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Zixu Zhao

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

TRACE: Tourism Recommendation with Accountable Citation Evidence

Tourism is a high-stakes setting for conversational recommender systems (CRS): a plausible-sounding suggestion can waste real money and trip time once a traveler acts on it. Existing CRS benchmarks primarily evaluate systems with a single Recall@k score over entity mentions, and tourism-specific resources add spatial or knowledge-graph context, yet none of them couple multi-turn recommendation with verbatim review-span evidence and rejection recovery. This leaves an evaluation gap for tourism recommendation that is simultaneously trustworthy, verifiable, and adaptive: recommend the right point of interest (POI) for multi-aspect preferences (such as cuisine, price, atmosphere, walking distance), justify each suggestion with verifiable evidence from prior visitors so the traveler can act without trial and error, and recover when the first recommendation is rejected mid-dialogue. We introduce TRACE, where each item is a multi-turn tourism recommendation dialogue with review-span citations and explicit rejection turns: 10,000 dialogues over 2,400 Yelp POIs and 34,208 reviews across eight U.S. cities, paired with 14 retrieval, planning, and LLM baselines, along with 25 metrics organized under Accuracy, Grounding, and Recovery. Across these baselines, TRACE reveals the Three-Competency Gap: LLM Zero-Shot leads in closed-set Recall@1 and rejection recovery but cites less densely than retrievers; non-LLM retrievers achieve surface-verbatim grounding but with low accuracy; Multi-Review Synthesis fails at recovery. The Grounding Score agrees with human citation precision (Spearman rho=+0.80, p<10^-20), and paired t-tests reproduce the per-baseline ranking (p<0.01 on the dominant contrasts). TRACE reframes accountable tourism recommendation as a joint target (right POI, verifiable evidence, adaptive repair) rather than a single-axis leaderboard.

preprint2022arXiv

Excited states of holographic superconductors with hyperscaling violation

We employ the numerical and analytical methods to study the effects of the hyperscaling violation on the ground and excited states of holographic superconductors for $d=2,~z=2$. For both the holographic s-wave and p-wave models with the hyperscaling violation, we observe that the excited state has a lower critical temperature than the corresponding ground state, which is similar to the relativistic case, and the difference of the dimensionless critical chemical potential between the consecutive states decreases as the hyperscaling violation increases. Interestingly, as we amplify the hyperscaling violation in the s-wave model, the critical temperature of the ground state first decreases and then increases, but that of the excited states always decreases. In the p-wave model, regardless of the ground state or the excited states, the critical temperature always decreases with increasing the hyperscaling violation. In addition, we find that the hyperscaling violation affects the conductivity $σ$ which has $n$ peaks for the $n$-th excited state, and changes the relation in the gap frequency for the excited states in both s-wave and p-wave models.

preprint2022arXiv

Exploring Intra- and Inter-Video Relation for Surgical Semantic Scene Segmentation

Automatic surgical scene segmentation is fundamental for facilitating cognitive intelligence in the modern operating theatre. Previous works rely on conventional aggregation modules (e.g., dilated convolution, convolutional LSTM), which only make use of the local context. In this paper, we propose a novel framework STswinCL that explores the complementary intra- and inter-video relations to boost segmentation performance, by progressively capturing the global context. We firstly develop a hierarchy Transformer to capture intra-video relation that includes richer spatial and temporal cues from neighbor pixels and previous frames. A joint space-time window shift scheme is proposed to efficiently aggregate these two cues into each pixel embedding. Then, we explore inter-video relation via pixel-to-pixel contrastive learning, which well structures the global embedding space. A multi-source contrast training objective is developed to group the pixel embeddings across videos with the ground-truth guidance, which is crucial for learning the global property of the whole data. We extensively validate our approach on two public surgical video benchmarks, including EndoVis18 Challenge and CaDIS dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our method, which consistently exceeds previous state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/YuemingJin/STswinCL.

preprint2022arXiv

Geometric phases acquired for a two-level atom coupled to fluctuating vacuum scalar fields due to linear acceleration and circular motion

In open quantum systems, we study the geometric phases acquired for a two-level atom coupled to a bath of fluctuating vacuum massless scalar fields due to linear acceleration and circular motion without and with a boundary. In free space, as we amplify acceleration, the geometric phase acquired purely due to linear acceleration case firstly is smaller than the circular acceleration case in the ultrarelativistic limit for the initial atomic state $θ\in(0,\fracπ{2})\cup(\fracπ{2},π)$, then equals to the circular acceleration case in a certain acceleration, and finally, is larger than the circular acceleration case. The spontaneous transition rates show a similar feature. This result is different from the case of a bath of fluctuating vacuum electromagnetic fields that has been studied. Considering the initial atomic state $θ\in(0,π)$, we find that the geometric phase acquired purely due to linear acceleration always equals to the circular acceleration case for the certain acceleration. The feature implies that, in a certain condition, one can simulate the case of the uniformly accelerated two-level atom by studying the properties of the two-level atom in circular motion. Adding a reflecting boundary, we observe that a larger value of a geometric phase can be obtained compared to the absence of a boundary. Besides, the geometric phase fluctuates along $z$, and the maximum of geometric phase is closer to the boundary for a larger acceleration. We also find that geometric phases can be acquired purely due to the linear acceleration case and circular acceleration case with $θ\in(0,π)$ for a smaller $z$.

preprint2022arXiv

Pseudo-label Guided Cross-video Pixel Contrast for Robotic Surgical Scene Segmentation with Limited Annotations

Surgical scene segmentation is fundamentally crucial for prompting cognitive assistance in robotic surgery. However, pixel-wise annotating surgical video in a frame-by-frame manner is expensive and time consuming. To greatly reduce the labeling burden, in this work, we study semi-supervised scene segmentation from robotic surgical video, which is practically essential yet rarely explored before. We consider a clinically suitable annotation situation under the equidistant sampling. We then propose PGV-CL, a novel pseudo-label guided cross-video contrast learning method to boost scene segmentation. It effectively leverages unlabeled data for a trusty and global model regularization that produces more discriminative feature representation. Concretely, for trusty representation learning, we propose to incorporate pseudo labels to instruct the pair selection, obtaining more reliable representation pairs for pixel contrast. Moreover, we expand the representation learning space from previous image-level to cross-video, which can capture the global semantics to benefit the learning process. We extensively evaluate our method on a public robotic surgery dataset EndoVis18 and a public cataract dataset CaDIS. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, consistently outperforming the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods under different labeling ratios, and even surpassing fully supervised training on EndoVis18 with 10.1% labeling.

preprint2022arXiv

TraSeTR: Track-to-Segment Transformer with Contrastive Query for Instance-level Instrument Segmentation in Robotic Surgery

Surgical instrument segmentation -- in general a pixel classification task -- is fundamentally crucial for promoting cognitive intelligence in robot-assisted surgery (RAS). However, previous methods are struggling with discriminating instrument types and instances. To address the above issues, we explore a mask classification paradigm that produces per-segment predictions. We propose TraSeTR, a novel Track-to-Segment Transformer that wisely exploits tracking cues to assist surgical instrument segmentation. TraSeTR jointly reasons about the instrument type, location, and identity with instance-level predictions i.e., a set of class-bbox-mask pairs, by decoding query embeddings. Specifically, we introduce the prior query that encoded with previous temporal knowledge, to transfer tracking signals to current instances via identity matching. A contrastive query learning strategy is further applied to reshape the query feature space, which greatly alleviates the tracking difficulty caused by large temporal variations. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated with state-of-the-art instrument type segmentation results on three public datasets, including two RAS benchmarks from EndoVis Challenges and one cataract surgery dataset CaDIS.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Motion Flows for Semi-supervised Instrument Segmentation from Robotic Surgical Video

Performing low hertz labeling for surgical videos at intervals can greatly releases the burden of surgeons. In this paper, we study the semi-supervised instrument segmentation from robotic surgical videos with sparse annotations. Unlike most previous methods using unlabeled frames individually, we propose a dual motion based method to wisely learn motion flows for segmentation enhancement by leveraging temporal dynamics. We firstly design a flow predictor to derive the motion for jointly propagating the frame-label pairs given the current labeled frame. Considering the fast instrument motion, we further introduce a flow compensator to estimate intermediate motion within continuous frames, with a novel cycle learning strategy. By exploiting generated data pairs, our framework can recover and even enhance temporal consistency of training sequences to benefit segmentation. We validate our framework with binary, part, and type tasks on 2017 MICCAI EndoVis Robotic Instrument Segmentation Challenge dataset. Results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by a large margin, and even exceeds fully supervised training on two tasks.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantum estimation of acceleration and temperature in open quantum system

In an open quantum system, we study the evolution of a two-level atom as a detector which interacts with given environments. For a uniformly accelerated two-level atom coupled to a massless scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum, when it evolves for a certain time, we find that there exists a peak value for the quantum Fisher information (QFI) of acceleration, which indicates that the optimal precision of estimation is achieved when choosing an appropriate acceleration $a$. QFI has different behaviors for different initial state parameters $θ$ of the atom, displaying periodicity. However, the periodicity fades away with the evolution of time, which means that the initial state cannot affect the later stable quantum state. Furthermore, adding a boundary, we observe that the peak value of QFI increases when the atom is close to the boundary, which shows that QFI is protected by the boundary. Here, QFI fluctuates, and there may exist two peak values with a certain moment, which expands the detection range of the acceleration. Therefore, we can enhance the estimation precision of acceleration by choosing an appropriate position and acceleration $a$. The periodicity of QFI with respect to the initial state parameter $θ$ lasts a longer time than the previous unbounded case, which indicates that the initial state is protected by the boundary. Finally, for a thermal bath with a boundary, QFI of temperature has no more than one peak value with a certain moment, which is different from QFI of acceleration with a boundary. The periodicity also lasts a longer time than unbounded case, which shows the initial quantum state of the atom is protected by the boundary for two cases.

preprint2016arXiv

Generalized thermodynamic identity and new Maxwell's law for charged AdS black hole

We study the thermodynamic properties of the RN-AdS black hole in full phase space and propose a generalized thermodynamic identity. As an example, we use it to find relations of thermodynamical coefficients between the grand canonical and canonical ensembles. We also show, for the first order phase transition, that the usual Maxwell's equal area law should be extended to a new form for the RN-AdS black hole.

preprint2014arXiv

Ehrenfest scheme for complex thermodynamic systems in full phase space

For a thermodynamic system with multiple pairs of intensive/extensive variables and the thermodynamical coefficients attain finite or infinite values on the phase boundary, we obtain the two classes of Ehrenfest equations in the full phase space, and find that the rank of the matrix for these equations can tell us the dimensions of the phase boundary. We also apply this treatment to the RN-AdS black hole.

preprint2014arXiv

Notes on analytical study of holographic superconductors with Lifshitz scaling in external magnetic field

We employ the matching method to analytically investigate the holographic superconductors with Lifshitz scaling in an external magnetic field. We discuss systematically the restricted conditions for the matching method and find that this analytic method is not always powerful to explore the effect of external magnetic field on the holographic superconductors unless the matching point is chosen in an appropriate range and the dynamical exponent $z$ satisfies the relation $z=d-1$ or $z=d-2$. From the analytic treatment, we observe that Lifshitz scaling can hinder the condensation to be formed, which can be used to back up the numerical results. Moreover, we study the effect of Lifshitz scaling on the upper critical magnetic field and reproduce the well-known relation obtained from Ginzburg-Landau theory.

preprint2013arXiv

Holographic insulator/superconductor phase transition with Weyl corrections

We analytically investigate the phase transition between the holographic insulator and superconductor with Weyl corrections by using the variational method for the Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problem. We find that similar to the curvature corrections, in p-wave model, the higher Weyl couplings make the insulator/superconductor phase transition harder to occur. However, in s-wave case the Weyl corrections do not influence the critical chemical potential, which is in contrast to the effect caused by the curvature corrections. Moreover, we observe that the Weyl corrections will not affect the critical phenomena and the critical exponent of the system always takes the mean-field value in both models. Our analytic results are found to be in good agreement with the numerical findings.

preprint2013arXiv

Holographic superconductor models with $RF^{2}$ corrections

We investigate the effect of the $RF^2$ correction on the holographic superconductor model in the background of AdS black hole. We find that, similar to the effect caused by the Weyl correction, the higher $RF^2$ correction term can make it easier for the scalar operator to condense and result in the larger deviations from the expected relation in the gap frequency. However, if a non-trivial hair for the black hole has been triggered, we observe that the $RF^2$ correction and the Weyl correction do play different roles in the behavior of the condensation, which can be used to support the existing findings.

preprint2013arXiv

Notes on holographic superconductor models with the nonlinear electrodynamics

We investigate systematically the effect of the nonlinear correction to the usual Maxwell electrodynamics on the holographic dual models in the backgrounds of AdS black hole and AdS soliton. Considering three types of typical nonlinear electrodynamics, we observe that in the black hole background the higher nonlinear electrodynamics correction makes the condensation harder to form and changes the expected relation in the gap frequency, which is similar to that caused by the curvature correction. However, in strong contrast to the influence of the curvature correction, we find that in the AdS soliton background the nonlinear electrodynamics correction will not affect the properties of the holographic superconductor and insulator phase transitions, which may be a quite general feature for the s-wave holographic superconductor/insulator system.