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Yiwen Zhang

Yiwen Zhang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

13 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Similarity Network for Correlating Musical Structure to Military Strategy

Music perception, a multi-sensory process based on the synesthesia effect, is an essential component of music aesthetic education. Understanding music structure helps both perception and aesthetic education. Music structure incorporates a range of information, the coordination of which forms the melody, just as different military actions cooperate to produce a military strategy. However, there are a few ways for assessing music perception from the perspectives of system operation and information management. In this paper, we explore the similarities between music structure and military strategy while creating the Music Clips Correlation Network (MCCN) based on Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). The inspiration comes from the comparison between a concert conductor's musical score and a military war commander's sand table exercise. Specifically, we create MCCNs for various kinds of war movie soundtracks, then relate military tactics (Sun Tzu's Art of War, etc.) and political institutions to military operations networks. Our primary findings suggest a few similarities, implying that music perception and aesthetic education can be approached from a military strategy and management perspective through this interdisciplinary research. Similarly, we can discover similarities between the art of military scheming and the art of musical structure based on network analysis in order to facilitate the understanding of the relationship between technology and art.

preprint2026arXiv

DemoTuner: Automatic Performance Tuning for Database Management Systems Based on Demonstration Reinforcement Learning

The performance of modern DBMSs such as MySQL and PostgreSQL heavily depends on the configuration of performance-critical knobs. Manual tuning these knobs is laborious and inefficient due to the complex and high-dimensional nature of the configuration space. Among the automated tuning methods, reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods have recently sought to improve the DBMS knobs tuning process from several different perspectives. However, they still encounter challenges with slow convergence speed during offline training. In this paper, we mainly focus on how to leverage the valuable tuning hints contained in various textual documents such as DBMS manuals and web forums to improve the offline training of RL-based methods. To this end, we propose an efficient DBMS knobs tuning framework named DemoTuner via a novel LLM-assisted demonstration reinforcement learning method. Specifically, to comprehensively and accurately mine tuning hints from documents, we design a structured chain of thought prompt to employ LLMs to conduct a condition-aware tuning hints extraction task. To effectively integrate the mined tuning hints into RL agent training, we propose a hint-aware demonstration reinforcement learning algorithm HA-DDPGfD in DemoTuner. As far as we know, DemoTuner is the first work to introduce the demonstration reinforcement learning algorithm for DBMS knobs tuning. Experimental evaluations conducted on MySQL and PostgreSQL across various workloads demonstrate that DemoTuner achieves performance gains of up to 44.01% for MySQL and 39.95% for PostgreSQL over default configurations. Compared with three representative baseline methods, DemoTuner is able to further reduce the execution time by up to 10.03%, while always consuming the least online tuning cost. Additionally, DemoTuner also exhibits superior adaptability to application scenarios with unknown workloads.

preprint2026arXiv

Preference-Based Self-Distillation: Beyond KL Matching via Reward Regularization

On-policy distillation is an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning, offering dense token-level training signals. However, its reliance on a stronger external teacher has driven recent work on on-policy self-distillation, where the same model serves as both teacher and student under different prompt contexts. Yet, existing self-distillation methods largely reduce learning to KL matching toward the context-augmented teacher model. This approach often suffers from training instability and can degrade reasoning performance over time. Moreover, self-distillation from the same model with prompt augmentation lacks the exploratory diversity provided by a genuine external teacher. To address these limitations, we move beyond fixed-teacher KL matching and propose \textbf{P}reference-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{D}istillation (\textbf{PBSD}), which revisits on-policy self-distillation through a reward-regularized perspective. Instead of directly matching the teacher distribution, we derive a reward-regularized objective whose analytic optimum is a reward-reweighted teacher distribution, yielding a target policy provably superior to the original teacher under this objective. Practically, PBSD optimizes preference gaps between teacher and student samples while maintaining on-policy student sampling. We support this framework with a statistical analysis of the induced preference-learning problem, formally establishing when on policy self-distillation is preferable to learning from an external teacher in our setting. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks across multiple model scales demonstrate that PBSD consistently achieves the strongest average performance among comparable baselines, showing improved training stability over prior self-distillation baselines while preserving token efficiency.

preprint2026arXiv

ProMax: Exploring the Potential of LLM-derived Profiles with Distribution Shaping for Recommender Systems

The remarkable text understanding and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have revitalized the field of general recommendation based on implicit user feedback. Rather than deploying LLMs directly as recommendation models, a more flexible paradigm leverages their ability to interpret users' historical interactions and semantic contexts to extract structured profiles that characterize user preferences. These profiles can be further transformed into actionable high-dimensional representations, serving as powerful signals to augment and strengthen recommendation models. However, the mechanism by which such profiles enhance recommendation performance within the feature space remains insufficiently understood. Moreover, existing studies predominantly rely on nonlinear alignment and fusion strategies to incorporate these profiles, which often lead to semantic loss and fail to fully exploit their potential. To address these limitations, we revisit profiles from a retrieval perspective and propose a simple yet effective recommendation framework built upon distribution shaping (ProMax) in this paper. We begin by employing dense retrieval to uncover the collaborative relationships between user and item profiles within the feature space. Based on this insight, we introduce a dual distribution-reshaping process, in which the profile distribution acts as a guiding signal to steer the recommendation model toward learning user preferences for unseen items beyond the scope of observed interactions. We apply ProMax to four classic recommendation methods on three public datasets. The results indicate that ProMax substantially improves base model performance and outperforms existing LLM-based recommendation approaches.

preprint2024arXiv

Integrated lithium niobate microwave photonic processing engine

Integrated microwave photonics is an intriguing field that leverages integrated photonic technologies for the generation, transmission, and manipulation of microwave signals in chip-scale optical systems. In particular, ultrafast processing and computation of analog electronic signals in the optical domain with high fidelity and low latency could enable a variety of applications such as MWP filters, microwave signal processing, and image recognition. An ideal photonic platform for achieving these integrated MWP processing tasks shall simultaneously offer an efficient, linear and high-speed electro-optic modulation block to faithfully perform microwave-optic conversion at low power, and a low-loss functional photonic network that can be configured for a variety of signal processing tasks, as well as large-scale, low-cost manufacturability to monolithically integrate the two building blocks on the same chip. In this work, we demonstrate such an integrated MWP processing engine based on a thin-film lithium niobate platform capable of performing multi-purpose processing and computation tasks of analog signals up to 92 giga samples per second at CMOS-compatible voltages. We demonstrate high-speed analog computation, i.e., first- and second-order temporal integration and differentiation with computing accuracies up to 98.1 %, and deploy these functions to showcase three proof-of-concept applications, namely, ordinary differential equation solving, ultra-wideband signal generation and high-speed edge detection of images. We further leverage the image edge detector to enable a photonic-assisted image segmentation model that could effectively outline the boundaries of melanoma lesion in medical diagnostic images, achieving orders of magnitude faster processing speed and lower power consumption than conventional electronic processors.

preprint2022arXiv

A power-efficient integrated lithium niobate electro-optic comb generator

Integrated electro-optic (EO) frequency combs are essential components for future applications in optical communications, light detection and ranging, optical computation, sensing and spectroscopy. To date, broadband on-chip EO combs are typically generated in high-quality-factor micro-resonators, while the more straightforward and flexible non-resonant method, usually using single or cascaded EO phase modulators, often requires high driving power to realize a reasonably strong modulation index. Here, we show that the phase modulation efficiency of an integrated lithium niobate modulator could be dramatically enhanced by passing optical signals through the modulation electrodes for a total of 4 round trips, via multiple low-loss TE0/TE1 mode multiplexers and waveguide crossings, reducing electrical power consumption by more than one order of magnitude. Using devices fabricated from a wafer-scale stepper lithography process, we demonstrate a broadband optical frequency comb featuring 47 comb lines at a 25-GHz repetition rate, using a moderate RF driving power of 28 dBm (0.63 W). Leveraging the excellent tunability in repetition rate and operation wavelength, our power-efficient EO comb generator could serve as a compact low-cost solution for future high-speed data transmission, sensing and spectroscopy, as well as classical and quantum optical computation systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Heterogeneous Information Network-based Interest Composition with Graph Neural Network for Recommendation

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are widely applied to recommendation systems due to their capability of modeling various auxiliary information with meta-paths. However, existing HIN-based recommendation models usually fuse the information from various meta-paths by simple weighted sum or concatenation, which limits performance improvement because it lacks the capability of interest compositions among meta-paths. In this article, we propose an HIN-based Interest Composition model for Recommendation (HicRec). Specifically, user and item representations are learned with a graph neural network on both the graph structure and features in each meta-path, and a parameter sharing mechanism is utilized here to ensure that the user and item representations are in the same latent space. Then, users' interests in each item from each pair of related meta-paths are calculated by a combination of the user and item representations. The composed user interests are obtained by their single interest from both intra- and inter-meta-paths for recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets and the results demonstrate that our proposed HicRec model outperforms the baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

HyperCI: A Higher Order Collective Influence Measure for Hypernetwork Dismantling

The connectivity of networked systems is often dependent on a small portion of critical nodes. Network dismantling studies the strategy to identify a subset of nodes the removal of which will maximally destroy the connectivity of a network and fragment it into disconnected components. However, conventional network dismantling approaches focus on simple network which models only pairwise interaction between nodes while groupwise interactions among arbitrary number of nodes are ubiquitous in networked systems like integrated circuits. Groupwise interactions modeled by hypernetwork introduce higher order connectivity patterns, which limits the application of conventional network dismantling methods on hypernetwork. In this brief, we propose HyperCI, a higher order collective influence measure for hypernetwork dismantling. It considers the node co-occurrence characteristics and higher order influence ability both introduced by hyperedges in hypernetwork. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed HyperCI on six real world hypernetworks including integrated circuits and citation networks and the results indicate our proposed HyperCI outperforms baseline network dismantling methods for both simple network and hypernetwork.

preprint2022arXiv

Hypernetwork Dismantling via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Network dismantling aims to degrade the connectivity of a network by removing an optimal set of nodes. It has been widely adopted in many real-world applications such as epidemic control and rumor containment. However, conventional methods usually focus on simple network modeling with only pairwise interactions, while group-wise interactions modeled by hypernetwork are ubiquitous and critical. In this work, we formulate the hypernetwork dismantling problem as a node sequence decision problem and propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based hypernetwork dismantling framework. Besides, we design a novel inductive hypernetwork embedding method to ensure the transferability to various real-world hypernetworks. Our framework first generates small-scale synthetic hypernetworks and embeds the nodes and hypernetworks into a low dimensional vector space to represent the action and state space in DRL, respectively. Then trial-and-error dismantling tasks are conducted by an agent on these synthetic hypernetworks, and the dismantling strategy is continuously optimized. Finally, the well-optimized strategy is applied to real-world hypernetwork dismantling tasks. Experimental results on five real-world hypernetworks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

preprint2022arXiv

Session-based Social and Dependency-aware Software Recommendation

With the increase of complexity of modern software, social collaborative coding and reuse of open source software packages become more and more popular, which thus greatly enhances the development efficiency and software quality. However, the explosive growth of open source software packages exposes developers to the challenge of information overload. While this can be addressed by conventional recommender systems, they usually do not consider particular constraints of social coding such as social influence among developers and dependency relations among software packages. In this paper, we aim to model the dynamic interests of developers with both social influence and dependency constraints, and propose the Session-based Social and Dependency-aware software Recommendation (SSDRec) model. This model integrates recurrent neural network (RNN) and graph attention network (GAT) into a unified framework. An RNN is employed to model the short-term dynamic interests of developers in each session and two GATs are utilized to capture social influence from friends and dependency constraints from dependent software packages, respectively. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world datasets and the results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms the competitive baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Spatial-Aware Local Community Detection Guided by Dominance Relation

The problem of finding the spatial-aware community for a given node has been defined and investigated in geo-social networks. However, existing studies suffer from two limitations: a) the criteria of defining communities are determined by parameters, which are difficult to set; b) algorithms may require global information and are not suitable for situations where the network is incomplete. Therefore, we propose spatial-aware local community detection (SLCD), which finds the spatial-aware local community with only local information and defines the community based on the difference in the sparseness of edges inside and outside the community. Specifically, to address the SLCD problem, we design a novel spatial aware local community detection algorithm based on dominance relation, but this algorithm incurs high cost. To further improve the efficiency, we propose an approximate algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approximate algorithm outperforms the comparison algorithms.

preprint2022arXiv

Undoped Strained Ge Quantum Well with Ultrahigh Mobility Grown by Reduce Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition

We fabricate an undoped Ge quantum well under 30 nm Ge0.8Si0.2 shallow barrier with reverse grading technology. The under barrier is deposited by Ge0.8Si0.2 followed by Ge0.9Si0.1 so that the variation of Ge content forms a sharp interface which can suppress the threading dislocation density penetrating into undoped Ge quantum well. And the Ge0.8Si0.2 barrier introduces enough in-plane parallel strain -0.41% in the Ge quantum well. The heterostructure field-effect transistors with a shallow buried channel get a high two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG) mobility over 2E6 cm2/Vs at a low percolation density of 2.51 E-11 cm2. We also discover a tunable fractional quantum Hall effect at high densities and high magnetic fields. This approach defines strained germanium as providing the material basis for tuning the spin-orbit coupling strength for fast and coherent quantum computation.

preprint2019arXiv

Generating optical vortex beams by momentum-space polarization vortices centered at bound states in the continuum

An optical vortex (OV) is a beam with spiral wave front and screw phase dislocation. This kind of beams is attracting rising interest in various fields. Here we theoretically proposed and experimentally realized a novel but easy approach to generate optical vortices. We leverage the inherent topological vortex structures of polarization around bound states in the continuum (BIC) in the momentum space of two dimensional periodic structures, e.g. photonic crystal slabs, to induce Pancharatnam-Berry phases to the beams. This new class of OV generators operates in the momentum space, meaning that there is no real-space center of structure. Thus, not only the fabrication but also the practical alignment would be greatly simplified. Any even order of OV, which is actually a quasi-non-diffractive high-order quasi-Bessel beam, at any desired working wavelength could be achieved in principle. The proposed approach expands the application of bound states in the continuum and topological photonics.