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Using first-principles calculations, we show that CsBX$_3$ halides with B=Sn or Pb undergo octahedral rotation distortions, while for B=Ge and Si, they undergo a ferro-electric rhombohedral distortion accompanied by a rhombohedral stretching of the lattice. We show that these are mutually exclusive at their equilibrium volume although different distortions may occur as function of lattice expansion. The choice between the two distortion modes is in part governed by the Goldschmidt tolerance factor. However, another factor explaining the difference between Sn and Pb compared with Ge and Si is the stronger lone-pair character of Ge and Si when forced to be divalent as is the case in these structures. The lone-pair chemistry is related to the off-centering. While the Si-based compounds have not yet been synthesized, the Ge compounds have been established experimentally. As a final test of the importance of the tolerance factor we consider RbGeX$_3$, which has smaller tolerance factor than the corresponding CsGeX$_3$ because Rb is smaller than Cs. We find that it can lower its energy by both rotations or rhombohedral off-centering distortions but the latter lower the energy slightly more efficiently.
Open Source Software (OSS) plays an important role in the digital economy. Yet although software production is amenable to remote collaboration and its outputs are easily shared across distances, software development seems to cluster geographically in places such as Silicon Valley, London, or Berlin. And while recent work indicates that OSS activity creates positive externalities which accrue locally through knowledge spillovers and information effects, up-to-date data on the geographic distribution of active open source developers is limited. This presents a significant blindspot for policymakers, who tend to promote OSS at the national level as a cost-saving tool for public sector institutions. We address this gap by geolocating more than half a million active contributors to GitHub in early 2021 at various spatial scales. Compared to results from 2010, we find a significant increase in the share of developers based in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, suggesting a more even spread of OSS developers globally. Within countries, however, we find significant concentration in regions, exceeding the concentration of workers in high-tech fields. Social and economic development indicators predict at most half of regional variation in OSS activity in the EU, suggesting that clusters of OSS have idiosyncratic roots. We argue that policymakers seeking to foster OSS should focus locally rather than nationally, using the tools of cluster policy to support networks of OSS developers.
Using the group $G(1)$ of invertible elements and the maximal ideals $\mathfrak{m}_x$ of the commutative algebra $C(X)$ of real-valued functions on a compact regular space $X$, we define a Borel action of the algebra on the measure space $(X,\mu)$ with $\mu$ a Radon measure. The zero sets $Z(X)$ of the algebra $C(X)$ is used to study the ergodicity of the $G(1)$-action via its action on the maximal ideals $\mathfrak{m}_x$ which defines an action groupoid $\mathcal{G} = \mathfrak{m}_x \ltimes G(1)$ trivialized on $X$. The resulting measure groupoid $(\mathcal{G},\mathcal{C})$ is used to define a proper action on the generalized space $\mathcal{M}(X)$. The existence of slice at each point of $\mathcal{M}(X)$ present it as a cohomogeneity-one $\mathcal{G}$-space. The dynamical system of the algebra $C(X)$ is defined by the action of the measure groupoid $(\mathcal{G},\mathcal{C}) \times \mathcal{M}(X) \to \mathcal{M}(X)$.
End-to-end speech recognition systems usually require huge amounts of labeling resource, while annotating the speech data is complicated and expensive. Active learning is the solution by selecting the most valuable samples for annotation. In this paper, we proposed to use a predicted loss that estimates the uncertainty of the sample. The CTC (Connectionist Temporal Classification) and attention loss are informative for speech recognition since they are computed based on all decoding paths and alignments. We defined an end-to-end active learning pipeline, training an ASR/LP (Automatic Speech Recognition/Loss Prediction) joint model. The proposed approach was validated on an English and a Chinese speech recognition task. The experiments show that our approach achieves competitive results, outperforming random selection, least confidence, and estimated loss method.
Transformers with remarkable global representation capacities achieve competitive results for visual tasks, but fail to consider high-level local pattern information in input images. In this paper, we present a generic Dual-stream Network (DS-Net) to fully explore the representation capacity of local and global pattern features for image classification. Our DS-Net can simultaneously calculate fine-grained and integrated features and efficiently fuse them. Specifically, we propose an Intra-scale Propagation module to process two different resolutions in each block and an Inter-Scale Alignment module to perform information interaction across features at dual scales. Besides, we also design a Dual-stream FPN (DS-FPN) to further enhance contextual information for downstream dense predictions. Without bells and whistles, the proposed DS-Net outperforms DeiT-Small by 2.4% in terms of top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k and achieves state-of-the-art performance over other Vision Transformers and ResNets. For object detection and instance segmentation, DS-Net-Small respectively outperforms ResNet-50 by 6.4% and 5.5% in terms of mAP on MSCOCO 2017, and surpasses the previous state-of-the-art scheme, which significantly demonstrates its potential to be a general backbone in vision tasks. The code will be released soon.
Magnetic reconnection can convert magnetic energy into kinetic energy of non-thermal electron beams. We have now characterized the EVDFs generated by 3D kinetic magnetic reconnection obtained by numerical simulations utilizing the ACRONYM particle-in-cell (PIC) code, and their consequences for plasma instabilities which differ from those of 2D kinetic magnetic reconnection, since in 3D unstable waves can propagate in all directions. We found that: (1) In both diffusion region and separatrices of reconnection, EVDFs with positive velocity-space gradients in the direction parallel to the local magnetic field are formed. These gradients can cause counter-streaming and bump-on-tail instabilities. (2) In regions with weak magnetic field strength, namely, regions near the current sheet midplane, EVDF with positive velocity space gradients are generated in the direction perpendicular to the local magnetic field. In particular crescent-shaped EVDFs in the velocity space perpendicular to local magnetic field are mainly formed in the diffusion region of reconnection. These perpendicular gradients in the EVDFs can cause electron cyclotron maser instabilities. (3) As guide-field strength increases, less regions in the current sheets feature perpendicular velocity-space gradients in the EVDFs. The formation of EVDFs with positive gradients in the parallel (magnetic field-aligned) direction is mainly due to magnetized and adiabatic electrons, while EVDFs with positive gradients in the direction perpendicular to the local magnetic field are attributed to unmagnetized, nonadiabatic electrons in the diffusion and outflow region near the reconnection midplane.
We propose a method for learning linear models whose predictive performance is robust to causal interventions on unobserved variables, when noisy proxies of those variables are available. Our approach takes the form of a regularization term that trades off between in-distribution performance and robustness to interventions. Under the assumption of a linear structural causal model, we show that a single proxy can be used to create estimators that are prediction optimal under interventions of bounded strength. This strength depends on the magnitude of the measurement noise in the proxy, which is, in general, not identifiable. In the case of two proxy variables, we propose a modified estimator that is prediction optimal under interventions up to a known strength. We further show how to extend these estimators to scenarios where additional information about the "test time" intervention is available during training. We evaluate our theoretical findings in synthetic experiments and using real data of hourly pollution levels across several cities in China.
Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) is a popular tool for dimensional reduction of high-dimensional data. Despite its massive popularity, there is still a lack of theoretically justifiable Bayesian sparse PCA that is computationally scalable. A major challenge is choosing a suitable prior for the loadings matrix, as principal components are mutually orthogonal. We propose a spike and slab prior that meets this orthogonality constraint and show that the posterior enjoys both theoretical and computational advantages. Two computational algorithms, the PX-CAVI and the PX-EM algorithms, are developed. Both algorithms use parameter expansion to deal with the orthogonality constraint and to accelerate their convergence speeds. We found that the PX-CAVI algorithm has superior empirical performance than the PX-EM algorithm and two other penalty methods for sparse PCA. The PX-CAVI algorithm is then applied to study a lung cancer gene expression dataset. $\mathsf{R}$ package $\mathsf{VBsparsePCA}$ with an implementation of the algorithm is available on The Comprehensive R Archive Network.
The physics goal of the strong interaction program of the NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is to study the phase diagram of hadronic matter by a scan of particle production in collisions of nuclei with various sizes at a set of energies covering the SPS energy range. This paper presents differential inclusive spectra of transverse momentum, transverse mass and rapidity of $\pi^{-}$ mesons produced in $central$ ${}^{40}$Ar+${}^{45}$Sc collisions at beam momenta of 13$A$, 19$A$, 30$A$, 40$A$, 75$A$ and 150$A$ GeV/$c$. Energy and system size dependence of parameters of these distributions -- mean transverse mass, the inverse slope parameter of transverse mass spectra, width of the rapidity distribution and mean multiplicity -- are presented and discussed. Furthermore, the dependence of the ratio of the mean number of produced pions to the mean number of wounded nucleons on the collision energy was derived. The results are compared to predictions of several models.
Effective theory framework based on symmetry has recently gained widespread interest in the field of cosmology. In this paper, we apply the same idea on the genesis of the primordial magnetic field and its evolution throughout the cosmological universe. Given the broken time-diffeomorphism symmetry by the cosmological background, we considered the most general Lagrangian of electromagnetic and metric fluctuation up to second order, which naturally breaks conformal symmetry in the electromagnetic (EM) sector. We also include parity violation in the electromagnetic sector with the motivation that has potential observational significance. In such a set-up, we explore the evolution of EM, scalar, and tensor perturbations considering different observational constraints. In our analysis we emphasize the role played by the intermediate reheating phase which has got limited interest in all the previous studies. Assuming the vanishing electrical conductivity during the entire period of reheating, the well-known Faraday electromagnetic induction has been shown to play a crucial role in enhancing the strength of the present-day magnetic field. We show how such physical effects combined with the PLANCK and the large scale magnetic field observation makes a large class of models viable and severely restricts the reheating equation of state parameter within a very narrow range of $0.01 < \omega_\mathrm{eff} < 0.27$, which is nearly independent of reheating scenarios we have considered.
In the real world, medical datasets often exhibit a long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes occupy most of the data, while most classes have rarely few samples), which results in a challenging imbalance learning scenario. For example, there are estimated more than 40 different kinds of retinal diseases with variable morbidity, however with more than 30+ conditions are very rare from the global patient cohorts, which results in a typical long-tailed learning problem for deep learning-based screening models. In this study, we propose class subset learning by dividing the long-tailed data into multiple class subsets according to prior knowledge, such as regions and phenotype information. It enforces the model to focus on learning the subset-specific knowledge. More specifically, there are some relational classes that reside in the fixed retinal regions, or some common pathological features are observed in both the majority and minority conditions. With those subsets learnt teacher models, then we are able to distill the multiple teacher models into a unified model with weighted knowledge distillation loss. The proposed framework proved to be effective for the long-tailed retinal diseases recognition task. The experimental results on two different datasets demonstrate that our method is flexible and can be easily plugged into many other state-of-the-art techniques with significant improvements.
Local feature attribution methods are increasingly used to explain complex machine learning models. However, current methods are limited because they are extremely expensive to compute or are not capable of explaining a distributed series of models where each model is owned by a separate institution. The latter is particularly important because it often arises in finance where explanations are mandated. Here, we present DeepSHAP, a tractable method to propagate local feature attributions through complex series of models based on a connection to the Shapley value. We evaluate DeepSHAP across biological, health, and financial datasets to show that it provides equally salient explanations an order of magnitude faster than existing model-agnostic attribution techniques and demonstrate its use in an important distributed series of models setting.
A definition of a convolution of tensor fields on group manifolds is given, which is then generalised to generic homogeneous spaces. This is applied to the product of gauge fields in the context of `gravity $=$ gauge $\times$ gauge'. In particular, it is shown that the linear Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) gauge transformations of two Yang-Mills gauge fields generate the linear BRST diffeomorphism transformations of the graviton. This facilitates the definition of the `gauge $\times$ gauge' convolution product on, for example, the static Einstein universe, and more generally for ultrastatic spacetimes with compact spatial slices.
Network dismantling aims to scratch the network into unconnected fragments by removing an optimal set of nodes and has been widely adopted in many real-world applications such as epidemic control and rumor containment. However, conventional methods often disassemble the system from the perspective of classic networks, which have only pairwise interactions, and often ignored the more ubiquitous and nature group-wise interactions modeled by hypernetwork. Moreover, a simple network can't describe the collective behavior of multiple objects, it is necessary to solve related problems through hypernetwork dismantling. In this work, we designed a higher order collective influence measure to identify key node sets in hypernetwork. It comprehensively consider the environment in which the target node is located and its own characteristics to determine the importance of the node, so as to dismantle the hypernetwork by removing these selected nodes. Finally, we used the method to carry out a series of real-world hypernetwork dismantling tasks. Experimental results on five real-world hypernetworks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed measure.
We investigate the sensitivity of the projected TeV muon collider to the gauged $L^{}_{\mu}$-$L^{}_{\tau}$ model. Two processes are considered: $Z'$-mediated two-body scatterings $\mu^+ \mu^- \to \ell^+ \ell^-$ with $\ell = \mu$ or $\tau$, and scattering with initial state photon emission, $\mu^+ \mu^- \to \gamma Z',~Z' \to \ell \overline{\ell}$, where $\ell$ can be $\mu$, $\tau$ or $\nu_{\mu/\tau}$. We quantitatively study the sensitivities of these two processes by taking into account possible signals and relevant backgrounds in a muon collider experiment with a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s} = 3~{\rm TeV}$ and a luminosity $L=1~{\rm ab^{-1}}$. For two-body scattering one can exclude $Z'$ masses $M^{}_{Z'} \lesssim 100~{\rm TeV}$ with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ gauge couplings. When $M^{}_{Z'} \lesssim 1~{\rm TeV} <\sqrt{s}$, one can exclude $g' \gtrsim 2\times 10^{-2}$. The process with photon emission is more powerful than the two-body scattering if $M^{}_{Z'} < \sqrt{s}$. For instance, a sensitivity of $g' \simeq 4 \times 10^{-3}$ can be achieved at $M^{}_{Z'} = 1~{\rm TeV}$. The parameter spaces favored by the $(g-2)^{}_{\mu}$ and $B$ anomalies with $M^{}_{Z'} > 100~{\rm GeV}$ are entirely covered by a muon collider.
A monopolist seller of multiple goods screens a buyer whose type is initially unknown to both but drawn from a commonly known distribution. The buyer privately learns about his type via a signal. We derive the seller's optimal mechanism in two different information environments. We begin by deriving the buyer-optimal outcome. Here, an information designer first selects a signal, and then the seller chooses an optimal mechanism in response; the designer's objective is to maximize consumer surplus. Then, we derive the optimal informationally robust mechanism. In this case, the seller first chooses the mechanism, and then nature picks the signal that minimizes the seller's profits. We derive the relation between both problems and show that the optimal mechanism in both cases takes the form of pure bundling.
The task of age transformation illustrates the change of an individual's appearance over time. Accurately modeling this complex transformation over an input facial image is extremely challenging as it requires making convincing, possibly large changes to facial features and head shape, while still preserving the input identity. In this work, we present an image-to-image translation method that learns to directly encode real facial images into the latent space of a pre-trained unconditional GAN (e.g., StyleGAN) subject to a given aging shift. We employ a pre-trained age regression network to explicitly guide the encoder in generating the latent codes corresponding to the desired age. In this formulation, our method approaches the continuous aging process as a regression task between the input age and desired target age, providing fine-grained control over the generated image. Moreover, unlike approaches that operate solely in the latent space using a prior on the path controlling age, our method learns a more disentangled, non-linear path. Finally, we demonstrate that the end-to-end nature of our approach, coupled with the rich semantic latent space of StyleGAN, allows for further editing of the generated images. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show the advantages of our method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Camera pose regression methods apply a single forward pass to the query image to estimate the camera pose. As such, they offer a fast and light-weight alternative to traditional localization schemes based on image retrieval. Pose regression approaches simultaneously learn two regression tasks, aiming to jointly estimate the camera position and orientation using a single embedding vector computed by a convolutional backbone. We propose an attention-based approach for pose regression, where the convolutional activation maps are used as sequential inputs. Transformers are applied to encode the sequential activation maps as latent vectors, used for camera pose regression. This allows us to pay attention to spatially-varying deep features. Using two Transformer heads, we separately focus on the features for camera position and orientation, based on how informative they are per task. Our proposed approach is shown to compare favorably to contemporary pose regressors schemes and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across multiple outdoor and indoor benchmarks. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, our approach is the only method to attain sub-meter average accuracy across outdoor scenes. We make our code publicly available from here.
A pervasive design issue of AI systems is their explainability--how to provide appropriate information to help users understand the AI. The technical field of explainable AI (XAI) has produced a rich toolbox of techniques. Designers are now tasked with the challenges of how to select the most suitable XAI techniques and translate them into UX solutions. Informed by our previous work studying design challenges around XAI UX, this work proposes a design process to tackle these challenges. We review our and related prior work to identify requirements that the process should fulfill, and accordingly, propose a Question-Driven Design Process that grounds the user needs, choices of XAI techniques, design, and evaluation of XAI UX all in the user questions. We provide a mapping guide between prototypical user questions and exemplars of XAI techniques to reframe the technical space of XAI, also serving as boundary objects to support collaboration between designers and AI engineers. We demonstrate it with a use case of designing XAI for healthcare adverse events prediction, and discuss lessons learned for tackling design challenges of AI systems.
Assuming time-scale separation, a simple and unified theory of thermodynamics and stochastic thermodynamics is constructed for small classical systems strongly interacting with its environment in a controllable fashion. The total Hamiltonian is decomposed into a bath part and a system part, the latter being the Hamiltonian of mean force. Both the conditional equilibrium of bath and the reduced equilibrium of the system are described by canonical ensemble theories with respect to their own Hamiltonians. The bath free energy is independent of the system variables and the control parameter. Furthermore, the weak coupling theory of stochastic thermodynamics becomes applicable almost verbatim, even if the interaction and correlation between the system and its environment are strong and varied externally. Finally, this TSS-based approach also leads to some new insights about the origin of the second law of thermodynamics.
End-to-end models are favored in automatic speech recognition (ASR) because of their simplified system structure and superior performance. Among these models, Transformer and Conformer have achieved state-of-the-art recognition accuracy in which self-attention plays a vital role in capturing important global information. However, the time and memory complexity of self-attention increases squarely with the length of the sentence. In this paper, a prob-sparse self-attention mechanism is introduced into Conformer to sparse the computing process of self-attention in order to accelerate inference speed and reduce space consumption. Specifically, we adopt a Kullback-Leibler divergence based sparsity measurement for each query to decide whether we compute the attention function on this query. By using the prob-sparse attention mechanism, we achieve impressively 8% to 45% inference speed-up and 15% to 45% memory usage reduction of the self-attention module of Conformer Transducer while maintaining the same level of error rate.
In this paper, we investigate the nonhomogeneous boundary value problem for the steady Navier-Stokes equations in a helically symmetric spatial domain. When data is assumed to be helical invariant and satisfies the compatibility condition, we prove this problem has at least one helical invariant solution.
We use the aggregate information from individual-to-firm and firm-to-firm in Garanti BBVA Bank transactions to mimic domestic private demand. Particularly, we replicate the quarterly national accounts aggregate consumption and investment (gross fixed capital formation) and its bigger components (Machinery and Equipment and Construction) in real time for the case of Turkey. In order to validate the usefulness of the information derived from these indicators we test the nowcasting ability of both indicators to nowcast the Turkish GDP using different nowcasting models. The results are successful and confirm the usefulness of Consumption and Investment Banking transactions for nowcasting purposes. The value of the Big data information is more relevant at the beginning of the nowcasting process, when the traditional hard data information is scarce. This makes this information specially relevant for those countries where statistical release lags are longer like the Emerging Markets.
Satterthwaite and Toepke (1970 Phys. Rev. Lett. 25 741) predicted high-temperature superconductivity in hydrogen-rich metallic alloys, based on an idea that these compounds should exhibit high Debye frequency of the proton lattice, which boosts the superconducting transition temperature, Tc. The idea has got full confirmation more than four decades later when Drozdov et al (2015 Nature 525 73) experimentally discovered near-room-temperature superconductivity in highly-compressed sulphur superhydride, H3S. To date, more than a dozen of high-temperature hydrogen-rich superconducting phases in Ba-H, Pr-H, P-H, Pt-H, Ce-H, Th-H, S-H, Y-H, La-H, and (La,Y)-H systems have been synthesized and, recently, Hong et al (2021 arXiv:2101.02846) reported on the discovery of C2/m-SnH12 phase with superconducting transition temperature of Tc ~ 70 K. Here we analyse the magnetoresistance data, R(T,B), of C2/m-SnH12 phase and report that this superhydride exhibits the ground state superconducting gap of $\Delta$(0) = 9.2 meV, the ratio of 2$\Delta$(0)/k$_B$Tc = 3.3, and 0.010 < Tc/Tf < 0.014 (where Tf is the Fermi temperature) and, thus, C2/m-SnH12 falls into unconventional superconductors band in the Uemura plot.
Intelligent systems are transforming the world, as well as our healthcare system. We propose a deep learning-based cough sound classification model that can distinguish between children with healthy versus pathological coughs such as asthma, upper respiratory tract infection (URTI), and lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI). In order to train a deep neural network model, we collected a new dataset of cough sounds, labelled with clinician's diagnosis. The chosen model is a bidirectional long-short term memory network (BiLSTM) based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) features. The resulting trained model when trained for classifying two classes of coughs -- healthy or pathology (in general or belonging to a specific respiratory pathology), reaches accuracy exceeding 84\% when classifying cough to the label provided by the physicians' diagnosis. In order to classify subject's respiratory pathology condition, results of multiple cough epochs per subject were combined. The resulting prediction accuracy exceeds 91\% for all three respiratory pathologies. However, when the model is trained to classify and discriminate among the four classes of coughs, overall accuracy dropped: one class of pathological coughs are often misclassified as other. However, if one consider the healthy cough classified as healthy and pathological cough classified to have some kind of pathologies, then the overall accuracy of four class model is above 84\%. A longitudinal study of MFCC feature space when comparing pathological and recovered coughs collected from the same subjects revealed the fact that pathological cough irrespective of the underlying conditions occupy the same feature space making it harder to differentiate only using MFCC features.
The Tick library allows researchers in market microstructure to simulate and learn Hawkes process in high-frequency data, with optimized parametric and non-parametric learners. But one challenge is to take into account the correct causality of order book events considering latency: the only way one order book event can influence another is if the time difference between them (by the central order book timestamps) is greater than the minimum amount of time for an event to be (i) published in the order book, (ii) reach the trader responsible for the second event, (iii) influence the decision (processing time at the trader) and (iv) the 2nd event reach the order book and be processed. For this we can use exponential kernels shifted to the right by the latency amount. We derive the expression for the log-likelihood to be minimized for the 1-D and the multidimensional cases, and test this method with simulated data and real data. On real data we find that, although not all decays are the same, the latency itself will determine most of the decays. We also show how the decays are related to the latency. Code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/MarcosCarreira/Hawkes-With-Latency.
We study the problem of diffeomorphometric geodesic landmark matching where the objective is to find a diffeomorphism that via its group action maps between two sets of landmarks. It is well-known that the motion of the landmarks, and thereby the diffeomorphism, can be encoded by an initial momentum leading to a formulation where the landmark matching problem can be solved as an optimisation problem over such momenta. The novelty of our work lies in the application of a derivative-free Bayesian inverse method for learning the optimal momentum encoding the diffeomorphic mapping between the template and the target. The method we apply is the ensemble Kalman filter, an extension of the Kalman filter to nonlinear observation operators. We describe an efficient implementation of the algorithm and show several numerical results for various target shapes.
We propose a novel framework for model-order reduction of hyperbolic differential equations. The approach combines a relaxation formulation of the hyperbolic equations with a discretization using shifted base functions. Model-order reduction techniques are then applied to the resulting system of coupled ordinary differential equations. On computational examples including in particular the case of shock waves we show the validity of the approach and the performance of the reduced system.
Quantum computing is poised to dramatically change the computational landscape, worldwide. Quantum computers can solve complex problems that are, at least in some cases, beyond the ability of even advanced future classical-style computers. In addition to being able to solve these classical computer-unsolvable problems, quantum computers have demonstrated a capability to solve some problems (such as prime factoring) much more efficiently than classical computing. This will create problems for encryption techniques, which depend on the difficulty of factoring for their security. Security, scientific, and other applications will require access to quantum computing resources to access their unique capabilities, speed and economic (aggregate computing time cost) benefits. Many scientific applications, as well as numerous other ones, use grid computing to provide benefits such as scalability and resource access. As these applications may benefit from quantum capabilities - and some future applications may require quantum capabilities - identifying how to integrate quantum computing systems into grid computing environments is critical. This paper discusses the benefits of grid-connected quantum computers and what is required to achieve this.
Moral outrage has become synonymous with social media in recent years. However, the preponderance of academic analysis on social media websites has focused on hate speech and misinformation. This paper focuses on analyzing moral judgements rendered on social media by capturing the moral judgements that are passed in the subreddit /r/AmITheAsshole on Reddit. Using the labels associated with each judgement we train a classifier that can take a comment and determine whether it judges the user who made the original post to have positive or negative moral valence. Then, we use this classifier to investigate an assortment of website traits surrounding moral judgements in ten other subreddits, including where negative moral users like to post and their posting patterns. Our findings also indicate that posts that are judged in a positive manner will score higher.
A pair-density-wave (PDW) is a novel superconducting state with an oscillating order parameter. A microscopic mechanism that can give rise to it has been long sought but has not yet been established by any controlled calculation. Here we report a density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) study of an effective $t$-$J$-$V$ model, which is equivalent to the Holstein-Hubbard model in a strong-coupling limit, on long two-, four- and six-leg triangular cylinders. While a state with long-range PDW order is precluded in one dimension, we find strong quasi-long-range PDW order with a divergent PDW susceptibility as well as spontaneous breaking of time-reversal and inversion symmetries. Despite the strong interactions, the underlying Fermi surfaces and electron pockets around the $K$ and $K^\prime$ points in the Brillouin zone can be identified. We conclude that the state is valley-polarized and that the PDW arises from intra-pocket pairing with an incommensurate center of mass momentum. In the two-leg case, the exponential decay of spin correlations and the measured central charge $c\approx 1$ are consistent with an unusual realization of a Luther-Emery liquid.
One-dimensional (1D) materials have attracted significant research interest due to their unique quantum confinement effects and edge-related properties. Atomically thin 1D nanoribbon is particularly interesting because it is a valuable platform with physical limits of both thickness and width. Here, we develop a catalyst-free growth method and achieves the growth of Bi2O2Se nanostructures with tunable dimensionality. Significantly, Bi2O2Se nanoribbons with thickness down to 0.65 nm, corresponding to monolayer, are successfully grown for the first time. Electrical and optoelectronic measurements show that Bi2O2Se nanoribbons possess decent performance in terms of mobility, on/off ratio, and photoresponsivity, suggesting their promising for devices. This work not only reports a new method for the growth of atomically thin nanoribbons but also provides a platform to study properties and applications of such nanoribbon materials at thickness limit.
In many dynamic systems, decisions on system operation are updated over time, and the decision maker requires an online learning approach to optimize its strategy in response to the changing environment. When the loss and constraint functions are convex, this belongs to the general family of online convex optimization (OCO). In existing OCO works, the environment is assumed to vary in a time-slotted fashion, while the decisions are updated at each time slot. However, many wireless communication systems permit only periodic decision updates, i.e., each decision is fixed over multiple time slots, while the environment changes between the decision epochs. The standard OCO model is inadequate for these systems. Therefore, in this work, we consider periodic decision updates for OCO. We aim to minimize the accumulation of time-varying convex loss functions, subject to both short-term and long-term constraints. Information about the loss functions within the current update period may be incomplete and is revealed to the decision maker only after the decision is made. We propose an efficient algorithm, termed Periodic Queueing and Gradient Aggregation (PQGA), which employs novel periodic queues together with possibly multi-step aggregated gradient descent to update the decisions over time. We derive upper bounds on the dynamic regret, static regret, and constraint violation of PQGA. As an example application, we study the performance of PQGA in a large-scale multi-antenna system shared by multiple wireless service providers. Simulation results show that PQGA converges fast and substantially outperforms the known best alternative.
In this paper, we propose an anchor-free single-stage LiDAR-based 3D object detector -- RangeDet. The most notable difference with previous works is that our method is purely based on the range view representation. Compared with the commonly used voxelized or Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations, the range view representation is more compact and without quantization error. Although there are works adopting it for semantic segmentation, its performance in object detection is largely behind voxelized or BEV counterparts. We first analyze the existing range-view-based methods and find two issues overlooked by previous works: 1) the scale variation between nearby and far away objects; 2) the inconsistency between the 2D range image coordinates used in feature extraction and the 3D Cartesian coordinates used in output. Then we deliberately design three components to address these issues in our RangeDet. We test our RangeDet in the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset (WOD). Our best model achieves 72.9/75.9/65.8 3D AP on vehicle/pedestrian/cyclist. These results outperform other range-view-based methods by a large margin (~20 3D AP in vehicle detection), and are overall comparable with the state-of-the-art multi-view-based methods. Codes will be public.
Parameter Estimation (PE) and State Estimation (SE) are the most wide-spread tasks in the system engineering. They need to be done automatically, fast and frequently, as measurements arrive. Deep Learning (DL) holds the promise of tackling the challenge, however in so far, as PE and SE in power systems is concerned, (a) DL did not win trust of the system operators because of the lack of the physics of electricity based, interpretations and (b) DL remained illusive in the operational regimes were data is scarce. To address this, we present a hybrid scheme which embeds physics modeling of power systems into Graphical Neural Networks (GNN), therefore empowering system operators with a reliable and explainable real-time predictions which can then be used to control the critical infrastructure. To enable progress towards trustworthy DL for PE and SE, we build a physics-informed method, named Power-GNN, which reconstructs physical, thus interpretable, parameters within Effective Power Flow (EPF) models, such as admittances of effective power lines, and NN parameters, representing implicitly unobserved elements of the system. In our experiments, we test the Power-GNN on different realistic power networks, including these with thousands of loads and hundreds of generators. We show that the Power-GNN outperforms vanilla NN scheme unaware of the EPF physics.
A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), $\textsf{Max-CSP}(\mathcal{F})$, is specified by a finite set of constraints $\mathcal{F} \subseteq \{[q]^k \to \{0,1\}\}$ for positive integers $q$ and $k$. An instance of the problem on $n$ variables is given by $m$ applications of constraints from $\mathcal{F}$ to subsequences of the $n$ variables, and the goal is to find an assignment to the variables that satisfies the maximum number of constraints. In the $(\gamma,\beta)$-approximation version of the problem for parameters $0 \leq \beta < \gamma \leq 1$, the goal is to distinguish instances where at least $\gamma$ fraction of the constraints can be satisfied from instances where at most $\beta$ fraction of the constraints can be satisfied. In this work we consider the approximability of this problem in the context of sketching algorithms and give a dichotomy result. Specifically, for every family $\mathcal{F}$ and every $\beta < \gamma$, we show that either a linear sketching algorithm solves the problem in polylogarithmic space, or the problem is not solvable by any sketching algorithm in $o(\sqrt{n})$ space.
Traditionally, origami has been categorized into two groups according to their kinematics design: rigid and non-rigid origami. However, such categorization can be superficial, and rigid origami can obtain new mechanical properties by intentionally relaxing the rigid-folding kinematics. Based on numerical simulations using the bar-hinge approach and experiments, this study examines the multi-stability of a stacked Miura-origami cellular structure with different levels of facet compliance. The simulation and experiment results show that a unit cell in such cellular solid exhibits only two stable states if it follows the rigid origami kinematics; however, two more stable states are reachable if the origami facets become sufficiently compliant. Moreover, the switch between two certain stable states shows an asymmetric energy barrier, meaning that the unit cell follows fundamentally different deformation paths when it extends from one state to another compared to the opposite compression switch. As a result, the reaction force required for extending this unit cell between these two states can be higher than the compression switch. Such asymmetric multi-stability can be fine-tuned by tailoring the underlying origami design, and it can be extended into cellular solids with carefully placed voids. By showing the benefits of exploiting facet compliance, this study could foster multi-functional structures and material systems that traditional rigid origami cannot create.
We prove $L^p$ bounds for the maximal operators associated to an Ahlfors-regular variant of fractal percolation. Our bounds improve upon those obtained by I. {\L}aba and M. Pramanik and in some cases are sharp up to the endpoint. A consequence of our main result is that there exist Ahlfors-regular Salem Cantor sets of any dimension $>1/2$ such that the associated maximal operator is bounded on $L^2(\mathbb{R})$. We follow the overall scheme of {\L}aba-Pramanik for the analytic part of the argument, while the probabilistic part is instead inspired by our earlier work on intersection properties of random measures.
Bayesian Optimization is a popular tool for tuning algorithms in automatic machine learning (AutoML) systems. Current state-of-the-art methods leverage Random Forests or Gaussian processes to build a surrogate model that predicts algorithm performance given a certain set of hyperparameter settings. In this paper, we propose a new surrogate model based on gradient boosting, where we use quantile regression to provide optimistic estimates of the performance of an unobserved hyperparameter setting, and combine this with a distance metric between unobserved and observed hyperparameter settings to help regulate exploration. We demonstrate empirically that the new method is able to outperform some state-of-the art techniques across a reasonable sized set of classification problems.
Consider a connected graph $G$ and let $T$ be a spanning tree of $G$. Every edge $e \in G-T$ induces a cycle in $T \cup \{e\}$. The intersection of two distinct such cycles is the set of edges of $T$ that belong to both cycles. We consider the problem of finding a spanning tree that has the least number of such non-empty intersections.
We consider the task of grasping a target object based on a natural language command query. Previous work primarily focused on localizing the object given the query, which requires a separate grasp detection module to grasp it. The cascaded application of two pipelines incurs errors in overlapping multi-object cases due to ambiguity in the individual outputs. This work proposes a model named Command Grasping Network(CGNet) to directly output command satisficing grasps from RGB image and textual command inputs. A dataset with ground truth (image, command, grasps) tuple is generated based on the VMRD dataset to train the proposed network. Experimental results on the generated test set show that CGNet outperforms a cascaded object-retrieval and grasp detection baseline by a large margin. Three physical experiments demonstrate the functionality and performance of CGNet.
It has been shown that the parallel Lattice Linear Predicate (LLP) algorithm solves many combinatorial optimization problems such as the shortest path problem, the stable marriage problem and the market clearing price problem. In this paper, we give the parallel LLP algorithm for many dynamic programming problems. In particular, we show that the LLP algorithm solves the longest subsequence problem, the optimal binary search tree problem, and the knapsack problem. Furthermore, the algorithm can be used to solve the constrained versions of these problems so long as the constraints are lattice linear. The parallel LLP algorithm requires only read-write atomicity and no higher-level atomic instructions.
We report the first investigation of the performance of EOM-CC4 -- an approximate equation-of-motion coupled-cluster model which includes iterative quadruple excitations -- for vertical excitation energies in molecular systems. By considering a set of 28 excited states in 10 small molecules for which we have computed CCSDTQP and FCI reference energies, we show that, in the case of excited states with a dominant contribution from the single excitations, CC4 yields excitation energies with sub-kJ~mol$^{-1}$ accuracy (i.e., error below $0.01$ eV), in very close agreement with its more expensive CCSDTQ parent. Therefore, if one aims at high accuracy, CC4 stands as a highly competitive approximate method to model molecular excited states, with a significant improvement over both CC3 and CCSDT. Our results also evidence that, although the same qualitative conclusions hold, one cannot reach the same level of accuracy for transitions with a dominant contribution from the double excitations.
We present a comprehensive analytic model of a relativistic jet propagation in expanding media. This model is the first to cover the entire jet evolution from early to late times, as well as a range of configurations that are relevant to binary neutron star mergers. These include low and high luminosity jets, unmagnetized and mildly magnetized jets, time-dependent luminosity jets, and Newtonian and relativistic head velocities. We also extend the existing solution of jets in a static medium to power-law density media with index $\alpha<5$. Our model, which is tested and calibrated by a suite of 3D RMHD simulations, provides simple analytic formulae for the jet head propagation and breakout times, as well as a simple breakout criterion which depends only on the jet to ejecta energy ratio and jet opening angle. Assuming a delay time $ t_d $ between the onset of a homologous ejecta expansion and jet launching, the system evolution has two main regimes: strong and weak jets. The regime depends on the ratio between the jet head velocity in the ejecta frame and the local ejecta velocity, denoted as $ \eta $. Strong jets start their propagation in the ejecta on a timescale shorter than $t_d$ with $\eta \gg 1$, and within several ejecta dynamical times $\eta$ drops below unity. Weak jets are unable to penetrate the ejecta at first (start with $\eta \ll 1$), and breach the ejecta only after the ejecta expands over a timescale longer than $ t_d $, thus their evolution is independent of $ t_d $. After enough time, both strong and weak jets approach an asymptotic phase where $\eta$ is constant. Applying our model to short GRBs, we find that there is most likely a large diversity of ejecta mass, where mass $ \lesssim 10^{-3}~{\rm M}_{\odot} $ (at least along the poles) is common.
As gradient descent method in deep learning causes a series of questions, this paper proposes a novel gradient-free deep learning structure. By adding a new module into traditional Self-Organizing Map and introducing residual into the map, a Deep Valued Self-Organizing Map network is constructed. And analysis about the convergence performance of such a deep Valued Self-Organizing Map network is proved in this paper, which gives an inequality about the designed parameters with the dimension of inputs and the loss of prediction.
It has been previously shown that a particular nonperturbative constituent-quark model of hadrons describes experimental measurements of electromagnetic form factors of light charged mesons through a small number of common phenomenological parameters, matching at the same time the Quantum-Chromodynamics (QCD) asymptotics for the pi-meson form factor at large momentum transfer. Here we start with the determination of the K0 electromagnetic form factor in this approach. Precise measurement of the K0 charge radius makes it possible to constrain model parameters with high accuracy. Then, with all parameters fixed, we revisit the K+ form factor and find that it matches experimental measurements in the infrared, lattice results at moderate momentum transfer and the perturbative QCD asymptotics in the ultraviolet. In this way we obtain a narrow constraint on the K+ charge radius, <r_K+^2> = 0.403 +0.007 -0.006 fm^2, and extend the successful infrared-ultraviolet connection from pi to K mesons.
The purpose of this paper is to present an inexact version of the scaled gradient projection method on a convex set, which is inexact in two sense. First, an inexact projection on the feasible set is computed, allowing for an appropriate relative error tolerance. Second, an inexact non-monotone line search scheme is employed to compute a step size which defines the next iteration. It is shown that the proposed method has similar asymptotic convergence properties and iteration-complexity bounds as the usual scaled gradient projection method employing monotone line searches.
We calculate the mass difference between the $\Upsilon$ and $\eta_b$ and the $\Upsilon$ leptonic width from lattice QCD using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark formalism for the $b$ quark and including $u$, $d$, $s$ and $c$ quarks in the sea. We have results for lattices with lattice spacing as low as 0.03 fm and multiple heavy quark masses, enabling us to map out the heavy quark mass dependence and determine values at the $b$ quark mass. Our results are: $M_{\Upsilon} -M_{\eta_b} = 57.5(2.3)(1.0) \,\mathrm{MeV}$ (where the second uncertainty comes from neglect of quark-line disconnected correlation functions) and decay constants, $f_{\eta_b}=724(12)$ MeV and $f_{\Upsilon} =677.2(9.7)$ MeV, giving $\Gamma(\Upsilon \rightarrow e^+e^-) = 1.292(37)(3) \,\mathrm{keV}$. The hyperfine splitting and leptonic width are both in good agreement with experiment, and provide the most accurate lattice QCD results to date for these quantities by some margin. At the same time results for the time moments of the vector-vector correlation function can be compared to values for the $b$ quark contribution to $\sigma(e^+e^- \rightarrow \mathrm{hadrons})$ determined from experiment. Moments 4--10 provide a 2\% test of QCD and yield a $b$ quark contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon of 0.300(15)$\times 10^{-10}$. Our results, covering a range of heavy quark masses, may also be useful to constrain QCD-like composite theories for beyond the Standard Model physics.
The purpose of this paper is presenting a theoretical basis for the study of $\omega$-Hamiltonian vector fields in a more general approach than the classical one. We introduce the concepts of $\omega$-symplectic group and $\omega$-semisymplectic group, and describe some of their properties. We show that the Lie algebra of such groups is a useful tool in the recognition of an $\omega$-Hamiltonian vector field defined on a symplectic vector space $(V,\omega)$ with respect to coordinates that are not necessarily symplectic.
Ineffective fundraising lowers the resources charities can use to provide goods. We combine a field experiment and a causal machine-learning approach to increase a charity's fundraising effectiveness. The approach optimally targets a fundraising instrument to individuals whose expected donations exceed solicitation costs. Our results demonstrate that machine-learning-based optimal targeting allows the charity to substantially increase donations net of fundraising costs relative to uniform benchmarks in which either everybody or no one receives the gift. To that end, it (a) should direct its fundraising efforts to a subset of past donors and (b) never address individuals who were previously asked but never donated. Further, we show that the benefits of machine-learning-based optimal targeting even materialize when the charity only exploits publicly available geospatial information or applies the estimated optimal targeting rule to later fundraising campaigns conducted in similar samples. We conclude that charities not engaging in optimal targeting waste significant resources.
Spin$-$orbit alignment (SOA; i.e., the vector alignment between the halo spin and the orbital angular momentum of neighboring halos) provides an important clue to how galactic angular momenta develop. For this study, we extract virial-radius-wise contact halo pairs with mass ratios between 1/10 and 10 from a set of cosmological $N$-body simulations. In the spin--orbit angle distribution, we find a significant SOA in that 52.7%$\pm$0.2% of neighbors are on the prograde orbit. The SOA of our sample is mainly driven by low-mass target halos ($<10^{11.5}h^{-1}M_{\odot}$) with close merging neighbors, corroborating the notion that the tidal interaction is one of the physical origins of SOA. We also examine the correlation of SOA with the adjacent filament and find that halos closer to the filament show stronger SOA. Most interestingly, we discover for the first time that halos with the spin parallel to the filament experience most frequently the prograde-polar interaction (i.e., fairly perpendicular but still prograde interaction; spin--orbit angle $\sim$ 70$^{\circ}$). This instantly invokes the spin-flip event and the prograde-polar interaction will soon flip the spin of the halo to align it with the neighbor's orbital angular momentum. We propose that the SOA originates from the local cosmic flow along the anisotropic large-scale structure, especially that along the filament, and grows further by interactions with neighbors.
The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has now spread throughout the globe infecting over 150 million people and causing the death of over 3.2 million people. Thus, there is an urgent need to study the dynamics of epidemiological models to gain a better understanding of how such diseases spread. While epidemiological models can be computationally expensive, recent advances in machine learning techniques have given rise to neural networks with the ability to learn and predict complex dynamics at reduced computational costs. Here we introduce two digital twins of a SEIRS model applied to an idealised town. The SEIRS model has been modified to take account of spatial variation and, where possible, the model parameters are based on official virus spreading data from the UK. We compare predictions from a data-corrected Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network and a predictive Generative Adversarial Network. The predictions given by these two frameworks are accurate when compared to the original SEIRS model data. Additionally, these frameworks are data-agnostic and could be applied to towns, idealised or real, in the UK or in other countries. Also, more compartments could be included in the SEIRS model, in order to study more realistic epidemiological behaviour.
This work presents the selection principle $S_1^*(\tau_x,CD)$ that characterizes $q$-points. We also discuss the induced topological game $G_1^*(\tau_x,CD)$ and its relations with $W$-points and $\widetilde{W}$-points, as well as with the game $G_1(\Omega_x,\Omega_x)$.
A single layer neural network for the solution of linear equations is presented. The proposed circuit is based on the standard Hopfield model albeit with the added flexibility that the interconnection weight matrix need not be symmetric. This results in an asymmetric Hopfield neural network capable of solving linear equations. PSPICE simulation results are given which verify the theoretical predictions. Experimental results for circuits set up to solve small problems further confirm the operation of the proposed circuit.
We introduce a simple and effective method for learning VAEs with controllable inductive biases by using an intermediary set of latent variables. This allows us to overcome the limitations of the standard Gaussian prior assumption. In particular, it allows us to impose desired properties like sparsity or clustering on learned representations, and incorporate prior information into the learned model. Our approach, which we refer to as the Intermediary Latent Space VAE (InteL-VAE), is based around controlling the stochasticity of the encoding process with the intermediary latent variables, before deterministically mapping them forward to our target latent representation, from which reconstruction is performed. This allows us to maintain all the advantages of the traditional VAE framework, while incorporating desired prior information, inductive biases, and even topological information through the latent mapping. We show that this, in turn, allows InteL-VAEs to learn both better generative models and representations.
We shall describe the various activities done by us in Covid Times including outreach and educational workshops in Physics and Astronomy. We shall discuss the caveats in virtual teaching of Astronomy and the lessons learnt in the process.
We investigate and analyze principles of typical motion planning algorithms. These include traditional planning algorithms, supervised learning, optimal value reinforcement learning, policy gradient reinforcement learning. Traditional planning algorithms we investigated include graph search algorithms, sampling-based algorithms, and interpolating curve algorithms. Supervised learning algorithms include MSVM, LSTM, MCTS and CNN. Optimal value reinforcement learning algorithms include Q learning, DQN, double DQN, dueling DQN. Policy gradient algorithms include policy gradient method, actor-critic algorithm, A3C, A2C, DPG, DDPG, TRPO and PPO. New general criteria are also introduced to evaluate performance and application of motion planning algorithms by analytical comparisons. Convergence speed and stability of optimal value and policy gradient algorithms are specially analyzed. Future directions are presented analytically according to principles and analytical comparisons of motion planning algorithms. This paper provides researchers with a clear and comprehensive understanding about advantages, disadvantages, relationships, and future of motion planning algorithms in robotics, and paves ways for better motion planning algorithms.
Missing data is a common problem in clinical data collection, which causes difficulty in the statistical analysis of such data. To overcome problems caused by incomplete data, we propose a new imputation method called projective resampling imputation mean estimation (PRIME), which can also address ``the curse of dimensionality" problem in imputation with less information loss. We use various sample sizes, missing-data rates, covariate correlations, and noise levels in simulation studies, and all results show that PRIME outperformes other methods such as iterative least-squares estimation (ILSE), maximum likelihood (ML), and complete-case analysis (CC). Moreover, we conduct a study of influential factors in cardiac surgery-associated acute kidney injury (CSA-AKI), which show that our method performs better than the other models. Finally, we prove that PRIME has a consistent property under some regular conditions.
We study a duality for the $n$-point functions in VEV formalism that we call the ordinary vs fully simple duality. It provides an ultimate generalisation and a proper context for the duality between maps and fully simple maps observed by Borot and Garcia-Failde. Our approach allows to transfer the algebraicity properties between the systems of $n$-point functions related by this duality, and gives direct tools for the analysis of singularities. As an application, we give a proof of a recent conjecture of Borot and Garcia-Failde on topological recursion for fully simple maps.
Logging is a development practice that plays an important role in the operations and monitoring of complex systems. Developers place log statements in the source code and use log data to understand how the system behaves in production. Unfortunately, anticipating where to log during development is challenging. Previous studies show the feasibility of leveraging machine learning to recommend log placement despite the data imbalance since logging is a fraction of the overall code base. However, it remains unknown how those techniques apply to an industry setting, and little is known about the effect of imbalanced data and sampling techniques. In this paper, we study the log placement problem in the code base of Adyen, a large-scale payment company. We analyze 34,526 Java files and 309,527 methods that sum up +2M SLOC. We systematically measure the effectiveness of five models based on code metrics, explore the effect of sampling techniques, understand which features models consider to be relevant for the prediction, and evaluate whether we can exploit 388,086 methods from 29 Apache projects to learn where to log in an industry setting. Our best performing model achieves 79% of balanced accuracy, 81% of precision, 60% of recall. While sampling techniques improve recall, they penalize precision at a prohibitive cost. Experiments with open-source data yield under-performing models over Adyen's test set; nevertheless, they are useful due to their low rate of false positives. Our supporting scripts and tools are available to the community.
Faraday rotation provides a valuable tracer of magnetic fields in the interstellar medium; catalogs of Faraday rotation measures provide key observations for studies of the Galactic magnetic field. We present a new catalog of rotation measures derived from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey, covering a large region of the Galactic plane spanning 52 deg < l < 192 deg, -3 deg < b < 5 deg, along with northern and southern latitude extensions around l ~ 105 deg. We have derived rotation measures for 2234 sources (4 of which are known pulsars), 75% of which have no previous measurements, over an area of approximately 1300 square degrees. These new rotation measures increase the measurement density for this region of the Galactic plane by a factor of two.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms show amazing performance in simulation in recent years, but placing MARL in real-world applications may suffer safety problems. MARL with centralized shields was proposed and verified in safety games recently. However, centralized shielding approaches can be infeasible in several real-world multi-agent applications that involve non-cooperative agents or communication delay. Thus, we propose to combine MARL with decentralized Control Barrier Function (CBF) shields based on available local information. We establish a safe MARL framework with decentralized multiple CBFs and develop Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) to Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient with decentralized multiple Control Barrier Functions (MADDPG-CBF). Based on a collision-avoidance problem that includes not only cooperative agents but obstacles, we demonstrate the construction of multiple CBFs with safety guarantees in theory. Experiments are conducted and experiment results verify that the proposed safe MARL framework can guarantee the safety of agents included in MARL.
Carbon is one of the most essential elements to support a sustained human presence in space, and more immediately, several large-scale methalox-based transport systems will begin operating in the near future. This raises the question of whether indigenous carbon on the Moon is abundant and concentrated to the extent where it could be used as a viable resource including as propellant. Here, I assess potential sources of lunar carbon based on previous work focused on polar water ice. A simplified model is used to estimate the temperature-dependent Carbon Content of Ices at the lunar poles, and this is combined with remote sensing data to estimate the total amount of carbon and generate a Carbon Favorability Index that highlights promising deposits for future ground-based prospecting. Hotspots in the index maps are identified, and nearby staging areas are analyzed using quantitative models of trafficability and solar irradiance. Overall, the Moon is extremely poor in carbon sources compared to more abundant and readily accessible options at Mars. However, a handful of polar regions may contain appreciable amounts of subsurface carbon-bearing ices that could serve as a rich source in the near term, but would be easily exhausted on longer timescales. Four of those regions were found to have safe nearby staging areas with equatorial-like illumination at a modest height above the surface. Any one of these sites could yield enough C, H and O to produce propellant for hundreds of refuelings of a large spacecraft. Other potential lunar carbon sources including bulk regolith and pyroclastic glasses are less viable due to their low carbon concentrations.
Traffic simulators act as an essential component in the operating and planning of transportation systems. Conventional traffic simulators usually employ a calibrated physical car-following model to describe vehicles' behaviors and their interactions with traffic environment. However, there is no universal physical model that can accurately predict the pattern of vehicle's behaviors in different situations. A fixed physical model tends to be less effective in a complicated environment given the non-stationary nature of traffic dynamics. In this paper, we formulate traffic simulation as an inverse reinforcement learning problem, and propose a parameter sharing adversarial inverse reinforcement learning model for dynamics-robust simulation learning. Our proposed model is able to imitate a vehicle's trajectories in the real world while simultaneously recovering the reward function that reveals the vehicle's true objective which is invariant to different dynamics. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods and its robustness to variant dynamics of traffic.
The direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in array signal processing is an important research area. The effectiveness of the direction of arrival greatly determines the performance of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) antenna systems. The multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, which is the most canonical and widely used subspace-based method, has a moderate estimation performance of DOA. However, in hybrid massive MIMO systems, the received signals at the antennas are not sent to the receiver directly, and spatial covariance matrix, which is essential in MUSIC algorithm, is thus unavailable. Therefore, the spatial covariance matrix reconstruction is required for the application of MUSIC in hybrid massive MIMO systems. In this article, we present a quantum algorithm for MUSIC-based DOA estimation in hybrid massive MIMO systems. Compared with the best-known classical algorithm, our quantum algorithm can achieve an exponential speedup on some parameters and a polynomial speedup on others under some mild conditions. In our scheme, we first present the quantum subroutine for the beam sweeping based spatial covariance matrix reconstruction, where we implement a quantum singular vector transition process to avoid extending the steering vectors matrix into the Hermitian form. Second, a variational quantum density matrix eigensolver (VQDME) is proposed for obtaining signal and noise subspaces, where we design a novel objective function in the form of the trace of density matrices product. Finally, a quantum labeling operation is proposed for the direction of arrival estimation of the signal.
Time-frequency concentration operators restrict the integral analysis-synthesis formula for the short-time Fourier transform to a given compact domain. We estimate how much the corresponding eigenvalue counting function deviates from the Lebesgue measure of the time-frequency domain. For window functions in the Gelfand-Shilov class, the bounds approximately match known asymptotics. We also consider window functions that decay only polynomially in time and frequency.
The correlation between the event mean-transverse momentum $[p_{\mathrm{T}}]$, and the anisotropic flow magnitude $v_n$, $\rho(v^{2}_{n},[p_{T}])$, has been argued to be sensitive to the initial conditions in heavy-ion collisions. We use simulated events generated with the AMPT and EPOS models for Au+Au at $\sqrt{\textit{s}_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV, to investigate the model dependence and the response and sensitivity of the $\rho(v^{2}_{2},[p_{T}])$ correlator to collision-system size and shape, and the viscosity of the matter produced in the collisions. We find good qualitative agreement between the correlators for the string melting version of the AMPT model and the EPOS model. The model investigations for shape-engineered events as well as events with different viscosity ($\eta/s$), indicate that $\rho(v^{2}_{2},[p_{T}])$ is sensitive to the initial-state geometry of the collision system but is insensitive to sizable changes in $\eta/s$ for the medium produced in the collisions. These findings suggest that precise differential measurements of $\rho(v^{2}_{2},[p_{T}])$ as a function of system size, shape, and beam-energy could provide more stringent constraints to discern between initial-state models and hence, more reliable extractions of $\eta/s$.
Crowd counting is critical for numerous video surveillance scenarios. One of the main issues in this task is how to handle the dramatic scale variations of pedestrians caused by the perspective effect. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel convolution neural network-based crowd counting method, termed Perspective-guided Fractional-Dilation Network (PFDNet). By modeling the continuous scale variations, the proposed PFDNet is able to select the proper fractional dilation kernels for adapting to different spatial locations. It significantly improves the flexibility of the state-of-the-arts that only consider the discrete representative scales. In addition, by avoiding the multi-scale or multi-column architecture that used in other methods, it is computationally more efficient. In practice, the proposed PFDNet is constructed by stacking multiple Perspective-guided Fractional-Dilation Convolutions (PFC) on a VGG16-BN backbone. By introducing a novel generalized dilation convolution operation, the PFC can handle fractional dilation ratios in the spatial domain under the guidance of perspective annotations, achieving continuous scales modeling of pedestrians. To deal with the problem of unavailable perspective information in some cases, we further introduce an effective perspective estimation branch to the proposed PFDNet, which can be trained in either supervised or weakly-supervised setting once the branch has been pre-trained. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PFDNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ShanghaiTech A, ShanghaiTech B, WorldExpo'10, UCF-QNRF, UCF_CC_50 and TRANCOS dataset, achieving MAE 53.8, 6.5, 6.8, 84.3, 205.8, and 3.06 respectively.
Rikudo is a number-placement puzzle, where the player is asked to complete a Hamiltonian path on a hexagonal grid, given some clues (numbers already placed and edges of the path). We prove that the game is complete for NP, even if the puzzle has no hole. When all odd numbers are placed it is in P, whereas it is still NP-hard when all numbers of the form $3k+1$ are placed.
We have demonstrated the advantage of combining multi-wavelength observations, from the ultraviolet (UV) to near-infrared, to study Kron 3, a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. We have estimated the radius of the cluster Kron 3 to be 2.'0 and for the first time, we report the identification of NUV-bright red clump (RC) stars and the extension of the RCin colour and magnitude in the NUV vs (NUV-optical) colour-magnitude diagram (CMD). We found that extension of the RC is an intrinsic property of the cluster and it is not due to contamination of field stars or differential reddening across the field. We studied the spectral energy distribution of the RC stars and estimated a small range in temperature ~5000 - 5500K, luminosity ~60 - 90 Land radius ~8.0 - 11.0 Supporting their RC nature. The range of UV magnitudes amongst the RC stars (~23.3 to 24.8 mag) is likely caused by the combined effect of variable mass loss, variation in initial helium abundance (Y_ini=0.23 to 0.28), and a small variation in age (6.5-7.5 Gyr) and metallicity ([Fe/H]=-1.5 to -1.3). Spectroscopic follow-up observations of RC stars in Kron 3 are necessary to confirm the cause of the extended RC.
Image restoration is a typical ill-posed problem, and it contains various tasks. In the medical imaging field, an ill-posed image interrupts diagnosis and even following image processing. Both traditional iterative and up-to-date deep networks have attracted much attention and obtained a significant improvement in reconstructing satisfying images. This study combines their advantages into one unified mathematical model and proposes a general image restoration strategy to deal with such problems. This strategy consists of two modules. First, a novel generative adversarial net(GAN) with WGAN-GP training is built to recover image structures and subtle details. Then, a deep iteration module promotes image quality with a combination of pre-trained deep networks and compressed sensing algorithms by ADMM optimization. (D)eep (I)teration module suppresses image artifacts and further recovers subtle image details, (A)ssisted by (M)ulti-level (O)bey-pixel feature extraction networks (D)iscriminator to recover general structures. Therefore, the proposed strategy is named DIAMOND.
This work (Part (I)) together with its companion (Part (II) [45]) develops a new framework for stochastic functional Kolmogorov equations, which are nonlinear stochastic differential equations depending on the current as well as the past states. Because of the complexity of the results, it seems to be instructive to divide our contributions to two parts. In contrast to the existing literature, our effort is to advance the knowledge by allowing delay and past dependence, yielding essential utility to a wide range of applications. A long-standing question of fundamental importance pertaining to biology and ecology is: What are the minimal necessary and sufficient conditions for long-term persistence and extinction (or for long-term coexistence of interacting species) of a population? Regardless of the particular applications encountered, persistence and extinction are properties shared by Kolmogorov systems. While there are many excellent treaties of stochastic-differential-equation-based Kolmogorov equations, the work on stochastic Kolmogorov equations with past dependence is still scarce. Our aim here is to answer the aforementioned basic question. This work, Part (I), is devoted to characterization of persistence, whereas its companion, Part (II) [45], is devoted to extinction. The main techniques used in this paper include the newly developed functional It^o formula and asymptotic coupling and Harris-like theory for infinite dimensional systems specialized to functional equations. General theorems for stochastic functional Kolmogorov equations are developed first. Then a number of applications are examined to obtain new results substantially covering, improving, and extending the existing literature. Furthermore, these conditions reduce to that of Kolmogorov systems when there is no past dependence.
Most softwarized telco services are conveniently framed as Service Function Chains (SFCs). Indeed, being structured as a combination of interconnected nodes, service chains may suffer from the single point of failure problem, meaning that an individual node malfunctioning could compromise the whole chain operation. To guarantee "highly available" (HA) levels, service providers are required to introduce redundancy strategies to achieve specific availability demands, where cost constraints have to be taken into account as well. Along these lines we propose HASFC (standing for High Availability SFC), a framework designed to support, through a dedicated REST interface, the MANO infrastructure in deploying SFCs with an optimal availability-cost trade off. Our framework is equipped with: i) an availability model builder aimed to construct probabilistic models of the SFC nodes in terms of failure and repair actions; ii) a chaining and selection module to compose the possible redundant SFCs, and extract the best candidates thereof. Beyond providing architectural details, we demonstrate the functionalities of HASFC through a use case which considers the IP Multimedia Subsystem, an SFC-like structure adopted to manage multimedia contents within 4G and 5G networks.
Many computer systems for calculating the proper organization of memory are among the most critical issues. Using a tier cache memory (along with branching prediction) is an effective means of increasing modern multi-core processors' performance. Designing high-performance processors is a complex task and requires preliminary verification and analysis of the model level, usually used in analytical and simulation modeling. The refinement of extreme programming is an unfortunate challenge. Few experts disagree with the synthesis of access points. This article demonstrates that Internet QoS and 16-bit architectures are always incompatible, but it's the same situation for write-back caches. The solution to this problem can be implemented by analyzing simulation models of different complexity in combination with the analytical evaluation of individual algorithms. This work is devoted to designing a multi-parameter simulation model of a multi-process for evaluating the performance of cache memory algorithms and the optimality of the structure. Optimization of the structures and algorithms of the cache memory allows you to accelerate the interaction of the memory process and improve the performance of the entire system.
This article investigates the heat kernel of the two-dimensional uniform spanning tree. We improve previous work by demonstrating the occurrence of log-logarithmic fluctuations around the leading order polynomial behaviour for the on-diagonal part of the quenched heat kernel. In addition we give two-sided estimates for the averaged heat kernel, and we show that the exponents that appear in the off-diagonal parts of the quenched and averaged versions of the heat kernel differ. Finally, we derive various scaling limits for the heat kernel, the implications of which include enabling us to sharpen the known asymptotics regarding the on-diagonal part of the averaged heat kernel and the expected distance travelled by the associated simple random walk.
We extend the weak-strong uniqueness principle to general models of compressible viscous fluids near/on the vacuum. In particular, the physically relevant case of positive density with polynomial decay at infinity is considered.
How can a collection of motile cells, each generating contractile nematic stresses in isolation, become an extensile nematic at the tissue-level? Understanding this seemingly contradictory experimental observation, which occurs irrespective of whether the tissue is in the liquid or solid states, is not only crucial to our understanding of diverse biological processes, but is also of fundamental interest to soft matter and many-body physics. Here, we resolve this cellular to tissue level disconnect in the small fluctuation regime by using analytical theories based on hydrodynamic descriptions of confluent tissues, in both liquid and solid states. Specifically, we show that a collection of microscopic constituents with no inherently nematic extensile forces can exhibit active extensile nematic behavior when subject to polar fluctuating forces. We further support our findings by performing cell level simulations of minimal models of confluent tissues.
Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming human lives by paving the way for the management of physical devices on the edge. These interconnected IoT objects share data for remote accessibility and can be vulnerable to open attacks and illegal access. Intrusion detection methods are commonly used for the detection of such kinds of attacks but with these methods, the performance/accuracy is not optimal. This work introduces a novel intrusion detection approach based on an ensemble-based voting classifier that combines multiple traditional classifiers as a base learner and gives the vote to the predictions of the traditional classifier in order to get the final prediction. To test the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are performed on a set of seven different IoT devices and tested for binary attack classification and multi-class attack classification. The results illustrate prominent accuracies on Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors and weather sensors to 96% and 97% and for other machine learning algorithms to 85% and 87%, respectively. Furthermore, comparison with other traditional machine learning methods validates the superiority of the proposed algorithm.
We combine observations from ALMA, ATCA, MUSE, andHerschel to study gas-to-dust ratios in 15 Fornax cluster galaxies detected in the FIR/sub-mm by Herschel and observed by ALMA as part of the ALMA Fornax Cluster Survey (AlFoCS). The sample spans a stellar mass range of 8.3 $\leq$ log (M$_*$ / M$_\odot$) $\leq$ 11.16, and a variety of morphological types. We use gas-phase metallicities derived from MUSE observations (from the Fornax3D survey) to study these ratios as a function of metallicity, and to study dust-to-metal ratios, in a sub-sample of nine galaxies. We find that gas-to-dust ratios in Fornax galaxies are systematically lower than those in field galaxies at fixed stellar mass/metallicity. This implies that a relatively large fraction of the metals in these Fornax systems is locked up in dust, which is possibly due to altered chemical evolution as a result of the dense environment. The low ratios are not only driven by HI deficiencies, but H$_2$-to-dust ratios are also significantly decreased. This is different in the Virgo cluster, where low gas-to-dust ratios inside the virial radius are driven by low HI-to-dust ratios, while H$_2$-to-dust ratios are increased. Resolved observations of NGC1436 show a radial increase in H$_2$-to-dust ratio, and show that low ratios are present throughout the disc. We propose various explanations for the low H$_2$-to-dust ratios in the Fornax cluster, including the more efficient stripping of H$_2$ compared to dust, more efficient enrichment of dust in the star formation process, and altered ISM physics in the cluster environment.
It has been established that solutions to the inviscid Proudman-Johnson equation subject to a homogeneous three-point boundary condition can develop singularities in finite time. In this paper, we consider the possibility of singularity formation in solutions of the generalized, inviscid Proudman-Johnson equation with damping subject to the same homogeneous three-point boundary condition. In particular, we derive conditions the initial data must satisfy in order for solutions to blowup in finite time with either bounded or unbounded smooth damping term.
Finding a good query plan is key to the optimization of query runtime. This holds in particular for cost-based federation engines, which make use of cardinality estimations to achieve this goal. A number of studies compare SPARQL federation engines across different performance metrics, including query runtime, result set completeness and correctness, number of sources selected and number of requests sent. Albeit informative, these metrics are generic and unable to quantify and evaluate the accuracy of the cardinality estimators of cost-based federation engines. To thoroughly evaluate cost-based federation engines, the effect of estimated cardinality errors on the overall query runtime performance must be measured. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting novel evaluation metrics targeted at a fine-grained benchmarking of cost-based federated SPARQL query engines. We evaluate five cost-based federated SPARQL query engines using existing as well as novel evaluation metrics by using LargeRDFBench queries. Our results provide a detailed analysis of the experimental outcomes that reveal novel insights, useful for the development of future cost-based federated SPARQL query processing engines.
Radiomics is an active area of research in medical image analysis, the low reproducibility of radiomics has limited its applicability to clinical practice. This issue is especially prominent when radiomic features are calculated from noisy images, such as low dose computed tomography (CT) scans. In this article, we investigate the possibility of improving the reproducibility of radiomic features calculated on noisy CTs by using generative models for denoising.One traditional denoising method - non-local means - and two generative models - encoder-decoder networks (EDN) and conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs) - were selected as the test models. We added noise to the sinograms of full dose CTs to mimic low dose CTs with two different levels of noise: low-noise CT and high-noise CT. Models were trained on high-noise CTs and used to denoise low-noise CTs without re-training. We also test the performance of our model in real data, using dataset of same-day repeat low dose CTs to assess the reproducibility of radiomic features in denoised images. The EDN and the CGAN improved the concordance correlation coefficients (CCC) of radiomic features for low-noise images from 0.87 to 0.92 and for high-noise images from 0.68 to 0.92 respectively. Moreover, the EDN and the CGAN improved the test-retest reliability of radiomic features (mean CCC increased from 0.89 to 0.94) based on real low dose CTs. The results show that denoising using EDN and CGANs can improve the reproducibility of radiomic features calculated on noisy CTs. Moreover, images with different noise levels can be denoised to improve the reproducibility using these models without re-training, as long as the noise intensity is equal or lower than that in high-noise CTs. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first effort to improve the reproducibility of radiomic features calculated on low dose CT scans.
From any location outside the event horizon of a black hole there are an infinite number of trajectories for light to an observer. Each of these paths differ in the number of orbits revolved around the black hole and in their proximity to the last photon orbit. With simple numerical and a perturbed analytical solution to the null-geodesic equation of the Schwarzschild black hole we will reaffirm how each additional orbit is a factor $e^{2 \pi}$ closer to the black hole's optical edge. Consequently, the surface of the black hole and any background light will be mirrored infinitely in exponentially thinner slices around the last photon orbit. Furthermore, the introduced formalism proves how the entire trajectories of light in the strong field limit is prescribed by a diverging and a converging exponential. Lastly, the existence of the exponential family is generalized to the equatorial plane of the Kerr black hole with the exponentials dependence on spin derived. Thereby, proving that the distance between subsequent images increases and decreases for respectively retrograde and prograde images. In the limit of an extremely rotating Kerr black hole no logarithmic divergence exists for prograde trajectories.
We provide a unified, comprehensive treatment of all operators that contribute to the anti-ferromagnetic, ferromagnetic, and charge-density-wave structure factors and order parameters of the hexagonal Hubbard Model. We use the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm to perform a systematic, carefully controlled analysis in the temporal Trotter error and of the thermodynamic limit. We expect our findings to improve the consistency of Monte Carlo determinations of critical exponents. We perform a data collapse analysis and determine the critical exponent $\beta=0.898(37)$ for the semimetal-Mott insulator transition in the hexagonal Hubbard Model. Our methods are applicable to a wide range of lattice theories of strongly correlated electrons.
MixUp is a computer vision data augmentation technique that uses convex interpolations of input data and their labels to enhance model generalization during training. However, the application of MixUp to the natural language understanding (NLU) domain has been limited, due to the difficulty of interpolating text directly in the input space. In this study, we propose MixUp methods at the Input, Manifold, and sentence embedding levels for the transformer architecture, and apply them to finetune the BERT model for a diverse set of NLU tasks. We find that MixUp can improve model performance, as well as reduce test loss and model calibration error by up to 50%.
We enrich the setting of strongly stable ideals (SSI): We introduce shift modules, a module category encompassing SSI's. The recently introduced duality on SSI's is given an effective conceptual and computational setting. We study strongly stable ideals in infinite dimensional polynomial rings, where the duality is most natural. Finally a new type of resolution for SSI's is introduced. This is the projective resolution in the category of shift modules.
The states of two electrons in tunnel-coupled semiconductor quantum dots can be effectively described in terms of a two-spin Hamiltonian with an isotropic Heisenberg interaction. A similar description needs to be generalized in the case of holes due to their multiband character and spin-orbit coupling, which mixes orbital and spin degrees of freedom, and splits $J=3/2$ and $J = 1/2$ multiplets. Here we investigate two-hole states in prototypical coupled Si and Ge quantum dots via different theoretical approaches. Multiband $\boldsymbol{k}\cdot\boldsymbol{p}$ and Configuration-Interaction calculations are combined with entanglement measures in order to thoroughly characterize the two-hole states in terms of band mixing and justify the introduction of an effective spin representation, which we analytically derive a from generalized Hubbard model. We find that, in the weak interdot regime, the ground state and first excited multiplet of the two-hole system display -- unlike their electronic counterparts -- a high degree of $J$-mixing, even in the limit of purely heavy-hole states. The light-hole component additionally induces $M$-mixing and a weak coupling between spinors characterized by different permutational symmetries.
CT image quality is heavily reliant on radiation dose, which causes a trade-off between radiation dose and image quality that affects the subsequent image-based diagnostic performance. However, high radiation can be harmful to both patients and operators. Several (deep learning-based) approaches have been attempted to denoise low dose images. However, those approaches require access to large training sets, specifically the full dose CT images for reference, which can often be difficult to obtain. Self-supervised learning is an emerging alternative for lowering the reference data requirement facilitating unsupervised learning. Currently available self-supervised CT denoising works are either dependent on foreign domain or pretexts are not very task-relevant. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel self-supervised learning approach, namely Self-Supervised Window-Leveling for Image DeNoising (SSWL-IDN), leveraging an innovative, task-relevant, simple, yet effective surrogate -- prediction of the window-leveled equivalent. SSWL-IDN leverages residual learning and a hybrid loss combining perceptual loss and MSE, all incorporated in a VAE framework. Our extensive (in- and cross-domain) experimentation demonstrates the effectiveness of SSWL-IDN in aggressive denoising of CT (abdomen and chest) images acquired at 5\% dose level only.
The wild McKay correspondence, a variant of the McKay correspondence in positive characteristics, shows that stringy motives of quotient varieties equal some motivic integrals on the moduli space of of the Galois covers of a formal disk. In this paper, we determine when the integrals converge for the the case of cyclic groups of prime power order. As an application, we give a criterion for the quotient variety being canonical or log canonical.
This paper presents a Matlab toolbox to perform basic image processing and visualization tasks, particularly designed for medical image processing. The functionalities available are similar to basic functions found in other non-Matlab widely used libraries such as the Insight Toolkit (ITK). The toolbox is entirely written in native Matlab code, but is fast and flexible. Main use cases for the toolbox are illustrated here, including image input/output, pre-processing, filtering, image registration and visualisation. Both the code and sample data are made publicly available and open source.
Sound event detection (SED) is a hot topic in consumer and smart city applications. Existing approaches based on Deep Neural Networks are very effective, but highly demanding in terms of memory, power, and throughput when targeting ultra-low power always-on devices. Latency, availability, cost, and privacy requirements are pushing recent IoT systems to process the data on the node, close to the sensor, with a very limited energy supply, and tight constraints on the memory size and processing capabilities precluding to run state-of-the-art DNNs. In this paper, we explore the combination of extreme quantization to a small-footprint binary neural network (BNN) with the highly energy-efficient, RISC-V-based (8+1)-core GAP8 microcontroller. Starting from an existing CNN for SED whose footprint (815 kB) exceeds the 512 kB of memory available on our platform, we retrain the network using binary filters and activations to match these memory constraints. (Fully) binary neural networks come with a natural drop in accuracy of 12-18% on the challenging ImageNet object recognition challenge compared to their equivalent full-precision baselines. This BNN reaches a 77.9% accuracy, just 7% lower than the full-precision version, with 58 kB (7.2 times less) for the weights and 262 kB (2.4 times less) memory in total. With our BNN implementation, we reach a peak throughput of 4.6 GMAC/s and 1.5 GMAC/s over the full network, including preprocessing with Mel bins, which corresponds to an efficiency of 67.1 GMAC/s/W and 31.3 GMAC/s/W, respectively. Compared to the performance of an ARM Cortex-M4 implementation, our system has a 10.3 times faster execution time and a 51.1 times higher energy-efficiency.
We prove a quantitative $h$-principle statement for subcritical isotropic embeddings. As an application, we construct a symplectic homeomorphism that takes a symplectic disc into an isotropic one in dimension at least $6$.
We construct a family of functions suitable for establishing lower bounds on the oracle complexity of first-order minimization of smooth strongly-convex functions. Based on this construction, we derive new lower bounds on the complexity of strongly-convex minimization under various inaccuracy criteria. The new bounds match the known upper bounds up to a constant factor, and when the inaccuracy of a solution is measured by its distance to the solution set, the new lower bound exactly matches the upper bound obtained by the recent Information-Theoretic Exact Method by the same authors, thereby establishing the exact oracle complexity for this class of problems.
A large class of two dimensional quantum gravity theories of Jackiw-Teitelboim form have a description in terms of random matrix models. Such models, treated fully non-perturbatively, can give an explicit and tractable description of the underlying ``microstate'' degrees of freedom. They play a prominent role in regimes where the smooth geometrical picture of the physics is inadequate. This is shown using a natural tool for extracting the detailed microstate physics, a Fredholm determinant ${\rm det}(\mathbf{1}{-}\mathbf{ K})$. Its associated kernel $K(E,E^\prime)$ can be defined explicitly for a wide variety of JT gravity theories. To illustrate the methods, the statistics of the first several energy levels of a non-perturbative definition of JT gravity are constructed explicitly using numerical methods, and the full quenched free energy $F_Q(T)$ of the system is computed for the first time. These results are also of relevance to quantum properties of black holes in higher dimensions.
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) should form frequently in galactic nuclei as a result of galaxy mergers. At sub-parsec separations, binaries become strong sources of low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs), targeted by Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs). We used recent upper limits on continuous GWs from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) 11yr dataset to place constraints on putative SMBHBs in nearby massive galaxies. We compiled a comprehensive catalog of ~44,000 galaxies in the local universe (up to redshift ~0.05) and populated them with hypothetical binaries, assuming that the total mass of the binary is equal to the SMBH mass derived from global scaling relations. Assuming circular equal-mass binaries emitting at NANOGrav's most sensitive frequency of 8nHz, we found that 216 galaxies are within NANOGrav's sensitivity volume. We ranked the potential SMBHBs based on GW detectability by calculating the total signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) such binaries would induce within the NANOGrav array. We placed constraints on the chirp mass and mass ratio of the 216 hypothetical binaries. For 19 galaxies, only very unequal-mass binaries are allowed, with the mass of the secondary less than 10 percent that of the primary, roughly comparable to constraints on a SMBHB in the Milky Way. Additionally, we were able to exclude binaries delivered by major mergers (mass ratio of at least 1/4) for several of these galaxies. We also derived the first limit on the density of binaries delivered by major mergers purely based on GW data.
We characterize the monodromies of projective structures with fuchsian-type singularities. Namely, any representation from the fundamental group of a Riemann surface of finite-type in $PSL_2(\mathbb{C})$ can be represented as the holonomy of branched projective structure with fuchsian-type singularities over the cusps. We made a geometrical/topological study of all local conical projective structures whose Schwarzian derivative admits a simple pole at the cusp. Finally, we explore isomonodromic deformations of such projective structures and the problem of minimizing angles.
The cytoskeleton is a model active matter system that controls diverse cellular processes from division to motility. While both active actomyosin dynamics and actin-microtubule interactions are key to the cytoskeleton's versatility and adaptability, an understanding of their interplay is lacking. Here, we couple microscale experiments with mechanistic modeling to elucidate how connectivity, rigidity, and force-generation affect emergent material properties in in vitro composites of actin, tubulin, and myosin. We use time-resolved differential dynamic microscopy and spatial image autocorrelation to show that ballistic contraction occurs in composites with sufficient flexibility and motor density, but that a critical fraction of microtubules is necessary to sustain controlled dynamics. Our active double-network models reveal that percolated actomyosin networks are essential for contraction, but that networks with comparable actin and microtubule densities can uniquely resist mechanical stresses while simultaneously supporting substantial restructuring. Our findings provide a much-needed blueprint for designing cytoskeleton-inspired materials that couple tunability with resilience and adaptability.
This paper describes the submission of the NiuTrans end-to-end speech translation system for the IWSLT 2021 offline task, which translates from the English audio to German text directly without intermediate transcription. We use the Transformer-based model architecture and enhance it by Conformer, relative position encoding, and stacked acoustic and textual encoding. To augment the training data, the English transcriptions are translated to German translations. Finally, we employ ensemble decoding to integrate the predictions from several models trained with the different datasets. Combining these techniques, we achieve 33.84 BLEU points on the MuST-C En-De test set, which shows the enormous potential of the end-to-end model.
Video-based person re-identification aims to match pedestrians from video sequences across non-overlapping camera views. The key factor for video person re-identification is to effectively exploit both spatial and temporal clues from video sequences. In this work, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Correlation and Topology Learning framework (CTL) to pursue discriminative and robust representation by modeling cross-scale spatial-temporal correlation. Specifically, CTL utilizes a CNN backbone and a key-points estimator to extract semantic local features from human body at multiple granularities as graph nodes. It explores a context-reinforced topology to construct multi-scale graphs by considering both global contextual information and physical connections of human body. Moreover, a 3D graph convolution and a cross-scale graph convolution are designed, which facilitate direct cross-spacetime and cross-scale information propagation for capturing hierarchical spatial-temporal dependencies and structural information. By jointly performing the two convolutions, CTL effectively mines comprehensive clues that are complementary with appearance information to enhance representational capacity. Extensive experiments on two video benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method and the state-of-the-art performance.
For fixed graphs $F$ and $H$, the generalized Tur\'an problem asks for the maximum number $ex(n,H,F)$ of copies of $H$ that an $n$-vertex $F$-free graph can have. In this paper, we focus on cases with $F$ being $B_{r,s}$, the graph consisting of two cliques of size $s$ sharing $r$ common vertices. We determine $ex(n,K_t,B_{r,0})$, $ex(n,K_{a,b},B_{3,1})$ for any values of $a,b,r,t$ if $n$ is large enough and $ex(n,K_{r+t},B_{r,s})$ if $2s+t+1<r$ and $n$ is large enough.