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Researcher profile

Zhiming Zheng

Zhiming Zheng contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
physics.soc-phMachine LearningSocial and Information NetworksArtificial IntelligenceApplicationsComputation and LanguageComputer VisionCryptography and SecurityDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingNeurons and Cognitionphysics.chem-phphysics.data-an

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Published work

15 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Advancing multi-site emission control: A physics-informed transfer learning framework with mixture of experts for carbon-pollutant synergy

Municipal solid waste incineration is increasingly central to urban waste management, yet its sustainability benefit depends on controlling carbon emissions and multiple air pollutants under highly heterogeneous operating conditions. Current data-driven models are often accurate within individual plants but are difficult to transfer across facilities, limiting their value for scalable emission-control strategies. Here we show that multi-site emission behaviour can be represented through transferable system-level structures when physical constraints, operating-regime heterogeneity and carbon--pollutant coupling are jointly considered. We develop a physics-informed transfer learning framework built on a carbon--pollutant mixture-of-experts model, which combines regime-dependent expert routing with conservation-based regularization and a carbon--pollutant synergistic index for integrated risk evaluation. Across 13 municipal solid waste incineration plants, the model captured both pollutant-specific emissions and system-level risk, achieving source-domain average pollutant $R^2$ values of 0.668--0.904 and CPSI $R^2$ values of 0.666--0.970. After transfer from a reference facility to 12 target plants, average pollutant $R^2$ remained between 0.661 and 0.842, while CPSI retained comparable transferability ($R^2$ = 0.610--0.841). Expert-utilization patterns further indicate that adaptation occurs through structured re-weighting of operating regimes rather than complete model re-learning. By extending the learned representation into an interpretable digital twin, this framework provides a route from emission prediction to regime-aware operational navigation, supporting scalable carbon--pollutant synergistic control across heterogeneous waste-to-energy systems.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

E-MIA: Exam-Style Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks against RAG Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) equips large language models (LLMs) with external evidence by retrieving documents at inference time, but it also turns the retrieval corpusinto a sensitive asset. Under a black-box setting, an adversary given a candidate document can infer whether it has been ingested into the RAG knowledge base (i.e., document-level membership inference) solely from query response interactions, thereby leaking corpus coverage and the existence of sensitive topics. Existing RAG MIA methods either rely on soft signals such as semantic similarity, which often yield overlapping member/non-member score distributions and unstable thresholds, or employ explicit confirmation probes whose intent is conspicuous and thus prone to refusal and detection. We propose E-MIA, which converts verifiable hard evidence in the target document (e.g., fine-grained details, proper nouns/technical terms, definitional statements, metadata cues, and causal/constraint relations) into an exam with four objectively gradable question types (FB/SC/MC/T/F), and uses the aggregated exam score across multiple evidence targeted questions as the membership signal. Experiments across multiple datasets and diverse RAG configurations demonstrate that E-MIA improves member/non-member separability in stringent settings while preserving natural, stealthy queries, and we further analyze the impact of question composition and exam length on attack effectiveness.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

FedSEA-LLaMA: A Secure, Efficient and Adaptive Federated Splitting Framework for Large Language Models

Private data holds promise for improving LLMs due to its high quality, but its scattered distribution across data silos and the high computational demands of LLMs limit their deployment in federated environments. To address this, the transformer-based federated split models are proposed, which offload most model parameters to the server (or distributed clients) while retaining only a small portion on the client to ensure data privacy. Despite this design, they still face three challenges: 1) Peer-to-peer key encryption struggles to secure transmitted vectors effectively; 2) The auto-regressive nature of LLMs means that federated split learning can only train and infer sequentially, causing high communication overhead; 3) Fixed partition points lack adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce FedSEA-LLaMA, a Secure, Efficient, and Adaptive Federated splitting framework based on LLaMA2. First, we inject Gaussian noise into forward-pass hidden states to enable secure end-to-end vector transmission. Second, we employ attention-mask compression and KV cache collaboration to reduce communication costs, accelerating training and inference. Third, we allow users to dynamically adjust the partition points for input/output blocks based on specific task requirements. Experiments on natural language understanding, summarization, and conversational QA tasks show that FedSEA-LLaMA maintains performance comparable to centralized LLaMA2 and achieves up to 8x speedups in training and inference. Further analysis of privacy attacks and different partition points also demonstrates the effectiveness of FedSEA-LLaMA in security and adaptability.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Replacing Parameters with Preferences: Federated Alignment of Heterogeneous Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have broad potential in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance, yet strict data-sharing constraints render centralized training infeasible. Federated Learning mitigates this issue by enabling decentralized training, but practical deployments face challenges due to client heterogeneity in computational resources, application requirements, and model architectures. Under extreme model and data heterogeneity, replacing parameter aggregation with preference-based collaboration offers a more suitable interface, as it eliminates the need for direct parameter or data exchange. Motivated by this, we propose MoR, a federated alignment framework that combines GRPO with Mixture-of-Rewards for heterogeneous VLMs. In MoR, each client locally trains a reward model from local preference annotations, capturing specific evaluation signals without exposing raw data. To combine these heterogeneous supervision signals, MoR introduces a Mixture-of-Rewards mechanism with learned routing, which adaptively fuses client reward models according to the input and alignment objective. The server then optimizes a base VLM using GRPO with a KL penalty to a reference model, enabling preference alignment without requiring client models to share architectures or parameters. Experiments on diverse public vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that MoR consistently outperforms federated alignment baselines in generalization and cross-client adaptability. Our approach provides a scalable solution for privacy-preserving alignment of heterogeneous VLMs under federated settings.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Taming Noise-Induced Prototype Degradation for Privacy-Preserving Personalized Federated Fine-Tuning

Prototype-based Personalized Federated Learning (ProtoPFL) enables efficient multi-domain adaptation by communicating compact class prototypes, but directly sharing them poses privacy risks. A common defense involves per-example $\ell_2$ clipping before prototype computation to bound sensitivity, followed by isotropic Gaussian noise to enforce Local Differential Privacy (LDP). However, Isotropic Gaussian Prototype Perturbation (IGPP) typically over-perturbs discriminative dimensions and struggles to balance the clipping threshold with representation fidelity. In this paper, we propose VPDR, a client-side privacy plug-in that seamlessly integrates into existing ProtoPFLs. Motivated by the observation that dimension-wise class variance reflects discriminability, we introduce Variance-adaptive Prototype Perturbation (VPP), which allocates less noise to discriminative subspaces, preserving semantic separability while ensuring privacy. We further develop Distillation-guided Clipping Regularization (DCR), which enables feature norms to adaptively concentrate near the predefined clipping threshold while maintaining prediction consistency. Theoretical analysis shows that our groupwise mechanism provides privacy guarantees no weaker than the isotropic baseline under the same privacy constraints. Extensive experiments on multi-domain benchmarks demonstrate that VPDR achieves a superior privacy-utility trade-off, outperforming IGPP in personalized federated fine-tuning without sacrificing robustness against realistic attacks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Adaptive trajectory-constrained exploration strategy for deep reinforcement learning

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL. Most previous exploration methods relied on complex architectures to estimate state novelty or introduced sensitive hyperparameters, resulting in instability. To mitigate these issues, we propose an efficient adaptive trajectory-constrained exploration strategy for DRL. The proposed method guides the policy of the agent away from suboptimal solutions by leveraging incomplete offline demonstrations as references. This approach gradually expands the exploration scope of the agent and strives for optimality in a constrained optimization manner. Additionally, we introduce a novel policy-gradient-based optimization algorithm that utilizes adaptively clipped trajectory-distance rewards for both single- and multi-agent reinforcement learning. We provide a theoretical analysis of our method, including a deduction of the worst-case approximation error bounds, highlighting the validity of our approach for enhancing exploration. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments on two large 2D grid world mazes and several MuJoCo tasks. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the significant advantages of our method in achieving temporally extended exploration and avoiding myopic and suboptimal behaviors in both single- and multi-agent settings. Notably, the specific metrics and quantifiable results further support these findings. The code used in the study is available at \url{https://github.com/buaawgj/TACE}.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Anonymous Pattern Molecular Fingerprint and its Applications on Property Identification

Molecular fingerprints are significant cheminformatics tools to map molecules into vectorial space according to their characteristics in diverse functional groups, atom sequences, and other topological structures. In this paper, we set out to investigate a novel molecular fingerprint \emph{Anonymous-FP} that possesses abundant perception about the underlying interactions shaped in small, medium, and large molecular scale links. In detail, the possible inherent atom chains are sampled from each molecule and are extended in a certain anonymous pattern. After that, the molecular fingerprint \emph{Anonymous-FP} is encoded in virtue of the Natural Language Processing technique \emph{PV-DBOW}. \emph{Anonymous-FP} is studied on molecular property identification and has shown valuable advantages such as rich information content, high experimental performance, and full structural significance. During the experimental verification, the scale of the atom chain or its anonymous manner matters significantly to the overall representation ability of \emph{Anonymous-FP}. Generally, the typical scale $r = 8$ enhances the performance on a series of real-world molecules, and specifically, the accuracy could level up to above $93\%$ on all NCI datasets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Enhanced brain structure-function tethering in transmodal cortex revealed by high-frequency eigenmodes

The brain's structural connectome supports signal propagation between neuronal elements, shaping diverse coactivation patterns that can be captured as functional connectivity. While the link between structure and function remains an ongoing challenge, the prevailing hypothesis is that the structure-function relationship may itself be gradually decoupled along a macroscale functional gradient spanning unimodal to transmodal regions. However, this hypothesis is strongly constrained by the underlying models which may neglect requisite signaling mechanisms. Here, we transform the structural connectome into a set of orthogonal eigenmodes governing frequency-specific diffusion patterns and show that regional structure-function relationships vary markedly under different signaling mechanisms. Specifically, low-frequency eigenmodes, which are considered sufficient to capture the essence of the functional network, contribute little to functional connectivity reconstruction in transmodal regions, resulting in structure-function decoupling along the unimodal-transmodal gradient. In contrast, high-frequency eigenmodes, which are usually on the periphery of attention due to their association with noisy and random dynamical patterns, contribute significantly to functional connectivity prediction in transmodal regions, inducing gradually convergent structure-function relationships from unimodal to transmodal regions. Although the information in high-frequency eigenmodes is weak and scattered, it effectively enhances the structure-function correspondence by 35% in unimodal regions and 56% in transmodal regions. Altogether, our findings suggest that the structure-function divergence in transmodal areas may not be an intrinsic property of brain organization, but can be narrowed through multiplexed and regionally specialized signaling mechanisms.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Representation Learning of Reconstructed Graphs Using Random Walk Graph Convolutional Network

Graphs are often used to organize data because of their simple topological structure, and therefore play a key role in machine learning. And it turns out that the low-dimensional embedded representation obtained by graph representation learning are extremely useful in various typical tasks, such as node classification, content recommendation and link prediction. However, the existing methods mostly start from the microstructure (i.e., the edges) in the graph, ignoring the mesoscopic structure (high-order local structure). Here, we propose wGCN -- a novel framework that utilizes random walk to obtain the node-specific mesoscopic structures of the graph, and utilizes these mesoscopic structures to reconstruct the graph And organize the characteristic information of the nodes. Our method can effectively generate node embeddings for previously unseen data, which has been proven in a series of experiments conducted on citation networks and social networks (our method has advantages over baseline methods). We believe that combining high-order local structural information can more efficiently explore the potential of the network, which will greatly improve the learning efficiency of graph neural network and promote the establishment of new learning models.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Community detection based on first passage probabilities

Community detection is of fundamental significance for understanding the topology characters and the spreading dynamics on complex networks. While random walk is widely used and is proven effective in many community detection algorithms, there still exists two major defects: (i) the maximal length of random walk is too large to distinguish the clustering information if using the average step of all possible random walks; (ii) the useful community information at all other step lengths are missed if using a pre-assigned maximal length. In this paper, we propose a novel community detection method based on the first passage probabilities (FPPM), equipped with a new similarity measure that incorporates the complete structural information within the maximal step length. Here the diameter of the network is chosen as an appropriate boundary of random walks which is adaptive to different networks. Then we use the hierarchical clustering to group the vertices into communities and further select the best division through the corresponding modularity values. Finally, a post-processing strategy is designed to integrate the unreasonable small communities, which significantly improves the accuracy of community division. Surprisingly, the numerical simulations show that FPPM performs best compared to several classic algorithms on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world networks, which reveals the universality and effectiveness of our method.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Dynamic aspiration based on Win-Stay-Lose-Learn rule in Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma Gam

Prisoner's dilemma game is the most commonly used model of spatial evolutionary game which is considered as a paradigm to portray competition among selfish individuals. In recent years, Win-Stay-Lose-Learn, a strategy updating rule base on aspiration, has been proved to be an effective model to promote cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game, which leads aspiration to receive lots of attention. But in many research the assumption that individual's aspiration is fixed is inconsistent with recent results from psychology. In this paper, according to Expected Value Theory and Achievement Motivation Theory, we propose a dynamic aspiration model based on Win-Stay-Lose-Learn rule in which individual's aspiration is inspired by its payoff. It is found that dynamic aspiration has a significant impact on the evolution process, and different initial aspirations lead to different results, which are called Stable Coexistence under Low Aspiration, Dependent Coexistence under Moderate aspiration and Defection Explosion under High Aspiration respectively. Furthermore, a deep analysis is performed on the local structures which cause cooperator's existence or defector's expansion, and the evolution process for different parameters including strategy and aspiration. As a result, the intrinsic structures leading to defectors' expansion and cooperators' survival are achieved for different evolution process, which provides a penetrating understanding of the evolution. Compared to fixed aspiration model, dynamic aspiration introduces a more satisfactory explanation on population evolution laws and can promote deeper comprehension for the principle of prisoner's dilemma.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Public discourse and social network echo chambers driven by socio-cognitive biases

In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual socio-cognitive biases, dueling campaign efforts, and social media platforms. We examine this complex socio-political process by integrating observed retweet networks from the 2016 political networks with an agent-based model of political opinion formation and network structure. Here we show that the range of political viewpoints individuals are willing to consider is a key determinant in the formation of polarized networks and the emergence of echo chambers. We also find that winning majority support in public discourse is determined by both the effort exerted by campaigns and the relative ideological positioning of opposing campaigns. Our results demonstrate how public discourse and political polarization can be modeled as an interactive process of shifting individual opinions, evolving social networks, and political campaigns.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Representation Learning of Graphs Using Graph Convolutional Multilayer Networks Based on Motifs

The graph structure is a commonly used data storage mode, and it turns out that the low-dimensional embedded representation of nodes in the graph is extremely useful in various typical tasks, such as node classification, link prediction , etc. However, most of the existing approaches start from the binary relationship (i.e., edges) in the graph and have not leveraged the higher order local structure (i.e., motifs) of the graph. Here, we propose mGCMN -- a novel framework which utilizes node feature information and the higher order local structure of the graph to effectively generate node embeddings for previously unseen data. Through research we have found that different types of networks have different key motifs. And the advantages of our method over the baseline methods have been demonstrated in a large number of experiments on citation network and social network datasets. At the same time, a positive correlation between increase of the classification accuracy and the clustering coefficient is revealed. It is believed that using high order structural information can truly manifest the potential of the network, which will greatly improve the learning efficiency of the graph neural network and promote a brand-new learning mode establishment.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Homophily on social networks changes evolutionary advantage in competitive information diffusion

Competitive information diffusion on large-scale social networks reveals fundamental characteristics of rumor contagions and has profound influence on public opinion formation. There has been growing interest in exploring dynamical mechanisms of the competing evolutions recently. Nevertheless, the impacts of population homophily, which determines powerful collective human behaviors, remains unclear. In this paper, we incorporate homophily effects into a modified competitive ignorant-spreader-ignorant (SIS) rumor diffusion model with generalized population preference. Using microscopic Markov chain approach, we first derive the phase diagram of competing diffusion results and examine how competitive information spreads and evolves on social networks. We then explore the detailed effects of homophily, which is modeled by a rewiring mechanism. Results show that homophily promotes the formation of divided "echo chambers" and protects the disadvantaged information from extinction, which further changes or even reverses the evolutionary advantage, i.e., the difference of final proportions of the competitive information. We highlight the conclusion that the reversals may happen only when the initially disadvantaged information has stronger transmission ability, owning diffusion advantage over the other one. Our framework provides profound insight into competing dynamics with population homophily, which may pave ways for further controlling misinformation and guiding public belief systems. Moreover, the reversing condition sheds light on designing effective competing strategies in many real scenarios.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Steering Eco-Evolutionary Games Dynamics with Manifold Control

Feedback loops between population dynamics of individuals and their ecological environment are ubiquitously found in nature, and have shown profound effects on the resulting eco-evolutionary dynamics. Incorporating linear environmental feedback law into replicator dynamics of two-player games, recent theoretical studies shed light on understanding the oscillating dynamics of social dilemma. However, detailed effects of more general nonlinear feedback loops in multi-player games, which is more common especially in microbial systems, remain unclear. Here, we focus on ecological public goods games with environmental feedbacks driven by nonlinear selection gradient. Unlike previous models, multiple segments of stable and unstable equilibrium manifolds can emerge from the population dynamical systems. We find that a larger relative asymmetrical feedback speed for group interactions centered on cooperators not only accelerates the convergence of stable manifolds, but also increases the attraction basin of these stable manifolds. Furthermore, our work offers an innovative manifold control approach: by designing appropriate switching control laws, we are able to steer the eco-evolutionary dynamics to any desired population states. Our mathematical framework is an important generalization and complement to coevolutionary game dynamics, and also fills the theoretical gap in guiding the widespread problem of population state control in microbial experiments.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access