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Published work

24 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

GRACE: Gradient-aligned Reasoning Data Curation for Efficient Post-training

Existing reasoning data curation pipelines score whole samples, treating every intermediate step as equally valuable. In reality, steps within a trace contribute very unevenly, and selecting reasoning data well requires assessing them individually. We present GRACE, a gradient-aligned curation method that views each reasoning trace as a sequence of optimization events and scores every step by two complementary signals: its alignment with the answer-oriented gradient direction, and its consistency with the preceding reasoning trajectory. Step-level scores are aggregated into a sample-level value for subset selection, using only the model's internal optimization signals and no external reward models or step annotations. To make this scalable, GRACE introduces a representation-level gradient proxy that estimates step-level alignment from token-level upstream signals in a single forward pass. Post-training Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct on MMathCoT-1M, GRACE reaches 108.8% of the full-data performance with 20% of the data and retains 100.2% with only 5%, with subsets that transfer effectively across model backbones.

preprint2026arXiv

Learning Geometric Invariance for Gait Recognition

The goal of gait recognition is to extract identity-invariant features of an individual under various gait conditions, e.g., cross-view and cross-clothing. Most gait models strive to implicitly learn the common traits across different gait conditions in a data-driven manner to pull different gait conditions closer for recognition. However, relatively few studies have explicitly explored the inherent relations between different gait conditions. For this purpose, we attempt to establish connections among different gait conditions and propose a new perspective to achieve gait recognition: variations in different gait conditions can be approximately viewed as a combination of geometric transformations. In this case, all we need is to determine the types of geometric transformations and achieve geometric invariance, then identity invariance naturally follows. As an initial attempt, we explore three common geometric transformations (i.e., Reflect, Rotate, and Scale) and design a $\mathcal{R}$eflect-$\mathcal{R}$otate-$\mathcal{S}$cale invariance learning framework, named ${\mathcal{RRS}}$-Gait. Specifically, it first flexibly adjusts the convolution kernel based on the specific geometric transformations to achieve approximate feature equivariance. Then these three equivariant-aware features are respectively fed into a global pooling operation for final invariance-aware learning. Extensive experiments on four popular gait datasets (Gait3D, GREW, CCPG, SUSTech1K) show superior performance across various gait conditions.

preprint2026arXiv

Multipath Routing for Multi-Hop UAV Networks

Multi-hop uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) networks are promising to extend the terrestrial network coverage. Existing multi-hop UAV networks employ a single routing path by selecting the next-hop forwarding node in a hop-by-hop manner, which leads to local congestion and increases traffic delays. In this paper, a novel traffic-adaptive multipath routing method is proposed for multi-hop UAV networks, which enables each UAV to dynamically split and forward traffic flows across multiple next-hop neighbors, thus meeting latency requirements of diverse traffic flows in dynamic mobile environments. An on-time packet delivery ratio maximization problem is formulated to determine the traffic splitting ratios at each hop. This sequential decision-making problem is modeled as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP). To solve this Dec-POMDP, a novel multi-agent deep reinforcement leaning (MADRL) algorithm, termed Independent Proximal Policy Optimization with Dirichlet Modeling (IPPO-DM), is developed. Specifically, the IPPO serves as the core optimization framework, where the Dirichlet distribution is leveraged to parameterize a continuous stochastic policy network on the probability simplex, inherently ensuring feasible traffic splitting ratios. Simulation results demonstrate that IPPO-DM outperforms benchmark schemes in terms of both delivery latency guarantee and packet loss performance.

preprint2026arXiv

Predictive Radiomics for Evaluation of Cancer Immune SignaturE in Glioblastoma: the PRECISE-GBM study

Background: Radiogenomics allows identification of radiological biomarkers for genomic phenotypes. In glioblastoma, these biomarkers could potentially complement patient stratification strategies. We aim to develop and analytically validate radiological biomarkers that capture immune cell signatures within IDH-wildtype glioblastoma microenvironment using radiogenomic analysis. Methods: This was a retrospective multicenter study using curated open-access anonymized imaging and genomic data from TCGA-GBM, CPTAC, IvyGAP, REMBRANDT and CGGA datasets. Imaging data consisted of MRI-based radiomic features extracted from necrotic core, enhancing and edema regions of deep learning-based auto-segmented tumors. Radiomic feature selections were performed using nested cross-validated LASSO. Support vector machine and ensemble models were trained using seventeen immune and cell-specific score labels extracted from deconvoluted transcriptomic data using pan-cancer and glioblastoma immune signature matrices as reference standards. Seventeen classifier models trained in three cross-cohort strategies were validated on three held-out datasets assessing stability and generalizability. Results: One-hundred-and-seventy-six patients were included in the study. The immune-related radiomic signatures obtained after feature selection were shape, first order and higher order radiomic features. Models predicting macrophage subtype immune signature showed stable mean performance on balanced accuracy (0.67) and precision (0.89) metrics for three independent holdout datasets with ensemble model outperforming support vector machine model. Conclusion: Radiogenomic models non-invasively predicted the macrophage subtype M0 immune signature in IDH-wildtype glioblastoma. These biomarkers have the potential to stratify patients for immunotherapy within prospective glioblastoma clinical trials.

preprint2026arXiv

ProxyKV: Cross-Model Proxy Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Efficient long-context inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is severely constrained by the Key-Value (KV) cache memory wall, yet existing pruning methods force a choice between low-latency heuristics that sacrifice precision and high-precision reconstruction methods that incur prohibitive prefilling overhead. To bridge this scoring-cost--accuracy gap, we propose ProxyKV, a cross-model proxy pruning framework that offloads importance scoring to a lightweight intra-family Small-Model Proxy executed asynchronously to the Large-Model Target. To bridge the architectural gap between heterogeneous models, we design the HybridAxialMapper, which disentangles temporal feature extraction from cross-head alignment, together with a Multi-Granularity Hybrid Loss that shifts the learning objective from rigid regression to relative ranking consistency. Across the Llama-3.1, Qwen-2.5, and Qwen-3 families spanning targets from 7B up to 32B parameters on LongBench, SCBench, and RULER, ProxyKV matches KVZip on aggregate (recovering $\sim$$98.7\%$ of its mean accuracy) while delivering up to a $3.21\times$ prefilling speedup on Llama-3.1-8B (dual-GPU; $\sim$$1.5\times$ shared single-GPU) and sustaining the speedup at contexts up to 170k tokens on Qwen-2.5-7B.

preprint2026arXiv

Uncovering Intrinsic Capabilities: A Paradigm for Data Curation in Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong benchmark performance, but controlling their behavior through instruction tuning remains difficult. Reducing the budget of instruction tuning dataset often causes regressions, as heuristic strategies treat models as black boxes and overlook the latent capabilities that govern learning. We introduce Capability-Attributed Data Curation (CADC), a framework that shifts curation from task-specific heuristics to intrinsic capability analysis. CADC discovers intrinsic capabilities in an unsupervised manner from gradient-based learning trajectories, attributes training data to these capabilities via influence estimation, and curates capability-aware curricula through balanced selection and staged sequencing. This transforms black-box instruction tuning into a controllable, capability-driven process. With as little as 5% of the original data, CADC surpasses full-data training on multimodal benchmarks. These results validate intrinsic capabilities as the fundamental building blocks of model learning and establish CADC as a principle paradigm for instruction data curation.

preprint2026arXiv

XekRung Technical Report

We present XekRung, a frontier large language model for cybersecurity, designed to provide comprehensive security capabilities. To achieve this, we develop diverse data synthesis pipelines tailored to the cybersecurity domain, enabling the scalable construction of high-quality training data and providing a strong foundation for cybersecurity knowledge and understanding. Building on this foundation, we establish a complete training pipeline spanning continued pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL) to further extend the model's capabilities. We further introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation system to guide the iterative improvement of both domain-specific and general-purpose abilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that XekRung achieves state-of-the-art performance on cybersecurity-specific benchmarks among models of the same scale, while maintaining strong performance on general benchmarks.

preprint2025arXiv

GCRank: A Generative Contextual Comprehension Paradigm for Takeout Ranking Model

The ranking stage serves as the central optimization and allocation hub in advertising systems, governing economic value distribution through eCPM and orchestrating the user-centric blending of organic and advertising content. Prevailing ranking models often rely on fragmented modules and hand-crafted features, limiting their ability to interpret complex user intent. This challenge is further amplified in location-based services such as food delivery, where user decisions are shaped by dynamic spatial, temporal, and individual contexts. To address these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework that reframes ranking as a context comprehension task, modeling heterogeneous signals in a unified architecture. Our architecture consists of two core components: the Generative Contextual Encoder (GCE) and the Generative Contextual Fusion (GCF). The GCE comprises three specialized modules: a Personalized Context Enhancer (PCE) for user-specific modeling, a Collective Context Enhancer (CCE) for group-level patterns, and a Dynamic Context Enhancer (DCE) for real-time situational adaptation. The GCF module then seamlessly integrates these contextual representations through low-rank adaptation. Extensive experiments confirm that our method achieves significant gains in critical business metrics, including click-through rate and platform revenue. We have successfully deployed our method on a large-scale food delivery advertising platform, demonstrating its substantial practical impact. This work pioneers a new perspective on generative recommendation and highlights its practical potential in industrial advertising systems.

preprint2023arXiv

Video Semantic Segmentation with Inter-Frame Feature Fusion and Inner-Frame Feature Refinement

Video semantic segmentation aims to generate accurate semantic maps for each video frame. To this end, many works dedicate to integrate diverse information from consecutive frames to enhance the features for prediction, where a feature alignment procedure via estimated optical flow is usually required. However, the optical flow would inevitably suffer from inaccuracy, and then introduce noises in feature fusion and further result in unsatisfactory segmentation results. In this paper, to tackle the misalignment issue, we propose a spatial-temporal fusion (STF) module to model dense pairwise relationships among multi-frame features. Different from previous methods, STF uniformly and adaptively fuses features at different spatial and temporal positions, and avoids error-prone optical flow estimation. Besides, we further exploit feature refinement within a single frame and propose a novel memory-augmented refinement (MAR) module to tackle difficult predictions among semantic boundaries. Specifically, MAR can store the boundary features and prototypes extracted from the training samples, which together form the task-specific memory, and then use them to refine the features during inference. Essentially, MAR can move the hard features closer to the most likely category and thus make them more discriminative. We conduct extensive experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid, and the results show that our proposed methods significantly outperform previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/jfzhuang/ST_Memory.

preprint2022arXiv

Exploring High-quality Target Domain Information for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

In unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) semantic segmentation, the distillation based methods are currently dominant in performance. However, the distillation technique requires complicate multi-stage process and many training tricks. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method that can achieve competitive performance to the advanced distillation methods. Our core idea is to fully explore the target-domain information from the views of boundaries and features. First, we propose a novel mix-up strategy to generate high-quality target-domain boundaries with ground-truth labels. Different from the source-domain boundaries in previous works, we select the high-confidence target-domain areas and then paste them to the source-domain images. Such a strategy can generate the object boundaries in target domain (edge of target-domain object areas) with the correct labels. Consequently, the boundary information of target domain can be effectively captured by learning on the mixed-up samples. Second, we design a multi-level contrastive loss to improve the representation of target-domain data, including pixel-level and prototype-level contrastive learning. By combining two proposed methods, more discriminative features can be extracted and hard object boundaries can be better addressed for the target domain. The experimental results on two commonly adopted benchmarks (\textit{i.e.}, GTA5 $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes and SYNTHIA $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes) show that our method achieves competitive performance to complicated distillation methods. Notably, for the SYNTHIA$\rightarrow$ Cityscapes scenario, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance with $57.8\%$ mIoU and $64.6\%$ mIoU on 16 classes and 13 classes. Code is available at https://github.com/ljjcoder/EHTDI.

preprint2022arXiv

First Experiences in Performance Benchmarking with the New SPEChpc 2021 Suites

Modern HPC systems are built with innovative system architectures and novel programming models to further push the speed limit of computing. The increased complexity poses challenges for performance portability and performance evaluation. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation -SPEC has a long history of producing industry standard benchmarks for modern computer systems. SPEC is a newly released SPEChpc 2021 benchmark suites, developed by the High Performance Group, are a bold attempt to provide a fair and objective benchmarking tool designed for state of the art HPC systems. With the support of multiple host and accelerator programming models, the suites are portable across both homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures. Different workloads are developed to fit system sizes ranging from a few compute nodes to a few hundred compute nodes. In this manuscript, we take a first glance at these benchmark suites and evaluate their portability and basic performance characteristics on various popular and emerging HPC architectures, including x86 CPU, NVIDIA GPU, and AMD GPU. This study provides a first-hand experience of executing the SPEChpc 2021 suites at scale on production HPC systems, discusses real-world use cases, and serves as an initial guideline for using the benchmark suites.

preprint2022arXiv

In-situ comparison of interface instability of basal and edge planes during unidirectional growth of sea ice

The unique anisotropy of ice has endowed sea ice growth a peculiar and attractive subject from both fundamental and applied viewpoints. The distinct growth behaviors between edge and basal plane of ice are one of the central topics in ice growth. And the unidirectional freezing pattern stems from perturbations of both basal and edge planes. To date there is no direct comparison of unidirectional freezing behavior between basal and edge plane ice. Here, we in-situ investigate the planar instability as well as the unidirectional freezing pattern of basal and edge planes of ice by a design of parallel freezing samples with specified ice orientations in a NaCl solution as a modeled sea water. The planar instability is discussed via neutral stability curves with surface tension anisotropy for both basal and edge plane ice. For the first time, we realize the simultaneous observation of solid/liquid interfaces of basal and edge plane ice under the same set of freezing conditions. The results show that planar instability occurs faster for edge plane ice than basal plane ice. The time-lapse observations confirm a transient competitive interaction of perturbations between the basal and edge planes ice, which is explained by the anisotropic growth of perturbations in basal and edge planes of ice. These experimental results provide a link between morphology evolution of unidirectional grown sea ice and different ice orientations and are suggested to enrich our understanding of sea ice growth as well as crystallization pattern of other anisotropic materials.

preprint2022arXiv

Low-confidence Samples Matter for Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a related but label-scarce target domain. The conventional DA strategy is to align the feature distributions of the two domains. Recently, increasing researches have focused on self-training or other semi-supervised algorithms to explore the data structure of the target domain. However, the bulk of them depend largely on confident samples in order to build reliable pseudo labels, prototypes or cluster centers. Representing the target data structure in such a way would overlook the huge low-confidence samples, resulting in sub-optimal transferability that is biased towards the samples similar to the source domain. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel contrastive learning method by processing low-confidence samples, which encourages the model to make use of the target data structure through the instance discrimination process. To be specific, we create positive and negative pairs only using low-confidence samples, and then re-represent the original features with the classifier weights rather than directly utilizing them, which can better encode the task-specific semantic information. Furthermore, we combine cross-domain mixup to augment the proposed contrastive loss. Consequently, the domain gap can be well bridged through contrastive learning of intermediate representations across domains. We evaluate the proposed method in both unsupervised and semi-supervised DA settings, and extensive experimental results on benchmarks reveal that our method is effective and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code can be found in https://github.com/zhyx12/MixLRCo.

preprint2022arXiv

Research on Dual Channel News Headline Classification Based on ERNIE Pre-training Model

The classification of news headlines is an important direction in the field of NLP, and its data has the characteristics of compactness, uniqueness and various forms. Aiming at the problem that the traditional neural network model cannot adequately capture the underlying feature information of the data and cannot jointly extract key global features and deep local features, a dual-channel network model DC-EBAD based on the ERNIE pre-training model is proposed. Use ERNIE to extract the lexical, semantic and contextual feature information at the bottom of the text, generate dynamic word vector representations fused with context, and then use the BiLSTM-AT network channel to secondary extract the global features of the data and use the attention mechanism to give key parts higher The weight of the DPCNN channel is used to overcome the long-distance text dependence problem and obtain deep local features. The local and global feature vectors are spliced, and finally passed to the fully connected layer, and the final classification result is output through Softmax. The experimental results show that the proposed model improves the accuracy, precision and F1-score of news headline classification compared with the traditional neural network model and the single-channel model under the same conditions. It can be seen that it can perform well in the multi-classification application of news headline text under large data volume.

preprint2022arXiv

Revisiting the transient coarsening kinetics: a new framework in the Lifshitz-Slyozov-Wagner space

Phase coarsening is a fundamental process of microstructure evolution in multiphase materials. A thorough understanding of its kinetics is of great significance for material processing and performance. Generally, coarsening can be divided into the transient stage and the steady stage. Compared with steady coarsening kinetics, the current understanding of transient coarsening is rather limited and contradictory. In the present work, a new framework in the dimensionless Lifshitz-Slyozov-Wagner space is developed to study transient coarsening kinetics co-controlled by interface migration/reaction and matrix diffusion, where the dynamic equation for individual particles is derived from the thermodynamic extremal principle.

preprint2022arXiv

Securing Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Cell-Free Networks

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security in the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided cell-free networks. A maximum weighted sum secrecy rate problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the active beamforming (BF) at the base stations and passive BF at the RISs. To handle this non-trivial problem, we adopt the alternating optimization to decouple the original problem into two sub-ones, which are solved using the semidefinite relaxation and continuous convex approximation theory. To decrease the complexity for obtaining overall channel state information (CSI), we extend the proposed framework to the case that only requires part of the RIS' CSI. This is achieved via deliberately discarding the RIS that has a small contribution to the user's secrecy rate. Based on this, we formulate a mixed integer non-linear programming problem, and the linear conic relaxation is used to obtained the solutions. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed schemes can obtain a higher secrecy rate than the existing ones.

preprint2021arXiv

Information Bottleneck Theory on Convolutional Neural Networks

Recent years, many researches attempt to open the black box of deep neural networks and propose a various of theories to understand it. Among them, Information Bottleneck (IB) theory claims that there are two distinct phases consisting of fitting phase and compression phase in the course of training. This statement attracts many attentions since its success in explaining the inner behavior of feedforward neural networks. In this paper, we employ IB theory to understand the dynamic behavior of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and investigate how the fundamental features such as convolutional layer width, kernel size, network depth, pooling layers and multi-fully connected layer have impact on the performance of CNNs. In particular, through a series of experimental analysis on benchmark of MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, we demonstrate that the compression phase is not observed in all these cases. This shows us the CNNs have a rather complicated behavior than feedforward neural networks.

preprint2021arXiv

Planar chiral metasurfaces with maximal tunable chiroptical response driven by bound states in the continuum

Optical metasurfaces with high-Q chiral resonances can boost light-matter interaction for various applications of chiral response for ultrathin, active, and nonlinear metadevices. Usually, such metasurfaces require sophisticated depth-resolved nanofabrication to realize subwavelength stereo-nanostructures, posing overwhelming challenges, especially in the short-wavelength range. Here, we suggest a novel planar design for chiral metasurfaces supporting bound states in the continuum (BICs) and demonstrate experimentally chiroptical responses with record-high Q-factors (Q=390) and near-perfect circular dichroism (CD=0.93) at optical frequencies. The symmetry-reduced meta-atoms are highly birefringent and support winding elliptical eigen-polarizations with opposite helicity surrounding the BIC polarization singularity, providing a convenient way for achieving maximal planar chirality tuned by either breaking in-plane symmetry or changing illumination direction. Such sharply resonant chirality realized in planar metasurfaces promises various practical applications in classical and quantum optics including chiral sensing, enantiomer selection, and chiral quantum emitters.

preprint2020arXiv

A Study of Selectively Digital Etching Silicon-Germanium with Nitric and Hydrofluoric Acids

A digital etching method was proposed to achieve excellent control of etching depth. The digital etching characteristics of p+ Si and Si0.7Ge0.3 using the combinations of HNO3 oxidation and BOE oxide removal processes were studied. Experiments showed that oxidation saturates with time due to low activation energy. A physical model was presented to describe the wet oxidation process with nitric acid. The model was calibrated with experimental data and the oxidation saturation time, final oxide thickness, and selectivity between Si0.7Ge0.3 and p+ Si were obtained. The digital etch of laminated Si0.7Ge0.3/p+ Si was also investigated. The depth of the tunnels formed by etching SiGe layers between two Si layers was found in proportion to digital etching cycles. And oxidation would also saturate and the saturated relative etched amount per cycle (REPC) was 0.5 nm (4 monolayers). A corrected selectivity calculation formula was presented. The oxidation model was also calibrated with Si0.7Ge0.3/p+ Si stacks, and selectivity from model was the same with the corrected formula. The model can also be used to analyze process variations and repeatability. And it could act as a guidance for experiment design. Selectivity and repeatability should make a trade-off.

preprint2020arXiv

Concurrent probing of electron-lattice dephasing induced by photoexcitation in 1T-TaSeTe using ultrafast electron diffraction

It has been technically challenging to concurrently probe the electrons and the lattices in materials during non-equilibrium processes, allowing their correlations to be determined. Here, in a single set of ultrafast electron diffraction patterns taken on the charge-density-wave (CDW) material 1T-TaSeTe, we discover a temporal shift in the diffraction intensity measurements as a function of scattering angle. With the help of dynamic models and theoretical calculations, we show that the ultrafast electrons probe both the valence-electron and lattice dynamic processes, resulting in the temporal shift measurements. Our results demonstrate unambiguously that the CDW is not merely a result of the periodic lattice deformation ever-present in 1T-TaSeTe but has significant electronic origin. This method demonstrates a novel approach for studying many quantum effects that arise from electron-lattice dephasing in molecules and crystals for next-generation devices.

preprint2020arXiv

Low-Latency and Fresh Content Provision in Information-Centric Vehicular Networks

In this paper, the content service provision of information-centric vehicular networks (ICVNs) is investigated from the aspect of mobile edge caching, considering the dynamic driving-related context information. To provide up-to-date information with low latency, two schemes are designed for cache update and content delivery at the roadside units (RSUs). The roadside unit centric (RSUC) scheme decouples cache update and content delivery through bandwidth splitting, where the cached content items are updated regularly in a round-robin manner. The request adaptive (ReA) scheme updates the cached content items upon user requests with certain probabilities. The performance of both proposed schemes are analyzed, whereby the average age of information (AoI) and service latency are derived in closed forms. Surprisingly, the AoI-latency trade-off does not always exist, and frequent cache update can degrade both performances. Thus, the RSUC and ReA schemes are further optimized to balance the AoI and latency. Extensive simulations are conducted on SUMO and OMNeT++ simulators, and the results show that the proposed schemes can reduce service latency by up to 80\% while guaranteeing content freshness in heavily loaded ICVNs.

preprint2020arXiv

Rapid Determination of Antimicrobial Susceptibility by Stimulated Raman Scattering Imaging of D2O Metabolic Incorporation in a Single Bacterium

Rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is urgently needed for treating infections with correct antibiotics and slowing down the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Here, we report a phenotypic platform that rapidly produces AST results by femtosecond stimulated Raman scattering imaging of deuterium oxide (D2O) metabolism. Metabolic incorporation of D2O into biomass in a single bacterium is probed in as short as 10 minutes after culture in 70% D2O medium, the fastest among current technologies. Single-cell metabolism inactivation concentration (SC-MIC) is obtained in less than 2.5 hours from colony to results. The SC-MIC results of 37 sets of samples, which include 8 major bacterial species and 14 different antibiotics often encountered in clinic, are validated by standard minimal inhibitory concentration blindly measured via broth microdilution. Towards clinical translation, SRS imaging of D2O metabolic incorporation and SC-MIC determination after 1-h antibiotics treatment and 30-minutes mixture of D2O and antibiotics incubation of bacteria in urine or whole blood is demonstrated.

preprint2020arXiv

Suphx: Mastering Mahjong with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved great success in many domains, and game AI is widely regarded as its beachhead since the dawn of AI. In recent years, studies on game AI have gradually evolved from relatively simple environments (e.g., perfect-information games such as Go, chess, shogi or two-player imperfect-information games such as heads-up Texas hold'em) to more complex ones (e.g., multi-player imperfect-information games such as multi-player Texas hold'em and StartCraft II). Mahjong is a popular multi-player imperfect-information game worldwide but very challenging for AI research due to its complex playing/scoring rules and rich hidden information. We design an AI for Mahjong, named Suphx, based on deep reinforcement learning with some newly introduced techniques including global reward prediction, oracle guiding, and run-time policy adaptation. Suphx has demonstrated stronger performance than most top human players in terms of stable rank and is rated above 99.99% of all the officially ranked human players in the Tenhou platform. This is the first time that a computer program outperforms most top human players in Mahjong.

preprint2020arXiv

Vector exceptional points with strong superchiral fields

Exceptional points(EPs), branch points of complex energy surfaces at which eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce, are ubiquitous in non-Hermitian systems. Many novel properties and applications have been proposed around the EPs. One of the important applications is to enhance the detection sensitivity. However, due to the lack of single-handed superchiral fields, all of the proposed EP-based sensing mechanisms are only useful for the non-chiral discrimination. Here, we propose theoretically and demonstrate experimentally a new type of EP, which is a called radiation vector EP, to fulfill the homogeneous superchiral fields for chiral sensing. This type of EP is realized by suitably tuning the coupling strength and radiation losses for a pair of orthogonal polarization modes in the photonic crystal slab. Based on the unique modal-coupling property at the vector EP, we demonstrate that the uniform superchiral fields can be generated with two beams of lights illuminating on the photonic crystal slab from opposite directions. Thus, the designed photonic crystal slab, which supports the vector EP, can be used to perform surface-enhanced chiral detection. Our findings provide a new strategy for ultrasensitive characterization and quantification of molecular chirality, a key aspect for various bioscience and biomedicine applications.