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Our goal in this work is to present some mean value type theorems that are not studied in classic calculus and analysis courses. They are simple theorems yet with large applicability in mathematical analysis (for example, in the study of functional equations and integral operators), computational mathematics, economics among other areas.
Depression is a public health issue which severely affects one's well being and cause negative social and economic effect for society. To rise awareness of these problems, this publication aims to determine if long lasting effects of depression can be determined from electoencephalographic (EEG) signals. The article contains accuracy comparison for SVM, LDA, NB, kNN and D3 binary classifiers which were trained using linear (relative band powers, APV, SASI) and non-linear (HFD, LZC, DFA) EEG features. The age and gender matched dataset consisted of 10 healthy subjects and 10 subjects with depression diagnosis at some point in their lifetime. Several of the proposed feature selection and classifier combinations reached accuracy of 90% where all models where evaluated using 10-fold cross validation and averaged over 100 repetitions with random sample permutations.
The amount and variety of data is increasing drastically for several years. These data are often represented as networks, which are then explored with approaches arising from network theory. Recent years have witnessed the extension of network exploration methods to leverage more complex and richer network frameworks. Random walks, for instance, have been extended to explore multilayer networks. However, current random walk approaches are limited in the combination and heterogeneity of network layers they can handle. New analytical and numerical random walk methods are needed to cope with the increasing diversity and complexity of multilayer networks. We propose here MultiXrank, a Python package that enables Random Walk with Restart (RWR) on any kind of multilayer network with an optimized implementation. This package is supported by a universal mathematical formulation of the RWR. We evaluated MultiXrank with leave-one-out cross-validation and link prediction, and introduced protocols to measure the impact of the addition or removal of multilayer network data on prediction performances. We further measured the sensitivity of MultiXrank to input parameters by in-depth exploration of the parameter space. Finally, we illustrate the versatility of MultiXrank with different use-cases of unsupervised node prioritization and supervised classification in the context of human genetic diseases.
We consider the point evaluation of the solution to interface problems with geometric uncertainties, where the uncertainty in the obstacle is described by a high-dimensional parameter $\boldsymbol{y}\in[-1,1]^d$, $d\in\mathbb{N}$. We focus in particular on an elliptic interface problem and a Helmholtz transmission problem. Point values of the solution in the physical domain depend in general non-smoothly on the high-dimensional parameter, posing a challenge when one is interested in building surrogates. Indeed, high-order methods show poor convergence rates, while methods which are able to track discontinuities usually suffer from the so-called curse of dimensionality. For this reason, in this work we propose to build surrogates for point evaluation using deep neural networks. We provide a theoretical justification for why we expect neural networks to provide good surrogates. Furthermore, we present extensive numerical experiments showing their good performance in practice. We observe in particular that neural networks do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality, and we study the dependence of the error on the number of point evaluations (that is, the number of discontinuities in the parameter space), as well as on several modeling parameters, such as the contrast between the two materials and, for the Helmholtz transmission problem, the wavenumber.
Starting from 2003, a large number of the so-called exotic hadrons, such as $X(3872)$ and $D_{s0}^*(2317)$, were discovered experimentally. Since then, understanding the nature of these states has been a central issue both theoretically and experimentally. As many of these states are located close to two hadron thresholds, they are believed to be molecular states or at least contain large molecular components. We argue that if they are indeed molecular states, in the way that the deuteron is a bound state of proton and neutron, then molecular states of three or more hadrons are likely, in the sense that atomic nuclei are bound states of nucleons. Following this conjecture, we study the likely existence of $DDK$, $D\bar{D}K$, and $D\bar{D}^{*}K$ molecular states. We show that within the theoretical uncertainties of the two-body interactions deduced, they most likely exist. Furthermore, we predict their strong decays to help guide future experimental searches. In addition, we show that the same approach can indeed reproduce some of the known three-body systems from the two-body inputs, such as the deuteron-triton and the $\Lambda(1405)$-$\bar{K}NN$ systems.
The integration of energy systems such as electricity and gas grids and power and thermal grids can bring significant benefits in terms of system security, reliability, and reduced emissions. Another alternative coupling of sectors with large potential benefits is the power and transportation networks. This is primarily due to the increasing use of electric vehicles (EV) and their demand on the power grid. Besides, the production and operating costs of EVs and battery technologies are steadily decreasing, while tax credits for EV purchase and usage are being offered to users in developed countries. The power grid is also undergoing major upgrades and changes with the aim of ensuring environmentally sustainable grids. These factors influence our work. We present a new operating model for an integrated EV-grid system that incorporates a set of aggregators (owning a fleet of EVs) with partial access to the distribution grid. Then, the Cooperative Game Theory is used to model the behavior of the system. The Core is used to describe the stability of the interaction between these aggregators, and the Shapley value is used to assign costs to them. The results obtained show the benefit of cooperation, which could lead to an overall reduction in energy consumption, reduced operating costs for electric vehicles and the distribution grid, and, in some cases, the additional monetary budget available to reinforce the transmission and grid infrastructures.
We investigate classes of shear-free cosmological dust models with irrotational fluid flows within the framework of $f(T)$ gravity. In particular, we use the $1 + 3$ covariant formalism and present the covariant linearised evolution and constraint equations describing such models. We then derive the integrability conditions describing a consistent evolution of the linearised field equations of these quasi-Newtonian universes in the $f(T)$ gravitational theory. Finally, we derive the evolution equations for the density and velocity perturbations of the quasi-Newtonian universe. We explore the behaviour of the matter density contrast for two models - $f(T)= \mu T_{0}(T/T_{0})^{n}$ and the more generalised case, where $f(T)= T+ \mu T_{0} (T/T_{0})^{n}$, with and without the application of the quasi-static approximation. Our numerical solutions show that these $f(T)$ theories can be suitable alternatives to study the background dynamics, whereas the growth of energy density fluctuations change dramatically from the expected $\Lambda$CDM behaviour even for small deviations away from the general relativistic limits of the underlying $f(T)$ theory. Moreover, applying the so-called quasi-static approximation yields exact-solution results that are orders of magnitude different from the numerically integrated solutions of the full system, suggesting that these approximations are not applicable here.
Dual-energy X-ray tomography is considered in a context where the target under imaging consists of two distinct materials. The materials are assumed to be possibly intertwined in space, but at any given location there is only one material present. Further, two X-ray energies are chosen so that there is a clear difference in the spectral dependence of the attenuation coefficients of the two materials. A novel regularizer is presented for the inverse problem of reconstructing separate tomographic images for the two materials. A combination of two things, (a) non-negativity constraint, and (b) penalty term containing the inner product between the two material images, promotes the presence of at most one material in a given pixel. A preconditioned interior point method is derived for the minimization of the regularization functional. Numerical tests with digital phantoms suggest that the new algorithm outperforms the baseline method, Joint Total Variation regularization, in terms of correctly material-characterized pixels. While the method is tested only in a two-dimensional setting with two materials and two energies, the approach readily generalizes to three dimensions and more materials. The number of materials just needs to match the number of energies used in imaging.
We consider random Hermitian matrices with independent upper triangular entries. Wigner's semicircle law says that under certain additional assumptions, the empirical spectral distribution converges to the semicircle distribution. We characterize convergence to semicircle in terms of the variances of the entries, under natural assumptions such as the Lindeberg condition. The result extends to certain matrices with entries having infinite second moments. As a corollary, another characterization of semicircle convergence is given in terms of convergence in distribution of the row sums to the standard normal distribution.
With strong marketing advocacy of the benefits of cannabis use for improved mental health, cannabis legalization is a priority among legislators. However, preliminary scientific research does not conclusively associate cannabis with improved mental health. In this study, we explore the relationship between depression and consumption of cannabis in a targeted social media corpus involving personal use of cannabis with the intent to derive its potential mental health benefit. We use tweets that contain an association among three categories annotated by domain experts - Reason, Effect, and Addiction. The state-of-the-art Natural Langauge Processing techniques fall short in extracting these relationships between cannabis phrases and the depression indicators. We seek to address the limitation by using domain knowledge; specifically, the Drug Abuse Ontology for addiction augmented with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lexicons for mental health. Because of the lack of annotations due to the limited availability of the domain experts' time, we use supervised contrastive learning in conjunction with GPT-3 trained on a vast corpus to achieve improved performance even with limited supervision. Experimental results show that our method can significantly extract cannabis-depression relationships better than the state-of-the-art relation extractor. High-quality annotations can be provided using a nearest neighbor approach using the learned representations that can be used by the scientific community to understand the association between cannabis and depression better.
Sequential recommendation aims to leverage users' historical behaviors to predict their next interaction. Existing works have not yet addressed two main challenges in sequential recommendation. First, user behaviors in their rich historical sequences are often implicit and noisy preference signals, they cannot sufficiently reflect users' actual preferences. In addition, users' dynamic preferences often change rapidly over time, and hence it is difficult to capture user patterns in their historical sequences. In this work, we propose a graph neural network model called SURGE (short for SeqUential Recommendation with Graph neural nEtworks) to address these two issues. Specifically, SURGE integrates different types of preferences in long-term user behaviors into clusters in the graph by re-constructing loose item sequences into tight item-item interest graphs based on metric learning. This helps explicitly distinguish users' core interests, by forming dense clusters in the interest graph. Then, we perform cluster-aware and query-aware graph convolutional propagation and graph pooling on the constructed graph. It dynamically fuses and extracts users' current activated core interests from noisy user behavior sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and proprietary industrial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further studies on sequence length confirm that our method can model long behavioral sequences effectively and efficiently.
The multiple lobes of high order Hermite-Gaussian (HG) laser modes differ in terms of shape, size, and optical energy distribution. Here, we introduce a generic numerical method that redistributes optical energy among the lobes of high order HG modes such that all the identical low intense lobes become both moderate or high intense lobes and vice-versa, in a controlled manner. Further, the modes which consist of only two types of intensity distribution among its multiple lobes are transformed together into all high intense lobes. Furthermore, in some cases, moderate intense lobes together with high intense lobes become high intense lobes, and moderate intense lobes together with low intense lobes become high intense lobes. Such controlled modulation of optical energy may offer efficient and selective utilization of each lobe of HG modes in most applications like particle manipulation, optical lithography, and the method can be used in other fields like nonlinear frequency conversion and shaping ultrafast optical pulses.
Internet of Things (IoT) is now omnipresent in all aspects of life and provides a large number of potentially critical services. For this, Internet of Things relies on the data collected by objects. Data integrity is therefore essential. Unfortunately, this integrity is threatened by a type of attack known as False Data Injection Attack. This consists of an attacker who injects fabricated data into a system to modify its behaviour. In this work, we dissect and present a method that uses a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to generate altered data, allowing these attacks to be simulated and tested.
We consider the problem of empirical risk minimization given a database, using the gradient descent algorithm. We note that the function to be optimized may be non-convex, consisting of saddle points which impede the convergence of the algorithm. A perturbed gradient descent algorithm is typically employed to escape these saddle points. We show that this algorithm, that perturbs the gradient, inherently preserves the privacy of the data. We then employ the differential privacy framework to quantify the privacy hence achieved. We also analyze the change in privacy with varying parameters such as problem dimension and the distance between the databases.
In situ generation of a high-energy, high-current, spin-polarized electron beam is an outstanding scientific challenge to the development of plasma-based accelerators for high-energy colliders. In this Letter we show how such a spin-polarized relativistic beam can be produced by ionization injection of electrons of certain atoms with a circularly polarized laser field into a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator, providing a much desired one-step solution to this challenge. Using time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation (TDSE) simulations, we show the propensity rule of spin-dependent ionization of xenon atoms can be reversed in the strong-field multi-photon regime compared with the non-adiabatic tunneling regime, leading to high total spin-polarization. Furthermore, three-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are incorporated with TDSE simulations, providing start-to-end simulations of spin-dependent strong-field ionization of xenon atoms and subsequent trapping, acceleration, and preservation of electron spin-polarization in lithium plasma. We show the generation of a high-current (0.8 kA), ultra-low-normalized-emittance (~37 nm), and high-energy (2.7 GeV) electron beam within just 11 cm distance, with up to ~31% net spin polarization. Higher current, energy, and net spin-polarization beams are possible by optimizing this concept, thus solving a long-standing problem facing the development of plasma accelerators.
Angular path integration is the ability of a system to estimate its own heading direction from potentially noisy angular velocity (or increment) observations. Non-probabilistic algorithms for angular path integration, which rely on a summation of these noisy increments, do not appropriately take into account the reliability of such observations, which is essential for appropriately weighing one's current heading direction estimate against incoming information. In a probabilistic setting, angular path integration can be formulated as a continuous-time nonlinear filtering problem (circular filtering) with observed state increments. The circular symmetry of heading direction makes this inference task inherently nonlinear, thereby precluding the use of popular inference algorithms such as Kalman filters and rendering the problem analytically inaccessible. Here, we derive an approximate solution to circular continuous-time filtering, which integrates state increment observations while maintaining a fixed representation through both state propagation and observational updates. Specifically, we extend the established projection-filtering method to account for observed state increments and apply this framework to the circular filtering problem. We further propose a generative model for continuous-time angular-valued direct observations of the hidden state, which we integrate seamlessly into the projection filter. Applying the resulting scheme to a model of probabilistic angular path integration, we derive an algorithm for circular filtering, which we term the circular Kalman filter. Importantly, this algorithm is analytically accessible, interpretable, and outperforms an alternative filter based on a Gaussian approximation.
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) can be solved in polynomial time by interior point methods. However, when the dimension of the problem gets large, interior point methods become impractical both in terms of computational time and memory requirements. First order methods, such as Alternating Direction Methods of Multipliers (ADMMs), turned out to be suitable algorithms to deal with large scale SDPs and gained growing attention during the past decade. In this paper, we focus on an ADMM designed for SDPs in standard form and extendit to deal with inequalities when solving SDPs in general form. This allows to handle SDP relaxations of classical combinatorial problems such as the graph coloring problem and the maximum clique problem, that we consider in our extensive numerical experience. The numerical results show the comparison of the method proposed equipped with a post-processing procedure with the state-of-the-art solver SDPNAL+.
Non-Gaussian continuous variable states play a central role both in the foundations of quantum theory and for emergent quantum technologies. In particular, "cat states", i.e., two-component macroscopic quantum superpositions, embody quantum coherence in an accessible way and can be harnessed for fundamental tests and quantum information tasks alike. Degenerate optical parametric oscillators can naturally produce single-mode cat states and thus represent a promising platform for their realization and harnessing. We show that a dissipative coupling between degenerate optical parametric oscillators extends this to two-mode entangled cat states, i.e., two-mode entangled cat states are naturally produced under such dissipative coupling. While overcoming single-photon loss still represents a major challenge towards the realization of sufficiently pure single-mode cat states in degenerate optical parametric oscillators, we show that the generation of two-mode entangled cat states under such dissipative coupling can then be achieved without additional hurdles. We numerically explore the parameter regime for the successful generation of transient two-mode entangled cat states in two dissipatively coupled degenerate optical parametric oscillators. To certify the cat-state entanglement, we employ a tailored, variance-based entanglement criterion, which can robustly detect cat-state entanglement under realistic conditions.
The interpolation of spatial data can be of tremendous value in various applications, such as forecasting weather from only a few measurements of meteorological or remote sensing data. Existing methods for spatial interpolation, such as variants of kriging and spatial autoregressive models, tend to suffer from at least one of the following limitations: (a) the assumption of stationarity, (b) the assumption of isotropy, and (c) the trade-off between modelling local or global spatial interaction. Addressing these issues in this work, we propose the use of Markov reward processes (MRPs) as a spatial interpolation method, and we introduce three variants thereof: (i) a basic static discount MRP (SD-MRP), (ii) an accurate but mostly theoretical optimised MRP (O-MRP), and (iii) a transferable weight prediction MRP (WP-MRP). All variants of MRP interpolation operate locally, while also implicitly accounting for global spatial relationships in the entire system through recursion. Additionally, O-MRP and WP-MRP no longer assume stationarity and are robust to anisotropy. We evaluated our proposed methods by comparing the mean absolute errors of their interpolated grid cells to those of 7 common baselines, selected from models based on spatial autocorrelation, (spatial) regression, and deep learning. We performed detailed evaluations on two publicly available datasets (local GDP values, and COVID-19 patient trajectory data). The results from these experiments clearly show the competitive advantage of MRP interpolation, which achieved significantly lower errors than the existing methods in 23 out of 40 experimental conditions, or 35 out of 40 when including O-MRP.
Metallography is crucial for a proper assessment of material's properties. It involves mainly the investigation of spatial distribution of grains and the occurrence and characteristics of inclusions or precipitates. This work presents an holistic artificial intelligence model for Anomaly Detection that automatically quantifies the degree of anomaly of impurities in alloys. We suggest the following examination process: (1) Deep semantic segmentation is performed on the inclusions (based on a suitable metallographic database of alloys and corresponding tags of inclusions), producing inclusions masks that are saved into a separated database. (2) Deep image inpainting is performed to fill the removed inclusions parts, resulting in 'clean' metallographic images, which contain the background of grains. (3) Grains' boundaries are marked using deep semantic segmentation (based on another metallographic database of alloys), producing boundaries that are ready for further inspection on the distribution of grains' size. (4) Deep anomaly detection and pattern recognition is performed on the inclusions masks to determine spatial, shape and area anomaly detection of the inclusions. Finally, the system recommends to an expert on areas of interests for further examination. The performance of the model is presented and analyzed based on few representative cases. Although the models presented here were developed for metallography analysis, most of them can be generalized to a wider set of problems in which anomaly detection of geometrical objects is desired. All models as well as the data-sets that were created for this work, are publicly available at https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MLography.
The intensity of the Cosmic UV background (UVB), coming from all sources of ionising photons such as star-forming galaxies and quasars, determines the thermal evolution and ionization state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) and is, therefore, a critical ingredient for models of cosmic structure formation. Most of the previous estimates are based on the comparison between observed and simulated Lyman-$\alpha$ forest. We present the results of an independent method to constrain the product of the UVB photoionisation rate and the covering fraction of Lyman limit systems (LLSs) by searching for the fluorescent Lyman-$\alpha$ emission produced by self-shielded clouds. Because the expected surface brightness is well below current sensitivity limits for direct imaging, we developed a new method based on three-dimensional stacking of the IGM around Lyman-$\alpha$ emitting galaxies (LAEs) between 2.9<z<6.6 using deep MUSE observations. Combining our results with covering fractions of LLSs obtained from mock cubes extracted from the EAGLE simulation, we obtain new and independent constraints on the UVB at z>3 that are consistent with previous measurements, with a preference for relatively low UVB intensities at z=3, and which suggest a non-monotonic decrease of $\Gamma$HI with increasing redshift between 3<z<5. This could suggest a possible tension between some UVB models and current observations which however require deeper and wider observations in Lyman-$\alpha$ emission and absorption to be confirmed. Assuming instead a value of UVB from current models, our results constrain the covering fraction of LLSs at 3<z<4.5 to be less than 25% within 150kpc from LAEs.
The ability to accurately detect and localize objects is recognized as being the most important for the perception of self-driving cars. From 2D to 3D object detection, the most difficult is to determine the distance from the ego-vehicle to objects. Expensive technology like LiDAR can provide a precise and accurate depth information, so most studies have tended to focus on this sensor showing a performance gap between LiDAR-based methods and camera-based methods. Although many authors have investigated how to fuse LiDAR with RGB cameras, as far as we know there are no studies to fuse LiDAR and stereo in a deep neural network for the 3D object detection task. This paper presents SLS-Fusion, a new approach to fuse data from 4-beam LiDAR and a stereo camera via a neural network for depth estimation to achieve better dense depth maps and thereby improves 3D object detection performance. Since 4-beam LiDAR is cheaper than the well-known 64-beam LiDAR, this approach is also classified as a low-cost sensors-based method. Through evaluation on the KITTI benchmark, it is shown that the proposed method significantly improves depth estimation performance compared to a baseline method. Also, when applying it to 3D object detection, a new state of the art on low-cost sensor based method is achieved.
We experimentally demonstrate that when three single photons transmit through two polarization channels, in a well-defined pre- and postselected ensemble, there are no two photons in the same polarization channel by weak-strength measurement, a counter-intuitive quantum counting effect called quantum pigeonhole paradox. We further show that this effect breaks down in second-order measurement. These results indicate the existence of quantum pigeonhole paradox and its operating regime.
HCI and NLP traditionally focus on different evaluation methods. While HCI involves a small number of people directly and deeply, NLP traditionally relies on standardized benchmark evaluations that involve a larger number of people indirectly. We present five methodological proposals at the intersection of HCI and NLP and situate them in the context of ML-based NLP models. Our goal is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and progress in both fields by emphasizing what the fields can learn from each other.
We study distribution dependent stochastic differential equation driven by a continuous process, without any specification on its law, following the approach initiated in [16]. We provide several criteria for existence and uniqueness of solutions which go beyond the classical globally Lipschitz setting. In particular we show well-posedness of the equation, as well as almost sure convergence of the associated particle system, for drifts satisfying either Osgood-continuity, monotonicity, local Lipschitz or Sobolev differentiability type assumptions.
We demonstrate Raman sideband thermometry of single carbyne chains confined in double-walled carbon nanotubes. Our results show that carbyne's record-high Raman scattering cross section enables anti-Stokes Raman measurements at the single chain level. Using laser irradiation as a heating source, we exploit the temperature dependence of the anti-Stokes/Stokes ratio for local temperature sensing. Due to its molecular size and its large Raman cross section carbyne is an efficient probe for local temperature monitoring, with applications ranging from nanoelectronics to biology.
In this paper we present our preliminary work on model-based behavioral analysis of horse motion. Our approach is based on the SMAL model, a 3D articulated statistical model of animal shape. We define a novel SMAL model for horses based on a new template, skeleton and shape space learned from $37$ horse toys. We test the accuracy of our hSMAL model in reconstructing a horse from 3D mocap data and images. We apply the hSMAL model to the problem of lameness detection from video, where we fit the model to images to recover 3D pose and train an ST-GCN network on pose data. A comparison with the same network trained on mocap points illustrates the benefit of our approach.
This paper continues discussions in the author's previous paper about the Misiurewicz polynomials defined for a family of degree $d \ge 2$ rational maps with an automorphism group containing the cyclic group of order $d$. In particular, we extend the sufficient conditions that the Misiurewicz polynomials are irreducible over $\mathbb{Q}$. We also prove that the Misiurewicz polynomials always have an irreducible factor of large degree.
If devices are physically accessible optical fault injection attacks pose a great threat since the data processed as well as the operation flow can be manipulated. Successful physical attacks may lead not only to leakage of secret information such as cryptographic private keys, but can also cause economic damage especially if as a result of such a manipulation a critical infrastructure is successfully attacked. Laser based attacks exploit the sensitivity of CMOS technologies to electromagnetic radiation in the visible or the infrared spectrum. It can be expected that radiation-hard designs, specially crafted for space applications, are more robust not only against high-energy particles and short electromagnetic waves but also against optical fault injection attacks. In this work we investigated the sensitivity of radiation-hard JICG shift registers to optical fault injection attacks. In our experiments, we were able to trigger bit-set and bit-reset repeatedly changing the data stored in single JICG flip-flops despite their high-radiation fault tolerance.
Geometrical chirality is a universal phenomenon that is encountered on many different length scales ranging from geometrical shapes of various living organisms to protein and DNA molecules. Interaction of chiral matter with chiral light - that is, electromagnetic field possessing a certain handedness - underlies our ability to discriminate enantiomers of chiral molecules. In this context, it is often desired to have an optical cavity that would efficiently couple to only a specific (right or left) molecular enantiomer, and not couple to the opposite one. Here, we demonstrate a single-handedness chiral optical cavity supporting only an eigenmode of a given handedness without the presence of modes of other helicity. Resonant excitation of the cavity with light of appropriate handedness enables formation of a helical standing wave with a uniform chirality density, while the opposite handedness does not cause any resonant effects. Furthermore, only chiral emitters of the matching handedness efficiently interact with such a chiral eigenmode, enabling the handedness-selective coupling light-matter strength. The proposed system expands the set of tools available for investigations of chiral matter and opens the door to studies of chiral electromagnetic vacuum.
In this article, we consider the estimation of the marginal distributions for pairs of data are recorded, with unobserved order in each pair. New estimators are proposed and their asymptotic properties are established, by proving a Glivenko-Cantelli theorem and a functional central limit result. Results from a simulation study are included and we illustrate the applicability of the method on the homologous chromosomes data.
Pitting corrosion is a much-studied and technologically relevant subject. However, the fundamental mechanisms responsible for the breakdown of the passivating oxide layer are still subjects of debate. Chloride anions are known to accelerate corrosion; relevant hypotheses include Cl insertion into positively charged oxygen vacancies in the oxide film, and Cl adsorption on passivating oxide surfaces, substituting for surface hydroxyl groups. In this work, we conduct large-scale first principles modeling of explicit metal/Al(2)O(3) interfaces to investigate the energetics and electronic structures associated with these hypotheses. The explicit interface models allow electron transfer that mimics electrochemical events, and the establishment of the relation between atomic structures at different interfaces and the electronic band alignment. For multiple model interfaces, we find that doubly charged oxygen vacancies, which are key ingredients of the point defect model (PDM) often used to analyze corrosion data, can only occur in the presence of a potential gradient that raises the voltage. Cl-insertion into oxide films can be energetically favorable in some oxygen vacancy sites, depending on the voltage. We also discuss the challenges associated with explicit DFT modeling of these complex interfaces.
The LHC is undergoing a high luminosity upgrade, which is set to increase the instantaneous luminosity by at least a factor of five, resulting in a higher muon flux rate in the forward region, which will overwhelm the current trigger system of the CMS experiment. The ME0, a gas electron multiplier detector, is proposed for the Phase-2 Muon System Upgrade to help increase the muon acceptance and to control the Level 1 muon trigger rate. To lower the probability of HV discharges, the ME0 was designed with GEM foils that are segmented on both sides. Initial testing of the ME0 showed substantial crosstalk between readout sectors. Here, we investigate, characterize, and quantify the crosstalk in the detector, and estimate the performance of the chamber as a result of this crosstalk via simulation of the detector dead time, efficiency loss, and frontend electronics response. The results of crosstalk via signals produced by applying a square voltage pulse directly on the readout strips of the detector with a pulser are summarized, and the efficacy of various mitigation strategies are presented. The crosstalk is a result of capacitive coupling between the readout strips on the readout board and between the readout strips and the bottom of GEM3. The crosstalk also generally follows a pattern where the largest magnitude of crosstalk is within the same azimuthal readout segment in the detector and in the nearest horizontal segments. The use of bypass capacitors and larger HV segments successfully reduce the crosstalk: we observe a maximum decrease of crosstalk in sectors previously experiencing crosstalk from $(1.66\pm0.03)\%$ to $(1.11\pm0.02)\%$ with all HV segments connected in parallel on the bottom of GEM3, with an HV low-pass filter, and an HV divider. These mitigation strategies slightly increase crosstalk $\big(\hspace{-0.1cm}\lessapprox 0.4\%\big)$ in readout sectors farther away.
High-dimensional black-box optimisation remains an important yet notoriously challenging problem. Despite the success of Bayesian optimisation methods on continuous domains, domains that are categorical, or that mix continuous and categorical variables, remain challenging. We propose a novel solution -- we combine local optimisation with a tailored kernel design, effectively handling high-dimensional categorical and mixed search spaces, whilst retaining sample efficiency. We further derive convergence guarantee for the proposed approach. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that our method outperforms the current baselines on a variety of synthetic and real-world tasks in terms of performance, computational costs, or both.
Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the alternatives be compared pairwise to best approximate their true but latent ranking. We consider various formats including knockout tournaments, multi-stage championships consisting of round-robin groups followed by single elimination, and the Swiss-system. They are evaluated via Monte-Carlo simulations under six different assumptions on winning probabilities. Comparing the same pair of alternatives multiple times turns out to be an inefficacious policy. While seeding can increase the efficacy of the knockout and group-based designs, its influence remains marginal unless one has an unrealistically good estimation on the true ranking of the players. The Swiss-system is found to be the most accurate among all these tournament formats, especially in its ability to rank all participants. A possible explanation is that it does not eliminate a player after a single loss, while it takes the history of the comparisons into account. The results can be especially interesting for emerging esports, where the tournament designs are not yet solidified.
Context: Software startups develop innovative, software-intensive products. Given the uncertainty associated with such an innovative context, experimentation is a valuable approach for these companies, especially in the early stages of the development, when implementing unnecessary features represents a higher risk for companies' survival. Nevertheless, researchers have argued that the lack of clearly defined practices led to limited adoption of experimentation. In this regard, the first step is to define the hypotheses based on which teams will create experiments. Objective: We aim to develop a systematic technique to identify hypotheses for early-stage software startups. Methods: We followed a Design Science approach consisted of three cycles in the construction phase, that involved seven startups in total, and an evaluation of the final artifact within three startups. Results: We developed the HyMap, a hypotheses elicitation technique based on cognitive mapping. It consists of a visual language to depict a cognitive map representing the founder's understanding of the product, and a process to elicit this map consisted of a series of questions the founder must answer. Our evaluation showed that the artifacts are clear, easy to use, and useful leading to hypotheses and facilitating founders to visualize their idea. Conclusion: Our study contributes to both descriptive and prescriptive bodies of knowledge. Regarding the first, it provides a better understanding of the guidance founders use to develop their startups and, for the latter, a technique to identify hypotheses in early-stage software startups.
We prove an algebraic version of the Hamilton-Tian Conjecture for all log Fano pairs. More precisely, we show that any log Fano pair admits a canonical two-step degeneration to a reduced uniformly Ding stable triple, which admits a K\"ahler-Ricci soliton when the ground field $\mathbb{k}=\mathbb{C}$.
In the text processing context, most ML models are built on word embeddings. These embeddings are themselves trained on some datasets, potentially containing sensitive data. In some cases this training is done independently, in other cases, it occurs as part of training a larger, task-specific model. In either case, it is of interest to consider membership inference attacks based on the embedding layer as a way of understanding sensitive information leakage. But, somewhat surprisingly, membership inference attacks on word embeddings and their effect in other natural language processing (NLP) tasks that use these embeddings, have remained relatively unexplored. In this work, we show that word embeddings are vulnerable to black-box membership inference attacks under realistic assumptions. Furthermore, we show that this leakage persists through two other major NLP applications: classification and text-generation, even when the embedding layer is not exposed to the attacker. We show that our MI attack achieves high attack accuracy against a classifier model and an LSTM-based language model. Indeed, our attack is a cheaper membership inference attack on text-generative models, which does not require the knowledge of the target model or any expensive training of text-generative models as shadow models.
In this work we study the time complexity for the search of local minima in random graphs whose vertices have i.i.d. cost values. We show that, for Erd\"os-R\'enyi graphs with connection probability given by $\lambda/n^\alpha$ (with $\lambda > 0$ and $0 < \alpha < 1$), a family of local algorithms that approximate a gradient descent find local minima faster than the full gradient descent. Furthermore, we find a probabilistic representation for the running time of these algorithms leading to asymptotic estimates of the mean running times.
Spatially separating electrons of different spins and efficiently generating spin currents are crucial steps towards building practical spintronics devices. Transverse magnetic focusing is a potential technique to accomplish both those tasks. In a material where there is significant Rashba spin-orbit interaction, electrons of different spins will traverse different paths in the presence of an external magnetic field. Experiments have demonstrated the viability of this technique by measuring conductance spectra that indicate the separation of spin-up and spin-down electrons. However the effect that the geometry of the leads has on these measurements is not well understood. We show that the resolution of features in the conductance spectra is affected by the shape, separation and width of the leads. Furthermore, the number of subbands occupied by the electrons in the leads affects the ratio between the amplitudes of the spin-split peaks in the spectra. We simulated devices with random onsite potentials and observed that transverse magnetic focusing devices are sensitive to disorder. Ultimately we show that careful choice and characterisation of device geometry is crucial for correctly interpreting the results of transverse magnetic focusing experiments.
Predicting materials properties from composition or structure is of great interest to the materials science community. Deep learning has recently garnered considerable interest in materials predictive tasks with low model errors when dealing with large materials data. However, deep learning models suffer in the small data regime that is common in materials science. Here we leverage the transfer learning concept and the graph network deep learning framework and develop the AtomSets machine learning framework for consistent high model accuracy at both small and large materials data. The AtomSets models can work with both compositional and structural materials data. By combining with transfer learned features from graph networks, they can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy from using small compositional data (<400) to large structural data (>130,000). The AtomSets models show much lower errors than the state-of-the-art graph network models at small data limits and the classical machine learning models at large data limits. They also transfer better in the simulated materials discovery process where the targeted materials have property values out of the training data limits. The models require minimal domain knowledge inputs and are free from feature engineering. The presented AtomSets model framework opens new routes for machine learning-assisted materials design and discovery.
We present an analytical model to identify thin discs in galaxies, and apply this model to a sample of SDSS MaNGA galaxies. This model fits the velocity and velocity dispersion fields of galaxies with regular kinematics. By introducing two parameters $\zeta$ related to the comparison of the model's asymmetric drift correction to the observed gas kinematics and $\eta$ related to the dominant component of a galaxy, we classify the galaxies in the sample as "disc-dominated", "non-disc-dominated", or "disc-free" indicating galaxies with a dominating thin disc, a non-dominating thin disc, or no thin disc detection with our method, respectively. The dynamical mass resulting from our model correlates with stellar mass, and we investigate discrepancies by including gas mass and variation of the initial mass function. As expected, most spiral galaxies in the sample are disc-dominated, while ellipticals are predominantly disc-free. Lenticular galaxies show a dichotomy in their kinematic classification, which is related to their different star formation rates and gas fractions. We propose two possible scenarios to explain these results. In the first scenario, disc-free lenticulars formed in more violent processes than disc-dominated ones, while in the second scenario, the quenching processes in lenticulars lead to a change in their kinematic structures as disc-dominated lenticulars evolve to disc-free ones.
Motivated by applications from computer vision to bioinformatics, the field of shape analysis deals with problems where one wants to analyze geometric objects, such as curves, while ignoring actions that preserve their shape, such as translations, rotations, or reparametrizations. Mathematical tools have been developed to define notions of distances, averages, and optimal deformations for geometric objects. One such framework, which has proven to be successful in many applications, is based on the square root velocity (SRV) transform, which allows one to define a computable distance between spatial curves regardless of how they are parametrized. This paper introduces a supervised deep learning framework for the direct computation of SRV distances between curves, which usually requires an optimization over the group of reparametrizations that act on the curves. The benefits of our approach in terms of computational speed and accuracy are illustrated via several numerical experiments.
Perhaps the most explored hypothesis for the accelerated cosmic expansion rate arise in the context of extra fields or modifications to General Relativity. A prevalent approach is to parameterise the expansion history through the equation of state, $\omega(z)$. We present a parametric form for $\omega(z)$ that can reproduce the generic behaviour of the most widely used physical models for accelerated expansion with infrared corrections. The present proposal has at most 3 free parameters which can be mapped back to specific archetypal models for dark energy. We analyze in detail how different combinations of data can constrain the specific cases embedded in our form for $\omega(z)$. We implement our parametric equation for $\omega(z)$ to observations from CMB, luminous distance of SNeIa, cosmic chronometers, and baryon acoustic oscillations identified in galaxies and in the Lymann-$\alpha$ forest. We find that the parameters can be well constrained by using different observational data sets. Our findings point to an oscillatory behaviour which is consistent with an $f(R)$-like model or an unknown combination of scalar fields. When we let the three parameters vary freely, we find an EOS which oscillates around the phantom-dividing line, and, with over 99$\%$ of confidence, the cosmological constant solution is disfavored.
We introduce the Macaulay2 package $\mathtt{LinearTruncations}$ for finding and studying the truncations of a multigraded module over a standard multigraded ring that have linear resolutions.
As a critical component for online advertising and marking, click-through rate (CTR) prediction has draw lots of attentions from both industry and academia field. Recently, the deep learning has become the mainstream methodological choice for CTR. Despite of sustainable efforts have been made, existing approaches still pose several challenges. On the one hand, high-order interaction between the features is under-explored. On the other hand, high-order interactions may neglect the semantic information from the low-order fields. In this paper, we proposed a novel prediction method, named FINT, that employs the Field-aware INTeraction layer which captures high-order feature interactions while retaining the low-order field information. To empirically investigate the effectiveness and robustness of the FINT, we perform extensive experiments on the three realistic databases: KDD2012, Criteo and Avazu. The obtained results demonstrate that the FINT can significantly improve the performance compared to the existing methods, without increasing the amount of computation required. Moreover, the proposed method brought about 2.72\% increase to the advertising revenue of a big online video app through A/B testing. To better promote the research in CTR field, we released our code as well as reference implementation at: https://github.com/zhishan01/FINT.
In this paper, the zero-forcing (ZF) precoder with max-min power allocation is proposed for cell-free millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems using low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with limited-capacity fronthaul links. The proposed power allocation aims to achieve max-min fairness on the achievable rate lower bounds of the users obtained by the additive quantization noise model (AQNM), which mimics the effect of low-resolution DACs. To solve the max-min power allocation problem, an alternating optimization (AO) method is proposed, which is guaranteed to converge because the global optima of the subproblems that constitute the original problem are attained at each AO iteration. The performance of cell-free and small-cell systems is explored in the simulation results, which suggest that not-too-small fronthaul capacity suffices for cell-free systems to outperform small-cell systems.
We consider scattering theory of the Laplace Beltrami operator on differential forms on a Riemannian manifold that is Euclidean near infinity. Allowing for compact boundaries of low regularity we prove a Birman-Krein formula on the space of co-closed differential forms. In the case of dimension three this reduces to a Birman-Krein formula in Maxwell scattering.
The evolution by horizontal mean curvature flow (HMCF) is a partial differential equation in a sub-Riemannian setting with application in IT and neurogeometry (see Citti-Franceschiello-Sanguinetti-Sarti, 2016). Unfortunately this equation is difficult to study, since the horizontal normal is not always well defined. To overcome this problem the Riemannian approximation was introduced. In this article we define a stochastic representation of the solution of the approximated Riemannian mean curvature using the Riemannian approximation and we will prove that it is a solution in the viscosity sense of the approximated mean curvature flow, generalizing the result of Dirr-Dragoni-von Renesse, 2010.
The advent of the transformer has sparked a quick growth in the size of language models, far outpacing hardware improvements. (Dense) transformers are expected to reach the trillion-parameter scale in the near future, for which training requires thousands or even tens of thousands of GPUs. We investigate the challenges of training at this scale and beyond on commercially available hardware. In particular, we analyse the shortest possible training time for different configurations of distributed training, leveraging empirical scaling laws for language models to estimate the optimal (critical) batch size. Contrary to popular belief, we find no evidence for a memory wall, and instead argue that the real limitation -- other than the cost -- lies in the training duration. In addition to this analysis, we introduce two new methods, \textit{layered gradient accumulation} and \textit{modular pipeline parallelism}, which together cut the shortest training time by half. The methods also reduce data movement, lowering the network requirement to a point where a fast InfiniBand connection is not necessary. This increased network efficiency also improve on the methods introduced with the ZeRO optimizer, reducing the memory usage to a tiny fraction of the available GPU memory.
We investigated the out-of-plane transport properties of parent and chemically substituted BaFe$_{2}$As$_{2}$ for various types of substitution. Based on the studies of Hall coefficient and chemical-substitution effect, we have clarified the origin for the unusual temperature dependence of out-of-plane resistivity $\rho_c(T)$ in the high-temperature paramagnetic-tetragonal phase. Electron (hole) carriers have an incoherent (coherent) character, which is responsible for non-metallic (metallic) $\rho_c(T)$. Although both of electron and hole contributions are almost comparable, a slightly larger contribution comes from electrons at high temperatures, while from holes at low temperatures, resulting in a maximum in $\rho_c(T)$. In the low-temperature antiferromagnetic-orthorhombic phase, the major effect of substitution is to increase the residual-resistivity component, as in the case for the in-plane transport. In particular, Co atoms substituted for Fe give rise to strong scattering with large $\mathit{ac}$ anisotropy. We found that K substitution induces a non-metallic behavior in $\rho_c(T)$ at low temperatures, which is likely due to a weakly localized nature along the $c$-axis direction.
We study the problem of determining elements of the Selberg class by information on the coefficents of the Dirichlet series at the squares of primes, or information about the zeroes of the functions.
Clinicians often do not sufficiently adhere to evidence-based clinical guidelines in a manner sensitive to the context of each patient. It is important to detect such deviations, typically including redundant or missing actions, even when the detection is performed retrospectively, so as to inform both the attending clinician and policy makers. Furthermore, it would be beneficial to detect such deviations in a manner proportional to the level of the deviation, and not to simply use arbitrary cut-off values. In this study, we introduce a new approach for automated guideline-based quality assessment of the care process, the bidirectional knowledge-based assessment of compliance (BiKBAC) method. Our BiKBAC methodology assesses the degree of compliance when applying clinical guidelines, with respect to multiple different aspects of the guideline (e.g., the guideline's process and outcome objectives). The assessment is performed through a highly detailed, automated quality-assessment retrospective analysis, which compares a formal representation of the guideline and of its process and outcome intentions (we use the Asbru language for that purpose) with the longitudinal electronic medical record of its continuous application over a significant time period, using both a top-down and a bottom-up approach, which we explain in detail. Partial matches of the data to the process and to the outcome objectives are resolved using fuzzy temporal logic. We also introduce the DiscovErr system, which implements the BiKBAC approach, and present its detailed architecture. The DiscovErr system was evaluated in a separate study in the type 2 diabetes management domain, by comparing its performance to a panel of three clinicians, with highly encouraging results with respect to the completeness and correctness of its comments.
The presence of a small concentration of in-plane Fe dopants in La$_{1.87}$Sr$_{0.13}$Cu$_{0.99}$Fe$_{0.01}$O$_4$ is known to enhance stripe-like spin and charge density wave (SDW and CDW) order, and suppress the superconducting $T_c$. Here, we show that it also induces highly two-dimensional (2D) superconducting correlations that have been argued to be signatures of a new form of superconducting order, so-called pair-density-wave (PDW) order. In addition, using the resonant soft x-ray scattering, we find that the 2D superconducting fluctuation is strongly associated with the CDW stripe. In particular, the PDW signature first appears when the correlation length of the CDW stripe grows over eight times the lattice unit ($\sim$ 8$a$). These results provide critical conditions for the formation of PDW order.
Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) are highly anisotropic optical materials that behave as metals or as dielectrics depending on the direction of propagation of light. They are becoming essential for a plethora of applications, ranging from aerospace to automotive, from wireless to medical and IoT. These applications often work in harsh environments or may sustain remarkable external stresses. This calls for materials that show enhanced optical properties as well as tailorable mechanical properties. Depending on their specific use, both hard and ultrasoft materials could be required, although the combination with optical hyperbolic response is rarely addressed. Here, we demonstrate the possibility to combine optical hyperbolicity and tunable mechanical properties in the same (meta)material, focusing on the case of extreme mechanical hardness. Using high-throughput calculations from first principles and effective medium theory, we explored a large class of layered materials with hyperbolic optical activity in the near-IR and visible range, and we identified a reduced number of ultrasoft and hard HMMs among more than 1800 combinations of transition metal rocksalt crystals. Once validated by the experiments, this new class of metamaterials may foster previously unexplored optical/mechanical applications.
Interpretability of learning algorithms is crucial for applications involving critical decisions, and variable importance is one of the main interpretation tools. Shapley effects are now widely used to interpret both tree ensembles and neural networks, as they can efficiently handle dependence and interactions in the data, as opposed to most other variable importance measures. However, estimating Shapley effects is a challenging task, because of the computational complexity and the conditional expectation estimates. Accordingly, existing Shapley algorithms have flaws: a costly running time, or a bias when input variables are dependent. Therefore, we introduce SHAFF, SHApley eFfects via random Forests, a fast and accurate Shapley effect estimate, even when input variables are dependent. We show SHAFF efficiency through both a theoretical analysis of its consistency, and the practical performance improvements over competitors with extensive experiments. An implementation of SHAFF in C++ and R is available online.
In the present work, we report the dynamics and geometrical features of the plasma plume formed by the laser ablation of copper and graphite (carbon) targets in the presence of different transverse magnetic field. This work emphasizes on the effect of atomic mass of the plume species on the diamagnetic behaviour and geometrical aspect of the expanding plasma plume in the magnetic field. The time-resolved analysis of the simultaneously captured two directional images in orthogonal to the expansion axis is carried out for the comparative study of projected three-dimensional structure of copper and carbon plasma plume. In the presence of magnetic field, sharp differences are observed between the copper and carbon plasma plumes in terms of formation of diamagnetic cavity and structure formation. An elliptical cavity-like structure is observed in case of copper plasma plume which attains the sharp conical shape with increasing the time delay or magnetic field strength. On the other hand, splitted carbon plasma plume appears as a Y-shape structure in the presence of magnetic field where the cavity-like structure is not observed for the considered time and magnetic field. Based on the modified energy balance relation for the elliptic cylindrical geometry, we have also simulated the dynamics of the plume which is in close agreement with observed plasma expansion in diamagnetic and non-diamagnetic regions.
Large labeled data sets are one of the essential basics of modern deep learning techniques. Therefore, there is an increasing need for tools that allow to label large amounts of data as intuitively as possible. In this paper, we introduce SALT, a tool to semi-automatically annotate RGB-D video sequences to generate 3D bounding boxes for full six Degrees of Freedom (DoF) object poses, as well as pixel-level instance segmentation masks for both RGB and depth. Besides bounding box propagation through various interpolation techniques, as well as algorithmically guided instance segmentation, our pipeline also provides built-in pre-processing functionalities to facilitate the data set creation process. By making full use of SALT, annotation time can be reduced by a factor of up to 33.95 for bounding box creation and 8.55 for RGB segmentation without compromising the quality of the automatically generated ground truth.
Several language applications often require word semantics as a core part of their processing pipeline, either as precise meaning inference or semantic similarity. Multi-sense embeddings (M-SE) can be exploited for this important requirement. M-SE seeks to represent each word by their distinct senses in order to resolve the conflation of meanings of words as used in different contexts. Previous works usually approach this task by training a model on a large corpus and often ignore the effect and usefulness of the semantic relations offered by lexical resources. However, even with large training data, coverage of all possible word senses is still an issue. In addition, a considerable percentage of contextual semantic knowledge are never learned because a huge amount of possible distributional semantic structures are never explored. In this paper, we leverage the rich semantic structures in WordNet using a graph-theoretic walk technique over word senses to enhance the quality of multi-sense embeddings. This algorithm composes enriched texts from the original texts. Furthermore, we derive new distributional semantic similarity measures for M-SE from prior ones. We adapt these measures to word sense disambiguation (WSD) aspect of our experiment. We report evaluation results on 11 benchmark datasets involving WSD and Word Similarity tasks and show that our method for enhancing distributional semantic structures improves embeddings quality on the baselines. Despite the small training data, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on some of the datasets.
Score-based generative models provide state-of-the-art quality for image and audio synthesis. Sampling from these models is performed iteratively, typically employing a discretized series of noise levels and a predefined scheme. In this note, we first overview three common sampling schemes for models trained with denoising score matching. Next, we focus on one of them, consistent annealed sampling, and study its hyper-parameter boundaries. We then highlight a possible formulation of such hyper-parameter that explicitly considers those boundaries and facilitates tuning when using few or a variable number of steps. Finally, we highlight some connections of the formulation with other sampling schemes.
Larger language models have higher accuracy on average, but are they better on every single instance (datapoint)? Some work suggests larger models have higher out-of-distribution robustness, while other work suggests they have lower accuracy on rare subgroups. To understand these differences, we investigate these models at the level of individual instances. However, one major challenge is that individual predictions are highly sensitive to noise in the randomness in training. We develop statistically rigorous methods to address this, and after accounting for pretraining and finetuning noise, we find that our BERT-Large is worse than BERT-Mini on at least 1-4% of instances across MNLI, SST-2, and QQP, compared to the overall accuracy improvement of 2-10%. We also find that finetuning noise increases with model size and that instance-level accuracy has momentum: improvement from BERT-Mini to BERT-Medium correlates with improvement from BERT-Medium to BERT-Large. Our findings suggest that instance-level predictions provide a rich source of information; we therefore, recommend that researchers supplement model weights with model predictions.
We consider an architecture of confidential cloud-based control synthesis based on Homomorphic Encryption (HE). Our study is motivated by the recent surge of data-driven control such as deep reinforcement learning, whose heavy computational requirements often necessitate an outsourcing to the third party server. To achieve more flexibility than Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and less computational overhead than Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), we consider a Reinforcement Learning (RL) architecture over Leveled Homomorphic Encryption (LHE). We first show that the impact of the encryption noise under the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) encryption scheme on the convergence of the model-based tabular Value Iteration (VI) can be analytically bounded. We also consider secure implementations of TD(0), SARSA(0) and Z-learning algorithms over the CKKS scheme, where we numerically demonstrate that the effects of the encryption noise on these algorithms are also minimal.
Recently, surface electromyography (sEMG) emerged as a novel biometric authentication method. Since EMG system parameters, such as the feature extraction methods and the number of channels, have been known to affect system performances, it is important to investigate these effects on the performance of the sEMG-based biometric system to determine optimal system parameters. In this study, three robust feature extraction methods, Time-domain (TD) feature, Frequency Division Technique (FDT), and Autoregressive (AR) feature, and their combinations were investigated while the number of channels varying from one to eight. For these system parameters, the performance of sixteen static wrist and hand gestures was systematically investigated in two authentication modes: verification and identification. The results from 24 participants showed that the TD features significantly (p<0.05) and consistently outperformed FDT and AR features for all channel numbers. The results also showed that the performance of a four-channel setup was not significantly different from those with higher number of channels. The average equal error rate (EER) for a four-channel sEMG verification system was 4% for TD features, 5.3% for FDT features, and 10% for AR features. For an identification system, the average Rank-1 error (R1E) for a four-channel configuration was 3% for TD features, 12.4% for FDT features, and 36.3% for AR features. The electrode position on the flexor carpi ulnaris (FCU) muscle had a critical contribution to the authentication performance. Thus, the combination of the TD feature set and a four-channel sEMG system with one of the electrodes positioned on the FCU are recommended for optimal authentication performance.
Let "Faulhaber's formula" refer to an expression for the sum of powers of integers written with terms in n(n+1)/2. Initially, the author used Faulhaber's formula to explain why odd Bernoulli numbers are equal to zero. Next, Cereceda gave alternate proofs of that result and then proved the converse, if odd Bernoulli numbers are equal to zero then we can derive Faulhaber's formula. Here, the original author will give a new proof of the converse.
Following the recent discovery of the Lauricella string scattering amplitudes (LSSA) and their associated exact SL(K+3,C) symmetry, we give a brief comment on Gross conjecture regarding "High energy symmetry of string theory".
A method to compute optimal collision avoidance maneuvers for short-term encounters is presented. The maneuvers are modeled as multiple-impulses to handle impulsive cases and to approximate finite burn arcs associated either with short alert times or the use of low-thrust propulsion. The maneuver design is formulated as a sequence of convex optimization problems solved in polynomial time by state-of-the-art primal-dual interior-point algorithms. The proposed approach calculates optimal solutions without assumptions about the thrust arc structure and thrust direction. The execution time is fraction of a second for an optimization problem with hundreds of variables and constraints, making it suitable for autonomous calculations.
Microgrids with energy storage systems and distributed renewable energy sources play a crucial role in reducing the consumption from traditional power sources and the emission of $CO_2$. Connecting multi microgrid to a distribution power grid can facilitate a more robust and reliable operation to increase the security and privacy of the system. The proposed model consists of three layers, smart grid layer, independent system operator (ISO) layer and power grid layer. Each layer aims to maximise its benefit. To achieve these objectives, an intelligent multi-microgrid energy management method is proposed based on the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) techniques, leading to a Pareto optimal set. A non-dominated solution is selected to implement a fair design in order not to favour any particular participant. The simulation results demonstrate the performance of the MORL and verify the viability of the proposed approach.
At ambient pressure, lithium molybdenum purple bronze (Li0.9Mo6O17) is a quasi-one dimensional solid in which the anisotropic crystal structure and the linear dispersion of the underlying bands produced by electronic correlations possibly bring about a rare experimental realization of Tomomaga-Luttinger liquid physics. It is also the sole member of the broader purple molybdenum bronzes family where a Peierls instability has not been identified at low temperatures. The present study reports a pressure-induced series of phase transitions between 0 and 12 GPa. These transitions are strongly reflected in infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and x-ray diffraction. The most dramatic effect seen in optical conductivity is the metallization of the c-axis, concomitant to the decrease of conductivity along the b-axis. This indicates that high pressure drives the material away from its quasi-one dimensional behavior at ambient pressure. While the first pressure-induced structure of the series is resolved, the identification of the underlying mechanisms driving the dimensional change in the physics remains a challenge.
Optimizing the confinement and transport of fast ions is an important consideration in the design of modern fusion reactors. For spherical tokamaks in particular, fast ions can significantly influence global plasma behavior because their large drift orbits often sample both core and scrape-off-layer (SOL) plasma conditions. Their Larmor radii are also comparable to the SOL width, rendering the commonly chosen guiding center approximations inappropriate. Accurately modeling the behavior of fast ions therefore requires retaining a complete description of the fast ion orbit including its Larmor motion. Here, we introduce the Scrape-Off-Layer Fast Ion (SOLFI) code, which is a new and versatile full-orbit Monte Carlo particle tracer being developed to follow fast ion orbits inside and outside the separatrix. We benchmark SOLFI in a simple straight mirror geometry and show that the code (i) conserves particle energy and magnetic moment, (ii) obtains the correct passing boundary for particles moving in magnetic mirror field with an imposed electrostatic field, and (iii) correctly observes equal ion and electron current at the ambipolar potential predicted from analytical theory.
Automated testing tools typically create test cases that are different from what human testers create. This often makes the tools less effective, the created tests harder to understand, and thus results in tools providing less support to human testers. Here, we propose a framework based on cognitive science and, in particular, an analysis of approaches to problem-solving, for identifying cognitive processes of testers. The framework helps map test design steps and criteria used in human test activities and thus to better understand how effective human testers perform their tasks. Ultimately, our goal is to be able to mimic how humans create test cases and thus to design more human-like automated test generation systems. We posit that such systems can better augment and support testers in a way that is meaningful to them.
We obtain a type of Ay\'{o}n-Beato-Garc\'{\i}a (ABG) related black hole solutions with five parameters: the mass $m$, the charge $q$, and three dimensionless parameters $\alpha$, $\beta$ and $\gamma$ associated with nonlinear electrodynamics. We find that this type of black holes is regular under the conditions: $\alpha \gamma \geqslant 6$, $\beta \gamma \geqslant 8$, and $\gamma >0$. Here we focus on the saturated case: $\alpha={6}/{\gamma}$ and $\beta ={8}/{\gamma }$, such that only three parameters $m$, $q$ and $\gamma$ remain, which leads to a new family of ABG black holes. For such a family of black holes, we investigate the influence of the charge $q$ and the parameter $\gamma$ on the horizon radius and the Hawking temperature. In addition, we calculate the quasinormal mode frequencies of massless scalar field perturbations by using the sixth-order WKB approximation method and the unstable circular null geodesic method in the eikonal limit. We also compute the shadow radius for the new family of ABG black holes and use the shadow data of the $M87^{*}$ black hole detected by the Event Horizon Telescope to provide an upper limit on the charge $q$ of the new black holes. Using the shadow data of the $M87^{*}$ black hole, we find that the upper limit of the charge $q$ increases rapidly at first and then slowly but does not exceed the mass of the $M87^{*}$ black hole at last when the parameter $\gamma$ is increasing and going to infinity, and that the data restrict the frequency range of the fundamental mode with $l=1$ to $1.4\times 10^{-6}Hz\sim 1.9\times 10^{-6} Hz$.
This paper describes the development needed to support the functional and teaching requirements of iRead, a 4-year EU-funded project which produced an award-winning serious game utilising lexical and syntactical game content. The main functional requirement was that the game should retain different profiles for each student, encapsulating both the respective language model (which language features should be taught/used in the game first, before moving on to more advanced ones) and the user model (mastery level for each feature, as reported by the student's performance in the game). In addition to this, researchers and stakeholders stated additional requirements related to learning objectives and strategies to make the game more interesting and successful; these were implemented as a set of selection rules which take into account not only the mastery level for each feature, but also respect the priorities set by teachers, helping avoid repetition of content and features, and maintaining a balance between new content and revision of already mastered features to give students the sense of progress, while also reinforcing learning.
Surface ion traps are among the most promising technologies for scaling up quantum computing machines, but their complicated multi-electrode geometry can make some tasks, including compensation for stray electric fields, challenging both at the level of modeling and of practical implementation. Here we demonstrate the compensation of stray electric fields using a gradient descent algorithm and a machine learning technique, which trained a deep learning network. We show automated dynamical compensation tested against induced electric charging from UV laser light hitting the chip trap surface. The results show improvement in compensation using gradient descent and the machine learner over manual compensation. This improvement is inferred from an increase of the fluorescence rate of 78% and 96% respectively, for a trapped $^{171}$Yb$^+$ ion driven by a laser tuned to -7.8 MHz of the $^2$S$_{1/2}\leftrightarrow^2$P$_{1/2}$ Doppler cooling transition at 369.5 nm.
Active learning is usually applied to acquire labels of informative data points in supervised learning, to maximize accuracy in a sample-efficient way. However, maximizing the accuracy is not the end goal when the results are used for decision-making, for example in personalized medicine or economics. We argue that when acquiring samples sequentially, separating learning and decision-making is sub-optimal, and we introduce an active learning strategy which takes the down-the-line decision problem into account. Specifically, we introduce a novel active learning criterion which maximizes the expected information gain on the posterior distribution of the optimal decision. We compare our targeted active learning strategy to existing alternatives on both simulated and real data, and show improved performance in decision-making accuracy.
We show that there is a red-blue colouring of $[N]$ with no blue 3-term arithmetic progression and no red arithmetic progression of length $e^{C(\log N)^{3/4}(\log \log N)^{1/4}}$. Consequently, the two-colour van der Waerden number $w(3,k)$ is bounded below by $k^{b(k)}$, where $b(k) = c \big( \frac{\log k}{\log\log k} \big)^{1/3}$. Previously it had been speculated, supported by data, that $w(3,k) = O(k^2)$.
We prove that, for $g\geq19$ the mapping class group of a nonorientable surface of genus $g$, $\textrm{Mod}(N_g)$, can be generated by two elements, one of which is of order $g$. We also prove that for $g\geq26$, $\textrm{Mod}(N_g)$ can be generated by three involutions if $g\geq26$.
Advances in both instrumentation and data analysis software are now enabling the first ultra-high-resolution microcalorimeter gamma spectrometers designed for implementation in nuclear facilities and analytical laboratories. With approximately ten times better energy resolution than high-purity germanium detectors, these instruments can overcome important uncertainty limits. Microcalorimeter gamma spectroscopy is intended to provide nondestructive isotopic analysis capabilities with sufficient precision and accuracy to reduce the need for sampling, chemical separations, and mass spectrometry to meet safeguards and security goals. Key milestones were the development of the SOFIA instrument (Spectrometer Optimized for Facility Integrated Applications) and the SAPPY software (Spectral Analysis Program in PYthon). SOFIA is a compact instrument that combines advances in large multiplexed transition-edge sensor arrays with optimized cryogenic performance to overcome many practical limitations of previous systems. With a 256-pixel multiplexed detector array capable of 5000 counts per second, measurement time can be comparable to high-purity germanium detectors. SAPPY was developed to determine isotopic ratios in data from SOFIA and other microcalorimeter instruments with an approach similar to the widely-used FRAM software. SAPPY provides a flexible framework with rigorous uncertainty analysis for both microcalorimeter and HPGe data, allowing direct comparison. We present current results from the SOFIA instrument, preliminary isotopic analysis using SAPPY, and describe how the technology is being used to explore uncertainty limits of nondestructive isotopic characterization, inform safeguards models, and extract improved nuclear data including gamma-ray branching ratios.
This dissertation studies the quantum anomalous effects on the description of high energy electrodynamics. We argue that on the temperatures comparable to the electroweak scale, characteristic for the early Universe and objects like neutron stars, the description of electromagnetic fields in conductive plasmas needs to be extended to include the effects of chiral anomaly. It is demonstrated that chiral effects can have a significant influence on the evolution of magnetic fields, tending to produce exponential amplification, creation of magnetic helicity from initially non-helical fields, and can lead to an inverse energy transfer. We further discuss the modified magnetohydrodynamic equations around the electroweak transition. The obtained solutions demonstrate that the asymmetry between right-handed and left-handed charged fermions of negligible mass typically grows with time when approaching the electroweak crossover from higher temperatures, until it undergoes a fast decrease at the transition, and then eventually gets damped at lower temperatures in the broken phase. At the same time, the dissipation of magnetic fields gets slower due to the chiral effects. We furthermore report some first analytical attempts in the study of chiral magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. Using the analysis of simplified regimes and qualitative arguments, it is shown that anomalous effects can strongly support turbulent inverse cascade and lead to a faster growth of the correlation length, when compared to the evolution predicted by the non-chiral magnetohydrodynamics. Finally, the discussion of relaxation towards minimal energy states in the chiral magnetohydrodynamic turbulence is also presented.
The Covid-19 pandemic introduces new challenges and constraints for return to work business planning. We describe a space allocation problem that incorporates social distancing constraints while optimising the number of available safe workspaces in a return to work scenario. We propose and demonstrate a graph based approach that solves the optimisation problem via modelling as a bipartite graph of disconnected components over a graph of constraints. We compare results obtained with a constrained random walk and a linear programming approach.
We provide a new analysis technique to measure the effect of the isotropic polarization rotation, induced by e.g. the isotropic cosmic birefringence from axion-like particles and a miscalibration of CMB polarization angle, via mode coupling in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Several secondary effects such as gravitational lensing and CMB optical-depth anisotropies lead to mode coupling in observed CMB anisotropies, i.e., non-zero off-diagonal elements in the observed CMB covariance. To derive the mode coupling, however, we usually assume no parity violation in the observed CMB anisotropies. We first derive a new contribution to the CMB mode coupling arising from parity violation in observed CMB. Since the isotropic polarization rotation leads to parity violation in the observed CMB anisotropies, we then discuss the use of the new mode coupling for constraining the isotropic polarization angle. We find that constraints on the isotropic polarization angle by measuring the new mode-coupling contribution are comparable to that using the $EB$ cross-power spectrum in future high-sensitivity polarization experiments such as CMB-S4 and LiteBIRD. Thus, this technique can be used to cross-check results obtained by the use of the $EB$ cross-power spectrum.
What breathes life into an embodied agent or avatar? While body motions such as facial expressions, speech and gestures have been well studied, relatively little attention has been applied to subtle changes due to underlying physiology. We argue that subtle pulse signals are important for creating more lifelike and less disconcerting avatars. We propose a method for animating blood flow patterns, based on a data-driven physiological model that can be used to directly augment the appearance of synthetic avatars and photo-realistic faces. While the changes are difficult for participants to "see", they significantly more frequently select faces with blood flow as more anthropomorphic and animated than faces without blood flow. Furthermore, by manipulating the frequency of the heart rate in the underlying signal we can change the perceived arousal of the character.
During software evolution, inexperienced developers may introduce design anti-patterns when they modify their software systems to fix bugs or to add new functionalities based on changes in requirements. Developers may also use design patterns to promote software quality or as a possible cure for some design anti-patterns. Thus, design patterns and design anti-patterns are introduced, removed, and mutated from one another by developers. Many studies investigated the evolution of design patterns and design anti-patterns and their impact on software development. However, they investigated design patterns or design anti-patterns in isolation and did not consider their mutations and the impact of these mutations on software quality. Therefore, we report our study of bidirectional mutations between design patterns and design anti-patterns and the impacts of these mutations on software change- and fault-proneness. We analyzed snapshots of seven Java software systems with diverse sizes, evolution histories, and application domains. We built Markov models to capture the probability of occurrences of the different design patterns and design anti-patterns mutations. Results from our study show that (1) design patterns and design anti-patterns mutate into other design patterns and/or design anti-patterns. They also show that (2) some change types primarily trigger mutations of design patterns and design anti-patterns (renaming and changes to comments, declarations, and operators), and (3) some mutations of design anti-patterns and design patterns are more faulty in specific contexts. These results provide important insights into the evolution of design patterns and design anti-patterns and its impact on the change- and fault-proneness of software systems.
In order to study the phenomenon of regional economic development and urban expansion from the perspective of night-light remote sensing images, researchers use NOAA-provided night-light remote sensing image data (data from 1992 to 2013) along with ArcGIS software to process image information, obtain the basic pixel information data of specific areas of the image, and analyze these data from the space-time domain for presentation of the trend of regional economic development in China in recent years, and tries to explore the urbanization effect brought by the rapid development of China's economy. Through the analysis and study of the data, the results show that the urbanization development speed in China is still at its peak, and has great development potential and space. But at the same time, people also need to pay attention to the imbalance of regional development.
Specific heat and linear thermal expansivity are fundamental thermal dynamics and have been proven as interesting relaxing quantities to investigate in glass transition and glassy state. However, their possibility has much less been exploited compared to mechanical and dielectric susceptibilities due to the limited spectroscopy bandwidth. This work reports on simultaneous spectroscopy of the two by making use of ultrafast time-resolved thermal lens (TL) spectroscopy. Detailed modeling of the thermoelastic transients of a relaxing system subjected to ultrashort laser heating is presented to describe the TL response. The model has been applied to analyze a set of experimentally recorded TL waveforms, allowing the determination of relaxation strength and relaxation frequency from sub-kilohertz to sub-100 MHz and in a wide temperature range from 200-280 K.
This paper proposes an efficient video summarization framework that will give a gist of the entire video in a few key-frames or video skims. Existing video summarization frameworks are based on algorithms that utilize computer vision low-level feature extraction or high-level domain level extraction. However, being the ultimate user of the summarized video, humans remain the most neglected aspect. Therefore, the proposed paper considers human's role in summarization and introduces human visual attention-based summarization techniques. To understand human attention behavior, we have designed and performed experiments with human participants using electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye-tracking technology. The EEG and eye-tracking data obtained from the experimentation are processed simultaneously and used to segment frames containing useful information from a considerable video volume. Thus, the frame segmentation primarily relies on the cognitive judgments of human beings. Using our approach, a video is summarized by 96.5% while maintaining higher precision and high recall factors. The comparison with the state-of-the-art techniques demonstrates that the proposed approach yields ceiling-level performance with reduced computational cost in summarising the videos.
Let $\mathbf{X}\in\mathbb{C}^{m\times n}$ ($m\geq n$) be a random matrix with independent rows each distributed as complex multivariate Gaussian with zero mean and {\it single-spiked} covariance matrix $\mathbf{I}_n+ \eta \mathbf{u}\mathbf{u}^*$, where $\mathbf{I}_n$ is the $n\times n$ identity matrix, $\mathbf{u}\in\mathbb{C}^{n\times n}$ is an arbitrary vector with a unit Euclidean norm, $\eta\geq 0$ is a non-random parameter, and $(\cdot)^*$ represents conjugate-transpose. This paper investigates the distribution of the random quantity $\kappa_{\text{SC}}^2(\mathbf{X})=\sum_{k=1}^n \lambda_k/\lambda_1$, where $0<\lambda_1<\lambda_2<\ldots<\lambda_n<\infty$ are the ordered eigenvalues of $\mathbf{X}^*\mathbf{X}$ (i.e., single-spiked Wishart matrix). This random quantity is intimately related to the so called {\it scaled condition number} or the Demmel condition number (i.e., $\kappa_{\text{SC}}(\mathbf{X})$) and the minimum eigenvalue of the fixed trace Wishart-Laguerre ensemble (i.e., $\kappa_{\text{SC}}^{-2}(\mathbf{X})$). In particular, we use an orthogonal polynomial approach to derive an exact expression for the probability density function of $\kappa_{\text{SC}}^2(\mathbf{X})$ which is amenable to asymptotic analysis as matrix dimensions grow large. Our asymptotic results reveal that, as $m,n\to\infty$ such that $m-n$ is fixed and when $\eta$ scales on the order of $1/n$, $\kappa_{\text{SC}}^2(\mathbf{X})$ scales on the order of $n^3$. In this respect we establish simple closed-form expressions for the limiting distributions.
Millimeter wave multiple-input multiple-output (mmWave-MIMO) systems with small number of radio-frequency (RF) chains have limited multiplexing gain. Spatial path index modulation (SPIM) is helpful in improving this gain by utilizing additional signal bits modulated by the indices of spatial paths. In this paper, we introduce model-based and model-free frameworks for beamformer design in multi-user SPIM-MIMO systems. We first design the beamformers via model-based manifold optimization algorithm. Then, we leverage federated learning (FL) with dropout learning (DL) to train a learning model on the local dataset of users, who estimate the beamformers by feeding the model with their channel data. The DL randomly selects different set of model parameters during training, thereby further reducing the transmission overhead compared to conventional FL. Numerical experiments show that the proposed framework exhibits higher spectral efficiency than the state-of-the-art SPIM-MIMO methods and mmWave-MIMO, which relies on the strongest propagation path. Furthermore, the proposed FL approach provides at least 10 times lower transmission overhead than the centralized learning techniques.
Out-of-town recommendation is designed for those users who leave their home-town areas and visit the areas they have never been to before. It is challenging to recommend Point-of-Interests (POIs) for out-of-town users since the out-of-town check-in behavior is determined by not only the user's home-town preference but also the user's travel intention. Besides, the user's travel intentions are complex and dynamic, which leads to big difficulties in understanding such intentions precisely. In this paper, we propose a TRAvel-INtention-aware Out-of-town Recommendation framework, named TRAINOR. The proposed TRAINOR framework distinguishes itself from existing out-of-town recommenders in three aspects. First, graph neural networks are explored to represent users' home-town check-in preference and geographical constraints in out-of-town check-in behaviors. Second, a user-specific travel intention is formulated as an aggregation combining home-town preference and generic travel intention together, where the generic travel intention is regarded as a mixture of inherent intentions that can be learned by Neural Topic Model (NTM). Third, a non-linear mapping function, as well as a matrix factorization method, are employed to transfer users' home-town preference and estimate out-of-town POI's representation, respectively. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets validate the effectiveness of the TRAINOR framework. Moreover, the learned travel intention can deliver meaningful explanations for understanding a user's travel purposes.
Cavity optomechanical systems have become a popular playground for studies of controllable nonlinear interactions between light and motion. Owing to the large speed of light, realizing cavity optomechanics in the microwave frequency range requires cavities up to several mm in size, hence making it hard to embed several of them on the same chip. An alternative scheme with much smaller footprint is provided by magnomechanics, where the electromagnetic cavity is replaced by a magnet undergoing ferromagnetic resonance, and the optomechanical coupling originates from magnetic shape anisotropy. Here, we consider the magnomechanical interaction occurring in a suspended magnetic beam -- a scheme in which both magnetic and mechanical modes physically overlap and can also be driven individually. We show that a sizable interaction can be produced if the beam has some initial static deformation, as is often the case due to unequal strains in the constituent materials. We also show how the magnetism affects the magnetomotive detection of the vibrations, and how the magnomechanics interaction can be used in microwave signal amplification. Finally, we discuss experimental progress towards realizing the scheme.
This paper studies offline Imitation Learning (IL) where an agent learns to imitate an expert demonstrator without additional online environment interactions. Instead, the learner is presented with a static offline dataset of state-action-next state transition triples from a potentially less proficient behavior policy. We introduce Model-based IL from Offline data (MILO): an algorithmic framework that utilizes the static dataset to solve the offline IL problem efficiently both in theory and in practice. In theory, even if the behavior policy is highly sub-optimal compared to the expert, we show that as long as the data from the behavior policy provides sufficient coverage on the expert state-action traces (and with no necessity for a global coverage over the entire state-action space), MILO can provably combat the covariate shift issue in IL. Complementing our theory results, we also demonstrate that a practical implementation of our approach mitigates covariate shift on benchmark MuJoCo continuous control tasks. We demonstrate that with behavior policies whose performances are less than half of that of the expert, MILO still successfully imitates with an extremely low number of expert state-action pairs while traditional offline IL method such as behavior cloning (BC) fails completely. Source code is provided at https://github.com/jdchang1/milo.
This position paper examines potential pitfalls on the way towards achieving human-AI co-creation with generative models in a way that is beneficial to the users' interests. In particular, we collected a set of nine potential pitfalls, based on the literature and our own experiences as researchers working at the intersection of HCI and AI. We illustrate each pitfall with examples and suggest ideas for addressing it. Reflecting on all pitfalls, we discuss and conclude with implications for future research directions. With this collection, we hope to contribute to a critical and constructive discussion on the roles of humans and AI in co-creative interactions, with an eye on related assumptions and potential side-effects for creative practices and beyond.
We give an explicit description of the generator of finitely presented objects of the coslice of a locally finitely presentable category under a given object, as consisting of all pushouts of finitely presented maps under this object. Then we prove that the comma category under the direct image part of a morphism of locally finitely presentable category is still locally finitely presentable, and we give again an explicit description of its generator of finitely presented objects. We finally deduce that 2-category $\LFP$ has comma objects computed in $\Cat$.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified thousands of genetic variants associated with complex traits. Many complex traits are found to have shared genetic etiology. Genetic covariance is defined as the underlying covariance of genetic values and can be used to measure the shared genetic architecture. The data of two outcomes may be collected from the same group or different groups of individuals and the outcomes can be of different types or collected based on different study designs. This paper proposes a unified approach to robust estimation and inference for genetic covariance of general outcomes that may be associated with genetic variants nonlinearly. We provide the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator and show that our proposal is robust under certain model mis-specification. Our method under linear working models provides robust inference for the narrow-sense genetic covariance, even when both linear models are mis-specified. Various numerical experiments are performed to support the theoretical results. Our method is applied to an outbred mice GWAS data set to study the overlapping genetic effects between the behavioral and physiological phenotypes. The real data results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method and reveal interesting genetic covariance among different mice developmental traits.
We study unirationality of a Del Pezzo surface of degree two over a given (non algebraically closed) field, under the assumption that it admits at least one rational double point over an algebraic closure of the base field. As corollaries of our main results, we find that over a finite field, it is unirational if the cardinality of the field is greater than or equal to nine and we also find that over an infinite field, which is not necessarily perfect, it is unirational if and only if the rational points are Zariski dense over the field.
Input perturbation methods occlude parts of an input to a function and measure the change in the function's output. Recently, input perturbation methods have been applied to generate and evaluate saliency maps from convolutional neural networks. In practice, neutral baseline images are used for the occlusion, such that the baseline image's impact on the classification probability is minimal. However, in this paper we show that arguably neutral baseline images still impact the generated saliency maps and their evaluation with input perturbations. We also demonstrate that many choices of hyperparameters lead to the divergence of saliency maps generated by input perturbations. We experimentally reveal inconsistencies among a selection of input perturbation methods and find that they lack robustness for generating saliency maps and for evaluating saliency maps as saliency metrics.
We introduce a novel fine-grained dataset and benchmark, the Danish Fungi 2020 (DF20). The dataset, constructed from observations submitted to the Atlas of Danish Fungi, is unique in its taxonomy-accurate class labels, small number of errors, highly unbalanced long-tailed class distribution, rich observation metadata, and well-defined class hierarchy. DF20 has zero overlap with ImageNet, allowing unbiased comparison of models fine-tuned from publicly available ImageNet checkpoints. The proposed evaluation protocol enables testing the ability to improve classification using metadata -- e.g. precise geographic location, habitat, and substrate, facilitates classifier calibration testing, and finally allows to study the impact of the device settings on the classification performance. Experiments using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and the recent Vision Transformers (ViT) show that DF20 presents a challenging task. Interestingly, ViT achieves results superior to CNN baselines with 80.45% accuracy and 0.743 macro F1 score, reducing the CNN error by 9% and 12% respectively. A simple procedure for including metadata into the decision process improves the classification accuracy by more than 2.95 percentage points, reducing the error rate by 15%. The source code for all methods and experiments is available at https://sites.google.com/view/danish-fungi-dataset.
In the present work, the European option pricing SWIFT method is extended for Heston model calibration. The computation of the option price gradient is simplified thanks to the knowledge of the characteristic function in closed form. The proposed calibration machinery appears to be extremely fast, in particular for a single expiry and multiples strikes, outperforming the state-of-the-art method we compare with. Further, the a priori knowledge of SWIFT parameters makes possible a reliable and practical implementation of the presented calibration method. A wide set of stress, speed and convergence numerical experiments is carried out, with deep in-the-money, at-the-money and deep out-of-the-money options for very short and very long maturities.
We note that a strongly minimal Steiner $k$-Steiner system $(M,R)$ from (Baldwin-Paolini 2020) can be `coordinatized' in the sense of (Gantner-Werner 1975) by a quasigroup if $k$ is a prime-power. But for the basic construction this coordinatization is never definable in $(M,R)$. Nevertheless, by refining the construction, if $k$ is a prime power there is a $(2,k)$-variety of quasigroups which is strongly minimal and definably coordinatizes a Steiner $k$-system.
The chromosphere is a partially ionized layer of the solar atmosphere, the transition between the photosphere where the gas motion is determined by the gas pressure and the corona dominated by the magnetic field. We study the effect of partial ionization for 2D wave propagation in a gravitationally stratified, magnetized atmosphere with properties similar to the solar chromosphere. We adopt an oblique uniform magnetic field in the plane of propagation with strength suitable for a quiet sun region. The theoretical model used is a single fluid magnetohydrodynamic approximation, where ion-neutral interaction is modeled by the ambipolar diffusion term. Magnetic energy can be converted into internal energy through the dissipation of the electric current produced by the drift between ions and neutrals. We use numerical simulations where we continuously drive fast waves at the bottom of the atmosphere. The collisional coupling between ions and neutrals decreases with the decrease of the density and the ambipolar effect becomes important. Fast waves excited at the base of the atmosphere reach the equipartition layer and reflect or transmit as slow waves. While the waves propagate through the atmosphere and the density drops, the waves steepen into shocks. The main effect of ambipolar diffusion is damping of the waves. We find that for the parameters chosen in this work, the ambipolar diffusion affects the fast wave before it is reflected, with damping being more pronounced for waves which are launched in a direction perpendicular to the magnetic field. Slow waves are less affected by ambipolar effects. The damping increases for shorter periods and larger magnetic field strengths. Small scales produced by the nonlinear effects and the superposition of different types of waves created at the equipartition height are efficiently damped by ambipolar diffusion.
In this paper we obtain a parametric solution of the hitherto unsolved diophantine equation $(x_1^5+x_2^5)(x_3^5+x_4^5)=(y_1^5+y_2^5)(y_3^5+y_4^5)$. Further, we show, using elliptic curves, that there exist infinitely many parametric solutions of the aforementioned diophantine equation, and they can be effectively computed.