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We study cosmic evolution based on the fixed points in the dynamical analysis of the Degenerate Higher-Order Scalar-Tensor (DHOST) theories. We consider the DHOST theories in which the propagation speed of gravitational waves is equal to the speed of light, the tensor perturbations do not decay to dark energy perturbations, and the scaling solutions exist. The scaling fixed point associated with late time acceleration of universe can be either stable or saddle depending on the parameters of the theory. For some ranges of the parameters, the accelerated scaling point and the field dominated point can be simultaneously stable. Cosmic evolution will reach the accelerated scaling point if the time derivative of the scalar field in the theory is positive during the matter domination. If the time derivative of the scalar field is negative during the matter domination, the background universe will evolve towards the field dominated point. The density parameter of the matter can be larger than unity before reaching the scaling fixed point if the deviation from the Einstein theory of gravity is too large and the initial conditions for the dynamical variables during the matter domination are significantly different from the accelerated scaling point. The stabilities of $\phi$MDE fixed point are similar to the coupled dark energy models. In our consideration, the universe can only evolve from the $\phi$MDE to the field dominated point.
We study a bottom-up holographic description of the QCD colour superconducting phase in the presence of higher derivative corrections. We expand this holographic model in the context of Gauss-Bonnet (GB) gravity. The Cooper pair condensate has been investigated in the deconfinement phase for different values of the GB coupling parameter $\lambda_{G B}$, we observe a change in the value of the critical chemical potential $\mu_c$ in comparison to Einstein gravity. We find that $\mu_c$ grows as $\lambda_{G B}$ increases. We add four fermion interactions and show that in the presence of these corrections the main interesting features of the model are still present and that the intrinsic attractive interaction can not be switched off. This study suggests to find GB corrections to equation of state of holographic QCD matter.
This paper proposes a new concept in which a digital twin derived from a digital product description will automatically perform assembly planning and orchestrate the production resources in a manufacturing cell. Thus the manufacturing cell has generic services with minimal assumptions about what kind of product will be assembled, while the digital product description is designed collaboratively between the designer at an OEM and automated services at potential manufacturers. This has several advantages. Firstly, the resulting versatile manufacturing facility can handle a broad variety of products with minimal or no reconfiguration effort, so it can cost-effectively offer its services to a large number of OEMs. Secondly, a solution is presented to the problem of performing concurrent product design and assembly planning over the organizational boundary. Thirdly, the product design at the OEM is not constrained to the capabilities of specific manufacturing facilities. The concept is presented in general terms in UML and an implementation is provided in a 3D simulation environment using Automation Markup Language for digital product descriptions. Finally, two case studies are presented and applications in a real industrial context are discussed.
We present a practical analysis of the fermion sign problem in fermionic path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations in the grand-canonical ensemble (GCE). As a representative model system, we consider electrons in a $2D$ harmonic trap. We find that the sign problem in the GCE is even more severe than in the canonical ensemble at the same conditions, which, in general, makes the latter the preferred option. Despite these difficulties, we show that fermionic PIMC simulations in the GCE are still feasible in many cases, which potentially gives access to important quantities like the compressiblity or the Matsubara Greens function. This has important implications for contemporary fields of research such as warm dense matter, ultracold atoms, and electrons in quantum dots.
We present a general approach to obtain effective field theories for topological crystalline insulators whose low-energy theories are described by massive Dirac fermions. We show that these phases are characterized by the responses to spatially dependent mass parameters with interfaces. These mass interfaces implement the dimensional reduction procedure such that the state of interest is smoothly deformed into a topological crystal, which serves as a representative state of a phase in the general classification. Effective field theories are obtained by integrating out the massive Dirac fermions, and various quantized topological terms are uncovered. Our approach can be generalized to other crystalline symmetry protected topological phases and provides a general strategy to derive effective field theories for such crystalline topological phases.
We investigate the creation of scalar particles inside a region delimited by a bubble which is expanding with non-zero acceleration. The bubble is modelled as a thin shell and plays the role of a moving boundary, thus influencing the fluctuations of the test scalar field inside it. Bubbles expanding in Minkowski spacetime as well as those dividing two de Sitter spacetimes are explored in a unified way. Our results for the Bogoliubov coefficient $\beta_k$ in the adiabatic approximation show that in all cases the creation of scalar particles decreases with the mass, and is much more significant in the case of nonzero curvature. They also show that the dynamics of the bubble and its size are relevant for particle creation, but in the dS-dS case the combination of both effects leads to a behaviour different from that of Minkowski space-time, due to the presence of a length scale (the Hubble radius of the internal geometry).
Deep neural networks have emerged as very successful tools for image restoration and reconstruction tasks. These networks are often trained end-to-end to directly reconstruct an image from a noisy or corrupted measurement of that image. To achieve state-of-the-art performance, training on large and diverse sets of images is considered critical. However, it is often difficult and/or expensive to collect large amounts of training images. Inspired by the success of Data Augmentation (DA) for classification problems, in this paper, we propose a pipeline for data augmentation for accelerated MRI reconstruction and study its effectiveness at reducing the required training data in a variety of settings. Our DA pipeline, MRAugment, is specifically designed to utilize the invariances present in medical imaging measurements as naive DA strategies that neglect the physics of the problem fail. Through extensive studies on multiple datasets we demonstrate that in the low-data regime DA prevents overfitting and can match or even surpass the state of the art while using significantly fewer training data, whereas in the high-data regime it has diminishing returns. Furthermore, our findings show that DA can improve the robustness of the model against various shifts in the test distribution.
Quantum circuits that are classically simulatable tell us when quantum computation becomes less powerful than or equivalent to classical computation. Such classically simulatable circuits are of importance because they illustrate what makes universal quantum computation different from classical computers. In this work, we propose a novel family of classically simulatable circuits by making use of dual-unitary quantum circuits (DUQCs), which have been recently investigated as exactly solvable models of non-equilibrium physics, and we characterize their computational power. Specifically, we investigate the computational complexity of the problem of calculating local expectation values and the sampling problem of one-dimensional DUQCs, and we generalize them to two spatial dimensions. We reveal that a local expectation value of a DUQC is classically simulatable at an early time, which is linear in a system length. In contrast, in a late time, they can perform universal quantum computation, and the problem becomes a BQP-complete problem. Moreover, classical simulation of sampling from a DUQC turns out to be hard.
In this work, we consider a binary classification problem and cast it into a binary hypothesis testing framework, where the observations can be perturbed by an adversary. To improve the adversarial robustness of a classifier, we include an abstain option, where the classifier abstains from making a decision when it has low confidence about the prediction. We propose metrics to quantify the nominal performance of a classifier with an abstain option and its robustness against adversarial perturbations. We show that there exist a tradeoff between the two metrics regardless of what method is used to choose the abstain region. Our results imply that the robustness of a classifier with an abstain option can only be improved at the expense of its nominal performance. Further, we provide necessary conditions to design the abstain region for a 1- dimensional binary classification problem. We validate our theoretical results on the MNIST dataset, where we numerically show that the tradeoff between performance and robustness also exist for the general multi-class classification problems.
Off-policy evaluation learns a target policy's value with a historical dataset generated by a different behavior policy. In addition to a point estimate, many applications would benefit significantly from having a confidence interval (CI) that quantifies the uncertainty of the point estimate. In this paper, we propose a novel deeply-debiasing procedure to construct an efficient, robust, and flexible CI on a target policy's value. Our method is justified by theoretical results and numerical experiments. A Python implementation of the proposed procedure is available at https://github.com/RunzheStat/D2OPE.
The successful amalgamation of cryptocurrency and consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices can pave the way for novel applications in machine-to-machine economy. However, the lack of scalability and heavy resource requirements of initial blockchain designs hinders the integration as they prioritized decentralization and security. Numerous solutions have been proposed since the emergence of Bitcoin to achieve this goal. However, none of them seem to dominate and thus it is unclear how consumer devices will be adopting these approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we critically review the existing integration approaches and cryptocurrency designs that strive to enable micro-payments among consumer devices. We identify and discuss solutions under three main categories; direct integration, payment channel network and new cryptocurrency design. The first approach utilizes a full node to interact with the payment system. Offline channel payment is suggested as a second layer solution to solve the scalability issue and enable instant payment with low fee. New designs converge to semi-centralized scheme and focuson lightweight consensus protocol that does not require highcomputation power which might mean loosening the initial designchoices in favor of scalability. We evaluate the pros and cons ofeach of these approaches and then point out future researchchallenges. Our goal is to help researchers and practitioners tobetter focus their efforts to facilitate micro-payment adoptions.
We show that it is possible to have arbitrarily long sequences of Alices and Bobs so every (Alice, Bob) pair violates a Bell inequality. We propose an experiment to observe this effect with two Alices and two Bobs.
One of the main goal of large-scale structure surveys is to test the consistency of General Relativity at cosmological scales. In the $\Lambda$CDM model of cosmology, the relations between the fields describing the geometry and the content of our Universe are uniquely determined. In particular, the two gravitational potentials -- that describe the spatial and temporal fluctuations in the geometry -- are equal. Whereas large classes of dark energy models preserve this equality, theories of modified gravity generally create a difference between the potentials, known as anisotropic stress. Even though measuring this anisotropic stress is one of the key goals of large-scale structure surveys, there are currently no methods able to measure it directly. Current methods all rely on measurements of galaxy peculiar velocities (through redshift-space distortions), from which the time component of the metric is inferred, assuming that dark matter follows geodesics. If this is not the case, all the proposed tests fail to measure the anisotropic stress. In this letter, we propose a novel test which directly measures anisotropic stress, without relying on any assumption about the unknown dark matter. Our method uses relativistic effects in the galaxy number counts to provide a direct measurement of the time component of the metric. By comparing this with lensing observations our test provides a direct measurement of the anisotropic stress.
Intensification and poleward expansion of upwelling favourable winds have been predicted as a response to anthropogenic global climate change and have recently been documented in most Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystems of the world. To identify how these processes are impacting nearshore oceanographic habitats and, especially, long term trends of primary productivity in the Humboldt Upwelling Ecosystem (HUE), we analysed time series of sea level pressure, wind stress, sea surface and atmospheric surface temperatures, and Chlorophyll-a, as a proxy for primary productivity, along 26{\deg} - 36{\deg} S. We show that climate induced trends in primary productivity are highly heterogeneous across the region. On the one hand, the well documented poleward migration of the South Pacific Anticyclone (SPA) has led to decreased spring upwelling winds in the region between ca. 30{\deg} and 34{\deg} S, and to their intensification to the south. Decreased winds have produced slight increases in sea surface temperature and a pronounced and meridionally extensive decrease in surface Chlorophyll-a in this region of central Chile. To the north of 30{\deg} S, significant increases in upwelling winds, decreased SST, and enhanced Chlorophyll-a concentration are observed in the nearshore. We show that this increased in upwelling driven coastal productivity is probably produced by the increased land-sea pressure gradients (Bakun's effect) that have occurred over the past two decades north of 30{\deg} S. Thus, climate drivers along the HUE are inducing contrasting trends in oceanographic conditions and primary productivity, which can have far-reaching consequences for coastal pelagic and benthic ecosystems and lead to geographic displacements of the major fisheries.
Extensions of a set partition obtained by imposing bounds on the size of the parts and the coloring of some of the elements are examined. Combinatorial properties and the generating functions of some counting sequences associated with these partitions are established. Connections with Riordan arrays are presented.
Finding the largest cardinality feasible subset of an infeasible set of linear constraints is the Maximum Feasible Subsystem problem (MAX FS). Solving this problem is crucial in a wide range of applications such as machine learning and compressive sensing. Although MAX FS is NP-hard, useful heuristic algorithms exist, but these can be slow for large problems. We extend the existing heuristics for the case of dense constraint matrices to greatly increase their speed while preserving or improving solution quality. We test the extended algorithms on two applications that have dense constraint matrices: binary classification, and sparse recovery in compressive sensing. In both cases, speed is greatly increased with no loss of accuracy.
Simulations of high energy density physics are expensive in terms of computational resources. In particular, the computation of opacities of plasmas in the non-local thermal equilibrium (NLTE) regime can consume as much as 90\% of the total computational time of radiation hydrodynamics simulations for high energy density physics applications. Previous work has demonstrated that a combination of fully-connected autoencoders and a deep jointly-informed neural network (DJINN) can successfully replace the standard NLTE calculations for the opacity of krypton. This work expands this idea to combining multiple elements into a single surrogate model with the focus here being on the autoencoder.
We consider the minimal seesaw model, the Standard Model extended by two right-handed neutrinos, for explaining the neutrino masses and mixing angles measured in oscillation experiments. When one of right-handed neutrinos is lighter than the electroweak scale, it can give a sizable contribution to neutrinoless double beta ($0\nu \beta \beta$) decay. We show that the detection of the $0 \nu \beta \beta$ decay by future experiments gives a significant implication to the search for such light right-handed neutrino.
In the Stochastic Thermodynamics theory, heat is a random variable with a probability distribution associated. Studies in the distribution of heat are mostly in the overdamped regime. Here we solve the heat distribution in the underdamped regime for three different cases: the free particle, the linear potential, and the harmonic potential. The results are exact and generalize known results in the literature.
For safety of autonomous driving, vehicles need to be able to drive under various lighting, weather, and visibility conditions in different environments. These external and environmental factors, along with internal factors associated with sensors, can pose significant challenges to perceptual data processing, hence affecting the decision-making and control of the vehicle. In this work, we address this critical issue by introducing a framework for analyzing robustness of the learning algorithm w.r.t varying quality in the image input for autonomous driving. Using the results of sensitivity analysis, we further propose an algorithm to improve the overall performance of the task of "learning to steer". The results show that our approach is able to enhance the learning outcomes up to 48%. A comparative study drawn between our approach and other related techniques, such as data augmentation and adversarial training, confirms the effectiveness of our algorithm as a way to improve the robustness and generalization of neural network training for autonomous driving.
Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) aims to solve tasks in target domain by utilizing transferable information learned from the available source domain and a few labeled target data. However, source data is not always accessible in practical scenarios, which restricts the application of SSDA in real world circumstances. In this paper, we propose a novel task named Semi-supervised Source Hypothesis Transfer (SSHT), which performs domain adaptation based on source trained model, to generalize well in target domain with a few supervisions. In SSHT, we are facing two challenges: (1) The insufficient labeled target data may result in target features near the decision boundary, with the increased risk of mis-classification; (2) The data are usually imbalanced in source domain, so the model trained with these data is biased. The biased model is prone to categorize samples of minority categories into majority ones, resulting in low prediction diversity. To tackle the above issues, we propose Consistency and Diversity Learning (CDL), a simple but effective framework for SSHT by facilitating prediction consistency between two randomly augmented unlabeled data and maintaining the prediction diversity when adapting model to target domain. Encouraging consistency regularization brings difficulty to memorize the few labeled target data and thus enhances the generalization ability of the learned model. We further integrate Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization into our method to enhance the discriminability and diversity. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing SSDA methods and unsupervised model adaptation methods on DomainNet, Office-Home and Office-31 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Wang-xd1899/SSHT.
Dual function radar communications (DFRC) systems are attractive technologies for autonomous vehicles, which utilize electromagnetic waves to constantly sense the environment while simultaneously communicating with neighbouring devices. An emerging approach to implement DFRC systems is to embed information in radar waveforms via index modulation (IM). Implementation of DFRC schemes in vehicular systems gives rise to strict constraints in terms of cost, power efficiency, and hardware complexity. In this paper, we extend IM-based DFRC systems to utilize sparse arrays and frequency modulated continuous waveforms (FMCWs), which are popular in automotive radar for their simplicity and low hardware complexity. The proposed FMCW-based radar-communications system (FRaC) operates at reduced cost and complexity by transmitting with a reduced number of radio frequency modules, combined with narrowband FMCW signalling. This is achieved via array sparsification in transmission, formulating a virtual multiple-input multiple-output array by combining the signals in one coherent processing interval, in which the narrowband waveforms are transmitted in a randomized manner. Performance analysis and numerical results show that the proposed radar scheme achieves similar resolution performance compared with a wideband radar system operating with a large receive aperture, while requiring less hardware overhead. For the communications subsystem, FRaC achieves higher rates and improved error rates compared to dual-function signalling based on conventional phase modulation.
We deploy and demonstrate the capabilities of the magnetic field model developed by Ewertowski & Basu (2013) by fitting observed polarimetry data of the prestellar core FeSt 1-457. The analytic hourglass magnetic field function derived directly from Maxwell's equations yields a central-to-surface magnetic field strength ratio in the equatorial plane, as well as magnetic field directions with relative magnitudes throughout the core. This fit emerges from a comparison of a single plane of the model with the polarization map that results from the integrated properties of the magnetic field and dust throughout the core. Importantly, our fit is independent of any assumed density profile of the core. We check the robustness of the fit by using the POLARIS code to create synthetic polarization maps that result from the integrated scattering and emission properties of the dust grains and their radiative transfer, employing an observationally-motivated density profile. We find that the synthetic polarization maps obtained from the model also provides a good fit to the observed polarimetry. Our model fits the striking feature of significant curvature of magnetic field lines in the outer part of FeSt 1-457. Combined with independent column density estimates, we infer that the core of size $R_{\rm gas}$ has a mildly supercritical mass-to-flux ratio and may have formed through dynamical motions starting from a significantly larger radius $R$. A breakdown of flux-freezing through neutral-ion slip (ambipolar diffusion) could be responsible for effecting such a transition from a large-scale magnetic field structure to a more compact gas structure.
Uncertainty relations play a crucial role in quantum mechanics. Well-defined methods exist for the derivation of such uncertainties for pairs of observables. Specific methods also allow to obtain time-energy uncertainty relations. However, in these cases, different approaches are associated with different meanings and interpretations. The one of interest here revolves around the idea of whether quantum mechanics inherently imposes a fundamental minimum duration for energy measurements with a certain precision. In our study, we investigate within the Page and Wootters timeless framework how energy measurements modify the relative "flow of time" between internal and external clocks. This provides a unified framework for discussing the subject, allowing us to recover previous results and derive new ones. In particular, we show that the duration of an energy measurement carried out by an external system cannot be performed arbitrarily fast from the perspective of the internal clock. Moreover, we show that during any energy measurement the evolution given by the internal clock is non-unitary.
Recent success of deep neural networks (DNNs) hinges on the availability of large-scale dataset; however, training on such dataset often poses privacy risks for sensitive training information. In this paper, we aim to explore the power of generative models and gradient sparsity, and propose a scalable privacy-preserving generative model DATALENS. Comparing with the standard PATE privacy-preserving framework which allows teachers to vote on one-dimensional predictions, voting on the high dimensional gradient vectors is challenging in terms of privacy preservation. As dimension reduction techniques are required, we need to navigate a delicate tradeoff space between (1) the improvement of privacy preservation and (2) the slowdown of SGD convergence. To tackle this, we take advantage of communication efficient learning and propose a novel noise compression and aggregation approach TOPAGG by combining top-k compression for dimension reduction with a corresponding noise injection mechanism. We theoretically prove that the DATALENS framework guarantees differential privacy for its generated data, and provide analysis on its convergence. To demonstrate the practical usage of DATALENS, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets including MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and high dimensional CelebA, and we show that, DATALENS significantly outperforms other baseline DP generative models. In addition, we adapt the proposed TOPAGG approach, which is one of the key building blocks in DATALENS, to DP SGD training, and show that it is able to achieve higher utility than the state-of-the-art DP SGD approach in most cases. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/DataLens.
We discuss a mechanism where charged lepton masses are derived from one-loop diagrams mediated by particles in a dark sector including a dark matter candidate. We focus on a scenario where the muon and electron masses are generated at one loop with new ${\cal O}(1)$ Yukawa couplings. The measured muon anomalous magnetic dipole moment, $(g-2)_\mu$, can be explained in this framework. As an important prediction, the muon and electron Yukawa couplings can largely deviate from their standard model predictions, and such deviations can be tested at High-Luminosity LHC and future $e^+e^-$ colliders.
We introduce a new combinatorial principle which we call $\clubsuit_{AD}$. This principle asserts the existence of a certain multi-ladder system with guessing and almost-disjointness features, and is shown to be sufficient for carrying out de Caux type constructions of topological spaces. Our main result states that strong instances of $\clubsuit_{AD}$ follow from the existence of a Souslin tree. It is also shown that the weakest instance of $\clubsuit_{AD}$ does not follow from the existence of an almost Souslin tree. As an application, we obtain a simple, de Caux type proof of Rudin's result that if there is a Souslin tree, then there is an $S$-space which is Dowker.
In this paper, we study the pattern occurrence in $k$-ary words. We prove an explicit upper bound on the number of $k$-ary words avoiding any given pattern using a random walk argument. Additionally, we reproduce several already known results and establish a simple connection among pattern occurrences in permutations and $k$-ary words. A simple consequence of this connection is that Wilf-equivalence of two patterns in words implies their Wilf-equivalence in permutations.
We propose a framework to model an operational conversational negation by applying worldly context (prior knowledge) to logical negation in compositional distributional semantics. Given a word, our framework can create its negation that is similar to how humans perceive negation. The framework corrects logical negation to weight meanings closer in the entailment hierarchy more than meanings further apart. The proposed framework is flexible to accommodate different choices of logical negations, compositions, and worldly context generation. In particular, we propose and motivate a new logical negation using matrix inverse. We validate the sensibility of our conversational negation framework by performing experiments, leveraging density matrices to encode graded entailment information. We conclude that the combination of subtraction negation and phaser in the basis of the negated word yields the highest Pearson correlation of 0.635 with human ratings.
In recent years, an intensive study of strong approximation of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with a drift coefficient that may have discontinuities in space has begun. In many of these results it is assumed that the drift coefficient satisfies piecewise regularity conditions and the diffusion coefficient is Lipschitz continuous and non-degenerate at the discontinuity points of the drift coefficient. For scalar SDEs of that type the best $L_p$-error rate known so far for approximation of the solution at the final time point is $3/4$ in terms of the number of evaluations of the driving Brownian motion and it is achieved by the transformed equidistant quasi-Milstein scheme, see [M\"uller-Gronbach, T., and Yaroslavtseva, L., A strong order 3/4 method for SDEs with discontinuous drift coefficient, to appear in IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis]. Recently in [M\"uller-Gronbach, T., and Yaroslavtseva, L., Sharp lower error bounds for strong approximation of SDEs with discontinuous drift coefficient by coupling of noise, arXiv:2010.00915 (2020)] it has been shown that for such SDEs the $L_p$-error rate $3/4$ can not be improved in general by no numerical method based on evaluations of the driving Brownian motion at fixed time points. In the present article we construct for the first time in the literature a method based on sequential evaluations of the driving Brownian motion, which achieves an $L_p$-error rate of at least $1$ in terms of the average number of evaluations of the driving Brownian motion for such SDEs.
Due to the strong coupling between magnetism and ferroelectricity, $(\mathrm{ND}_4)_2\mathrm{FeCl}_5\cdot\mathrm{D}_2\mathrm{O}$ exhibits several intriguing magnetic and electric phases. In this letter, we include high-order onsite spin anisotropic interactions in a spin model that successfully captures the ferroelectric phase transitions of $(\mathrm{ND}_4)_2\mathrm{FeCl}_5\cdot\mathrm{D}_2\mathrm{O}$ under a magnetic field and produces the large weights of high-order harmonic components in the cycloid structure that are observed from neutron diffraction experiments. Moreover, we predict a new ferroelectric phase sandwiched between the FE II and FE III phases in a magnetic field. Our results emphasize the importance of the high-order spin anisotropic interactions and provide a guideline to understand multiferroic materials with rich phase diagrams.
Continued population growth and urbanization is shifting research to consider the quality of urban green space over the quantity of these parks, woods, and wetlands. The quality of urban green space has been hitherto measured by expert assessments, including in-situ observations, surveys, and remote sensing analyses. Location data platforms, such as TripAdvisor, can provide people's opinion on many destinations and experiences, including UGS. This paper leverages Artificial Intelligence techniques for opinion mining and text classification using such platform's reviews as a novel approach to urban green space quality assessments. Natural Language Processing is used to analyze contextual information given supervised scores of words by implementing computational analysis. Such an application can support local authorities and stakeholders in their understanding of and justification for future investments in urban green space.
As a highly data-driven application, recommender systems could be affected by data bias, resulting in unfair results for different data groups, which could be a reason that affects the system performance. Therefore, it is important to identify and solve the unfairness issues in recommendation scenarios. In this paper, we address the unfairness problem in recommender systems from the user perspective. We group users into advantaged and disadvantaged groups according to their level of activity, and conduct experiments to show that current recommender systems will behave unfairly between two groups of users. Specifically, the advantaged users (active) who only account for a small proportion in data enjoy much higher recommendation quality than those disadvantaged users (inactive). Such bias can also affect the overall performance since the disadvantaged users are the majority. To solve this problem, we provide a re-ranking approach to mitigate this unfairness problem by adding constraints over evaluation metrics. The experiments we conducted on several real-world datasets with various recommendation algorithms show that our approach can not only improve group fairness of users in recommender systems, but also achieve better overall recommendation performance.
Humans race drones faster than algorithms, despite being limited to a fixed camera angle, body rate control, and response latencies in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. A better understanding of the ability of human pilots of selecting appropriate motor commands from highly dynamic visual information may provide key insights for solving current challenges in vision-based autonomous navigation. This paper investigates the relationship between human eye movements, control behavior, and flight performance in a drone racing task. We collected a multimodal dataset from 21 experienced drone pilots using a highly realistic drone racing simulator, also used to recruit professional pilots. Our results show task-specific improvements in drone racing performance over time. In particular, we found that eye gaze tracks future waypoints (i.e., gates), with first fixations occurring on average 1.5 seconds and 16 meters before reaching the gate. Moreover, human pilots consistently looked at the inside of the future flight path for lateral (i.e., left and right turns) and vertical maneuvers (i.e., ascending and descending). Finally, we found a strong correlation between pilots eye movements and the commanded direction of quadrotor flight, with an average visual-motor response latency of 220 ms. These results highlight the importance of coordinated eye movements in human-piloted drone racing. We make our dataset publicly available.
We investigate formation of Bose-Einstein condensates under non-equilibrium conditions using numerical simulations of the three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation. For this, we set initial random weakly nonlinear excitations and the forcing at high wave numbers, and study propagation of the turbulent spectrum toward the low wave numbers. Our primary goal is to compare the results for the evolving spectrum with the previous results obtained for the kinetic equation of weak wave turbulence. We demonstrate existence of a regime for which good agreement with the wave turbulence results is found in terms of the main features of the previously discussed self-similar solution. In particular, we find a reasonable agreement with the low-frequency and the high-frequency power-law asymptotics of the evolving solution, including the anomalous power-law exponent $x^* \approx 1.24$ for the three-dimensional waveaction spectrum. We also study the regimes of very weak turbulence, when the evolution is affected by the discreteness of the Fourier space, and the strong turbulence regime when emerging condensate modifies the wave dynamics and leads to formation of strongly nonlinear filamentary vortices.
Development of memory devices with ultimate performance has played a key role in innovation of modern electronics. As a mainstream technology nonvolatile memory devices have manifested high capacity and mechanical reliability, however current major bottlenecks include low extinction ratio and slow operational speed. Although substantial effort has been employed to improve their performance, a typical hundreds of micro- or even milli- second write time remains a few orders of magnitude longer than their volatile counterparts. We have demonstrated nonvolatile, floating-gate memory devices based on van der Waals heterostructures with atomically sharp interfaces between different functional elements, and achieved ultrahigh-speed programming/erasing operations verging on an ultimate theoretical limit of nanoseconds with extinction ratio up to 10^10. This extraordinary performance has allowed new device capabilities such as multi-bit storage, thus opening up unforeseen applications in the realm of modern nanoelectronics and offering future fabrication guidelines for device scale-up.
The optical bistability have been studied theoretically in a multi-mode optomechanical system with two mechanical oscillators independently coupled to two cavities in addition to direct tunnel coupling between cavities. It is proved that the bistable behavior of mean intracavity photon number in the right cavity can be tuned by adjusting the strength of the pump laser beam driving the left cavity. And the mean intracavity photon number is relatively larger in the red sideband regime than that in the blue sideband regime. Moreover, we have shown that the double optical bistability of intracavity photon in the right cavity and the two steady-state positions of mechanical resonators can be observed when the control field power is increased to a critical value. Besides, the critical values for observing bistability and double bistability can be tuned by adjusting the coupling coefficient between two cavities and the coupling rates between cavities mode and mechanical mode.
Let $1<g_1<\ldots<g_{\varphi(p-1)}<p-1$ be the ordered primitive roots modulo~$p$. We study the pseudorandomness of the binary sequence $(s_n)$ defined by $s_n\equiv g_{n+1}+g_{n+2}\bmod 2$, $n=0,1,\ldots$. In particular, we study the balance, linear complexity and $2$-adic complexity of $(s_n)$. We show that for a typical $p$ the sequence $(s_n)$ is quite unbalanced. However, there are still infinitely many $p$ such that $(s_n)$ is very balanced. We also prove similar results for the distribution of longer patterns. Moreover, we give general lower bounds on the linear complexity and $2$-adic complexity of~$(s_n)$ and state sufficient conditions for attaining their maximums. Hence, for carefully chosen $p$, these sequences are attractive candidates for cryptographic applications.
We study a frequency-modulated quantum harmonic oscillator as a thermodynamic system. For this purpose, we introduce an `invariant' thermal state by using Ermakov-Lewis-Riesenfeld invariant in place of an initial state. This prescription enables us to analyze the thermodynamics of the oscillator system regardless of whether the process is slowly varying (adiabatic) or not (nonadiabatic). We introduce a quantity $\mathscr{S}$ that describes the `nonadiabaticity' contribution satisfactorily. We write down the thermodynamics of the oscillator system by using this quantity in addition to the ordinary thermodynamical ones. As a result, we extend the first law of thermodynamics to nonadiabatic processes. We discuss universality for the method and some possible applications. In short, we suggest a schematic procedure for obtaining a measure of the `degree of nonadiabaticity' and present an application to the thermodynamics of the squeezed quantum oscillators.
Representation learning has been widely studied in the context of meta-learning, enabling rapid learning of new tasks through shared representations. Recent works such as MAML have explored using fine-tuning-based metrics, which measure the ease by which fine-tuning can achieve good performance, as proxies for obtaining representations. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing representations derived from a MAML-like algorithm, assuming the available tasks use approximately the same underlying representation. We then provide risk bounds on the best predictor found by fine-tuning via gradient descent, demonstrating that the algorithm can provably leverage the shared structure. The upper bound applies to general function classes, which we demonstrate by instantiating the guarantees of our framework in the logistic regression and neural network settings. In contrast, we establish the existence of settings where any algorithm, using a representation trained with no consideration for task-specific fine-tuning, performs as well as a learner with no access to source tasks in the worst case. This separation result underscores the benefit of fine-tuning-based methods, such as MAML, over methods with "frozen representation" objectives in few-shot learning.
Network pruning is an effective method to reduce the computational expense of over-parameterized neural networks for deployment on low-resource systems. Recent state-of-the-art techniques for retraining pruned networks such as weight rewinding and learning rate rewinding have been shown to outperform the traditional fine-tuning technique in recovering the lost accuracy (Renda et al., 2020), but so far it is unclear what accounts for such performance. In this work, we conduct extensive experiments to verify and analyze the uncanny effectiveness of learning rate rewinding. We find that the reason behind the success of learning rate rewinding is the usage of a large learning rate. Similar phenomenon can be observed in other learning rate schedules that involve large learning rates, e.g., the 1-cycle learning rate schedule (Smith et al., 2019). By leveraging the right learning rate schedule in retraining, we demonstrate a counter-intuitive phenomenon in that randomly pruned networks could even achieve better performance than methodically pruned networks (fine-tuned with the conventional approach). Our results emphasize the cruciality of the learning rate schedule in pruned network retraining - a detail often overlooked by practitioners during the implementation of network pruning. One-sentence Summary: We study the effective of different retraining mechanisms while doing pruning
For broad nanoscale applications, it is crucial to implement more functional properties, especially those ferroic orders, into two-dimensional materials. Here GdI$_3$ is theoretically identified as a honeycomb antiferromagnet with large $4f$ magnetic moment. The intercalation of metal atoms can dope electrons into Gd's $5d$-orbitals, which alters its magnetic state and lead to Peierls transition. Due to the strong electron-phonon coupling, the Peierls transition induces prominent ferroelasticity, making it a multiferroic system. The strain from undirectional stretching can be self-relaxed via resizing of triple ferroelastic domains, which can protect the magnet aganist mechnical breaking in flexible applications.
The temperature scales of screening of local magnetic and orbital moments are important characteristics of strongly correlated substances. In a recent paper X. Deng et al. using dynamic mean-field theory (DMFT) have identified temperature scales of the onset of screening in orbital and spin channels in some correlated metals from the deviation of temperature dependence of local susceptibility from the Curie law. We argue that the scales obtained this way are in fact much larger, than the corresponding Kondo temperatures, and, therefore, do not characterize the screening process. By reanalyzing the results of this paper we find the characteristic (Kondo) temperatures for screening in the spin channel $T_K\approx 100$ K for V$_2$O$_3$ and $T_K\approx 350$ K for Sr$_2$RuO$_4$, which are almost an order of magnitude smaller than those for the onset of the screening estimated in the paper ($1000$ K and $2300$ K, respectively); for V$_2$O$_3$ the obtained temperature scale $T_K$ is therefore comparable to the temperature of completion of the screening, $T^{\rm comp}\sim 25$ K, which shows that the screening in this material can be described in terms of a single temperature scale.
We present a multi-line survey of the interstellar medium (ISM) in two $z>6$ quasar (QSO) host galaxies, PJ231-20 ($z=6.59$) and PJ308-21 ($z=6.23$), and their two companion galaxies. Observations were carried out using the Atacama Large (sub-)Millimeter Array (ALMA). We targeted eleven transitions including atomic fine structure lines (FSLs) and molecular lines: [NII]$_{\rm 205\mu m}$, [CI]$_{\rm 369\mu m}$, CO ($J_{\rm up} = 7, 10, 15, 16$), H$_2$O $3_{12}-2_{21}$, $3_{21}-3_{12}$, $3_{03}-2_{12}$, and the OH$_{\rm 163\mu m}$ doublet. The underlying far-infrared (FIR) continuum samples the Rayleigh-Jeans tail of the respective dust emission. By combining this information with our earlier ALMA [CII]$_{\rm 158\mu m}$ observations, we explore the effects of star formation and black hole feedback on the galaxies' ISM using the CLOUDY radiative transfer models. We estimate dust masses, spectral indexes, IR luminosities, and star-formation rates from the FIR continuum. The analysis of the FSLs indicates that the [CII]$_{\rm 158\mu m}$ and [CI]$_{\rm 369\mu m}$ emission arises predominantly from the neutral medium in photodissociation regions (PDRs). We find that line deficits are in agreement with those of local luminous infrared galaxies. The CO spectral line energy distributions (SLEDs), reveal significant high-$J$ CO excitation in both quasar hosts. Our CO SLED modeling of the quasar PJ231-20 shows that PDRs dominate the molecular mass and CO luminosities for $J_{\rm up}\le 7$, while the $J_{\rm up}\ge10$ CO emission is likely driven by X-ray dissociation regions produced by the active galactic nucleus (AGN) at the very center of the quasar host [abridged].
The central idea of this review is to consider quantum field theory models relevant for particle physics and replace the fermionic matter in these models by a bosonic one. This is mostly motivated by the fact that bosons are more ``accessible'' and easier to manipulate for experimentalists, but this ``substitution'' also leads to new physics and novel phenomena. It allows us to gain new information about among other things confinement and the dynamics of the deconfinement transition. We will thus consider bosons in dynamical lattices corresponding to the bosonic Schwinger or Z$_2$ Bose-Hubbard models. Another central idea of this review concerns atomic simulators of paradigmatic models of particle physics theory such as the Creutz-Hubbard ladder, or Gross-Neveu-Wilson and Wilson-Hubbard models. Finally, we will briefly describe our efforts to design experimentally friendly simulators of these and other models relevant for particle physics.
How can neural networks trained by contrastive learning extract features from the unlabeled data? Why does contrastive learning usually need much stronger data augmentations than supervised learning to ensure good representations? These questions involve both the optimization and statistical aspects of deep learning, but can hardly be answered by analyzing supervised learning, where the target functions are the highest pursuit. Indeed, in self-supervised learning, it is inevitable to relate to the optimization/generalization of neural networks to how they can encode the latent structures in the data, which we refer to as the feature learning process. In this work, we formally study how contrastive learning learns the feature representations for neural networks by analyzing its feature learning process. We consider the case where our data are comprised of two types of features: the more semantically aligned sparse features which we want to learn from, and the other dense features we want to avoid. Theoretically, we prove that contrastive learning using $\mathbf{ReLU}$ networks provably learns the desired sparse features if proper augmentations are adopted. We present an underlying principle called $\textbf{feature decoupling}$ to explain the effects of augmentations, where we theoretically characterize how augmentations can reduce the correlations of dense features between positive samples while keeping the correlations of sparse features intact, thereby forcing the neural networks to learn from the self-supervision of sparse features. Empirically, we verified that the feature decoupling principle matches the underlying mechanism of contrastive learning in practice.
In this paper, we propose a transformer based approach for visual grounding. Unlike previous proposal-and-rank frameworks that rely heavily on pretrained object detectors or proposal-free frameworks that upgrade an off-the-shelf one-stage detector by fusing textual embeddings, our approach is built on top of a transformer encoder-decoder and is independent of any pretrained detectors or word embedding models. Termed VGTR -- Visual Grounding with TRansformers, our approach is designed to learn semantic-discriminative visual features under the guidance of the textual description without harming their location ability. This information flow enables our VGTR to have a strong capability in capturing context-level semantics of both vision and language modalities, rendering us to aggregate accurate visual clues implied by the description to locate the interested object instance. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art proposal-free approaches by a considerable margin on five benchmarks while maintaining fast inference speed.
Microservices have become popular in the past few years, attracting the interest of both academia and industry. Despite of its benefits, this new architectural style still poses important challenges, such as resilience, performance and evolution. Self-adaptation techniques have been applied recently as an alternative to solve or mitigate those problems. However, due to the range of quality attributes that affect microservice architectures, many different self-adaptation strategies can be used. Thus, to understand the state-of-the-art of the use of self-adaptation techniques and mechanisms in microservice-based systems, this work conducted a systematic mapping, in which 21 primary studies were analyzed considering qualitative and quantitative research questions. The results show that most studies focus on the Monitor phase (28.57%) of the adaptation control loop, address the self-healing property (23.81%), apply a reactive adaptation strategy (80.95%) in the system infrastructure level (47.62%) and use a centralized approach (38.10%). From those, it was possible to propose some research directions to fill existing gaps.
We recently found the globular cluster (GC) EXT8 in M31 to have an extremely low metallicity of [Fe/H]=-2.91+/-0.04 using high-resolution spectroscopy. Here we present a colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) for EXT8, obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Compared with the CMDs of metal-poor Galactic GCs, we find that the upper red giant branch (RGB) of EXT8 is about 0.03 mag bluer in F606W-F814W and slightly steeper, as expected from the low spectroscopic metallicity. The observed colour spread on the upper RGB is consistent with being caused entirely by the measurement uncertainties, and we place an upper limit of sigma(F606W-F814W)=0.015 mag on any intrinsic colour spread. The corresponding metallicity spread can be up to sigma([Fe/H])=0.2 dex or >0.7 dex, depending on the isochrone library adopted. The horizontal branch (HB) is located mostly on the blue side of the instability strip and has a tail extending to at least M(F606W)=+3, as in the Galactic GC M15. We identify two candidate RR Lyrae variables and several UV-luminous post-HB/post AGB star candidates, including one very bright (M(F300X)=-3.2) source near the centre of EXT8. The surface brightness of EXT8 out to a radius of 25 arcsec is well fitted by a Wilson-type profile with an ellipticity of epsilon=0.20, a semi-major axis core radius of 0.25", and a central surface brightness of 15.2 mag per square arcsec in the F606W band, with no evidence of extra-tidal structure. Overall, EXT8 has properties consistent with it being a "normal", but very metal-poor GC, and its combination of relatively high mass and very low metallicity thus remains challenging to explain in the context of GC formation theories operating within the hierarchical galaxy assembly paradigm.
The next-generation non-volatile memory (NVM) is striding into computer systems as a new tier as it incorporates both DRAM's byte-addressability and disk's persistency. Researchers and practitioners have considered building persistent memory by placing NVM on the memory bus for CPU to directly load and store data. As a result, cache-friendly data structures have been developed for NVM. One of them is the prevalent B+-tree. State-of-the-art in-NVM B+-trees mainly focus on the optimization of write operations (insertion and deletion). However, search is of vital importance for B+-tree. Not only search-intensive workloads benefit from an optimized search, but insertion and deletion also rely on a preceding search operation to proceed. In this paper, we attentively study a sorted B+-tree node that spans over contiguous cache lines. Such cache lines exhibit a monotonically increasing trend and searching a target key across them can be accelerated by estimating a range the key falls into. To do so, we construct a probing Sentinel Array in which a sentinel stands for each cache line of B+-tree node. Checking the Sentinel Array avoids scanning unnecessary cache lines and hence significantly reduces cache misses for a search. A quantitative evaluation shows that using Sentinel Arrays boosts the search performance of state-of-the-art in-NVM B+-trees by up to 48.4% while the cost of maintaining of Sentinel Array is low.
Kontsevich introduced certain ribbon graphs as cell decompositions for combinatorial models of moduli spaces of complex curves with boundaries in his proof of Witten's conjecture. In this work, we define four types of generalised Kontsevich graphs and find combinatorial relations among them. We call the main type ciliated maps and use the auxiliary ones to show they satisfy a Tutte recursion that we turn into a combinatorial interpretation of the loop equations of topological recursion for a large class of spectral curves. It follows that ciliated maps, which are Feynman graphs for the Generalised Kontsevich matrix Model (GKM), are computed by topological recursion. Our particular instance of the GKM relates to the r-KdV integrable hierarchy and since the string solution of the latter encodes intersection numbers with Witten's $r$-spin class, we find an identity between ciliated maps and $r$-spin intersection numbers, implying that they are also governed by topological recursion. In turn, this paves the way towards a combinatorial understanding of Witten's class. This new topological recursion perspective on the GKM provides concrete tools to explore the conjectural symplectic invariance property of topological recursion for large classes of spectral curves.
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has led to the emergence of multiple smart applications in different vital sectors including healthcare, education, agriculture, energy management, etc. IoT aims to interconnect several intelligent devices over the Internet such as sensors, monitoring systems, and smart appliances to control, store, exchange, and analyze collected data. The main issue in IoT environments is that they can present potential vulnerabilities to be illegally accessed by malicious users, which threatens the safety and privacy of gathered data. To face this problem, several recent works have been conducted using microservices-based architecture to minimize the security threats and attacks related to IoT data. By employing microservices, these works offer extensible, reusable, and reconfigurable security features. In this paper, we aim to provide a survey about microservices-based approaches for securing IoT applications. This survey will help practitioners understand ongoing challenges and explore new and promising research opportunities in the IoT security field. To the best of our knowledge, this paper constitutes the first survey that investigates the use of microservices technology for securing IoT applications.
The past decades have witnessed the prosperity of graph mining, with a multitude of sophisticated models and algorithms designed for various mining tasks, such as ranking, classification, clustering and anomaly detection. Generally speaking, the vast majority of the existing works aim to answer the following question, that is, given a graph, what is the best way to mine it? In this paper, we introduce the graph sanitation problem, to answer an orthogonal question. That is, given a mining task and an initial graph, what is the best way to improve the initially provided graph? By learning a better graph as part of the input of the mining model, it is expected to benefit graph mining in a variety of settings, ranging from denoising, imputation to defense. We formulate the graph sanitation problem as a bilevel optimization problem, and further instantiate it by semi-supervised node classification, together with an effective solver named GaSoliNe. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is (1) broadly applicable with respect to different graph neural network models and flexible graph modification strategies, (2) effective in improving the node classification accuracy on both the original and contaminated graphs in various perturbation scenarios. In particular, it brings up to 25% performance improvement over the existing robust graph neural network methods.
In the context of DP-SGD each round communicates a local SGD update which leaks some new information about the underlying local data set to the outside world. In order to provide privacy, Gaussian noise is added to local SGD updates. However, privacy leakage still aggregates over multiple training rounds. Therefore, in order to control privacy leakage over an increasing number of training rounds, we need to increase the added Gaussian noise per local SGD update. This dependence of the amount of Gaussian noise $\sigma$ on the number of training rounds $T$ may impose an impractical upper bound on $T$ (because $\sigma$ cannot be too large) leading to a low accuracy global model (because the global model receives too few local SGD updates). This makes DP-SGD much less competitive compared to other existing privacy techniques. We show for the first time that for $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy $\sigma$ can be chosen equal to $\sqrt{2(\epsilon +\ln(1/\delta))/\epsilon}$ for $\epsilon=\Omega(T/N^2)$. In many existing machine learning problems, $N$ is always large and $T=O(N)$. Hence, $\sigma$ becomes ``independent'' of any $T=O(N)$ choice with $\epsilon=\Omega(1/N)$ (aggregation of privacy leakage increases to a limit). This means that our $\sigma$ only depends on $N$ rather than $T$. This important discovery brings DP-SGD to practice -- as also demonstrated by experiments -- because $\sigma$ can remain small to make the trained model have high accuracy even for large $T$ as usually happens in practice.
We discuss functoriality properties of the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant, and expose a number of results which seemed destined for folklore. We clarify the (in)dependence of the invariant on the basepoint, prove that it is functorial with respect to contactomorphisms, and show that it is strongly functorial under Stein cobordisms.
The Standing Wave (SW) TESLA niobium-based superconducting radio frequency structure is limited to an accelerating gradient of about 50 MV/m by the critical RF magnetic field. To break through this barrier, we explore the option of niobium-based traveling wave (TW) structures. Optimization of TW structures was done considering experimentally known limiting electric and magnetic fields. It is shown that a TW structure can have an accelerating gradient above 70 MeV/m that is about 1.5 times higher than contemporary standing wave structures with the same critical magnetic field. The other benefit of TW structures shown is R/Q about 2 times higher than TESLA structure that reduces the dynamic heat load by a factor of 2. A method is proposed how to make TW structures multipactor-free. Some design proposals are offered to facilitate fabrication. Further increase of the real-estate gradient (equivalent to 80 MV/m active gradient) is also possible by increasing the length of the accelerating structure because of higher group velocity and cell-to-cell coupling. Realization of this work opens paths to ILC energy upgrades beyond 1 TeV to 3 TeV in competition with CLIC. The paper will discuss corresponding opportunities and challenges.
We present here a detailed calculation of opacities for Fe~XVII at the physical conditions corresponding to the base of the Solar convection zone. Many ingredients are involved in the calculation of opacities. We review the impact of each ingredient on the final monochromatic and mean opacities (Rosseland and Planck). The necessary atomic data were calculated with the $R$-matrix and the distorted-wave (DW) methods. We study the effect of broadening, of resolution, of the extent of configuration sets and of configuration interaction to understand the differences between several theoretical predictions as well as the existing large disagreement with measurements. New Dirac $R$-matrix calculations including all configurations up to the $n=$ 4, 5 and $6$ complexes have been performed as well as corresponding Breit--Pauli DW calculations. The DW calculations have been extended to include autoionizing initial levels. A quantitative contrast is made between comparable DW and $R$-matrix models. We have reached self-convergence with $n=6$ $R$-matrix and DW calculations. Populations in autoionizing initial levels contribute significantly to the opacities and should not be neglected. The $R$-matrix and DW results are consistent under the similar treatment of resonance broadening. The comparison with the experiment shows a persistent difference in the continuum while the filling of the windows shows some improvement. The present study defines our path to the next generation of opacities and opacity tables for stellar modeling.
The aim of this article is to provide characterizations for subadditivity-like growth conditions for the so-called associated weight functions in terms of the defning weight sequence. Such growth requirements arise frequently in the literature and are standard when dealing with ultradifferentiable function classes defned by Braun-Meise-Taylor weight functions since they imply or even characterize important and desired consequences for the underlying function spaces, e.g. closedness under composition.
In a pervious paper Weidmann shows that there a bound on the number of orbits of edges in a tree on which a finitely generated group acts $(k,C)$-acylindrically. In this paper we extend this result to actions which are $k$-acylindrical except on a family of groups with "finite height". We also give an example which gives a negative result to a conjecture of Weidmann from the same paper and produce a sharp bound for groups acting $k$--acylindrically.
The growing demand for connected devices and the increase in investments in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector induce the growth of the market for this technology. IoT permeates all areas of life of an individual, from smartwatches to entire home assistants and solutions in different areas. The IoT concept is gradually increasing all over the globe. IoT projects induce an articulation of studies in software engineering to prepare the development and operation of software systems materialized in physical objects and structures interconnected with embedded software and hosted in clouds. IoT projects have boundaries between development and operation stages. This study search for evidence in scientific literature to support these boundaries through Development and Operations (DevOps) principles. We rely on a Systematic Literature Review to investigate the relations of DevOps in IoT software systems. As a result, we identify concepts, characterize the benefits and challenges in the context of knowledge previously reported in primary studies in the literature. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) discussion of benefits and challenges for DevOps in IoT software systems, (ii) identification of tools, concepts, and programming languages used, and, (iii) perceived pipeline for this kind of software development.
A music mashup combines audio elements from two or more songs to create a new work. To reduce the time and effort required to make them, researchers have developed algorithms that predict the compatibility of audio elements. Prior work has focused on mixing unaltered excerpts, but advances in source separation enable the creation of mashups from isolated stems (e.g., vocals, drums, bass, etc.). In this work, we take advantage of separated stems not just for creating mashups, but for training a model that predicts the mutual compatibility of groups of excerpts, using self-supervised and semi-supervised methods. Specifically, we first produce a random mashup creation pipeline that combines stem tracks obtained via source separation, with key and tempo automatically adjusted to match, since these are prerequisites for high-quality mashups. To train a model to predict compatibility, we use stem tracks obtained from the same song as positive examples, and random combinations of stems with key and/or tempo unadjusted as negative examples. To improve the model and use more data, we also train on "average" examples: random combinations with matching key and tempo, where we treat them as unlabeled data as their true compatibility is unknown. To determine whether the combined signal or the set of stem signals is more indicative of the quality of the result, we experiment on two model architectures and train them using semi-supervised learning technique. Finally, we conduct objective and subjective evaluations of the system, comparing them to a standard rule-based system.
The success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision is mainly driven by their strong inductive bias, which is strong enough to allow CNNs to solve vision-related tasks with random weights, meaning without learning. Similarly, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has a strong inductive bias towards storing information over time. However, many real-world systems are governed by conservation laws, which lead to the redistribution of particular quantities -- e.g. in physical and economical systems. Our novel Mass-Conserving LSTM (MC-LSTM) adheres to these conservation laws by extending the inductive bias of LSTM to model the redistribution of those stored quantities. MC-LSTMs set a new state-of-the-art for neural arithmetic units at learning arithmetic operations, such as addition tasks, which have a strong conservation law, as the sum is constant over time. Further, MC-LSTM is applied to traffic forecasting, modelling a pendulum, and a large benchmark dataset in hydrology, where it sets a new state-of-the-art for predicting peak flows. In the hydrology example, we show that MC-LSTM states correlate with real-world processes and are therefore interpretable.
In this work, we address the problem of formal safety verification for stochastic cyber-physical systems (CPS) equipped with ReLU neural network (NN) controllers. Our goal is to find the set of initial states from where, with a predetermined confidence, the system will not reach an unsafe configuration within a specified time horizon. Specifically, we consider discrete-time LTI systems with Gaussian noise, which we abstract by a suitable graph. Then, we formulate a Satisfiability Modulo Convex (SMC) problem to estimate upper bounds on the transition probabilities between nodes in the graph. Using this abstraction, we propose a method to compute tight bounds on the safety probabilities of nodes in this graph, despite possible over-approximations of the transition probabilities between these nodes. Additionally, using the proposed SMC formula, we devise a heuristic method to refine the abstraction of the system in order to further improve the estimated safety bounds. Finally, we corroborate the efficacy of the proposed method with simulation results considering a robot navigation example and comparison against a state-of-the-art verification scheme.
Galactic charged cosmic rays (notably electrons, positrons, antiprotons and light antinuclei) are powerful probes of dark matter annihilation or decay, in particular for candidates heavier than a few MeV or tiny evaporating primordial black holes. Recent measurements by PAMELA, AMS-02, or VOYAGER on positrons and antiprotons already translate into constraints on several models over a large mass range. However, these constraints depend on Galactic transport models, in particular the diffusive halo size, subject to theoretical and statistical uncertainties. We update the so-called MIN-MED-MAX benchmark transport parameters that yield generic minimal, median and maximal dark-matter induced fluxes; this reduces the uncertainties on fluxes by a factor of about 2 for positrons and 6 for antiprotons, with respect to their former version. We also provide handy fitting formulae for the associated predicted secondary antiproton and positron background fluxes. Finally, for more refined analyses, we provide the full details of the model parameters and covariance matrices of uncertainties.
It has been shown beyond reasonable doubt that the majority (about 95%) of the total energy budget of the universe is given by the dark components, namely Dark Matter and Dark Energy. What constitutes these components remains to be satisfactorily understood however, despite a number of promising candidates. An associated conundrum is that of the coincidence, i.e. the question as to why the Dark Matter and Dark Energy densities are of the same order of magnitude at the present epoch, after evolving over the entire expansion history of the universe. In an attempt to address these, we consider a quantum potential resulting from a quantum corrected Raychaudhuri/Friedmann equation in presence of a cosmic fluid, which is presumed to be a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of ultralight bosons. For a suitable and physically motivated macroscopic ground state wavefunction of the BEC, we show that a unified picture of the cosmic dark sector can indeed emerge, thus resolving the issue of the coincidence. The effective Dark energy component turns out to be a cosmological constant, by virtue of a residual homogeneous term in the quantum potential. Furthermore, comparison with the observational data gives an estimate of the mass of the constituent bosons in the BEC, which is well within the bounds predicted from other considerations.
We present a new form of intermittency, L\'evy on-off intermittency, which arises from multiplicative $\alpha$-stable white noise close to an instability threshold. We study this problem in the linear and nonlinear regimes, both theoretically and numerically, for the case of a pitchfork bifurcation with fluctuating growth rate. We compute the stationary distribution analytically and numerically from the associated fractional Fokker-Planck equation in the Stratonovich interpretation. We characterize the system in the parameter space $(\alpha,\beta)$ of the noise, with stability parameter $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and skewness parameter $\beta\in[-1,1]$. Five regimes are identified in this parameter space, in addition to the well-studied Gaussian case $\alpha=2$. Three regimes are located at $1<\alpha<2$, where the noise has finite mean but infinite variance. They are differentiated by $\beta$ and all display a critical transition at the deterministic instability threshold, with on-off intermittency close to onset. Critical exponents are computed from the stationary distribution. Each regime is characterized by a specific form of the density and specific critical exponents, which differ starkly from the Gaussian case. A finite or infinite number of integer-order moments may converge, depending on parameters. Two more regimes are found at $0<\alpha\leq 1$. There, the mean of the noise diverges, and no critical transition occurs. In one case the origin is always unstable, independently of the distance $\mu$ from the deterministic threshold. In the other case, the origin is conversely always stable, independently of $\mu$. We thus demonstrate that an instability subject to non-equilibrium, power-law-distributed fluctuations can display substantially different properties than for Gaussian thermal fluctuations, in terms of statistics and critical behavior.
Object pose estimation from a single RGB image is a challenging problem due to variable lighting conditions and viewpoint changes. The most accurate pose estimation networks implement pose refinement via reprojection of a known, textured 3D model, however, such methods cannot be applied without high quality 3D models of the observed objects. In this work we propose an approach, namely an Innovation CNN, to object pose estimation refinement that overcomes the requirement for reprojecting a textured 3D model. Our approach improves initial pose estimation progressively by applying the Innovation CNN iteratively in a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework. We evaluate our method on the popular LINEMOD and Occlusion LINEMOD datasets and obtain state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
In order to connect galaxy clusters to their progenitor protoclusters, we must constrain the star formation histories within their member galaxies and the timescale of virial collapse. In this paper we characterize the complex star-forming properties of a $z=2.5$ protocluster in the COSMOS field using ALMA dust continuum and new VLA CO(1-0) observations of two filaments associated with the structure, sometimes referred to as the "Hyperion" protocluster. We focus in particular on the protocluster "core" which has previously been suggested as the highest redshift bona fide galaxy cluster traced by extended X-ray emission in a stacked Chandra/XMM image. We re-analyze this data and refute these claims, finding that at least 40 $\pm$ 17% of extended X-ray sources of similar luminosity and size at this redshift arise instead from Inverse Compton scattering off recently extinguished radio galaxies rather than intracluster medium. Using ancillary COSMOS data, we also constrain the SEDs of the two filaments' eight constituent galaxies from the rest-frame UV to radio. We do not find evidence for enhanced star formation efficiency in the core and conclude that the constituent galaxies are already massive (M$_{\star} \approx 10^{11} M_{\odot}$), with molecular gas reservoirs $>10^{10} M_{\odot}$ that will be depleted within 200-400 Myr. Finally, we calculate the halo mass of the nested core at $z=2.5$ and conclude that it will collapse into a cluster of 2-9 $\times 10^{14} M_{\odot}$, comparable to the size of the Coma cluster at $z=0$ and accounting for at least 50% of the total estimated halo mass of the extended "Hyperion" structure.
Quantum-mechanical correlations of interacting fermions result in the emergence of exotic phases. Magnetic phases naturally arise in the Mott-insulator regime of the Fermi-Hubbard model, where charges are localized and the spin degree of freedom remains. In this regime, the occurrence of phenomena such as resonating valence bonds, frustrated magnetism, and spin liquids is predicted. Quantum systems with engineered Hamiltonians can be used as simulators of such spin physics to provide insights beyond the capabilities of analytical methods and classical computers. To be useful, methods for the preparation of intricate many-body spin states and access to relevant observables are required. Here, we show the quantum simulation of magnetism in the Mott-insulator regime with a linear quantum-dot array. We characterize the energy spectrum for a Heisenberg spin chain, from which we can identify when the conditions for homogeneous exchange couplings are met. Next, we study the multispin coherence with global exchange oscillations in both the singlet and triplet subspace of the Heisenberg Hamiltonian. Last, we adiabatically prepare the low-energy global singlet of the homogeneous spin chain and probe it with two-spin singlettriplet measurements on each nearest-neighbor pair and the correlations therein. The methods and control presented here open new opportunities for the simulation of quantum magnetism benefiting from the flexibility in tuning and layout of gate-defined quantum-dot arrays.
The exotic range of known planetary systems has provoked an equally exotic range of physical explanations for their diverse architectures. However, constraining formation processes requires mapping the observed exoplanet population to that which initially formed in the protoplanetary disc. Numerous results suggest that (internal or external) dynamical perturbation alters the architectures of some exoplanetary systems. Isolating planets that have evolved without any perturbation can help constrain formation processes. We consider the Kepler multiples, which have low mutual inclinations and are unlikely to have been dynamically perturbed. We apply a modelling approach similar to that of Mulders et al. (2018), additionally accounting for the two-dimensionality of the radius ($R =0.3-20\,R_\oplus$) and period ($P= 0.5-730$ days) distribution. We find that an upper limit in planet mass of the form $M_{\rm{lim}} \propto a^\beta \exp(-a_{\rm{in}}/a)$, for semi-major axis $a$ and a broad range of $a_{\rm{in}}$ and $\beta$, can reproduce a distribution of $P$, $R$ that is indistinguishable from the observed distribution by our comparison metric. The index is consistent with $\beta= 1.5$, expected if growth is limited by accretion within the Hill radius. This model is favoured over models assuming a separable PDF in $P$, $R$. The limit, extrapolated to longer periods, is coincident with the orbits of RV-discovered planets ($a>0.2$ au, $M>1\,M_{\rm{J}}$) around recently identified low density host stars, hinting at isolation mass limited growth. We discuss the necessary circumstances for a coincidental age-related bias as the origin of this result, concluding that such a bias is possible but unlikely. We conclude that, in light of the evidence that some planetary systems have been dynamically perturbed, simple models for planet growth during the formation stage are worth revisiting.
Data is the key factor to drive the development of machine learning (ML) during the past decade. However, high-quality data, in particular labeled data, is often hard and expensive to collect. To leverage large-scale unlabeled data, self-supervised learning, represented by contrastive learning, is introduced. The objective of contrastive learning is to map different views derived from a training sample (e.g., through data augmentation) closer in their representation space, while different views derived from different samples more distant. In this way, a contrastive model learns to generate informative representations for data samples, which are then used to perform downstream ML tasks. Recent research has shown that machine learning models are vulnerable to various privacy attacks. However, most of the current efforts concentrate on models trained with supervised learning. Meanwhile, data samples' informative representations learned with contrastive learning may cause severe privacy risks as well. In this paper, we perform the first privacy analysis of contrastive learning through the lens of membership inference and attribute inference. Our experimental results show that contrastive models trained on image datasets are less vulnerable to membership inference attacks but more vulnerable to attribute inference attacks compared to supervised models. The former is due to the fact that contrastive models are less prone to overfitting, while the latter is caused by contrastive models' capability of representing data samples expressively. To remedy this situation, we propose the first privacy-preserving contrastive learning mechanism, Talos, relying on adversarial training. Empirical results show that Talos can successfully mitigate attribute inference risks for contrastive models while maintaining their membership privacy and model utility.
Many ecological and spatial processes are complex in nature and are not accurately modeled by linear models. Regression trees promise to handle the high-order interactions that are present in ecological and spatial datasets, but fail to produce physically realistic characterizations of the underlying landscape. The "autocart" (autocorrelated regression trees) R package extends the functionality of previously proposed spatial regression tree methods through a spatially aware splitting function and novel adaptive inverse distance weighting method in each terminal node. The efficacy of these autocart models, including an autocart extension of random forest, is demonstrated on multiple datasets. This highlights the ability of autocart to model complex interactions between spatial variables while still providing physically realistic representations of the landscape.
The lightest neutralino, assumed to be the lightest supersymmetric particle, is proposed to be a dark matter (DM) candidate for the mass $\cal{O}$(100) GeV. Constraints from various direct dark matter detection experiments and Planck measurements exclude a substantial region of parameter space of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). However, a "mild-tempered" neutralino with dominant bino composition and a little admixture of Higgsino is found to be a viable candidate for DM. Within the MSSM framework, we revisit the allowed region of parameter space that is consistent with all existing constraints. Regions of parameters that are not sensitive to direct detection experiments, known as "blind spots," are also revisited. Complimentary to the direct detection of DM particles, a mild-tempered neutralino scenario is explored at the LHC with the center of mass energy $\rm \sqrt{s}$=13 TeV through the top-squark pair production, and its subsequent decays with the standard-model-like Higgs boson in the final state. Our considered channel is found to be very sensitive also to the blind spot scenario. Detectable signal sensitivities are achieved using the cut-based method for the high luminosity options $\rm 300$ and $\rm 3000 ~fb^{-1}$, which are further improved by applying the multi-variate analysis technique.
Various autonomous or assisted driving strategies have been facilitated through the accurate and reliable perception of the environment around a vehicle. Among the commonly used sensors, radar has usually been considered as a robust and cost-effective solution even in adverse driving scenarios, e.g., weak/strong lighting or bad weather. Instead of considering to fuse the unreliable information from all available sensors, perception from pure radar data becomes a valuable alternative that is worth exploring. In this paper, we propose a deep radar object detection network, named RODNet, which is cross-supervised by a camera-radar fused algorithm without laborious annotation efforts, to effectively detect objects from the radio frequency (RF) images in real-time. First, the raw signals captured by millimeter-wave radars are transformed to RF images in range-azimuth coordinates. Second, our proposed RODNet takes a sequence of RF images as the input to predict the likelihood of objects in the radar field of view (FoV). Two customized modules are also added to handle multi-chirp information and object relative motion. Instead of using human-labeled ground truth for training, the proposed RODNet is cross-supervised by a novel 3D localization of detected objects using a camera-radar fusion (CRF) strategy in the training stage. Finally, we propose a method to evaluate the object detection performance of the RODNet. Due to no existing public dataset available for our task, we create a new dataset, named CRUW, which contains synchronized RGB and RF image sequences in various driving scenarios. With intensive experiments, our proposed cross-supervised RODNet achieves 86% average precision and 88% average recall of object detection performance, which shows the robustness to noisy scenarios in various driving conditions.
Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems that are prone to the exploding gradient problem. Despite its widespread popularity, the convergence properties of the gradient clipping heuristic are poorly understood, especially for stochastic problems. This paper establishes both qualitative and quantitative convergence results of the clipped stochastic (sub)gradient method (SGD) for non-smooth convex functions with rapidly growing subgradients. Our analyses show that clipping enhances the stability of SGD and that the clipped SGD algorithm enjoys finite convergence rates in many cases. We also study the convergence of a clipped method with momentum, which includes clipped SGD as a special case, for weakly convex problems under standard assumptions. With a novel Lyapunov analysis, we show that the proposed method achieves the best-known rate for the considered class of problems, demonstrating the effectiveness of clipped methods also in this regime. Numerical results confirm our theoretical developments.
We present the first results from the Quasar Feedback Survey, a sample of 42 z<0.2, [O III] luminous AGN (L[O III]>10^42.1 ergs/s) with moderate radio luminosities (i.e. L(1.4GHz)>10^23.4 W/Hz; median L(1.4GHz)=5.9x10^23 W/Hz). Using high spatial resolution (~0.3-1 arcsec), 1.5-6 GHz radio images from the Very Large Array, we find that 67 percent of the sample have spatially extended radio features, on ~1-60 kpc scales. The radio sizes and morphologies suggest that these may be lower radio luminosity versions of compact, radio-loud AGN. By combining the radio-to-infrared excess parameter, spectral index, radio morphology and brightness temperature, we find radio emission in at least 57 percent of the sample that is associated with AGN-related processes (e.g. jets, quasar-driven winds or coronal emission). This is despite only 9.5-21 percent being classified as radio-loud using traditional criteria. The origin of the radio emission in the remainder of the sample is unclear. We find that both the established anti-correlation between radio size and the width of the [O III] line, and the known trend for the most [O III] luminous AGN to be associated with spatially-extended radio emission, also hold for our sample of moderate radio luminosity quasars. These observations add to the growing evidence of a connection between the radio emission and ionised gas in quasar host galaxies. This work lays the foundation for deeper investigations into the drivers and impact of feedback in this unique sample.
The European Spallation Source (ESS), currently finishing its construction, will soon provide the most intense neutron beams for multi-disciplinary science. At the same time, it will also produce a high-intensity neutrino flux with an energy suitable for precision measurements of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering. We describe some physics prospects, within and beyond the Standard Model, of employing innovative detector technologies to take the most out of this large flux. We show that, compared to current measurements, the ESS will provide a much more precise understanding of neutrino and nuclear properties.
With approximately 50 binary black hole events detected by LIGO/Virgo to date and many more expected in the next few years, gravitational-wave astronomy is shifting from individual-event analyses to population studies. We perform a hierarchical Bayesian analysis on the GWTC-2 catalog by combining several astrophysical formation models with a population of primordial black holes. We compute the Bayesian evidence for a primordial population compared to the null hypothesis, and the inferred fraction of primordial black holes in the data. We find that these quantities depend on the set of assumed astrophysical models: the evidence for primordial black holes against an astrophysical-only multichannel model is decisively favored in some scenarios, but it is significantly reduced in the presence of a dominant stable-mass-transfer isolated formation channel. The primordial channel can explain mergers in the upper mass gap such as GW190521, but (depending on the astrophysical channels we consider) a significant fraction of the events could be of primordial origin even if we neglected GW190521. The tantalizing possibility that LIGO/Virgo may have already detected black holes formed after inflation should be verified by reducing uncertainties in astrophysical and primordial formation models, and it may ultimately be confirmed by third-generation interferometers.
The paper is devoted to the participation of the TUDublin team in Constraint@AAAI2021 - COVID19 Fake News Detection Challenge. Today, the problem of fake news detection is more acute than ever in connection with the pandemic. The number of fake news is increasing rapidly and it is necessary to create AI tools that allow us to identify and prevent the spread of false information about COVID-19 urgently. The main goal of the work was to create a model that would carry out a binary classification of messages from social media as real or fake news in the context of COVID-19. Our team constructed the ensemble consisting of Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory, Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes and a combination of Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes. The model allowed us to achieve 0.94 F1-score, which is within 5\% of the best result.
We consider the moduli space $\mathcal{M}_{\nu}$ of torsion-free, asymptotically conical (AC) Spin(7)-structures which are defined on the same manifold and asymptotic to the same Spin(7)-cone with decay rate $\nu<0$. We show that $\mathcal{M}_{\nu}$ is an orbifold if $\nu$ is a generic rate in the non-$L^2$ regime $(-4,0)$. Infinitesimal deformations are given by topological data and solutions to a non-elliptic first-order PDE system on the compact link of the asymptotic cone. As an application, we show that the classical Bryant-Salamon metric on the bundle of positive spinors on $S^4$ has no continuous deformations as an AC Spin(7)-metric.
The advent of large pre-trained language models has given rise to rapid progress in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While the performance of these models on standard benchmarks has scaled with size, compression techniques such as knowledge distillation have been key in making them practical. We present, MATE-KD, a novel text-based adversarial training algorithm which improves the performance of knowledge distillation. MATE-KD first trains a masked language model based generator to perturb text by maximizing the divergence between teacher and student logits. Then using knowledge distillation a student is trained on both the original and the perturbed training samples. We evaluate our algorithm, using BERT-based models, on the GLUE benchmark and demonstrate that MATE-KD outperforms competitive adversarial learning and data augmentation baselines. On the GLUE test set our 6 layer RoBERTa based model outperforms BERT-Large.
Simulated images of a black hole surrounded by optically thin emission typically display two main features: a central brightness depression and a narrow, bright "photon ring" consisting of strongly lensed images superposed on top of the direct emission. The photon ring closely tracks a theoretical curve on the image plane corresponding to light rays that asymptote to unstably bound photon orbits around the black hole. This critical curve has a size and shape that are purely governed by the Kerr geometry; in contrast, the size, shape, and depth of the observed brightness depression all depend on the details of the emission region. For instance, images of spherical accretion models display a distinctive dark region -- the "black hole shadow" -- that completely fills the photon ring. By contrast, in models of equatorial disks extending to the black hole's event horizon, the darkest region in the image is restricted to a much smaller area -- an inner shadow -- whose edge lies near the direct lensed image of the equatorial horizon. Using both semi-analytic models and general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations, we demonstrate that the photon ring and inner shadow may be simultaneously visible in submillimeter images of M87*, where magnetically arrested disk (MAD) simulations predict that the emission arises in a thin region near the equatorial plane. We show that the relative size, shape, and centroid of the photon ring and inner shadow can be used to estimate the black hole mass and spin, breaking degeneracies in measurements of these quantities that rely on the photon ring alone. Both features may be accessible to direct observation via high-dynamic-range images with a next-generation Event Horizon Telescope.
In this paper we investigate Erd\H{o}s-Ko-Rado theorems in ovoidal circle geometries. We prove that in M\"obius planes of even order greater than 2, and ovoidal Laguerre planes of odd order, the largest families of circles which pairwise intersect in at least one point, consist of all circles through a fixed point. In ovoidal Laguerre planes of even order, a similar result holds, but there is one other type of largest family of pairwise intersecting circles. As a corollary, we prove that the largest families of polynomials over $\mathbb F_q$ of degree at most $k$, with $2 \leq k < q$, which pairwise take the same value on at least one point, consist of all polynomials $f$ of degree at most $k$ such that $f(x) = y$ for some fixed $x$ and $y$ in $\mathbb F_q$. We also discuss this problem for ovoidal Minkowski planes, and we investigate the largest families of circles pairwise intersecting in two points in circle geometries.
We investigated laser-induced periodic surface structures (LIPSS) generated on indium-tin-oxide (ITO) thin films with femtosecond laser pulses in the infrared region. Using pulses between 1.6 and 2.4 ${\mu}$m central wavelength, we observed robust LIPSS morphologies with a periodicity close to ${\lambda}$/10. Supporting finite-difference time-domain calculations suggest that the surface forms are rooted in the field localization in the surface pits leading to a periodically increased absorption of the laser pulse energy that creates the observed periodic structures.
We study the 2+1 dimensional continuum model for the evolution of stepped epitaxial surface under long-range elastic interaction proposed by Xu and Xiang (SIAM J. Appl. Math. 69, 1393-1414, 2009). The long-range interaction term and the two length scales in this model makes PDE analysis challenging. Moreover, unlike in the 1+1 dimensional case, there is a nonconvexity contribution (of the gradient norm of the surface height) in the total energy in the 2+1 dimensional case, and it is not easy to prove that the solution is always in the well-posed regime during the evolution. In this paper, we propose a modified 2+1 dimensional continuum model and prove the existence and uniqueness of both the static and dynamic solutions and derive a minimum energy scaling law for it. We show that the minimum energy surface profile is mainly attained by surfaces with step meandering instability. This is essentially different from the energy scaling law for the 1+1 dimensional epitaxial surfaces under elastic effects attained by step bunching surface profiles. We also discuss the transition from the step bunching instability to the step meandering instability in 2+1 dimensions.
Full connectivity of qubits is necessary for most quantum algorithms, which is difficult to directly implement on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum processors. However, inserting swap gate to enable the two-qubit gates between uncoupled qubits significantly decreases the computation result fidelity. To this end, we propose a Special-Purpose Quantum Processor Design method that can design suitable structures for different quantum algorithms. Our method extends the processor structure from two-dimensional lattice graph to general planar graph and arranges the physical couplers according to the two-qubit gate distribution between the logical qubits of the quantum algorithm and the physical constraints. Experimental results show that our design methodology, compared with other methods, could reduce the number of extra swap gates per two-qubit gate by at least 104.2% on average. Also, our method's advantage over other methods becomes more obvious as the depth and qubit number increase. The result reveals that our method is competitive in improving computation result fidelity and it has the potential to demonstrate quantum advantage under the technical conditions.
In this paper, we consider the Potts-SOS model where the spin takes values in the set $\{0, 1, 2\}$ on the Cayley tree of order two. We describe all the translation-invariant splitting Gibbs measures for this model in some conditions. Moreover, we investigate whether these Gibbs measures are extremal or non-extremal in the set of all Gibbs measures.
Machine learning models often use spurious patterns such as "relying on the presence of a person to detect a tennis racket," which do not generalize. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline for identifying and mitigating spurious patterns for image classifiers. We start by finding patterns such as "the model's prediction for tennis racket changes 63% of the time if we hide the people." Then, if a pattern is spurious, we mitigate it via a novel form of data augmentation. We demonstrate that this approach identifies a diverse set of spurious patterns and that it mitigates them by producing a model that is both more accurate on a distribution where the spurious pattern is not helpful and more robust to distribution shift.
Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control, assembly, and actuation of tensegrity robots are still difficult tasks. Moreover, the stiffness of tensegrity robots is still an underestimated design parameter. In this article, we propose to use easy to assemble, actuated tensegrity modules and body-brain co-evolution to design soft tensegrity modular robots. Moreover, we prove the importance of tensegrity robots stiffness showing how the evolution suggests a different morphology, control, and locomotion strategy according to the modules stiffness.
We derive the conjugate prior of the Dirichlet and beta distributions and explore it with numerical examples to gain an intuitive understanding of the distribution itself, its hyperparameters, and conditions concerning its convergence. Due to the prior's intractability, we proceed to define and analyze a closed-form approximation. Finally, we provide an algorithm implementing this approximation that enables fully tractable Bayesian conjugate treatment of Dirichlet and beta likelihoods without the need for Monte Carlo simulations.
We consider non-convex stochastic optimization using first-order algorithms for which the gradient estimates may have heavy tails. We show that a combination of gradient clipping, momentum, and normalized gradient descent yields convergence to critical points in high-probability with best-known rates for smooth losses when the gradients only have bounded $\mathfrak{p}$th moments for some $\mathfrak{p}\in(1,2]$. We then consider the case of second-order smooth losses, which to our knowledge have not been studied in this setting, and again obtain high-probability bounds for any $\mathfrak{p}$. Moreover, our results hold for arbitrary smooth norms, in contrast to the typical SGD analysis which requires a Hilbert space norm. Further, we show that after a suitable "burn-in" period, the objective value will monotonically decrease for every iteration until a critical point is identified, which provides intuition behind the popular practice of learning rate "warm-up" and also yields a last-iterate guarantee.
We give a local characterization for the Cuntz semigroup of AI-algebras building upon Shen's characterization of dimension groups. Using this result, we provide an abstract characterization for the Cuntz semigroup of AI-algebras.
Much recent interest has focused on the design of optimization algorithms from the discretization of an associated optimization flow, i.e., a system of differential equations (ODEs) whose trajectories solve an associated optimization problem. Such a design approach poses an important problem: how to find a principled methodology to design and discretize appropriate ODEs. This paper aims to provide a solution to this problem through the use of contraction theory. We first introduce general mathematical results that explain how contraction theory guarantees the stability of the implicit and explicit Euler integration methods. Then, we propose a novel system of ODEs, namely the Accelerated-Contracting-Nesterov flow, and use contraction theory to establish it is an optimization flow with exponential convergence rate, from which the linear convergence rate of its associated optimization algorithm is immediately established. Remarkably, a simple explicit Euler discretization of this flow corresponds to the Nesterov acceleration method. Finally, we present how our approach leads to performance guarantees in the design of optimization algorithms for time-varying optimization problems.
Depth maps captured with commodity sensors are often of low quality and resolution; these maps need to be enhanced to be used in many applications. State-of-the-art data-driven methods of depth map super-resolution rely on registered pairs of low- and high-resolution depth maps of the same scenes. Acquisition of real-world paired data requires specialized setups. Another alternative, generating low-resolution maps from high-resolution maps by subsampling, adding noise and other artificial degradation methods, does not fully capture the characteristics of real-world low-resolution images. As a consequence, supervised learning methods trained on such artificial paired data may not perform well on real-world low-resolution inputs. We consider an approach to depth super-resolution based on learning from unpaired data. While many techniques for unpaired image-to-image translation have been proposed, most fail to deliver effective hole-filling or reconstruct accurate surfaces using depth maps. We propose an unpaired learning method for depth super-resolution, which is based on a learnable degradation model, enhancement component and surface normal estimates as features to produce more accurate depth maps. We propose a benchmark for unpaired depth SR and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing unpaired methods and performs on par with paired.
We consider the Schr\"odinger equation with nonlinear derivative term on $[0,+\infty)$ under Robin boundary condition at $0$. Using a virial argument, we obtain the existence of blowing up solutions and using variational techniques, we obtain stability and instability by blow up results for standing waves.
A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and previous research has reached mixed conclusions, because collective decision outcomes depend on the insufficiently understood complex system of cognitive strategies, task properties, and social influence processes. This study integrates these complex interactions together in one general yet partially analytically tractable mathematical framework using a dynamical system model. In particular, it investigates how the interplay of the proportion of social learners, the relative merit of options, and the type of conformity response affect collective decision outcomes in a binary choice. The model predicts that when the proportion of social learners exceeds a critical threshold, a bi-stable state appears in which the majority can end up favoring either the higher- or lower-merit option, depending on fluctuations and initial conditions. Below this threshold, the high-merit option is chosen by the majority. The critical threshold is determined by the conformity response function and the relative merits of the two options. The study helps reconcile disagreements about the effect of social learners on collective performance and proposes a mathematical framework that can be readily adapted to extensions investigating a wider variety of dynamics.
Dirbusting is a technique used to brute force directories and file names on web servers while monitoring HTTP responses, in order to enumerate server contents. Such a technique uses lists of common words to discover the hidden structure of the target website. Dirbusting typically relies on response codes as discovery conditions to find new pages. It is widely used in web application penetration testing, an activity that allows companies to detect websites vulnerabilities. Dirbusting techniques are both time and resource consuming and innovative approaches have never been explored in this field. We hence propose an advanced technique to optimize the dirbusting process by leveraging Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, we use semantic clustering techniques in order to organize wordlist items in different groups according to their semantic meaning. The created clusters are used in an ad-hoc implemented next-word intelligent strategy. This paper demonstrates that the usage of clustering techniques outperforms the commonly used brute force methods. Performance is evaluated by testing eight different web applications. Results show a performance increase that is up to 50% for each of the conducted experiments.
Decision-making policies for agents are often synthesized with the constraint that a formal specification of behaviour is satisfied. Here we focus on infinite-horizon properties. On the one hand, Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is a popular example of a formalism for qualitative specifications. On the other hand, Steady-State Policy Synthesis (SSPS) has recently received considerable attention as it provides a more quantitative and more behavioural perspective on specifications, in terms of the frequency with which states are visited. Finally, rewards provide a classic framework for quantitative properties. In this paper, we study Markov decision processes (MDP) with the specification combining all these three types. The derived policy maximizes the reward among all policies ensuring the LTL specification with the given probability and adhering to the steady-state constraints. To this end, we provide a unified solution reducing the multi-type specification to a multi-dimensional long-run average reward. This is enabled by Limit-Deterministic B\"uchi Automata (LDBA), recently studied in the context of LTL model checking on MDP, and allows for an elegant solution through a simple linear programme. The algorithm also extends to the general $\omega$-regular properties and runs in time polynomial in the sizes of the MDP as well as the LDBA.
We study the design of revenue-maximizing bilateral trade mechanisms in the correlated private value environment. We assume the designer only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but knows neither the marginal distribution nor the correlation structure. The performance of a mechanism is evaluated in the worst-case over the uncertainty of joint distributions that are consistent with the known expectations. Among all dominant-strategy incentive compatible and ex-post individually rational mechanisms, we provide a complete characterization of the maxmin trade mechanisms and the worst-case joint distributions.
The design of moderators and cold sources of neutrons is a key point in research-reactor physics, requiring extensive knowledge of the scattering properties of very important light molecular liquids such as methane, hydrogen and their deuterated counterparts. Inelastic scattering measurements constitute the basic source of such information but are difficult to perform, the more so when high accuracy is required, and additional experimental information is scarce. The need of data covering as large as possible portions of the kinematic Q-E plane thus pushes towards the use of computable models, validated by testing them, mainly, against integral quantities (either known from theory or measured) such as spectral moments and total cross section data. A few recent experiments demonstrated that, at least for the self contribution, which dominates in the incoherent scattering case of hydrogen, accurate calculations can be performed by means of quantum simulations of the velocity autocorrelation function. This method is shown here to be by far superior to the use of standard analytical models devised, although rather cleverly, for generic classical samples. The neutron dynamic structure factor (and consequently the well-known S({\alpha},{\beta}) of parahydrogen and deuterium, suitable for use in packages like NJOY, are given and shown to agree very well with total cross section measurements and expected quantum properties.