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Tree shape statistics provide valuable quantitative insights into evolutionary mechanisms underpinning phylogenetic trees, a commonly used graph representation of evolution systems ranging from viruses to species. By developing limit theorems for a version of extended P\'olya urn models in which negative entries are permitted for their replacement matrices, we present strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for asymptotic joint distributions of two subtree counting statistics, the number of cherries and that of pitchforks, for random phylogenetic trees generated by two widely used null tree models: the proportional to distinguishable arrangements (PDA) and the Yule-Harding-Kingman (YHK) models. Our results indicate that the limiting behaviour of these two statistics, when appropriately scaled, are independent of the initial trees used in the tree generating process.
Detecting novel objects from few examples has become an emerging topic in computer vision recently. However, these methods need fully annotated training images to learn new object categories which limits their applicability in real world scenarios such as field robotics. In this work, we propose a probabilistic multiple instance learning approach for few-shot Common Object Localization (COL) and few-shot Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD). In these tasks, only image-level labels, which are much cheaper to acquire, are available. We find that operating on features extracted from the last layer of a pre-trained Faster-RCNN is more effective compared to previous episodic learning based few-shot COL methods. Our model simultaneously learns the distribution of the novel objects and localizes them via expectation-maximization steps. As a probabilistic model, we employ von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution which captures the semantic information better than Gaussian distribution when applied to the pre-trained embedding space. When the novel objects are localized, we utilize them to learn a linear appearance model to detect novel classes in new images. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed method, despite being simple, outperforms strong baselines in few-shot COL and WSOD, as well as large-scale WSOD tasks.
Recommender system usually faces popularity bias issues: from the data perspective, items exhibit uneven (long-tail) distribution on the interaction frequency; from the method perspective, collaborative filtering methods are prone to amplify the bias by over-recommending popular items. It is undoubtedly critical to consider popularity bias in recommender systems, and existing work mainly eliminates the bias effect. However, we argue that not all biases in the data are bad -- some items demonstrate higher popularity because of their better intrinsic quality. Blindly pursuing unbiased learning may remove the beneficial patterns in the data, degrading the recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction. This work studies an unexplored problem in recommendation -- how to leverage popularity bias to improve the recommendation accuracy. The key lies in two aspects: how to remove the bad impact of popularity bias during training, and how to inject the desired popularity bias in the inference stage that generates top-K recommendations. This questions the causal mechanism of the recommendation generation process. Along this line, we find that item popularity plays the role of confounder between the exposed items and the observed interactions, causing the bad effect of bias amplification. To achieve our goal, we propose a new training and inference paradigm for recommendation named Popularity-bias Deconfounding and Adjusting (PDA). It removes the confounding popularity bias in model training and adjusts the recommendation score with desired popularity bias via causal intervention. We demonstrate the new paradigm on latent factor model and perform extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Empirical studies validate that the deconfounded training is helpful to discover user real interests and the inference adjustment with popularity bias could further improve the recommendation accuracy.
Let $\mathfrak{F}_n$ be the set of all cuspidal automorphic representations $\pi$ of $\mathrm{GL}_n$ with unitary central character over a number field $F$. We prove the first unconditional zero density estimate for the set $\mathcal{S}=\{L(s,\pi\times\pi')\colon\pi\in\mathfrak{F}_n\}$ of Rankin-Selberg $L$-functions, where $\pi'\in\mathfrak{F}_{n'}$ is fixed. We use this density estimate to prove (i) a strong average form of effective multiplicity one for $\mathrm{GL}_n$; (ii) that given $\pi\in\mathfrak{F}_n$ defined over $\mathbb{Q}$, the convolution $\pi\times\tilde{\pi}$ has a positive level of distribution in the sense of Bombieri-Vinogradov; (iii) that almost all $L(s,\pi\times\pi')\in \mathcal{S}$ have a hybrid-aspect subconvexity bound on $\mathrm{Re}(s)=\frac{1}{2}$; (iv) a hybrid-aspect power-saving upper bound for the variance in the discrepancy of the measures $|\varphi(x+iy)|^2 y^{-2}dxdy$ associated to $\mathrm{GL}_2$ Hecke-Maass newforms $\varphi$ with trivial nebentypus, extending work of Luo and Sarnak for level 1 cusp forms; and (v) a nonsplit analogue of quantum ergodicity: almost all restrictions of Hilbert Hecke-Maass newforms to the modular surface dissipate as their Laplace eigenvalues grow.
In this paper, we introduce the task of multi-view RGB-based 3D object detection as an end-to-end optimization problem. To address this problem, we propose ImVoxelNet, a novel fully convolutional method of 3D object detection based on monocular or multi-view RGB images. The number of monocular images in each multi-view input can variate during training and inference; actually, this number might be unique for each multi-view input. ImVoxelNet successfully handles both indoor and outdoor scenes, which makes it general-purpose. Specifically, it achieves state-of-the-art results in car detection on KITTI (monocular) and nuScenes (multi-view) benchmarks among all methods that accept RGB images. Moreover, it surpasses existing RGB-based 3D object detection methods on the SUN RGB-D dataset. On ScanNet, ImVoxelNet sets a new benchmark for multi-view 3D object detection. The source code and the trained models are available at https://github.com/saic-vul/imvoxelnet.
LAMOST Data Release 5, covering $\sim$17,000 $deg^2$ from $-10^{\circ}$ to $80^{\circ}$ in declination, contains 9 millions co-added low resolution spectra of celestial objects, each spectrum combined from repeat exposure of two to tens of times during Oct 2011 to Jun 2017. In this paper, We present the spectra of individual exposures for all the objects in LAMOST Data Release 5. For each spectrum, equivalent width of 60 lines from 11 different elements are calculated with a new method combining the actual line core and fitted line wings. For stars earlier than F type, the Balmer lines are fitted with both emission and absorption profiles once two components are detected. Radial velocity of each individual exposure is measured by minimizing ${\chi}^2$ between the spectrum and its best template. Database for equivalent widths of spectral lines and radial velocities of individual spectra are available online. Radial velocity uncertainties with different stellar type and signal-to-noise ratio are quantified by comparing different exposure of the same objects. We notice that the radial velocity uncertainty depends on the time lag between observations. For stars observed in the same day and with signal-to-noise ratio higher than 20, the radial velocity uncertainty is below 5km/s, and increase to 10km/s for stars observed in different nights.
The rapid progress in clinical data management systems and artificial intelligence approaches enable the era of personalized medicine. Intensive care units (ICUs) are the ideal clinical research environment for such development because they collect many clinical data and are highly computerized environments. We designed a retrospective clinical study on a prospective ICU database using clinical natural language to help in the early diagnosis of heart failure in critically ill children. The methodology consisted of empirical experiments of a learning algorithm to learn the hidden interpretation and presentation of the French clinical note data. This study included 1386 patients' clinical notes with 5444 single lines of notes. There were 1941 positive cases (36 % of total) and 3503 negative cases classified by two independent physicians using a standardized approach. The multilayer perceptron neural network outperforms other discriminative and generative classifiers. Consequently, the proposed framework yields an overall classification performance with 89 % accuracy, 88 % recall, and 89 % precision. This study successfully applied learning representation and machine learning algorithms to detect heart failure from clinical natural language in a single French institution. Further work is needed to use the same methodology in other institutions and other languages.
We present a comprehensive overview of chirality and its optical manifestation in plasmonic nanosystems and nanostructures. We discuss top-down fabricated structures that range from solid metallic nanostructures to groupings of metallic nanoparticles arranged in three dimensions. We also present the large variety of bottom-up synthesized structures. Using DNA, peptides, or other scaffolds, complex nanoparticle arrangements of up to hundreds of individual nanoparticles have been realized. Beyond this static picture, we also give an overview of recent demonstrations of active chiral plasmonic systems, where the chiral optical response can be controlled by an external stimulus. We discuss the prospect of using the unique properties of complex chiral plasmonic systems for enantiomeric sensing schemes.
Programming language detection is a common need in the analysis of large source code bases. It is supported by a number of existing tools that rely on several features, and most notably file extensions, to determine file types. We consider the problem of accurately detecting the type of files commonly found in software code bases, based solely on textual file content. Doing so is helpful to classify source code that lack file extensions (e.g., code snippets posted on the Web or executable scripts), to avoid misclassifying source code that has been recorded with wrong or uncommon file extensions, and also shed some light on the intrinsic recognizability of source code files. We propose a simple model that (a) use a language-agnostic word tokenizer for textual files, (b) group tokens in 1-/2-grams, (c) build feature vectors based on N-gram frequencies, and (d) use a simple fully connected neural network as classifier. As training set we use textual files extracted from GitHub repositories with at least 1000 stars, using existing file extensions as ground truth. Despite its simplicity the proposed model reaches 85% in our experiments for a relatively high number of recognized classes (more than 130 file types).
An essential feature of the subdiffusion equations with the $\alpha$-order time fractional derivative is the weak singularity at the initial time. The weak regularity of the solution is usually characterized by a regularity parameter $\sigma\in (0,1)\cup(1,2)$. Under this general regularity assumption, we here obtain the pointwise-in-time error estimate of the widely used L1 scheme for nonlinear subdiffusion equations. To the end, we present a refined discrete fractional-type Gr\"onwall inequality and a rigorous analysis for the truncation errors. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretical analysis.
In this paper, we presented a new method for deformation control of deformable objects, which utilizes both visual and tactile feedback. At present, manipulation of deformable objects is basically formulated by assuming positional constraints. But in fact, in many situations manipulation has to be performed under actively applied force constraints. This scenario is considered in this research. In the proposed scheme a tactile feedback is integrated to ensure a stable contact between the robot end-effector and the soft object to be manipulated. The controlled contact force is also utilized to regulate the deformation of the soft object with its shape measured by a vision sensor. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by a book page turning and shaping experiment.
With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies in our daily lives, fear and anxiety about their misuse as well as the hidden biases in their creation have led to a demand for regulation to address such issues. Yet blindly regulating an innovation process that is not well understood, may stifle this process and reduce benefits that society may gain from the generated technology, even under the best intentions. In this paper, starting from a baseline model that captures the fundamental dynamics of a race for domain supremacy using AI technology, we demonstrate how socially unwanted outcomes may be produced when sanctioning is applied unconditionally to risk-taking, i.e. potentially unsafe, behaviours. As an alternative to resolve the detrimental effect of over-regulation, we propose a voluntary commitment approach wherein technologists have the freedom of choice between independently pursuing their course of actions or establishing binding agreements to act safely, with sanctioning of those that do not abide to what they pledged. Overall, this work reveals for the first time how voluntary commitments, with sanctions either by peers or an institution, leads to socially beneficial outcomes in all scenarios envisageable in a short-term race towards domain supremacy through AI technology. These results are directly relevant for the design of governance and regulatory policies that aim to ensure an ethical and responsible AI technology development process.
Chinese pre-trained language models usually process text as a sequence of characters, while ignoring more coarse granularity, e.g., words. In this work, we propose a novel pre-training paradigm for Chinese -- Lattice-BERT, which explicitly incorporates word representations along with characters, thus can model a sentence in a multi-granularity manner. Specifically, we construct a lattice graph from the characters and words in a sentence and feed all these text units into transformers. We design a lattice position attention mechanism to exploit the lattice structures in self-attention layers. We further propose a masked segment prediction task to push the model to learn from rich but redundant information inherent in lattices, while avoiding learning unexpected tricks. Experiments on 11 Chinese natural language understanding tasks show that our model can bring an average increase of 1.5% under the 12-layer setting, which achieves new state-of-the-art among base-size models on the CLUE benchmarks. Further analysis shows that Lattice-BERT can harness the lattice structures, and the improvement comes from the exploration of redundant information and multi-granularity representations. Our code will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/pretrained-language-models/LatticeBERT.
We address the problem of novel view synthesis (NVS) from a few sparse source view images. Conventional image-based rendering methods estimate scene geometry and synthesize novel views in two separate steps. However, erroneous geometry estimation will decrease NVS performance as view synthesis highly depends on the quality of estimated scene geometry. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end NVS framework to eliminate the error propagation issue. To be specific, we construct a volume under the target view and design a source-view visibility estimation (SVE) module to determine the visibility of the target-view voxels in each source view. Next, we aggregate the visibility of all source views to achieve a consensus volume. Each voxel in the consensus volume indicates a surface existence probability. Then, we present a soft ray-casting (SRC) mechanism to find the most front surface in the target view (i.e. depth). Specifically, our SRC traverses the consensus volume along viewing rays and then estimates a depth probability distribution. We then warp and aggregate source view pixels to synthesize a novel view based on the estimated source-view visibility and target-view depth. At last, our network is trained in an end-to-end self-supervised fashion, thus significantly alleviating error accumulation in view synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates novel views in higher quality compared to the state-of-the-art.
In this paper, we present a first-order projection-free method, namely, the universal conditional gradient sliding (UCGS) method, for solving $\varepsilon$-approximate solutions to convex differentiable optimization problems. For objective functions with H\"older continuous gradients, we show that UCGS is able to terminate with $\varepsilon$-solutions with at most $O((M_\nu D_X^{1+\nu}/{\varepsilon})^{2/(1+3\nu)})$ gradient evaluations and $O((M_\nu D_X^{1+\nu}/{\varepsilon})^{4/(1+3\nu)})$ linear objective optimizations, where $\nu\in (0,1]$ and $M_\nu>0$ are the exponent and constant of the H\"older condition. Furthermore, UCGS is able to perform such computations without requiring any specific knowledge of the smoothness information $\nu$ and $M_\nu$. In the weakly smooth case when $\nu\in (0,1)$, both complexity results improve the current state-of-the-art $O((M_\nu D_X^{1+\nu}/{\varepsilon})^{1/\nu})$ results on first-order projection-free method achieved by the conditional gradient method. Within the class of sliding-type algorithms, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a sliding-type algorithm is able to improve not only the gradient complexity but also the overall complexity for computing an approximate solution. In the smooth case when $\nu=1$, UCGS matches the state-of-the-art complexity result but adds more features allowing for practical implementation.
Let $M\stackrel{\rho_0}{\curvearrowleft}S$ be a $C^\infty$ locally free action of a connected simply connected solvable Lie group $S$ on a closed manifold $M$. Roughly speaking, $\rho_0$ is parameter rigid if any $C^\infty$ locally free action of $S$ on $M$ having the same orbits as $\rho_0$ is $C^\infty$ conjugate to $\rho_0$. In this paper we prove two types of result on parameter rigidity. First let $G$ be a connected semisimple Lie group with finite center of real rank at least $2$ without compact factors nor simple factors locally isomorphic to $\mathrm{SO}_0(n,1)$ $(n\geq2)$ or $\mathrm{SU}(n,1)$ $(n\geq2)$, and let $\Gamma$ be an irreducible cocompact lattice in $G$. Let $G=KAN$ be an Iwasawa decomposition. We prove that the action $\Gamma\backslash G\curvearrowleft AN$ by right multiplication is parameter rigid. One of the three main ingredients of the proof is the rigidity theorems of Pansu and Kleiner-Leeb on the quasiisometries of Riemannian symmetric spaces of noncompact type. Secondly we show, if $M\stackrel{\rho_0}{\curvearrowleft}S$ is parameter rigid, then the zeroth and first cohomology of the orbit foliation of $\rho_0$ with certain coefficients must vanish. This is a partial converse to the results in the author's [Vanishing of cohomology and parameter rigidity of actions of solvable Lie groups. Geom. Topol. 21(1) (2017), 157-191], where we saw sufficient conditions for parameter rigidity in terms of vanishing of the first cohomology with various coefficients.
This letter studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided multicasting (MC) system, which is enabled by simultaneous free space optics (FSO) backhaul and power transfer. The UAV applies the power-splitting technique to harvest wireless power and decode backhaul information simultaneously over the FSO link, while at the same time using the harvested power to multicast the backhauled information over the radio frequency (RF) links to multiple ground users (GUs). We derive the UAV's achievable MC rate under the Poisson point process (PPP) based GU distribution. By jointly designing the FSO and RF links and the UAV altitude, we maximize the system-level energy efficiency (EE), which can be equivalently expressed as the ratio of the UAV's MC rate over the optics base station (OBS) transmit power, subject to the UAV's sustainable operation and reliable backhauling constraints. Due to the non-convexity of this problem, we propose suboptimal solutions with low complexity. Numerical results show the close-to-optimal EE performance by properly balancing the power-rate tradeoff between the FSO power and the MC data transmissions.
The first mobile camera phone was sold only 20 years ago, when taking pictures with one's phone was an oddity, and sharing pictures online was unheard of. Today, the smartphone is more camera than phone. How did this happen? This transformation was enabled by advances in computational photography -the science and engineering of making great images from small form factor, mobile cameras. Modern algorithmic and computing advances, including machine learning, have changed the rules of photography, bringing to it new modes of capture, post-processing, storage, and sharing. In this paper, we give a brief history of mobile computational photography and describe some of the key technological components, including burst photography, noise reduction, and super-resolution. At each step, we may draw naive parallels to the human visual system.
We study dynamic clustering problems from the perspective of online learning. We consider an online learning problem, called \textit{Dynamic $k$-Clustering}, in which $k$ centers are maintained in a metric space over time (centers may change positions) such as a dynamically changing set of $r$ clients is served in the best possible way. The connection cost at round $t$ is given by the \textit{$p$-norm} of the vector consisting of the distance of each client to its closest center at round $t$, for some $p\geq 1$ or $p = \infty$. We present a \textit{$\Theta\left( \min(k,r) \right)$-regret} polynomial-time online learning algorithm and show that, under some well-established computational complexity conjectures, \textit{constant-regret} cannot be achieved in polynomial-time. In addition to the efficient solution of Dynamic $k$-Clustering, our work contributes to the long line of research on combinatorial online learning.
Photonic quantum networking relies on entanglement distribution between distant nodes, typically realized by swapping procedures. However, entanglement swapping is a demanding task in practice, mainly because of limited effectiveness of entangled photon sources and Bell-state measurements necessary to realize the process. Here we experimentally activate a remote distribution of two-photon polarization entanglement which supersedes the need for initial entangled pairs and traditional Bell-state measurements. This alternative procedure is accomplished thanks to the controlled spatial indistinguishability of four independent photons in three separated nodes of the network, which enables us to perform localized product-state measurements on the central node acting as a trigger. This experiment proves that the inherent indistinguishability of identical particles supplies new standards for feasible quantum communication in multinode photonic quantum networks.
Adapting the idea of training CartPole with Deep Q-learning agent, we are able to find a promising result that prevent the pole from falling down. The capacity of reinforcement learning (RL) to learn from the interaction between the environment and agent provides an optimal control strategy. In this paper, we aim to solve the classic pendulum swing-up problem that making the learned pendulum to be in upright position and balanced. Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm is introduced to operate over continuous action domain in this problem. Salient results of optimal pendulum are proved with increasing average return, decreasing loss, and live video in the code part.
We report the detection of [O I]145.5um in the BR 1202-0725 system, a compact group at z=4.7 consisting of a quasar (QSO), a submillimeter-bright galaxy (SMG), and three faint Lya emitters. By taking into account the previous detections and upper limits, the [O I]/[C II] line ratios of the now five known high-z galaxies are higher than or on the high-end of the observed values in local galaxies ([O I]/[C II]$\gtrsim$0.13). The high [O I]/[C II] ratios and the joint analysis with the previous detection of [N II] lines for both the QSO and the SMG suggest the presence of warm and dense neutral gas in these highly star-forming galaxies. This is further supported by new CO (12-11) line detections and a comparison with cosmological simulations. There is a possible positive correlation between the [NII]122/205 line ratio and the [O I]/[C II] ratio when all local and high-z sources are taken into account, indicating that the denser the ionized gas, the denser and warmer the neutral gas (or vice versa). The detection of the [O I] line in the BR1202-0725 system with a relatively short amount of integration with ALMA demonstrates the great potential of this line as a dense gas tracer for high-z galaxies.
We study the nonsingular black hole in Anti de-Sitter background taking the negative cosmological constant as the pressure of the system. We investigate the horizon structure, and find the critical values $m_0$ and $\tilde{k}_0$, such that $m>m_0$ (or $\tilde{k}<\tilde{k}_0$) corresponds to a black solution with two horizons, namely the Cauchy horizon $x_-$ and the event horizon $x_+$. For $m=m_0$ (or $\tilde{k}=\tilde{k}_0$), there exist an extremal black hole with degenerate horizon $x_0=x_{\pm}$ and for $m<m_0$ (or $\tilde{k}>\tilde{k}_0$), no black hole solution exists. In turn, we calculate the thermodynamical properties and by observing the behaviour of Gibb's free energy and specific heat, we find that this black hole solution exhibits first order (small to large black hole) and second order phase transition. Further, we study the $P-V$ criticality of system and then calculate the critical exponents showing that they are the same as those of the Van der Waals fluid.
In the context of autonomous vehicles, one of the most crucial tasks is to estimate the risk of the undertaken action. While navigating in complex urban environments, the Bayesian occupancy grid is one of the most popular types of maps, where the information of occupancy is stored as the probability of collision. Although widely used, this kind of representation is not well suited for risk assessment: because of its discrete nature, the probability of collision becomes dependent on the tessellation size. Therefore, risk assessments on Bayesian occupancy grids cannot yield risks with meaningful physical units. In this article, we propose an alternative framework called Dynamic Lambda-Field that is able to assess generic physical risks in dynamic environments without being dependent on the tessellation size. Using our framework, we are able to plan safe trajectories where the risk function can be adjusted depending on the scenario. We validate our approach with quantitative experiments, showing the convergence speed of the grid and that the framework is suitable for real-world scenarios.
The use of crowdworkers in NLP research is growing rapidly, in tandem with the exponential increase in research production in machine learning and AI. Ethical discussion regarding the use of crowdworkers within the NLP research community is typically confined in scope to issues related to labor conditions such as fair pay. We draw attention to the lack of ethical considerations related to the various tasks performed by workers, including labeling, evaluation, and production. We find that the Final Rule, the common ethical framework used by researchers, did not anticipate the use of online crowdsourcing platforms for data collection, resulting in gaps between the spirit and practice of human-subjects ethics in NLP research. We enumerate common scenarios where crowdworkers performing NLP tasks are at risk of harm. We thus recommend that researchers evaluate these risks by considering the three ethical principles set up by the Belmont Report. We also clarify some common misconceptions regarding the Institutional Review Board (IRB) application. We hope this paper will serve to reopen the discussion within our community regarding the ethical use of crowdworkers.
Motivated by applications to single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), we study several problems of function estimation in a low SNR regime, where samples are observed under random rotations of the function domain. In a general framework of group orbit estimation with linear projection, we describe a stratification of the Fisher information eigenvalues according to a sequence of transcendence degrees in the invariant algebra, and relate critical points of the log-likelihood landscape to a sequence of method-of-moments optimization problems. This extends previous results for a discrete rotation group without projection. We then compute these transcendence degrees and the forms of these moment optimization problems for several examples of function estimation under $SO(2)$ and $SO(3)$ rotations, including a simplified model of cryo-EM as introduced by Bandeira, Blum-Smith, Kileel, Perry, Weed, and Wein. For several of these examples, we affirmatively resolve numerical conjectures that $3^\text{rd}$-order moments are sufficient to locally identify a generic signal up to its rotational orbit. For low-dimensional approximations of the electric potential maps of two small protein molecules, we empirically verify that the noise-scalings of the Fisher information eigenvalues conform with these theoretical predictions over a range of SNR, in a model of $SO(3)$ rotations without projection.
The recently introduced harmonic resolvent framework is concerned with the study of the input-output dynamics of nonlinear flows in the proximity of a known time-periodic orbit. These dynamics are governed by the harmonic resolvent operator, which is a linear operator in the frequency domain whose singular value decomposition sheds light on the dominant input-output structures of the flow. Although the harmonic resolvent is a mathematically well-defined operator, the numerical computation of its singular value decomposition requires inverting a matrix that becomes exactly singular as the periodic orbit approaches an exact solution of the nonlinear governing equations. The very poor condition properties of this matrix hinder the convergence of classical Krylov solvers, even in the presence of preconditioners, thereby increasing the computational cost required to perform the harmonic resolvent analysis. In this paper we show that a suitable augmentation of the (nearly) singular matrix removes the singularity, and we provide a lower bound for the smallest singular value of the augmented matrix. We also show that the desired decomposition of the harmonic resolvent can be computed using the augmented matrix, whose improved condition properties lead to a significant speedup in the convergence of classical iterative solvers. We demonstrate this simple, yet effective, computational procedure on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation in the proximity of an unstable time-periodic orbit.
This objective of this report is to review existing enterprise blockchain technologies - EOSIO powered systems, Hyperledger Fabric and Besu, Consensus Quorum, R3 Corda and Ernst and Young's Nightfall - that provide data privacy while leveraging the data integrity benefits of blockchain. By reviewing and comparing how and how well these technologies achieve data privacy, a snapshot is captured of the industry's current best practices and data privacy models. Major enterprise technologies are contrasted in parallel to EOSIO to better understand how EOSIO can evolve to meet the trends seen in enterprise blockchain privacy. The following strategies and trends were generally observed in these technologies: Cryptography: the hashing algorithm was found to be the most used cryptographic primitive in enterprise or changeover privacy solutions. Coordination via on-chain contracts - a common strategy was to use a shared publicly ledger to coordinate data privacy groups and more generally managed identities and access control. Transaction and contract code sharing: there was a variety of different levels of privacy around the business logic (smart contract code) visibility. Some solutions only allowed authorised peers to view code while others made this accessible to everybody that was a member of the shared ledger. Data migrations for data privacy applications: significant challenges exist when using cryptographically stored data in terms of being able to run system upgrades. Multiple blockchain ledgers for data privacy: solutions attempted to create a new private blockchain for every private data relationship which was eventually abandoned in favour of one shared ledger with private data collections/transactions that were anchored to the ledger with a hash in order to improve scaling.
Wavefront aberrations can reflect the imaging quality of high-performance optical systems better than geometric aberrations. Although laser interferometers have emerged as the main tool for measurement of transmitted wavefronts, their application is greatly limited, as they are typically designed for operation at specific wavelengths. In a previous study, we proposed a method for determining the wavefront transmitted by an optical system at any wavelength in a certain band. Although this method works well for most monochromatic systems, where the image plane is at the focal point for the transmission wavelength, for general multi-color systems, it is more practical to measure the wavefront at the defocused image plane. Hence, in this paper, we have developed a complete method for determining transmitted wavefronts in a broad bandwidth at any defocused position, enabling wavefront measurements for multi-color systems. Here, we assume that in small ranges, the Zernike coefficients have a linear relationship with position, such that Zernike coefficients at defocused positions can be derived from measurements performed at the focal point. We conducted experiments to verify these assumptions, validating the new method. The experimental setup has been improved so that it can handle multi-color systems, and a detailed experimental process is summarized. With this technique, application of broadband transmission wavefront measurement can be extended to most general optical systems, which is of great significance for characterization of achromatic and apochromatic optical lenses.
We study for the first time the $p\Sigma^-\to K^-d$ and $K^-d\to p\Sigma^-$ reactions close to threshold and show that they are driven by a triangle mechanism, with the $\Lambda(1405)$, a proton and a neutron as intermediate states, which develops a triangle singularity close to the $\bar{K}d$ threshold. We find that a mechanism involving virtual pion exchange and the $K^-p\to\pi^+\Sigma^-$ amplitude dominates over another one involving kaon exchange and the $K^-p\to K^-p$ amplitude. Moreover, of the two $\Lambda(1405)$ states, the one with higher mass around $1420$ MeV, gives the largest contribution to the process. We show that the cross section, well within measurable range, is very sensitive to different models that, while reproducing $\bar{K}N$ observables above threshold, provide different extrapolations of the $\bar{K}N$ amplitudes below threshold. The observables of this reaction will provide new constraints on the theoretical models, leading to more reliable extrapolations of the $\bar{K}N$ amplitudes below threshold and to more accurate predictions of the $\Lambda(1405)$ state of lower mass.
We present a newly enlarged census of the compact radio population towards the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) using high-sensitivity continuum maps (3-10 $\mu$Jy bm$^{-1}$) from a total of $\sim30$ h centimeter-wavelength observations over an area of $\sim$20$'\times20'$ obtained in the C-band (4$-$8 GHz) with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in its high-resolution A-configuration. We thus complement our previous deep survey of the innermost areas of the ONC, now covering the field of view of the Chandra Orion Ultra-deep Project (COUP). Our catalog contains 521 compact radio sources of which 198 are new detections. Overall, we find that 17% of the (mostly stellar) COUP sources have radio counterparts, while 53% of the radio sources have COUP counterparts. Most notably, the radio detection fraction of X-ray sources is higher in the inner cluster and almost constant for $r>3'$ (0.36 pc) from $\theta^1$ Ori C suggesting a correlation between the radio emission mechanism of these sources and their distance from the most massive stars at the center of the cluster, for example due to increased photoionisation of circumstellar disks. The combination with our previous observations four years prior lead to the discovery of fast proper motions of up to $\sim$373 km s$^{-1}$ from faint radio sources associated with ejecta of the OMC1 explosion. Finally, we search for strong radio variability. We found changes in flux density by a factor of $\lesssim$5 within our observations and a few sources with changes by a factor $>$10 on long timescales of a few years.
With the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) era, the ever-increasing number of devices and emerging applications have triggered the need for ubiquitous connectivity and more efficient computing paradigms. These stringent demands have posed significant challenges to the current wireless networks and their computing architectures. In this article, we propose a high-altitude platform (HAP) network-enabled edge computing paradigm to tackle the key issues of massive IoT connectivity. Specifically, we first provide a comprehensive overview of the recent advances in non-terrestrial network-based edge computing architectures. Then, the limitations of the existing solutions are further summarized from the perspectives of the network architecture, random access procedure, and multiple access techniques. To overcome the limitations, we propose a HAP-enabled aerial cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output network to realize the edge computing paradigm, where multiple HAPs cooperate via the edge servers to serve IoT devices. For the case of a massive number of devices, we further adopt a grant-free massive access scheme to guarantee low-latency and high-efficiency massive IoT connectivity to the network. Besides, a case study is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Finally, to shed light on the future research directions of HAP network-enabled edge computing paradigms, the key challenges and open issues are discussed.
Supervised machine learning, in which models are automatically derived from labeled training data, is only as good as the quality of that data. This study builds on prior work that investigated to what extent 'best practices' around labeling training data were followed in applied ML publications within a single domain (social media platforms). In this paper, we expand by studying publications that apply supervised ML in a far broader spectrum of disciplines, focusing on human-labeled data. We report to what extent a random sample of ML application papers across disciplines give specific details about whether best practices were followed, while acknowledging that a greater range of application fields necessarily produces greater diversity of labeling and annotation methods. Because much of machine learning research and education only focuses on what is done once a "ground truth" or "gold standard" of training data is available, it is especially relevant to discuss issues around the equally-important aspect of whether such data is reliable in the first place. This determination becomes increasingly complex when applied to a variety of specialized fields, as labeling can range from a task requiring little-to-no background knowledge to one that must be performed by someone with career expertise.
Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in industry settings can be trained to closely mimic human behaviors, including lying and deception. However, lying is often a necessary part of negotiation. To address this, we develop a normative framework for when it is ethical or unethical for a conversational AI to lie to humans, based on whether there is what we call "invitation of trust" in a particular scenario. Importantly, cultural norms play an important role in determining whether there is invitation of trust across negotiation settings, and thus an AI trained in one culture may not be generalizable to others. Moreover, individuals may have different expectations regarding the invitation of trust and propensity to lie for human vs. AI negotiators, and these expectations may vary across cultures as well. Finally, we outline how a conversational chatbot can be trained to negotiate ethically by applying autoregressive models to large dialog and negotiations datasets.
Technology has the opportunity to assist older adults as they age in place, coordinate caregiving resources, and meet unmet needs through access to resources. Currently, older adults use consumer technologies to support everyday life, however these technologies are not always accessible or as useful as they can be. Indeed, industry has attempted to create smart home technologies with older adults as a target user group, however these solutions are often more focused on the technical aspects and are short lived. In this paper, we advocate for older adults being involved in the design process - from initial ideation to product development to deployment. We encourage federally funded researchers and industry to create compensated, diverse older adult advisory boards to address stereotypes about aging while ensuring their needs are considered. We envision artificial intelligence systems that augment resources instead of replacing them - especially in under-resourced communities. Older adults rely on their caregiver networks and community organizations for social, emotional, and physical support; thus, AI should be used to coordinate resources better and lower the burden of connecting with these resources. Although sociotechnical smart systems can help identify needs of older adults, the lack of affordable research infrastructure and translation of findings into consumer technology perpetuates inequities in designing for diverse older adults. In addition, there is a disconnect between the creation of smart sensing systems and creating understandable, actionable data for older adults and caregivers to utilize. We ultimately advocate for a well-coordinated research effort across the United States that connects older adults, caregivers, community organizations, and researchers together to catalyze innovative and practical research for all stakeholders.
Let $k \geq 1$ be an integer and $n=3k-1$. Let $\mathbb{Z}_n$ denote the additive group of integers modulo $n$ and let $C$ be the subset of $\mathbb{Z}_n$ consisting of the elements congruent to 1 modulo 3. The Cayley graph $Cay(\mathbb{Z}_n; C)$ is known as the Andr\'asfia graph And($k$). In this note, we wish to determine the automorphism group of this graph. We will show that $Aut(And(k))$ is isomorphic with the dihedral group $\mathbb{D}_{2n}$.
The Landau form of the Fokker-Planck equation is the gold standard for plasmas dominated by small angle collisions, however its $\Order{N^2}$ work complexity has limited its practicality. This paper extends previous work on a fully conservative finite element method for this Landau collision operator with adaptive mesh refinement, optimized for vector machines, by porting the algorithm to the Cuda programming model with implementations in Cuda and Kokkos, and by reporting results within a Vlasov-Maxwell-Landau model of a plasma thermal quench. With new optimizations of the Landau kernel and ports of this kernel, the sparse matrix assembly and algebraic solver to Cuda, the cost of a well resolved Landau collision time advance is shown to be practical for kinetic plasma applications. This fully implicit Landau time integrator and the plasma quench model is available in the PETSc (Portable, Extensible, Toolkit for Scientific computing) numerical library.
Let $X$ and $Y$ be two smooth manifolds of the same dimension. It was proved by Seeger, Sogge and Stein in \cite{SSS} that the Fourier integral operators with real non-degenerate phase functions in the class $I^{\mu}_1(X,Y;\Lambda),$ $\mu\leq -(n-1)/2,$ are bounded from $H^1$ to $L^1.$ The sharpness of the order $-(n-1)/2,$ for any elliptic operator was also proved in \cite{SSS} and extended to other types of canonical relations in \cite{Ruzhansky1999}. That the operators in the class $I^{\mu}_1(X,Y;\Lambda),$ $\mu\leq -(n-1)/2,$ satisfy the weak (1,1) inequality was proved by Tao \cite{Tao:weak11}. In this note, we prove that the weak (1,1) inequality for the order $ -(n-1)/2$ is sharp for any elliptic Fourier integral operator, as well as its versions for canonical relations satisfying additional rank conditions.
A novel data-processing method was developed to facilitate scintillation detector characterization. Combined with fan-beam calibration, this method can be used to quickly and conveniently calibrate gamma-ray detectors for SPECT, PET, homeland security or astronomy. Compared with traditional calibration methods, this new technique can accurately calibrate a photon-counting detector, including DOI information, with greatly reduced time. The enabling part of this technique is fan-beam scanning combined with a data-processing strategy called the common-data subset (CDS) method, which was used to synthesize the detector's mean detector response functions (MDRFs). Using this approach, $2N$ scans ($N$ in x and $N$ in y direction) are necessary to finish calibration of a 2D detector as opposed to $N^2$ scans with a pencil beam. For a 3D detector calibration, only $3N$ scans are necessary to achieve the 3D detector MDRFs that include DOI information. Moreover, this calibration technique can be used for detectors with complicated or irregular MDRFs. We present both Monte-Carlo simulations and experimental results that support the feasibility of this method.
While numerous attempts have been made to jointly parse syntax and semantics, high performance in one domain typically comes at the price of performance in the other. This trade-off contradicts the large body of research focusing on the rich interactions at the syntax-semantics interface. We explore multiple model architectures which allow us to exploit the rich syntactic and semantic annotations contained in the Universal Decompositional Semantics (UDS) dataset, jointly parsing Universal Dependencies and UDS to obtain state-of-the-art results in both formalisms. We analyze the behaviour of a joint model of syntax and semantics, finding patterns supported by linguistic theory at the syntax-semantics interface. We then investigate to what degree joint modeling generalizes to a multilingual setting, where we find similar trends across 8 languages.
This paper considers the Gaussian multiple-access channel (MAC) in the asymptotic regime where the number of users grows linearly with the code length. We propose efficient coding schemes based on random linear models with approximate message passing (AMP) decoding and derive the asymptotic error rate achieved for a given user density, user payload (in bits), and user energy. The tradeoff between energy-per-bit and achievable user density (for a fixed user payload and target error rate) is studied, and it is demonstrated that in the large system limit, a spatially coupled coding scheme with AMP decoding achieves near-optimal tradeoffs for a wide range of user densities. Furthermore, in the regime where the user payload is large, we also study the spectral efficiency versus energy-per-bit tradeoff and discuss methods to reduce decoding complexity at large payload sizes.
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics classes with computation integrated into the curriculum are a fitting setting for investigating computational thinking. In this paper, we lay the foundation for exploring computational thinking in introductory physics courses. First, we review relevant literature to synthesize a set of potential learning goals that students could engage in when working with computation. The computational thinking framework that we have developed features 14 practices contained within 6 different categories. We use in-class video data as existence proofs of the computational thinking practices proposed in our framework. In doing this work, we hope to provide ways for teachers to assess their students' development of computational thinking, while also giving physics education researchers some guidance on how to study this topic in greater depth.
In this study, an algorithm to blind and automatic modulation classification has been proposed. It well benefits combined machine leaning and signal feature extraction to recognize diverse range of modulation in low signal power to noise ratio (SNR). The presented algorithm contains four. First, it advantages spectrum analyzing to branching modulated signal based on regular and irregular spectrum character. Seconds, a nonlinear soft margin support vector (NS SVM) problem is applied to received signal, and its symbols are classified to correct and incorrect (support vectors) symbols. The NS SVM employment leads to discounting in physical layer noise effect on modulated signal. After that, a k-center clustering can find center of each class. finally, in correlation function estimation of scatter diagram is correlated with pre-saved ideal scatter diagram of modulations. The correlation outcome is classification result. For more evaluation, success rate, performance, and complexity in compare to many published methods are provided. The simulation prove that the proposed algorithm can classified the modulated signal in less SNR. For example, it can recognize 4-QAM in SNR=-4.2 dB, and 4-FSK in SNR=2.1 dB with %99 success rate. Moreover, due to using of kernel function in dual problem of NS SVM and feature base function, the proposed algorithm has low complexity and simple implementation in practical issues.
Jupiter family comets contribute a significant amount of debris to near-Earth space. However, telescopic observations of these objects seem to suggest they have short physical lifetimes. If this is true, the material generated will also be short-lived, but fireball observation networks still detect material on cometary orbits. This study examines centimeter-meter scale sporadic meteoroids detected by the Desert Fireball Network from 2014-2020 originating from Jupiter family comet-like orbits. Analyzing each event's dynamic history and physical characteristics, we confidently determined whether they originated from the main asteroid belt or the trans-Neptunian region. Our results indicate that $<4\%$ of sporadic meteoroids on JFC-like orbits are genetically cometary. This observation is statistically significant and shows that cometary material is too friable to survive in near-Earth space. Even when considering shower contributions, meteoroids on JFC-like orbits are primarily from the main-belt. Thus, the presence of genuine cometary meteorites in terrestrial collections is highly unlikely.
Leakage of data from publicly available Machine Learning (ML) models is an area of growing significance as commercial and government applications of ML can draw on multiple sources of data, potentially including users' and clients' sensitive data. We provide a comprehensive survey of contemporary advances on several fronts, covering involuntary data leakage which is natural to ML models, potential malevolent leakage which is caused by privacy attacks, and currently available defence mechanisms. We focus on inference-time leakage, as the most likely scenario for publicly available models. We first discuss what leakage is in the context of different data, tasks, and model architectures. We then propose a taxonomy across involuntary and malevolent leakage, available defences, followed by the currently available assessment metrics and applications. We conclude with outstanding challenges and open questions, outlining some promising directions for future research.
Fitting concentric geometric objects to digitized data is an important problem in many areas such as iris detection, autonomous navigation, and industrial robotics operations. There are two common approaches to fitting geometric shapes to data: the geometric (iterative) approach and algebraic (non-iterative) approach. The geometric approach is a nonlinear iterative method that minimizes the sum of the squares of Euclidean distances of the observed points to the ellipses and regarded as the most accurate method, but it needs a good initial guess to improve the convergence rate. The algebraic approach is based on minimizing the algebraic distances with some constraints imposed on parametric space. Each algebraic method depends on the imposed constraint, and it can be solved with the aid of the generalized eigenvalue problem. Only a few methods in literature were developed to solve the problem of concentric ellipses. Here we study the statistical properties of existing methods by firstly establishing a general mathematical and statistical framework for this problem. Using rigorous perturbation analysis, we derive the variances and biasedness of each method under the small-sigma model. We also develop new estimators, which can be used as reliable initial guesses for other iterative methods. Then we compare the performance of each method according to their theoretical accuracy. Not only do our methods described here outperform other existing non-iterative methods, they are also quite robust against large noise. These methods and their practical performances are assessed by a series of numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data.
Gradient-based adversarial attacks on deep neural networks pose a serious threat, since they can be deployed by adding imperceptible perturbations to the test data of any network, and the risk they introduce cannot be assessed through the network's original training performance. Denoising and dimensionality reduction are two distinct methods that have been independently investigated to combat such attacks. While denoising offers the ability to tailor the defense to the specific nature of the attack, dimensionality reduction offers the advantage of potentially removing previously unseen perturbations, along with reducing the training time of the network being defended. We propose strategies to combine the advantages of these two defense mechanisms. First, we propose the cascaded defense, which involves denoising followed by dimensionality reduction. To reduce the training time of the defense for a small trade-off in performance, we propose the hidden layer defense, which involves feeding the output of the encoder of a denoising autoencoder into the network. Further, we discuss how adaptive attacks against these defenses could become significantly weak when an alternative defense is used, or when no defense is used. In this light, we propose a new metric to evaluate a defense which measures the sensitivity of the adaptive attack to modifications in the defense. Finally, we present a guideline for building an ordered repertoire of defenses, a.k.a. a defense infrastructure, that adjusts to limited computational resources in presence of uncertainty about the attack strategy.
Gender-based crime is one of the most concerning scourges of contemporary society. Governments worldwide have invested lots of economic and human resources to radically eliminate this threat. Despite these efforts, providing accurate predictions of the risk that a victim of gender violence has of being attacked again is still a very hard open problem. The development of new methods for issuing accurate, fair and quick predictions would allow police forces to select the most appropriate measures to prevent recidivism. In this work, we propose to apply Machine Learning (ML) techniques to create models that accurately predict the recidivism risk of a gender-violence offender. The relevance of the contribution of this work is threefold: (i) the proposed ML method outperforms the preexisting risk assessment algorithm based on classical statistical techniques, (ii) the study has been conducted through an official specific-purpose database with more than 40,000 reports of gender violence, and (iii) two new quality measures are proposed for assessing the effective police protection that a model supplies and the overload in the invested resources that it generates. Additionally, we propose a hybrid model that combines the statistical prediction methods with the ML method, permitting authorities to implement a smooth transition from the preexisting model to the ML-based model. This hybrid nature enables a decision-making process to optimally balance between the efficiency of the police system and aggressiveness of the protection measures taken.
Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a cellular network that is popular and has been growing in recent years. It was developed to solve fragmentation issues of the first cellular system, and it addresses digital modulation methods, level of the network structure, and services. It is fundamental for organizations to become learning organizations to keep up with the technology changes for network services to be at a competitive level. A simulation analysis using the NetSim tool in this paper is presented for comparing different cellular network codecs for GSM network performance. These parameters such as throughput, delay, and jitter are analyzed for the quality of service provided by each network codec. Unicast application for the cellular network is modeled for different network scenarios. Depending on the evaluation and simulation, it was discovered that G.711, GSM_FR, and GSM-EFR performed better than the other codecs, and they are considered to be the best codecs for cellular networks. These codecs will be of best use to better the performance of the network in the near future.
User-facing software services are becoming increasingly reliant on remote servers to host Deep Neural Network (DNN) models, which perform inference tasks for the clients. Such services require the client to send input data to the service provider, who processes it using a DNN and returns the output predictions to the client. Due to the rich nature of the inputs such as images and speech, the input often contains more information than what is necessary to perform the primary inference task. Consequently, in addition to the primary inference task, a malicious service provider could infer secondary (sensitive) attributes from the input, compromising the client's privacy. The goal of our work is to improve inference privacy by injecting noise to the input to hide the irrelevant features that are not conducive to the primary classification task. To this end, we propose Adaptive Noise Injection (ANI), which uses a light-weight DNN on the client-side to inject noise to each input, before transmitting it to the service provider to perform inference. Our key insight is that by customizing the noise to each input, we can achieve state-of-the-art trade-off between utility and privacy (up to 48.5% degradation in sensitive-task accuracy with <1% degradation in primary accuracy), significantly outperforming existing noise injection schemes. Our method does not require prior knowledge of the sensitive attributes and incurs minimal computational overheads.
Getman et al. (2021) reports the discovery, energetics, frequencies, and effects on environs of $>1000$ X-ray super-flares with X-ray energies $E_X \sim 10^{34}-10^{38}$~erg from pre-main sequence (PMS) stars identified in the $Chandra$ MYStIX and SFiNCs surveys. Here we perform detailed plasma evolution modeling of $55$ bright MYStIX/SFiNCs super-flares from these events. They constitute a large sample of the most powerful stellar flares analyzed in a uniform fashion. They are compared with published X-ray super-flares from young stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster, older active stars, and the Sun. Several results emerge. First, the properties of PMS X-ray super-flares are independent of the presence or absence of protoplanetary disks inferred from infrared photometry, supporting the solar-type model of PMS flaring magnetic loops with both footpoints anchored in the stellar surface. Second, most PMS super-flares resemble solar long duration events (LDEs) that are associated with coronal mass ejections. Slow rise PMS super-flares are an interesting exception. Third, strong correlations of super-flare peak emission measure and plasma temperature with the stellar mass are similar to established correlations for the PMS X-ray emission composed of numerous smaller flares. Fourth, a new correlation of loop geometry is linked to stellar mass; more massive stars appear to have thicker flaring loops. Finally, the slope of a long-standing relationship between the X-ray luminosity and magnetic flux of various solar-stellar magnetic elements appears steeper in PMS super-flares than for solar events.
The swampland is the set of seemingly consistent low-energy effective field theories that cannot be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. In this review we cover some of the conjectural properties that effective theories should possess in order not to fall in the swampland, and we give an overview of their main applications to particle physics. The latter include predictions on neutrino masses, bounds on the cosmological constant, the electroweak and QCD scales, the photon mass, the Higgs potential and some insights about supersymmetry.
This paper examines the use of Lie group and Lie Algebra theory to construct the geometry of pairwise comparisons matrices. The Hadamard product (also known as coordinatewise, coordinate-wise, elementwise, or element-wise product) is analyzed in the context of inconsistency and inaccuracy by the decomposition method. The two designed components are the approximation and orthogonal components. The decomposition constitutes the theoretical foundation for the multiplicative pairwise comparisons. Keywords: approximate reasoning, subjectivity, inconsistency, consistency-driven, pairwise comparison, matrix Lie group, Lie algebra, approximation, orthogonality, decomposition.
Dark matter (DM) scattering and its subsequent capture in the Sun can boost the local relic density, leading to an enhanced neutrino flux from DM annihilations that is in principle detectable at neutrino telescopes. We calculate the event rates expected for a radiative seesaw model containing both scalar triplet and singlet-doublet fermion DM candidates. In the case of scalar DM, the absence of a spin dependent scattering on nuclei results in a low capture rate in the Sun, which is reflected in an event rate of less than one per year in the current IceCube configuration with 86 strings. For singlet-doublet fermion DM, there is a spin dependent scattering process next to the spin independent one, which significantly boosts the event rate and thus makes indirect detection competitive with respect to the direct detection limits imposed by PICO-60. Due to a correlation between both scattering processes, the limits on the spin independent cross section set by XENON1T exclude also parts of the parameter space that can be probed at IceCube. Previously obtained limits by ANTARES, IceCube and Super-Kamiokande from the Sun and the Galactic Center are shown to be much weaker.
Recent work has established that, for every positive integer $k$, every $n$-node graph has a $(2k-1)$-spanner on $O(f^{1-1/k} n^{1+1/k})$ edges that is resilient to $f$ edge or vertex faults. For vertex faults, this bound is tight. However, the case of edge faults is not as well understood: the best known lower bound for general $k$ is $\Omega(f^{\frac12 - \frac{1}{2k}} n^{1+1/k} +fn)$. Our main result is to nearly close this gap with an improved upper bound, thus separating the cases of edge and vertex faults. For odd $k$, our new upper bound is $O_k(f^{\frac12 - \frac{1}{2k}} n^{1+1/k} + fn)$, which is tight up to hidden $poly(k)$ factors. For even $k$, our new upper bound is $O_k(f^{1/2} n^{1+1/k} +fn)$, which leaves a gap of $poly(k) f^{1/(2k)}$. Our proof is an analysis of the fault-tolerant greedy algorithm, which requires exponential time, but we also show that there is a polynomial-time algorithm which creates edge fault tolerant spanners that are larger only by factors of $k$.
In warehouse and manufacturing environments, manipulation platforms are frequently deployed at conveyor belts to perform pick and place tasks. Because objects on the conveyor belts are moving, robots have limited time to pick them up. This brings the requirement for fast and reliable motion planners that could provide provable real-time planning guarantees, which the existing algorithms do not provide. Besides the planning efficiency, the success of manipulation tasks relies heavily on the accuracy of the perception system which is often noisy, especially if the target objects are perceived from a distance. For fast moving conveyor belts, the robot cannot wait for a perfect estimate before it starts executing its motion. In order to be able to reach the object in time, it must start moving early on (relying on the initial noisy estimates) and adjust its motion on-the-fly in response to the pose updates from perception. We propose a planning framework that meets these requirements by providing provable constant-time planning and replanning guarantees. To this end, we first introduce and formalize a new class of algorithms called Constant-Time Motion Planning algorithms (CTMP) that guarantee to plan in constant time and within a user-defined time bound. We then present our planning framework for grasping objects off a conveyor belt as an instance of the CTMP class of algorithms.
Fluid-structure interactions are a widespread phenomenon in nature. Although their numerical modeling have come a long way, the application of numerical design tools to these multiphysics problems is still lagging behind. Gradient-based optimization is the most popular approach in topology optimization currently. Hence, it's a necessity to utilize mesh deformation techniques that have continuous, smooth derivatives. In this work, we address mesh deformation techniques for structured, quadrilateral meshes. We discuss and comment on two legacy mesh deformation techniques; namely the spring analogy model and the linear elasticity model. In addition, we propose a new technique based on the Yeoh hyperelasticity model. We focus on mesh quality as a gateway to mesh admissibility. We propose layered selective stiffening such that the elements adjacent to the fluid-structure interface - where the bulk of the mesh distortion occurs - are stiffened in consecutive layers. The legacy and the new models are able to sustain large deformations without deprecating the mesh quality, and the results are enhanced with using layered selective stiffening.
The ability to generate high-fidelity synthetic data is crucial when available (real) data is limited or where privacy and data protection standards allow only for limited use of the given data, e.g., in medical and financial data-sets. Current state-of-the-art methods for synthetic data generation are based on generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Even though GANs have achieved remarkable results in synthetic data generation, they are often challenging to interpret.Furthermore, GAN-based methods can suffer when used with mixed real and categorical variables.Moreover, loss function (discriminator loss) design itself is problem specific, i.e., the generative model may not be useful for tasks it was not explicitly trained for. In this paper, we propose to use a probabilistic model as a synthetic data generator. Learning the probabilistic model for the data is equivalent to estimating the density of the data. Based on the copula theory, we divide the density estimation task into two parts, i.e., estimating univariate marginals and estimating the multivariate copula density over the univariate marginals. We use normalising flows to learn both the copula density and univariate marginals. We benchmark our method on both simulated and real data-sets in terms of density estimation as well as the ability to generate high-fidelity synthetic data
Logistic Regression (LR) is a widely used statistical method in empirical binary classification studies. However, real-life scenarios oftentimes share complexities that prevent from the use of the as-is LR model, and instead highlight the need to include high-order interactions to capture data variability. This becomes even more challenging because of: (i) datasets growing wider, with more and more variables; (ii) studies being typically conducted in strongly imbalanced settings; (iii) samples going from very large to extremely small; (iv) the need of providing both predictive models and interpretable results. In this paper we present a novel algorithm, Learning high-order Interactions via targeted Pattern Search (LIPS), to select interaction terms of varying order to include in a LR model for an imbalanced binary classification task when input data are categorical. LIPS's rationale stems from the duality between item sets and categorical interactions. The algorithm relies on an interaction learning step based on a well-known frequent item set mining algorithm, and a novel dissimilarity-based interaction selection step that allows the user to specify the number of interactions to be included in the LR model. In addition, we particularize two variants (Scores LIPS and Clusters LIPS), that can address even more specific needs. Through a set of experiments we validate our algorithm and prove its wide applicability to real-life research scenarios, showing that it outperforms a benchmark state-of-the-art algorithm.
The concept of exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) is used to conceive a degenerate synchronization regime that is able to enhance the level of output power and power conversion efficiency for backward wave oscillators (BWOs) operating at millimeter-wave and Terahertz frequencies. Standard BWOs operating at such high frequency ranges typically generate output power not exceeding tens of watts with very poor power conversion efficiency in the order of 1%. The novel concept of degenerate synchronization for the BWO based on a folded waveguide is implemented by engineering distributed gain and power extraction along the slow-wave waveguide. The distributed power extraction along the folded waveguide is useful to satisfy the necessary conditions to have an EPD at the synchronization point. Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation results shows that BWO operating at an EPD regime is capable of generating output power exceeding 3 kwatts with conversion efficiency of exceeding 20% at frequency of 88.5 GHz.
We consider nonlinear impulsive systems on Banach spaces subjected to disturbances and look for dwell-time conditions guaranteeing the the ISS property. In contrary to many existing results our conditions cover the case where both continuous and discrete dynamics can be unstable simultaneously. Lyapunov type methods are use for this purpose. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated on a rather nontrivial example, which is feedback connection of an ODE and a PDE systems.
In this work, we consider the problem of joint calibration and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using sensor arrays. This joint estimation problem is referred to as self calibration. Unlike many previous iterative approaches, we propose geometry independent convex optimization algorithms for jointly estimating the sensor gain and phase errors as well as the source DOAs. We derive these algorithms based on both the conventional element-space data model and the covariance data model. We focus on sparse and regular arrays formed using scalar sensors as well as vector sensors. The developed algorithms are obtained by transforming the underlying bilinear calibration model into a linear model, and subsequently by using standard convex relaxation techniques to estimate the unknown parameters. Prior to the algorithm discussion, we also derive identifiability conditions for the existence of a unique solution to the self calibration problem. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed techniques, numerical experiments and comparisons to the state-of-the-art methods are provided. Finally, the results from an experiment that was performed in an anechoic chamber using an acoustic vector sensor array are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed self calibration techniques.
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) as an emerging technique have shown superior capacity of dealing with heterogeneous information network (HIN). However, most HGNNs follow a semi-supervised learning manner, which notably limits their wide use in reality since labels are usually scarce in real applications. Recently, contrastive learning, a self-supervised method, becomes one of the most exciting learning paradigms and shows great potential when there are no labels. In this paper, we study the problem of self-supervised HGNNs and propose a novel co-contrastive learning mechanism for HGNNs, named HeCo. Different from traditional contrastive learning which only focuses on contrasting positive and negative samples, HeCo employs cross-viewcontrastive mechanism. Specifically, two views of a HIN (network schema and meta-path views) are proposed to learn node embeddings, so as to capture both of local and high-order structures simultaneously. Then the cross-view contrastive learning, as well as a view mask mechanism, is proposed, which is able to extract the positive and negative embeddings from two views. This enables the two views to collaboratively supervise each other and finally learn high-level node embeddings. Moreover, two extensions of HeCo are designed to generate harder negative samples with high quality, which further boosts the performance of HeCo. Extensive experiments conducted on a variety of real-world networks show the superior performance of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-arts.
We study the average behaviour of the Iwasawa invariants for Selmer groups of elliptic curves, considered over anticyclotomic $\mathbb{Z}_p$-extensions in both the definite and indefinite settings. The results in this paper lie at the intersection of arithmetic statistics and Iwasawa theory.
We propose a novel numerical method for high dimensional Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) type elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs). The HJB PDEs, reformulated as optimal control problems, are tackled by the actor-critic framework inspired by reinforcement learning, based on neural network parametrization of the value and control functions. Within the actor-critic framework, we employ a policy gradient approach to improve the control, while for the value function, we derive a variance reduced least-squares temporal difference method using stochastic calculus. To numerically discretize the stochastic control problem, we employ an adaptive step size scheme to improve the accuracy near the domain boundary. Numerical examples up to $20$ spatial dimensions including the linear quadratic regulators, the stochastic Van der Pol oscillators, the diffusive Eikonal equations, and fully nonlinear elliptic PDEs derived from a regulator problem are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
High-contrast imaging observations are fundamentally limited by the spatially and temporally correlated noise source called speckles. Suppression of speckle noise is the key goal of wavefront control and adaptive optics (AO), coronagraphy, and a host of post-processing techniques. Speckles average at a rate set by the statistical speckle lifetime, and speckle-limited integration time in long exposures is directly proportional to this lifetime. As progress continues in post-coronagraph wavefront control, residual atmospheric speckles will become the limiting noise source in high-contrast imaging, so a complete understanding of their statistical behavior is crucial to optimizing high-contrast imaging instruments. Here we present a novel power spectral density (PSD) method for calculating the lifetime, and develop a semi-analytic method for predicting intensity PSDs behind a coronagraph. Considering a frozen-flow turbulence model, we analyze the residual atmosphere speckle lifetimes in a MagAO-X-like AO system as well as 25--39 m giant segmented mirror telescope (GSMT) scale systems. We find that standard AO control shortens atmospheric speckle lifetime from ~130 ms to ~50 ms, and predictive control will further shorten the lifetime to ~20 ms on 6.5 m MagAO-X. We find that speckle lifetimes vary with diameter, wind speed, seeing, and location within the AO control region. On bright stars lifetimes remain within a rough range of ~20 ms to ~100 ms. Due to control system dynamics there are no simple scaling laws which apply across a wide range of system characteristics. Finally, we use these results to argue that telemetry-based post-processing should enable ground-based telescopes to achieve the photon-noise limit in high-contrast imaging.
The Eliashberg theory of superconductivity accounts for the fundamental physics of conventional electron-phonon superconductors, including the retardation of the interaction and the effect of the Coulomb pseudopotential, to predict the critical temperature $T_c$ and other properties. McMillan, Allen, and Dynes derived approximate closed-form expressions for the critical temperature predicted by this theory, which depends essentially on the electron-phonon spectral function $\alpha^2F(\omega)$, using $\alpha^2F$ for low-$T_c$ superconductors. Here we show that modern machine learning techniques can substantially improve these formulae, accounting for more general shapes of the $\alpha^2F$ function. Using symbolic regression and the sure independence screening and sparsifying operator (SISSO) framework, together with a database of artificially generated $\alpha^2F$ functions, ranging from multimodal Einstein-like models to calculated spectra of polyhydrides, as well as numerical solutions of the Eliashberg equations, we derive a formula for $T_c$ that performs as well as Allen-Dynes for low-$T_c$ superconductors, and substantially better for higher-$T_c$ ones. The expression identified through our data-driven approach corrects the systematic underestimation of $T_c$ while reproducing the physical constraints originally outlined by Allen and Dynes. This equation should replace the Allen-Dynes formula for the prediction of higher-temperature superconductors and for the estimation of $\lambda$ from experimental data.
The HI Ly$\alpha$ (1215.67 $\unicode{xC5}$) emission line dominates the far-UV spectra of M dwarf stars, but strong absorption from neutral hydrogen in the interstellar medium makes observing Ly$\alpha$ challenging even for the closest stars. As part of the Far-Ultraviolet M-dwarf Evolution Survey (FUMES), the Hubble Space Telescope has observed 10 early-to-mid M dwarfs with ages ranging from $\sim$24 Myr to several Gyrs to evaluate how the incident UV radiation evolves through the lifetime of exoplanetary systems. We reconstruct the intrinsic Ly$\alpha$ profiles from STIS G140L and E140M spectra and achieve reconstructed fluxes with 1-$\sigma$ uncertainties ranging from 5% to a factor of two for the low resolution spectra (G140L) and 3-20% for the high resolution spectra (E140M). We observe broad, 500-1000 km s$^{-1}$ wings of the Ly$\alpha$ line profile, and analyze how the line width depends on stellar properties. We find that stellar effective temperature and surface gravity are the dominant factors influencing the line width with little impact from the star's magnetic activity level, and that the surface flux density of the Ly$\alpha$ wings may be used to estimate the chromospheric electron density. The Ly$\alpha$ reconstructions on the G140L spectra are the first attempted on $\lambda/\Delta\lambda\sim$1000 data. We find that the reconstruction precision is not correlated with SNR of the observation, rather, it depends on the intrinsic broadness of the stellar Ly$\alpha$ line. Young, low-gravity stars have the broadest lines and therefore provide more information at low spectral resolution to the fit to break degeneracies among model parameters.
We study the current-induced torques in asymmetric magnetic tunnel junctions containing a conventional ferromagnet and a magnetic Weyl semimetal contact. The Weyl semimetal hosts chiral bulk states and topologically protected Fermi arc surface states which were found to govern the voltage behavior and efficiency of current-induced torques. We report how bulk chirality dictates the sign of the non-equilibrium torques acting on the ferromagnet and discuss the existence of large field-like torques acting on the magnetic Weyl semimetal which exceeds the theoretical maximum of conventional magnetic tunnel junctions. The latter are derived from the Fermi arc spin texture and display a counter-intuitive dependence on the Weyl nodes separation. Our results shed light on the new physics of multilayered spintronic devices comprising of magnetic Weyl semimetals, which might open doors for new energy efficient spintronic devices.
This paper contains two finite-sample results about the sign test. First, we show that the sign test is unbiased against two-sided alternatives even when observations are not identically distributed. Second, we provide simple theoretical counterexamples to show that correlation that is unaccounted for leads to size distortion and over-rejection. Our results have implication for practitioners, who are increasingly employing randomization tests for inference.
A pair of biadjoint functors between two categories produces a collection of elements in the centers of these categories, one for each isotopy class of nested circles in the plane. If the centers are equipped with a trace map into the ground field, then one assigns an element of that field to a diagram of nested circles. We focus on the self-adjoint functor case of this construction and study the reverse problem of recovering such a functor and a category given values associated to diagrams of nested circles.
Superpixels serve as a powerful preprocessing tool in numerous computer vision tasks. By using superpixel representation, the number of image primitives can be largely reduced by orders of magnitudes. With the rise of deep learning in recent years, a few works have attempted to feed deeply learned features / graphs into existing classical superpixel techniques. However, none of them are able to produce superpixels in near real-time, which is crucial to the applicability of superpixels in practice. In this work, we propose a two-stage graph-based framework for superpixel segmentation. In the first stage, we introduce an efficient Deep Affinity Learning (DAL) network that learns pairwise pixel affinities by aggregating multi-scale information. In the second stage, we propose a highly efficient superpixel method called Hierarchical Entropy Rate Segmentation (HERS). Using the learned affinities from the first stage, HERS builds a hierarchical tree structure that can produce any number of highly adaptive superpixels instantaneously. We demonstrate, through visual and numerical experiments, the effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared to various state-of-the-art superpixel methods.
This paper is an excerpt of an early version of Chapter 2 of the book "Validity, Reliability, and Significance. Empirical Methods for NLP and Data Science", by Stefan Riezler and Michael Hagmann, published in December 2021 by Morgan & Claypool. Please see the book's homepage at https://www.morganclaypoolpublishers.com/catalog_Orig/product_info.php?products_id=1688 for a more recent and comprehensive discussion.
Training deep reinforcement learning agents on environments with multiple levels / scenes from the same task, has become essential for many applications aiming to achieve generalization and domain transfer from simulation to the real world. While such a strategy is helpful with generalization, the use of multiple scenes significantly increases the variance of samples collected for policy gradient computations. Current methods, effectively continue to view this collection of scenes as a single Markov decision process (MDP), and thus learn a scene-generic value function V(s). However, we argue that the sample variance for a multi-scene environment is best minimized by treating each scene as a distinct MDP, and then learning a joint value function V(s,M) dependent on both state s and MDP M. We further demonstrate that the true joint value function for a multi-scene environment, follows a multi-modal distribution which is not captured by traditional CNN / LSTM based critic networks. To this end, we propose a dynamic value estimation (DVE) technique, which approximates the true joint value function through a sparse attention mechanism over multiple value function hypothesis / modes. The resulting agent not only shows significant improvements in the final reward score across a range of OpenAI ProcGen environments, but also exhibits enhanced navigation efficiency and provides an implicit mechanism for unsupervised state-space skill decomposition.
Deep learning as a service (DLaaS) has been intensively studied to facilitate the wider deployment of the emerging deep learning applications. However, DLaaS may compromise the privacy of both clients and cloud servers. Although some privacy preserving deep neural network (DNN) based inference techniques have been proposed by composing cryptographic primitives, the challenges on computational efficiency have not been well-addressed due to the complexity of DNN models and expensive cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy preserving cloud-based DNN inference framework (namely, "PROUD"), which greatly improves the computational efficiency. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two commonly-used datasets to validate both effectiveness and efficiency for the PROUD, which also outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques.
We derive the interaction of fermions with a dynamical space-time based on the postulate that the description of physics should be independent of the reference frame, which means to require the form-invariance of the fermion action under diffeomorphisms. The derivation is worked out in the Hamiltonian formalism as a canonical transformation along the line of non-Abelian gauge theories. This yields a closed set of field equations for fermions, unambiguously fixing their coupling to dynamical space-time. We encounter, in addition to the well-known minimal coupling, anomalous couplings to curvature and torsion. In torsion-free geometries that anomalous interaction reduces to a Pauli-type coupling with the curvature scalar via a spontaneously emerged new coupling constant with the dimension of mass resp.\ inverse length. A consistent model Hamiltonian for the free gravitational field and the impact of its functional form on the structure of the dynamical geometry space-time is discussed.
This paper introduces a shoebox room simulator able to systematically generate synthetic datasets of binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) given an arbitrary set of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). The evaluation of machine hearing algorithms frequently requires BRIR datasets in order to simulate the acoustics of any environment. However, currently available solutions typically consider only HRTFs measured on dummy heads, which poorly characterize the high variability in spatial sound perception. Our solution allows to integrate a room impulse response (RIR) simulator with different HRTF sets represented in Spatially Oriented Format for Acoustics (SOFA). The source code and the compiled binaries for different operating systems allow to both advanced and non-expert users to benefit from our toolbox, see https://github.com/spatialaudiotools/sofamyroom/ .
Backwards Stochastic Differential Equations (BSDEs) have been widely employed in various areas of applied and financial mathematics. In particular, BSDEs appear extensively in the pricing and hedging of financial derivatives, stochastic optimal control problems and optimal stopping problems. Most BSDEs cannot be solved analytically and thus numerical methods must be applied in order to approximate their solutions. There have been many numerical methods proposed over the past few decades, for the most part, in a complex and scattered manner, with each requiring a variety of different and similar assumptions and conditions. The aim of the present paper is thus to systematically survey various numerical methods for BSDEs, and in particular, compare and categorise them. To this end, we focus on the core features of each method: the main assumptions, the numerical algorithm itself, key convergence properties and advantages and disadvantages, in order to provide an exhaustive up-to-date coverage of numerical methods for BSDEs, with insightful summaries of each and useful comparison and categorization.
With the continuing rapid development of artificial microrobots and active particles, questions of microswimmer guidance and control are becoming ever more relevant and prevalent. In both the applications and theoretical study of such microscale swimmers, control is often mediated by an engineered property of the swimmer, such as in the case of magnetically propelled microrobots. In this work, we will consider a modality of control that is applicable in more generality, effecting guidance via modulation of a background fluid flow. Here, considering a model swimmer in a commonplace flow and simple geometry, we analyse and subsequently establish the efficacy of flow-mediated microswimmer positional control, later touching upon a question of optimal control. Moving beyond idealised notions of controllability and towards considerations of practical utility, we then evaluate the robustness of this control modality to sources of variation that may be present in applications, examining in particular the effects of measurement inaccuracy and rotational noise. This exploration gives rise to a number of cautionary observations, which, overall, demonstrate the need for the careful assessment of both policy and behavioural robustness when designing control schemes for use in practice.
We theoretically investigate the fluorescence intensity correlation (FIC) of Ar clusters and Mo-doped iron oxide nanoparticles subjected to intense, femtosecond and sub-femtosecond XFEL pulses for high-resolution and elemental contrast imaging. We present the FIC of {\Ka} and {\Kah} emission in Ar clusters and discuss the impact of sample damage on retrieving high-resolution structural information and compare the obtained structural information with those from the coherent difractive imaging (CDI) approach. We found that, while sub-femtosecond pulses will substantially benefit the CDI approach, few-femtosecond pulses may be sufficient for achieving high-resolution information with FIC. Furthermore, we show that the fluorescence intensity correlation computed from the fluorescence of Mo atoms in Mo-doped iron oxide nanoparticles can be used to image dopant distributions.
Today, almost all banks have adopted ICT as a means of enhancing their banking service quality. These banks provide ICT based electronic service which is also called electronic banking, internet banking or online banking etc to their customers. Despite the increasing adoption of electronic banking and it relevance towards end users satisfaction, few investigations has been conducted on factors that enhanced end users satisfaction perception. In this research, an empirical analysis has been conducted on factors that influence electronic banking user's satisfaction perception and the relationship between these factors and the customer's satisfaction. The study will help bank industries in improving the level of their customer's satisfaction and increase the bond between a bank and its customer.
Monitoring the state of contact is essential for robotic devices, especially grippers that implement gecko-inspired adhesives where intimate contact is crucial for a firm attachment. However, due to the lack of deformable sensors, few have demonstrated tactile sensing for gecko grippers. We present Viko, an adaptive gecko gripper that utilizes vision-based tactile sensors to monitor contact state. The sensor provides high-resolution real-time measurements of contact area and shear force. Moreover, the sensor is adaptive, low-cost, and compact. We integrated gecko-inspired adhesives into the sensor surface without impeding its adaptiveness and performance. Using a robotic arm, we evaluate the performance of the gripper by a series of grasping test. The gripper has a maximum payload of 8N even at a low fingertip pitch angle of 30 degrees. We also showcase the gripper's ability to adjust fingertip pose for better contact using sensor feedback. Further, everyday object picking is presented as a demonstration of the gripper's adaptiveness.
A starlike univalent function $f$ is characterized by the function $zf'(z)/f(z)$; several subclasses of these functions were studied in the past by restricting the function $zf'(z)/f(z)$ to take values in a region $\Omega$ on the right-half plane, or, equivalently, by requiring the function $zf'(z)/f(z)$ to be subordinate to the corresponding mapping of the unit disk $\mathbb{D}$ to the region $\Omega$. The mappings $w_1(z):=z+\sqrt{1+z^2}, w_2(z):=\sqrt{1+z}$ and $w_3(z):=e^z$ maps the unit disk $\mathbb{D}$ to various regions in the right half plane. For normalized analytic functions $f$ satisfying the conditions that $f(z)/g(z), g(z)/zp(z)$ and $p(z)$ are subordinate to the functions $w_i, i=1,2,3$ in various ways for some analytic functions $g(z)$ and $p(z)$, we determine the sharp radius for them to belong to various subclasses of starlike functions.
We report on the discovery of FRB 20200120E, a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) with low dispersion measure (DM), detected by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)/FRB project. The source DM of 87.82 pc cm$^{-3}$ is the lowest recorded from an FRB to date, yet is significantly higher than the maximum expected from the Milky Way interstellar medium in this direction (~ 50 pc cm$^{-3}$). We have detected three bursts and one candidate burst from the source over the period 2020 January-November. The baseband voltage data for the event on 2020 January 20 enabled a sky localization of the source to within $\simeq$ 14 sq. arcmin (90% confidence). The FRB localization is close to M81, a spiral galaxy at a distance of 3.6 Mpc. The FRB appears on the outskirts of M81 (projected offset $\sim$ 20 kpc) but well inside its extended HI and thick disks. We empirically estimate the probability of chance coincidence with M81 to be $< 10^{-2}$. However, we cannot reject a Milky Way halo origin for the FRB. Within the FRB localization region, we find several interesting cataloged M81 sources and a radio point source detected in the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS). We searched for prompt X-ray counterparts in Swift/BAT and Fermi/GBM data, and for two of the FRB 20200120E bursts, we rule out coincident SGR 1806$-$20-like X-ray bursts. Due to the proximity of FRB 20200120E, future follow-up for prompt multi-wavelength counterparts and sub-arcsecond localization could be constraining of proposed FRB models.
This paper investigates the transmission power control in over-the-air federated edge learning (Air-FEEL) system. Different from conventional power control designs (e.g., to minimize the individual mean squared error (MSE) of the over-the-air aggregation at each round), we consider a new power control design aiming at directly maximizing the convergence speed. Towards this end, we first analyze the convergence behavior of Air-FEEL (in terms of the optimality gap) subject to aggregation errors at different communication rounds. It is revealed that if the aggregation estimates are unbiased, then the training algorithm would converge exactly to the optimal point with mild conditions; while if they are biased, then the algorithm would converge with an error floor determined by the accumulated estimate bias over communication rounds. Next, building upon the convergence results, we optimize the power control to directly minimize the derived optimality gaps under both biased and unbiased aggregations, subject to a set of average and maximum power constraints at individual edge devices. We transform both problems into convex forms, and obtain their structured optimal solutions, both appearing in a form of regularized channel inversion, by using the Lagrangian duality method. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed power control policies achieve significantly faster convergence for Air-FEEL, as compared with benchmark policies with fixed power transmission or conventional MSE minimization.
The social media platform is a convenient medium to express personal thoughts and share useful information. It is fast, concise, and has the ability to reach millions. It is an effective place to archive thoughts, share artistic content, receive feedback, promote products, etc. Despite having numerous advantages these platforms have given a boost to hostile posts. Hate speech and derogatory remarks are being posted for personal satisfaction or political gain. The hostile posts can have a bullying effect rendering the entire platform experience hostile. Therefore detection of hostile posts is important to maintain social media hygiene. The problem is more pronounced languages like Hindi which are low in resources. In this work, we present approaches for hostile text detection in the Hindi language. The proposed approaches are evaluated on the Constraint@AAAI 2021 Hindi hostility detection dataset. The dataset consists of hostile and non-hostile texts collected from social media platforms. The hostile posts are further segregated into overlapping classes of fake, offensive, hate, and defamation. We evaluate a host of deep learning approaches based on CNN, LSTM, and BERT for this multi-label classification problem. The pre-trained Hindi fast text word embeddings by IndicNLP and Facebook are used in conjunction with CNN and LSTM models. Two variations of pre-trained multilingual transformer language models mBERT and IndicBERT are used. We show that the performance of BERT based models is best. Moreover, CNN and LSTM models also perform competitively with BERT based models.
In this paper, we address zero-shot learning (ZSL), the problem of recognizing categories for which no labeled visual data are available during training. We focus on the transductive setting, in which unlabelled visual data from unseen classes is available. State-of-the-art paradigms in ZSL typically exploit generative adversarial networks to synthesize visual features from semantic attributes. We posit that the main limitation of these approaches is to adopt a single model to face two problems: 1) generating realistic visual features, and 2) translating semantic attributes into visual cues. Differently, we propose to decouple such tasks, solving them separately. In particular, we train an unconditional generator to solely capture the complexity of the distribution of visual data and we subsequently pair it with a conditional generator devoted to enrich the prior knowledge of the data distribution with the semantic content of the class embeddings. We present a detailed ablation study to dissect the effect of our proposed decoupling approach, while demonstrating its superiority over the related state-of-the-art.
We construct closed immersions from initial degenerations of the spinor variety $\mathbb{S}_n$ to inverse limits of strata associated to even $\Delta$-matroids. As an application, we prove that these initial degenerations are smooth and irreducible for $n\leq 5$ and identify the log canonical model of the Chow quotient of $\mathbb{S}_5$ by the action of the diagonal torus of $\operatorname{GL}(5)$.
We provide an abstract characterization for the Cuntz semigroup of unital commutative AI-algebras, as well as a characterization for abstract Cuntz semigroups of the form $\text{Lsc} (X,\overline{\mathbb{N}})$ for some $T_1$-space $X$. In our investigations, we also uncover new properties that the Cuntz semigroup of all AI-algebras satisfies.
Understanding the effects of interventions, such as restrictions on community and large group gatherings, is critical to controlling the spread of COVID-19. Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) models are traditionally used to forecast the infection rates but do not provide insights into the causal effects of interventions. We propose a spatiotemporal model that estimates the causal effect of changes in community mobility (intervention) on infection rates. Using an approximation to the SIR model and incorporating spatiotemporal dependence, the proposed model estimates a direct and indirect (spillover) effect of intervention. Under an interference and treatment ignorability assumption, this model is able to estimate causal intervention effects, and additionally allows for spatial interference between locations. Reductions in community mobility were measured by cell phone movement data. The results suggest that the reductions in mobility decrease Coronavirus cases 4 to 7 weeks after the intervention.
Governments, Healthcare, and Private Organizations in the global scale have been using digital tracking to keep COVID-19 outbreaks under control. Although this method could limit pandemic contagion, it raises significant concerns about user privacy. Known as ~"Contact Tracing Apps", these mobile applications are facilitated by Cellphone Service Providers (CSPs), who enable the spatial and temporal real-time user tracking. Accordingly, it might be speculated that CSPs collect information violating the privacy policies such as GDPR, CCPA, and others. To further clarify, we conducted an in-depth analysis comparing privacy legislations with the real-world practices adapted by CSPs. We found that three of the regulations (GDPR, COPPA, and CCPA) analyzed defined mobile location data as private information, and two (T-Mobile US, Boost Mobile) of the five CSPs that were analyzed did not comply with the COPPA regulation. Our results are crucial in view of the threat these violations represent, especially when it comes to children's data. As such proper security and privacy auditing is necessary to curtail such violations. We conclude by providing actionable recommendations to address concerns and provide privacy-preserving monitoring of the COVID-19 spread through the contact tracing applications.
Nonlinear surface-plasmon polaritons~(NSPPs) in nanophotonic waveguides excite with dissimilar temporal properties due to input field modifications and material characteristics, but they possess similar nonlinear spectral evolution. In this work, we uncover the origin of this similarity and establish that the spectral dynamics is an inherent property of the system that depends on the synthetic dimension and is beyond waveguide geometrical dimensionality. To this aim, we design an ultra-low loss nonlinear plasmonic waveguide, to establish the invariance of the surface plasmonic frequency combs~(FCs) and phase singularities for plasmonic peregrine waves and Akhmediev breather. By finely tuning the nonlinear coefficient of the interaction interface, we uncover the conservation conditions through this plasmonic system and employ the mean-value evolution of the quantum NSPP field commensurate with the Schr\"odinger equation to evaluate spectral dynamics of the plasmonic FCs~(PFCs). Through providing suppressed interface losses and modified nonlinearity as dual requirements for conservative conditions, we propose exciting PFCs as equally spaced invariant quantities of this plasmonic scheme and prove that the spectral dynamics of the NSPPs within the interaction interface yields the formation of plasmonic analog of the synthetic photonic lattice, which we termed \textit{synthetic plasmonic lattice}~(SPL).
We continue our previous study of cylindrically symmetric, static electrovacuum spacetimes generated by a magnetic field, involving optionally the cosmological constant, and investigate several classes of exact solutions. These spacetimes are due to magnetic fields that are perpendicular to the axis of symmetry.
Factorial designs are widely used due to their ability to accommodate multiple factors simultaneously. The factor-based regression with main effects and some interactions is the dominant strategy for downstream data analysis, delivering point estimators and standard errors via one single regression. Justification of these convenient estimators from the design-based perspective requires quantifying their sampling properties under the assignment mechanism conditioning on the potential outcomes. To this end, we derive the sampling properties of the factor-based regression estimators from both saturated and unsaturated models, and demonstrate the appropriateness of the robust standard errors for the Wald-type inference. We then quantify the bias-variance trade-off between the saturated and unsaturated models from the design-based perspective, and establish a novel design-based Gauss--Markov theorem that ensures the latter's gain in efficiency when the nuisance effects omitted indeed do not exist. As a byproduct of the process, we unify the definitions of factorial effects in various literatures and propose a location-shift strategy for their direct estimation from factor-based regressions. Our theory and simulation suggest using factor-based inference for general factorial effects, preferably with parsimonious specifications in accordance with the prior knowledge of zero nuisance effects.
One of the most ubiquitous and technologically important phenomena in nature is the nucleation of homogeneous flowing systems. The microscopic effects of shear on a nucleating system are still imperfectly understood, although in recent years a consistent picture has emerged. The opposing effects of shear can be split into two major contributions for simple liquids: increase of the energetic cost of nucleation, and enhancement of the kinetics. In this perspective, we describe the latest computational and theoretical techniques which have been developed over the past two decades. We collate and unify the overarching influences of shear, temperature, and supersaturation on the process of homogeneous nucleation. Experimental techniques and capabilities are discussed, against the backdrop of results from simulations and theory. Although we primarily focus on simple liquids, we also touch upon the sheared nucleation of more complex systems, including glasses and polymer melts. We speculate on the promising directions and possible advances that could come to fruition in the future.
In this paper, we develop general techniques for computing the G-index of a closed, spin, hyperbolic 2- or 4-manifold, and apply these techniques to compute the G-index of the fully symmetric spin structure of the Davis hyperbolic 4-manifold.
In binary classification, kernel-free linear or quadratic support vector machines are proposed to avoid dealing with difficulties such as finding appropriate kernel functions or tuning their hyper-parameters. Furthermore, Universum data points, which do not belong to any class, can be exploited to embed prior knowledge into the corresponding models so that the generalization performance is improved. In this paper, we design novel kernel-free Universum quadratic surface support vector machine models. Further, we propose the L1 norm regularized version that is beneficial for detecting potential sparsity patterns in the Hessian of the quadratic surface and reducing to the standard linear models if the data points are (almost) linearly separable. The proposed models are convex such that standard numerical solvers can be utilized for solving them. Nonetheless, we formulate a least squares version of the L1 norm regularized model and next, design an effective tailored algorithm that only requires solving one linear system. Several theoretical properties of these models are then reported/proved as well. We finally conduct numerical experiments on both artificial and public benchmark data sets to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed models.
To operate efficiently across a wide range of workloads with varying power requirements, a modern processor applies different current management mechanisms, which briefly throttle instruction execution while they adjust voltage and frequency to accommodate for power-hungry instructions (PHIs) in the instruction stream. Doing so 1) reduces the power consumption of non-PHI instructions in typical workloads and 2) optimizes system voltage regulators' cost and area for the common use case while limiting current consumption when executing PHIs. However, these mechanisms may compromise a system's confidentiality guarantees. In particular, we observe that multilevel side-effects of throttling mechanisms, due to PHI-related current management mechanisms, can be detected by two different software contexts (i.e., sender and receiver) running on 1) the same hardware thread, 2) co-located Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) threads, and 3) different physical cores. Based on these new observations on current management mechanisms, we develop a new set of covert channels, IChannels, and demonstrate them in real modern Intel processors (which span more than 70% of the entire client and server processor market). Our analysis shows that IChannels provides more than 24x the channel capacity of state-of-the-art power management covert channels. We propose practical and effective mitigations to each covert channel in IChannels by leveraging the insights we gain through a rigorous characterization of real systems.
We develop the integration theory of two-parameter controlled paths $Y$ allowing us to define integrals of the form \begin{equation} \int_{[s,t] \times [u,v]} Y_{r,r'} \;d(X_{r}, X_{r'}) \end{equation} where $X$ is the geometric $p$-rough path that controls $Y$. This extends to arbitrary regularity the definition presented for $2\leq p<3$ in the recent paper of Hairer and Gerasimovi\v{c}s where it is used in the proof of a version of H\"{o}rmander's theorem for a class of SPDEs. We extend the Fubini type theorem of the same paper by showing that this two-parameter integral coincides with the two iterated one-parameter integrals \[ \int_{[s,t] \times [u,v]} Y_{r,r'} \;d(X_{r}, X_{r'}) = \int_{s}^{t} \int_{u}^{v} Y_{r,r'} \;dX_{r'} \;dX_{r'} = \int_{u}^{v} \int_{s}^{t} Y_{r,r'} \;dX_{r} \;dX_{r'}. \] A priori these three integrals have distinct definitions, and so this parallels the classical Fubini's theorem for product measures. By extending the two-parameter Young-Towghi inequality in this context, we derive a maximal inequality for the discrete integrals approximating the two-parameter integral. We also extend the analysis to consider integrals of the form \begin{equation*} \int_{[s,t] \times [u,v]} Y_{r,r'} \; d(X_{r}, \tilde{X}_{r'}) \end{equation*} for possibly different rough paths $X$ and $\tilde{X}$, and obtain the corresponding Fubini type theorem. We prove continuity estimates for these integrals in the appropriate rough path topologies. As an application we consider the signature kernel, which has recently emerged as a useful tool in data science, as an example of a two-parameter controlled rough path which also solves a two-parameter rough integral equation.
We revisit the calculation of vacuum energy density in compact space times. By explicitly computing the effective action through the heat kernel method, we compute vacuum energy density for the general case of $k$ compact spatial dimensions in $p+k$ dimensional Minkowski space time. Additionally, we use this formalism to calculate the Casimir force on a piston placed in such space times, and note the deviations from previously reported results in the literature.