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Hong-Yu Zhou

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Published work

30 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Concept-Guided Noisy Negative Suppression for Zero-Shot Classification and Grounding of Chest X-Ray Findings

Vision-language alignment using chest X-rays and radiology reports has emerged as an advanced paradigm for zero-shot classification and grounding of chest X-ray findings. However, standard contrastive learning typically treats radiographs and reports from different patients simply as negative pairs. This assumption introduces noisy negatives, as different patients frequently exhibit similar findings. Such noisy negatives cause semantic ambiguity and degrade performance in zero-shot understanding tasks. To address this challenge, we propose CoNNS, a concept-guided noisy-negative suppression framework. To support the negative suppression mechanism, unlike previous methods that use raw reports or templatized texts, we construct a hierarchical concept ontology using large language models. The ontology structures 41 key clinical concepts by explicitly modeling presence, attributes (location and characteristics), and texts (evidential segment and presence statement). Leveraging this ontology, we implement a cross-patient pair relabeling strategy comprising three steps: (1) Fine-Grained Breakdown to categorize pairs based on finding presence; (2) Noisy Negative Filtering to resolve semantic conflicts by removing false negatives; and (3) Hard Negative Mining to identify subtle attribute discrepancies using a lightweight language model. Finally, we propose a Concept-Aware NCE loss to align visual features with text while suppressing the identified noisy negatives. Extensive experiments across multi-granularity zero-shot grounding tasks and five zero-shot classification datasets validate that CoNNS outperforms existing state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/DopamineLcy/conns.

preprint2026arXiv

Evidential Reasoning Advances Interpretable Real-World Disease Screening

Disease screening is critical for early detection and timely intervention in clinical practice. However, most current screening models for medical images suffer from limited interpretability and suboptimal performance. They often lack effective mechanisms to reference historical cases or provide transparent reasoning pathways. To address these challenges, we introduce EviScreen, an evidential reasoning framework for disease screening that leverages region-level evidence from historical cases. The proposed EviScreen offers retrospection interpretability through regional evidence retrieved from dual knowledge banks. Using this evidential mechanism, the subsequent evidence-aware reasoning module makes predictions using both the current case and evidence from historical cases, thereby enhancing disease screening performance. Furthermore, rather than relying on post-hoc saliency maps, EviScreen enhances localization interpretability by leveraging abnormality maps derived from contrastive retrieval. Our method achieves superior performance on our carefully established benchmarks for real-world disease screening, yielding notably higher specificity at clinical-level recall. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/DopamineLcy/EviScreen.

preprint2026arXiv

SkinFlow: Efficient Information Transmission for Open Dermatological Diagnosis via Dynamic Visual Encoding and Staged RL

General-purpose Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their massive scale, often falter in dermatology due to "diffuse attention" - the inability to disentangle subtle pathological lesions from background noise. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that parameter scaling is the only path to medical precision. We introduce SkinFlow, a framework that treats diagnosis as an optimization of visual information transmission efficiency. Our approach utilizes a Virtual-Width Dynamic Vision Encoder (DVE) to "unfold" complex pathological manifolds without physical parameter expansion, coupled with a two-stage Reinforcement Learning strategy. This strategy sequentially aligns explicit medical descriptions (Stage I) and reconstructs implicit diagnostic textures (Stage II) within a constrained semantic space. Furthermore, we propose a clinically grounded evaluation protocol that prioritizes diagnostic safety and hierarchical relevance over rigid label matching. Empirical results are compelling: our 7B model establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Fitzpatrick17k benchmark, achieving a +12.06% gain in Top-1 accuracy and a +28.57% boost in Top-6 accuracy over the massive general-purpose models (e.g., Qwen3VL-235B and GPT-5.2). These findings demonstrate that optimizing geometric capacity and information flow yields superior diagnostic reasoning compared to raw parameter scaling.

preprint2024arXiv

MLIP: Medical Language-Image Pre-training with Masked Local Representation Learning

Existing contrastive language-image pre-training aims to learn a joint representation by matching abundant image-text pairs. However, the number of image-text pairs in medical datasets is usually orders of magnitude smaller than that in natural datasets. Besides, medical image-text pairs often involve numerous complex fine-grained correspondences. This paper aims to enhance the data efficiency by introducing multiple-to-multiple local relationship modeling to capture denser supervisions. More specifically, we propose a Medical Language-Image Pre-training (MLIP) framework, which exploits the limited image-text medical data more efficiently through patch-sentence matching. Furthermore, we introduce a masked contrastive learning strategy with semantic integrity estimation to reduce redundancy in images while preserving the underlying semantics. Our evaluation results show that MLIP outperforms previous work in zero/few-shot classification and few-shot segmentation tasks by a large margin.

preprint2023arXiv

GraVIS: Grouping Augmented Views from Independent Sources for Dermatology Analysis

Self-supervised representation learning has been extremely successful in medical image analysis, as it requires no human annotations to provide transferable representations for downstream tasks. Recent self-supervised learning methods are dominated by noise-contrastive estimation (NCE, also known as contrastive learning), which aims to learn invariant visual representations by contrasting one homogeneous image pair with a large number of heterogeneous image pairs in each training step. Nonetheless, NCE-based approaches still suffer from one major problem that is one homogeneous pair is not enough to extract robust and invariant semantic information. Inspired by the archetypical triplet loss, we propose GraVIS, which is specifically optimized for learning self-supervised features from dermatology images, to group homogeneous dermatology images while separating heterogeneous ones. In addition, a hardness-aware attention is introduced and incorporated to address the importance of homogeneous image views with similar appearance instead of those dissimilar homogeneous ones. GraVIS significantly outperforms its transfer learning and self-supervised learning counterparts in both lesion segmentation and disease classification tasks, sometimes by 5 percents under extremely limited supervision. More importantly, when equipped with the pre-trained weights provided by GraVIS, a single model could achieve better results than winners that heavily rely on ensemble strategies in the well-known ISIC 2017 challenge.

preprint2023arXiv

PCRLv2: A Unified Visual Information Preservation Framework for Self-supervised Pre-training in Medical Image Analysis

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) in computer vision are primarily comparative, whose goal is to preserve invariant and discriminative semantics in latent representations by comparing siamese image views. However, the preserved high-level semantics do not contain enough local information, which is vital in medical image analysis (e.g., image-based diagnosis and tumor segmentation). To mitigate the locality problem of comparative SSL, we propose to incorporate the task of pixel restoration for explicitly encoding more pixel-level information into high-level semantics. We also address the preservation of scale information, a powerful tool in aiding image understanding but has not drawn much attention in SSL. The resulting framework can be formulated as a multi-task optimization problem on the feature pyramid. Specifically, we conduct multi-scale pixel restoration and siamese feature comparison in the pyramid. In addition, we propose non-skip U-Net to build the feature pyramid and develop sub-crop to replace multi-crop in 3D medical imaging. The proposed unified SSL framework (PCRLv2) surpasses its self-supervised counterparts on various tasks, including brain tumor segmentation (BraTS 2018), chest pathology identification (ChestX-ray, CheXpert), pulmonary nodule detection (LUNA), and abdominal organ segmentation (LiTS), sometimes outperforming them by large margins with limited annotations.

preprint2022arXiv

Advancing 3D Medical Image Analysis with Variable Dimension Transform based Supervised 3D Pre-training

The difficulties in both data acquisition and annotation substantially restrict the sample sizes of training datasets for 3D medical imaging applications. As a result, constructing high-performance 3D convolutional neural networks from scratch remains a difficult task in the absence of a sufficient pre-training parameter. Previous efforts on 3D pre-training have frequently relied on self-supervised approaches, which use either predictive or contrastive learning on unlabeled data to build invariant 3D representations. However, because of the unavailability of large-scale supervision information, obtaining semantically invariant and discriminative representations from these learning frameworks remains problematic. In this paper, we revisit an innovative yet simple fully-supervised 3D network pre-training framework to take advantage of semantic supervisions from large-scale 2D natural image datasets. With a redesigned 3D network architecture, reformulated natural images are used to address the problem of data scarcity and develop powerful 3D representations. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed pre-trained models can effectively accelerate convergence while also improving accuracy for a variety of 3D medical imaging tasks such as classification, segmentation and detection. In addition, as compared to training from scratch, it can save up to 60% of annotation efforts. On the NIH DeepLesion dataset, it likewise achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, outperforming earlier self-supervised and fully-supervised pre-training approaches, as well as methods that do training from scratch. To facilitate further development of 3D medical models, our code and pre-trained model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/urmagicsmine/CSPR.

preprint2022arXiv

Attribute Surrogates Learning and Spectral Tokens Pooling in Transformers for Few-shot Learning

This paper presents new hierarchically cascaded transformers that can improve data efficiency through attribute surrogates learning and spectral tokens pooling. Vision transformers have recently been thought of as a promising alternative to convolutional neural networks for visual recognition. But when there is no sufficient data, it gets stuck in overfitting and shows inferior performance. To improve data efficiency, we propose hierarchically cascaded transformers that exploit intrinsic image structures through spectral tokens pooling and optimize the learnable parameters through latent attribute surrogates. The intrinsic image structure is utilized to reduce the ambiguity between foreground content and background noise by spectral tokens pooling. And the attribute surrogate learning scheme is designed to benefit from the rich visual information in image-label pairs instead of simple visual concepts assigned by their labels. Our Hierarchically Cascaded Transformers, called HCTransformers, is built upon a self-supervised learning framework DINO and is tested on several popular few-shot learning benchmarks. In the inductive setting, HCTransformers surpass the DINO baseline by a large margin of 9.7% 5-way 1-shot accuracy and 9.17% 5-way 5-shot accuracy on miniImageNet, which demonstrates HCTransformers are efficient to extract discriminative features. Also, HCTransformers show clear advantages over SOTA few-shot classification methods in both 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot settings on four popular benchmark datasets, including miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, FC100, and CIFAR-FS. The trained weights and codes are available at https://github.com/StomachCold/HCTransformers.

preprint2022arXiv

Generalized Radiograph Representation Learning via Cross-supervision between Images and Free-text Radiology Reports

Pre-training lays the foundation for recent successes in radiograph analysis supported by deep learning. It learns transferable image representations by conducting large-scale fully-supervised or self-supervised learning on a source domain. However, supervised pre-training requires a complex and labor intensive two-stage human-assisted annotation process while self-supervised learning cannot compete with the supervised paradigm. To tackle these issues, we propose a cross-supervised methodology named REviewing FreE-text Reports for Supervision (REFERS), which acquires free supervision signals from original radiology reports accompanying the radiographs. The proposed approach employs a vision transformer and is designed to learn joint representations from multiple views within every patient study. REFERS outperforms its transfer learning and self-supervised learning counterparts on 4 well-known X-ray datasets under extremely limited supervision. Moreover, REFERS even surpasses methods based on a source domain of radiographs with human-assisted structured labels. Thus REFERS has the potential to replace canonical pre-training methodologies.

preprint2022arXiv

nnFormer: Interleaved Transformer for Volumetric Segmentation

Transformer, the model of choice for natural language processing, has drawn scant attention from the medical imaging community. Given the ability to exploit long-term dependencies, transformers are promising to help atypical convolutional neural networks to overcome their inherent shortcomings of spatial inductive bias. However, most of recently proposed transformer-based segmentation approaches simply treated transformers as assisted modules to help encode global context into convolutional representations. To address this issue, we introduce nnFormer, a 3D transformer for volumetric medical image segmentation. nnFormer not only exploits the combination of interleaved convolution and self-attention operations, but also introduces local and global volume-based self-attention mechanism to learn volume representations. Moreover, nnFormer proposes to use skip attention to replace the traditional concatenation/summation operations in skip connections in U-Net like architecture. Experiments show that nnFormer significantly outperforms previous transformer-based counterparts by large margins on three public datasets. Compared to nnUNet, nnFormer produces significantly lower HD95 and comparable DSC results. Furthermore, we show that nnFormer and nnUNet are highly complementary to each other in model ensembling.

preprint2022arXiv

Preservational Learning Improves Self-supervised Medical Image Models by Reconstructing Diverse Contexts

Preserving maximal information is one of principles of designing self-supervised learning methodologies. To reach this goal, contrastive learning adopts an implicit way which is contrasting image pairs. However, we believe it is not fully optimal to simply use the contrastive estimation for preservation. Moreover, it is necessary and complemental to introduce an explicit solution to preserve more information. From this perspective, we introduce Preservational Learning to reconstruct diverse image contexts in order to preserve more information in learned representations. Together with the contrastive loss, we present Preservational Contrastive Representation Learning (PCRL) for learning self-supervised medical representations. PCRL provides very competitive results under the pretraining-finetuning protocol, outperforming both self-supervised and supervised counterparts in 5 classification/segmentation tasks substantially.

preprint2022arXiv

ProCo: Prototype-aware Contrastive Learning for Long-tailed Medical Image Classification

Medical image classification has been widely adopted in medical image analysis. However, due to the difficulty of collecting and labeling data in the medical area, medical image datasets are usually highly-imbalanced. To address this problem, previous works utilized class samples as prior for re-weighting or re-sampling but the feature representation is usually still not discriminative enough. In this paper, we adopt the contrastive learning to tackle the long-tailed medical imbalance problem. Specifically, we first propose the category prototype and adversarial proto-instance to generate representative contrastive pairs. Then, the prototype recalibration strategy is proposed to address the highly imbalanced data distribution. Finally, a unified proto-loss is designed to train our framework. The overall framework, namely as Prototype-aware Contrastive learning (ProCo), is unified as a single-stage pipeline in an end-to-end manner to alleviate the imbalanced problem in medical image classification, which is also a distinct progress than existing works as they follow the traditional two-stage pipeline. Extensive experiments on two highly-imbalanced medical image classification datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

preprint2022arXiv

Relation Matters: Foreground-aware Graph-based Relational Reasoning for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) focuses on improving the generalization ability of object detectors via knowledge transfer. Recent advances in DAOD strive to change the emphasis of the adaptation process from global to local in virtue of fine-grained feature alignment methods. However, both the global and local alignment approaches fail to capture the topological relations among different foreground objects as the explicit dependencies and interactions between and within domains are neglected. In this case, only seeking one-vs-one alignment does not necessarily ensure the precise knowledge transfer. Moreover, conventional alignment-based approaches may be vulnerable to catastrophic overfitting regarding those less transferable regions (e.g. backgrounds) due to the accumulation of inaccurate localization results in the target domain. To remedy these issues, we first formulate DAOD as an open-set domain adaptation problem, in which the foregrounds and backgrounds are seen as the ``known classes'' and ``unknown class'' respectively. Accordingly, we propose a new and general framework for DAOD, named Foreground-aware Graph-based Relational Reasoning (FGRR), which incorporates graph structures into the detection pipeline to explicitly model the intra- and inter-domain foreground object relations on both pixel and semantic spaces, thereby endowing the DAOD model with the capability of relational reasoning beyond the popular alignment-based paradigm. The inter-domain visual and semantic correlations are hierarchically modeled via bipartite graph structures, and the intra-domain relations are encoded via graph attention mechanisms. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed FGRR exceeds the state-of-the-art performance on four DAOD benchmarks.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning Expectation of Label Distribution for Facial Age and Attractiveness Estimation

Facial attributes (\eg, age and attractiveness) estimation performance has been greatly improved by using convolutional neural networks. However, existing methods have an inconsistency between the training objectives and the evaluation metric, so they may be suboptimal. In addition, these methods always adopt image classification or face recognition models with a large amount of parameters, which carry expensive computation cost and storage overhead. In this paper, we firstly analyze the essential relationship between two state-of-the-art methods (Ranking-CNN and DLDL) and show that the Ranking method is in fact learning label distribution implicitly. This result thus firstly unifies two existing popular state-of-the-art methods into the DLDL framework. Second, in order to alleviate the inconsistency and reduce resource consumption, we design a lightweight network architecture and propose a unified framework which can jointly learn facial attribute distribution and regress attribute value. The effectiveness of our approach has been demonstrated on both facial age and attractiveness estimation tasks. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art results using the single model with 36$\times$ fewer parameters and 3$\times$ faster inference speed on facial age/attractiveness estimation. Moreover, our method can achieve comparable results as the state-of-the-art even though the number of parameters is further reduced to 0.9M (3.8MB disk storage).

preprint2021arXiv

MixSearch: Searching for Domain Generalized Medical Image Segmentation Architectures

Considering the scarcity of medical data, most datasets in medical image analysis are an order of magnitude smaller than those of natural images. However, most Network Architecture Search (NAS) approaches in medical images focused on specific datasets and did not take into account the generalization ability of the learned architectures on unseen datasets as well as different domains. In this paper, we address this point by proposing to search for generalizable U-shape architectures on a composited dataset that mixes medical images from multiple segmentation tasks and domains creatively, which is named MixSearch. Specifically, we propose a novel approach to mix multiple small-scale datasets from multiple domains and segmentation tasks to produce a large-scale dataset. Then, a novel weaved encoder-decoder structure is designed to search for a generalized segmentation network in both cell-level and network-level. The network produced by the proposed MixSearch framework achieves state-of-the-art results compared with advanced encoder-decoder networks across various datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

A Macro-Micro Weakly-supervised Framework for AS-OCT Tissue Segmentation

Primary angle closure glaucoma (PACG) is the leading cause of irreversible blindness among Asian people. Early detection of PACG is essential, so as to provide timely treatment and minimize the vision loss. In the clinical practice, PACG is diagnosed by analyzing the angle between the cornea and iris with anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT). The rapid development of deep learning technologies provides the feasibility of building a computer-aided system for the fast and accurate segmentation of cornea and iris tissues. However, the application of deep learning methods in the medical imaging field is still restricted by the lack of enough fully-annotated samples. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to segment the target tissues accurately for the AS-OCT images, by using the combination of weakly-annotated images (majority) and fully-annotated images (minority). The proposed framework consists of two models which provide reliable guidance for each other. In addition, uncertainty guided strategies are adopted to increase the accuracy and stability of the guidance. Detailed experiments on the publicly available AGE dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-/weakly-supervised methods and has a comparable performance as the fully-supervised method. Therefore, the proposed method is demonstrated to be effective in exploiting information contained in the weakly-annotated images and has the capability to substantively relieve the annotation workload.

preprint2020arXiv

Comparing to Learn: Surpassing ImageNet Pretraining on Radiographs By Comparing Image Representations

In deep learning era, pretrained models play an important role in medical image analysis, in which ImageNet pretraining has been widely adopted as the best way. However, it is undeniable that there exists an obvious domain gap between natural images and medical images. To bridge this gap, we propose a new pretraining method which learns from 700k radiographs given no manual annotations. We call our method as Comparing to Learn (C2L) because it learns robust features by comparing different image representations. To verify the effectiveness of C2L, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies and evaluate it on different tasks and datasets. The experimental results on radiographs show that C2L can outperform ImageNet pretraining and previous state-of-the-art approaches significantly. Code and models are available.

preprint2020arXiv

Difficulty-aware Glaucoma Classification with Multi-Rater Consensus Modeling

Medical images are generally labeled by multiple experts before the final ground-truth labels are determined. Consensus or disagreement among experts regarding individual images reflects the gradeability and difficulty levels of the image. However, when being used for model training, only the final ground-truth label is utilized, while the critical information contained in the raw multi-rater gradings regarding the image being an easy/hard case is discarded. In this paper, we aim to take advantage of the raw multi-rater gradings to improve the deep learning model performance for the glaucoma classification task. Specifically, a multi-branch model structure is proposed to predict the most sensitive, most specifical and a balanced fused result for the input images. In order to encourage the sensitivity branch and specificity branch to generate consistent results for consensus labels and opposite results for disagreement labels, a consensus loss is proposed to constrain the output of the two branches. Meanwhile, the consistency/inconsistency between the prediction results of the two branches implies the image being an easy/hard case, which is further utilized to encourage the balanced fusion branch to concentrate more on the hard cases. Compared with models trained only with the final ground-truth labels, the proposed method using multi-rater consensus information has achieved superior performance, and it is also able to estimate the difficulty levels of individual input images when making the prediction.

preprint2011arXiv

Passively self-error-rejecting qubit transmission over a collective-noise channel

We propose a passively self-error-rejecting single-qubit transmission scheme for an arbitrary polarization state of a single qubit over a collective-noise channel, without resorting to additional qubits and entanglement. By splitting a single qubit into some wavepackets with some Mach-Zehnder interferometers, we can obtain an uncorrupted state with a success probability approaching 100% via postselection in different time bins, independent of the parameters of collective noise. It is simpler and more flexible than the schemes utilizing decoherence-free subspace and those with additional qubits. One can directly apply this scheme to almost all quantum communication protocols based on single photons or entangled photon systems against a collective noise.

preprint2010arXiv

Efficient and economic five-party quantum state sharing of an arbitrary m-qubit state

We present an efficient and economic scheme for five-party quantum state sharing of an arbitrary m-qubit state with $2m$ three-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states and three-particle GHZ-state measurements. It is more convenient than other schemes as it only resorts to three-particle GHZ states and three-particle joint measurement, not five-particle entanglements and five-particle joint measurements. Moreover, this symmetric scheme is in principle secure even though the number of the dishonest agents is more than one. Its total efficiency approaches the maximal value.

preprint2010arXiv

Fault tolerant quantum key distribution based on quantum dense coding with collective noise

We present two robust quantum key distribution protocols against two kinds of collective noise, following some ideas in quantum dense coding. Three-qubit entangled states are used as quantum information carriers, two of which forming the logical qubit which is invariant with a special type of collective noise. The information is encoded on logical qubits with four unitary operations, which can be read out faithfully with Bell-state analysis on two physical qubits and a single-photon measurement on the other physical qubit, not three-photon joint measurements. Two bits of information are exchanged faithfully and securely by transmitting two physical qubits through a noisy channel. When the losses in the noisy channel is low, these protocols can be used to transmit a secret message directly in principle.

preprint2010arXiv

Single-photon entanglement concentration for long-distance quantum communication

We present a single-photon entanglement concentration protocol for long-distance quantum communication with quantum nondemolition detector. It is the first concentration protocol for single-photon entangled states and it dose not require the two parties of quantum communication to know the accurate information about the coefficient $α$ and $β$ of the less entangled states. Also, it does not resort to sophisticated single-photon detectors, which makes this protocol more feasible in current experiments. Moreover, it can be iterated to get a higher efficiency and yield. All these advantages maybe make this protocol have more practical applications in long-distance quantum communication and quantum internet.

preprint2009arXiv

Efficient faithful qubit transmission with frequency degree of freedom

We propose an efficient faithful polarization-state transmission scheme by utilizing frequency degree of freedom besides polarization and an additional qubit prepared in a fixed polarization. An arbitrary single-photon polarization state is protected against the collective noise probabilistically. With the help of frequency beam splitter and frequency shifter, the success probability of our faithful qubit transmission scheme with frequency degree of freedom can be 1/2 in principle.

preprint2009arXiv

Efficient polarization entanglement concentration for electrons with charge detection

We present an entanglement concentration protocol for electrons based on their spins and their charges. The combination of an electronic polarizing beam splitter and a charge detector functions as a parity check device for two electrons, with which the parties can reconstruct maximally entangled electron pairs from those in a less-entanglement state nonlocally. This protocol has a higher efficiency than those based on linear optics and it does not require the parties to know accurately the information about the less-entanglement state, which makes it more convenient in a practical application of solid quantum computation and communication.

preprint2009arXiv

Genuine tripartite entanglement in quantum brachistochrone evolution of a three-qubit system

We explore the connection between quantum brachistochrone (time-optimal) evolution of a three-qubit system and its residual entanglement called three-tangle. The result shows that the entanglement between two qubits is not required for some brachistochrone evolutions of a three-qubit system. However, the evolution between two distinct states cannot be implemented without its three-tangle, except for the trivial cases in which less than three qubits attend evolution. Although both the probability density function of the time-averaged three-tangle and that of the time-averaged squared concurrence between two subsystems become more and more uniform with the decrease in angles of separation between an initial state and a final state, the features of their most probable values exhibit a different trend.

preprint2009arXiv

Multipartite entanglement purification with quantum nondemolition detectors

We present a scheme for multipartite entanglement purification of quantum systems in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state with quantum nondemolition detectors (QNDs). This scheme does not require the controlled-not gates which cannot be implemented perfectly with linear optical elements at present, but QNDs based on cross-Kerr nonlinearities. It works with two steps, i.e., the bit-flipping error correction and the phase-flipping error correction. These two steps can be iterated perfectly with parity checks and simple single-photon measurements. This scheme does not require the parties to possess sophisticated single photon detectors. These features maybe make this scheme more efficient and feasible than others in practical applications.

preprint2007arXiv

Coulomb effects on the formation of proton halo nuclei

The exotic structures in the 2s_{1/2} states of five pairs of mirror nuclei ^{17}O-^{17}F, ^{26}Na-^{26}P, ^{27}Mg-^{27}P, ^{28}Al-^{28}P and ^{29}Si-^{29}P are investigated with the relativistic mean-field (RMF) theory and the single-particle model (SPM) to explore the role of the Coulomb effects on the proton halo formation. The present RMF calculations show that the exotic structure of the valence proton is more obvious than that of the valence neutron of its mirror nucleus, the difference of exotic size between each mirror nuclei becomes smaller with the increase of mass number A of the mirror nuclei and the ratios of the valence proton and valence neutron root-mean-square (RMS) radius to the matter radius in each pair of mirror nuclei all decrease linearly with the increase of A. In order to interpret these results, we analyze two opposite effects of Coulomb interaction on the exotic structure formation with SPM and find that the contribution of the energy level shift is more important than that of the Coulomb barrier for light nuclei. However, the hindrance of the Coulomb barrier becomes more obvious with the increase of A. When A is larger than 34, Coulomb effects on the exotic structure formation will almost become zero because its two effects counteract with each other.

preprint2007arXiv

Efficient quantum cryptography network without entanglement and quantum memory

An efficient quantum cryptography network protocol is proposed with d-dimension polarized photons, without resorting to entanglement and quantum memory. A server on the network, say Alice, provides the service for preparing and measuring single photons whose initial state are |0>. The users code the information on the single photons with some unitary operations. For preventing the untrustworthy server Alice from eavesdropping the quantum lines, a nonorthogonal-coding technique (decoy-photon technique) is used in the process that the quantum signal is transmitted between the users. This protocol does not require the servers and the users to store the quantum state and almost all of the single photons can be used for carrying the information, which makes it more convenient for application than others with present technology. We also discuss the case with a faint laser pulse.

preprint2007arXiv

Quantum secure direct communication network with superdense coding and decoy photons

A quantum secure direct communication network scheme is proposed with quantum superdense coding and decoy photons. The servers on a passive optical network prepare and measure the quantum signal, i.e., a sequence of the $d$-dimensional Bell states. After confirming the security of the photons received from the receiver, the sender codes his secret message on them directly. For preventing a dishonest server from eavesdropping, some decoy photons prepared by measuring one photon in the Bell states are used to replace some original photons. One of the users on the network can communicate any other one. This scheme has the advantage of high capacity, and it is more convenient than others as only a sequence of photons is transmitted in quantum line.

preprint2006arXiv

Multiparty Quantum Remote Secret Conference

We present two schemes for multiparty quantum remote secret conference in which each legitimate conferee can read out securely the secret message announced by another one, but a vicious eavesdropper can get nothing about it. The first one is based on the same key shared efficiently and securely by all the parties with Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, and each conferee sends his secret message to the others with one-time pad crypto-system. The other one is based on quantum encryption with a quantum key, a sequence of GHZ states shared among all the conferees and used repeatedly after confirming their security. Both these schemes are optimal as their intrinsic efficiency for qubits approaches the maximal value.