arXiv subjects

Ziwen Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ziwen Zhang.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Evidence for the transformation from lenticular to spiral galaxies

It is widely accepted that late-type galaxies, such as spirals, evolve into early-type systems, including elliptical and lenticular galaxies, through galaxy mergers and violent disk instability processes. Throughout this morphological transformation, star formation is typically suppressed by quenching mechanisms whose detailed nature remains the subject of active investigation. Here, we present compelling evidence for an evolutionary pathway that proceeds in the reverse direction. Using the integral field unit observations, we identify a population of spiral galaxies hosting quenched central cores (QCCs). These galaxies exhibit bimodal distributions in both their stellar population properties and their dynamical properties, along with sharp changes in radial gradients near the QCC boundary. These results indicate that the QCCs and the surrounding outer disks formed at distinct cosmic epochs and through different physical processes. Remarkably, QCCs closely resemble quiescent early-type galaxies, particularly lenticular galaxies, in their mass-size and mass-velocity dispersion scaling relations, as well as in their stellar population demographics and internal kinematics. These findings provide strong support for a rejuvenation scenario in which spiral disks are reassembled around pre-existing quiescent lenticular or early-type systems. Moreover, we show that such rejuvenation, accompanied by a reverse morphological transformation from early- to late-type appearance, is quite common. This indicates that quenching in galaxies is not invariably a terminal state and can be reversed under appropriate conditions.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

When Good Equations Get Bad Scores: Improving Symbolic Regression Through Better Parameter Optimization

Symbolic Regression (SR) plays a central role in scientific knowledge discovery by distilling mathematical equations from observational data. Most existing SR methods function within a bi-level optimization framework: an outer loop that searches for the discrete equation structure, and an inner loop that optimizes the continuous parameters of that structure. Crucially, parameter-fitting quality directly determines a structure's score and thus the outer-loop search. However, nonlinear operators make the inner loop highly non-convex, and budget-driven reliance on fast local solvers (e.g., BFGS) often yields poor local minima and underestimated scores for correct structures. This ``Good Structure, Bad Score'' phenomenon becomes a key bottleneck, degrading efficiency and misguiding the search away from the true equation. To resolve this, we propose SAGE-Fit (Structure-Aware and Semantics-Guided Evaluator for Symbolic Regression), an SR-native fitting framework that exploits the dual native priors of symbolic expressions. By capitalizing on the structural and semantic priors unique to SR, we design tailored modules for each property, thereby effectively mitigating this optimization bottleneck. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach, as a plug-and-play module, significantly enhances evaluation fidelity and universally improves the performance of various SR systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Satellite quenching by radio jets of central galaxies in galaxy groups

Feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) is now recognized as a key component of galaxy formation models. It plays a central role in regulating the growth and quenching of galaxies in the center of groups. However, the impact of AGN feedback from central galaxies on satellite galaxies remains largely unexplored. Here based on the largest sample to date of radio AGNs in galaxy groups (Yang et al. 2007) and a comprehensive consideration of multiple physical parameters that may influence the star formation of satellite galaxies, we demonstrate that the quiescent satellite fraction around radio AGNs is higher than that around normal galaxies. The most significant enhancement is observed around AGNs with large radio lobes. These findings demonstrate that the impact of kinetic AGN feedback beyond their host galaxies to their satellites. These results provide novel insights into the physical origins of some long-standing puzzles in extragalactic astronomy, including, e.g., galactic conformity and the strong small-scale clustering of quiescent galaxies.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

Benchmarking the Limits of In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Ad-Hoc Teamwork

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) has enabled foundation agents to adapt instantaneously to novel tasks, yet its efficacy in Ad-Hoc Teamwork (AHT)-where coordination with unknown partners is required-remains unexplored. To rigorously evaluate this, we introduce a large-scale benchmark ICRL4AHT, built upon a high-throughput JAX implementation of Overcooked-V2. Our benchmark includes a large, diverse teammate suite spanning both RL and heuristic policies, enabling controlled train-test shifts, and provides a reproducible end-to-end pipeline for teammate generation, learning-history collection, dataset construction, and online multi-episode evaluation. We evaluate representative history-conditioned ICRL algorithms, including Algorithm Distillation (AD) and Decision-Pretrained Transformer (DPT), across millions of transitions. Results reveal notable limitations: contrary to their success in single-agent domains, these baselines fail to exhibit robust test-time adaptation in multi-agent settings. Specifically, these methods frequently underperform random baselines across both unseen teammate and unseen layout tracks, with no clear in-context improvement over long horizons. These findings highlight the challenges of strategic inference under partial observability within the OvercookedV2 AHT protocol, establishing our benchmark as a critical testbed for next-generation coordination algorithms.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Radio AGN feedback sustains quiescence only in a minority of massive galaxies

Radio active galactic nuclei (AGNs) eject a huge amount of energy into the surrounding medium and are thought to potentially prevent gas cooling and maintain the quiescence of massive galaxies. The short-lived, sporadic, and anisotropic nature of radio activities, coupled with the detection of abundant cold gas around some massive quiescent galaxies, raise questions about the efficiency of radio feedback in massive galaxies. Here we present an innovative method rooted in artificial intelligence to separate galaxies in which radio feedback is effective (RFE), regardless of current radio emission, from those in which radio feedback is ineffective (RFI), according to their optical images. Galaxies categorized as RFE are all dynamically hot, whereas quiescent RFI (RFI-Q) galaxies usually have extended cold-disk components. At given stellar mass, dark matter halos hosting RFE galaxies are between four to ten times more massive than those of RFI-Q galaxies. We find, for the first time, that almost all RFE galaxies have scant cold gas, irrespective of AGN activity. In contrast, many RFI-Q galaxies are surrounded by substantial amounts of condensed atomic gas, indicating a different evolutionary path from RFE galaxies. Our finding provides direct and compelling evidence that a radio AGN has gone through about 300 on-off cycles and that radio feedback can prevent gas cooling over a timescale much longer than that of radio activity. Contrary to general belief, our analysis shows that only a small fraction of massive galaxies are influenced by strong radio AGNs, suggesting that current galaxy formation models need serious revision.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Unexpected clustering pattern in dwarf galaxies challenges formation models

The galaxy correlation function serves as a fundamental tool for studying cosmology, galaxy formation, and the nature of dark matter. It is well established that more massive, redder and more compact galaxies tend to have stronger clustering in space. These results can be understood in terms of galaxy formation in Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos of different mass and assembly history. Here, we report an unexpectedly strong large-scale clustering for isolated, diffuse and blue dwarf galaxies, comparable to that seen for massive galaxy groups but much stronger than that expected from their halo mass. Our analysis indicates that the strong clustering aligns with the halo assembly bias seen in simulations with the standard $Λ$CDM cosmology only if more diffuse dwarfs formed in low-mass halos of older ages. This pattern is not reproduced by existing models of galaxy evolution in a $Λ$CDM framework, and our finding provides new clues for the search of more viable models. Our results can be explained well by assuming self-interacting dark matter, suggesting that such a scenario should be considered seriously.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Measuring Mass of Gas in Central Galaxies using weak lensing and satellite kinematics in MOND

In Milgrom's modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) framework, the dynamical mass of a galaxy is fully determined by its baryonic matter distribution. We fit the distribution of cold and hot gas halos, focusing on hot gas, around SDSS central galaxies using weak lensing signals from the DECaLS survey in MOND. The central galaxies are classified into two samples, the total galaxies and star-forming galaxies. We find that hot gas halo densities nearly follow Plummer's profile for both samples across all mass bins. The rotation curves of the galaxy samples are also demonstrated. The efficiency of converting gas into stars, $M_*/(M_* + M_{\rm g})$, is between 0.3 and 0.8 in all mass bins of the star-forming sample, which is higher than in the total sample. We also calculate gas mass using the satellite kinematics method in MOND. A constant, mildly radial anisotropy or isotropy in satellite motion leads to good agreement between the satellite kinematics and weak lensing methods. Combining both methods, we observe a baryonic mass to line-of-sight velocity dispersion of satellites ($M_{\rm b}$-$σ_{\rm s}$) relation. In addition, we examine more sophisticated models in MOND, including external field effects and Osipkov-Merritt anisotropy profiles, and find them unnecessary. A simple, mildly radial constant anisotropic model or an isotropic model, even when isolated, already aligns with observations. The strong concordance between the two methods suggests that weak lensing signals reliably measure the dynamical mass of central galaxies and can constrain the distribution of missing baryons in galaxy clusters.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2024

UNIONS: a direct measurement of intrinsic alignment with BOSS/eBOSS spectroscopy

During their formation, galaxies are subject to tidal forces, which create correlations between their shapes and the large-scale structure of the Universe, known as intrinsic alignment. This alignment is a contamination for cosmic-shear measurements as one needs to disentangle correlations induced by external lensing effects from those intrinsically present in galaxies. We constrain the amplitude of intrinsic alignment and test models by making use of the overlap between the Ultraviolet Near-Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) covering $3500 \, \mathrm{deg}^2$, and spectroscopic data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS/eBOSS). By comparing our results to measurements from other lensing surveys on the same spectroscopic tracers, we can test the reliability of these estimates and verify they are not survey dependent. We measure projected correlation functions between positions and ellipticities, which we model with perturbation theory to constrain the commonly used non-linear alignment model and its higher-order expansion. Using the non-linear alignment model, we obtain a $13σ$ detection with CMASS galaxies, a $3σ$ detection with LRGs, and a detection compatible with the null hypothesis for ELGs. We test the tidal alignment and tidal torque model, a higher-order alignment model, which we find to be in good agreement with the non-linear alignment prediction and for which we can constrain the second-order parameters. We show a strong scaling of our intrinsic alignment amplitude with luminosity. We demonstrate that the UNIONS sample is robust against systematic contributions, particularly concerning PSF biases. We reached a reasonable agreement when comparing our measurements to other lensing samples for the same spectroscopic samples. We take this agreement as an indication that direct measurements of intrinsic alignment are mature for stage IV priors.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Point-Spread Function errors for weak lensing - density cross-correlations. Application to UNIONS

Aims:Calibrating the point spread function (PSF) is a fundamental part of weak gravitational lensing analyses. Even with corrected galaxy images, imperfect calibrations can introduce biases. We propose an analytical framework for quantifying PSF-induced systematics as diagnostics for cross-correlation measurements of weak lensing with density tracers, e.g., galaxy-galaxy lensing. We show how those systematics propagate to physical parameters of the density tracers. Those diagnostics only require a shape catalogue of PSF stars and foreground galaxy positions. Methods:We consider the PSF-induced multiplicative bias, and introduce three second-order statistics as additive biases. We compute both biases for the weak-lensing derived halo mass of spectroscopic foreground galaxy samples, in particular, their effect on the tangential shear and fitted halo mass as a function of stellar mass. In addition, we assess their impact on the recently published black-hole - halo-mass relation for type I Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). Results:Using weak-lensing catalogues from the Ultraviolet Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) and Dark Energy Survey (DES), we find the multiplicative biases in the tangential shear to be less than $0.5\%$. No correlations between additive bias and galaxy properties of the foreground sample are detected. The combined PSF systematics affect low-mass galaxies and small angular scales; halo mass estimates can be biased by up to 18$\%$ for a sample of central galaxies in the stellar mass range 9.0 $\leq$ log $M_*/\rm M_{\odot}$ < 9.5. Conclusions:The PSF-induced multiplicative bias is a subdominant contribution to current studies of weak-lensing - density cross-correlations, but might become significant for upcoming Stage-VI surveys. For samples with a low tangential shear, additive PSF systematics can induce a significant bias on derived properties such as halo mass.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Black-Hole-to-Halo Mass Relation From UNIONS Weak Lensing

This letter presents, for the first time, direct constraints on the black-hole-to-halo-mass relation using weak gravitational lensing measurements. We construct type I and type II Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) samples from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), with a mean redshift of 0.4 0.1 for type I (type II) AGNs. This sample is cross-correlated with weak lensing shear from the Ultraviolet Near Infrared Northern Survey (UNIONS). We compute the excess surface mass density of the halos associated with $36,181$ AGNs from $94,308,561$ lensed galaxies and fit the halo mass in bins of black-hole mass. We find that more massive AGNs reside in more massive halos. We see no evidence of dependence on AGN type or redshift in the black-hole-to-halo-mass relationship when systematic errors in the measured black-hole masses are included. Our results are consistent with previous measurements for non-AGN galaxies. At a fixed black-hole mass, our weak-lensing halo masses are consistent with galaxy rotation curves, but significantly lower than galaxy clustering measurements. Finally, our results are broadly consistent with state-of-the-art hydro-dynamical cosmological simulations, providing a new constraint for black-hole masses in simulations.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2023

Halo mass-observable proxy scaling relations and their dependencies on galaxy and group properties

Based on the DECaLS shear catalog, we study the scaling relations between halo mass($M_{\rm h}$) and various proxies for SDSS central galaxies, including stellar mass($M_*$), stellar velocity dispersion($σ_*$), abundance matching halo mass($M_{\rm AM}$) and satellite velocity dispersion($σ_{\rm s}$), and their dependencies on galaxy and group properties. In general, these proxies all have strong positive correlations with $M_{\rm h}$, consistent with previous studies. We find that the $M_{\rm h}$-$M_*$ and $M_{\rm h}$-$σ_*$ relations depend strongly on group richness($N_{\rm sat}$), while the $M_{\rm h}$-$M_{\rm AM}$ and $M_{\rm h}$-$σ_{\rm s}$ relations are independent of it. Moreover, the dependence on star formation rate(SFR) is rather weak in the $M_{\rm h}$-$σ_*$ and $M_{\rm h}$-$σ_{\rm s}$ relations, but very prominent in the other two. $σ_{\rm s}$ is thus the best proxy among them, and its scaling relation is in good agreement with hydro-dynamical simulations. However, estimating $σ_{\rm s}$ accurately for individual groups/clusters is challenging because of interlopers and the requirement for sufficient satellites. We construct new proxies by combining $M_*$, $σ_*$, and $M_{\rm AM}$, and find the proxy with 30\% contribution from $M_{\rm AM}$ and 70\% from $σ_*$ can minimize the dependence on $N_{\rm sat}$ and SFR. We obtain the $M_{\rm h}$-supermassive black hole(SMBH) mass relation via the SMBH scaling relation and find indications for rapid and linear growth phases for SMBH. We also find that correlations among $M_{\rm h}$, $M_*$ and $σ_*$ change with $M_*$, indicating that different processes drive the growth of galaxies and SMBH at different stages.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2023

Dynamical hotness, star formation quenching and growth of supermassive black holes

A stellar system is dynamically hot when its kinetic energy is dominated by random motion represented by the velocity dispersion $σ_{\rm hot} (M_*)$. We use MaNGA data to obtain inner and outer dispersion of a galaxy, $σ_{\rm in}$ and $σ_{\rm out}$, to characterize its dynamical status and study its connection with star formation quenching and the growth of supermassive black hole (SMBH). We divide galaxies into fully quenched (FQGs), partially quenched (PQGs) and fully star-forming (FSGs) populations, and identify quenched central cores (QCCs) in PQGs. The galaxy distribution in $σ_{\rm in}/σ_{\rm hot}$-$σ_{\rm out}/σ_{\rm hot}$ diagram is L-shaped, consisting of a horizontal sequence ($σ_{\rm out}/σ_{\rm hot}\sim0$) and a vertical sequence ($σ_{\rm in}/σ_{\rm hot}\sim1$). FQGs and QCCs are located at the top of vertical sequence, $σ_{\rm out}/σ_{\rm hot}\sim1$, therefore they are dynamically hot over their entire bodies. PQGs reside along vertical sequence, so they have hot center but cold outskirt. FSGs are diverse and can be found in both sequences. Galaxy structural properties, star formation and AGN activities make a transition along horizontal sequence at $\log(σ_{\rm in}/σ_{\rm hot})\sim-0.3$, and along vertical sequence at $\log(σ_{\rm out}/σ_{\rm hot})\sim-0.3$. The fractions of optical AGNs and barred galaxies increase rapidly in the first transition and decline rapidly in the second; radio galaxies are located at the top of vertical sequence. Our results demonstrate that star formation quenching and SMBH growth are effective only in dynamically hot systems. A simple model along this line can reproduce the observed SMBH scaling relations. We discuss how secular processes and strong interactions can make a system dynamically hot, and lead to the SMBH growth and star formation quenching.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2023

Focus On Details: Online Multi-object Tracking with Diverse Fine-grained Representation

Discriminative representation is essential to keep a unique identifier for each target in Multiple object tracking (MOT). Some recent MOT methods extract features of the bounding box region or the center point as identity embeddings. However, when targets are occluded, these coarse-grained global representations become unreliable. To this end, we propose exploring diverse fine-grained representation, which describes appearance comprehensively from global and local perspectives. This fine-grained representation requires high feature resolution and precise semantic information. To effectively alleviate the semantic misalignment caused by indiscriminate contextual information aggregation, Flow Alignment FPN (FAFPN) is proposed for multi-scale feature alignment aggregation. It generates semantic flow among feature maps from different resolutions to transform their pixel positions. Furthermore, we present a Multi-head Part Mask Generator (MPMG) to extract fine-grained representation based on the aligned feature maps. Multiple parallel branches of MPMG allow it to focus on different parts of targets to generate local masks without label supervision. The diverse details in target masks facilitate fine-grained representation. Eventually, benefiting from a Shuffle-Group Sampling (SGS) training strategy with positive and negative samples balanced, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MOT17 and MOT20 test sets. Even on DanceTrack, where the appearance of targets is extremely similar, our method significantly outperforms ByteTrack by 5.0% on HOTA and 5.6% on IDF1. Extensive experiments have proved that diverse fine-grained representation makes Re-ID great again in MOT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Massive Star-Forming Galaxies Have Converted Most of Their Halo Gas into Stars

In the local Universe, the efficiency for converting baryonic gas into stars is very low. In dark matter halos where galaxies form and evolve, the average efficiency varies with galaxy stellar mass and has a maximum of about twenty percent for Milky-Way-like galaxies. The low efficiency at higher mass is believed to be produced by some quenching processes, such as the feedback from active galactic nuclei. We perform an analysis of weak lensing and satellite kinematics for SDSS central galaxies. Our results reveal that the efficiency is much higher, more than sixty percent, for a large population of massive star-forming galaxies around $10^{11}M_{\odot}$. This suggests that these galaxies acquired most of the gas in their halos and converted it into stars without being affected significantly by quenching processes. This population of galaxies is not reproduced in current galaxy formation models, indicating that our understanding of galaxy formation is incomplete. The implications of our results on circumgalactic media, star formation quenching and disc galaxy rotation curves are discussed. We also examine systematic uncertainties in halo-mass and stellar-mass measurements that might influence our results.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Hosts and triggers of AGNs in the Local Universe

Based on the spectroscopic and shear catalogs for SDSS galaxies in the local Universe, we compare optically-selected active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with control star-forming and quiescent galaxies on galactic, inter-halo and larger scales. We find that AGNs are preferentially found in two specific stages of galaxy evolution: star-burst and `green valley' phases, and that the stellar population of their host galaxies is quite independent of stellar mass, different from normal galaxies. Combining galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering on large scales, we measure the mass of AGN host halos. The typical halo mass is about $10^{12}h^{-1}\rm M_{\odot}$, similar to the characteristic mass in the stellar mass-halo mass relation (SHMR). For given stellar mass, AGN host galaxies and star-forming galaxies share the same SHMR, while quiescent galaxies have more massive halos. Clustering analysis on halo scales reveals that AGNs are surrounded by a larger number of satellites (with stellar mass down to 1/1000 of the mass of the central galaxy) than star-forming galaxies, and that galaxies with larger stellar velocity dispersion have more satellites. The number of satellites also increase with halo mass, reaching unity around $10^{12}h^{-1}\rm M_{\odot}$. Our results suggest a scenario, in which the interaction of the central galaxy with the satellites triggers an early episode of star burst and AGN activities, followed by multiple AGN cycles driven by the non-axisymmetric structure produced by the interaction. The feedback from the starburst and AGN reduces the amount of cold gas for fueling the central black hole, producing a characteristic halo mass scale, $\sim 10^{12}h^{-1}\rm M_{\odot}$, where the AGN fraction peaks.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2020

End-to-end Optimized Video Compression with MV-Residual Prediction

We present an end-to-end trainable framework for P-frame compression in this paper. A joint motion vector (MV) and residual prediction network MV-Residual is designed to extract the ensembled features of motion representations and residual information by treating the two successive frames as inputs. The prior probability of the latent representations is modeled by a hyperprior autoencoder and trained jointly with the MV-Residual network. Specially, the spatially-displaced convolution is applied for video frame prediction, in which a motion kernel for each pixel is learned to generate predicted pixel by applying the kernel at a displaced location in the source image. Finally, novel rate allocation and post-processing strategies are used to produce the final compressed bits, considering the bits constraint of the challenge. The experimental results on validation set show that the proposed optimized framework can generate the highest MS-SSIM for P-frame compression competition.

eess.IV↗