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Asian Americans as a group are overrepresented among STEM college graduates and have the highest average college enrollment rate of any racial or ethnic category. Thus, Asian Americans are typically excluded from educational interventions directed at improving STEM education for Students of Color because they are not considered to be underrepresented minorities. However, statistics obscure the individual needs of the more than 20 ethnic subgroups that fall under the umbrella term Asian Americans. Using a participatory action research approach, this paper documents the institutional and sociocultural factors that push out HMoob (or Hmong) American college students from STEM programs at one large, predominantly White university; and the coordinate processes of gatekeeping and transactional advising that either redirect those students toward non-STEM programs or force them out of the university completely.

DarkSHINE is a newly proposed fixed-target experiment initiative to search for the invisible decay of Dark Photon via missing energy/momentum signatures, based on the high repetition rate electron beam to be deployed/delivered by the Shanghai High repetition rate XFEL and Extreme light facility (SHINE). This report elaborates the baseline design of DarkSHINE experiment by introducing the physics goals, experimental setups, details of each sub-detector system technical designs, signal and backgground modelings, expected search sensitivities and future prospects, which mark an important step towards the further prototyping and technical demonstrations.

We study the three-dimensional Carrollian field theory on the Rindler horizon which is dual to a bulk massless scalar field theory in the four-dimensional Rindler wedge. The Carrollian field theory could be mapped to a two-dimensional Euclidean field theory in the transverse plane by a Fourier transform. After defining the incoming and outgoing states at the future and past Rindler horizon, respectively, we construct the boundary-to-boundary and bulk-to-boundary propagators that are consistent with the bulk Green's function in the literature. We investigate the tree-level Carrollian amplitudes up to four points. The tree-level four-point Carrollian amplitude in $\Phi^4$ theory has the same structure as the one-loop triangle Feynman integral in the Lee-Pomeransky representation with complex powers in the propagators and spacetime dimension. Moreover, the four-point Carrollian amplitude with a zero energy state inserted at infinity in $\Phi^4$ theory is proportional to the three-point Carrollian amplitude in $\Phi^3$ theory., Comment: 78 pages, 14 figures, 8 tables

Employing aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), we meticulously investigated the intrinsic chemical heterogeneity of Fe1+yTe, Fe1+yTe0.8Se0.2, and Fe1+yTe0.5Se0.5. Comprehensive analysis reveals the presence of interstitial iron atoms (Feint) across all samples, pre-dominantly occupying the 2c site of the P4/nmm space group. Moreover, a superstructure phase characterized by a wave vector q = 2/5a + 1/2c, originating from the ordering of Feint, is distinctly observable in the parent compound Fe1+yTe. In this scenario, the Feint atoms interact with adjacent Fe atoms, forming iron polycomplex and leading to an evident distortion of the FeTe4 tetrahedral. Experimental results further demonstrate effective suppression of Feint concentration and ordering through appropriate Se substitution; notably, Fe1+yTe0.5Se0.5 manifests the lowest concentration of Feint atoms. Our findings additionally indicate that Se substitution is random, and nanoscale phase separation induced by Te/Se chemical heterogeneity is commonly observed within Fe1+yTe1-xSex crystals., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures

In the first paper of this sequence, we provided an explicit hypergeometric modularity method by combining different techniques from the classical, $p$-adic, and finite field settings. In this article, we explore an application of this method from a motivic viewpoint through some known hypergeometric well-poised formulae of Whipple and McCarthy. We first use the method to derive a class of special weight three modular forms, labeled as $\mathbb{K}_2$-functions. Then using well-poised hypergeometric formulae we further construct a class of degree four Galois representations of the absolute Galois groups of the corresponding cyclotomic fields. These representations are then shown to be extendable to $G_{\mathbb{Q}}$ and the $L$-function of each extension coincides with the $L$-function of an automorphic form.

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), researchers have explored various methods to optimally leverage their comprehension and generation capabilities in sequential recommendation scenarios. However, several challenges persist in this endeavor. Firstly, most existing approaches rely on the input-output prompting paradigm, which can result in irrelevant or inaccurate responses. Secondly, while there have been attempts to enhance LLMs using prompting strategies such as chain-of-thought (CoT), these efforts have not fully harnessed the reasoning abilities of LLMs or effectively captured the multifaceted information contained within user sequences. To address these limitations, we propose GOT4Rec, a sequential recommendation method that utilizes the graph of thoughts (GoT) prompting strategy. Specifically, we identify and utilize three key types of information within user history sequences: short-term interests, long-term interests and collaborative information from other users. Our approach enables LLMs to independently reason and generate recommendations based on these distinct types of information, subsequently aggregating the results within the GoT framework to derive the final recommended items. This method allows LLMs, with enhanced reasoning capabilities, to more effectively consider the diverse information within user sequences, resulting in more accurate recommendations and more comprehensive explanations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GOT4Rec, indicating that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GOT4Rec-ED99.

Implicit discourse relation recognition involves determining relationships that hold between spans of text that are not linked by an explicit discourse connective. In recent years, the pre-train, prompt, and predict paradigm has emerged as a promising approach for tackling this task. However, previous work solely relied on manual verbalizers for implicit discourse relation recognition, which suffer from issues of ambiguity and even incorrectness. To overcome these limitations, we leverage the prototypes that capture certain class-level semantic features and the hierarchical label structure for different classes as the verbalizer. We show that our method improves on competitive baselines. Besides, our proposed approach can be extended to enable zero-shot cross-lingual learning, facilitating the recognition of discourse relations in languages with scarce resources. These advancement validate the practicality and versatility of our approach in addressing the issues of implicit discourse relation recognition across different languages.

This paper is devoted to the study of acceleration methods for an inequality constrained convex optimization problem by using Lyapunov functions. We first approximate such a problem as an unconstrained optimization problem by employing the logarithmic barrier function. Using the Hamiltonian principle, we propose a continuous-time dynamical system associated with a Bregman Lagrangian for solving the unconstrained optimization problem. Under certain conditions, we demonstrate that this continuous-time dynamical system exponentially converges to the optimal solution of the inequality constrained convex optimization problem. Moreover, we derive several discrete-time algorithms from this continuous-time framework and obtain their optimal convergence rates. Finally, we present numerical experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

In this article, we address the challenge of identifying skilled mutual funds among a large pool of candidates, utilizing the linear factor pricing model. Assuming observable factors with a weak correlation structure for the idiosyncratic error, we propose a spatial-sign based multiple testing procedure (SS-BH). When latent factors are present, we first extract them using the elliptical principle component method (He et al. 2022) and then propose a factor-adjusted spatial-sign based multiple testing procedure (FSS-BH). Simulation studies demonstrate that our proposed FSS-BH procedure performs exceptionally well across various applications and exhibits robustness to variations in the covariance structure and the distribution of the error term. Additionally, real data application further highlights the superiority of the FSS-BH procedure.

Motivated by the recent observation of real-space edge modes with ultracold atoms [Braun et al., Nat. Phys. 20, 1306 (2024)], we investigate the preparation and detection of anomalous counterpropagating edge states -- a defining feature of the anomalous Floquet valley-Hall (AFVH) phase -- in a two-dimensional periodically driven optical Raman lattice. Modeling the atomic cloud with a Gaussian wave packet state, we explore, both analytically and numerically, how the population of edge modes depends on the initial-state parameters. In particular, we reveal that, in addition to the internal spin state, the initial momenta parallel and perpendicular to the boundary play essential roles: they independently control the selective population of edge states across distinct momenta and within separate quasienergy gaps. Furthermore, we examine the wave-packet dynamics of counterpropagating edge states and demonstrate that their characteristic motion is robust against long-range disorder. These results establish a theoretical framework for future experimental explorations of the AFVH phase and topological phenomena associated with its unique edge modes., Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures

Leveraging quantum computing's intrinsic properties to enhance machine learning has shown promise, with quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) demonstrating benefits in data generation. However, the application of QGANs to complex unsupervised image-to-image (I2I) translation remains unexplored. Moreover,classical neural networks often suffer from large parameter spaces, posing challenges for GAN-based I2I methods. Inspired by the fact that unsupervised I2I translation is essentially an approximate reversible problem, we propose a lightweight invertible hybrid quantum-classical unsupervised I2I translation model - iHQGAN, by harnessing the invertibility of quantum computing. Specifically,iHQGAN employs two mutually approximately reversible quantum generators with shared parameters, effectively reducing the parameter scale. To ensure content consistency between generated and source images, each quantum generator is paired with an assisted classical neural network (ACNN), enforcing a unidirectional cycle consistency constraint between them. Simulation experiments were conducted on 19 sub-datasets across three tasks. Qualitative and quantitative assessments indicate that iHQGAN effectively performs unsupervised I2I translation with excellent generalization and can outperform classical methods that use low-complexity CNN-based generators. Additionally, iHQGAN, as with classical reversible methods, reduces the parameter scale of classical irreversible methods via a reversible mechanism.This study presents the first versatile quantum solution for unsupervised I2I translation, extending QGAN research to more complex image generation scenarios and offering a quantum approach to decrease the parameters of GAN-based unsupervised I2I translation methods.

Watermarking has offered an effective approach to distinguishing text generated by large language models (LLMs) from human-written text. However, the pervasive presence of human edits on LLM-generated text dilutes watermark signals, thereby significantly degrading detection performance of existing methods. In this paper, by modeling human edits through mixture model detection, we introduce a new method in the form of a truncated goodness-of-fit test for detecting watermarked text under human edits, which we refer to as Tr-GoF. We prove that the Tr-GoF test achieves optimality in robust detection of the Gumbel-max watermark in a certain asymptotic regime of substantial text modifications and vanishing watermark signals. Importantly, Tr-GoF achieves this optimality \textit{adaptively} as it does not require precise knowledge of human edit levels or probabilistic specifications of the LLMs, in contrast to the optimal but impractical (Neyman--Pearson) likelihood ratio test. Moreover, we establish that the Tr-GoF test attains the highest detection efficiency rate in a certain regime of moderate text modifications. In stark contrast, we show that sum-based detection rules, as employed by existing methods, fail to achieve optimal robustness in both regimes because the additive nature of their statistics is less resilient to edit-induced noise. Finally, we demonstrate the competitive and sometimes superior empirical performance of the Tr-GoF test on both synthetic data and open-source LLMs in the OPT and LLaMA families.

Neural network force field models such as DeePMD have enabled highly efficient large-scale molecular dynamics simulations with ab initio accuracy. However, building such models heavily depends on the training data obtained by costly electronic structure calculations, thereby it is crucial to carefully select and label the most representative configurations during model training to improve both extrapolation capability and training efficiency. To address this challenge, based on the Kalman filter theory we propose the Kalman Prediction Uncertainty (KPU) to quantify uncertainty of the model's prediction. With KPU we design the Active Learning by KPU (ALKPU) method, which can efficiently select representative configurations that should be labelled during model training. We prove that ALKPU locally leads to the fastest reduction of model's uncertainty, which reveals its rationality as a general active learning method. We test the ALKPU method using various physical system simulations and demonstrate that it can efficiently coverage the system's configuration space. Our work demonstrates the benefits of ALKPU as a novel active learning method, enhancing training efficiency and reducing computational resource demands.

This paper introduces the Global Challenge for Safe and Secure Large Language Models (LLMs), a pioneering initiative organized by AI Singapore (AISG) and the CyberSG R&D Programme Office (CRPO) to foster the development of advanced defense mechanisms against automated jailbreaking attacks. With the increasing integration of LLMs in critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and public administration, ensuring these models are resilient to adversarial attacks is vital for preventing misuse and upholding ethical standards. This competition focused on two distinct tracks designed to evaluate and enhance the robustness of LLM security frameworks. Track 1 tasked participants with developing automated methods to probe LLM vulnerabilities by eliciting undesirable responses, effectively testing the limits of existing safety protocols within LLMs. Participants were challenged to devise techniques that could bypass content safeguards across a diverse array of scenarios, from offensive language to misinformation and illegal activities. Through this process, Track 1 aimed to deepen the understanding of LLM vulnerabilities and provide insights for creating more resilient models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate enhanced capabilities and reliability by reasoning more, evolving from Chain-of-Thought prompting to product-level solutions like OpenAI o1. Despite various efforts to improve LLM reasoning, high-quality long-chain reasoning data and optimized training pipelines still remain inadequately explored in vision-language tasks. In this paper, we present Insight-V, an early effort to 1) scalably produce long and robust reasoning data for complex multi-modal tasks, and 2) an effective training pipeline to enhance the reasoning capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, to create long and structured reasoning data without human labor, we design a two-step pipeline with a progressive strategy to generate sufficiently long and diverse reasoning paths and a multi-granularity assessment method to ensure data quality. We observe that directly supervising MLLMs with such long and complex reasoning data will not yield ideal reasoning ability. To tackle this problem, we design a multi-agent system consisting of a reasoning agent dedicated to performing long-chain reasoning and a summary agent trained to judge and summarize reasoning results. We further incorporate an iterative DPO algorithm to enhance the reasoning agent's generation stability and quality. Based on the popular LLaVA-NeXT model and our stronger base MLLM, we demonstrate significant performance gains across challenging multi-modal benchmarks requiring visual reasoning. Benefiting from our multi-agent system, Insight-V can also easily maintain or improve performance on perception-focused multi-modal tasks.

In contrast to quadruped robots that can navigate diverse terrains using a "blind" policy, humanoid robots require accurate perception for stable locomotion due to their high degrees of freedom and inherently unstable morphology. However, incorporating perceptual signals often introduces additional disturbances to the system, potentially reducing its robustness, generalizability, and efficiency. This paper presents the Perceptive Internal Model (PIM), which relies on onboard, continuously updated elevation maps centered around the robot to perceive its surroundings. We train the policy using ground-truth obstacle heights surrounding the robot in simulation, optimizing it based on the Hybrid Internal Model (HIM), and perform inference with heights sampled from the constructed elevation map. Unlike previous methods that directly encode depth maps or raw point clouds, our approach allows the robot to perceive the terrain beneath its feet clearly and is less affected by camera movement or noise. Furthermore, since depth map rendering is not required in simulation, our method introduces minimal additional computational costs and can train the policy in 3 hours on an RTX 4090 GPU. We verify the effectiveness of our method across various humanoid robots, various indoor and outdoor terrains, stairs, and various sensor configurations. Our method can enable a humanoid robot to continuously climb stairs and has the potential to serve as a foundational algorithm for the development of future humanoid control methods., Comment: submitted to ICRA2025

Our work aims to reconstruct hand-object interactions from a single-view image, which is a fundamental but ill-posed task. Unlike methods that reconstruct from videos, multi-view images, or predefined 3D templates, single-view reconstruction faces significant challenges due to inherent ambiguities and occlusions. These challenges are further amplified by the diverse nature of hand poses and the vast variety of object shapes and sizes. Our key insight is that current foundational models for segmentation, inpainting, and 3D reconstruction robustly generalize to in-the-wild images, which could provide strong visual and geometric priors for reconstructing hand-object interactions. Specifically, given a single image, we first design a novel pipeline to estimate the underlying hand pose and object shape using off-the-shelf large models. Furthermore, with the initial reconstruction, we employ a prior-guided optimization scheme, which optimizes hand pose to comply with 3D physical constraints and the 2D input image content. We perform experiments across several datasets and show that our method consistently outperforms baselines and faithfully reconstructs a diverse set of hand-object interactions. Here is the link of our project page: https://lym29.github.io/EasyHOI-page/, Comment: Project page: https://lym29.github.io/EasyHOI-page/

Multilayer rhombohedral graphene (RG) has recently emerged as a new, structurally simple flat-band system, which facilitates the exploration of interaction-driven correlation states with highly ordered electron arrangements. Despite a variety of many-body order behaviors observed in RG by transport measurements, the direct microscopic visualization of such correlated phases in real space is still lacking. Here, we show the discovery of a robust intervalley coherent order, a long-predicted ground state in RG, at 77 K in tetralayer RG placed on MoS2 via imaging atomic-scale spatial reconstruction of wave functions for correlated states. By using scanning tunnelling microscopy, we observe spectroscopic signatures of electronic correlations at partially filled flat bands, where distinct splitting appears. At ~60% and ~70% fillings of the flat bands, we visualize atomic-scale reconstruction patterns with a 3 x 3 supercell on graphene lattice at liquid nitrogen temperature, which indicates a robust intervalley coherent phase of the interacting electrons. The 3 x 3 pattern is observed in MoS2-supported RG, while it is absent in hBN-based ones under the same experimental conditions, suggesting the significant influence of spin-orbit proximity effect. Our results provide microscopic insights into the correlated phases in tetralayer RG and highlight the significant potential for realizing highly accessible collective phenomena through Van der Waals proximity., Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures

Stereo matching has been a pivotal component in 3D vision, aiming to find corresponding points between pairs of stereo images to recover depth information. In this work, we introduce StereoAnything, a highly practical solution for robust stereo matching. Rather than focusing on a specialized model, our goal is to develop a versatile foundational model capable of handling stereo images across diverse environments. To this end, we scale up the dataset by collecting labeled stereo images and generating synthetic stereo pairs from unlabeled monocular images. To further enrich the model's ability to generalize across different conditions, we introduce a novel synthetic dataset that complements existing data by adding variability in baselines, camera angles, and scene types. We extensively evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of our model on five public datasets, showcasing its impressive ability to generalize to new, unseen data. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XiandaGuo/OpenStereo}., Comment: Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XiandaGuo/OpenStereo}

In ultra-dense unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, it is challenging to coordinate the resource allocation and interference management among large-scale UAVs, for providing flexible and efficient service coverage to the ground users (GUs). In this paper, we propose a learning-based resource allocation scheme in an ultra-dense UAV communication network, where the GUs' service demands are time-varying with unknown distributions. We formulate the non-cooperative game among multiple co-channel UAVs as a stochastic game, where each UAV jointly optimizes its trajectory, user association, and downlink power control to maximize the expectation of its locally cumulative energy efficiency under the interference and energy constraints. To cope with the scalability issue in a large-scale network, we further formulate the problem as a mean-field game (MFG), which simplifies the interactions among the UAVs into a two-player game between a representative UAV and a mean-field. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium for the MFG, and propose a model-free mean-field reinforcement learning algorithm named maximum entropy mean-field deep Q network (ME-MFDQN) to solve the mean-field equilibrium in both fully and partially observable scenarios. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm improves the energy efficiency compared with the benchmark algorithms. Moreover, the performance can be further enhanced if the GUs' service demands exhibit higher temporal correlation or if the UAVs have wider observation capabilities over their nearby GUs.

Recent advances in foundation models have established scaling laws that enable the development of larger models to achieve enhanced performance, motivating extensive research into large-scale recommendation models. However, simply increasing the model size in recommendation systems, even with large amounts of data, does not always result in the expected performance improvements. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Collaborative Ensemble Training Network (CETNet), to leverage multiple distinct models, each with its own embedding table, to capture unique feature interaction patterns. Unlike naive model scaling, our approach emphasizes diversity and collaboration through collaborative learning, where models iteratively refine their predictions. To dynamically balance contributions from each model, we introduce a confidence-based fusion mechanism using general softmax, where model confidence is computed via negation entropy. This design ensures that more confident models have a greater influence on the final prediction while benefiting from the complementary strengths of other models. We validate our framework on three public datasets (AmazonElectronics, TaobaoAds, and KuaiVideo) as well as a large-scale industrial dataset from Meta, demonstrating its superior performance over individual models and state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, we conduct further experiments on the Criteo and Avazu datasets to compare our method with the multi-embedding paradigm. Our results show that our framework achieves comparable or better performance with smaller embedding sizes, offering a scalable and efficient solution for CTR prediction tasks.

We consider the production of a pair of heavy quarks $Q\bar{Q}$ in association with a generic colour singlet system $V$ at lepton colliders, and present the first analytic calculation of the two-loop soft function differential in the total momentum of the real radiation. The calculation is performed by reducing the relevant Feynman integrals into a canonical basis of master integrals by means of integration-by-parts identities. The resulting integrals are then evaluated by solving a system of differential equations in the kinematic invariants, whose boundary conditions are determined analytically with some care due to the presence of Coulomb singularities. The fully differential soft function is expressed in terms of Goncharov polylogarithms. This result is an essential ingredient for a range of N$^3$LL resummations for key collider observables at lepton colliders, such as the $Q\bar{Q}V$ production cross section at threshold and observables sensitive to the total transverse momentum of the radiation in heavy-quark final states. Moreover, it constitutes the complete final-final dipole contribution to the fully differential soft function needed for the description of $Q\bar{Q}V$ production at hadron colliders, which plays an important role in the LHC physics programme., Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure; ancillary files for the analytical result

Group Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendations aim to predict the next POI that satisfies the diverse preferences of a group of users. This task is more challenging than traditional individual POI recommendations due to complex group decision-making and extremely sparse group-level check-in data. Existing methods for group POI recommendations primarily rely on single ID-based features from check-in data, capturing only statistical correlations and failing to fully utilize the rich semantic information contained in the check-ins, resulting in suboptimal performance. To this end, we propose a framework that unleashes the power of the Large Language Model (LLM) for context-aware group POI recommendations (LLMGPR). Our approach first introduces POI tokens alongside the original word tokens of the LLM, which are initialized by applying the LLM to the rich information of each POI. We then propose a novel sequencing adapter guided by Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLORA) to modify the LLM. The enhanced LLM can learn sequence representations by combining semantic-enhanced POI tokens and rich contextual information including positional encodings and spatio-temporal differences. This approach can be adapted for learning either group or user representations depending on the sequence type. Furthermore, we enhance group representations by aggregating individual member representations with another QLORA-based aggregation adapter and introducing a self-supervised learning task that predicts the purpose of check-in sequences, alleviating the data sparsity issue. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMGPR outperforms existing methods, effectively addressing group-level data sparsity and providing superior recommendations.

The CMS and ATLAS Collaborations have recently reported their findings based on the comprehensive run 2 dataset, detailing their searches for a light Higgs boson with a mass of approximately 95 GeV. We investigate the excesses observed in the $\gamma\gamma$, $\tau{\bar\tau}$ and $b{\bar b}$ data at approximately 95 GeV in the $U(1)_X$ model. Additionally, it also mixes with the SM-like Higgs boson. Research indicates that, in this model, identifying this singlet Higgs state as the lightest Higgs boson holds tremendous potential for explaining the excess observed at approximately 95 GeV. In our calculations, we maintain the masses of the lightest and next-to-lightest Higgs bosons at approximately 95 GeV and 125 GeV, respectively. The study finds that the theoretical predictions for the signal strengths $\mu(h_{95})_{\gamma\gamma}$ $\mu(h_{95})_{\tau{\bar\tau}}$ and $\mu(h_{95})_{b{\bar b}}$ in the $U(1)_X$ model align well with the excesses observed by CMS., Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures

Autonomous driving requires a comprehensive understanding of 3D environments to facilitate high-level tasks such as motion prediction, planning, and mapping. In this paper, we introduce DriveMLLM, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatial understanding capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in autonomous driving. DriveMLLM includes 2,734 front-facing camera images and introduces both absolute and relative spatial reasoning tasks, accompanied by linguistically diverse natural language questions. To measure MLLMs' performance, we propose novel evaluation metrics focusing on spatial understanding. We evaluate several state-of-the-art MLLMs on DriveMLLM, and our results reveal the limitations of current models in understanding complex spatial relationships in driving contexts. We believe these findings underscore the need for more advanced MLLM-based spatial reasoning methods and highlight the potential for DriveMLLM to drive further research in autonomous driving. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XiandaGuo/Drive-MLLM}., Comment: Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XiandaGuo/Drive-MLLM}

The abelian $(p+1)$-form gauge field is inherently coupled to the $p$-brane worldvolume. After quantization, the corresponding $p$-form gauge transformation is associated with the local phase ambiguity of the $p$-brane wave functional. In essence, the $p$-form gauge symmetry can be realized as a special construction of the generic 0-form gauge symmetry in the functional space of $p$-brane configurations. The non-abelian generalization is straightforward in the functional space language. To simplify the analysis, we further introduce a toy model where the infinite dimensional functional space of $p$-brane configurations is replaced by a finite dimensional matrix space. After taking the symmetric trace in the matrix model, the original discussions of the $p$-form gauge symmetry can be inherited by the toy model., Comment: 9 pages, no figures

In the era of large foundation models, data has become a crucial component for building high-performance AI systems. As the demand for high-quality and large-scale data continues to rise, data copyright protection is attracting increasing attention. In this work, we explore the problem of data watermarking for sequential recommender systems, where a watermark is embedded into the target dataset and can be detected in models trained on that dataset. We address two specific challenges: dataset watermarking, which protects the ownership of the entire dataset, and user watermarking, which safeguards the data of individual users. We systematically define these problems and present a method named DWRS to address them. Our approach involves randomly selecting unpopular items to create a watermark sequence, which is then inserted into normal users' interaction sequences. Extensive experiments on five representative sequential recommendation models and three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DWRS in protecting data copyright while preserving model utility.

In this article, we investigate soliton solutions in a system involving a charged Dirac field minimally coupled to Einstein gravity and the Bardeen field. We analyze the impact of two key parameters on the properties of the solution family: the magnetic charge $p$ of the Bardeen field and the electric charge $q$ of the Dirac field. We discover that the introduction of the Bardeen field alters the critical charge of the charged Dirac field. In reference [1], solutions named frozen stars are obtained when the magnetic charge is sufficiently large and the frequency approaches zero. In this paper, we define an effective frequency and find that, when the magnetic charge is sufficiently large, a frozen star solution can also be obtained, at which point the effective frequency approaches zero rather than the frequency itself., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures

We report the discovery of three ultracompact binary white dwarf systems hosting accretion disks, with orbital periods of 7.95, 8.68, and 13.15 minutes. This significantly augments the population of mass-transferring binaries at the shortest periods, and provides the first evidence that accretors in ultracompacts can be dense enough to host accretion disks even below 10 minutes (where previously only direct-impact accretors were known). In the two shortest-period systems, we measured changes in the orbital periods driven by the combined effect of gravitational wave emission and mass transfer; we find $\dot{P}$ is negative in one case, and positive in the other. This is only the second system measured with a positive $\dot{P}$, and it the most compact binary known that has survived a period minimum. Using these systems as examples, we show how the measurement of $\dot{P}$ is a powerful tool in constraining the physical properties of binaries, e.g. the mass and mass-radius relation of the donor stars. We find that the chirp masses of ultracompact binaries at these periods seem to cluster around $\mathcal{M}_c \sim 0.3 M_\odot$, perhaps suggesting a common origin for these systems or a selection bias in electromagnetic discoveries. Our new systems are among the highest-amplitude known gravitational wave sources in the millihertz regime, providing exquisite opportunity for multi-messenger study with future space-based observatories such as \textit{LISA} and TianQin; we discuss how such systems provide fascinating laboratories to study the unique regime where the accretion process is mediated by gravitational waves., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ

Recent advancements in 3D generation models have opened new possibilities for simulating dynamic 3D object movements and customizing behaviors, yet creating this content remains challenging. Current methods often require manual assignment of precise physical properties for simulations or rely on video generation models to predict them, which is computationally intensive. In this paper, we rethink the usage of multi-modal large language model (MLLM) in physics-based simulation, and present Sim Anything, a physics-based approach that endows static 3D objects with interactive dynamics. We begin with detailed scene reconstruction and object-level 3D open-vocabulary segmentation, progressing to multi-view image in-painting. Inspired by human visual reasoning, we propose MLLM-based Physical Property Perception (MLLM-P3) to predict mean physical properties of objects in a zero-shot manner. Based on the mean values and the object's geometry, the Material Property Distribution Prediction model (MPDP) model then estimates the full distribution, reformulating the problem as probability distribution estimation to reduce computational costs. Finally, we simulate objects in an open-world scene with particles sampled via the Physical-Geometric Adaptive Sampling (PGAS) strategy, efficiently capturing complex deformations and significantly reducing computational costs. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate our Sim Anything achieves more realistic motion than state-of-the-art methods within 2 minutes on a single GPU.

Image super-resolution (SR) is a classical yet still active low-level vision problem that aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts, serving as a key technique for image enhancement. Current approaches to address SR tasks, such as transformer-based and diffusion-based methods, are either dedicated to extracting RGB image features or assuming similar degradation patterns, neglecting the inherent modal disparities between infrared and visible images. When directly applied to infrared image SR tasks, these methods inevitably distort the infrared spectral distribution, compromising the machine perception in downstream tasks. In this work, we emphasize the infrared spectral distribution fidelity and propose a Contourlet refinement gate framework to restore infrared modal-specific features while preserving spectral distribution fidelity. Our approach captures high-pass subbands from multi-scale and multi-directional infrared spectral decomposition to recover infrared-degraded information through a gate architecture. The proposed Spectral Fidelity Loss regularizes the spectral frequency distribution during reconstruction, which ensures the preservation of both high- and low-frequency components and maintains the fidelity of infrared-specific features. We propose a two-stage prompt-learning optimization to guide the model in learning infrared HR characteristics from LR degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing image SR models in both visual and perceptual tasks while notably enhancing machine perception in downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/hey-it-s-me/CoRPLE., Comment: 13 figures, 6 tables

The disperse structure distributions (discreteness) and variant scattering characteristics (variability) of SAR airplane targets lead to special challenges of object detection and recognition. The current deep learning-based detectors encounter challenges in distinguishing fine-grained SAR airplanes against complex backgrounds. To address it, we propose a novel physics-guided detector (PGD) learning paradigm for SAR airplanes that comprehensively investigate their discreteness and variability to improve the detection performance. It is a general learning paradigm that can be extended to different existing deep learning-based detectors with "backbone-neck-head" architectures. The main contributions of PGD include the physics-guided self-supervised learning, feature enhancement, and instance perception, denoted as PGSSL, PGFE, and PGIP, respectively. PGSSL aims to construct a self-supervised learning task based on a wide range of SAR airplane targets that encodes the prior knowledge of various discrete structure distributions into the embedded space. Then, PGFE enhances the multi-scale feature representation of a detector, guided by the physics-aware information learned from PGSSL. PGIP is constructed at the detection head to learn the refined and dominant scattering point of each SAR airplane instance, thus alleviating the interference from the complex background. We propose two implementations, denoted as PGD and PGD-Lite, and apply them to various existing detectors with different backbones and detection heads. The experiments demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed PGD, which can improve existing detectors on SAR airplane detection with fine-grained classification task (an improvement of 3.1\% mAP most), and achieve the state-of-the-art performance (90.7\% mAP) on SAR-AIRcraft-1.0 dataset. The project is open-source at \url{https://github.com/XAI4SAR/PGD}.

Stereo video synthesis from a monocular input is a demanding task in the fields of spatial computing and virtual reality. The main challenges of this task lie on the insufficiency of high-quality paired stereo videos for training and the difficulty of maintaining the spatio-temporal consistency between frames. Existing methods primarily address these issues by directly applying novel view synthesis (NVS) techniques to video, while facing limitations such as the inability to effectively represent dynamic scenes and the requirement for large amounts of training data. In this paper, we introduce a novel self-supervised stereo video synthesis paradigm via a video diffusion model, termed SpatialDreamer, which meets the challenges head-on. Firstly, to address the stereo video data insufficiency, we propose a Depth based Video Generation module DVG, which employs a forward-backward rendering mechanism to generate paired videos with geometric and temporal priors. Leveraging data generated by DVG, we propose RefinerNet along with a self-supervised synthetic framework designed to facilitate efficient and dedicated training. More importantly, we devise a consistency control module, which consists of a metric of stereo deviation strength and a Temporal Interaction Learning module TIL for geometric and temporal consistency ensurance respectively. We evaluated the proposed method against various benchmark methods, with the results showcasing its superior performance.

Recent studies reveal that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where adversaries embed hidden triggers that manipulate model responses. Existing backdoor defense methods are primarily designed for vision or classification tasks, and are thus ineffective for text generation tasks, leaving LLMs vulnerable. We introduce Internal Consistency Regularization (CROW), a novel defense using consistency regularization finetuning to address layer-wise inconsistencies caused by backdoor triggers. CROW leverages the intuition that clean models exhibit smooth, consistent transitions in hidden representations across layers, whereas backdoored models show noticeable fluctuation when triggered. By enforcing internal consistency through adversarial perturbations and regularization, CROW neutralizes backdoor effects without requiring clean reference models or prior trigger knowledge, relying only on a small set of clean data. This makes it practical for deployment across various LLM architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that CROW consistently achieves a significant reductions in attack success rates across diverse backdoor strategies and tasks, including negative sentiment, targeted refusal, and code injection, on models such as Llama-2 (7B, 13B), CodeLlama (7B, 13B) and Mistral-7B, while preserving the model's generative capabilities.

Research on two-dimensional van der Waals materials has demonstrated that the layer degree of freedom can significantly alter the physical properties of materials due to the substantial modification of bulk bands. Inspired by this concept, layered photonic systems have been proposed and realized, revealing novel phenomena absent in their monolayer counterparts. In this work, we experimentally investigate the band structures of bilayer valley photonic crystals. Two typical structures with different stacking configurations are experimentally imaged via the near-field scanning technology, exhibiting distinct bulk band structures. Furthermore, different topological edge modes induced by distinct topology are observed, revealing that the layer degree of freedom can be regarded as a pseudospin and offer further capabilities for controlling the flow of light. Our work not only elucidates the evolution of band structures from monolayer to bilayer topological systems but also provides an experimental platform for the further exploration of bilayer topological insulators., Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search in high-dimensional Euclidean space has a broad range of applications. Among existing ANN algorithms, graph-based methods have shown superior performance in terms of the time-accuracy trade-off. However, they face performance bottlenecks due to the random memory accesses caused by the searching process on the graph indices and the costs of computing exact distances to guide the searching process. To relieve the bottlenecks, a recent method named NGT-QG makes an attempt by integrating quantization and graph. It (1) replicates and stores the quantization codes of a vertex's neighbors compactly so that they can be accessed sequentially, and (2) uses a SIMD-based implementation named FastScan to efficiently estimate distances based on the quantization codes in batch for guiding the searching process. While NGT-QG achieves promising improvements over the vanilla graph-based methods, it has not fully unleashed the potential of integrating quantization and graph. For instance, it entails a re-ranking step to compute exact distances at the end, which introduces extra random memory accesses; its graph structure is not jointly designed considering the in-batch nature of FastScan, which causes wastes of computation in searching. In this work, following NGT-QG, we present a new method named SymphonyQG, which achieves more symphonious integration of quantization and graph (e.g., it avoids the explicit re-ranking step and refines the graph structure to be more aligned with FastScan). Based on extensive experiments on real-world datasets, SymphonyQG establishes the new state-of-the-art in terms of the time-accuracy trade-off., Comment: The paper has been accepted by SIGMOD 2025

The $C\!P$ asymmetry and branching fraction of the CKM-suppressed decay $B^+\!\to J\mskip -3mu/\mskip -2mu\psi\,\pi^+$ are precisely measured relative to the favoured decay $B^+\!\to J\mskip -3mu/\mskip -2mu\psi\,K^+$, using a sample of proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $5.4~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ recorded at center-of-mass energy of $13~\mathrm{TeV}$ during 2016--2018. The results of the $C\!P$ asymmetry difference and branching fraction ratio are \begin{align*} \Delta\mathcal{A}^{C\!P} &\equiv \mathcal{A}^{C\!P}(B^+ \to J\mskip -3mu/\mskip -2mu\psi\,\pi^+) - \mathcal{A}^{C\!P}(B^+ \to J\mskip -3mu/\mskip -2mu\psi\,K^+) = (1.29 \pm 0.49 \pm 0.08) \times 10^{-2}, \end{align*} \begin{equation*} \mathcal{R}_{\pi/K} \equiv \frac{\mathcal{B}(B^+ \!\to J\mskip -3mu/\mskip -2mu\psi\,\pi^+)}{\mathcal{B}(B^+ \!\to J\mskip -3mu/\mskip -2mu\psi\,K^+)} = (3.852 \pm 0.022 \pm 0.018) \times 10^{-2}. \end{equation*} where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second systematic. A combination with previous LHCb results based on data collected at $7$ and $8~\mathrm{TeV}$ in 2011 and 2012 yields $\Delta\mathcal{A}^{C\!P} = (1.42 \pm 0.43 \pm 0.08) \times 10^{-2}$ and $\mathcal{R}_{\pi/K} = (3.846 \pm 0.018 \pm 0.018) \times 10^{-2}$. The combined $\Delta\mathcal{A}^{C\!P}$ value deviates from zero by 3.2 standard deviations, providing the first evidence for direct $C\!P$ violation in the amplitudes of beauty decays to charmonium final states., Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, no conference or journal information All figures and tables, along with machine-readable versions and any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://lbfence.cern.ch/alcm/public/analysis/full-details/1623/ (LHCb public pages)

Decision Transformer (DT) can learn effective policy from offline datasets by converting the offline reinforcement learning (RL) into a supervised sequence modeling task, where the trajectory elements are generated auto-regressively conditioned on the return-to-go (RTG).However, the sequence modeling learning approach tends to learn policies that converge on the sub-optimal trajectories within the dataset, for lack of bridging data to move to better trajectories, even if the condition is set to the highest RTG.To address this issue, we introduce Diffusion-Based Trajectory Branch Generation (BG), which expands the trajectories of the dataset with branches generated by a diffusion model.The trajectory branch is generated based on the segment of the trajectory within the dataset, and leads to trajectories with higher returns.We concatenate the generated branch with the trajectory segment as an expansion of the trajectory.After expanding, DT has more opportunities to learn policies to move to better trajectories, preventing it from converging to the sub-optimal trajectories.Empirically, after processing with BG, DT outperforms state-of-the-art sequence modeling methods on D4RL benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of adding branches to the dataset without further modifications.