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Zijian Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Zijian Zhang.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

Realization of all-band-flat photonic lattices

Flatbands play an important role in correlated quantum matter and have novel applications in photonic lattices. Synthetic magnetic fields and destructive interference in lattices are traditionally used to obtain flatbands. However, such methods can only obtain a few flatbands with most bands remaining dispersive. Here we realize all-band-flat photonic lattices of an arbitrary size by precisely controlling the coupling strengths between lattice sites to mimic those in Fock-state lattices. This allows us to go beyond the perturbative regime of strain engineering and group all eigenmodes in flatbands, which simultaneously achieves high band flatness and large usable bandwidth. We map out the distribution of each flatband in the lattices and selectively excite the eigenmodes with different chiralities. Our method paves a new way in controlling band structure and topology of photonic lattices.

physics.optics↗

Nonlinear vibration of a dipteran flight robot system with rotational geometric nonlinearity

The dipteran flight mechanism of the insects is commonly used to design the nonlinear flight robot system. However, the dynamic response of the click mechanism of the nonlinear robot system with multiple stability still unclear. In this paper, a novel dipteran robot model with click mechanism proposed based on the multiple stability of snap-through buckling. The motion of equation of the nonlinear flight robot system is obtained by using the Euler-Lagrange equation. The nonlinear potential energy, the elastic force, equilibrium bifurcation, as well as equilibrium stability are investigated to show the multiple stability characteristics. The transient sets of bifurcation and persistent set of regions in the system parameter plane and the corresponding phase portraits are obtained with multiple stability of single and double well behaviors. Then, the periodic free vibration response are defined by the analytical solution of three kinds of elliptical functions, as well as the amplitude frequency responses are investigated by numerical integration. Based on the topological equivalent method, the chaotic thresholds of the homo-clinic orbits for the chaotic vibration of harmonic forced robot system are derived to show the chaotic parametric condition. Finally, the prototype of nonlinear flapping robot is manufactured and the experimental system is setup. The nonlinear static moment of force curves, periodic response and dynamic flight vibration of dipteran robot system are carried out. It is shown that the test results are agree well with the theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. Those result have the potential application for the structure design of the efficient flight robot.

cs.RO↗

Nonlinear energy harvesting system with multiple stability

The nonlinear energy harvesting systems of the forced vibration with an electron-mechanical coupling are widely used to capture ambient vibration energy and convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. However, the nonlinear response mechanism of the friction induced vibration (FIV) energy harvesting system with multiple stability and stick-slip motion is still unclear. In the current paper, a novel nonlinear energy harvesting model with multiple stability of single-, double- and triple-well potential is proposed based on V-shaped structure spring and the belt conveying system. The dynamic equations for the energy harvesting system with multiple stability and self-excited friction are established by using Euler-Lagrangian equations. Secondly, the nonlinear restoring force, friction force, and potential energy surfaces for static characteristics of the energy harvesting system are obtained to show the nonlinear varying stiffness, multiple equilibrium points, discontinuous behaviors and multiple well response. Then, the equilibrium surface of bifurcation sets of the autonomous system is given to show the third-order quasi zero stiffness (QZS3), fifth-order quasi zero stiffness (QZS5), double well (DW) and triple well (TW). Furthermore, the response amplitudes of charge, current, voltage and power of the forced electron-mechanical coupled vibration system for QZS3, QZS5, DW and TW are analyzed by using the numerically solution. Finally, a prototype of FIV energy harvesting system is manufactured and the experimental system is setup. The experimental work of static restoring force, damping force and electrical output are well agreeable with the numerical results, which testified the proposed FIV energy harvesting model.

eess.SY↗

Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in h-space of Pre-trained Diffusion Models

We propose the first unsupervised and learning-based method to identify interpretable directions in h-space of pre-trained diffusion models. Our method is derived from an existing technique that operates on the GAN latent space. Specifically, we employ a shift control module that works on h-space of pre-trained diffusion models to manipulate a sample into a shifted version of itself, followed by a reconstructor to reproduce both the type and the strength of the manipulation. By jointly optimizing them, the model will spontaneously discover disentangled and interpretable directions. To prevent the discovery of meaningless and destructive directions, we employ a discriminator to maintain the fidelity of shifted sample. Due to the iterative generative process of diffusion models, our training requires a substantial amount of GPU VRAM to store numerous intermediate tensors for back-propagating gradient. To address this issue, we propose a general VRAM-efficient training algorithm based on gradient checkpointing technique to back-propagate any gradient through the whole generative process, with acceptable occupancy of VRAM and sacrifice of training efficiency. Compared with existing related works on diffusion models, our method inherently identifies global and scalable directions, without necessitating any other complicated procedures. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV↗

MLPST: MLP is All You Need for Spatio-Temporal Prediction

Traffic prediction is a typical spatio-temporal data mining task and has great significance to the public transportation system. Considering the demand for its grand application, we recognize key factors for an ideal spatio-temporal prediction method: efficient, lightweight, and effective. However, the current deep model-based spatio-temporal prediction solutions generally own intricate architectures with cumbersome optimization, which can hardly meet these expectations. To accomplish the above goals, we propose an intuitive and novel framework, MLPST, a pure multi-layer perceptron architecture for traffic prediction. Specifically, we first capture spatial relationships from both local and global receptive fields. Then, temporal dependencies in different intervals are comprehensively considered. Through compact and swift MLP processing, MLPST can well capture the spatial and temporal dependencies while requiring only linear computational complexity, as well as model parameters that are more than an order of magnitude lower than baselines. Extensive experiments validated the superior effectiveness and efficiency of MLPST against advanced baselines, and among models with optimal accuracy, MLPST achieves the best time and space efficiency.

cs.LG↗

Rethinking Sensors Modeling: Hierarchical Information Enhanced Traffic Forecasting

With the acceleration of urbanization, traffic forecasting has become an essential role in smart city construction. In the context of spatio-temporal prediction, the key lies in how to model the dependencies of sensors. However, existing works basically only consider the micro relationships between sensors, where the sensors are treated equally, and their macroscopic dependencies are neglected. In this paper, we argue to rethink the sensor's dependency modeling from two hierarchies: regional and global perspectives. Particularly, we merge original sensors with high intra-region correlation as a region node to preserve the inter-region dependency. Then, we generate representative and common spatio-temporal patterns as global nodes to reflect a global dependency between sensors and provide auxiliary information for spatio-temporal dependency learning. In pursuit of the generality and reality of node representations, we incorporate a Meta GCN to calibrate the regional and global nodes in the physical data space. Furthermore, we devise the cross-hierarchy graph convolution to propagate information from different hierarchies. In a nutshell, we propose a Hierarchical Information Enhanced Spatio-Temporal prediction method, HIEST, to create and utilize the regional dependency and common spatio-temporal patterns. Extensive experiments have verified the leading performance of our HIEST against state-of-the-art baselines. We publicize the code to ease reproducibility.

cs.AI↗

PromptST: Prompt-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Multi-Attribute Prediction

In the era of information explosion, spatio-temporal data mining serves as a critical part of urban management. Considering the various fields demanding attention, e.g., traffic state, human activity, and social event, predicting multiple spatio-temporal attributes simultaneously can alleviate regulatory pressure and foster smart city construction. However, current research can not handle the spatio-temporal multi-attribute prediction well due to the complex relationships between diverse attributes. The key challenge lies in how to address the common spatio-temporal patterns while tackling their distinctions. In this paper, we propose an effective solution for spatio-temporal multi-attribute prediction, PromptST. We devise a spatio-temporal transformer and a parameter-sharing training scheme to address the common knowledge among different spatio-temporal attributes. Then, we elaborate a spatio-temporal prompt tuning strategy to fit the specific attributes in a lightweight manner. Through the pretrain and prompt tuning phases, our PromptST is able to enhance the specific spatio-temoral characteristic capture by prompting the backbone model to fit the specific target attribute while maintaining the learned common knowledge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify that our PromptST attains state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we also prove PromptST owns good transferability on unseen spatio-temporal attributes, which brings promising application potential in urban computing. The implementation code is available to ease reproducibility.

cs.AI↗

Decentralized Threshold Signatures with Dynamically Private Accountability

Threshold signatures are a fundamental cryptographic primitive used in many practical applications. As proposed by Boneh and Komlo (CRYPTO'22), TAPS is a threshold signature that is a hybrid of privacy and accountability. It enables a combiner to combine t signature shares while revealing nothing about the threshold t or signing quorum to the public and asks a tracer to track a signature to the quorum that generates it. However, TAPS has three disadvantages: it 1) structures upon a centralized model, 2) assumes that both combiner and tracer are honest, and 3) leaves the tracing unnotarized and static. In this work, we introduce Decentralized, Threshold, dynamically Accountable and Private Signature (DeTAPS) that provides decentralized combining and tracing, enhanced privacy against untrusted combiners (tracers), and notarized and dynamic tracing. Specifically, we adopt Dynamic Threshold Public-Key Encryption (DTPKE) to dynamically notarize the tracing process, design non-interactive zero knowledge proofs to achieve public verifiability of notaries, and utilize the Key-Aggregate Searchable Encryption to bridge TAPS and DTPKE so as to awaken the notaries securely and efficiently. In addition, we formalize the definitions and security requirements for DeTAPS. Then we present a generic construction and formally prove its security and privacy. To evaluate the performance, we build a prototype based on SGX2 and Ethereum.

cs.CR↗

XFlow: Benchmarking Flow Behaviors over Graphs

The occurrence of diffusion on a graph is a prevalent and significant phenomenon, as evidenced by the spread of rumors, influenza-like viruses, smart grid failures, and similar events. Comprehending the behaviors of flow is a formidable task, due to the intricate interplay between the distribution of seeds that initiate flow propagation, the propagation model, and the topology of the graph. The study of networks encompasses a diverse range of academic disciplines, including mathematics, physics, social science, and computer science. This interdisciplinary nature of network research is characterized by a high degree of specialization and compartmentalization, and the cooperation facilitated by them is inadequate. From a machine learning standpoint, there is a deficiency in a cohesive platform for assessing algorithms across various domains. One of the primary obstacles to current research in this field is the absence of a comprehensive curated benchmark suite to study the flow behaviors under network scenarios. To address this disparity, we propose the implementation of a novel benchmark suite that encompasses a variety of tasks, baseline models, graph datasets, and evaluation tools. In addition, we present a comprehensive analytical framework that offers a generalized approach to numerous flow-related tasks across diverse domains, serving as a blueprint and roadmap. Drawing upon the outcomes of our empirical investigation, we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of current foundational models, and we underscore potential avenues for further study. The datasets, code, and baseline models have been made available for the public at: https://github.com/XGraphing/XFlow

cs.SI↗

ClickINC: In-network Computing as a Service in Heterogeneous Programmable Data-center Networks

In-Network Computing (INC) has found many applications for performance boosts or cost reduction. However, given heterogeneous devices, diverse applications, and multi-path network typologies, it is cumbersome and error-prone for application developers to effectively utilize the available network resources and gain predictable benefits without impeding normal network functions. Previous work is oriented to network operators more than application developers. We develop ClickINC to streamline the INC programming and deployment using a unified and automated workflow. ClickINC provides INC developers a modular programming abstractions, without concerning to the states of the devices and the network topology. We describe the ClickINC framework, model, language, workflow, and corresponding algorithms. Experiments on both an emulator and a prototype system demonstrate its feasibility and benefits.

cs.NI↗

XMM-Newton Observations of Two Archival X-ray Weak Type 1 Quasars: Obscuration Induced X-ray Weakness and Variability

We report \hbox{XMM-Newton} observations of two examples of an unclassified type of \hbox{X-ray} weak quasars from the \citet{2020ApJ...900..141P} survey of \hbox{X-ray} weak quasars in the Chandra archive, SDSS J083116.62+321329.6 at $z=1.797$ and SDSS J142339.87+042041.1 at $z=1.702$. They do not belong to the known populations of \hbox{X-ray} weak quasars that show broad absorption lines, weak ultraviolet (UV) broad emission lines, or red optical/UV continua. Instead, they display typical quasar UV spectra and spectral energy distributions. In the \hbox{XMM-Newton} observations, both quasars show nominal levels of \hbox{X-ray} emission with typical quasar \hbox{X-ray} spectral shapes (\hbox{power-law} photon indices of $1.99^{+0.27}_{-0.23}$ and $1.86^{+0.15}_{-0.14}$), displaying strong \hbox{X-ray} variability compared to the archival Chandra data (variability factors of $4.0^{+1.6}_{-1.4}$ and $9.0^{+7.4}_{-3.8}$ in terms of the 2 keV flux density). Simultaneous optical (rest-frame UV) spectra indicate no strong variability compared to the archival spectra. Long-term optical/UV and infrared light curves do not show any substantial variability either. We consider that the \hbox{X-ray} weakness observed in the Chandra data is due to \hbox{X-ray} obscuration from a small-scale dust-free absorber, likely related to accretion-disk winds. Such \hbox{X-ray} weak/absorbed states are probably rare in typical quasars, and thus both targets recovered to \hbox{X-ray} nominal-strength states in the \hbox{XMM-Newton} observations.

astro-ph.GA↗

Pattern-Division Multiplexing for Multi-User Continuous-Aperture MIMO

In recent years, thanks to the advances in meta-materials, the concept of continuous-aperture MIMO (CAP-MIMO) is reinvestigated to achieve improved communication performance with limited antenna apertures. Unlike the classical MIMO composed of discrete antennas, CAP-MIMO has a quasi-continuous antenna surface, which is expected to generate any current distribution (i.e., pattern) and induce controllable spatial electromagnetic (EM) waves. In this way, the information is directly modulated on the EM waves, which makes it promising to approach the ultimate capacity of finite apertures. The pattern design is the key factor to determine the communication performance of CAP-MIMO, but it has not been well studied in the literature. In this paper, we develop pattern-division multiplexing (PDM) to design the patterns for CAP-MIMO. Specifically, we first study and model a typical multi-user CAP-MIMO system, which allows us to formulate the sum-rate maximization problem. Then, we develop a general PDM technique to transform the design of the continuous pattern functions to the design of their projection lengths on finite orthogonal bases, which can overcome the challenge of functional programming. Utilizing PDM, we further propose a block coordinate descent (BCD) based pattern design scheme to solve the formulated sum-rate maximization problem. Simulation results show that, the sum-rate achieved by the proposed scheme is higher than that achieved by benchmark schemes, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the developed PDM for CAP-MIMO.

cs.IT↗

Detector Guidance for Multi-Object Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive performance in text-to-image generation. They utilize a text encoder and cross-attention blocks to infuse textual information into images at a pixel level. However, their capability to generate images with text containing multiple objects is still restricted. Previous works identify the problem of information mixing in the CLIP text encoder and introduce the T5 text encoder or incorporate strong prior knowledge to assist with the alignment. We find that mixing problems also occur on the image side and in the cross-attention blocks. The noisy images can cause different objects to appear similar, and the cross-attention blocks inject information at a pixel level, leading to leakage of global object understanding and resulting in object mixing. In this paper, we introduce Detector Guidance (DG), which integrates a latent object detection model to separate different objects during the generation process. DG first performs latent object detection on cross-attention maps (CAMs) to obtain object information. Based on this information, DG then masks conflicting prompts and enhances related prompts by manipulating the following CAMs. We evaluate the effectiveness of DG using Stable Diffusion on COCO, CC, and a novel multi-related object benchmark, MRO. Human evaluations demonstrate that DG provides an 8-22\% advantage in preventing the amalgamation of conflicting concepts and ensuring that each object possesses its unique region without any human involvement and additional iterations. Our implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/luping-liu/Detector-Guidance}.

cs.CV↗

Hierarchical Beam Training for Extremely Large-Scale MIMO: From Far-Field to Near-Field

Extremely large-scale MIMO (XL-MIMO) is a promising technique for future 6G communications. The sharp increase in the number of antennas causes electromagnetic propagation to change from far-field to near-field. Due to the near-field effect, the exhaustive near-field beam training at all angles and distances requires very high overhead. The improved fast near-field beam training scheme based on time-delay structure can reduce the overhead, but it suffers from very high hardware costs and energy consumption caused by time-delay circuits. In this paper, we propose a near-field two dimension (2D) hierarchical beam training scheme to reduce the overhead without the need for extra hardware circuits. Specifically, we first formulate the multi-resolution near-field codewords design problem covering different angle and distance coverages. Next, inspired by phase retrieval problems in digital holography imaging technology, we propose a Gerchberg-Saxton (GS)-based algorithm to acquire the theoretical codeword by considering the ideal fully digital architecture. Based on the theoretical codeword, an alternating optimization algorithm is then proposed to acquire the practical codeword by considering the hybrid digital-analog architecture. Finally, with the help of multi-resolution codebooks, we propose a near-field 2D hierarchical beam training scheme to significantly reduce the training overhead, which is verified by extensive simulation results.

cs.IT↗

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for 6G: Nine Fundamental Issues and One Critical Problem

Thanks to the recent advances in metamaterials, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as a promising technology for future 6G wireless communications. Benefiting from its high array gain, low cost, and low power consumption, RISs are expected to greatly enlarge signal coverage, improve system capacity, and increase energy efficiency. In this article, we systematically overview the emerging RIS technology with the focus on its key basics, nine fundamental issues, and one critical problem. Specifically, we first explain the RIS basics, including its working principles, hardware structures, and potential benefits for communications. Based on these basics, nine fundamental issues of RISs, such as ``What's the differences between RISs and massive MIMO?'' and ``Is RIS really intelligent?'', are explicitly addressed to elaborate its technical features, distinguish it from existing technologies, and clarify some misunderstandings in the literature. Then, one critical problem of RISs is revealed that, due to the ``multiplicative fading'' effect, existing passive RISs can hardly achieve visible performance gains in many communication scenarios with strong direct links. To address this critical problem, a potential solution called active RISs is introduced, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by numerical simulations.

cs.IT↗

Polarization-Orthogonal Nondegenerate Plasmonic Higher-Order Topological States

Photonic topological states, providing light-manipulation approaches in robust manners, have attracted intense attention. Connecting photonic topological states with far-field degrees of freedom(DoFs) has given rise to fruitful phenomena. Recently emerged higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs), hosting boundary states two or more dimensions lower than those of bulk, offer new paradigms to localize/transport light topologically in extended dimensionalities. However, photonic HOTIs have not been related to DoFs of radiation fields yet. Here, we report the observation of polarization-orthogonal second-order topological corner states at different frequencies on a designer-plasmonic Kagome metasurface in the far field.Such phenomenon stands on two mechanisms, i.e., projecting the far-field polarizations to the intrinsic parity DoFs of lattice modes and the parity splitting of the plasmonic corner states in spectra. We theoretically and numerically show that the parity splitting originates from the underlying inter-orbital coupling. Both near-field and far-field experiments verify the polarization-orthogonal nondegeneratesecond-order topological corner states. These results promise applications in robust optical single photon emitters and multiplexed photonic devices.

physics.optics↗

Dual Personalization on Federated Recommendation

Federated recommendation is a new Internet service architecture that aims to provide privacy-preserving recommendation services in federated settings. Existing solutions are used to combine distributed recommendation algorithms and privacy-preserving mechanisms. Thus it inherently takes the form of heavyweight models at the server and hinders the deployment of on-device intelligent models to end-users. This paper proposes a novel Personalized Federated Recommendation (PFedRec) framework to learn many user-specific lightweight models to be deployed on smart devices rather than a heavyweight model on a server. Moreover, we propose a new dual personalization mechanism to effectively learn fine-grained personalization on both users and items. The overall learning process is formulated into a unified federated optimization framework. Specifically, unlike previous methods that share exactly the same item embeddings across users in a federated system, dual personalization allows mild finetuning of item embeddings for each user to generate user-specific views for item representations which can be integrated into existing federated recommendation methods to gain improvements immediately. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of PFedRec and the dual personalization mechanism. Moreover, we provide visualizations and in-depth analysis of the personalization techniques in item embedding, which shed novel insights on the design of recommender systems in federated settings. The code is available.

cs.IR↗

Zero-Knowledge Proof-based Practical Federated Learning on Blockchain

Since the concern of privacy leakage extremely discourages user participation in sharing data, federated learning has gradually become a promising technique for both academia and industry for achieving collaborative learning without leaking information about the local data. Unfortunately, most federated learning solutions cannot efficiently verify the execution of each participant's local machine learning model and protect the privacy of user data, simultaneously. In this article, we first propose a Zero-Knowledge Proof-based Federated Learning (ZKP-FL) scheme on blockchain. It leverages zero-knowledge proof for both the computation of local data and the aggregation of local model parameters, aiming to verify the computation process without requiring the plaintext of the local data. We further propose a Practical ZKP-FL (PZKP-FL) scheme to support fraction and non-linear operations. Specifically, we explore a Fraction-Integer mapping function, and use Taylor expansion to efficiently handle non-linear operations while maintaining the accuracy of the federated learning model. We also analyze the security of PZKP-FL. Performance analysis demonstrates that the whole running time of the PZKP-FL scheme is approximately less than one minute in parallel execution.

cs.CR↗