Z. Zhang

R. Abbasi, M. Ackermann, J. Adams et al.

The origin of high-energy cosmic rays, atomic nuclei that continuously impact Earth's atmosphere, has been a mystery for over a century. Due to deflection in interstellar magnetic fields, cosmic rays from the Milky Way arrive at Earth from random directions. However, near their sources and during propagation, cosmic rays interact with matter and produce high-energy neutrinos. We search for neutrino emission using machine learning techniques applied to ten years of data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. We identify neutrino emission from the Galactic plane at the 4.5$σ$ level of significance, by comparing diffuse emission models to a background-only hypothesis. The signal is consistent with modeled diffuse emission from the Galactic plane, but could also arise from a population of unresolved point sources.

R. Abbasi, M. Ackermann, J. Adams et al.

IceCube, a cubic-kilometer array of optical sensors built to detect atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos between 1 GeV and 1 PeV, is deployed 1.45 km to 2.45 km below the surface of the ice sheet at the South Pole. The classification and reconstruction of events from the in-ice detectors play a central role in the analysis of data from IceCube. Reconstructing and classifying events is a challenge due to the irregular detector geometry, inhomogeneous scattering and absorption of light in the ice and, below 100 GeV, the relatively low number of signal photons produced per event. To address this challenge, it is possible to represent IceCube events as point cloud graphs and use a Graph Neural Network (GNN) as the classification and reconstruction method. The GNN is capable of distinguishing neutrino events from cosmic-ray backgrounds, classifying different neutrino event types, and reconstructing the deposited energy, direction and interaction vertex. Based on simulation, we provide a comparison in the 1-100 GeV energy range to the current state-of-the-art maximum likelihood techniques used in current IceCube analyses, including the effects of known systematic uncertainties. For neutrino event classification, the GNN increases the signal efficiency by 18% at a fixed false positive rate (FPR), compared to current IceCube methods. Alternatively, the GNN offers a reduction of the FPR by over a factor 8 (to below half a percent) at a fixed signal efficiency. For the reconstruction of energy, direction, and interaction vertex, the resolution improves by an average of 13%-20% compared to current maximum likelihood techniques in the energy range of 1-30 GeV. The GNN, when run on a GPU, is capable of processing IceCube events at a rate nearly double of the median IceCube trigger rate of 2.7 kHz, which opens the possibility of using low energy neutrinos in online searches for transient events.

MiroMind Team, S. Bai, L. Bing et al.

We present MiroThinker-1.7, a new research agent designed for complex long-horizon reasoning tasks. Building on this foundation, we further introduce MiroThinker-H1, which extends the agent with heavy-duty reasoning capabilities for more reliable multi-step problem solving. In particular, MiroThinker-1.7 improves the reliability of each interaction step through an agentic mid-training stage that emphasizes structured planning, contextual reasoning, and tool interaction. This enables more effective multi-step interaction and sustained reasoning across complex tasks. MiroThinker-H1 further incorporates verification directly into the reasoning process at both local and global levels. Intermediate reasoning decisions can be evaluated and refined during inference, while the overall reasoning trajectory is audited to ensure that final answers are supported by coherent chains of evidence. Across benchmarks covering open-web research, scientific reasoning, and financial analysis, MiroThinker-H1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on deep research tasks while maintaining strong results on specialized domains. We also release MiroThinker-1.7 and MiroThinker-1.7-mini as open-source models, providing competitive research-agent capabilities with significantly improved efficiency.

M. V. Tretyakov, Z. Zhang

A version of the fundamental mean-square convergence theorem is proved for stochastic differential equations (SDE) which coefficients are allowed to grow polynomially at infinity and which satisfy a one-sided Lipschitz condition. The theorem is illustrated on a number of particular numerical methods, including a special balanced scheme and fully implicit methods. Some numerical tests are presented.

R. Abbasi, M. Ackermann, J. Adams et al.

IceCube is a cubic-kilometer-scale neutrino detector located at the geographic South Pole. A precise directional reconstruction of IceCube neutrinos is vital for associations with astronomical objects. In this context, we discuss neural posterior estimation of the neutrino direction via a transformer encoder that maps to a normalizing flow on the 2-sphere. It achieves a new state-of-the-art angular resolution for the two main event morphologies in IceCube - tracks and showers - while being significantly faster than traditional B-spline-based likelihood reconstructions. All-sky scans can be performed within seconds rather than hours, and take constant computation time, regardless of whether the posterior extent is arc-minutes or spans the whole sky. We utilize a combination of $C^2$-smooth rational-quadratic splines, scale transformations and rotations to define a novel spherical normalizing-flow distribution whose parameters are predicted as a whole as the output of the transformer encoder. We test several structural choices diverting from the vanilla transformer architecture. In particular, we find dual residual streams, nonlinear QKV projection and a separate class token with its own cross-attention processing to boost test-time performance. The angular resolution for both showers and tracks improves substantially over the whole trained energy range from 100 GeV to 100 PeV. At 100 TeV deposited energy, for example, the median angular resolution improves by a factor of $1.3$ for throughgoing tracks, by a factor of $1.7$ for showers and by a factor of $2.5$ for starting tracks compared to state-of-the art likelihood reconstructions based on B-splines. While previous machine-learning (ML) efforts have managed to obtain competitive shower resolutions, this is the first time an ML-based method outperforms likelihood-based muon reconstructions above 100 GeV.

T. Aarrestad, M. van Beekveld, M. Bona et al.

We describe the outcome of a data challenge conducted as part of the Dark Machines Initiative and the Les Houches 2019 workshop on Physics at TeV colliders. The challenged aims at detecting signals of new physics at the LHC using unsupervised machine learning algorithms. First, we propose how an anomaly score could be implemented to define model-independent signal regions in LHC searches. We define and describe a large benchmark dataset, consisting of >1 Billion simulated LHC events corresponding to $10~\rm{fb}^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. We then review a wide range of anomaly detection and density estimation algorithms, developed in the context of the data challenge, and we measure their performance in a set of realistic analysis environments. We draw a number of useful conclusions that will aid the development of unsupervised new physics searches during the third run of the LHC, and provide our benchmark dataset for future studies at https://www.phenoMLdata.org. Code to reproduce the analysis is provided at https://github.com/bostdiek/DarkMachines-UnsupervisedChallenge.

H. Li, J. Sun, Z. Zhang

We consider operator learning for efficiently solving parametric non-selfadjoint eigenvalue problems. To overcome the spectral instability and mode switching inherent in non-selfadjoint operators, we introduce a hybrid framework that learns the stable invariant eigensubspace mapping rather than individual eigenfunctions. We proposed a Deep Eigenspace Network (DEN) architecture integrating Fourier Neural Operators, geometry-adaptive POD bases, and explicit banded cross-mode mixing mechanisms to capture complex spectral dependencies on unstructured meshes. We apply DEN to the parametric non-selfadjoint Steklov eigenvalue problem and provide theoretical proofs for the Lipschitz continuity of the eigensubspace with respect to the parameters. In addition, we derive error bounds for the reconstruction of the eigenspace. Numerical experiments validate DEN's high accuracy and zero-shot generalization capabilities across different discretizations.

Z. Zhang, I. Agapov, S. Gasiorowski et al.

We demonstrate that multipoint Bayesian algorithm execution can overcome fundamental computational challenges in storage ring design optimization. Dynamic (DA) and momentum (MA) optimization is a multipoint, multiobjective design task for storage rings, ultimately informing the flux of x-ray sources and luminosity of colliders. Current state-of-art black-box optimization methods require extensive particle-tracking simulations for each trial configuration; the high computational cost restricts the extent of the search to $\sim 10^3$ configurations, and therefore limits the quality of the final design. We remove this bottleneck using multipointBAX, which selects, simulates, and models each trial configuration at the single particle level. We demonstrate our approach on a novel design for a fourth-generation light source, with neural-network powered multipointBAX achieving equivalent Pareto front results using more than two orders of magnitude fewer tracking computations compared to genetic algorithms. The significant reduction in cost positions multipointBAX as a promising alternative to black-box optimization, and we anticipate multipointBAX will be instrumental in the design of future light sources, colliders, and large-scale scientific facilities.

Z. Zhang, B. Liu, J. Bao et al.

Recent text-to-image generation favors various forms of spatial conditions, e.g., masks, bounding boxes, and key points. However, the majority of the prior art requires form-specific annotations to fine-tune the original model, leading to poor test-time generalizability. Meanwhile, existing training-free methods work well only with simplified prompts and spatial conditions. In this work, we propose a novel yet generic test-time controllable generation method that aims at natural text prompts and complex conditions. Specifically, we decouple spatial conditions into semantic and geometric conditions and then enforce their consistency during the image-generation process individually. As for the former, we target bridging the gap between the semantic condition and text prompts, as well as the gap between such condition and the attention map from diffusion models. To achieve this, we propose to first complete the prompt w.r.t. semantic condition, and then remove the negative impact of distracting prompt words by measuring their statistics in attention maps as well as distances in word space w.r.t. this condition. To further cope with the complex geometric conditions, we introduce a geometric transform module, in which Region-of-Interests will be identified in attention maps and further used to translate category-wise latents w.r.t. geometric condition. More importantly, we propose a diffusion-based latents-refill method to explicitly remove the impact of latents at the RoI, reducing the artifacts on generated images. Experiments on Coco-stuff dataset showcase 30$\%$ relative boost compared to SOTA training-free methods on layout consistency evaluation metrics.

R. Abbasi, M. Ackermann, J. Adams et al.

Continued improvements on existing reconstruction methods are vital to the success of high-energy physics experiments, such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. In IceCube, further challenges arise as the detector is situated at the geographic South Pole where computational resources are limited. However, to perform real-time analyses and to issue alerts to telescopes around the world, powerful and fast reconstruction methods are desired. Deep neural networks can be extremely powerful, and their usage is computationally inexpensive once the networks are trained. These characteristics make a deep learning-based approach an excellent candidate for the application in IceCube. A reconstruction method based on convolutional architectures and hexagonally shaped kernels is presented. The presented method is robust towards systematic uncertainties in the simulation and has been tested on experimental data. In comparison to standard reconstruction methods in IceCube, it can improve upon the reconstruction accuracy, while reducing the time necessary to run the reconstruction by two to three orders of magnitude.

E. Kharazmi, Z. Zhang, G. E. Karniadakis

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) [31] use automatic differentiation to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) by penalizing the PDE in the loss function at a random set of points in the domain of interest. Here, we develop a Petrov-Galerkin version of PINNs based on the nonlinear approximation of deep neural networks (DNNs) by selecting the {\em trial space} to be the space of neural networks and the {\em test space} to be the space of Legendre polynomials. We formulate the \textit{variational residual} of the PDE using the DNN approximation by incorporating the variational form of the problem into the loss function of the network and construct a \textit{variational physics-informed neural network} (VPINN). By integrating by parts the integrand in the variational form, we lower the order of the differential operators represented by the neural networks, hence effectively reducing the training cost in VPINNs while increasing their accuracy compared to PINNs that essentially employ delta test functions. For shallow networks with one hidden layer, we analytically obtain explicit forms of the \textit{variational residual}. We demonstrate the performance of the new formulation for several examples that show clear advantages of VPINNs over PINNs in terms of both accuracy and speed.

A. Fannjiang, Z. Zhang

Blind ptychography is the scanning version of coherent diffractive imaging which seeks to recover both the object and the probe simultaneously. Based on alternating minimization by Douglas-Rachford splitting, AMDRS is a blind ptychographic algorithm informed by the uniqueness theory, the Poisson noise model and the stability analysis. Enhanced by the initialization method and the use of a randomly phased mask, AMDRS converges globally and geometrically. Three boundary conditions are considered in the simulations: periodic, dark-field and bright-field boundary conditions. The dark-field boundary condition is suited for isolated objects while the bright-field boundary condition is for non-isolated objects. The periodic boundary condition is a mathematically convenient reference point. Depending on the avail- ability of the boundary prior the dark-field and the bright-field boundary conditions may or may not be enforced in the reconstruction. Not surprisingly, enforcing the boundary condition improves the rate of convergence, sometimes in a significant way. Enforcing the bright-field condition in the reconstruction can also remove the linear phase ambiguity.

Z. Zhang, K. Duraisamy, N. A. Gumerov

Standard Gaussian Process (GP) regression, a powerful machine learning tool, is computationally expensive when it is applied to large datasets, and potentially inaccurate when data points are sparsely distributed in a high-dimensional feature space. To address these challenges, a new multiscale, sparsified GP algorithm is formulated, with the goal of application to large scientific computing datasets. In this approach, the data is partitioned into clusters and the cluster centers are used to define a reduced training set, resulting in an improvement over standard GPs in terms of training and evaluation costs. Further, a hierarchical technique is used to adaptively map the local covariance representation to the underlying sparsity of the feature space, leading to improved prediction accuracy when the data distribution is highly non-uniform. A theoretical investigation of the computational complexity of the algorithm is presented. The efficacy of this method is then demonstrated on smooth and discontinuous analytical functions and on data from a direct numerical simulation of turbulent combustion.

Z. Zhang, M. V. Tretyakov, B. Rozovskii et al.

We consider a sparse grid collocation method in conjunction with a time discretization of the differential equations for computing expectations of functionals of solutions to differential equations perturbed by time-dependent white noise. We first analyze the error of Smolyak's sparse grid collocation used to evaluate expectations of functionals of solutions to stochastic differential equations discretized by the Euler scheme. We show theoretically and numerically that this algorithm can have satisfactory accuracy for small magnitude of noise or small integration time, however it does not converge neither with decrease of the Euler scheme's time step size nor with increase of Smolyak's sparse grid level. Subsequently, we use this method as a building block for proposing a new algorithm by combining sparse grid collocation with a recursive procedure. This approach allows us to numerically integrate linear stochastic partial differential equations over longer times, which is illustrated in numerical tests on a stochastic advection-diffusion equation.

Q. S. Song, G. Yin, Z. Zhang

This work develops an epsilon-uniform finite element method for singularly perturbed boundary value problems. A surprising and remarkable observation is illustrated: By moving one node arbitrarily in between its adjacent nodes, the new finite element solution always intersect with original one at fixed point. Using this fact, an effective epsilon-uniform approximation out of boundary is proposed by adding one point only in the grid that contains boundary layer. The thickness of boundary layer is not necessary to be known from priori estimation. Numerical results are carried out and compared to Shishkin mesh for demonstration purpose.