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Confinement remains one the most interesting and challenging nonperturbative phenomenon in non-Abelian gauge theories. Recent semiclassical (for SU(2)) and lattice (for QCD) studies have suggested that confinement arises from interactions of statistical ensembles of instanton-dyons with the Polyakov loop. In this work, we extend studies of semiclassical ensemble of dyons to the $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills theory. We find that such interactions do generate the expected first-order deconfinement phase transition. The properties of the ensemble, including correlations and topological susceptibility, are studied over a range of temperatures above and below $T_c$. Additionally, the dyon ensemble is studied in the Yang-Mills theory containing an extra trace-deformation term. It is shown that such a term can cause the theory to remain confined and even retain the same topological observables at high temperatures.
We derive the first positivity bounds for low-energy Effective Field Theories (EFTs) that are not invariant under Lorentz boosts. "Positivity bounds" are the low-energy manifestation of certain fundamental properties in the UV -- to date they have been used to constrain a wide variety of EFTs, however since all of the existing bounds require Lorentz invariance they are not directly applicable when this symmetry is broken, such as for most cosmological and condensed matter systems. From the UV axioms of unitarity, causality and locality, we derive an infinite family of bounds which (derivatives of) the $2\to2$ EFT scattering amplitude must satisfy even when Lorentz boosts are broken (either spontaneously or explicitly). We apply these bounds to the leading-order EFT of both a superfluid and the scalar fluctuations produced during inflation, comparing in the latter case with the current observational constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity.
In this paper we consider the nature of the cosmological constant as due by quantum fluctuations. Quantum fluctuations are generated at Planckian scales by noncommutative effects and watered down at larger scales up to a decoherence scale $L_D$ where classicality is reached. In particular, we formally depict the presence of the scale at $L_D$ by adopting a renormalization group approach. As a result, an analogy arises between the expression for the observed cosmological constant $\overline{\Lambda}$ generated by quantum fluctuations and the one expected by a renormalization group approach, provided that the renormalization scale $\mu$ is suitably chosen. In this framework, the decoherence scale $L_D$ is naturally identified with the value ${\mu}_D$, with $\hbar{\mu}_D$ representing the minimum allowed particle-momentum for our visible universe. Finally, by mimicking renormalization group approach, we present a technique to formally obtain a non-trivial infrared (IR) fixed point at $\mu=\mu_D$ in our model.
We find that, under certain conditions, protoplanetary disks may spontaneously generate multiple, concentric gas rings without an embedded planet through an eccentric cooling instability. Using both linear theory and non-linear hydrodynamics simulations, we show that a variety of background states may trap a slowly precessing, one-armed spiral mode that becomes unstable when a gravitationally-stable disk rapidly cools. The angular momentum required to excite this spiral comes at the expense of non-uniform mass transport that generically results in multiple rings. For example, one long-term hydrodynamics simulation exhibits four long-lived, axisymmetric gas rings. We verify the instability evolution and ring formation mechanism from first principles with our linear theory, which shows remarkable agreement with the simulation results. Dust trapped in these rings may produce observable features consistent with observed disks. Additionally, direct detection of the eccentric gas motions may be possible when the instability saturates, and any residual eccentricity leftover in the rings at later times may also provide direct observational evidence of this mechanism.
Let $(F_n)_{n\ge 1}$ be the Fibonacci sequence. Define $P(F_n): = (\sum_{i=1}^n F_i)_{n\ge 1}$; that is, the function $P$ gives the sequence of partial sums of $(F_n)$. In this paper, we first give an identity involving $P^k(F_n)$, which is the resulting sequence from applying $P$ to $(F_n)$ $k$ times. Second, we provide a combinatorial interpretation of the numbers in $P^k(F_n)$.
We consider an interacting collective spin model known as coupled top (CT), exhibiting a rich variety of phenomena related to quantum transitions and ergodicity, which we explore and find their connection with underlying dynamics. The ferromagnetic interaction between the spins leads to the quantum phase transition (QPT) as well as a dynamical transition at a critical coupling strength, and both the transitions are accompanied by excited state quantum phase transitions at critical energy densities. Above QPT, the onset of chaos in the CT model occurs in an intermediate coupling strength, which is analyzed both classically and quantum mechanically. However, a detailed analysis reveals the presence of non-ergodic multifractal eigenstates in the chaotic regime. We quantify the degree of ergodicity of the eigenstates from the relative entanglement entropy and multifractal dimensions, revealing its variation with energy density across the energy band. We probe such energy dependent ergodic behavior of states from non-equilibrium dynamics, which is also supplemented by phase space mixing in classical dynamics. Moreover, we identify another source of deviation from ergodicity due to the formation of `quantum scars' arising from the unstable steady states and periodic orbits. Unlike the ergodic states, the scarred eigenstates violate Berry's conjecture even in the chaotic regime, leading to the athermal non-ergodic behavior. Finally, we discuss the detection of non-ergodic behavior and dynamical signature of quantum scars by using `out-of-time-order correlator', which has relevance in the recent experiments.
In this paper, we present the Quantum Information Software Developer Kit - Qiskit, for teaching quantum computing to undergraduate students, with basic knowledge of quantum mechanics postulates. We focus on presenting the construction of the programs on any common laptop or desktop computer and their execution on real quantum processors through the remote access to the quantum hardware available on the IBM Quantum Experience platform. The codes are made available throughout the text so that readers, even with little experience in scientific computing, can reproduce them and adopt the methods discussed in this paper to address their own quantum computing projects. The results presented are in agreement with theoretical predictions and show the effectiveness of the Qiskit package as a robust classroom working tool for the introduction of applied concepts of quantum computing and quantum information theory.
Researchers and designers have incorporated social media affordances into learning technologies to engage young people and support personally relevant learning, but youth may reject these attempts because they do not meet user expectations. Through in-depth case studies, we explore the sociotechnical ecosystems of six teens (ages 15-18) working at a science center that had recently introduced a digital badge system to track and recognize their learning. By analyzing interviews, observations, ecological momentary assessments, and system data, we examined tensions in how badges as connected learning technologies operate in teens' sociotechnical ecosystems. We found that, due to issues of unwanted context collapse and incongruent identity representations, youth only used certain affordances of the system and did so sporadically. Additionally, we noted that some features seemed to prioritize values of adult stakeholders over youth. Using badges as a lens, we reveal critical tensions and offer design recommendations for networked learning technologies.
Overfitting is one of the critical problems in deep neural networks. Many regularization schemes try to prevent overfitting blindly. However, they decrease the convergence speed of training algorithms. Adaptive regularization schemes can solve overfitting more intelligently. They usually do not affect the entire network weights. This paper detects a subset of the weighting layers that cause overfitting. The overfitting recognizes by matrix and tensor condition numbers. An adaptive regularization scheme entitled Adaptive Low-Rank (ALR) is proposed that converges a subset of the weighting layers to their Low-Rank Factorization (LRF). It happens by minimizing a new Tikhonov-based loss function. ALR also encourages lazy weights to contribute to the regularization when epochs grow up. It uses a damping sequence to increment layer selection likelihood in the last generations. Thus before falling the training accuracy, ALR reduces the lazy weights and regularizes the network substantially. The experimental results show that ALR regularizes the deep networks well with high training speed and low resource usage.
A word equation with one variable in a free group is given as $U = V$, where both $U$ and $V$ are words over the alphabet of generators of the free group and $X, X^{-1}$, for a fixed variable $X$. An element of the free group is a solution when substituting it for $X$ yields a true equality (interpreted in the free group) of left- and right-hand sides. It is known that the set of all solutions of a given word equation with one variable is a finite union of sets of the form $\{\alpha w^i \beta \: : \: i \in \mathbb Z \}$, where $\alpha, w, \beta$ are reduced words over the alphabet of generators, and a polynomial-time algorithm (of a high degree) computing this set is known. We provide a cubic time algorithm for this problem, which also shows that the set of solutions consists of at most a quadratic number of the above-mentioned sets. The algorithm uses only simple tools of word combinatorics and group theory and is simple to state. Its analysis is involved and focuses on the combinatorics of occurrences of powers of a word within a larger word.
Salient human detection (SHD) in dynamic 360{\deg} immersive videos is of great importance for various applications such as robotics, inter-human and human-object interaction in augmented reality. However, 360{\deg} video SHD has been seldom discussed in the computer vision community due to a lack of datasets with large-scale omnidirectional videos and rich annotations. To this end, we propose SHD360, the first 360{\deg} video SHD dataset which contains various real-life daily scenes. Since so far there is no method proposed for 360{\deg} image/video SHD, we systematically benchmark 11 representative state-of-the-art salient object detection (SOD) approaches on our SHD360, and explore key issues derived from extensive experimenting results. We hope our proposed dataset and benchmark could serve as a good starting point for advancing human-centric researches towards 360{\deg} panoramic data. The dataset is available at https://github.com/PanoAsh/SHD360.
Accurate and trustworthy epidemic forecasting is an important problem that has impact on public health planning and disease mitigation. Most existing epidemic forecasting models disregard uncertainty quantification, resulting in mis-calibrated predictions. Recent works in deep neural models for uncertainty-aware time-series forecasting also have several limitations; e.g. it is difficult to specify meaningful priors in Bayesian NNs, while methods like deep ensembling are computationally expensive in practice. In this paper, we fill this important gap. We model the forecasting task as a probabilistic generative process and propose a functional neural process model called EPIFNP, which directly models the probability density of the forecast value. EPIFNP leverages a dynamic stochastic correlation graph to model the correlations between sequences in a non-parametric way, and designs different stochastic latent variables to capture functional uncertainty from different perspectives. Our extensive experiments in a real-time flu forecasting setting show that EPIFNP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in both accuracy and calibration metrics, up to 2.5x in accuracy and 2.4x in calibration. Additionally, due to properties of its generative process,EPIFNP learns the relations between the current season and similar patterns of historical seasons,enabling interpretable forecasts. Beyond epidemic forecasting, the EPIFNP can be of independent interest for advancing principled uncertainty quantification in deep sequential models for predictive analytics
In fingerprint-based systems, the size of databases increases considerably with population growth. In developing countries, because of the difficulty in using a central system when enlisting voters, it often happens that several regional voter databases are created and then merged to form a central database. A process is used to remove duplicates and ensure uniqueness by voter. Until now, companies specializing in biometrics use several costly computing servers with algorithms to perform large-scale deduplication based on fingerprints. These algorithms take a considerable time because of their complexity in O (n2), where n is the size of the database. This article presents an algorithm that can perform this operation in O (2n), with just a computer. It is based on the development of an index obtained using a 5 * 5 matrix performed on each fingerprint. This index makes it possible to build clusters of O (1) in size in order to compare fingerprints. This approach has been evaluated using close to 11 4000 fingerprints, and the results obtained show that this approach allows a penetration rate of less than 1%, an almost O (1) identification, and an O (n) deduplication. A base of 10 000 000 fingerprints can be deduplicated with a just computer in less than two hours, contrary to several days and servers for the usual tools. Keywords: fingerprint, cluster, index, deduplication.
Content replication to many destinations is a common use case in the Internet of Things (IoT). The deployment of IP multicast has proven inefficient, though, due to its lack of layer-2 support by common IoT radio technologies and its synchronous end-to-end transmission, which is highly susceptible to interference. Information-centric networking (ICN) introduced hop-wise multi-party dissemination of cacheable content, which has proven valuable in particular for low-power lossy networking regimes. Even NDN, however, the most prominent ICN protocol, suffers from a lack of deployment. In this paper, we explore how multiparty content distribution in an information-centric Web of Things (WoT) can be built on CoAP. We augment the CoAP proxy by request aggregation and response replication functions, which together with proxy caches enable asynchronous group communication. In a further step, we integrate content object security with OSCORE into the CoAP multicast proxy system, which enables ubiquitous caching of certified authentic content. In our evaluation, we compare NDN with different deployment models of CoAP, including our data-centric approach in realistic testbed experiments. Our findings indicate that multiparty content distribution based on CoAP proxies performs equally well as NDN, while remaining fully compatible with the established IoT protocol world of CoAP on the Internet.
Models for strongly interacting fermions in disordered clusters forming an array, with electron hopping between sites, reproduce the linear dependence on temperature of the resistivity, typical of the strange metal phase of High Temperature Superconducting materials (Extended Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models). Our hydrodynamical approach to the marginal Fermi liquid emerging out of the interaction, identifies the low energy collective excitations of the system in its coherent phase. These neutral excitations diffuse in the lattice, but the diffusion is heavily hindered by coupling to the pseudo Goldstone modes of the conformal broken symmetry SYK phase, which are local in space. A critical temperature for superconductivity arises in the electron liquid,in case these excitations are assumed to mediate an attractive Cooper-pairing, in the electron liquid, which is not BCS-like.
We consider the problem of active and sequential beam tracking at mmWave frequencies and above. We focus on the dynamic scenario of a UAV to UAV communications where we formulate the problem to be equivalent to tracking an optimal beamforming vector along the line-of-sight path. In this setting, the resulting beam ideally points in the direction of the angle of arrival with sufficiently high resolution. Existing solutions account for predictable movements or small random movements using filtering strategies or by accounting for predictable mobility but must resort to re-estimation protocols when tracking fails due to unpredictable movements. We propose an algorithm for active learning of the AoA through evolving a Bayesian posterior probability belief which is utilized for a sequential selection of beamforming vectors. We propose an adaptive pilot allocation strategy based on a trade-off of mutual information versus spectral efficiency. Numerically, we analyze the performance of our proposed algorithm and demonstrate significant improvements over existing strategies.
In this paper, the necessity theory for commutators of multilinear singular integral operators on weighted Lebesgue spaces is investigated. The results relax the restriction of the weights class to the general multiple weights, which can be regarded as an essential improvement of \cite{ChafCruz2018,GLW2020}. Our approach elaborates on a commonly expanding the kernel locally by Fourier series, recovering many known results but yielding also numerous new ones. In particular, we answer the question about the necessity theory of the iterated commutators of the multilinear singular integral operators.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are groups of spatially distributed and dedicated autonomous sensors for monitoring (and recording) the physical conditions of the environment (and organizing the collected data at a central location). They have been a topic of interest due to their versatility and diverse capabilities despite having simple sensors measuring local quantities such as temperature, pH, or pressure. We delve into understanding how such networks can be utilized for localization, and propose a technique for improving conditions of living for animals and humans on the IIT Bombay campus.
Building an interactive artificial intelligence that can ask questions about the real world is one of the biggest challenges for vision and language problems. In particular, goal-oriented visual dialogue, where the aim of the agent is to seek information by asking questions during a turn-taking dialogue, has been gaining scholarly attention recently. While several existing models based on the GuessWhat?! dataset have been proposed, the Questioner typically asks simple category-based questions or absolute spatial questions. This might be problematic for complex scenes where the objects share attributes or in cases where descriptive questions are required to distinguish objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Questioner architecture, called Unified Questioner Transformer (UniQer), for descriptive question generation with referring expressions. In addition, we build a goal-oriented visual dialogue task called CLEVR Ask. It synthesizes complex scenes that require the Questioner to generate descriptive questions. We train our model with two variants of CLEVR Ask datasets. The results of the quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that UniQer outperforms the baseline.
We revisit the problem of the gauge invariance in the Coleman-Weinberg model in which a $U(1)$ gauge symmetry is driven spontaneously broken by radiative corrections. It was noticed in previous work that masses in this model are not gauge invariant at one-loop order. In our analysis, we use the dressed propagators of scalars which include a resummation of the one-loop self-energy correction to the tree-level propagator. We calculate the one-loop self-energy correction to the vector meson using these dressed propagators. We find that the pole mass of the vector meson calculated using the dressed propagator is gauge invariant at the vacuum determined using the effective potential calculated with a resummation of daisy diagrams.
We implement four algorithms for solving linear Diophantine equations in the naturals: a lexicographic enumeration algorithm, a completion procedure, a graph-based algorithm, and the Slopes algorithm. As already known, the lexicographic enumeration algorithm and the completion procedure are slower than the other two algorithms. We compare in more detail the graph-based algorithm and the Slopes algorithm. In contrast to previous comparisons, our work suggests that they are equally fast on small inputs, but the graph-based algorithm gets much faster as the input grows. We conclude that implementations of AC-unification algorithms should use the graph-based algorithm for maximum efficiency.
We study orbital evolution of multi-planet systems that form a resonant chain, with nearest neighbours close to first order commensurabilities, incorporating orbital circularisation produced by tidal interaction with the central star. We develop a semi-analytic model applicable when the relative proximities to commensurability, though small, are large compared to epsilon^(2/3) , with epsilon being a measure of the characteristic planet to central star mass ratio. This enables determination of forced eccentricities as well as which resonant angles enter libration. When there are no active linked three body Laplace resonances, the rate of evolution of the semi-major axes may also be determined. We perform numerical simulations of the HD 158259 and EPIC 245950175 systems finding that the semi-analytic approach works well in the former case but not so well in the latter case on account of the effects of three active three body Laplace resonances which persist during the evolution. For both systems we estimate that if the tidal parameter, Q', significantly exceeds 1000, tidal effects are unlikely to have influenced period ratios significantly since formation. On the other hand if Q' < ~ 100 tidal effects may have produced significant changes including the formation of three body Laplace resonances in the case of the EPIC 245950175 system.
Decades of research on Internet congestion control (CC) has produced a plethora of algorithms that optimize for different performance objectives. Applications face the challenge of choosing the most suitable algorithm based on their needs, and it takes tremendous efforts and expertise to customize CC algorithms when new demands emerge. In this paper, we explore a basic question: can we design a single CC algorithm to satisfy different objectives? We propose MOCC, the first multi-objective congestion control algorithm that attempts to address this challenge. The core of MOCC is a novel multi-objective reinforcement learning framework for CC that can automatically learn the correlations between different application requirements and the corresponding optimal control policies. Under this framework, MOCC further applies transfer learning to transfer the knowledge from past experience to new applications, quickly adapting itself to a new objective even if it is unforeseen. We provide both user-space and kernel-space implementation of MOCC. Real-world experiments and extensive simulations show that MOCC well supports multi-objective, competing or outperforming the best existing CC algorithms on individual objectives, and quickly adapting to new applications (e.g., 14.2x faster than prior work) without compromising old ones.
Analysis of burden of underregistration in tuberculosis data in Brazil, from 2012 to 2014. Approches of Oliveira et al. (2020) and Stoner et al. (2019) are applied. The main focus is to illustrated how the approach of Oliveira et al. (2020) can be applied when the clustering structure is not previously available.
The HERMES-TP/SP (High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites -- Technologic and Scientific Pathfinder) is an in-orbit demonstration of the so-called distributed astronomy concept. Conceived as a mini-constellation of six 3U nano-satellites hosting a new miniaturized detector, HERMES-TP/SP aims at the detection and accurate localisation of bright high-energy transients such as Gamma-Ray Bursts. The large energy band, the excellent temporal resolution and the wide field of view that characterize the detectors of the constellation represent the key features for the next generation high-energy all-sky monitor with good localisation capabilities that will play a pivotal role in the future of Multi-messenger Astronomy. In this work, we will describe in detail the temporal techniques that allow the localisation of bright transient events taking advantage of their almost simultaneous observation by spatially spaced detectors. Moreover, we will quantitatively discuss the all-sky monitor capabilities of the HERMES Pathfinder as well as its achievable accuracies on the localisation of the detected Gamma-Ray Bursts.
Neural personalized recommendation models are used across a wide variety of datacenter applications including search, social media, and entertainment. State-of-the-art models comprise large embedding tables that have billions of parameters requiring large memory capacities. Unfortunately, large and fast DRAM-based memories levy high infrastructure costs. Conventional SSD-based storage solutions offer an order of magnitude larger capacity, but have worse read latency and bandwidth, degrading inference performance. RecSSD is a near data processing based SSD memory system customized for neural recommendation inference that reduces end-to-end model inference latency by 2X compared to using COTS SSDs across eight industry-representative models.
Despite the accomplishments of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in modeling data distributions, training them remains a challenging task. A contributing factor to this difficulty is the non-intuitive nature of the GAN loss curves, which necessitates a subjective evaluation of the generated output to infer training progress. Recently, motivated by game theory, duality gap has been proposed as a domain agnostic measure to monitor GAN training. However, it is restricted to the setting when the GAN converges to a Nash equilibrium. But GANs need not always converge to a Nash equilibrium to model the data distribution. In this work, we extend the notion of duality gap to proximal duality gap that is applicable to the general context of training GANs where Nash equilibria may not exist. We show theoretically that the proximal duality gap is capable of monitoring the convergence of GANs to a wider spectrum of equilibria that subsumes Nash equilibria. We also theoretically establish the relationship between the proximal duality gap and the divergence between the real and generated data distributions for different GAN formulations. Our results provide new insights into the nature of GAN convergence. Finally, we validate experimentally the usefulness of proximal duality gap for monitoring and influencing GAN training.
In this work, the distance between a quark-antiquark pair is analyzed through both the confinement potential as well as the hadronic total cross section. Using the Helmholtz free energy, entropy is calculated near the minimum of the total cross section through the confinement potential. A fitting procedure for the proton-proton total cross section is performed, defining the fitting parameters. Therefore, the only free parameter remaining in the model is the mass scale $\kappa$ used to define the running coupling constant of the light-front approach to QCD. The mass scale controls the distance $r$ between the quark-antiquark pair and, under some conditions, it allows the occurrence of free quarks even in the confinement regime of QCD.
There have been many studies of the instability of a flexible plate or flag to flapping motions, and of large-amplitude flapping. Here we use inviscid simulations and a linearized model to study more generally how key quantities -- mode number (or wavenumber), frequency, and amplitude -- depend on the two dimensionless parameters, flag mass and bending stiffness. In the limit of small flag mass, flags perform traveling wave motions that move at nearly the speed of the oncoming flow. The flag mode number scales as the -1/4 power of bending stiffness. The flapping frequency has the same scaling, with an additional slight increase with flag mass in the small-mass regime. The flapping amplitude scales approximately as flag mass to the 1/2 power. For large flag mass, the dominant mode number is low (0 or 1), the flapping frequency tends to zero, and the amplitude saturates in the neighborhood of its upper limit (the flag length). In a linearized model, the fastest growing modes have somewhat different power law scalings for wavenumber and frequency. We discuss how the numerical scalings are consistent with a weakly nonlinear model.
In this paper, we propose FedChain, a novel framework for federated-blockchain systems, to enable effective transferring of tokens between different blockchain networks. Particularly, we first introduce a federated-blockchain system together with a cross-chain transfer protocol to facilitate the secure and decentralized transfer of tokens between chains. We then develop a novel PoS-based consensus mechanism for FedChain, which can satisfy strict security requirements, prevent various blockchain-specific attacks, and achieve a more desirable performance compared to those of other existing consensus mechanisms. Moreover, a Stackelberg game model is developed to examine and address the problem of centralization in the FedChain system. Furthermore, the game model can enhance the security and performance of FedChain. By analyzing interactions between the stakeholders and chain operators, we can prove the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium and find the exact formula for this equilibrium. These results are especially important for the stakeholders to determine their best investment strategies and for the chain operators to design the optimal policy to maximize their benefits and security protection for FedChain. Simulations results then clearly show that the FedChain framework can help stakeholders to maximize their profits and the chain operators to design appropriate parameters to enhance FedChain's security and performance.
The Hauser-Feshbach Fission Fragment Decay (HF$^3$D) model is extended to calculate the prompt fission neutron spectrum (PFNS) for the thermal neutron induced fission on $^{235}$U, where the evaporated neutrons from all possible fission fragment pairs are aggregated. By studying model parameter sensitivities on the calculated PFNS, as well as non-statistical behavior of low-lying discrete level spin distribution, we conclude that discrepancies between the aggregation calculation and the experimental PFNS seen at higher neutron emission energies can be attributed to both the primary fission fragment yield distribution and the possible high spin states that are not predicted by the statistical theory of nuclear structure.
Weight sharing has become a de facto standard in neural architecture search because it enables the search to be done on commodity hardware. However, recent works have empirically shown a ranking disorder between the performance of stand-alone architectures and that of the corresponding shared-weight networks. This violates the main assumption of weight-sharing NAS algorithms, thus limiting their effectiveness. We tackle this issue by proposing a regularization term that aims to maximize the correlation between the performance rankings of the shared-weight network and that of the standalone architectures using a small set of landmark architectures. We incorporate our regularization term into three different NAS algorithms and show that it consistently improves performance across algorithms, search-spaces, and tasks.
There is no unique way to encode a quantum algorithm into a quantum circuit. With limited qubit counts, connectivities, and coherence times, circuit optimization is essential to make the best use of near-term quantum devices. We introduce two separate ideas for circuit optimization and combine them in a multi-tiered quantum circuit optimization protocol called AQCEL. The first ingredient is a technique to recognize repeated patterns of quantum gates, opening up the possibility of future hardware co-optimization. The second ingredient is an approach to reduce circuit complexity by identifying zero- or low-amplitude computational basis states and redundant gates. As a demonstration, AQCEL is deployed on an iterative and efficient quantum algorithm designed to model final state radiation in high energy physics. For this algorithm, our optimization scheme brings a significant reduction in the gate count without losing any accuracy compared to the original circuit. Additionally, we have investigated whether this can be demonstrated on a quantum computer using polynomial resources. Our technique is generic and can be useful for a wide variety of quantum algorithms.
Modern scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) has become an indispensable tool in material research. However, as the s-SNOM technique marches into the far-infrared (IR) and terahertz (THz) regimes, emerging experiments sometimes produce puzzling results. For example, anomalies in the near-field optical contrast have been widely reported. In this Letter, we systematically investigate a series of extreme subwavelength metallic nanostructures via s-SNOM near-field imaging in the GHz to THz frequency range. We find that the near-field material contrast is greatly impacted by the lateral size of the nanostructure, while the spatial resolution is practically independent of it. The contrast is also strongly affected by the connectivity of the metallic structures to a larger metallic ground plane. The observed effect can be largely explained by a quasi-electrostatic analysis. We also compare the THz s-SNOM results to those of the mid-IR regime, where the size-dependence becomes significant only for smaller structures. Our results reveal that the quantitative analysis of the near-field optical material contrasts in the long-wavelength regime requires a careful assessment of the size and configuration of metallic (optically conductive) structures.
Audio and vision are two main modalities in video data. Multimodal learning, especially for audiovisual learning, has drawn considerable attention recently, which can boost the performance of various computer vision tasks. However, in video summarization, existing approaches just exploit the visual information while neglect the audio information. In this paper, we argue that the audio modality can assist vision modality to better understand the video content and structure, and further benefit the summarization process. Motivated by this, we propose to jointly exploit the audio and visual information for the video summarization task, and develop an AudioVisual Recurrent Network (AVRN) to achieve this. Specifically, the proposed AVRN can be separated into three parts: 1) the two-stream LSTM is utilized to encode the audio and visual feature sequentially by capturing their temporal dependency. 2) the audiovisual fusion LSTM is employed to fuse the two modalities by exploring the latent consistency between them. 3) the self-attention video encoder is adopted to capture the global dependency in the video. Finally, the fused audiovisual information, and the integrated temporal and global dependencies are jointly used to predict the video summary. Practically, the experimental results on the two benchmarks, \emph{i.e.,} SumMe and TVsum, have demonstrated the effectiveness of each part, and the superiority of AVRN compared to those approaches just exploiting visual information for video summarization.
We present results of three wide-band directed searches for continuous gravitational waves from 15 young supernova remnants in the first half of the third Advanced LIGO and Virgo observing run. We use three search pipelines with distinct signal models and methods of identifying noise artifacts. Without ephemerides of these sources, the searches are conducted over a frequency band spanning from 10~Hz to 2~kHz. We find no evidence of continuous gravitational radiation from these sources. We set upper limits on the intrinsic signal strain at 95\% confidence level in sample sub-bands, estimate the sensitivity in the full band, and derive the corresponding constraints on the fiducial neutron star ellipticity and $r$-mode amplitude. The best 95\% confidence constraints placed on the signal strain are $7.7\times 10^{-26}$ and $7.8\times 10^{-26}$ near 200~Hz for the supernova remnants G39.2--0.3 and G65.7+1.2, respectively. The most stringent constraints on the ellipticity and $r$-mode amplitude reach $\lesssim 10^{-7}$ and $ \lesssim 10^{-5}$, respectively, at frequencies above $\sim 400$~Hz for the closest supernova remnant G266.2--1.2/Vela Jr.
We investigate the numerical artifact known as a carbuncle, in the solution of the shallow water equations. We propose a new Riemann solver that is based on a local measure of the entropy residual and aims to avoid carbuncles while maintaining high accuracy. We propose a new challenging test problem for shallow water codes, consisting of a steady circular hydraulic jump that can be physically unstable. We show that numerical methods are prone to either suppress the instability completely or form carbuncles. We test existing cures for the carbuncle. In our experiments, only the proposed method is able to avoid unphysical carbuncles without suppressing the physical instability.
Universal gate sets for quantum computing have been known for decades, yet no universal gate set has been proposed for particle-conserving unitaries, which are the operations of interest in quantum chemistry. In this work, we show that controlled single-excitation gates in the form of Givens rotations are universal for particle-conserving unitaries. Single-excitation gates describe an arbitrary $U(2)$ rotation on the two-qubit subspace spanned by the states $|01\rangle, |10\rangle$, while leaving other states unchanged -- a transformation that is analogous to a single-qubit rotation on a dual-rail qubit. The proof is constructive, so our result also provides an explicit method for compiling arbitrary particle-conserving unitaries. Additionally, we describe a method for using controlled single-excitation gates to prepare an arbitrary state of a fixed number of particles. We derive analytical gradient formulas for Givens rotations as well as decompositions into single-qubit and CNOT gates. Our results offer a unifying framework for quantum computational chemistry where every algorithm is a unique recipe built from the same universal ingredients: Givens rotations.
The widespread significance of Android IoT devices is due to its flexibility and hardware support features which revolutionized the digital world by introducing exciting applications almost in all walks of daily life, such as healthcare, smart cities, smart environments, safety, remote sensing, and many more. Such versatile applicability gives incentive for more malware attacks. In this paper, we propose a framework which continuously aggregates multiple user trained models on non-overlapping data into single model. Specifically for malware detection task, (i) we propose a novel user (local) neural network (LNN) which trains on local distribution and (ii) then to assure the model authenticity and quality, we propose a novel smart contract which enable aggregation process over blokchain platform. The LNN model analyzes various static and dynamic features of both malware and benign whereas the smart contract verifies the malicious applications both for uploading and downloading processes in the network using stored aggregated features of local models. In this way, the proposed model not only improves malware detection accuracy using decentralized model network but also model efficacy with blockchain. We evaluate our approach with three state-of-the-art models and performed deep analyses of extracted features of the relative model.
Attempting to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics is one of the great undertakings of contemporary physics. Here we present how the incompatibility between the two theories arises in the simple thought experiment of preparing a heavy object in a quantum superposition. Following Penrose's analysis of the problem, we determine the requirements on physical parameters to perform experiments where both theories potentially interplay. We use these requirements to compare different systems, focusing on mechanical oscillators which can be coupled to superconducting circuits.
Discriminative correlation filters (DCF) and siamese networks have achieved promising performance on visual tracking tasks thanks to their superior computational efficiency and reliable similarity metric learning, respectively. However, how to effectively take advantages of powerful deep networks, while maintaining the real-time response of DCF, remains a challenging problem. Embedding the cross-correlation operator as a separate layer into siamese networks is a popular choice to enhance the tracking accuracy. Being a key component of such a network, the correlation layer is updated online together with other parts of the network. Yet, when facing serious disturbance, fused trackers may still drift away from the target completely due to accumulated errors. To address these issues, we propose a coarse-to-fine tracking framework, which roughly infers the target state via an online-updating DCF module first and subsequently, finely locates the target through an offline-training asymmetric siamese network (ASN). Benefitting from the guidance of DCF and the learned channel weights obtained through exploiting the given ground-truth template, ASN refines feature representation and implements precise target localization. Systematic experiments on five popular tracking datasets demonstrate that the proposed DCF-ASN achieves the state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting good tracking efficiency.
The Fermilab Muon $g-2$ experiment recently reported its first measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment $a_\mu^{\textrm{FNAL}}$, which is in full agreement with the previous BNL measurement and pushes the world average deviation $\Delta a_\mu^{2021}$ from the Standard Model to a significance of $4.2\sigma$. Here we provide an extensive survey of its impact on beyond the Standard Model physics. We use state-of-the-art calculations and a sophisticated set of tools to make predictions for $a_\mu$, dark matter and LHC searches in a wide range of simple models with up to three new fields, that represent some of the few ways that large $\Delta a_\mu$ can be explained. In addition for the particularly well motivated Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, we exhaustively cover the scenarios where large $\Delta a_\mu$ can be explained while simultaneously satisfying all relevant data from other experiments. Generally, the $\Delta a_\mu$ result can only be explained by rather small masses and/or large couplings and enhanced chirality flips, which can lead to conflicts with limits from LHC and dark matter experiments. Our results show that the new measurement excludes a large number of models and provides crucial constraints on others. Two-Higgs doublet and leptoquark models provide viable explanations of $a_\mu$ only in specific versions and in specific parameter ranges. Among all models with up to three fields, only models with chirality enhancements can accommodate $a_\mu$ and dark matter simultaneously. The MSSM can simultaneously explain $a_\mu$ and dark matter for Bino-like LSP in several coannihilation regions. Allowing under abundance of the dark matter relic density, the Higgsino- and particularly Wino-like LSP scenarios become promising explanations of the $a_\mu$ result.
It is a classical theorem of Sarason that an analytic function of bounded mean oscillation ($BMOA$), is of vanishing mean oscillation if and only if its rotations converge in norm to the original function as the angle of the rotation tends to zero. In a series of two papers Blasco et al. have raised the problem of characterizing all semigroups of holomorphic functions $(\varphi_t)$ that can replace the semigroup of rotations in Sarason's Theorem. We give a complete answer to this question, in terms of a logarithmic vanishing oscillation condition on the infinitesimal generator of the semigroup $(\varphi_t)$. In addition we confirm the conjecture of Blasco et al. that all such semigroups are elliptic. We also investigate the analogous question for the Bloch and the little Bloch space and surprisingly enough we find that the semigroups for which the Bloch version of Sarason's Theorem holds are exactly the same as in the $BMOA$ case.
Nested sampling is an important tool for conducting Bayesian analysis in Astronomy and other fields, both for sampling complicated posterior distributions for parameter inference, and for computing marginal likelihoods for model comparison. One technical obstacle to using nested sampling in practice is the requirement (for most common implementations) that prior distributions be provided in the form of transformations from the unit hyper-cube to the target prior density. For many applications - particularly when using the posterior from one experiment as the prior for another - such a transformation is not readily available. In this letter we show that parametric bijectors trained on samples from a desired prior density provide a general-purpose method for constructing transformations from the uniform base density to a target prior, enabling the practical use of nested sampling under arbitrary priors. We demonstrate the use of trained bijectors in conjunction with nested sampling on a number of examples from cosmology.
We live in momentous times. The science community is empowered with an arsenal of cosmic messengers to study the Universe in unprecedented detail. Gravitational waves, electromagnetic waves, neutrinos and cosmic rays cover a wide range of wavelengths and time scales. Combining and processing these datasets that vary in volume, speed and dimensionality requires new modes of instrument coordination, funding and international collaboration with a specialized human and technological infrastructure. In tandem with the advent of large-scale scientific facilities, the last decade has experienced an unprecedented transformation in computing and signal processing algorithms. The combination of graphics processing units, deep learning, and the availability of open source, high-quality datasets, have powered the rise of artificial intelligence. This digital revolution now powers a multi-billion dollar industry, with far-reaching implications in technology and society. In this chapter we describe pioneering efforts to adapt artificial intelligence algorithms to address computational grand challenges in Multi-Messenger Astrophysics. We review the rapid evolution of these disruptive algorithms, from the first class of algorithms introduced in early 2017, to the sophisticated algorithms that now incorporate domain expertise in their architectural design and optimization schemes. We discuss the importance of scientific visualization and extreme-scale computing in reducing time-to-insight and obtaining new knowledge from the interplay between models and data.
We study the relationship between the eluder dimension for a function class and a generalized notion of rank, defined for any monotone "activation" $\sigma : \mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$, which corresponds to the minimal dimension required to represent the class as a generalized linear model. When $\sigma$ has derivatives bounded away from $0$, it is known that $\sigma$-rank gives rise to an upper bound on eluder dimension for any function class; we show however that eluder dimension can be exponentially smaller than $\sigma$-rank. We also show that the condition on the derivative is necessary; namely, when $\sigma$ is the $\mathrm{relu}$ activation, we show that eluder dimension can be exponentially larger than $\sigma$-rank.
Software needs to be secure, in particular, when deployed to critical infrastructures. Secure coding guidelines capture practices in industrial software engineering to ensure the security of code. This study aims to assess the level of awareness of secure coding in industrial software engineering, the skills of software developers to spot weaknesses in software code, avoid them, and the organizational support to adhere to coding guidelines. The approach draws on well-established theories of policy compliance, neutralization theory, and security-related stress and the authors' many years of experience in industrial software engineering and on lessons identified from training secure coding in the industry. The paper presents the questionnaire design for the online survey and the first analysis of data from the pilot study.
Contextual word-representations became a standard in modern natural language processing systems. These models use subword tokenization to handle large vocabularies and unknown words. Word-level usage of such systems requires a way of pooling multiple subwords that correspond to a single word. In this paper we investigate how the choice of subword pooling affects the downstream performance on three tasks: morphological probing, POS tagging and NER, in 9 typologically diverse languages. We compare these in two massively multilingual models, mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa. For morphological tasks, the widely used `choose the first subword' is the worst strategy and the best results are obtained by using attention over the subwords. For POS tagging both of these strategies perform poorly and the best choice is to use a small LSTM over the subwords. The same strategy works best for NER and we show that mBERT is better than XLM-RoBERTa in all 9 languages. We publicly release all code, data and the full result tables at \url{https://github.com/juditacs/subword-choice}.
It is essential that software systems be tolerant to degradations in components they rely on. There are patterns and techniques which software engineers use to ensure their systems gracefully degrade. Despite these techniques being available in practice, tuning and configuration is hard to get right and it is expensive to explore possible changes to components and techniques in complex systems. To fill these gaps, we propose Quartermaster to model and simulate systems and fault-tolerant techniques. We anticipate that Quartermaster will be useful to further research on graceful degradation and help inform software engineers about techniques that are most appropriate for their use cases.
The coherent coupling between a quartz electro-mechanical resonator at room temperature and trapped ions in a 7-tesla Penning trap has been demonstrated for the first time. The signals arising from the coupling remain for integration times in the orders of seconds. From the measurements carried out, we demonstrate that the coupling allows detecting the reduced-cyclotron frequency ($\nu_+$) within times below 10~ms and with an improved resolution compared to conventional electronic detection schemes. A resolving power $\nu_+/\Delta \nu_+=2.4\times10^{7}$ has been reached in single measurements. In this publication we present the first results, emphasizing the novel features of the quartz resonator as fast non-destructive ion-trap detector together with different ways to analyze the data and considering aspects like precision, resolution and sensitivity.
Evidence for broken time reversal symmetry (TRS) has been found in the superconducting states of the $R_5$Rh$_6$Sn$_{18}$ (R = Sc, Y, Lu) compounds with a centrosymmetric caged crystal structure, but the origin of this phenomenon is unresolved. Here we report neutron diffraction measurements of single crystals with $R$=Lu, as well as measurements of the temperature dependence of the magnetic penetration depth using a self-induced tunnel diode-oscillator (TDO) based technique, together with band structure calculations using density functional theory. Neutron diffraction measurements reveal that the system crystallizes in a tetragonal caged structure, and that one of nominal Lu sites in the Lu$_5$Rh$_6$Sn$_{18}$ structure is occupied by Sn, yielding a composition Lu$_{5-x}$Rh$_6$Sn$_{18+x}$ ($x=1$). The low temperature penetration depth shift $\Delta\lambda(T)$ exhibits an exponential temperature dependence below around $0.3T_c$, giving clear evidence for fully gapped superconductivity. The derived superfluid density is reasonably well accounted for by a single gap $s$-wave model, whereas agreement cannot be found for models of TRS breaking states with two-component order parameters. Moreover, band structure calculations reveal multiple bands crossing the Fermi level, and indicate that the aforementioned TRS breaking states would be expected to have nodes on the Fermi surface, in constrast to the observations.
Interface science has become a key aspect for fundamental research questions and for the understanding, design and optimization of urgently needed energy and information technologies. As the interface properties change during operation, e.g. under applied electrochemical stimulus, and because multiple bulk and interface processes coexist and compete, detailed operando characterization is needed. In this perspective, I present an overview of the state-of-the art and challenges in selected X-ray spectroscopic techniques, concluding that among others, interface-sensitivity remains a major concern in the available techniques. I propose and discuss a new method to extract interface-information from nominally bulk sensitive techniques, and critically evaluate the selection of X-ray energies for the recently developed meniscus X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, a promising operando tool to characterize the solid-liquid interface. I expect that these advancements along with further developments in time and spatial resolution will expand our ability to probe the interface electronic and molecular structure with sub-nm depth and complete our understanding of charge transfer processes during operation.
We introduce DeepCert, a tool-supported method for verifying the robustness of deep neural network (DNN) image classifiers to contextually relevant perturbations such as blur, haze, and changes in image contrast. While the robustness of DNN classifiers has been the subject of intense research in recent years, the solutions delivered by this research focus on verifying DNN robustness to small perturbations in the images being classified, with perturbation magnitude measured using established Lp norms. This is useful for identifying potential adversarial attacks on DNN image classifiers, but cannot verify DNN robustness to contextually relevant image perturbations, which are typically not small when expressed with Lp norms. DeepCert addresses this underexplored verification problem by supporting:(1) the encoding of real-world image perturbations; (2) the systematic evaluation of contextually relevant DNN robustness, using both testing and formal verification; (3) the generation of contextually relevant counterexamples; and, through these, (4) the selection of DNN image classifiers suitable for the operational context (i)envisaged when a potentially safety-critical system is designed, or (ii)observed by a deployed system. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepCert by showing how it can be used to verify the robustness of DNN image classifiers build for two benchmark datasets (`German Traffic Sign' and `CIFAR-10') to multiple contextually relevant perturbations.
In our earlier publication we introduced the Spectrally Integrated Voigt Function (SIVF) as an alternative to the traditional Voigt function for the HITRAN-based applications [Quine & Abrarov, JQSRT 2013]. It was shown that application of the SIVF enables us to reduce spectral resolution without loss of accuracy in computation of the spectral radiance. As a further development, in this study we present more efficient SIVF approximations derived by using a new sampling method based on incomplete cosine expansion of the sinc function [Abrarov & Quine, Appl. Math. Comput. 2015]. Since the SIVF mathematically represents the mean value integral of the Voigt function, this method accounts for area under the curve of the Voigt function. Consequently, the total band radiance, defined as the integrated spectral radiance within a given spectral region, can also retain its accuracy even at low spectral resolution. Our numerical results demonstrate that application of the SIVF may be promising for more rapid line-by-line computation in atmospheric models utilizing the HITRAN molecular spectroscopic database. Such an approach may be particularly efficient to implement a retrieval algorithm for the greenhouse gases from the NIR space data collected by Earth-orbiting micro-spectrometers like Argus 1000 for their operation in a real-time mode. The real-time mode operation of the micro-spectrometers can be advantageous for instant decision making during flight for more efficient data collection from space.
The unit distance graph $G_{\mathbb{R}^d}^1$ is the infinite graph whose nodes are points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, with an edge between two points if the Euclidean distance between these points is 1. The 2-dimensional version $G_{\mathbb{R}^2}^1$ of this graph is typically studied for its chromatic number, as in the Hadwiger-Nelson problem. However, other properties of unit distance graphs are rarely studied. Here, we consider the restriction of $G_{\mathbb{R}^d}^1$ to closed convex subsets $X$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that the graph $G_{\mathbb{R}^d}^1[X]$ is connected precisely when the radius of $r(X)$ of $X$ is equal to 0, or when $r(X)\geq 1$ and the affine dimension of $X$ is at least 2. For hyperrectangles, we give bounds for the graph diameter in the critical case that the radius is exactly 1.
Humans are able to form a complex mental model of the environment they move in. This mental model captures geometric and semantic aspects of the scene, describes the environment at multiple levels of abstractions (e.g., objects, rooms, buildings), includes static and dynamic entities and their relations (e.g., a person is in a room at a given time). In contrast, current robots' internal representations still provide a partial and fragmented understanding of the environment, either in the form of a sparse or dense set of geometric primitives (e.g., points, lines, planes, voxels) or as a collection of objects. This paper attempts to reduce the gap between robot and human perception by introducing a novel representation, a 3D Dynamic Scene Graph(DSG), that seamlessly captures metric and semantic aspects of a dynamic environment. A DSG is a layered graph where nodes represent spatial concepts at different levels of abstraction, and edges represent spatio-temporal relations among nodes. Our second contribution is Kimera, the first fully automatic method to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. Kimera includes state-of-the-art techniques for visual-inertial SLAM, metric-semantic 3D reconstruction, object localization, human pose and shape estimation, and scene parsing. Our third contribution is a comprehensive evaluation of Kimera in real-life datasets and photo-realistic simulations, including a newly released dataset, uHumans2, which simulates a collection of crowded indoor and outdoor scenes. Our evaluation shows that Kimera achieves state-of-the-art performance in visual-inertial SLAM, estimates an accurate 3D metric-semantic mesh model in real-time, and builds a DSG of a complex indoor environment with tens of objects and humans in minutes. Our final contribution shows how to use a DSG for real-time hierarchical semantic path-planning. The core modules in Kimera are open-source.
Motivated by a variety of online matching platforms, we consider demand and supply units which are located i.i.d. in $[0,1]^d$, and each demand unit needs to be matched with a supply unit. The goal is to minimize the expected average distance between matched pairs (the "cost"). We model dynamic arrivals of one or both of demand and supply with uncertain locations of future arrivals, and characterize the scaling behavior of the achievable cost in terms of system size (number of supply units), as a function of the dimension $d$. Our achievability results are backed by concrete matching algorithms. Across cases, we find that the platform can achieve cost (nearly) as low as that achievable if the locations of future arrivals had been known beforehand. Furthermore, in all cases except one, cost nearly as low as the expected distance to the nearest neighboring supply unit is achievable, i.e., the matching constraint does not cause an increase in cost either. The aberrant case is where only demand arrivals are dynamic, and $d=1$; excess supply significantly reduces cost in this case.
We prove that the uniqueness results obtained in \cite{urrea} for the Benjamin equation, cannot be extended for any pair of non-vanishing solutions. On the other hand, we study uniqueness results of solutions of the Benjamin equation. With this purpose, we showed that for any solutions $u$ and $v$ defined in $\R\times [0,T]$, if there exists an open set $I\subset \R$ such that $u(\cdot,0)$ and $v(\cdot,0)$ agree in $I$, $\p_t u(\cdot,0)$ and $\p_t v(\cdot,0)$ agree in $I$, then $u\equiv v$. To finish, a better version of this uniqueness result is also established.
Contagion processes have been proven to fundamentally depend on the structural properties of the interaction networks conveying them. Many real networked systems are characterized by clustered substructures representing either collections of all-to-all pair-wise interactions (cliques) and/or group interactions, involving many of their members at once. In this work, focusing on interaction structures represented as simplicial complexes, we present a discrete-time microscopic model of complex contagion for a susceptible-infected-susceptible dynamics. Introducing a particular edge clique cover and a heuristic to find it, the model accounts for the higher-order dynamical correlations among the members of the substructures (cliques/simplices). The analytical computation of the critical point reveals that higher-order correlations are responsible for its dependence on the higher-order couplings. While such dependence eludes any mean-field model, the possibility of a bi-stable region is extended to structured populations.
The tensor product of props was defined by Hackney and Robertson as an extension of the Boardman-Vogt product of operads to more general monoidal theories. Theories that factor as tensor products include the theory of commutative monoids and the theory of bialgebras. We give a topological interpretation (and vast generalisation) of this construction as a low-dimensional projection of a "smash product of pointed directed spaces". Here directed spaces are embodied by combinatorial structures called diagrammatic sets, while Gray products replace cartesian products. The correspondence is mediated by a web of adjunctions relating diagrammatic sets, pros, probs, props, and Gray-categories. The smash product applies to presentations of higher-dimensional theories and systematically produces higher-dimensional coherence cells.
An extension of QPTL is considered where functional dependencies among the quantified variables can be restricted in such a way that their current values are independent of the future values of the other variables. This restriction is tightly connected to the notion of behavioral strategies in game-theory and allows the resulting logic to naturally express game-theoretic concepts. The fragment where only restricted quantifications are considered, called behavioral quantifications, can be decided, for both model checking and satisfiability, in 2ExpTime and is expressively equivalent to QPTL, though significantly less succinct.
Significant memory and computational requirements of large deep neural networks restrict their application on edge devices. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a prominent model compression technique for deep neural networks in which the knowledge of a trained large teacher model is transferred to a smaller student model. The success of knowledge distillation is mainly attributed to its training objective function, which exploits the soft-target information (also known as "dark knowledge") besides the given regular hard labels in a training set. However, it is shown in the literature that the larger the gap between the teacher and the student networks, the more difficult is their training using knowledge distillation. To address this shortcoming, we propose an improved knowledge distillation method (called Annealing-KD) by feeding the rich information provided by the teacher's soft-targets incrementally and more efficiently. Our Annealing-KD technique is based on a gradual transition over annealed soft-targets generated by the teacher at different temperatures in an iterative process, and therefore, the student is trained to follow the annealed teacher output in a step-by-step manner. This paper includes theoretical and empirical evidence as well as practical experiments to support the effectiveness of our Annealing-KD method. We did a comprehensive set of experiments on different tasks such as image classification (CIFAR-10 and 100) and NLP language inference with BERT-based models on the GLUE benchmark and consistently got superior results.
We rectify an incorrect citation of the reference in obtaining the Gaussian upper bound for heat kernels of the Schr\"odinger type operators $(-\Delta)^2+V^2$.
Fundamental to the theory of continued fractions is the fact that every infinite continued fraction with positive integer coefficients converges; however, it is unknown precisely which continued fractions with integer coefficients (not necessarily positive) converge. Here we present a simple test that determines whether an integer continued fraction converges or diverges. In addition, for convergent continued fractions the test specifies whether the limit is rational or irrational. An attractive way to visualise integer continued fractions is to model them as paths on the Farey graph, which is a graph embedded in the hyperbolic plane that induces a tessellation of the hyperbolic plane by ideal triangles. With this geometric representation of continued fractions our test for convergence can be interpreted in a particularly elegant manner, giving deeper insight into the nature of continued fraction convergence.
Several deep learning methods for phase retrieval exist, but most of them fail on realistic data without precise support information. We propose a novel method based on single-instance deep generative prior that works well on complex-valued crystal data.
Three-body calculations of $K\bar{K}N$ system with quantum numbers $I=1/2$, $J^{\pi}=(\frac{1}{2})^{+}$ were performed. Using separable potentials for two-body interactions, we calculated the $\pi\Sigma$ mass spectra for the $(\bar{K}N)_{I=0}+K^{+}\rightarrow(\pi\Sigma)^{0}K^{+}$ reaction on the basis of three-body Alt-Grassberger-Sandhas equations in the momentum representation. In this regard, different types of $\bar{K}N-\pi\Sigma$ potentials based on phenomenological and chiral SU(3) approach are used. The possibility to observe the trace of $\Lambda(1405)$ resonance in $(\pi\Sigma)^{0}$ mass spectra was studied. Using the $\chi^{2}$ fitting, it was shown that the mass of $\Lambda$(1405) resonance is about 1417 $\mathrm{MeV}/c^{2}$.
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a challenging combinatorial problem that asks us to plan collision-free paths for a team of cooperative agents. In this work, we show that one of the reasons why MAPF is so hard to solve is due to a phenomenon called pairwise symmetry, which occurs when two agents have many different paths to their target locations, all of which appear promising, but every combination of them results in a collision. We identify several classes of pairwise symmetries and show that each one arises commonly in practice and can produce an exponential explosion in the space of possible collision resolutions, leading to unacceptable runtimes for current state-of-the-art (bounded-sub)optimal MAPF algorithms. We propose a variety of reasoning techniques that detect the symmetries efficiently as they arise and resolve them by using specialized constraints to eliminate all permutations of pairwise colliding paths in a single branching step. We implement these ideas in the context of the leading optimal MAPF algorithm CBS and show that the addition of the symmetry reasoning techniques can have a dramatic positive effect on its performance - we report a reduction in the number of node expansions by up to four orders of magnitude and an increase in scalability by up to thirty times. These gains allow us to solve to optimality a variety of challenging MAPF instances previously considered out of reach for CBS.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/szc19990412/TransMIL.
Temporal language grounding (TLG) is a fundamental and challenging problem for vision and language understanding. Existing methods mainly focus on fully supervised setting with temporal boundary labels for training, which, however, suffers expensive cost of annotation. In this work, we are dedicated to weakly supervised TLG, where multiple description sentences are given to an untrimmed video without temporal boundary labels. In this task, it is critical to learn a strong cross-modal semantic alignment between sentence semantics and visual content. To this end, we introduce a novel weakly supervised temporal adjacent network (WSTAN) for temporal language grounding. Specifically, WSTAN learns cross-modal semantic alignment by exploiting temporal adjacent network in a multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm, with a whole description paragraph as input. Moreover, we integrate a complementary branch into the framework, which explicitly refines the predictions with pseudo supervision from the MIL stage. An additional self-discriminating loss is devised on both the MIL branch and the complementary branch, aiming to enhance semantic discrimination by self-supervising. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely used benchmark datasets, \emph{i.e.}, ActivityNet-Captions, Charades-STA, and DiDeMo, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Recent advances in implicit neural representations show great promise when it comes to generating numerical solutions to partial differential equations. Compared to conventional alternatives, such representations employ parameterized neural networks to define, in a mesh-free manner, signals that are highly-detailed, continuous, and fully differentiable. In this work, we present a novel machine learning approach for topology optimization -- an important class of inverse problems with high-dimensional parameter spaces and highly nonlinear objective landscapes. To effectively leverage neural representations in the context of mesh-free topology optimization, we use multilayer perceptrons to parameterize both density and displacement fields. Our experiments indicate that our method is highly competitive for minimizing structural compliance objectives, and it enables self-supervised learning of continuous solution spaces for topology optimization problems.
Multi-Target Multi-Camera (MTMC) vehicle tracking is an essential task of visual traffic monitoring, one of the main research fields of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Several offline approaches have been proposed to address this task; however, they are not compatible with real-world applications due to their high latency and post-processing requirements. In this paper, we present a new low-latency online approach for MTMC tracking in scenarios with partially overlapping fields of view (FOVs), such as road intersections. Firstly, the proposed approach detects vehicles at each camera. Then, the detections are merged between cameras by applying cross-camera clustering based on appearance and location. Lastly, the clusters containing different detections of the same vehicle are temporally associated to compute the tracks on a frame-by-frame basis. The experiments show promising low-latency results while addressing real-world challenges such as the a priori unknown and time-varying number of targets and the continuous state estimation of them without performing any post-processing of the trajectories.
We provide a systematic method to compute tree-level scattering amplitudes with spinning external states from amplitudes with scalar external states in arbitrary spacetime dimensions. We write down analytic answers for various scattering amplitudes, including the four graviton amplitude due to the massive spin $J$ exchange. We verify the results by computing angular distributions in 3 + 1 dimensions using various identities involving Jacobi polynomials.
We discuss a set of heterotic and type II string theory compactifications to 1+1 dimensions that are characterized by factorized internal worldsheet CFTs of the form $V_1\otimes \bar V_2$, where $V_1, V_2$ are self-dual (super) vertex operator algebras. In the cases with spacetime supersymmetry, we show that the BPS states form a module for a Borcherds-Kac-Moody (BKM) (super)algebra, and we prove that for each model the BKM (super)algebra is a symmetry of genus zero BPS string amplitudes. We compute the supersymmetric indices of these models using both Hamiltonian and path integral formalisms. The path integrals are manifestly automorphic forms closely related to the Borcherds-Weyl-Kac denominator. Along the way, we comment on various subtleties inherent to these low-dimensional string compactifications.
Observations restrict the parameter space of Holographic Dark Energy (HDE) so that a turning point in the Hubble parameter $H(z)$ is inevitable. Concretely, cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and Type Ia supernovae (SNE) data put the turning point in the future, but removing SNE results in an observational turning point at positive redshift. From the perspective of theory, not only does the turning point violate the Null Energy Condition (NEC), but as we argue, it may be interpreted as an evolution of the Hubble constant $H_0$ with redshift, which is at odds with the very FLRW framework within which data has been analysed. Tellingly, neither of these are problems for the flat $\Lambda$CDM model, and a direct comparison of fits further disfavours HDE relative to flat $\Lambda$CDM.
The conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a useful risk measure in fields such as machine learning, finance, insurance, energy, etc. When measuring very extreme risk, the commonly used CVaR estimation method of sample averaging does not work well due to limited data above the value-at-risk (VaR), the quantile corresponding to the CVaR level. To mitigate this problem, the CVaR can be estimated by extrapolating above a lower threshold than the VaR using a generalized Pareto distribution (GPD), which is often referred to as the peaks-over-threshold (POT) approach. This method often requires a very high threshold to fit well, leading to high variance in estimation, and can induce significant bias if the threshold is chosen too low. In this paper, we derive a new expression for the GPD approximation error of the CVaR, a bias term induced by the choice of threshold, as well as a bias correction method for the estimated GPD parameters. This leads to the derivation of a new estimator for the CVaR that we prove to be asymptotically unbiased. In a practical setting, we show through experiments that our estimator provides a significant performance improvement compared with competing CVaR estimators in finite samples. As a consequence of our bias correction method, it is also shown that a much lower threshold can be selected without introducing significant bias. This allows a larger portion of data to be be used in CVaR estimation compared with the typical POT approach, leading to more stable estimates. As secondary results, a new estimator for a second-order parameter of heavy-tailed distributions is derived, as well as a confidence interval for the CVaR which enables quantifying the level of variability in our estimator.
In this paper we have studied subgrid multiscale stabilized formulation with dynamic subscales for non-Newtonian Casson fluid flow model tightly coupled with variable coefficients ADR ($VADR$) equation. The Casson viscosity coefficient is taken to be dependent upon solute mass concentration. This paper presents the stability and convergence analyses of the stabilized finite element solution. The proposed expressions of the stabilization parameters helps in obtaining optimal order of convergences. Appropriate numerical experiments have been provided.
The mushroom body of the fruit fly brain is one of the best studied systems in neuroscience. At its core it consists of a population of Kenyon cells, which receive inputs from multiple sensory modalities. These cells are inhibited by the anterior paired lateral neuron, thus creating a sparse high dimensional representation of the inputs. In this work we study a mathematical formalization of this network motif and apply it to learning the correlational structure between words and their context in a corpus of unstructured text, a common natural language processing (NLP) task. We show that this network can learn semantic representations of words and can generate both static and context-dependent word embeddings. Unlike conventional methods (e.g., BERT, GloVe) that use dense representations for word embedding, our algorithm encodes semantic meaning of words and their context in the form of sparse binary hash codes. The quality of the learned representations is evaluated on word similarity analysis, word-sense disambiguation, and document classification. It is shown that not only can the fruit fly network motif achieve performance comparable to existing methods in NLP, but, additionally, it uses only a fraction of the computational resources (shorter training time and smaller memory footprint).
Despite previous success in generating audio-driven talking heads, most of the previous studies focus on the correlation between speech content and the mouth shape. Facial emotion, which is one of the most important features on natural human faces, is always neglected in their methods. In this work, we present Emotional Video Portraits (EVP), a system for synthesizing high-quality video portraits with vivid emotional dynamics driven by audios. Specifically, we propose the Cross-Reconstructed Emotion Disentanglement technique to decompose speech into two decoupled spaces, i.e., a duration-independent emotion space and a duration dependent content space. With the disentangled features, dynamic 2D emotional facial landmarks can be deduced. Then we propose the Target-Adaptive Face Synthesis technique to generate the final high-quality video portraits, by bridging the gap between the deduced landmarks and the natural head poses of target videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Unbiased random vectors i.e. distributed uniformly in n-dimensional space, are widely applied and the computational cost of generating a vector increases only linearly with n. On the other hand, generating uniformly distributed random vectors in its subspaces typically involves the inefficiency of rejecting vectors falling outside, or re-weighting a non-uniformly distributed set of samples. Both approaches become severely ineffective as n increases. We present an efficient algorithm to generate uniformly distributed random directions in n-dimensional cones, to aid searching and sampling tasks in high dimensions.
By using an equivalent form of the uniform Lopatinski condition for 1-shocks, we prove that the stability condition found by the energy method in [A. Morando, Y. Trakhinin, P. Trebeschi, Structural stability of shock waves in 2D compressible elastodynamics, Math. Ann. 378 (2020) 1471-1504] for the rectilinear shock waves in two-dimensional flows of compressible isentropic inviscid elastic materials is not only sufficient but also necessary for uniform stability (implying structural nonlinear stability of corresponding curved shock waves). The key point of our spectral analysis is a delicate study of the transition between uniform and weak stability. Moreover, we prove that the rectilinear shock waves are never violently unstable, i.e., they are always either uniformly or weakly stable.
We consider the Grassman manifold $G(E)$ as the subset of all orthogonal projections of a given Euclidean space $E$ and obtain some explicit formulas concerning the differential geometry of $G(E)$ as a submanifold of $L(E,E)$ endowed with the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product. Most of these formulas can be naturally extended to the infinite dimensional Hilbert space case.
Fair representation learning is an attractive approach that promises fairness of downstream predictors by encoding sensitive data. Unfortunately, recent work has shown that strong adversarial predictors can still exhibit unfairness by recovering sensitive attributes from these representations. In this work, we present Fair Normalizing Flows (FNF), a new approach offering more rigorous fairness guarantees for learned representations. Specifically, we consider a practical setting where we can estimate the probability density for sensitive groups. The key idea is to model the encoder as a normalizing flow trained to minimize the statistical distance between the latent representations of different groups. The main advantage of FNF is that its exact likelihood computation allows us to obtain guarantees on the maximum unfairness of any potentially adversarial downstream predictor. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of FNF in enforcing various group fairness notions, as well as other attractive properties such as interpretability and transfer learning, on a variety of challenging real-world datasets.
Broader disclosive transparency$-$truth and clarity in communication regarding the function of AI systems$-$is widely considered desirable. Unfortunately, it is a nebulous concept, difficult to both define and quantify. This is problematic, as previous work has demonstrated possible trade-offs and negative consequences to disclosive transparency, such as a confusion effect, where "too much information" clouds a reader's understanding of what a system description means. Disclosive transparency's subjective nature has rendered deep study into these problems and their remedies difficult. To improve this state of affairs, We introduce neural language model-based probabilistic metrics to directly model disclosive transparency, and demonstrate that they correlate with user and expert opinions of system transparency, making them a valid objective proxy. Finally, we demonstrate the use of these metrics in a pilot study quantifying the relationships between transparency, confusion, and user perceptions in a corpus of real NLP system descriptions.
We introduce a novel combination of Bayesian Models (BMs) and Neural Networks (NNs) for making predictions with a minimum expected risk. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, the data efficiency and interpretability of a BM with the speed of a NN. For a BM, making predictions with the lowest expected loss requires integrating over the posterior distribution. When exact inference of the posterior predictive distribution is intractable, approximation methods are typically applied, e.g. Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. For MC, the variance of the estimator decreases with the number of samples - but at the expense of increased computational cost. Our approach removes the need for iterative MC simulation on the CPU at prediction time. In brief, it works by fitting a NN to synthetic data generated using the BM. In a single feed-forward pass, the NN gives a set of point-wise approximations to the BM's posterior predictive distribution for a given observation. We achieve risk minimized predictions significantly faster than standard methods with a negligible loss on the test dataset. We combine this approach with Active Learning to minimize the amount of data required for fitting the NN. This is done by iteratively labeling more data in regions with high predictive uncertainty of the NN.
We study the roots of a random polynomial over the field of $p$-adic numbers. For a random monic polynomial with i.i.d. coefficients in $\mathbb{Z}_p$, we obtain an estimate for the expected number of roots of this polynomial. In particular, if the coefficients take the values $\pm1$ with equal probability, the expected number of $p$-adic roots converges to $\left(p-1\right)/\left(p+1\right)$ as the degree of the polynomial tends to $\infty$.
Datasets are mathematical objects (e.g., point clouds, matrices, graphs, images, fields/functions) that have shape. This shape encodes important knowledge about the system under study. Topology is an area of mathematics that provides diverse tools to characterize the shape of data objects. In this work, we study a specific tool known as the Euler characteristic (EC). The EC is a general, low-dimensional, and interpretable descriptor of topological spaces defined by data objects. We revise the mathematical foundations of the EC and highlight its connections with statistics, linear algebra, field theory, and graph theory. We discuss advantages offered by the use of the EC in the characterization of complex datasets; to do so, we illustrate its use in different applications of interest in chemical engineering such as process monitoring, flow cytometry, and microscopy. We show that the EC provides a descriptor that effectively reduces complex datasets and that this reduction facilitates tasks such as visualization, regression, classification, and clustering.
Purpose: To develop a deep learning method on a nonlinear manifold to explore the temporal redundancy of dynamic signals to reconstruct cardiac MRI data from highly undersampled measurements. Methods: Cardiac MR image reconstruction is modeled as general compressed sensing (CS) based optimization on a low-rank tensor manifold. The nonlinear manifold is designed to characterize the temporal correlation of dynamic signals. Iterative procedures can be obtained by solving the optimization model on the manifold, including gradient calculation, projection of the gradient to tangent space, and retraction of the tangent space to the manifold. The iterative procedures on the manifold are unrolled to a neural network, dubbed as Manifold-Net. The Manifold-Net is trained using in vivo data with a retrospective electrocardiogram (ECG)-gated segmented bSSFP sequence. Results: Experimental results at high accelerations demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain improved reconstruction compared with a compressed sensing (CS) method k-t SLR and two state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods, DC-CNN and CRNN. Conclusion: This work represents the first study unrolling the optimization on manifolds into neural networks. Specifically, the designed low-rank manifold provides a new technical route for applying low-rank priors in dynamic MR imaging.
Surgical training in medical school residency programs has followed the apprenticeship model. The learning and assessment process is inherently subjective and time-consuming. Thus, there is a need for objective methods to assess surgical skills. Here, we use the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to systematically survey the literature on the use of Deep Neural Networks for automated and objective surgical skill assessment, with a focus on kinematic data as putative markers of surgical competency. There is considerable recent interest in deep neural networks (DNN) due to the availability of powerful algorithms, multiple datasets, some of which are publicly available, as well as efficient computational hardware to train and host them. We have reviewed 530 papers, of which we selected 25 for this systematic review. Based on this review, we concluded that DNNs are powerful tools for automated, objective surgical skill assessment using both kinematic and video data. The field would benefit from large, publicly available, annotated datasets that are representative of the surgical trainee and expert demographics and multimodal data beyond kinematics and videos.
The constant changes in the software industry, practices, and methodologies impose challenges to teaching and learning current software engineering concepts and skills. DevOps is particularly challenging because it covers technical concepts, such as pipeline automation, and non-technical ones, such as team roles and project management. The present study investigates a course setup to introduce these concepts to software engineering undergraduates. We designed the course by employing coding to associate DevOps concepts to Agile, Lean, and Open source practices and tools. We present the main aspects of this project-oriented DevOps course, with 240 students enrolled in it since its first offering in 2016. We conducted an empirical study, with both a quantitative and qualitative analysis, to evaluate this project-oriented course setup. We collected the data from the projects repository and students perceptions from a questionnaire. We mined 148 repositories (corresponding to 72 projects) and obtained 86 valid responses to the questionnaire. We also mapped the concepts which are more challenging to students learn from experience. The results evidence that first-hand experience facilitates the comprehension of DevOps concepts and enriches classes discussions. We present a set of lessons learned, which may help professors better design and conduct project-oriented courses to cover DevOps concepts.
We examine the problem of generating temporally and spatially dense 4D human body motion. On the one hand generative modeling has been extensively studied as a per time-frame static fitting problem for dense 3D models such as mesh representations, where the temporal aspect is left out of the generative model. On the other hand, temporal generative models exist for sparse human models such as marker-based capture representations, but have not to our knowledge been extended to dense 3D shapes. We propose to bridge this gap with a generative auto-encoder-based framework, which encodes morphology, global locomotion including translation and rotation, and multi-frame temporal motion as a single latent space vector. To assess its generalization and factorization abilities, we train our model on a cyclic locomotion subset of AMASS, leveraging the dense surface models it provides for an extensive set of motion captures. Our results validate the ability of the model to reconstruct 4D sequences of human locomotions within a low error bound, and the meaningfulness of latent space interpolation between latent vectors representing different multi-frame sequences and locomotion types. We also illustrate the benefits of the approach for 4D human motion prediction of future frames from initial human locomotion frames, showing promising abilities of our model to learn realistic spatio-temporal features of human motion. We show that our model allows for data completion of both spatially and temporally sparse data.
The results of the analysis of the deviation of the force equilibrium for ions from the neoclassical theory prediction, calculated using the direct measurements of the radial electric field, in the view of its possible local and nonlocal correlation with the profiles of electron, Te, and ion, Ti, temperatures in the T-10 tokamak are presented. Local correlations are analyzed by means of the Pearson's correlation. Nonlocal correlations are treated with an inverse problem under the assumption of an integral equation relationship between the deviation and Te and Ti profiles. The discharges with zero, weak and strong auxiliary heating (electron cyclotron resonance heating) are analyzed. It is found that the electrons substantially (not less than ions) contribute to the deviation of the ion equilibrium from the neoclassical theory prediction both in the local and nonlocal models.
Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) can adopt one of the several possible structures, with most common being the trigonal prismatic and octahedral symmetry phases. Since the structure determines the electronic properties, being able to predict phase-preferences of TMDs from just the knowledge of the constituent atoms is highly desired, but has remained a long-standing problem. In this study, we combine high-throughput quantum mechanical computations with machine learning algorithms to discover novel TMDs and study their chemical stability, as well as their phase preferences. Our analysis provides insights into determining physiochemical factors that dictate the phase-preference of a TMD, identifying and even going beyond the attributes considered by earlier researchers in predicting crystal structures. We show that the machine learning algorithms are powerful tools that can be used not only to find new materials with targeted properties, but also to find connections between elemental attributes and the target property/properties that were not previously obvious.
Incorporating external knowledge into Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems has been widely studied in the generic domain. In this paper, we focus on clinical domain where only limited data is accessible and interpretability is important. Recent advancement in technology and the acceleration of clinical trials has resulted in the discovery of new drugs, procedures as well as medical conditions. These factors motivate towards building robust zero-shot NER systems which can quickly adapt to new medical terminology. We propose an auxiliary gazetteer model and fuse it with an NER system, which results in better robustness and interpretability across different clinical datasets. Our gazetteer based fusion model is data efficient, achieving +1.7 micro-F1 gains on the i2b2 dataset using 20% training data, and brings + 4.7 micro-F1 gains on novel entity mentions never presented during training. Moreover, our fusion model is able to quickly adapt to new mentions in gazetteers without re-training and the gains from the proposed fusion model are transferable to related datasets.
Using a series of detector measurements taken at different locations to localize a source of radiation is a well-studied problem. The source of radiation is sometimes constrained to a single point-like source, in which case the location of the point source can be found using techniques such as maximum likelihood. Recent advancements have shown the ability to locate point sources in 2D and even 3D, but few have studied the effect of intervening material on the problem. In this work we examine gamma-ray data taken from a freely moving system and develop voxelized 3-D models of the scene using data from the onboard LiDAR. Ray casting is used to compute the distance each gamma ray travels through the scene material, which is then used to calculate attenuation assuming a single attenuation coefficient for solids within the geometry. Parameter estimation using maximum likelihood is performed to simultaneously find the attenuation coefficient, source activity, and source position that best match the data. Using a simulation, we validate the ability of this method to reconstruct the true location and activity of a source, along with the true attenuation coefficient of the structure it is inside, and then we apply the method to measured data with sources and find good agreement.
Quantum classification and hypothesis testing are two tightly related subjects, the main difference being that the former is data driven: how to assign to quantum states $\rho(x)$ the corresponding class $c$ (or hypothesis) is learnt from examples during training, where $x$ can be either tunable experimental parameters or classical data "embedded" into quantum states. Does the model generalize? This is the main question in any data-driven strategy, namely the ability to predict the correct class even of previously unseen states. Here we establish a link between quantum machine learning classification and quantum hypothesis testing (state and channel discrimination) and then show that the accuracy and generalization capability of quantum classifiers depend on the (R\'enyi) mutual informations $I(C{:}Q)$ and $I_2(X{:}Q)$ between the quantum state space $Q$ and the classical parameter space $X$ or class space $C$. Based on the above characterization, we then show how different properties of $Q$ affect classification accuracy and generalization, such as the dimension of the Hilbert space, the amount of noise, and the amount of neglected information from $X$ via, e.g., pooling layers. Moreover, we introduce a quantum version of the Information Bottleneck principle that allows us to explore the various tradeoffs between accuracy and generalization. Finally, in order to check our theoretical predictions, we study the classification of the quantum phases of an Ising spin chain, and we propose the Variational Quantum Information Bottleneck (VQIB) method to optimize quantum embeddings of classical data to favor generalization.
Data augmentation has been successfully used in many areas of deep-learning to significantly improve model performance. Typically data augmentation simulates realistic variations in data in order to increase the apparent diversity of the training-set. However, for opcode-based malware analysis, where deep learning methods are already achieving state of the art performance, it is not immediately clear how to apply data augmentation. In this paper we study different methods of data augmentation starting with basic methods using fixed transformations and moving to methods that adapt to the data. We propose a novel data augmentation method based on using an opcode embedding layer within the network and its corresponding opcode embedding matrix to perform adaptive data augmentation during training. To the best of our knowledge this is the first paper to carry out a systematic study of different augmentation methods applied to opcode sequence based malware classification.
We consider the problem of finding the matching map between two sets of $d$ dimensional vectors from noisy observations, where the second set contains outliers. The matching map is then an injection, which can be consistently estimated only if the vectors of the second set are well separated. The main result shows that, in the high-dimensional setting, a detection region of unknown injection can be characterized by the sets of vectors for which the inlier-inlier distance is of order at least $d^{1/4}$ and the inlier-outlier distance is of order at least $d^{1/2}$. These rates are achieved using the estimated matching minimizing the sum of logarithms of distances between matched pairs of points. We also prove lower bounds establishing optimality of these rates. Finally, we report results of numerical experiments on both synthetic and real world data that illustrate our theoretical results and provide further insight into the properties of the estimators studied in this work.
Nonlinear Compton scattering is an inelastic scattering process where a photon is emitted due to the interaction between an electron and an intense laser field. With the development of X-ray free-electron lasers, the intensity of X-ray laser is greatly enhanced, and the signal from X-ray nonlinear Compton scattering is no longer weak. Although the nonlinear Compton scattering by an initially free electron has been thoroughly investigated, the mechanis of nonrelativistic nonlinear Compton scattering of X-ray photons by bound electrons is unclear yet. Here, we present a frequency-domain formulation based on the nonperturbative quantum electrodynamic to study nonlinear Compton scattering of two photons off a bound electron inside an atom in a strong X-ray laser field. In contrast to previous theoretical works, our results clearly reveal the existence of anomalous redshift phenomenon observed experimentally by Fuchs et al. (Nat. Phys. 11, 964 (2015)) and suggest its origin as the binding energy of the electron as well as the momentum transfer from incident photons to the electron during the scattering process. Our work builds a bridge between intense-laser atomic physics and Compton scattering process that can be used to study atomic structure and dynamics at high laser intensities.
Two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials attract unprecedented attention due to the spontaneous-symmetry-breaking induced novel properties and multifarious potential applications. Here we systematically investigate a large family (148) of 2D MGeX3 (M = metal elements, X = O/S/Se/Te) by means of the high-throughput first-principles calculations, and focus on their possible ferroic properties including ferromagnetism, ferroelectricity, and ferroelasticity. We discover eight stable 2D ferromagnets including five semiconductors and three half-metals, 21 2D antiferromagnets, and 11 stable 2D ferroelectric semiconductors including two multiferroic materials. Particularly, MnGeSe3 and MnGeTe3 are predicted to be room-temperature 2D ferromagnetic half metals with Tc of 490 and 308 K, respectively. It is probably for the first time that ferroelectricity is uncovered in 2D MGeX3 family, which derives from the spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by unexpected displacements of Ge-Ge atomic pairs, and we also reveal that the electric polarizations are in proportion to the ratio of electronegativity of X and M atoms, and IVB group metal elements are highly favored for 2D ferroelectricity. Magnetic tunnel junction and water-splitting photocatalyst based on 2D ferroic MGeX3 are proposed as examples of wide potential applications. The atlas of ferroicity in 2D MGeX3 materials will spur great interest in experimental studies and would lead to diverse applications.
Understanding user dynamics in online communities has become an active research topic and can provide valuable insights for human behavior analysis and community management. In this work, we investigate the "bandwagon fan" phenomenon, a special case of user dynamics, to provide a large-scale characterization of online fan loyalty in the context of professional sports teams. We leverage the existing structure of NBA-related discussion forums on Reddit, investigate the general bandwagon patterns, and trace the behavior of bandwagon fans to capture latent behavioral characteristics. We observe that better teams attract more bandwagon fans, but they do not necessarily come from weak teams. Our analysis of bandwagon fan flow also shows different trends for different teams, as the playoff season progresses. Furthermore, we compare bandwagon users with non-bandwagon users in terms of their activity and language usage. We find that bandwagon users write shorter comments but receive better feedback, and use words that show less attachment to their affiliated teams. Our observations allow for more effective identification of bandwagon users and prediction of users' future bandwagon behavior in a season, as demonstrated by the significant improvement over the baseline method in our evaluation results.