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Published work

23 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

6D Movable Antenna Enhanced Cell-free MIMO: Two-timescale Decentralized Beamforming and Antenna Movement Optimization

This paper investigates a six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA)-aided cell-free multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. In this system, each distributed access point (AP) can flexibly adjust its array orientation and antenna positions to adapt to spatial channel variations and enhance communication performance. However, frequent antenna movements and centralized beamforming based on global instantaneous channel state information (CSI) sharing among APs entail extremely high signal processing delay and system overhead, which is difficult to be practically implemented in high-mobility scenarios with short channel coherence time. To address these practical implementation challenges and improve scalability, a two-timescale decentralized optimization framework is proposed in this paper to jointly design the beamformer, antenna positions, and array orientations. In the short timescale, each AP updates its receive beamformer based on local instantaneous CSI and global statistical CSI. In the long timescale, the central processing unit optimizes the antenna positions and array orientations at all APs based on global statistical CSI to maximize the ergodic sum rate of all users. The resulting optimization problem is non-convex and involves highly coupled variables, thus posing significant challenges for obtaining efficient solutions. To address this problem, a constrained stochastic successive convex approximation algorithm is developed. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed 6DMA-aided cell-free system with decentralized beamforming significantly outperforms other antenna movement schemes with less flexibility and even achieves a performance comparable to that of the centralized beamforming benchmark.

preprint2026arXiv

Beyond Known Objects: A Novel Framework for Open-Set Object Detection using Negative-Aware Norm

Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) is crucial for autonomous driving, where perception systems must recognize and localize both known and previously unseen objects in complex, dynamic environments. While recent approaches deliver promising results, they often require retraining the detector extensively to learn objectness, which describes the likelihood that a bounding box tightly encloses a valid object, regardless of whether its category was learned during training. Deviating from existing work, we hypothesize that standard off-the-shelf detectors may already contain helpful cues for objectness, owing to their training on numerous and diverse known categories. Building on this idea, we propose NAN-SPOT, a training-light framework that does not require to retrain the base object detector and estimates objectness by leveraging a hidden layer metric called Negative-Aware Norm (NAN), requiring only minutes of training on just hundreds of images. To support comprehensive evaluation, we introduce COCO-Open, an expanded version of the existing COCO-Mixed dataset, increasing unknown object annotations from 433 to 1853, making it the most exhaustively labeled dataset for OSOD to the best of our knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that NAN-SPOT achieves even better performance on unknown object detection than methods requiring heavy training, without compromising performance on known objects. This efficiency and robustness make NAN-SPOT a promising step towards open-world perception in autonomous driving.

preprint2026arXiv

Characterizing the Consistency of the Emergent Misalignment Persona

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly misaligned data generalizes to broadly misaligned behavior, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work has found a correlation between harmful behavior and self-assessment in emergently misaligned models, it remains unclear how consistent this correspondence is across tasks and whether it varies across fine-tuning domains. We characterize the consistency of the EM persona by fine-tuning Qwen 2.5 32B Instruct on six narrowly misaligned domains (e.g., insecure code, risky financial advice, bad medical advice) and administering experiments including harmfulness evaluation, self-assessment, choosing between two descriptions of AI systems, output recognition, and score prediction. Our results reveal two distinct patterns: coherent-persona models, in which harmful behavior and self-reported misalignment are coupled, and inverted-persona models, which produce harmful outputs while identifying as aligned AI systems. These findings reveal a more fine-grained picture of the effects of emergent misalignment, calling into question the consistency of the EM persona.

preprint2026arXiv

Continuous Discovery of Vulnerabilities in LLM Serving Systems with Fuzzing

LLM inference and serving systems have become security-critical infrastructure; however, many of their most concerning failures arise from the serving layer rather than from model behavior alone. Modern inference engines combine KV cache, batching, prefix sharing, speculative decoding, adapters, and multi-tenant scheduling, creating shared-state behavior that only emerges under realistic concurrent workloads and is missed by standard model, safety, and API tests. We present GRIEF, a greybox fuzzer for LLM inference engines that treats timed multi-request traces as first-class inputs, uses lightweight oracles to detect crashes, hangs, performance pathologies, and silent output corruption, and applies controlled replay with log-probability checks to confirm reproducible serving-layer failures. Across early campaigns on vLLM and SGLang, GRIEF discovers 15 vulnerabilities, 10 confirmed by engine developers, including 2 CVEs, spanning KV-cache isolation failures, cross-request performance interference, and crash or liveness bugs. These results show that concurrency, caching, and state reuse can induce silent cross-request contamination, noisy-neighbor denial of service, and delayed crashes without malformed inputs or explicit server errors, making concurrent serving behavior a first-class security and reliability boundary for LLM infrastructure.

preprint2026arXiv

Distributed Integrated Sensing, Localization, and Communications over LEO Satellite Constellations

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are rapidly becoming essential enablers of next-generation wireless systems, offering global broadband access, high-precision localization, and reliable sensing beyond terrestrial coverage. However, the inherent limitations of individual LEO satellites, including restricted power, limited antenna aperture, and constrained onboard processing, hinder their ability to meet the growing demands of 6G applications. To address these challenges, this article introduces the concept of distributed integrated sensing, localization, and communication (DISLAC) over LEO constellations, inspired by distributed multiple input multiple output architectures. By enabling inter-satellite cooperation through inter-satellite links, DISLAC jointly exploits communication, localization, and sensing functionalities, achieving synergistic gains in throughput, positioning accuracy, and sensing robustness through shared resources and cooperative design. We present illustrative case studies that quantify these benefits and analyze key system-level considerations, including synchronization, antenna reconfigurability, and inter-satellite link design. The article concludes by outlining open research directions to advance the practical deployment of DISLAC in future non-terrestrial networks.

preprint2026arXiv

DynaTrain: Fast Online Parallelism Switching for Elastic LLM Training

Modern large language model (LLM) training is inherently dynamic: resource fluctuations, RLHF phase shifts, and cluster elasticity continually reshape the optimal parallelism layout, posing a significant challenge to existing training frameworks built around a static execution model. We present DynaTrain, a distributed training system for sub-second, online reconfiguration across arbitrary multi-dimensional parallelism. At its core, we propose a Virtual Parameter Space (VPS) abstraction that unifies all distributed training states under one logical coordinate space, turning any parallelism configuration into a deterministic mapping and collapsing complex transition into manageable geometric intersections. On top of VPS, a state routing-and-transition layer executes rank-local transfers under a memory-aware, deadlock-free schedule, and an Elastic Device Manager overlaps new-world construction with ongoing training to mask topology-change cost. On dense and MoE models up to 235B parameters, DynaTrain reconfigures a 70B dense model in under 2s and a 235B MoE model in 4.36s, outperforming state-of-the-art checkpoint-based and elastic systems by up to three orders of magnitude while preserving correctness.

preprint2026arXiv

GESR: Graph-Based Edge Semantic Reconstruction for Stealthy Communication Detection with Benign-Only Training

Detecting stealthy malicious communications from flow logs under benign-only training remains a critical challenge in network security. Malicious communications often camouflage as normal traffic like standard HTTPS flows. Conventional intrusion detectors rely strictly on known labeled attacks. Alternatively, they score flows completely independently. These approaches fail against sparse and context-dependent suspicious activity. To capture this essential context, graph anomaly detectors have been introduced to add valuable relational information to the analysis. However, existing methods fail to test the structural consistency of specific communication edges. To overcome these fundamental limitations, we present GESR, a novel graph-based framework for detecting suspicious communications and anomalous hosts under a benign-only training setting. GESR models complex network activity as attributed communication graphs. It cleverly reconstructs edge semantics entirely from local structural context rather than isolated features. This non-intuitive design forces the framework to predict expected communication patterns from neighborhood topologies. Attackers cannot easily manipulate this deep structural dependency. The model then converts the resulting structural inconsistencies into host-level anomaly scores. It utilizes robust Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) calibration for this final step. We evaluate GESR extensively on CTU-13 and CICIDS2017 datasets. These evaluations strictly impose tight false-positive operating constraints. On CICIDS2017, GESR achieves an outstanding ROC-AUC of 0.9753. It also yields a high TPR of 0.8569 at a strict 5% FPR threshold. GESR consistently outperforms existing methods across both evaluated benchmarks. The results prove that structure-conditioned edge reconstruction is a credible direction for practical intrusion detection.

preprint2026arXiv

Implicit Compression Regularization: Concise Reasoning via Internal Shorter Distributions in RL Post-Training

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards improves LLM reasoning but often induces overthinking, where models generate unnecessarily long reasoning traces. Existing methods mainly rely on length penalties or early-exit strategies; however, the former may degrade accuracy and induce underthinking, whereas the latter assumes that substantial portions of reasoning traces can be safely truncated. To obtain a compression signal without these limitations, we revisit the training dynamics of existing compression methods. We observe that the length--accuracy correlation is initially negative but continually increases during compression, indicating that shorter responses are initially more likely to be correct but gradually lose this property as the policy moves toward underthinking. Based on this observation, we formalize overthinking: a negative correlation indicates an overthinking regime, while a positive one indicates underthinking. When overthinking, the shortest correct responses are shorter than the group-average response length in expectation, making them natural compression targets already present in on-policy rollouts. We therefore propose \emph{Implicit Compression Regularization} (ICR), an on-policy regularization method whose compression signal comes from a virtual shorter distribution induced by the shortest correct responses in rollout groups, guiding the policy toward concise yet correct trajectories. Training dynamics show that ICR maintains a better length--accuracy correlation during compression, indicating that short responses remain better aligned with correctness instead of drifting toward underthinking. Experiments on three reasoning backbones and multiple mathematical and knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that ICR consistently shortens responses while preserving or improving accuracy, achieving a stronger accuracy--length Pareto frontier.

preprint2026arXiv

MT-JailBench: A Modular Benchmark for Understanding Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks

Multi-turn jailbreaks exploit the ability of large language models to accumulate and act on conversational context. Instead of stating a harmful request directly, an attacker can gradually steer the conversation toward an unsafe answer. Recent methods demonstrate this risk, but they are usually evaluated as black-box pipelines with different budgets, judges, retry rules, and strategy generation procedures. As a result, it is often unclear whether reported gains reflect stronger attack mechanisms or different experimental conditions. We introduce MT-JailBench, a modular evaluation framework for benchmarking multi-turn jailbreaks under fixed conditions. MT-JailBench implements each attack as five interacting modules: evaluation function, attack strategy, prompt generation, prompt refinement, and flow control. This design enables fair comparison across attack methods and component-wise analysis of what drives attack success. Using MT-JailBench, we find that resource budgets and evaluation functions are major confounders: controlling turns, retries, interactions, sampled strategies, and judges substantially change the ranking of attacks. At the component level, prompt generation accounts for most performance variation, while refinement and flow control provide moderate gains. We also find that explicit dynamic strategy generation is not always necessary; stochastic sampling from a fixed strategy can rival more elaborate diversification mechanisms. Finally, recomposing the best components yields a strong attack configuration that outperforms its source attacks and generalizes across diverse target LLMs. MT-JailBench therefore provides a modular framework for comparing multi-turn jailbreaks, understanding the impact of components, and guiding stronger red-teaming evaluations.

preprint2026arXiv

Nonlinear virtual lens for programmable and multispectral infrared upconversion imaging

Conventional infrared (IR) imaging techniques depend on IR cameras based on narrow-bandgap semiconductors, which offer limited spectral bandwidth, coupled with a separate lens. Recently, advances in nonlinear flat optics have opened a novel pathway for converting IR signals into the visible through nonlinear generations, enabling the direct visualisation of IR images using standard visible cameras. However, the narrow spectral bandwidth and the requirement for an additional lens remain the key challenges. Here, we address both issues via a novel adaptive and multifunctional IR-to-visible imaging platform offering tunable bandwidth and focusing simultaneously. We utilise sum-frequency generation (SFG) to convert IR light into the visible, by introducing a pump beam modulated by a spatial light modulator (SLM) to construct a virtual metalens enabling precisely controlled focusing of the generated nonlinear optical field. As a result, we demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally an optical focusing mechanism with a tunable focal length, achieved by varying the pump and signal wavelengths and modulating the phase distribution. Furthermore, since the focal length depends on the input signal wavelength, the imaging plane position varies accordingly, indicating a promising potential for the multispectral IR imaging applications. Our upconversion platform delivers SLM-controlled, programmable multispectral focusing for next-generation IR imaging, opening new avenues in the fields of computational and multispectral imaging techniques.

preprint2026arXiv

OmniVL-Guard Pro: A Tool-Augmented Agent for Omnibus Vision-Language Forensics

Existing vision-language forgery detection and grounding methods operate under a closed-world paradigm, assuming verification can be completed by the model alone. However, self-contained MLLMs are constrained by finite parametric knowledge, static training corpora, and limited perceptual resolution, creating a practical ceiling in dynamic open-world forensics -- particularly for real-time event verification requiring external clues and forgery segmentation demanding fine-grained scrutiny of local manipulations. To address these limitations, we shift from scaling up the self-contained model toward reaching beyond it. We propose \textbf{OmniVL-Guard Pro}, a tool-augmented agent that extends unified forensics from closed-world prediction to open-world clues-driven reasoning. OmniVL-Guard Pro integrates a tool environment spanning real-time event search, local cropping and zooming, edge-anomaly screening, face detection, video frame extraction, and SAM3-based segmentation. To generate high-quality tool-reasoning trajectories, we introduce \textbf{Tree-Structured Self-Evolving Tool Trajectory Generation}, which produces diverse trajectories through seed guidance, guider-free self-evolution, and weakly-hinted hard sample synthesis, yielding the Full-Spectrum Tool Reasoning (FSTR) dataset for training. We further propose \textbf{Checker-Guided Agentic Reinforcement Learning} (CGARL), which provides process-level supervision to penalize cases where the answer is correct but the reasoning is distorted. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniVL-Guard Pro achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization. The FSTR dataset and code for OmniVL-Guard Pro will be publicly released at \url{https://github.com/shen8424/OmniVL-Guard-Pro}.

preprint2026arXiv

Positioning-Aided Channel Estimation for Multi-LEO Satellite Cooperative Beamforming

We investigate a multi-low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite system that simultaneously provides positioning and communication services to terrestrial user terminals. To address the challenges of accurately acquiring channel state information in LEO satellite systems, we propose a novel two-timescale positioning-aided channel estimation framework, exploiting the distinct variation rates of position-related parameters and channel gains inherent in LEO satellite channels. Using the misspecified Cramér-Rao bound (MCRB) theory, we systematically analyze positioning performance under practical imperfections, such as inter-satellite clock bias and carrier frequency offset. Furthermore, we theoretically demonstrate how position information derived from downlink positioning can enhance uplink channel estimation accuracy, even in the presence of positioning errors, through an MCRB-based analysis. To address the limited link budgets and communication rates of single-satellite communication, we develop a multi-LEO cooperative beamforming strategy for downlink transmission that leverages cluster-wise satellite cooperation while maintaining reduced complexity. Theoretical analyses and numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in facilitating high-precision downlink positioning under practical imperfections, facilitating uplink channel estimation, and enabling efficient downlink communication.

preprint2026arXiv

Precoding Matrix Indicator in the 5G NR Protocol: A Tutorial on 3GPP Beamforming Codebooks

This paper bridges this critical gap by providing a systematic examination of the beamforming codebook technology, i.e., precoding matrix indicator (PMI), in the 5G NR from theoretical, standardization, and implementation perspectives. We begin by introducing the background of beamforming in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and the signaling procedures for codebook-based beamforming in practical 5G systems. Then, we establish the fundamentals of regular codebooks and port-selection codebooks in 3GPP standards. Next, we provide rigorous technical analysis of 3GPP codebook evolution spanning Releases 15-18, with particular focus on: 1) We elucidate the core principles underlying codebook design, 2) provide clear physical interpretations for each symbolic variable in the codebook formulas, summarized in tabular form, and 3) offer intuitive visual illustrations to explain how codebook parameters convey information. These essential pedagogical elements are almost entirely absent in the often-obscure standardization documents. Through mathematical modeling, performance benchmarking, feedback comparisons, and scenario-dependent applicability analysis, we provide researchers and engineers with a unified understanding of beamforming codebooks in real-world systems. Furthermore, we identify future directions and other beamforming scenarios for ongoing research and development efforts. This work serves as both an informative tutorial and a guidance for future research, facilitating more effective collaboration between academia and industry in advancing wireless communication technologies.

preprint2026arXiv

Teaching Thinking Models to Reason with Tools: A Full-Pipeline Recipe for Tool-Integrated Reasoning

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) offers a direct way to extend thinking models beyond the limits of text-only reasoning. Paradoxically, we observe that tool-enabled evaluation can degrade reasoning performance even when the strong thinking models make almost no actual tool calls. In this paper, we investigate how to inject natural tool-use behavior into a strong thinking model without sacrificing its no-tool reasoning ability, and present a comprehensive TIR recipe. We highlight that (i) the effectiveness of TIR supervised fine-tuning (SFT) hinges on the learnability of teacher trajectories, which should prioritize problems inherently suited for tool-augmented solutions; (ii) controlling the proportion of tool-use trajectories could mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of text-only reasoning capacity; (iii) optimizing for pass@k and response length instead of training loss could maximize TIR SFT gains while preserving headroom for reinforcement learning (RL) exploration; (iv) a stable RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) stage, built upon suitable SFT initialization and explicit safeguards against mode collapse, provides a simple yet remarkably effective solution. When applied to Qwen3 thinking models at 4B and 30B scales, our recipe yields models that achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of benchmarks among open-source models, such as 96.7% and 99.2% on AIME 2025 for 4B and 30B, respectively.

preprint2026arXiv

The RoboSense Challenge: Sense Anything, Navigate Anywhere, Adapt Across Platforms

Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and dynamic environments -- from city streets to aerial and indoor spaces -- where perception models must remain reliable under sensor noise, environmental variation, and platform shifts. However, even state-of-the-art methods often degrade under unseen conditions, highlighting the need for robust and generalizable robot sensing. The RoboSense 2025 Challenge is designed to advance robustness and adaptability in robot perception across diverse sensing scenarios. It unifies five complementary research tracks spanning language-grounded decision making, socially compliant navigation, sensor configuration generalization, cross-view and cross-modal correspondence, and cross-platform 3D perception. Together, these tasks form a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating real-world sensing reliability under domain shifts, sensor failures, and platform discrepancies. RoboSense 2025 provides standardized datasets, baseline models, and unified evaluation protocols, enabling large-scale and reproducible comparison of robust perception methods. The challenge attracted 143 teams from 85 institutions across 16 countries, reflecting broad community engagement. By consolidating insights from 23 winning solutions, this report highlights emerging methodological trends, shared design principles, and open challenges across all tracks, marking a step toward building robots that can sense reliably, act robustly, and adapt across platforms in real-world environments.

preprint2023arXiv

Mining User-aware Multi-relations for Fake News Detection in Large Scale Online Social Networks

Users' involvement in creating and propagating news is a vital aspect of fake news detection in online social networks. Intuitively, credible users are more likely to share trustworthy news, while untrusted users have a higher probability of spreading untrustworthy news. In this paper, we construct a dual-layer graph (i.e., the news layer and the user layer) to extract multiple relations of news and users in social networks to derive rich information for detecting fake news. Based on the dual-layer graph, we propose a fake news detection model named Us-DeFake. It learns the propagation features of news in the news layer and the interaction features of users in the user layer. Through the inter-layer in the graph, Us-DeFake fuses the user signals that contain credibility information into the news features, to provide distinctive user-aware embeddings of news for fake news detection. The training process conducts on multiple dual-layer subgraphs obtained by a graph sampler to scale Us-DeFake in large scale social networks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets illustrate the superiority of Us-DeFake which outperforms all baselines, and the users' credibility signals learned by interaction relation can notably improve the performance of our model.

preprint2022arXiv

Building Embedded Systems Like It's 1996

Embedded devices are ubiquitous. However, preliminary evidence shows that attack mitigations protecting our desktops/servers/phones are missing in embedded devices, posing a significant threat to embedded security. To this end, this paper presents an in-depth study on the adoption of common attack mitigations on embedded devices. Precisely, it measures the presence of standard mitigations against memory corruptions in over 10k Linux-based firmware of deployed embedded devices. The study reveals that embedded devices largely omit both user-space and kernel-level attack mitigations. The adoption rates on embedded devices are multiple times lower than their desktop counterparts. An equally important observation is that the situation is not improving over time. Without changing the current practices, the attack mitigations will remain missing, which may become a bigger threat in the upcoming IoT era. Throughout follow-up analyses, we further inferred a set of factors possibly contributing to the absence of attack mitigations. The exemplary ones include massive reuse of non-protected software, lateness in upgrading outdated kernels, and restrictions imposed by automated building tools. We envision these will turn into insights towards improving the adoption of attack mitigations on embedded devices in the future.

preprint2022arXiv

Distributed Estimation for Interconnected Systems with Arbitrary Coupling Structures

This paper is concerned with the problem of distributed estimation for time-varying interconnected dynamic systems with arbitrary coupling structures. To guarantee the robustness of the designed estimators, novel distributed stability conditions are proposed with only local information and the information from neighbors. Then, simplified stability conditions which do not require timely exchange of neighbors' estimator gain information is further developed for systems with delayed communication. By merging these subsystem-level stability conditions and the optimization-based estimator gain design, the distributed, stable and optimal estimators are proposed. Quite notably, these optimization solutions can be easily obtained by standard software packages, and it is also shown that the designed estimators are scalable in the sense of adding or subtracting subsystems. Finally, an illustrative example is employed to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Performance Analysis for Covert Communications Under Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling

In this letter, we analyze the performance of covert communications under faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling in the Rayleigh block fading channel. Both Bayesian criterion- and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based covertness constraints are considered. Especially, for KL divergence-based one, we prove that both the maximum transmit power and covert rate under FTN signaling are higher than those under Nyquist signaling. Numerical results coincide with our analysis and validate the advantages of FTN signaling to realize covert data transmission.

preprint2021arXiv

Adversarial example generation with AdaBelief Optimizer and Crop Invariance

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are crafted by applying small, human-imperceptible perturbations on the original images, so as to mislead deep neural networks to output inaccurate predictions. Adversarial attacks can thus be an important method to evaluate and select robust models in safety-critical applications. However, under the challenging black-box setting, most existing adversarial attacks often achieve relatively low success rates on adversarially trained networks and advanced defense models. In this paper, we propose AdaBelief Iterative Fast Gradient Method (ABI-FGM) and Crop-Invariant attack Method (CIM) to improves the transferability of adversarial examples. ABI-FGM and CIM can be readily integrated to build a strong gradient-based attack to further boost the success rates of adversarial examples for black-box attacks. Moreover, our method can also be naturally combined with other gradient-based attack methods to build a more robust attack to generate more transferable adversarial examples against the defense models. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate the method's effectiveness. Whether on adversarially trained networks or advanced defense models, our method has higher success rates than state-of-the-art gradient-based attack methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis

We describe an approach to task-oriented dialogue in which dialogue state is represented as a dataflow graph. A dialogue agent maps each user utterance to a program that extends this graph. Programs include metacomputation operators for reference and revision that reuse dataflow fragments from previous turns. Our graph-based state enables the expression and manipulation of complex user intents, and explicit metacomputation makes these intents easier for learned models to predict. We introduce a new dataset, SMCalFlow, featuring complex dialogues about events, weather, places, and people. Experiments show that dataflow graphs and metacomputation substantially improve representability and predictability in these natural dialogues. Additional experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset show that our dataflow representation enables an otherwise off-the-shelf sequence-to-sequence model to match the best existing task-specific state tracking model. The SMCalFlow dataset and code for replicating experiments are available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dataflow-based-dialogue-semantic-machines.

preprint2020arXiv

Chandra Detection of Three X-ray Bright Quasars at z>5

We report Chandra detection of three UV bright radio quiet quasars at $z\gtrsim5$. We have collected a sufficient number of photons to extract an X-ray spectrum of each quasar to measure their basic X-ray properties, such as the X-ray flux, power law photon index ($Γ$), and optical-to-X-ray spectral slope ($α_{\rm OX}$). J074749+115352 at $z=5.26$ is the X-ray brightest radio-quiet quasar at $z>5$. It may have a short timescale variation (on a timescale of $\sim3800\rm~s$ in the observer's frame, or $\sim600\rm~s$ in the rest frame) which is however largely embedded in the statistical noise. We extract phase folded spectra of this quasar. There are two distinguishable states: a "high soft" state with an average X-ray flux $\sim2.7$ times of the "low hard" state, and a significantly steeper X-ray spectral slope ($Γ=2.40_{-0.32}^{+0.33}$ vs $1.78_{-0.24}^{+0.25}$). We also compare the three quasars detected in this paper to other quasar samples. We find that J074749+115352, with a SMBH mass of $M_{\rm SMBH}\approx1.8\times10^9\rm~M_\odot$ and an Eddington ratio of $λ_{\rm Edd}\approx2.3$, is extraordinarily X-ray bright. It has an average $α_{\rm OX}=-1.46\pm0.02$ and a 2-10 keV bolometric correction factor of $L_{\rm bol}/L_{\rm2-10keV}=42.4\pm5.8$, both significantly depart from some well defined scaling relations. We compare $Γ$ of the three quasars to other samples at different redshifts, and do not find any significant redshift evolution based on the limited sample of $z>5$ quasars with reliable measurements of the X-ray spectral properties.

preprint2020arXiv

On Localized Discrepancy for Domain Adaptation

We propose the discrepancy-based generalization theories for unsupervised domain adaptation. Previous theories introduced distribution discrepancies defined as the supremum over complete hypothesis space. The hypothesis space may contain hypotheses that lead to unnecessary overestimation of the risk bound. This paper studies the localized discrepancies defined on the hypothesis space after localization. First, we show that these discrepancies have desirable properties. They could be significantly smaller than the pervious discrepancies. Their values will be different if we exchange the two domains, thus can reveal asymmetric transfer difficulties. Next, we derive improved generalization bounds with these discrepancies. We show that the discrepancies could influence the rate of the sample complexity. Finally, we further extend the localized discrepancies for achieving super transfer and derive generalization bounds that could be even more sample-efficient on source domain.