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This paper develops a novel second order cone relaxation of the semidefinite programming formulation of optimal power flow, that does not imply the `angle relaxation'. We build on a technique developed by Kim et al., extend it for complex matrices, and apply it to 3x3 positive semidefinite matrices to generate novel second-order cone constraints that augment upon the well-known 2x2 principal-minor based second-order cone constraints. Finally, we apply it to optimal power flow in meshed networks and provide numerical illustrations.
Self-supervised or weakly supervised models trained on large-scale datasets have shown sample-efficient transfer to diverse datasets in few-shot settings. We consider how upstream pretrained models can be leveraged for downstream few-shot, multilabel, and continual learning tasks. Our model CLIPPER (CLIP PERsonalized) uses image representations from CLIP, a large-scale image representation learning model trained using weak natural language supervision. We developed a technique, called Multi-label Weight Imprinting (MWI), for multi-label, continual, and few-shot learning, and CLIPPER uses MWI with image representations from CLIP. We evaluated CLIPPER on 10 single-label and 5 multi-label datasets. Our model shows robust and competitive performance, and we set new benchmarks for few-shot, multi-label, and continual learning. Our lightweight technique is also compute-efficient and enables privacy-preserving applications as the data is not sent to the upstream model for fine-tuning.
The adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) problem can be modeled as a multiagent cooperative game among urban intersections, where intersections cooperate to optimize their common goal. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved marked successes in managing sequential decision making problems, which motivates us to apply RL in the ASTC problem. Here we use independent reinforcement learning (IRL) to solve a complex traffic cooperative control problem in this study. One of the largest challenges of this problem is that the observation information of intersection is typically partially observable, which limits the learning performance of IRL algorithms. To this, we model the traffic control problem as a partially observable weak cooperative traffic model (PO-WCTM) to optimize the overall traffic situation of a group of intersections. Different from a traditional IRL task that averages the returns of all agents in fully cooperative games, the learning goal of each intersection in PO-WCTM is to reduce the cooperative difficulty of learning, which is also consistent with the traffic environment hypothesis. We also propose an IRL algorithm called Cooperative Important Lenient Double DQN (CIL-DDQN), which extends Double DQN (DDQN) algorithm using two mechanisms: the forgetful experience mechanism and the lenient weight training mechanism. The former mechanism decreases the importance of experiences stored in the experience reply buffer, which deals with the problem of experience failure caused by the strategy change of other agents. The latter mechanism increases the weight experiences with high estimation and `leniently' trains the DDQN neural network, which improves the probability of the selection of cooperative joint strategies. Experimental results show that CIL-DDQN outperforms other methods in almost all performance indicators of the traffic control problem.
COVID-19 pandemic has generated what public health officials called an infodemic of misinformation. As social distancing and stay-at-home orders came into effect, many turned to social media for socializing. This increase in social media usage has made it a prime vehicle for the spreading of misinformation. This paper presents a mechanism to detect COVID-19 health-related misinformation in social media following an interdisciplinary approach. Leveraging social psychology as a foundation and existing misinformation frameworks, we defined misinformation themes and associated keywords incorporated into the misinformation detection mechanism using applied machine learning techniques. Next, using the Twitter dataset, we explored the performance of the proposed methodology using multiple state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers. Our method shows promising results with at most 78% accuracy in classifying health-related misinformation versus true information using uni-gram-based NLP feature generations from tweets and the Decision Tree classifier. We also provide suggestions on alternatives for countering misinformation and ethical consideration for the study.
Accurate tracking is still a challenging task due to appearance variations, pose and view changes, and geometric deformations of target in videos. Recent anchor-free trackers provide an efficient regression mechanism but fail to produce precise bounding box estimation. To address these issues, this paper repurposes a Transformer-alike regression branch, termed as Target Transformed Regression (TREG), for accurate anchor-free tracking. The core to our TREG is to model pair-wise relation between elements in target template and search region, and use the resulted target enhanced visual representation for accurate bounding box regression. This target contextualized representation is able to enhance the target relevant information to help precisely locate the box boundaries, and deal with the object deformation to some extent due to its local and dense matching mechanism. In addition, we devise a simple online template update mechanism to select reliable templates, increasing the robustness for appearance variations and geometric deformations of target in time. Experimental results on visual tracking benchmarks including VOT2018, VOT2019, OTB100, GOT10k, NFS, UAV123, LaSOT and TrackingNet demonstrate that TREG obtains the state-of-the-art performance, achieving a success rate of 0.640 on LaSOT, while running at around 30 FPS. The code and models will be made available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/TREG.
Batch Normalization (BN) is one of the key components for accelerating network training, and has been widely adopted in the medical image analysis field. However, BN only calculates the global statistics at the batch level, and applies the same affine transformation uniformly across all spatial coordinates, which would suppress the image contrast of different semantic structures. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the semantic class information into normalization layers, so that the activations corresponding to different regions (i.e., classes) can be modulated differently. We thus develop a novel DualNorm-UNet, to concurrently incorporate both global image-level statistics and local region-wise statistics for network normalization. Specifically, the local statistics are integrated by adaptively modulating the activations along different class regions via the learned semantic masks in the normalization layer. Compared with existing methods, our approach exploits semantic knowledge at normalization and yields more discriminative features for robust segmentation results. More importantly, our network demonstrates superior abilities in capturing domain-invariant information from multiple domains (institutions) of medical data. Extensive experiments show that our proposed DualNorm-UNet consistently improves the performance on various segmentation tasks, even in the face of more complex and variable data distributions. Code is available at https://github.com/lambert-x/DualNorm-Unet.
With increasing usage of clickbaits in Indonesian Online News, newsworthy articles sometimes get buried among clickbaity news. A reliable and lightweight tool is needed to detect such clickbaits on-the-go. Leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing model BERT, a RESTful API based application is developed. This study offloaded the computing resources needed to train the model on the cloud server, while the client-side application only needs to send a request to the API and the cloud server will handle the rest. This study proposed the design and developed a web-based application to detect clickbait in Indonesian using IndoBERT as a language model. The application usage is discussed and available for public use with a performance of mean ROC-AUC of 89%.
Context: Technical Debt requirements are related to the distance between the ideal value of the specification and the system's actual implementation, which are consequences of strategic decisions for immediate gains, or unintended changes in context. To ensure the evolution of the software, it is necessary to keep it managed. Identification and measurement are the first two stages of the management process; however, they are little explored in academic research in requirements engineering. Objective: We aimed at investigating which evidence helps to strengthen the process of TD requirements management, including identification and measurement. Method: We conducted a Systematic Literature Review through manual and automatic searches considering 7499 studies from 2010 to 2020, and including 61 primary studies. Results: We identified some causes related to Technical Debt requirements, existing strategies to help in the identification and measurement, and metrics to support the measurement stage. Conclusion: Studies on TD requirements are still preliminary, especially on management tools. Yet, not enough attention is given to interpersonal issues, which are difficulties encountered when performing such activities, and therefore also require research. Finally, the provision of metrics to help measure TD is part of this work's contribution, providing insights into the application in the requirements context.
This paper introduces the first release of Pytearcat, a Python package developed to compute tensor algebra operations in the context of theoretical physics, for instance, in general relativity. Given that working with tensors can become a complex task, people often rely on computational tools to perform tensor calculations. We aim to build a tensor calculator based on Python, which benefits from being free and easy to use. Pytearcat syntax resembles the usual physics notation for tensor calculus, such as the Einstein notation for index contraction. This version allows the user to perform many tensor operations, including derivatives and series expansions, along with routines to obtain the typical General Relativity tensors. A particular concern was put in the execution times, leading to incorporate an alternative core for the symbolic calculations, enabling to reach much faster execution times. The syntax and the versatility of Pytearcat are the most important features of this package, where the latter can be used to extend Pytearcat to other areas of theoretical physics.
The black hole information paradox has been with us for some time. We outline the nature of the paradox. We then propose a resolution based on an examination of the properties of quantum gravity under circumstances that give rise to a classical singularity. We show that the gravitational wavefunction vanishes as one gets close to the classical singularity. This results in a future boundary condition inside the black hole that allows for quantum information to be recovered in the evaporation process.
In this paper we consider a class of boundary value problems for third order nonlinear functional differential equation. By the reduction of the problem to operator equation we establish the existence and uniqueness of solution and construct a numerical method for solving it. We prove that the method is of second order accuracy and obtain an estimate for total error. Some examples demonstrate the validity of the obtained theoretical results and the efficiency of the numerical method. The approach used for the third order nonlinear functional differential equation can be applied to functional differential equations of any orders.
Due to their long-standing reputation as excellent off-the-shelf predictors, random forests continue remain a go-to model of choice for applied statisticians and data scientists. Despite their widespread use, however, until recently, little was known about their inner-workings and about which aspects of the procedure were driving their success. Very recently, two competing hypotheses have emerged -- one based on interpolation and the other based on regularization. This work argues in favor of the latter by utilizing the regularization framework to reexamine the decades-old question of whether individual trees in an ensemble ought to be pruned. Despite the fact that default constructions of random forests use near full depth trees in most popular software packages, here we provide strong evidence that tree depth should be seen as a natural form of regularization across the entire procedure. In particular, our work suggests that random forests with shallow trees are advantageous when the signal-to-noise ratio in the data is low. In building up this argument, we also critique the newly popular notion of "double descent" in random forests by drawing parallels to U-statistics and arguing that the noticeable jumps in random forest accuracy are the result of simple averaging rather than interpolation.
The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre in diamond has emerged as a candidate to non-invasively hyperpolarise nuclear spins in molecular systems to improve the sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments. Several promising proof of principle experiments have demonstrated small-scale polarisation transfer from single NVs to hydrogen spins outside the diamond. However, the scaling up of these results to the use of a dense NV ensemble, which is a necessary prerequisite for achieving realistic NMR sensitivity enhancement, has not yet been demonstrated. In this work, we present evidence for a polarising interaction between a shallow NV ensemble and external nuclear targets over a micrometre scale, and characterise the challenges in achieving useful polarisation enhancement. In the most favourable example of the interaction with hydrogen in a solid state target, a maximum polarisation transfer rate of $\approx 7500$ spins per second per NV is measured, averaged over an area containing order $10^6$ NVs. Reduced levels of polarisation efficiency are found for liquid state targets, where molecular diffusion limits the transfer. Through analysis via a theoretical model, we find that our results suggest implementation of this technique for NMR sensitivity enhancement is feasible following realistic diamond material improvements.
Computing dynamical distributions in quantum many-body systems represents one of the paradigmatic open problems in theoretical condensed matter physics. Despite the existence of different techniques both in real-time and frequency space, computational limitations often dramatically constrain the physical regimes in which quantum many-body dynamics can be efficiently solved. Here we show that the combination of machine learning methods and complementary many-body tensor network techniques substantially decreases the computational cost of quantum many-body dynamics. We demonstrate that combining kernel polynomial techniques and real-time evolution, together with deep neural networks, allows to compute dynamical quantities faithfully. Focusing on many-body dynamical distributions, we show that this hybrid neural-network many-body algorithm, trained with single-particle data only, can efficiently extrapolate dynamics for many-body systems without prior knowledge. Importantly, this algorithm is shown to be substantially resilient to numerical noise, a feature of major importance when using this algorithm together with noisy many-body methods. Ultimately, our results provide a starting point towards neural-network powered algorithms to support a variety of quantum many-body dynamical methods, that could potentially solve computationally expensive many-body systems in a more efficient manner.
An Adversarial Swarm model consists of two swarms that are interacting with each other in a competing manner. In the present study, an agent-based Adversarial swarm model is developed comprising of two competing swarms, the Attackers and the Defenders, respectively. The Defender's aim is to protect a point of interest in unbounded 2D Euclidean space referred to as the Goal. In contrast, the Attacker's main task is to intercept the Goal while continually trying to evade the Defenders, which gets attracted to it when they are in a certain vicinity of the Goal termed as the sphere of influence, essentially a circular perimeter. The interaction of the two swarms was studied from a Dynamical systems perspective by changing the number of Agents making up each respective swarm. The simulations were strongly investigated for the presence of chaos by evaluating the Largest Lyapunov Exponent (LLE), implementing phase space reconstruction. The source of chaos in the system was observed to be induced by the passively constrained motion of the Defender agents around the Goal. Multiple local equilibrium points existed for the Defenders in all the cases and some instances for the Attackers, indicating complex dynamics. LLEs for all the trials of the Monte Carlo analysis in all the cases revealed the presence of chaotic and non-chaotic solutions in each case, respectively, with the majority of the Defenders indicating chaotic behavior. Overall, the swarms exist in the 'Edge of chaos', thus revealing complex dynamical behavior. The final system state (i,e, the outcome of the interaction between the swarms in a particular simulation) is studied for all the cases, which indicated the presence of binary final states in some. Finally, to evaluate the complexity of individual swarms, Multiscale Entropy is employed, which revealed a greater degree of randomness for the Defenders when compared to Attackers.
Starting from the moment sequences of classical orthogonal polynomials we derive the orthogonality purely algebraically. We consider also the moments of ($q=1$) classical orthogonal polynomials, and study those cases in which the exponential generating function has a nice form. In the opposite direction, we show that the generalized Dumont-Foata polynomials with six parameters are the moments of rescaled continuous dual Hahn polynomials.
Shift invariance is a critical property of CNNs that improves performance on classification. However, we show that invariance to circular shifts can also lead to greater sensitivity to adversarial attacks. We first characterize the margin between classes when a shift-invariant linear classifier is used. We show that the margin can only depend on the DC component of the signals. Then, using results about infinitely wide networks, we show that in some simple cases, fully connected and shift-invariant neural networks produce linear decision boundaries. Using this, we prove that shift invariance in neural networks produces adversarial examples for the simple case of two classes, each consisting of a single image with a black or white dot on a gray background. This is more than a curiosity; we show empirically that with real datasets and realistic architectures, shift invariance reduces adversarial robustness. Finally, we describe initial experiments using synthetic data to probe the source of this connection.
There are described equations coupling a completely symmetric conformal Killing or Codazzi tensor to the Einstein equations for a metric, in a manner analogous to that used to obtain the Einstein-Maxwell equations by coupling a two-form to the metric. Examples of solutions are constructed from mean curvature zero immersions, affine spheres, isoparametric polynomials, and regular graphs. There are deduced some constraints on the scalar curvature of the metric occurring in a solution. Along the way, there are reviewed Weitzenb\"ock formulas, vanishing theorems, and related results for conformal Killing and divergence free Codazzi tensors.
We initiate the study of the heterogeneous facility location problem with limited resources. We mainly focus on the fundamental case where a set of agents are positioned in the line segment [0,1] and have approval preferences over two available facilities. A mechanism takes as input the positions and the preferences of the agents, and chooses to locate a single facility based on this information. We study mechanisms that aim to maximize the social welfare (the total utility the agents derive from facilities they approve), under the constraint of incentivizing the agents to truthfully report their positions and preferences. We consider three different settings depending on the level of agent-related information that is public or private. For each setting, we design deterministic and randomized strategyproof mechanisms that achieve a good approximation of the optimal social welfare, and complement these with nearly-tight impossibility results.
The main challenge in visible light communications (VLC) is the low modulation bandwidth of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). This forms a barrier towards achieving high data rates. Moreover, the implementation of high order modulation schemes is restricted by the requirements of intensity modulation (IM) and direct detection (DD), which demand the use of real unipolar signals. In this paper, we propose a novel amplitude, phase and quadrant (APQ) modulation scheme that fits into the IM/DD restrictions in VLC systems. The proposed scheme decomposes the complex and bipolar symbols of high order modulations into three different symbols that carry the amplitude, phase and quadrant information of the intended symbol. The constructed symbols are assigned different power levels and are transmitted simultaneously, i.e. exploiting the entire bandwidth and time resources. The receiving terminal performs successive interference cancellation to extract and decode the three different symbols, and then uses them to decide the intended complex bipolar symbol. We evaluate the performance of the proposed APQ scheme in terms of symbol-error-rate and achievable system throughput for different setup scenarios. The obtained results are compared with generalized spatial shift keying (GSSK). The presented results show that APQ offers a higher reliability compared to GSSK across the simulation area, while providing lower hardware complexity.
For artificially intelligent learning systems to have widespread applicability in real-world settings, it is important that they be able to operate decentrally. Unfortunately, decentralized control is difficult -- computing even an epsilon-optimal joint policy is a NEXP complete problem. Nevertheless, a recently rediscovered insight -- that a team of agents can coordinate via common knowledge -- has given rise to algorithms capable of finding optimal joint policies in small common-payoff games. The Bayesian action decoder (BAD) leverages this insight and deep reinforcement learning to scale to games as large as two-player Hanabi. However, the approximations it uses to do so prevent it from discovering optimal joint policies even in games small enough to brute force optimal solutions. This work proposes CAPI, a novel algorithm which, like BAD, combines common knowledge with deep reinforcement learning. However, unlike BAD, CAPI prioritizes the propensity to discover optimal joint policies over scalability. While this choice precludes CAPI from scaling to games as large as Hanabi, empirical results demonstrate that, on the games to which CAPI does scale, it is capable of discovering optimal joint policies even when other modern multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms are unable to do so. Code is available at https://github.com/ssokota/capi .
Direct correlation functions (DCFs), linked to the second functional derivative of the free energy with respect to the one-particle density, play a fundamental role in a statistical mechanics description of matter. This holds in particular for the ordered phases: DCFs contain information about the local structure including defects and encode the thermodynamic properties of crystalline solids; they open a route to the elastic constants beyond low temperature expansions. Via a numerical tour de force we have explicitly calculated for the first time the DCF of a solid: based on the fundamental measure concept we provide results for the DCF of a hard sphere crystal. We demonstrate that this function differs at coexistence significantly from its liquid counterpart - both in shape as well as in its order of magnitude - because it is dominated by vacancies. We provide evidence that the traditional use of liquid DCFs in functional Taylor expansions of the free energy is conceptually wrong and show that the emergent elastic constants are in good agreement with simulation-based results.
This paper is concerned with reconstruction issue of some typical inverse problems and consists of three parts. First a framework of the enclosure method for an inverse source problem governed by the Helmholtz equation at a fixed wave number in three dimensions is introduced. It is based on the nonvanishing of the coefficient of the leading profile of an oscillatory integral over a domain having a conical singularity. Second an explicit formula of the coefficient for a domain having a circular cone singularity and its implication under the framework are given. Third, an application under the framework to an inverse obstacle problem governed by an inhomogeneous Helmholtz equation at a fixed wave number in three dimensions is given.
We consider a fractal refinement of the Carleson problem for the Schr\"odinger equation, that is to identify the minimal regularity needed by the solutions to converge pointwise to their initial data almost everywhere with respect to the $\alpha$-Hausdorff measure ($\alpha$-a.e.). We extend to the fractal setting ($\alpha < n$) a recent counterexample of Bourgain \cite{Bourgain2016}, which is sharp in the Lebesque measure setting ($\alpha = n$). In doing so we recover the necessary condition from \cite{zbMATH07036806} for pointwise convergence~$\alpha$-a.e. and we extend it to the range $n/2<\alpha \leq (3n+1)/4$.
Purpose: We implemented the Machine Learning (ML) aided k-t SENSE reconstruction to enable high resolution quantitative real-time phase contrast MR (PCMR). Methods: A residual U-net and our U-net M were used to generate the high resolution x-f space estimate for k-t SENSE regularisation prior. The networks were judged on their ability to generalise to real undersampled data. The in-vivo validation was done on 20 real-time 18x prospectively undersmapled GASperturbed PCMR data. The ML aided k-t SENSE reconstruction results were compared against the free-breathing Cartesian retrospectively gated sequence and the compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction of the same data. Results: In general, the ML aided k-t SENSE generated flow curves that were visually sharper than those produced using CS. In two exceptional cases, U-net M predictions exhibited blurring which propagated to the extracted velocity curves. However, there were no statistical differences in the measured peak velocities and stroke volumes between the tested methods. The ML aided k-t SENSE was estimated to be ~3.6x faster in processing than CS. Conclusion: The ML aided k-t SENSE reconstruction enables artefact suppression on a par with CS with no significant differences in quantitative measures. The timing results suggest the on-line implementation could deliver a substantial increase in clinical throughput.
Expected to operate in the imminent future, air taxi service (ATS) is an aerial on-demand transport for a single passenger or a small group of riders, which seeks to transform the method of everyday commute. This uncharted territory in the emerging transportation world is anticipated to enable consumers bypass traffic congestion in urban road networks. By adopting an electric vertical takeoff and landing concept (eVTOL), air taxis could be operational from skyports retrofitted on building rooftops, thus gaining advantage from an implementation standpoint. Motivated by the potential impact of ATS, this study provides a review of air taxi systems and associated operations. We first discuss the current developments in the ATS (demand prediction, air taxi network design, and vehicle configuration). Next, we anticipate potential future challenges of ATS from an operations management perspective, and review the existing literature that could be leveraged to tackle these problems (ride-matching, pricing strategies, vehicle maintenance scheduling, and pilot training and recruitment). Finally, we detail future research opportunities in the air taxi domain.
Multi-modal learning, which focuses on utilizing various modalities to improve the performance of a model, is widely used in video recognition. While traditional multi-modal learning offers excellent recognition results, its computational expense limits its impact for many real-world applications. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-modal learning framework, called AdaMML, that selects on-the-fly the optimal modalities for each segment conditioned on the input for efficient video recognition. Specifically, given a video segment, a multi-modal policy network is used to decide what modalities should be used for processing by the recognition model, with the goal of improving both accuracy and efficiency. We efficiently train the policy network jointly with the recognition model using standard back-propagation. Extensive experiments on four challenging diverse datasets demonstrate that our proposed adaptive approach yields 35%-55% reduction in computation when compared to the traditional baseline that simply uses all the modalities irrespective of the input, while also achieving consistent improvements in accuracy over the state-of-the-art methods.
We present the relation between the star formation rate surface density, $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$, and the hydrostatic mid-plane pressure, P$_{\rm h}$, for 4260 star-forming regions of kpc size located in 96 galaxies included in the EDGE-CALIFA survey covering a wide range of stellar masses and morphologies. We find that these two parameters are tightly correlated, exhibiting smaller scatter and strong correlation in comparison to other star-forming scaling relations. A power-law, with a slightly sub-linear index, is a good representation of this relation. Locally, the residuals of this correlation show a significant anti-correlation with both the stellar age and metallicity whereas the total stellar mass may also play a secondary role in shaping the $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ - P$_{\rm h}$ relation. For our sample of active star-forming regions (i.e., regions with large values of H$\alpha$ equivalent width), we find that the effective feedback momentum per unit stellar mass ($p_\ast/m_\ast$),measured from the P$_{\rm h}$ / $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ ratio increases with P$_{\rm h}$. The median value of this ratio for all the sampled regions is larger than the expected momentum just from supernovae explosions. Morphology of the galaxies, including bars, does not seem to have a significant impact in the $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ - P$_{\rm h}$ relation. Our analysis suggests that self regulation of the $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ at kpc scales comes mainly from momentum injection to the interstellar medium from supernovae explosions. However, other mechanism in disk galaxies may also play a significant role in shaping the $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ at local scales. Our results also suggest that P$_{\rm h}$ can be considered as the main parameter that modulates star formation at kpc scales, rather than individual components of the baryonic mass.
A graph is Helly if every family of pairwise intersecting balls has a nonempty common intersection. The class of Helly graphs is the discrete analogue of the class of hyperconvex metric spaces. It is also known that every graph isometrically embeds into a Helly graph, making the latter an important class of graphs in Metric Graph Theory. We study diameter, radius and all eccentricity computations within the Helly graphs. Under plausible complexity assumptions, neither the diameter nor the radius can be computed in truly subquadratic time on general graphs. In contrast to these negative results, it was recently shown that the radius and the diameter of an $n$-vertex $m$-edge Helly graph $G$ can be computed with high probability in $\tilde{\mathcal O}(m\sqrt{n})$ time (i.e., subquadratic in $n+m$). In this paper, we improve that result by presenting a deterministic ${\mathcal O}(m\sqrt{n})$ time algorithm which computes not only the radius and the diameter but also all vertex eccentricities in a Helly graph. Furthermore, we give a parameterized linear-time algorithm for this problem on Helly graphs, with the parameter being the Gromov hyperbolicity $\delta$. More specifically, we show that the radius and a central vertex of an $m$-edge $\delta$-hyperbolic Helly graph $G$ can be computed in $\mathcal O(\delta m)$ time and that all vertex eccentricities in $G$ can be computed in $\mathcal O(\delta^2 m)$ time. To show this more general result, we heavily use our new structural properties obtained for Helly graphs.
We present a graph-convolution-reinforced transformer, named Mesh Graphormer, for 3D human pose and mesh reconstruction from a single image. Recently both transformers and graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have shown promising progress in human mesh reconstruction. Transformer-based approaches are effective in modeling non-local interactions among 3D mesh vertices and body joints, whereas GCNNs are good at exploiting neighborhood vertex interactions based on a pre-specified mesh topology. In this paper, we study how to combine graph convolutions and self-attentions in a transformer to model both local and global interactions. Experimental results show that our proposed method, Mesh Graphormer, significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks, including Human3.6M, 3DPW, and FreiHAND datasets. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/MeshGraphormer
A staged tree model is a discrete statistical model encoding relationships between events. These models are realised by directed trees with coloured vertices. In algebro-geometric terms, the model consists of points inside a toric variety. For certain trees, called balanced, the model is in fact the intersection of the toric variety and the probability simplex. This gives the model a straightforward description, and has computational advantages. In this paper we show that the class of staged tree models with a toric structure extends far outside of the balanced case, if we allow a change of coordinates. It is an open problem whether all staged tree models have toric structure.
In this work, we firstly investigate how to reproduce and how well one can reproduce the Woods-Saxon density distribution of initial nuclei in the framework of the improved quantum molecular dynamics model. Then, we propose a new treatment for the initialization of nuclei which is correlated with the nucleonic mean-field potential by using the same potential energy density functional. In the mean field potential, the three-body force term is accurately calculated. Based on the new version of the model, the influences of precise calculations of the three-body force term, the slope of symmetry energy, the neutron-proton effective mass splitting, and the width of the wave packet on heavy ion collision observables, such as the neutron to proton yield ratios for emitted free nucleons [$R(n/p)$] and for coalescence invariant nucleons [$R_{ci}(n/p)$] for $^{124}$Sn+$^{112}$Sn at the beam energy of 200 MeV per nucleon, are discussed. Our calculations show that the spectra of neutron to proton yield ratios [$R(n/p)$] can be used to probe the slope of symmetry energy ($L$) and the neutron-proton effective mass splitting. In detail, the $R(n/p)$ in the low kinetic energy region can be used to probe the slope of symmetry energy ($L$). With a given $L$, the inclination of $R(n/p)$ to kinetic energy ($E_k$) can be used to probe the effective mass splitting. In the case where the neutron-proton effective mass splitting is fixed, $R(n/p)$ at high kinetic energy can also be used to learn the symmetry energy at suprasaturation density.
We study a natural generalization of that given in [arXiv:2005.13198 [hep-th]] to heterotic string. Namely, starting from the generic Gepner models for Calabi-Yau 3-folds, we construct the non-SUSY heterotic string vacua with the vanishing cosmological constant at the one loop. We especially focus on the asymmetric orbifolding based on some discrete subgroup of the chiral $U(1)$-action which acts on both of the Gepner model and the $SO(32)$ or $E_8\times E_8$-sector. We present a classification of the relevant orbifold models leading to the string vacua with the properties mentioned above. In some cases, the desired vacua can be constructed in the manner quite similar to those given in [arXiv:2005.13198 [hep-th]] for the type II string, in which the orbifold groups contain two generators with the discrete torsions. On the other hand, we also have simpler models that are just realized as the asymmetric orbifolds of cyclic groups with only one generator.
We consider the Hamiltonian renormalisation group flow of discretised one-dimensional physical theories. In particular, we investigate the influence the choice of different embedding maps has on the RG flow and the resulting continuum limit, and show in which sense they are, and in which sense they are not equivalent as physical theories. We are furthermore elucidating the interplay of the RG flow and the algebras operators satisfy, both on the discrete and the continuum. Further, we propose preferred renormalisation prescriptions for operator algebras guaranteeing to arrive at preferred algebraic relations in the continuum, if suitable extension properties are assumed. Finally, we introduce a weaker form of distributional equivalence, and show how unitarily inequivalent continuum limits, which arise due to a choice of different embedding maps, can still be weakly equivalent in that sense.
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) planning aims to define proactive plans, such as defining maximum file size, to prevent the occurrence of software defects in future releases. To aid this, defect prediction models have been proposed to generate insights as the most important factors that are associated with software quality. Such insights that are derived from traditional defect models are far from actionable-i.e., practitioners still do not know what they should do or avoid to decrease the risk of having defects, and what is the risk threshold for each metric. A lack of actionable guidance and risk threshold can lead to inefficient and ineffective SQA planning processes. In this paper, we investigate the practitioners' perceptions of current SQA planning activities, current challenges of such SQA planning activities, and propose four types of guidance to support SQA planning. We then propose and evaluate our AI-Driven SQAPlanner approach, a novel approach for generating four types of guidance and their associated risk thresholds in the form of rule-based explanations for the predictions of defect prediction models. Finally, we develop and evaluate an information visualization for our SQAPlanner approach. Through the use of qualitative survey and empirical evaluation, our results lead us to conclude that SQAPlanner is needed, effective, stable, and practically applicable. We also find that 80% of our survey respondents perceived that our visualization is more actionable. Thus, our SQAPlanner paves a way for novel research in actionable software analytics-i.e., generating actionable guidance on what should practitioners do and not do to decrease the risk of having defects to support SQA planning.
The threat from ransomware continues to grow both in the number of affected victims as well as the cost incurred by the people and organisations impacted in a successful attack. In the majority of cases, once a victim has been attacked there remain only two courses of action open to them; either pay the ransom or lose their data. One common behaviour shared between all crypto ransomware strains is that at some point during their execution they will attempt to encrypt the users' files. Previous research Penrose et al. (2013); Zhao et al. (2011) has highlighted the difficulty in differentiating between compressed and encrypted files using Shannon entropy as both file types exhibit similar values. One of the experiments described in this paper shows a unique characteristic for the Shannon entropy of encrypted file header fragments. This characteristic was used to differentiate between encrypted files and other high entropy files such as archives. This discovery was leveraged in the development of a file classification model that used the differential area between the entropy curve of a file under analysis and one generated from random data. When comparing the entropy plot values of a file under analysis against one generated by a file containing purely random numbers, the greater the correlation of the plots is, the higher the confidence that the file under analysis contains encrypted data.
Learning node representation on dynamically-evolving, multi-relational graph data has gained great research interest. However, most of the existing models for temporal knowledge graph forecasting use Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with discrete depth to capture temporal information, while time is a continuous variable. Inspired by Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE), we extend the idea of continuum-depth models to time-evolving multi-relational graph data, and propose a novel Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting model with NODE. Our model captures temporal information through NODE and structural information through a Graph Neural Network (GNN). Thus, our graph ODE model achieves a continuous model in time and efficiently learns node representation for future prediction. We evaluate our model on six temporal knowledge graph datasets by performing link forecasting. Experiment results show the superiority of our model.
Existing skin attributes detection methods usually initialize with a pre-trained Imagenet network and then fine-tune the medical target task. However, we argue that such approaches are suboptimal because medical datasets are largely different from ImageNet and often contain limited training samples. In this work, we propose Task Agnostic Transfer Learning (TATL), a novel framework motivated by dermatologists' behaviors in the skincare context. TATL learns an attribute-agnostic segmenter that detects lesion skin regions and then transfers this knowledge to a set of attribute-specific classifiers to detect each particular region's attributes. Since TATL's attribute-agnostic segmenter only detects abnormal skin regions, it enjoys ample data from all attributes, allows transferring knowledge among features, and compensates for the lack of training data from rare attributes. We extensively evaluate TATL on two popular skin attributes detection benchmarks and show that TATL outperforms state-of-the-art methods while enjoying minimal model and computational complexity. We also provide theoretical insights and explanations for why TATL works well in practice.
Protein function may be modulated by an event occurring far away from the functional site, a phenomenon termed allostery. While classically allostery involves conformational changes, we recently observed that charge redistribution within an antibody can also lead to an allosteric effect, modulating the kinetics of binding to target antigen. In the present study, we study the association of a poly-histidine tagged enzyme (phosphoglycerate kinase, PGK) to surface-immobilized anti-His antibodies, finding a significant Charge-Reorganization Allostery (CRA) effect. We further observe that the negatively charged nucleotide substrates of PGK modulate CRA substantially, even though they bind far away from the His-tag-antibody interaction interface. In particular, binding of ATP reduces CRA by more than 50%. The results indicate that CRA may be affected by charged substrates bound to a protein and provide further insight into the role of charge redistribution in protein function.
We study a methodology to tackle the NASA Langley Uncertainty Quantification Challenge, a model calibration problem under both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. Our methodology is based on an integration of robust optimization, more specifically a recent line of research known as distributionally robust optimization, and importance sampling in Monte Carlo simulation. The main computation machinery in this integrated methodology amounts to solving sampled linear programs. We present theoretical statistical guarantees of our approach via connections to nonparametric hypothesis testing, and numerical performances including parameter calibration and downstream decision and risk evaluation tasks.
Continual or lifelong learning has been a long-standing challenge in machine learning to date, especially in natural language processing (NLP). Although state-of-the-art language models such as BERT have ushered in a new era in this field due to their outstanding performance in multitask learning scenarios, they suffer from forgetting when being exposed to a continuous stream of data with shifting data distributions. In this paper, we introduce DRILL, a novel continual learning architecture for open-domain text classification. DRILL leverages a biologically inspired self-organizing neural architecture to selectively gate latent language representations from BERT in a task-incremental manner. We demonstrate in our experiments that DRILL outperforms current methods in a realistic scenario of imbalanced, non-stationary data without prior knowledge about task boundaries. To the best of our knowledge, DRILL is the first of its kind to use a self-organizing neural architecture for open-domain lifelong learning in NLP.
Interacting many-body quantum systems show a rich array of physical phenomena and dynamical properties, but are notoriously difficult to study: they are challenging analytically and exponentially difficult to simulate on classical computers. Small-scale quantum information processors hold the promise to efficiently emulate these systems, but characterizing their dynamics is experimentally challenging, requiring probes beyond simple correlation functions and multi-body tomographic methods. Here, we demonstrate the measurement of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), one of the most effective tools for studying quantum system evolution and processes like quantum thermalization. We implement a 3x3 two-dimensional hard-core Bose-Hubbard lattice with a superconducting circuit, study its time-reversibility by performing a Loschmidt echo, and measure OTOCs that enable us to observe the propagation of quantum information. A central requirement for our experiments is the ability to coherently reverse time evolution, which we achieve with a digital-analog simulation scheme. In the presence of frequency disorder, we observe that localization can partially be overcome with more particles present, a possible signature of many-body localization in two dimensions.
Although recent inpainting approaches have demonstrated significant improvements with deep neural networks, they still suffer from artifacts such as blunt structures and abrupt colors when filling in the missing regions. To address these issues, we propose an external-internal inpainting scheme with a monochromic bottleneck that helps image inpainting models remove these artifacts. In the external learning stage, we reconstruct missing structures and details in the monochromic space to reduce the learning dimension. In the internal learning stage, we propose a novel internal color propagation method with progressive learning strategies for consistent color restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme helps image inpainting models produce more structure-preserved and visually compelling results.
We derive the equations for the odd and even parity perturbations of coupled electromagnetic and gravitational fields of a black hole with an electric charge within the context of general nonlinear electrodynamics. The Lagrangian density is a generic function of the Lorentz invariant scalar quantities of the electromagnetic fields. We include the Hodge dual of the electromagnetic field tensor and the cosmological constant in our calculations. For each type of parity, we reduce the system of Einstein field equations coupled to nonlinear electrodynamics to two coupled Schr\"odinger-type wave equations, one for the gravitational field and one for the electromagnetic field. The stability conditions in the presence of the Hodge dual of the electromagnetic field are derived.
Terrestrial animals must often negotiate heterogeneous, varying environments. Accordingly, their locomotive strategies must adapt to a wide range of terrain, as well as to a range of speeds in order to accomplish different behavioral goals. Studies in \textit{Drosophila} have found that inter-leg coordination patterns (ICPs) vary smoothly with walking speed, rather than switching between distinct gaits as in vertebrates (e.g., horses transitioning between trotting and galloping). Such a continuum of stepping patterns implies that separate neural controllers are not necessary for each observed ICP. Furthermore, the spectrum of \textit{Drosophila} stepping patterns includes all canonical coordination patterns observed during forward walking in insects. This raises the exciting possibility that the controller in \textit{Drosophila} is common to all insects, and perhaps more generally to panarthropod walkers. Here, we survey and collate data on leg kinematics and inter-leg coordination relationships during forward walking in a range of arthropod species, as well as include data from a recent behavioral investigation into the tardigrade \textit{Hypsibius exemplaris}. Using this comparative dataset, we point to several functional and morphological features that are shared amongst panarthropods. The goal of the framework presented in this review is to emphasize the importance of comparative functional and morphological analyses in understanding the origins and diversification of walking in Panarthropoda.
Most of the works on the dispersion of droplets and their COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease) implications address droplets' dynamics in quiescent environments. As most droplets in a common situation are immersed in external flows (such as ambient flows), we consider the effect of canonical flow profiles namely, shear flow, Poiseuille flow, and unsteady shear flow on the transport of spherical droplets of radius ranging from 5$\mu$m to 100 $\mu $m, which are characteristic lengths in human talking, coughing or sneezing processes. The dynamics we employ satisfies the Maxey-Riley (M-R) equation. An order-of-magnitude estimate allows us to solve the M-R equation to leading order analytically, and to higher order (accounting for the Boussinesq-Basset memory term) numerically. Discarding evaporation, our results to leading order indicate that the maximum travelled distance for small droplets ($5\mu m$ radius) under a shear/Poiseuille external flow with a maximum flow speed of $1m/s$ may easily reach more than 250 meters, since those droplets remain in the air for around 600 seconds. The maximum travelled distance was also calculated to leading and higher orders, and it is observed that there is a small difference between the leading and higher order results, and that it depends on the strength of the flow. For example, this difference for droplets of radius $5\mu m$ in a shear flow, and with a maximum wind speed of $5m/s$, is seen to be around $2m$. In general, higher order terms are observed to slightly enhance droplets' dispersion and their flying time.
This paper concerns the structural stability of smooth cylindrically symmetric transonic flows in a concentric cylinder. Both cylindrical and axi-symmetric perturbations are considered. The governing system here is of mixed elliptic-hyperbolic and changes type and the suitable formulation of boundary conditions at the boundaries is of great importance. First, we establish the existence and uniqueness of smooth cylindrical transonic spiral solutions with nonzero angular velocity and vorticity which are close to the background transonic flow with small perturbations of the Bernoulli's function and the entropy at the outer cylinder and the flow angles at both the inner and outer cylinders independent of the symmetric axis, and it is shown that in this case, the sonic points of the flow are nonexceptional and noncharacteristically degenerate, and form a cylindrical surface. Second, we also prove the existence and uniqueness of axi-symmetric smooth transonic rotational flows which are adjacent to the background transonic flow, whose sonic points form an axi-symmetric surface. The key elements in our analysis are to utilize the deformation-curl decomposition for the steady Euler system introduced in \cite{WengXin19} to deal with the hyperbolicity in subsonic regions and to find an appropriate multiplier for the linearized second order mixed type equations which are crucial to identify the suitable boundary conditions and to yield the important basic energy estimates.
Consider a measure $\mu$ on $\R^n$ generating a natural exponential family $F(\mu)$ with variance function $V_{F(\mu)}(m)$ and Laplace transform $$ \exp(\ell_{\mu}(s))=\int_{\R^n} \exp(-\<s,x\>)\mu(dx).$$ A dual measure $\mu^*$ satisfies $-\ell'_{\mu^*}(-\ell'_{\mu}(s))=s.$ Such a dual measure does not always exist. One important property is $\ell"_{\mu^*}(m)=(V_{F(\mu)}(m))^{-1},$ leading to the notion of duality among exponential families (or rather among the extended notion of T exponential families $T\hskip-2pt F$ obtained by considering all translations of a given exponential family $F$).
The recently introduced polar codes constitute a breakthrough in coding theory due to their capacityachieving property. This goes hand in hand with a quasilinear construction, encoding, and successive cancellation list decoding procedures based on the Plotkin construction. The decoding algorithm can be applied with slight modifications to Reed-Muller or eBCH codes, that both achieve the capacity of erasure channels, although the list size needed for good performance grows too fast to make the decoding practical even for moderate block lengths. The key ingredient for proving the capacity-achieving property of Reed-Muller and eBCH codes is their group of symmetries. It can be plugged into the concept of Plotkin decomposition to design various permutation decoding algorithms. Although such techniques allow to outperform the straightforward polar-like decoding, the complexity stays impractical. In this paper, we show that although invariance under a large automorphism group is valuable in a theoretical sense, it also ensures that the list size needed for good performance grows exponentially. We further establish the bounds that arise if we sacrifice some of the symmetries. Although the theoretical analysis of the list decoding algorithm remains an open problem, our result provides an insight into the factors that impact the decoding complexity.
Transfer learning eases the burden of training a well-performed model from scratch, especially when training data is scarce and computation power is limited. In deep learning, a typical strategy for transfer learning is to freeze the early layers of a pre-trained model and fine-tune the rest of its layers on the target domain. Previous work focuses on the accuracy of the transferred model but neglects the transfer of adversarial robustness. In this work, we first show that transfer learning improves the accuracy on the target domain but degrades the inherited robustness of the target model. To address such a problem, we propose a novel cooperative adversarially-robust transfer learning (CARTL) by pre-training the model via feature distance minimization and fine-tuning the pre-trained model with non-expansive fine-tuning for target domain tasks. Empirical results show that CARTL improves the inherited robustness by about 28% at most compared with the baseline with the same degree of accuracy. Furthermore, we study the relationship between the batch normalization (BN) layers and the robustness in the context of transfer learning, and we reveal that freezing BN layers can further boost the robustness transfer.
The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has caused mortality and morbidity worldwide. Oropharyngeal-swab (OP-swab) sampling is widely used for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in the world. To avoid the clinical staff from being affected by the virus, we developed a 9-degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid-flexible coupling (RFC) robot to assist the COVID-19 OP-swab sampling. This robot is composed of a visual system, UR5 robot arm, micro-pneumatic actuator and force-sensing system. The robot is expected to reduce risk and free up the clinical staff from the long-term repetitive sampling work. Compared with a rigid sampling robot, the developed force-sensing RFC robot can facilitate OP-swab sampling procedures in a safer and softer way. In addition, a varying-parameter zeroing neural network-based optimization method is also proposed for motion planning of the 9-DOF redundant manipulator. The developed robot system is validated by OP-swab sampling on both oral cavity phantoms and volunteers.
Deep learning has been broadly applied to imaging in scattering applications. A common framework is to train a "descattering" neural network for image recovery by removing scattering artifacts. To achieve the best results on a broad spectrum of scattering conditions, individual "expert" networks have to be trained for each condition. However, the performance of the expert sharply degrades when the scattering level at the testing time differs from the training. An alternative approach is to train a "generalist" network using data from a variety of scattering conditions. However, the generalist generally suffers from worse performance as compared to the expert trained for each scattering condition. Here, we develop a drastically different approach, termed dynamic synthesis network (DSN), that can dynamically adjust the model weights and adapt to different scattering conditions. The adaptability is achieved by a novel architecture that enables dynamically synthesizing a network by blending multiple experts using a gating network. Notably, our DSN adaptively removes scattering artifacts across a continuum of scattering conditions regardless of whether the condition has been used for the training, and consistently outperforms the generalist. By training the DSN entirely on a multiple-scattering simulator, we experimentally demonstrate the network's adaptability and robustness for 3D descattering in holographic 3D particle imaging. We expect the same concept can be adapted to many other imaging applications, such as denoising, and imaging through scattering media. Broadly, our dynamic synthesis framework opens up a new paradigm for designing highly adaptive deep learning and computational imaging techniques.
We prove that sufficiently low-entropy hypersurfaces can be perturbed so that their mean curvature flow encounters only spherical and cylindrical singularities.
We take a deeper dive into the geometry and the number theory that underlay the butterfly graphs of the Harper and the generalized Harper models of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field. Root of the number theoretical characteristics of the fractal spectrum is traced to a close relationship between the Farey tree -- the hierarchical tree that generates all rationals and the Wannier diagram -- a graph that labels all the gaps of the butterfly graph. The resulting Farey-Wannier hierarchical lattice of trapezoids provides geometrical representation of the nested pattern of butterflies in the butterfly graph. Some features of the energy spectrum such as absence of some of the Wannier trajectories in the butterfly graph fall outside the number theoretical framework, can be stated as a simple rule of "minimal violation of mirror symmetry". In a generalized Harper model, Farey-Wannier representation prevails as the lattice regroups to form some hexagonal unit cells creating new {\it species} of butterflies
The ethical consequences of, constraints upon and regulation of algorithms arguably represent the defining challenges of our age, asking us to reckon with the rise of computational technologies whose potential to radically transforming social and individual orders and identity in unforeseen ways is already being realised. Yet despite the multidisciplinary impact of this algorithmic turn, there remains some way to go in motivating the crossdisciplinary collaboration that is crucial to advancing feasible proposals for the ethical design, implementation and regulation of algorithmic and automated systems. In this work, we provide a framework to assist cross-disciplinary collaboration by presenting a Four C's Framework covering key computational considerations researchers across such diverse fields should consider when approaching these questions: (i) computability, (ii) complexity, (iii) consistency and (iv) controllability. In addition, we provide examples of how insights from ethics, philosophy and population ethics are relevant to and translatable within sciences concerned with the study and design of algorithms. Our aim is to set out a framework which we believe is useful for fostering cross-disciplinary understanding of pertinent issues in ethical algorithmic literature which is relevant considering the feasibility of ethical algorithmic governance, especially the impact of computational constraints upon algorithmic governance.
Topological defects are one of the most conspicuous features of liquid crystals. In two dimensional nematics, they have been shown to behave effectively as particles with both, charge and orientation, which dictate their interactions. Here, we study "twisted" defects that have a radially dependent orientation. We find that twist can be partially relaxed through the creation and annihilation of defect pairs. By solving the equations for defect motion and calculating the forces on defects, we identify four distinct elements that govern the relative relaxational motion of interacting topological defects, namely attraction, repulsion, co-rotation and co-translation. The interaction of these effects can lead to intricate defect trajectories, which can be controlled by setting relevant timescales.
This article explores the existing normalizing and variance-stabilizing (NoVaS) method on predicting squared log-returns of financial data. First, we explore the robustness of the existing NoVaS method for long-term time-aggregated predictions. Then we develop a more parsimonious variant of the existing method. With systematic justification and extensive data analysis, our new method shows better performance than current NoVaS and standard GARCH(1,1) methods on both short- and long-term time-aggregated predictions.
Agent-based models of disease transmission involve stochastic rules that specify how a number of individuals would infect one another, recover or be removed from the population. Common yet stringent assumptions stipulate interchangeability of agents and that all pairwise contact are equally likely. Under these assumptions, the population can be summarized by counting the number of susceptible and infected individuals, which greatly facilitates statistical inference. We consider the task of inference without such simplifying assumptions, in which case, the population cannot be summarized by low-dimensional counts. We design improved particle filters, where each particle corresponds to a specific configuration of the population of agents, that take either the next or all future observations into account when proposing population configurations. Using simulated data sets, we illustrate that orders of magnitude improvements are possible over bootstrap particle filters. We also provide theoretical support for the approximations employed to make the algorithms practical.
Learning to flexibly follow task instructions in dynamic environments poses interesting challenges for reinforcement learning agents. We focus here on the problem of learning control flow that deviates from a strict step-by-step execution of instructions -- that is, control flow that may skip forward over parts of the instructions or return backward to previously completed or skipped steps. Demand for such flexible control arises in two fundamental ways: explicitly when control is specified in the instructions themselves (such as conditional branching and looping) and implicitly when stochastic environment dynamics require re-completion of instructions whose effects have been perturbed, or opportunistic skipping of instructions whose effects are already present. We formulate an attention-based architecture that meets these challenges by learning, from task reward only, to flexibly attend to and condition behavior on an internal encoding of the instructions. We test the architecture's ability to learn both explicit and implicit control in two illustrative domains -- one inspired by Minecraft and the other by StarCraft -- and show that the architecture exhibits zero-shot generalization to novel instructions of length greater than those in a training set, at a performance level unmatched by two baseline recurrent architectures and one ablation architecture.
We analyze the axiomatic strength of the following theorem due to Rival and Sands in the style of reverse mathematics. "Every infinite partial order $P$ of finite width contains an infinite chain $C$ such that every element of $P$ is either comparable with no element of $C$ or with infinitely many elements of $C$." Our main results are the following. The Rival-Sands theorem for infinite partial orders of arbitrary finite width is equivalent to $\mathsf{I}\Sigma^0_2 + \mathsf{ADS}$ over $\mathsf{RCA}_0$. For each fixed $k \geq 3$, the Rival-Sands theorem for infinite partial orders of width $\leq\! k$ is equivalent to $\mathsf{ADS}$ over $\mathsf{RCA}_0$. The Rival-Sands theorem for infinite partial orders that are decomposable into the union of two chains is equivalent to $\mathsf{SADS}$ over $\mathsf{RCA}_0$. Here $\mathsf{RCA}_0$ denotes the recursive comprehension axiomatic system, $\mathsf{I}\Sigma^0_2$ denotes the $\Sigma^0_2$ induction scheme, $\mathsf{ADS}$ denotes the ascending/descending sequence principle, and $\mathsf{SADS}$ denotes the stable ascending/descending sequence principle. To our knowledge, these versions of the Rival-Sands theorem for partial orders are the first examples of theorems from the general mathematics literature whose strength is exactly characterized by $\mathsf{I}\Sigma^0_2 + \mathsf{ADS}$, by $\mathsf{ADS}$, and by $\mathsf{SADS}$. Furthermore, we give a new purely combinatorial result by extending the Rival-Sands theorem to infinite partial orders that do not have infinite antichains, and we show that this extension is equivalent to arithmetical comprehension over $\mathsf{RCA}_0$.
Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) are often black box systems for which no exact model exists. Automata learning allows to build abstract models of CPSs and is used in several scenarios, i.e. simulation, monitoring, and test case generation. Real time localization systems (RTLSs) are an example of particularly complex and often safety critical CPSs. We present a procedure for automatic test case generation with automata learning and apply this approach in a case study to a localization system.
This is a survey on stated skein algebras and their representations.
Flares are known to play an important role for the evolution of the atmospheres of young planets. In order to understand the evolution of planets, it is thus important to study the flare-activity of young stars. This is particularly the case for young M-stars, because they are very active. We study photometrically and spectroscopically the highly active M-star 2MASS J16111534-1757214. We show that it is a member of the Upper Sco OB association, which has an age of 5-10 Myrs. We also re-evaluate the status of other bona-fide M-stars in this region and identify 42 members. Analyzing the K2-light curves, we find that 2MASS J16111534-1757214 has, on average, one super-flare with E > 1.0E35 erg every 620 hours, and one with E >1.0E34 erg every 52 hours. Although this is the most active M-star in the Upper Sco association, the power-law index of its flare-distribution is similar to that of other M-stars in this region. 2MASS J16111534-1757214 as well as other M-stars in this region show a broken power-law distribution in the flare-frequency diagram. Flares larger than E >3E34 erg have a power-law index beta=-1.3+/-0.1 and flares smaller than that beta=-0.8+/-0.1. We furthermore conclude that the flare-energy distribution for young M-stars is not that different from solar-like stars.
We report on the study of the magnetic ratchet effect in AlGaN/GaN heterostructures superimposed with lateral superlattice formed by dual-grating gate structure. We demonstrate that irradiation of the superlattice with terahertz beam results in the dc ratchet current, which shows giant magneto-oscillations in the regime of Shubnikov de Haas oscillations. The oscillations have the same period and are in phase with the resistivity oscillations. Remarkably, their amplitude is greatly enhanced as compared to the ratchet current at zero magnetic field, and the envelope of these oscillations exhibits large beatings as a function of the magnetic field. We demonstrate that the beatings are caused by the spin-orbit splitting of the conduction band. We develop a theory which gives a good qualitative explanation of all experimental observations and allows us to extract the spin-orbit splitting constant \alpha_{\rm SO}= 7.5 \pm 1.5 meV \unicode{x212B}. We also discuss how our results are modified by plasmonic effects and show that these effects become more pronounced with decreasing the period of the gating gate structures down to sub-microns.
Spectroscopic Amplitudes (SA) in the Interacting Boson Fermion Fermion Model (IBFFM) are necessary for the computation of $0\nu\beta\beta$ decays but also for cross sections of heavy-ion reactions, in particular, Double Charge Exchange reactions for the NUMEN collaboration, if one does not want to use the closure limit. We present for the first time: i) the formalism and operators to compute in a general case the spectroscopic amplitudes in the scheme IBFFM from an even-even to odd-odd nuclei, in a way suited to be used in reaction code, i.e., extracting the contribution of each orbital; 2) the odd-odd nuclei as described by the old IBFFM are obtained for the first time with the new implementation of Machine Learning (ML) techniques for fitting the parameters, getting a more realistic description. The one body transition densities for $^{116}$Cd $\rightarrow$ $^{116}$In and $^{116}$In $\rightarrow$ $^{116}$Sn are part of the experimental program of the NUMEN experiment, which aims to find constraints on Neutrinoless double beta decay matrix elements.
We derive Kubo formulae for first-order spin hydrodynamics based on non-equilibrium statistical operators method. In first-order spin hydrodynamics, there are two new transport coefficients besides the ordinary ones appearing in first-order viscous hydrodynamics. They emerge due to the incorporation of the spin degree of freedom into fluids and the spin-orbital coupling. Zubarev's non-equilibrium statistical operator method can be well applied to investigate these quantum effects in fluids. The Kubo formulae, based on the method of non-equilibrium statistical operators, are related to equilibrium (imaginary-time) infrared Green's functions, and all the transport coefficients can be determined when the microscopic theory is specified.
As a promising lensless imaging method for distance objects, intensity interferometry imaging (III) had been suffering from the unreliable phase retrieval process, hindering the development of III for decades. Recently, the introduction of the ptychographic detection in III overcame this challenge, and a method called ptychographic III (PIII) was proposed. We here experimentally demonstrate that PIII can image a dynamic distance object. A reasonable image for the moving object can be retrieved with only two speckle patterns for each probe, and only 10 to 20 iterations are needed. Meanwhile, PIII exhibits robust to the inaccurate information of the probe. Furthermore, PIII successfully recovers the image through a fog obfuscating the imaging light path, under which a conventional camera relying on lenses fails to provide a recognizable image.
We consider the possibility that the Milky Way's dark matter halo possesses a non vanishing equation of state. Consequently, we evaluate the contribution due to the speed of sound, assuming that the dark matter content of the galaxy behaves like a fluid with pressure. In particular, we model the dark matter distribution via an exponential sphere profile in the galactic core, and inner parts of the galaxy whereas we compare the exponential sphere with three widely-used profiles for the halo, i.e. the Einasto, Burkert and Isothermal profile. For the galactic core we also compare the effects due to a dark matter distribution without black hole with the case of a supermassive black hole in vacuum and show that present observations are unable to distinguish them. Finally we investigate the expected experimental signature provided by gravitational lensing due to the presence of dark matter in the core.
Pre-trained multilingual language models (LMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in cross-lingual transfer, but they often lead to an inequitable representation of languages due to limited capacity, skewed pre-training data, and sub-optimal vocabularies. This has prompted the creation of an ever-growing pre-trained model universe, where each model is trained on large amounts of language or domain specific data with a carefully curated, linguistically informed vocabulary. However, doing so brings us back full circle and prevents one from leveraging the benefits of multilinguality. To address the gaps at both ends of the spectrum, we propose MergeDistill, a framework to merge pre-trained LMs in a way that can best leverage their assets with minimal dependencies, using task-agnostic knowledge distillation. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in a practical setting by leveraging pre-existing teacher LMs and training student LMs that perform competitively with or even outperform teacher LMs trained on several orders of magnitude more data and with a fixed model capacity. We also highlight the importance of teacher selection and its impact on student model performance.
We define and study two new kinds of "effective resistances" based on hubs-biased -- hubs-repelling and hubs-attracting -- models of navigating a graph/network. We prove that these effective resistances are squared Euclidean distances between the vertices of a graph. They can be expressed in terms of the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse of the hubs-biased Laplacian matrices of the graph. We define the analogous of the Kirchhoff indices of the graph based of these resistance distances. We prove several results for the new resistance distances and the Kirchhoff indices based on spectral properties of the corresponding Laplacians. After an intensive computational search we conjecture that the Kirchhoff index based on the hubs-repelling resistance distance is not smaller than that based on the standard resistance distance, and that the last is not smaller than the one based on the hubs-attracting resistance distance. We also observe that in real-world brain and neural systems the efficiency of standard random walk processes is as high as that of hubs-attracting schemes. On the contrary, infrastructures and modular software networks seem to be designed to be navigated by using their hubs.
This is a continuation of a previous study initiated by one of us on nonlocal vertex bialgebras and smash product nonlocal vertex algebras. In this paper, we study a notion of right $H$-comodule nonlocal vertex algebra for a nonlocal vertex bialgebra $H$ and give a construction of deformations of vertex algebras with a right $H$-comodule nonlocal vertex algebra structure and a compatible $H$-module nonlocal vertex algebra structure. We also give a construction of $\phi$-coordinated quasi modules for smash product nonlocal vertex algebras. As an example, we give a family of quantum vertex algebras by deforming the vertex algebras associated to non-degenerate even lattices.
We study the ground state of the Hubbard model on a square lattice with two degenerate orbitals per site and at integer fillings as a function of onsite Hubbard repulsion $U$ and Hund's intra-atomic exchange coupling $J$. We use a variational slave-spin mean field (VSSMF) method which allows symmetry broken states to be studied within the computationally less intensive slave-spin mean field formalism, thus making the method more powerful to study strongly correlated electron physics. The results show that at half-filling, the ground state at smaller $U$ is a Slater antiferromagnet (AF) with substantial local charge fluctuations. As $U$ is increased, the AF state develops a Heisenberg behavior, finally undergoing a first order transition to a Mott insulating AF state at a critical interaction $U_c$ which is of the order of the bandwidth. Introducing the Hund's coupling $J$ correlates the system more and reduces $U_c$ drastically. At quarter-filling with one electron per site, the ground state at smaller $U$ is paramagnetic metallic. At finite Hund's coupling $J$, as interaction is increased above a lower critical value $U_{c1}$, it goes to a fully spin polarized ferromagnetic state coexisting with an antiferro-orbital order. The system eventually becomes Mott insulating at a higher critical value $U_{c2}$. The results as a function of $U$ and $J$ are thoroughly discussed.
We present an analysis of the $R\lesssim 1.5$ kpc core regions of seven simulated Milky Way mass galaxies, from the FIRE-2 (Feedback in Realistic Environments) cosmological zoom-in simulation suite, for a finely sampled period ($\Delta t = 2.2$ Myr) of 22 Myr at $z \approx 0$, and compare them with star formation rate (SFR) and gas surface density observations of the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). Despite not being tuned to reproduce the detailed structure of the CMZ, we find that four of these galaxies are consistent with CMZ observations at some point during this 22 Myr period. The galaxies presented here are not homogeneous in their central structures, roughly dividing into two morphological classes; (a) several of the galaxies have very asymmetric gas and SFR distributions, with intense (compact) starbursts occurring over a period of roughly 10 Myr, and structures on highly eccentric orbits through the CMZ, whereas (b) others have smoother gas and SFR distributions, with only slowly varying SFRs over the period analyzed. In class (a) centers, the orbital motion of gas and star-forming complexes across small apertures ($R \lesssim 150$pc, analogously $|l|<1^\circ$ in the CMZ observations) contributes as much to tracers of star formation/dense gas appearing in those apertures, as the internal evolution of those structures does. These asymmetric/bursty galactic centers can simultaneously match CMZ gas and SFR observations, demonstrating that time-varying star formation can explain the CMZ's low star formation efficiency.
Detecting anomalies in large complex systems is a critical and challenging task. The difficulties arise from several aspects. First, collecting ground truth labels or prior knowledge for anomalies is hard in real-world systems, which often lead to limited or no anomaly labels in the dataset. Second, anomalies in large systems usually occur in a collective manner due to the underlying dependency structure among devices or sensors. Lastly, real-time anomaly detection for high-dimensional data requires efficient algorithms that are capable of handling different types of data (i.e. continuous and discrete). We propose a correlation structure-based collective anomaly detection (CSCAD) model for high-dimensional anomaly detection problem in large systems, which is also generalizable to semi-supervised or supervised settings. Our framework utilize graph convolutional network combining a variational autoencoder to jointly exploit the feature space correlation and reconstruction deficiency of samples to perform anomaly detection. We propose an extended mutual information (EMI) metric to mine the internal correlation structure among different data features, which enhances the data reconstruction capability of CSCAD. The reconstruction loss and latent standard deviation vector of a sample obtained from reconstruction network can be perceived as two natural anomalous degree measures. An anomaly discriminating network can then be trained using low anomalous degree samples as positive samples, and high anomalous degree samples as negative samples. Experimental results on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms all the competing baselines.
Time-periodic driving fields could endow a system with peculiar topological and transport features. In this work, we find dynamically controlled localization transitions and mobility edges in non-Hermitian quasicrystals via shaking the lattice periodically. The driving force dresses the hopping amplitudes between lattice sites, yielding alternate transitions between localized, mobility edge and extended non-Hermitian quasicrystalline phases. We apply our Floquet engineering approach to five representative models of non-Hermitian quasicrystals, obtain the conditions of photon-assisted localization transitions and mobility edges, and find the expressions of Lyapunov exponents for some models. We further introduce topological winding numbers of Floquet quasienergies to distinguish non-Hermitian quasicrystalline phases with different localization nature. Our discovery thus extend the study of quasicrystals to non-Hermitian Floquet systems, and provide an efficient way of modulating the topological and transport properties of these unique phases.
Understanding the behavior of learned classifiers is an important task, and various black-box explanations, logical reasoning approaches, and model-specific methods have been proposed. In this paper, we introduce probabilistic sufficient explanations, which formulate explaining an instance of classification as choosing the "simplest" subset of features such that only observing those features is "sufficient" to explain the classification. That is, sufficient to give us strong probabilistic guarantees that the model will behave similarly when all features are observed under the data distribution. In addition, we leverage tractable probabilistic reasoning tools such as probabilistic circuits and expected predictions to design a scalable algorithm for finding the desired explanations while keeping the guarantees intact. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in finding sufficient explanations, and showcase its advantages compared to Anchors and logical explanations.
In this article, we consider the family of functions $f$ analytic in the unit disk $|z|<1$ with the normalization $f(0)=0=f'(0)-1$ and satisfying the condition $\big |\big (z/f(z)\big )^{2}f'(z)-1\big |<\lambda $ for some $0<\lambda \leq 1$. We denote this class by $\mathcal{U}(\lambda)$ and we are interested in the relations between $\mathcal{U}(\lambda)$ and other families of functions holomorphic or harmonic in the unit disk. Our first example in this direction is the family of functions convex in one direction. Then we are concerned with the subordinates to the function $1/((1-z)(1-\lambda z))$. We prove that not all functions $f(z)/z$ $(f \in \mathcal{U}(\lambda))$ belong to this family. This disproves an assertion from \cite{OPW}. Further, we disprove a related coefficient conjecture for $\mathcal{U}(\lambda)$. We consider the intersection of the class of the above subordinates and $\mathcal{U}(\lambda)$ concerning the boundary behaviour of its functions. At last, with the help of functions from $\mathcal{U}(\lambda)$, we construct functions harmonic and close-to-convex in the unit disk.
In two-dimensional geometric knapsack problem, we are given a set of n axis-aligned rectangular items and an axis-aligned square-shaped knapsack. Each item has integral width, integral height and an associated integral profit. The goal is to find a (non-overlapping axis-aligned) packing of a maximum profit subset of rectangles into the knapsack. A well-studied and frequently used constraint in practice is to allow only packings that are guillotine separable, i.e., every rectangle in the packing can be obtained by recursively applying a sequence of edge-to-edge axis-parallel cuts that do not intersect any item of the solution. In this paper we study approximation algorithms for the geometric knapsack problem under guillotine cut constraints. We present polynomial time (1 + {\epsilon})-approximation algorithms for the cases with and without allowing rotations by 90 degrees, assuming that all input numeric data are polynomially bounded in n. In comparison, the best-known approximation factor for this setting is 3 + {\epsilon} [Jansen-Zhang, SODA 2004], even in the cardinality case where all items have the same profit. Our main technical contribution is a structural lemma which shows that any guillotine packing can be converted into another structured guillotine packing with almost the same profit. In this packing, each item is completely contained in one of a constant number of boxes and L-shaped regions, inside which the items are placed by a simple greedy routine. In particular, we provide a clean sufficient condition when such a packing obeys the guillotine cut constraints which might be useful for other settings where these constraints are imposed.
Layered two-dimensional (2D) materials MoTe2 have been paid special attention due to the rich optoelectronic properties with various phases. The nonequilibrium carrier dynamics as well as its temperature dependence in MoTe2 are of prime importance, as it can shed light on understanding the anomalous optical response and potential applications in far infrared (IR) photodetection. Hereby, we employ time-resolved terahertz (THz) spectroscopy to study the temperature dependent nonequilibrium carrier dynamics in MoTe2 films. After photoexcitation of 1.59 eV, the 1T'-phase MoTe2 at high temperature behaves only THz positive photoconductivity (PPC) with relaxation time of less than 1 ps. In contrast, the Td-phase MoTe2 at low temperature shows ultrafast THz PPC initially followed by emerging THz negative photoconductivity (NPC), and the THz NPC signal relaxes to the equilibrium state in hundreds of ps time scale. Small polaron formation induced by hot carrier has been proposed to be ascribed to the THz NPC in the polar semimetal MoTe2 at low temperature. The polaron formation time after photoexcitation increases slightly with temperature, which is determined to be ~0.4 ps at 5 K and 0.5 ps at 100 K. Our experimental result demonstrates for the first time the dynamical formation of small poalron in MoTe2 Weyl semimetal, this is fundamental importance on the understanding the temperature dependent electron-phonon coupling and quantum phase transition, as well as the designing the MoTe2-based far IR photodetector.
Here we explore the structural, magnetic and dielectric properties of Co based compound Na$_5$Co$_{15.5}$Te$_6$O$_{36}$ as a candidate of short-range magnetic correlations driven development of dielectric anomaly above N$\acute{e}$el temperature of ($T_N$=) 50 K. Low temperature neutron powder diffraction (NPD) in zero applied magnetic field clearly indicates that the canted spin structure is responsible for the antiferromagnetic transition and partially occupied Co form short range magnetic correlation with other Co, which further facilitates the structural distortion and consequent development of dielectric anomaly above antiferromagnetic transition. Additionally, the temperature dependent magnetic heat capacity and electron spin resonance measurements reveal the presence of short-range magnetic correlations which coincides with an anomaly in the dielectric constant vs temperature curve. Moreover, significant changes in the lattice parameters are also observed around the same temperature, indicating presence of noticeable spin-lattice coupling. Further, sharp jump in the magnetic field dependent magnetization clearly indicates the presence of metamagnetic transition and magnetic field dependent NPD confirms that rotations of Co spins with applied magnetic field are responsible for this metamagnetic phase transition. As a result, this transition causes the magnetocaloric effect to be developed in the system, which is suitable for the application in low temperature refrigeration.
Scene graphs are a compact and explicit representation successfully used in a variety of 2D scene understanding tasks. This work proposes a method to incrementally build up semantic scene graphs from a 3D environment given a sequence of RGB-D frames. To this end, we aggregate PointNet features from primitive scene components by means of a graph neural network. We also propose a novel attention mechanism well suited for partial and missing graph data present in such an incremental reconstruction scenario. Although our proposed method is designed to run on submaps of the scene, we show it also transfers to entire 3D scenes. Experiments show that our approach outperforms 3D scene graph prediction methods by a large margin and its accuracy is on par with other 3D semantic and panoptic segmentation methods while running at 35 Hz.
A novel user friendly method is proposed for calibrating a procam system from a single pose of a planar chessboard target. The user simply needs to orient the chessboard in a single appropriate pose. A sequence of Gray Code patterns are projected onto the chessboard, which allows correspondences between the camera, projector and the chessboard to be automatically extracted. These correspondences are fed as input to a nonlinear optimization method that models the projector of the principle points onto the chessboard, and accurately calculates the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of both the camera and the projector, as well as the camera's distortion coefficients. The method is experimentally validated on the procam system, which is shown to be comparable in accuracy with existing multi-pose approaches. The impact of the orientation of the chessboard with respect to the procam imaging places is also explored through extensive simulation.
Exploration in environments with sparse rewards is difficult for artificial agents. Curiosity driven learning -- using feed-forward prediction errors as intrinsic rewards -- has achieved some success in these scenarios, but fails when faced with action-dependent noise sources. We present aleatoric mapping agents (AMAs), a neuroscience inspired solution modeled on the cholinergic system of the mammalian brain. AMAs aim to explicitly ascertain which dynamics of the environment are unpredictable, regardless of whether those dynamics are induced by the actions of the agent. This is achieved by generating separate forward predictions for the mean and variance of future states and reducing intrinsic rewards for those transitions with high aleatoric variance. We show AMAs are able to effectively circumvent action-dependent stochastic traps that immobilise conventional curiosity driven agents. The code for all experiments presented in this paper is open sourced: http://github.com/self-supervisor/Escaping-Stochastic-Traps-With-Aleatoric-Mapping-Agents.
We present two a posteriori error estimators for the virtual element method (VEM) based on global and local flux reconstruction in the spirit of [5]. The proposed error estimators are reliable and efficient for the $h$-, $p$-, and $hp$-versions of the VEM. This solves a partial limitation of our former approach in [6], which was based on solving local nonhybridized mixed problems. Differently from the finite element setting, the proof of the efficiency turns out to be simpler, as the flux reconstruction in the VEM does not require the existence of polynomial, stable, divergence right-inverse operators. Rather, we only need to construct right-inverse operators in virtual element spaces, exploiting only the implicit definition of virtual element functions. The theoretical results are validated by some numerical experiments on a benchmark problem.
We consider the steady-state nonequilibrium behavior of mesoscopic superconducting wires connected to normal-metal reservoirs. Going beyond the diffusive limit, we utilize the quasiclassical theory and perform a self-consistent calculation that guarantees current conservation through the entire system. Going from the ballistic to the diffusive limit, we investigate several crucial phenomena such as charge imbalance, momentum-resolved nonequilbrium distributions, and the current-to-superflow conversion. Connecting to earlier results for the diffusive case, we find that superconductivity can break down at a critical bias voltage $V_\mathrm{c}$. We find that $V_\mathrm{c}$ generally increases as the interface transparency is reduced, while the dependence on the mean-free path is non-monotonous. We discussthe key differences of the ballistic and semi-ballistic regimes to the fully diffusive case.
We experimentally and theoretically investigate the non-degenerate two-photon absorption coefficient $\beta(\omega_1,\omega_2)$ in the prototypical semiconductor ZnSe. In particular, we provide a comprehensive data set on the dependence of $\beta(\omega_1,\omega_2)$ on the non-degeneracy parameter $\omega_1/\omega_2$ with the total frequency sum $\omega_1+\omega_2$ kept constant. We find a substantial increase of the two-photon absorption strength with increasing $\omega_1/\omega_2$. In addition, different crystallographic orientations and polarization configurations are investigated. The nonlinear optical response is analyzed theoretically by evaluating the multiband semiconductor Bloch equations including inter- and intraband excitations in the length gauge. The band structure and the matrix elements are taken an eight-band k.p model. The simulation results are in very good agreement with the experiment.
We explore the use of a topological manifold, represented as a collection of charts, as the target space of neural network based representation learning tasks. This is achieved by a simple adjustment to the output of an encoder's network architecture plus the addition of a maximal mean discrepancy (MMD) based loss function for regularization. Most algorithms in representation and metric learning are easily adaptable to our framework and we demonstrate its effectiveness by adjusting SimCLR (for representation learning) and standard triplet loss training (for metric learning) to have manifold encoding spaces. Our experiments show that we obtain a substantial performance boost over the baseline for low dimensional encodings. In the case of triplet training, we also find, independent of the manifold setup, that the MMD loss alone (i.e. keeping a flat, euclidean target space but using an MMD loss to regularize it) increases performance over the baseline in the typical, high-dimensional Euclidean target spaces. Code for reproducing experiments is provided at https://github.com/ekorman/neurve .
Scale-free percolation is a spatial random graph model with vertex set $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Vertices $x$ and $y$ are connected with probability depending on i.i.d. vertex weights and the Euclidean distance. Depending on the various parameters involved, we get a rich phase diagram. We study graph distances (in comparison to Euclidean distances). Our main attention is on a regime where graph distances are (poly-)logarithmic in the Euclidean distance. We obtain improved bounds on the logarithmic exponents. In the light tail regime, the correct exponent is identified.
There is an analogy between the ResNet (Residual Network) architecture for deep neural networks and an Euler solver for an ODE. The transformation performed by each layer resembles an Euler step in solving an ODE. We consider the Heun Method, which involves a single predictor-corrector cycle, and complete the analogy, building a predictor-corrector variant of ResNet, which we call a HeunNet. Just as Heun's method is more accurate than Euler's, experiments show that HeunNet achieves high accuracy with low computational (both training and test) time compared to both vanilla recurrent neural networks and other ResNet variants.
Central compact objects are young neutron stars emitting thermal X-rays with bolometric luminosities $L_X$ in the range $10^{32}$-$10^{34}$ erg/s. Gourgouliatos, Hollerbach and Igoshev recently suggested that peculiar emission properties of central compact objects can be explained by tangled magnetic field configurations formed in a stochastic dynamo during the proto-neutron star stage. In this case the magnetic field consists of multiple small-scale components with negligible contribution of global dipolar field. We study numerically three-dimensional magneto-thermal evolution of tangled crustal magnetic fields in neutron stars. We find that all configurations produce complicated surface thermal patterns which consist of multiple small hot regions located at significant separations from each other. The configurations with initial magnetic energy of $2.5-10\times 10^{47}$ erg have temperatures of hot regions that reach $\approx 0.2$ keV, to be compared with the bulk temperature of $\approx 0.1$ keV in our simulations with no cooling. A factor of two in temperature is also seen in observations of central compact objects. The hot spots produce periodic modulations in light curve with typical amplitudes of $\leq 9-11$ %. Therefore, the tangled magnetic field configuration can explain thermal emission properties of some central compact objects.
We investigate the concept of cylindrical Wiener process subordinated to a strictly $\alpha$-stable L\'evy process, with $\alpha\in\left(0,1\right)$, in an infinite dimensional, separable Hilbert space, and consider the related stochastic convolution. We then introduce the corresponding Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, focusing on the regularizing properties of the Markov transition semigroup defined by it. In particular, we provide an explicit, original formula -- which is not of Bismut-Elworthy-Li's type -- for the Gateaux derivatives of the functions generated by the operators of the semigroup, as well as an upper bound for the norm of their gradients. In the case $\alpha\in\left(\frac{1}{2},1\right)$, this estimate represents the starting point for studying the Kolmogorov equation in its mild formulation.
Urdu is a widely spoken language in South Asia. Though immoderate literature exists for the Urdu language still the data isn't enough to naturally process the language by NLP techniques. Very efficient language models exist for the English language, a high resource language, but Urdu and other under-resourced languages have been neglected for a long time. To create efficient language models for these languages we must have good word embedding models. For Urdu, we can only find word embeddings trained and developed using the skip-gram model. In this paper, we have built a corpus for Urdu by scraping and integrating data from various sources and compiled a vocabulary for the Urdu language. We also modify fasttext embeddings and N-Grams models to enable training them on our built corpus. We have used these trained embeddings for a word similarity task and compared the results with existing techniques.
As robots interact with a broader range of end-users, end-user robot programming has helped democratize robot programming by empowering end-users who may not have experience in robot programming to customize robots to meet their individual contextual needs. This article surveys work on end-user robot programming, with a focus on end-user program specification. It describes the primary domains, programming phases, and design choices represented by the end-user robot programming literature. The survey concludes by highlighting open directions for further investigation to enhance and widen the reach of end-user robot programming systems.
We study an approximation method of stationary characters of a two-dimensional Markov chain via the Stein method. For this purpose, innovative methods are developed to estimate the moments of the Markov chain, as well as the solution to the Poisson equation with a partial differential operator.
The (non-uniform) sparsest cut problem is the following graph-partitioning problem: given a "supply" graph, and demands on pairs of vertices, delete some subset of supply edges to minimize the ratio of the supply edges cut to the total demand of the pairs separated by this deletion. Despite much effort, there are only a handful of nontrivial classes of supply graphs for which constant-factor approximations are known. We consider the problem for planar graphs, and give a $(2+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm that runs in quasipolynomial time. Our approach defines a new structural decomposition of an optimal solution using a "patching" primitive. We combine this decomposition with a Sherali-Adams-style linear programming relaxation of the problem, which we then round. This should be compared with the polynomial-time approximation algorithm of Rao (1999), which uses the metric linear programming relaxation and $\ell_1$-embeddings, and achieves an $O(\sqrt{\log n})$-approximation in polynomial time.
The fifth-generation (5G) mobile/cellular technology is a game changer for industrial systems. Private 5G deployments are promising to address the challenges faced by industrial networks. Programmability and open-source are two key aspects which bring unprecedented flexibility and customizability to private 5G networks. Recent regulatory initiatives are removing barriers for industrial stakeholders to deploy their own local 5G networks with dedicated equipment. To this end, this demonstration showcases an open and programmable 5G network-in-a-box solution for private deployments. The network-in-a-box provides an integrated solution, based on open-source software stack and general-purpose hardware, for operation in 5G non-standalone (NSA) as well as 4G long-term evolution (LTE) modes. The demonstration also shows the capability of operation in different sub-6 GHz frequency bands, some of which are specifically available for private networks. Performance results, in terms of end-to-end latency and data rates, with a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) 5G device are shown as well.
We study the impact of the recently computed mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to the production of $W$ and $Z$ bosons at the LHC on the value of the $W$ mass extracted from the transverse momentum distribution of charged leptons from $W$ decays. Using the average lepton transverse momenta in $W$ and $Z$ decays as simplified observables for the determination of the $W$ mass, we estimate that mixed QCD-electroweak corrections can shift the extracted value of the $W$ mass by up to ${\cal O}(20)~{\rm MeV}$, depending on the kinematic cuts employed to define fiducial cross sections for $Z$ and $W$ production. Since the target precision of the $W$-mass measurement at the LHC is ${\cal O}(10)~{\rm MeV}$, our results emphasize the need for fully-differential computations of mixed QCD-electroweak corrections and a careful analysis of their potential impact on the determination of the $W$ mass.
Principal loading analysis is a dimension reduction method that discards variables which have only a small distorting effect on the covariance matrix. We complement principal loading analysis and propose to rather use a mix of both, the correlation and covariance matrix instead. Further, we suggest to use rescaled eigenvectors and provide updated algorithms for all proposed changes.
In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown powerful ability in collaborative filtering, which is a widely adopted recommendation scenario. While without any side information, existing graph neural network based methods generally learn a one-hot embedding for each user or item as the initial input representation of GNNs. However, such one-hot embedding is intrinsically transductive, making these methods with no inductive ability, i.e., failing to deal with new users or new items that are unseen during training. Besides, the number of model parameters depends on the number of users and items, which is expensive and not scalable. In this paper, we give a formal definition of inductive recommendation and solve the above problems by proposing Inductive representation based Graph Convolutional Network (IGCN) for collaborative filtering. Specifically, we design an inductive representation layer, which utilizes the interaction behavior with core users or items as the initial representation, improving the general recommendation performance while bringing inductive ability. Note that, the number of parameters of IGCN only depends on the number of core users or items, which is adjustable and scalable. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of IGCN in both transductive and inductive recommendation scenarios, while with remarkably fewer model parameters. Our implementations are available here in PyTorch.
The three key elements of a quantum simulation are state preparation, time evolution, and measurement. While the complexity scaling of dynamics and measurements are well known, many state preparation methods are strongly system-dependent and require prior knowledge of the system's eigenvalue spectrum. Here, we report on a quantum-classical implementation of the coupled-cluster Green's function (CCGF) method, which replaces explicit ground state preparation with the task of applying unitary operators to a simple product state. While our approach is broadly applicable to a wide range of models, we demonstrate it here for the Anderson impurity model (AIM). The method requires a number of T gates that grows as $ \mathcal{O} \left(N^5 \right)$ per time step to calculate the impurity Green's function in the time domain, where $N$ is the total number of energy levels in the AIM. For comparison, a classical CCGF calculation of the same order would require computational resources that grow as $ \mathcal{O} \left(N^6 \right)$ per time step.