer codes. Using the operator algebra formalism, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between the topological data, such as anyon fusion rules and topological spins, of two-dimensional bulk stabilizer codes and one-dimensional boundary anomalous subsystem codes. To make the operator algebra computationally accessible, we adapt Laurent polynomials and convert the tasks into matrix operations, e.g., the Hermite normal form for obtaining boundary anyons and the Smith normal form for determining fusion rules. This approach enables computers to automatically generate all possible gapped boundaries and defects for topological Pauli stabilizer codes through boundary anyon condensation and topological order completion. This streamlines the analysis of surface codes and associated logical operations for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Our algorithm applies to $\mathbb{Z}_d$ qudits for both prime and nonprime $d$, enabling exploration of topological phases beyond the Kitaev toric code. We have applied the algorithm and explicitly demonstrated the lattice constructions of 2 boundaries and 6 defects in the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ toric code, 3 boundaries and 22 defects in the $\mathbb{Z}_4$ toric code, 1 boundary and 2 defects in the double semion code, 1 boundary and 22 defects in the six-semion code, 6 boundaries and 270 defects in the color code, and 6 defects in the anomalous three-fermion code. Finally, we study the boundaries of bivariate bicycle codes, showing that they exhibit large logical dimensions and anyons with long translation periods.

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arXiv2026

Topological subsystem bivariate bicycle codes with four-qubit check operators

High-rate bivariate bicycle (BB) codes are promising low-overhead quantum memories, but their stabilizer checks typically have weight $6$ or higher, making syndrome extraction challenging. We introduce subsystem bivariate bicycle (SBB) codes, a translation-invariant CSS subsystem construction that realizes BB-code logical structure using local weight-$4$ gauge measurements. Their stabilizer syndromes are inferred by multiplying the corresponding gauge outcomes. We further show that nonlocal stabilizers in translation-invariant CSS subsystem codes can be detected using a determinantal-ideal criterion based on the gauge-operator commutation matrix. When this criterion excludes nonlocal stabilizers, a finite-depth Clifford circuit decouples gauge qubits and identifies the protected subsystem with a corresponding BB stabilizer code. An SBB code is topological, meaning that it has no nontrivial local logical operators, if and only if the corresponding BB code is topological. A finite search yields low-overhead examples including $[[27,6,3]]$, $[[75,10,5]]$, and $[[108,12,6]]$; the latter encodes six times more logical qubits than a subsystem surface code at the same block length and distance. These results show how gauge degrees of freedom can make high-rate BB logical structure compatible with local weight-$4$ syndrome extraction.

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arXiv2026

Resolving spurious topological entanglement entropy in stabilizer codes

Topological entanglement entropy (TEE) is a key diagnostic of long-range entanglement in two-dimensional gapped phases of matter, but it can suffer from spurious contributions that overestimate the total quantum dimension of the underlying topological order. In this work, we identify the microscopic origin of spurious TEE and introduce a concave partition for computing the Levin-Wen TEE of translation-invariant stabilizer codes of prime-dimensional qudits. We rigorously prove that this prescription is free of spurious contributions. As a complementary probe, we study bivariate bicycle codes on a bipartite cylinder and show that the entanglement entropy depends sensitively on the cylinder circumference, revealing topological frustration of the underlying anyons.

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arXiv2026

AssemMate: Graph-Based LLM for Robotic Assembly Assistance

Large Language Model (LLM)-based robotic assembly assistance has gained significant research attention. It requires the injection of domain-specific knowledge to guide the assembly process through natural language interaction with humans. Despite some progress, existing methods represent knowledge in the form of natural language text. Due to the long context and redundant content, they struggle to meet the robots' requirements for real-time and precise reasoning. In order to bridge this gap, we present AssemMate, which utilizes the graph\textemdash a concise and accurate form of knowledge representation\textemdash as input. This graph-based LLM enables knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), supporting human-robot interaction and assembly task planning for specific products. Beyond interactive QA, AssemMate also supports sensing stacked scenes and executing grasping to assist with assembly. Specifically, a self-supervised Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) encodes knowledge graph entities and relations into a latent space and aligns them with LLM's representation, enabling the LLM to understand graph information. In addition, a vision-enhanced strategy is employed to address stacked scenes in grasping. Through training and evaluation, AssemMate outperforms existing methods, achieving 6.4\% higher accuracy, 3 times faster inference, and 28 times shorter context length, while demonstrating strong generalization ability on random graphs. And our approach further demonstrates superiority through robotic grasping experiments in both simulated and real-world settings. More details can be found on the project page: https://github.com/cristina304/AssemMate.git

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Generalized $\mathbb{Z}_p$ toric codes as qudit low-density parity-check codes

We study two-dimensional translation-invariant CSS stabilizer codes over prime-dimensional qudits on the square lattice under twisted boundary conditions, generalizing the Kitaev $\mathbb{Z}_p$ toric code by augmenting each stabilizer with two additional qudits. Using the Laurent-polynomial formalism, we adapt the Gröbner basis to compute the logical dimension $k$ efficiently, without explicitly constructing large parity-check matrices. We then perform a systematic search over various stabilizer realizations and lattice geometries for $p\in\{3,5,7,11\}$, identifying qudit low-density parity-check codes with the optimal finite-size performance. Representative examples include $[[242,10,22]]_3$ and $[[120,6,20]]_{11}$, both achieving $k d^{2}/n=20$. Across the searched regime, the best observed $k d^{2}$ at fixed $n$ increases with $p$, with an empirical relation $k d^{2} = 0.0541 \, n^{2}\ln p + 3.84 \, n$, compatible with a Bravyi--Poulin--Terhal-type tradeoff when the interaction range grows with system size.

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arXiv2026

A Theoretical Framework for Rate-Distortion Limits in Learned Image Compression

We present a novel systematic theoretical framework to analyze the rate-distortion (R-D) limits of learned image compression. While recent neural codecs have achieved remarkable empirical results, their distance from the information-theoretic limit remains unclear. Our work addresses this gap by decomposing the R-D performance loss into three key components: variance estimation, quantization strategy, and context modeling. First, we derive the optimal latent variance as the second moment under a Gaussian assumption, providing a principled alternative to hyperprior-based estimation. Second, we quantify the gap between uniform quantization and the Gaussian test channel derived from the reverse water-filling theorem. Third, we extend our framework to include context modeling, and demonstrate that accurate mean prediction yields substantial entropy reduction. Unlike prior R-D estimators, our method provides a structurally interpretable perspective that aligns with real compression modules and enables fine-grained analysis. Through joint simulation and end-to-end training, we derive a tight and actionable approximation of the theoretical R-D limits, offering new insights into the design of more efficient learned compression systems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Self-dual bivariate bicycle codes with transversal Clifford gates

Bivariate bicycle codes are promising candidates for high-threshold, low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum memories. Meanwhile, color codes are the most prominent self-dual CSS codes, supporting transversal Clifford gates that have been demonstrated experimentally. In this work, we combine these advantages and introduce a broad family of self-dual bivariate bicycle codes. These codes achieve higher encoding rates than surface and color codes while admitting transversal CNOT, Hadamard, and $S$ gates. In particular, we enumerate weight-8 self-dual bivariate bicycle codes with up to $n \leq 200$ physical qubits, realized on twisted tori that enhance code distance and improve stabilizer locality. Representative examples include codes with parameters $[[n,k,d]]$: $[[16,4,4]]$, $[[40,6,6]]$, $[[56,6,8]]$, $[[64,8,8]]$, $[[120,8,12]]$, $[[152,6,16]]$, and $[[160,8,16]]$.

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arXiv2025

DSM: Constructing a Diverse Semantic Map for 3D Visual Grounding

Effective scene representation is critical for the visual grounding ability of representations, yet existing methods for 3D Visual Grounding are often constrained. They either only focus on geometric and visual cues, or, like traditional 3D scene graphs, lack the multi-dimensional attributes needed for complex reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Diverse Semantic Map (DSM) framework, a novel scene representation framework that enriches robust geometric models with a spectrum of VLM-derived semantics, including appearance, physical properties, and affordances. The DSM is first constructed online by fusing multi-view observations within a temporal sliding window, creating a persistent and comprehensive world model. Building on this foundation, we propose DSM-Grounding, a new paradigm that shifts grounding from free-form VLM queries to a structured reasoning process over the semantic-rich map, markedly improving accuracy and interpretability. Extensive evaluations validate our approach's superiority. On the ScanRefer benchmark, DSM-Grounding achieves a state-of-the-art 59.06% overall accuracy of IoU@0.5, surpassing others by 10%. In semantic segmentation, our DSM attains a 67.93% F-mIoU, outperforming all baselines, including privileged ones. Furthermore, successful deployment on physical robots for complex navigation and grasping tasks confirms the framework's practical utility in real-world scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Planar quantum low-density parity-check codes with open boundaries

Although high-threshold and low-overhead quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes, such as bivariate bicycle (BB) codes, can reduce the physical-qubit cost by an order of magnitude compared to the Kitaev toric code, their torus layout remains difficult for physical implementation. In this work, we introduce the first systematic procedure to convert BB codes into fully planar, open-boundary qLDPC codes, preserving their performance. We present planar code families with logical dimensions $6 \leq k\leq13$, e.g., $[[78, 6, 6]]$, $[[107, 7, 7]]$, $[[268, 8, 12]]$, $[[405, 9, 15]]$, $[[348, 10, 13]]$, $[[450, 11, 15]]$, $[[386, 12, 12]]$, $[[362, 13, 11]]$, all with geometrically local weight-6 stabilizers. Allowing weight-8 stabilizers produces a $[[282,12,14]]$ code, exhibiting an efficiency metric ($kd^2/n$) an order of magnitude higher than the surface code. The construction combines boundary anyon condensation with the ``lattice grafting'' optimization, yielding high-performance qLDPC codes natively compatible with planar hardware architectures. It also uncovers Sierpinski-type fractal logical operators whose distance scales with the fractal area on finite lattices. These planar qLDPC codes provide an implementable route to resource-efficient, high-threshold fault tolerance and a flexible framework for future code design on realistic two-dimensional hardware.

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arXiv2025

Way to Build Native AI-driven 6G Air Interface: Principles, Roadmap, and Outlook

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to serve as a foundational capability across the entire lifecycle of 6G networks, spanning design, deployment, and operation. This article proposes a native AI-driven air interface architecture built around two core characteristics: compression and adaptation. On one hand, compression enables the system to understand and extract essential semantic information from the source data, focusing on task relevance rather than symbol-level accuracy. On the other hand, adaptation allows the air interface to dynamically transmit semantic information across diverse tasks, data types, and channel conditions, ensuring scalability and robustness. This article first introduces the native AI-driven air interface architecture, then discusses representative enabling methodologies, followed by a case study on semantic communication in 6G non-terrestrial networks. Finally, it presents a forward-looking discussion on the future of native AI in 6G, outlining key challenges and research opportunities.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Anyon Theory and Topological Frustration of High-Efficiency Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes offer a promising path to low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation but lack systematic strategies for exploration. In this Letter, we establish a topological framework for studying the bivariate-bicycle codes, a prominent class of QLDPC codes tailored for real-world quantum hardware. Our framework enables the investigation of these codes through universal properties of topological orders. In addition to efficient characterizations using Gröbner bases, we also introduce a novel algebraic-geometric approach based on the Bernstein--Khovanskii--Kushnirenko theorem. This approach allows us to analytically determine how the topological order varies with the generic choices of bivariate-bicycle codes under toric layouts. Novel phenomena are unveiled, including topological frustration, where ground-state degeneracy on a torus deviates from the total anyon number, and quasi-fractonic mobility, where anyon movement violates energy conservation. We demonstrate their intrinsic link to symmetry-enriched topological orders and derive an efficient method for generating finite-size codes. Furthermore, we extend the connection between anyons and logical operators using Koszul complex theory. Our Letter provides a rigorous theoretical basis for exploring the fault tolerance of QLDPC codes and deepens the interplay among topological order, quantum error correction, and advanced algebraic structures.

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arXiv2025

Extracting topological orders of generalized Pauli stabilizer codes in two dimensions

In this paper, we introduce an algorithm for extracting topological data from translation invariant generalized Pauli stabilizer codes in two-dimensional systems, focusing on the analysis of anyon excitations and string operators. The algorithm applies to $\mathbb{Z}_d$ qudits, including instances where $d$ is a nonprime number. This capability allows the identification of topological orders that differ from the $\mathbb{Z}_d$ toric codes. It extends our understanding beyond the established theorem that Pauli stabilizer codes for $\mathbb{Z}_p$ qudits (with $p$ being a prime) are equivalent to finite copies of $\mathbb{Z}_p$ toric codes and trivial stabilizers. The algorithm is designed to determine all anyons and their string operators, enabling the computation of their fusion rules, topological spins, and braiding statistics. The method converts the identification of topological orders into computational tasks, including Gaussian elimination, the Hermite normal form, and the Smith normal form of truncated Laurent polynomials. Furthermore, the algorithm provides a systematic approach for studying quantum error-correcting codes. We apply it to various codes, such as self-dual CSS quantum codes modified from the 2d honeycomb color code and non-CSS quantum codes that contain the double semion topological order or the six-semion topological order.

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arXiv2025

Generalized toric codes on twisted tori for quantum error correction

The Kitaev toric code is widely considered one of the leading candidates for error correction in fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, direct methods to increase its logical dimensions, such as lattice surgery or introducing punctures, often incur prohibitive overheads. In this work, we introduce a ring-theoretic approach for efficiently analyzing topological CSS codes in two dimensions, enabling the exploration of generalized toric codes with larger logical dimensions on twisted tori. Using Gröbner bases, we simplify stabilizer syndromes to efficiently identify anyon excitations and their geometric periodicities, even under twisted periodic boundary conditions. Since the properties of the codes are determined by the anyons, this approach allows us to directly compute the logical dimensions without constructing large parity-check matrices. Our approach provides a unified method for finding new quantum error-correcting codes and exhibiting their underlying topological orders via the Laurent polynomial ring. This framework naturally applies to bivariate bicycle codes. For example, we construct optimal weight-6 generalized toric codes on twisted tori with parameters $[[ n, k, d ]]$ for $n \leq 400$, yielding novel codes such as $[[120,8,12]]$, $[[186,10,14]]$, $[[210,10,16]]$, $[[248, 10, 18]]$, $[[254, 14, 16]]$, $[[294, 10, 20]]$, $[[310, 10, \leq 22]]$, and $[[340, 16, 18]]$. Moreover, we present a new realization of the $[[360, 12, \leq 24]]$ quantum code using the $(3,3)$-bivariate bicycle code on a twisted torus defined by the basis vectors $(0,30)$ and $(6,6)$, improving stabilizer locality relative to the previous construction. These results highlight the power of the topological order perspective in advancing the design and theoretical understanding of quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes.

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arXiv2025

Synonymous Variational Inference for Perceptual Image Compression

Recent contributions of semantic information theory reveal the set-element relationship between semantic and syntactic information, represented as synonymous relationships. In this paper, we propose a synonymous variational inference (SVI) method based on this synonymity viewpoint to re-analyze the perceptual image compression problem. It takes perceptual similarity as a typical synonymous criterion to build an ideal synonymous set (Synset), and approximate the posterior of its latent synonymous representation with a parametric density by minimizing a partial semantic KL divergence. This analysis theoretically proves that the optimization direction of perception image compression follows a triple tradeoff that can cover the existing rate-distortion-perception schemes. Additionally, we introduce synonymous image compression (SIC), a new image compression scheme that corresponds to the analytical process of SVI, and implement a progressive SIC codec to fully leverage the model's capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate comparable rate-distortion-perception performance using a single progressive SIC codec, thus verifying the effectiveness of our proposed analysis method.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Visual Agentic Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

A key trend in Large Reasoning Models (e.g., OpenAI's o3) is the native agentic ability to use external tools such as web browsers for searching and writing/executing code for image manipulation to think with images. In the open-source research community, while significant progress has been made in language-only agentic abilities such as function calling and tool integration, the development of multi-modal agentic capabilities that involve truly thinking with images, and their corresponding benchmarks, are still less explored. This work highlights the effectiveness of Visual Agentic Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-ARFT) for enabling flexible and adaptive reasoning abilities for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). With Visual-ARFT, open-source LVLMs gain the ability to browse websites for real-time information updates and write code to manipulate and analyze input images through cropping, rotation, and other image processing techniques. We also present a Multi-modal Agentic Tool Bench (MAT) with two settings (MAT-Search and MAT-Coding) designed to evaluate LVLMs' agentic search and coding abilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that Visual-ARFT outperforms its baseline by +18.6% F1 / +13.0% EM on MAT-Coding and +10.3% F1 / +8.7% EM on MAT-Search, ultimately surpassing GPT-4o. Visual-ARFT also achieves +29.3 F1% / +25.9% EM gains on existing multi-hop QA benchmarks such as 2Wiki and HotpotQA, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities. Our findings suggest that Visual-ARFT offers a promising path toward building robust and generalizable multimodal agents.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

MMDU: A Multi-Turn Multi-Image Dialog Understanding Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for LVLMs

Generating natural and meaningful responses to communicate with multi-modal human inputs is a fundamental capability of Large Vision-Language Models(LVLMs). While current open-source LVLMs demonstrate promising performance in simplified scenarios such as single-turn single-image input, they fall short in real-world conversation scenarios such as following instructions in a long context history with multi-turn and multi-images. Existing LVLM benchmarks primarily focus on single-choice questions or short-form responses, which do not adequately assess the capabilities of LVLMs in real-world human-AI interaction applications. Therefore, we introduce MMDU, a comprehensive benchmark, and MMDU-45k, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset, designed to evaluate and improve LVLMs' abilities in multi-turn and multi-image conversations. We employ the clustering algorithm to ffnd the relevant images and textual descriptions from the open-source Wikipedia and construct the question-answer pairs by human annotators with the assistance of the GPT-4o model. MMDU has a maximum of 18k image+text tokens, 20 images, and 27 turns, which is at least 5x longer than previous benchmarks and poses challenges to current LVLMs. Our in-depth analysis of 15 representative LVLMs using MMDU reveals that open-source LVLMs lag behind closed-source counterparts due to limited conversational instruction tuning data. We demonstrate that ffne-tuning open-source LVLMs on MMDU-45k signiffcantly address this gap, generating longer and more accurate conversations, and improving scores on MMDU and existing benchmarks (MMStar: +1.1%, MathVista: +1.5%, ChartQA:+1.2%). Our contributions pave the way for bridging the gap between current LVLM models and real-world application demands. This project is available at https://github.com/Liuziyu77/MMDU.

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