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Unfamiliar or esoteric visual forms arise in many areas of visualization. While such forms can be intriguing, it can be unclear how to make effective use of them without long periods of practice or costly user studies. In this work we analyze the table cartogram-a graphic which visualizes tabular data by bringing the areas of a grid of quadrilaterals into correspondence with the input data, like a heat map that has been "area-ed" rather than colored. Despite having existed for several years, little is known about its appropriate usage. We mend this gap by using Algebraic Visualization Design to show that they are best suited to relatively small tables with ordinal axes for some comparison and outlier identification tasks. In doing so we demonstrate a discount theory-based analysis that can be used to cheaply determine best practices for unknown visualizations.
It is now well established from a variety of studies that there is a significant benefit from combining video and audio data in detecting active speakers. However, either of the modalities can potentially mislead audiovisual fusion by inducing unreliable or deceptive information. This paper outlines active speaker detection as a multi-objective learning problem to leverage best of each modalities using a novel self-attention, uncertainty-based multimodal fusion scheme. Results obtained show that the proposed multi-objective learning architecture outperforms traditional approaches in improving both mAP and AUC scores. We further demonstrate that our fusion strategy surpasses, in active speaker detection, other modality fusion methods reported in various disciplines. We finally show that the proposed method significantly improves the state-of-the-art on the AVA-ActiveSpeaker dataset.
The XENON collaboration recently reported an excess of electron recoil events in the low energy region with a significance of around $3.3\sigma$. An explanation of this excess in terms of thermal dark matter seems challenging. We propose a scenario where dark matter in the Milky Way halo gets boosted as a result of scattering with the diffuse supernova neutrino background. This interaction can accelerate the dark-matter to semi-relativistic velocities, and this flux, in turn, can scatter with the electrons in the detector, thereby providing a much better fit to the data. We identify regions in the parameter space of dark-matter mass and interaction cross-section which satisfy the excess. Furthermore, considering the data only hypothesis, we also impose bounds on the dark-matter scattering cross-section, which are competitive with bounds from other experiments.
Deep neural networks are known to have security issues. One particular threat is the Trojan attack. It occurs when the attackers stealthily manipulate the model's behavior through Trojaned training samples, which can later be exploited. Guided by basic neuroscientific principles we discover subtle -- yet critical -- structural deviation characterizing Trojaned models. In our analysis we use topological tools. They allow us to model high-order dependencies in the networks, robustly compare different networks, and localize structural abnormalities. One interesting observation is that Trojaned models develop short-cuts from input to output layers. Inspired by these observations, we devise a strategy for robust detection of Trojaned models. Compared to standard baselines it displays better performance on multiple benchmarks.
A factor copula model is proposed in which factors are either simulable or estimable from exogenous information. Point estimation and inference are based on a simulated methods of moments (SMM) approach with non-overlapping simulation draws. Consistency and limiting normality of the estimator is established and the validity of bootstrap standard errors is shown. Doing so, previous results from the literature are verified under low-level conditions imposed on the individual components of the factor structure. Monte Carlo evidence confirms the accuracy of the asymptotic theory in finite samples and an empirical application illustrates the usefulness of the model to explain the cross-sectional dependence between stock returns.
For compact complex surfaces (M^4, J) of Kaehler type, it was previously shown that the sign of the Yamabe invariant Y(M) only depends on the Kodaira dimension Kod (M, J). In this paper, we prove that this pattern in fact extends to all compact complex surfaces except those of class VII. In the process, we give a simplified proof of a result that explains why the exclusion of class VII is essential here.
In literature, there are two different definitions of elliptic divisibility sequences. The first one says that a sequence of integers $\{h_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ is an elliptic divisibility sequence if it verifies the recurrence relation $h_{m+n}h_{m-n}h_{r}^2=h_{m+r}h_{m-r}h_{n}^2-h_{n+r}h_{n-r}h_{m}^2$ for every natural number $m\geq n\geq r$. The second definition says that a sequence of integers $\{\beta_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ is an elliptic divisibility sequence if it is the sequence of the square roots (chosen with an appropriate sign) of the denominators of the abscissas of the iterates of a point on a rational elliptic curve. It is well-known that the two sequences are not equivalent. Hence, given a sequence of the denominators $\{\beta_n\}_{n\geq 0}$, in general does not hold $\beta_{m+n}\beta_{m-n}\beta_{r}^2=\beta_{m+r}\beta_{m-r}\beta_{n}^2-\beta_{n+r}\beta_{n-r}\beta_{m}^2$ for $m\geq n\geq r$. We will prove that the recurrence relation above holds for $\{\beta_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ under some conditions on the indexes $m$, $n$, and $r$.
In this article we study smooth asymptotically conical self shrinkers in $\mathbb{R}^4$ with Colding-Minicozzi entropy bounded above by $\Lambda_{1}$.
We study the irreversibility \`a la Maxwell from a quantum point of view, involving an arbitrarily large ensemble of independent particles, with a daemonic potential that is capable of inducing asymmetries in the evolution, exhibiting new perspectives on how Maxwell's apparent paradox is posed and resolved dynamically. In addition, we design an electromagnetic cavity, to which dielectrics are added, fulfilling the function of a daemon. Thereby, this physical system is capable of cooling and ordering incident electromagnetic radiation. This setting can be generalized to many types of waves, without relying on the concept of measurement in quantum mechanics.
We study the inflationary period driven by a fermionic field which is non-minimally coupled to gravity in the context of the constant-roll approach. We consider the model for a specific form of coupling and perform the corresponding inflationary analysis. By comparing the result with the Planck observations coming from CMB anisotropies, we find the observational constraints on the parameters space of the model and also the predictions the model. We find that the values of $r$ and $n_{s}$ for $-1.5<\beta\leq-0.9$ are in good agreement with the observations when $|\xi|=0.1$ and $N=60$.
Organic semiconductor/ferromagnetic bilayer thin films can exhibit novel properties due to the formation of the spinterface at the interface. Buckminsterfullerene (C60) has been shown to exhibit ferromagnetism at the interface when it is placed next to a ferromagnet (FM) such as Fe or Co. Formation of spinterface occurs due to the orbital hybridization and spin polarized charge transfer at the interface. In this work, we have demonstrated that one can enhance the magnetic anisotropy of the low Gilbert damping alloy CoFeB by introducing a C60 layer. We have shown that anisotropy increases by increasing the thickness of C60 which might be a result of the formation of spinterface. However, the magnetic domain structure remains same in the bilayer samples as compared to the reference CoFeB film.
The current trends towards vehicle-sharing, electrification, and autonomy are predicted to transform mobility. Combined appropriately, they have the potential of significantly improving urban mobility. However, what will come after most vehicles are shared, electric, and autonomous remains an open question, especially regarding the interactions between vehicles and how these interactions will impact system-level behaviour. Inspired by nature and supported by swarm robotics and vehicle platooning models, this paper proposes a future mobility in which shared, electric, and autonomous vehicles behave as a bio-inspired collaborative system. The collaboration between vehicles will lead to a system-level behaviour analogous to natural swarms. Natural swarms can divide tasks, cluster, build together, or transport cooperatively. In this future mobility, vehicles will cluster by connecting either physically or virtually, which will enable the possibility of sharing energy, data or computational power, provide services or transfer cargo, among others. Vehicles will collaborate either with vehicles that are part of the same fleet, or with any other vehicle on the road, by finding mutualistic relationships that benefit both parties. The field of swarm robotics has already translated some of the behaviours from natural swarms to artificial systems and, if we further translate these concepts into urban mobility, exciting ideas emerge. Within mobility-related research, the coordinated movement proposed in vehicle platooning models can be seen as a first step towards collaborative mobility. This paper contributes with the proposal of a framework for future mobility that integrates current research and mobility trends in a novel and unique way.
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) demonstrated the need for accurate and fast diagnosis methods for emergent viral diseases. Soon after the emergence of COVID-19, medical practitioners used X-ray and computed tomography (CT) images of patients' lungs to detect COVID-19. Machine learning methods are capable of improving the identification accuracy of COVID-19 in X-ray and CT images, delivering near real-time results, while alleviating the burden on medical practitioners. In this work, we demonstrate the efficacy of a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, trained with a combination of deep convolutional and handcrafted features extracted from X-ray chest scans. We use this combination of features to discriminate between healthy, common pneumonia, and COVID-19 patients. The performance of the combined feature approach is compared with a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) and the SVM trained with handcrafted features. We find that combining the features in our novel framework improves the performance of the classification task compared to the independent application of convolutional and handcrafted features. Specifically, we achieve an accuracy of 0.988 in the classification task with our combined approach compared to 0.963 and 0.983 accuracy for the handcrafted features with SVM and CNN respectively.
A convex polygon $Q$ is inscribed in a convex polygon $P$ if every side of $P$ contains at least one vertex of $Q$. We present algorithms for finding a minimum area and a minimum perimeter convex polygon inscribed in any given convex $n$-gon in $O(n)$ and $O(n^3)$ time, respectively. We also investigate other variants of this problem.
We consider conformal deformations within a class of incomplete Riemannian metrics which generalize conic orbifold singularities by allowing both warping and any compact manifold (not just quotients of the sphere) to be the "link" of the singular set. Within this class of "conic metrics," we determine obstructions to the existence of conformal deformations to constant scalar curvature of any sign (positive, negative, or zero). For conic metrics with negative scalar curvature, we determine sufficient conditions for the existence of a conformal deformation to a conic metric with constant scalar curvature -1; moreover, we show that this metric is unique within its conformal class of conic metrics. Our work is in dimensions three and higher.
We study the robustness of reinforcement learning (RL) with adversarially perturbed state observations, which aligns with the setting of many adversarial attacks to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and is also important for rolling out real-world RL agent under unpredictable sensing noise. With a fixed agent policy, we demonstrate that an optimal adversary to perturb state observations can be found, which is guaranteed to obtain the worst case agent reward. For DRL settings, this leads to a novel empirical adversarial attack to RL agents via a learned adversary that is much stronger than previous ones. To enhance the robustness of an agent, we propose a framework of alternating training with learned adversaries (ATLA), which trains an adversary online together with the agent using policy gradient following the optimal adversarial attack framework. Additionally, inspired by the analysis of state-adversarial Markov decision process (SA-MDP), we show that past states and actions (history) can be useful for learning a robust agent, and we empirically find a LSTM based policy can be more robust under adversaries. Empirical evaluations on a few continuous control environments show that ATLA achieves state-of-the-art performance under strong adversaries. Our code is available at https://github.com/huanzhang12/ATLA_robust_RL.
A general class of models is proposed that is able to estimate the whole predictive distribution of a dependent variable $Y$ given a vector of explanatory variables $\xb$. The models exploit that the strength of explanatory variables to distinguish between low and high values of the dependent variable may vary across the thresholds that are used to define low and high. Simple linear versions of the models are generalizations of classical linear regression models but also of widely used ordinal regression models. They allow to visualize the effect of explanatory variables in the form of parameter functions. More general models are based on efficient nonparametric approaches like random forests, which are more flexible and are strong prediction tools. A general estimation method is given that can use all the estimation tools that have been proposed for binary regression, including selection methods like the lasso or elastic net. For linearly structured models maximum likelihood estimates are derived. The usefulness of the models is illustrated by simulations and several real data set.
Synchrotron radiation from hot gas near a black hole results in a polarized image. The image polarization is determined by effects including the orientation of the magnetic field in the emitting region, relativistic motion of the gas, strong gravitational lensing by the black hole, and parallel transport in the curved spacetime. We explore these effects using a simple model of an axisymmetric, equatorial accretion disk around a Schwarzschild black hole. By using an approximate expression for the null geodesics derived by Beloborodov (2002) and conservation of the Walker-Penrose constant, we provide analytic estimates for the image polarization. We test this model using currently favored general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of M87*, using ring parameters given by the simulations. For a subset of these with modest Faraday effects, we show that the ring model broadly reproduces the polarimetric image morphology. Our model also predicts the polarization evolution for compact flaring regions, such as those observed from Sgr A* with GRAVITY. With suitably chosen parameters, our simple model can reproduce the EVPA pattern and relative polarized intensity in Event Horizon Telescope images of M87*. Under the physically motivated assumption that the magnetic field trails the fluid velocity, this comparison is consistent with the clockwise rotation inferred from total intensity images.
This paper is concerned with a novel deep learning method for variational problems with essential boundary conditions. To this end, we first reformulate the original problem into a minimax problem corresponding to a feasible augmented Lagrangian, which can be solved by the augmented Lagrangian method in an infinite dimensional setting. Based on this, by expressing the primal and dual variables with two individual deep neural network functions, we present an augmented Lagrangian deep learning method for which the parameters are trained by the stochastic optimization method together with a projection technique. Compared to the traditional penalty method, the new method admits two main advantages: i) the choice of the penalty parameter is flexible and robust, and ii) the numerical solution is more accurate in the same magnitude of computational cost. As typical applications, we apply the new approach to solve elliptic problems and (nonlinear) eigenvalue problems with essential boundary conditions, and numerical experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of the new method.
We propose in this work a multi-view learning approach for audio and music classification. Considering four typical low-level representations (i.e. different views) commonly used for audio and music recognition tasks, the proposed multi-view network consists of four subnetworks, each handling one input types. The learned embedding in the subnetworks are then concatenated to form the multi-view embedding for classification similar to a simple concatenation network. However, apart from the joint classification branch, the network also maintains four classification branches on the single-view embedding of the subnetworks. A novel method is then proposed to keep track of the learning behavior on the classification branches and adapt their weights to proportionally blend their gradients for network training. The weights are adapted in such a way that learning on a branch that is generalizing well will be encouraged whereas learning on a branch that is overfitting will be slowed down. Experiments on three different audio and music classification tasks show that the proposed multi-view network not only outperforms the single-view baselines but also is superior to the multi-view baselines based on concatenation and late fusion.
Following a field-theoretical approach, we study the scalar Casimir effect upon a perfectly conducting cylindrical shell in the presence of spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking. The scalar field is modeled by a Lorentz-breaking extension of the theory for a real scalar quantum field in the bulk regions. The corresponding Green's functions satisfying Dirichlet boundary conditions on the cylindrical shell are derived explicitly. We express the Casimir pressure (i.e. the vacuum expectation value of the normal-normal component of the stress-energy tensor) as a suitable second-order differential operator acting on the corresponding Green's functions at coincident arguments. The divergences are regulated by making use of zeta function techniques, and our results are successfully compared with the Lorentz invariant case. Numerical calculations are carried out for the Casimir pressure as a function of the Lorentz-violating coefficient, and an approximate analytical expression for the force is presented as well. It turns out that the Casimir pressure strongly depends on the Lorentz-violating coefficient and it tends to diminish the force.
Person search aims to simultaneously localize and identify a query person from realistic, uncropped images, which can be regarded as the unified task of pedestrian detection and person re-identification (re-id). Most existing works employ two-stage detectors like Faster-RCNN, yielding encouraging accuracy but with high computational overhead. In this work, we present the Feature-Aligned Person Search Network (AlignPS), the first anchor-free framework to efficiently tackle this challenging task. AlignPS explicitly addresses the major challenges, which we summarize as the misalignment issues in different levels (i.e., scale, region, and task), when accommodating an anchor-free detector for this task. More specifically, we propose an aligned feature aggregation module to generate more discriminative and robust feature embeddings by following a "re-id first" principle. Such a simple design directly improves the baseline anchor-free model on CUHK-SYSU by more than 20% in mAP. Moreover, AlignPS outperforms state-of-the-art two-stage methods, with a higher speed. Code is available at https://github.com/daodaofr/AlignPS
With the growth of natural language processing techniques and demand for improved software engineering efficiency, there is an emerging interest in translating intention from human languages to programming languages. In this survey paper, we attempt to provide an overview of the growing body of research in this space. We begin by reviewing natural language semantic parsing techniques and draw parallels with program synthesis efforts. We then consider semantic parsing works from an evolutionary perspective, with specific analyses on neuro-symbolic methods, architecture, and supervision. We then analyze advancements in frameworks for semantic parsing for code generation. In closing, we present what we believe are some of the emerging open challenges in this domain.
Data sampling acts as a pivotal role in training deep learning models. However, an effective sampling schedule is difficult to learn due to the inherently high dimension of parameters in learning the sampling schedule. In this paper, we propose an AutoSampling method to automatically learn sampling schedules for model training, which consists of the multi-exploitation step aiming for optimal local sampling schedules and the exploration step for the ideal sampling distribution. More specifically, we achieve sampling schedule search with shortened exploitation cycle to provide enough supervision. In addition, we periodically estimate the sampling distribution from the learned sampling schedules and perturb it to search in the distribution space. The combination of two searches allows us to learn a robust sampling schedule. We apply our AutoSampling method to a variety of image classification tasks illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Standard quantum mechanics has been formulated with complex-valued Schrodinger equations, wave functions, operators, and Hilbert spaces. However, previous work has shown possible to simulate quantum systems using only real numbers by adding extra qubits and exploiting an enlarged Hilbert space. A fundamental question arises: are the complex numbers really necessary for the quantum mechanical description of nature? To answer this question, a non-local game has been developed to reveal a contradiction between a multiqubit quantum experiment and a player using only real numbers. Here, based on deterministic and high-fidelity entanglement swapping with superconducting qubits, we experimentally implement the Bell-like game and observe a quantum score of 8.09(1), which beats the real number bound of 7.66 by 43 standard deviations. Our results disprove the real-number description of nature and establish the indispensable role of complex numbers in quantum mechanics.
We initiate the work towards a comprehensive picture of the smoothed satisfaction of voting axioms, to provide a finer and more realistic foundation for comparing voting rules. We adopt the smoothed social choice framework, where an adversary chooses arbitrarily correlated "ground truth" preferences for the agents, on top of which random noises are added. We focus on characterizing the smoothed satisfaction of two well-studied voting axioms: Condorcet criterion and participation. We prove that for any fixed number of alternatives, when the number of voters $n$ is sufficiently large, the smoothed satisfaction of the Condorcet criterion under a wide range of voting rules is $1$, $1-\exp(-\Theta(n))$, $\Theta(n^{-0.5})$, $ \exp(-\Theta(n))$, or being $\Theta(1)$ and $1-\Theta(1)$ at the same time; and the smoothed satisfaction of participation is $1-\Theta(n^{-0.5})$. Our results address open questions by Berg and Lepelley in 1994 for these rules, and also confirm the following high-level message: the Condorcet criterion is a bigger concern than participation under realistic models.
The deep-learning-based image restoration and fusion methods have achieved remarkable results. However, the existing restoration and fusion methods paid little research attention to the robustness problem caused by dynamic degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic image restoration and fusion neural network, termed as DDRF-Net, which is capable of solving two problems, i.e., static restoration and fusion, dynamic degradation. In order to solve the static fusion problem of existing methods, dynamic convolution is introduced to learn dynamic restoration and fusion weights. In addition, a dynamic degradation kernel is proposed to improve the robustness of image restoration and fusion. Our network framework can effectively combine image degradation with image fusion tasks, provide more detailed information for image fusion tasks through image restoration loss, and optimize image restoration tasks through image fusion loss. Therefore, the stumbling blocks of deep learning in image fusion, e.g., static fusion weight and specifically designed network architecture, are greatly mitigated. Extensive experiments show that our method is more superior compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
In the present paper, we introduce a special function on the Drinfeld period domain $\Omega^{r}$ for $r\geq 2$ which gives the false Eisenstein series of Gekeler when $r=2$. We also study its functional equation and relation with quasi-periodic functions of a Drinfeld module as well as transcendence of its values at CM points.
Multifractal systems usually have singularity spectra defined on bounded sets of H\"older exponents. As a consequence, their associated multifractal scaling exponents are expected to depend linearly upon statistical moment orders at high enough orders -- a phenomenon referred to as the {\it{linearization effect}}. Motivated by general ideas taken from models of turbulent intermittency and focusing on the case of two-dimensional systems, we investigate the issue within the framework of Gaussian multiplicative chaos. As verified by means of Monte Carlo simulations, it turns out that the linearization effect can be accounted for by Liouville-like random measures defined in terms of upper-bounded scalar fields. The coarse-grained statistical properties of Gaussian multiplicative chaos are furthermore found to be preserved in the linear regime of the scaling exponents. As a related application, we look at the problem of turbulent circulation statistics, and obtain a remarkably accurate evaluation of circulation statistical moments, recently determined with the help of massive numerical simulations.
This paper outlines two approaches|based on counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) and counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS), respectively to the automated synthesis of finite-state probabilistic models and programs. Our CEGAR approach iteratively partitions the design space starting from an abstraction of this space and refines this by a light-weight analysis of verification results. The CEGIS technique exploits critical subsystems as counterexamples to prune all programs behaving incorrectly on that input. We show the applicability of these synthesis techniques to sketching of probabilistic programs, controller synthesis of POMDPs, and software product lines.
The increasing performance requirements of modern applications place a significant burden on software-based packet processing. Most of today's software input/output accelerations achieve high performance at the expense of reserving CPU resources dedicated to continuously poll the Network Interface Card. This is specifically the case with DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit), probably the most widely used framework for software-based packet processing today. The approach presented in this paper, descriptively called Metronome, has the dual goals of providing CPU utilization proportional to the load, and allowing flexible sharing of CPU resources between I/O tasks and applications. Metronome replaces DPDK's continuous polling with an intermittent sleep&wake mode, and revolves around a new multi-threaded operation, which improves service continuity. Since the proposed operation trades CPU usage with buffering delay, we propose an analytical model devised to dynamically adapt the sleep&wake parameters to the actual traffic load, meanwhile providing a target average latency. Our experimental results show a significant reduction of the CPU cycles, improvements in power usage, and robustness to CPU sharing even when challenged with CPU-intensive applications.
In logistics warehouse, since many objects are randomly stacked on shelves, it becomes difficult for a robot to safely extract one of the objects without other objects falling from the shelf. In previous works, a robot needed to extract the target object after rearranging the neighboring objects. In contrast, humans extract an object from a shelf while supporting other neighboring objects. In this paper, we propose a bimanual manipulation planner based on collapse prediction trained with data generated from a physics simulator, which can safely extract a single object while supporting the other object. We confirmed that the proposed method achieves more than 80% success rate for safe extraction by real-world experiments using a dual-arm manipulator.
For many practical computer vision applications, the learned models usually have high performance on the datasets used for training but suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed in new environments, where there are usually style differences between the training images and the testing images. An effective domain generalizable model is expected to be able to learn feature representations that are both generalizable and discriminative. In this paper, we design a novel Style Normalization and Restitution module (SNR) to simultaneously ensure both high generalization and discrimination capability of the networks. In the SNR module, particularly, we filter out the style variations (e.g, illumination, color contrast) by performing Instance Normalization (IN) to obtain style normalized features, where the discrepancy among different samples and domains is reduced. However, such a process is task-ignorant and inevitably removes some task-relevant discriminative information, which could hurt the performance. To remedy this, we propose to distill task-relevant discriminative features from the residual (i.e, the difference between the original feature and the style normalized feature) and add them back to the network to ensure high discrimination. Moreover, for better disentanglement, we enforce a dual causality loss constraint in the restitution step to encourage the better separation of task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. We validate the effectiveness of our SNR on different computer vision tasks, including classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Experiments demonstrate that our SNR module is capable of improving the performance of networks for domain generalization (DG) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) on many tasks. Code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/SNR.
Multi-agent simulations provide a scalable environment for learning policies that interact with rational agents. However, such policies may fail to generalize to the real-world where agents may differ from simulated counterparts due to unmodeled irrationality and misspecified reward functions. We introduce Epsilon-Robust Multi-Agent Simulation (ERMAS), a robust optimization framework for learning AI policies that are robust to such multiagent sim-to-real gaps. While existing notions of multi-agent robustness concern perturbations in the actions of agents, we address a novel robustness objective concerning perturbations in the reward functions of agents. ERMAS provides this robustness by anticipating suboptimal behaviors from other agents, formalized as the worst-case epsilon-equilibrium. We show empirically that ERMAS yields robust policies for repeated bimatrix games and optimal taxation problems in economic simulations. In particular, in the two-level RL problem posed by the AI Economist (Zheng et al., 2020) ERMAS learns tax policies that are robust to changes in agent risk aversion, improving social welfare by up to 15% in complex spatiotemporal simulations.
Feshbach resonances are an invaluable tool in atomic physics, enabling precise control of interactions and the preparation of complex quantum phases of matter. Here, we theoretically analyze a solid-state analogue of a Feshbach resonance in two dimensional semiconductor heterostructures. In the presence of inter-layer electron tunneling, the scattering of excitons and electrons occupying different layers can be resonantly enhanced by tuning an applied electric field. The emergence of an inter-layer Feshbach molecule modifies the optical excitation spectrum, and can be understood in terms of Fermi polaron formation. We discuss potential implications for the realization of correlated Bose-Fermi mixtures in bilayer semiconductors.
Precise in-situ measurements of the neutron flux in underground laboratories is crucial for direct dark matter searches, as neutron induced backgrounds can mimic the typical dark matter signal. The development of a novel neutron spectroscopy technique using Spherical Proportional Counters is investigated. The detector is operated with nitrogen and is sensitive to both fast and thermal neutrons through the $^{14}$N(n, $\alpha$)$^{11}$B and $^{14}$N(n, p)$^{14}$C reactions. This method holds potential to be a safe, inexpensive, effective, and reliable alternative to $^3$He-based detectors. Measurements of fast and thermal neutrons from an Am-Be source with a Spherical Proportional Counter operated at pressures up to 2 bar at Birmingham are discussed.
Electrostatic reaction inhibition in heterogeneous catalysis emerges if charged reactants and products are adsorbed on the catalyst and thus repel the approaching reactants. In this work, we study the effects of electrostatic inhibition on the reaction rate of unimolecular reactions catalyzed on the surface of a spherical model nanoparticle by using particle-based reaction-diffusion simulations. Moreover, we derive closed rate equations based on approximate Debye-Smoluchowski rate theory, valid for diffusion-controlled reactions, and a modified Langmuir adsorption isotherm, relevant for reaction-controlled reactions, to account for electrostatic inhibition in the Debye-H\"uckel limit. We study the kinetics of reactions ranging from low to high adsorptions on the nanoparticle surface and from the surface- to diffusion-controlled limits for charge valencies 1 and 2. In the diffusion-controlled limit, electrostatic inhibition drastically slows down the reactions for strong adsorption and low ionic concentration, which is well described by our theory. In particular, the rate decreases with adsorption affinity, because in this case the inhibiting products are generated at high rate. In the (slow) reaction-controlled limit, the effect of electrostatic inhibition is much weaker, as semi-quantitatively reproduced by our electrostatic-modified Langmuir theory. We finally propose and verify a simple interpolation formula that describes electrostatic inhibition for all reaction speeds (`diffusion-influenced' reactions) in general.
This paper addresses outdoor terrain mapping using overhead images obtained from an unmanned aerial vehicle. Dense depth estimation from aerial images during flight is challenging. While feature-based localization and mapping techniques can deliver real-time odometry and sparse points reconstruction, a dense environment model is generally recovered offline with significant computation and storage. This paper develops a joint 2D-3D learning approach to reconstruct local meshes at each camera keyframe, which can be assembled into a global environment model. Each local mesh is initialized from sparse depth measurements. We associate image features with the mesh vertices through camera projection and apply graph convolution to refine the mesh vertices based on joint 2-D reprojected depth and 3-D mesh supervision. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations using real aerial images show the potential of our method to support environmental monitoring and surveillance applications.
Intermediate band solar cells (IBSCs) pursue the increase in efficiency by absorbing below-bandgap energy photons while preserving the output voltage. Experimental IBSCs based on quantum dots have already demonstrated that both below-bandgap photon absorption and the output voltage preservation, are possible. However, the experimental work has also revealed that the below-bandgap absorption of light is weak and insufficient to boost the efficiency of the solar cells. The objective of this work is to contribute to the study of this absorption by manufacturing and characterizing a quantum dot intermediate band solar cell with a single quantum dot layer with and without light trapping elements. Using one-dimensional substrate texturing, our results show a three-fold increase in the absorption of below bandgap energy photons in the lowest energy region of the spectrum, a region not previously explored using this approach. Furthermore, we also measure, at 9K, a distinguished split of quasi-Fermi levels between the conduction and intermediate bands, which is a necessary condition to preserve the output voltage of the cell.
We present a randomized $O(m \log^2 n)$ work, $O(\text{polylog } n)$ depth parallel algorithm for minimum cut. This algorithm matches the work bounds of a recent sequential algorithm by Gawrychowski, Mozes, and Weimann [ICALP'20], and improves on the previously best parallel algorithm by Geissmann and Gianinazzi [SPAA'18], which performs $O(m \log^4 n)$ work in $O(\text{polylog } n)$ depth. Our algorithm makes use of three components that might be of independent interest. Firstly, we design a parallel data structure that efficiently supports batched mixed queries and updates on trees. It generalizes and improves the work bounds of a previous data structure of Geissmann and Gianinazzi and is work efficient with respect to the best sequential algorithm. Secondly, we design a parallel algorithm for approximate minimum cut that improves on previous results by Karger and Motwani. We use this algorithm to give a work-efficient procedure to produce a tree packing, as in Karger's sequential algorithm for minimum cuts. Lastly, we design an efficient parallel algorithm for solving the minimum $2$-respecting cut problem.
In this paper, the security-aware robust resource allocation in energy harvesting cognitive radio networks is considered with cooperation between two transmitters while there are uncertainties in channel gains and battery energy value. To be specific, the primary access point harvests energy from the green resource and uses time switching protocol to send the energy and data towards the secondary access point (SAP). Using power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access technique, the SAP helps the primary network to improve the security of data transmission by using the frequency band of the primary network. In this regard, we introduce the problem of maximizing the proportional-fair energy efficiency (PFEE) considering uncertainty in the channel gains and battery energy value subject to the practical constraints. Moreover, the channel gain of the eavesdropper is assumed to be unknown. Employing the decentralized partially observable Markov decision process, we investigate the solution of the corresponding resource allocation problem. We exploit multi-agent with single reward deep deterministic policy gradient (MASRDDPG) and recurrent deterministic policy gradient (RDPG) methods. These methods are compared with the state-of-the-art ones like multi-agent and single-agent DDPG. Simulation results show that both MASRDDPG and RDPG methods, outperform the state-of-the-art methods by providing more PFEE to the network.
Nanophononic materials are promising to control the transport of sound in the GHz range and heat in the THz range. Here we are interested in the influence of a dendritic shape of inclusion on acoustic attenuation. We investigate a Finite Element numerical simulation of the transient propagation of an acoustic wave-packet in 2D nanophononic materials with circular or dendritic inclusions periodically distributed in matrix. By measuring the penetration length, diffusivity, and instantaneous wave velocity, we find that the multi-branching tree-like form of dendrites provides a continuous source of phonon-interface scattering leading to an increasing acoustic attenuation. When the wavelength is far less than the inter-inclusion distance, we report a strong attenuation process in the dendritic case which can be fitted by a compressed exponential function with $\beta>1$.
We review the formation and evolution of fossil groups and clusters from both the theoretical and the observational points of view. In the optical band, these systems are dominated by the light of the central galaxy. They were interpreted as old systems that had enough time to merge all the M* galaxies within the central one. During the last two decades many observational studies were performed to prove the old and relaxed state of fossil systems. The majority of these studies, that spans a wide range of topics including halos global scaling relations, dynamical substructures, stellar populations, and galaxy luminosity functions, seem to challenge this scenario. The general picture that can be obtained by reviewing all the observational works is that the fossil state could be transitional. Indeed, the formation of the large magnitude gap observed in fossil systems could be related to internal processes rather than an old formation.
Nonlinear fractional differential equations have gained a significant place in mathematical physics. Finding the solutions to these equations has emerged as a field of study that has attracted a lot of attention lately. In this work, semi inverse variation method of He and the ansatz method have been applied to find the soliton solutions for fractional Korteweg de Vries equation, fractional equal width equation, and fractional modified equal width equation defined by conformable derivative of Atangana (beta derivative). These two methods are effective methods employed to get the soliton solutions of these nonlinear equations. All of the calculations in this work have been obtained using the Maple program and the solutions have been replaced in the equations and their accuracy has been confirmed. In addition, graphics of some of the solutions are also included. The found solutions in this study have the potential to be useful in mathematical physics and engineering.
Designing a speech-to-intent (S2I) agent which maps the users' spoken commands to the agents' desired task actions can be challenging due to the diverse grammatical and lexical preference of different users. As a remedy, we discuss a user-taught S2I system in this paper. The user-taught system learns from scratch from the users' spoken input with action demonstration, which ensure it is fully matched to the users' way of formulating intents and their articulation habits. The main issue is the scarce training data due to the user effort involved. Existing state-of-art approaches in this setting are based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and capsule networks. In this paper we combine the encoder of an end-to-end ASR system with the prior NMF/capsule network-based user-taught decoder, and investigate whether pre-training methodology can reduce training data requirements for the NMF and capsule network. Experimental results show the pre-trained ASR-NMF framework significantly outperforms other models, and also, we discuss limitations of pre-training with different types of command-and-control(C&C) applications.
Deep reinforcement Learning for end-to-end driving is limited by the need of complex reward engineering. Sparse rewards can circumvent this challenge but suffers from long training time and leads to sub-optimal policy. In this work, we explore full-control driving with only goal-constrained sparse reward and propose a curriculum learning approach for end-to-end driving using only navigation view maps that benefit from small virtual-to-real domain gap. To address the complexity of multiple driving policies, we learn concurrent individual policies selected at inference by a navigation system. We demonstrate the ability of our proposal to generalize on unseen road layout, and to drive significantly longer than in the training.
We systematically study linear and nonlinear wave propagation in a chain composed of piecewise-linear bistable springs. Such bistable systems are ideal testbeds for supporting nonlinear wave dynamical features including transition and (supersonic) solitary waves. We show that bistable chains can support the propagation of subsonic wavepackets which in turn can be trapped by a low-energy phase to induce energy localization. The spatial distribution of these energy foci strongly affects the propagation of linear waves, typically causing scattering, but, in special cases, leading to a reflectionless mode analogous to the Ramsauer-Townsend (RT) effect. Further, we show that the propagation of nonlinear waves can spontaneously generate or remove additional foci, which act as effective "impurities". This behavior serves as a novel mechanism for reversibly programming the dynamic response of bistable chains.
Today we have quite stringent constraints on possible violations of the Weak Equivalence Principle from the comparison of the acceleration of test-bodies of different composition in Earth's gravitational field. In the present paper, we propose a test of the Weak Equivalence Principle in the strong gravitational field of black holes. We construct a relativistic reflection model in which either the massive particles of the gas of the accretion disk or the photons emitted by the disk may not follow the geodesics of the spacetime. We employ our model to analyze the reflection features of a NuSTAR spectrum of the black hole binary EXO 1846-031 and we constrain two parameters that quantify a possible violation of the Weak Equivalence Principle by massive particles and X-ray photons, respectively.
Internet of Things (IoT) allowed smart homes to improve the quality and the comfort of our daily lives. However, these conveniences introduced several security concerns that increase rapidly. IoT devices, smart home hubs, and gateway raise various security risks. The smart home gateways act as a centralized point of communication between the IoT devices, which can create a backdoor into network data for hackers. One of the common and effective ways to detect such attacks is intrusion detection in the network traffic. In this paper, we proposed an intrusion detection system (IDS) to detect anomalies in a smart home network using a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) hybrid model. The BiLSTM recurrent behavior provides the intrusion detection model to preserve the learned information through time, and the CNN extracts perfectly the data features. The proposed model can be applied to any smart home network gateway.
In this paper, a dynamical process in a statistical thermodynamic system of spins exhibiting a phase transition is described on a contact manifold, where such a dynamical process is a process that a metastable equilibrium state evolves into the most stable symmetry broken equilibrium state. Metastable and equilibrium states in the symmetry broken phase or ordered phase are assumed to be described as pruned projections of Legendre submanifolds of contact manifolds, where these pruned projections of the submanifolds express hysteresis and pseudo-free energy curves. Singularities associated with phase transitions are naturally arose in this framework as has been suggested by Legendre singularity theory. Then a particular contact Hamiltonian vector field is proposed so that a pruned segment of the projected Legendre submanifold is a stable fixed point set in a region of a contact manifold, and that another pruned segment is a unstable fixed point set. This contact Hamiltonian vector field is identified with a dynamical process departing from a metastable equilibrium state to the most stable equilibrium one. To show the statements above explicitly an Ising type spin model with long-range interactions, called the Husimi-Temperley model, is focused, where this model exhibits a phase transition.
Face presentation attack detection plays a critical role in the modern face recognition pipeline. A face presentation attack detection model with good generalization can be obtained when it is trained with face images from different input distributions and different types of spoof attacks. In reality, training data (both real face images and spoof images) are not directly shared between data owners due to legal and privacy issues. In this paper, with the motivation of circumventing this challenge, we propose a Federated Face Presentation Attack Detection (FedPAD) framework that simultaneously takes advantage of rich fPAD information available at different data owners while preserving data privacy. In the proposed framework, each data center locally trains its own fPAD model. A server learns a global fPAD model by iteratively aggregating model updates from all data centers without accessing private data in each of them. To equip the aggregated fPAD model in the server with better generalization ability to unseen attacks from users, following the basic idea of FedPAD, we further propose a Federated Generalized Face Presentation Attack Detection (FedGPAD) framework. A federated domain disentanglement strategy is introduced in FedGPAD, which treats each data center as one domain and decomposes the fPAD model into domain-invariant and domain-specific parts in each data center. Two parts disentangle the domain-invariant and domain-specific features from images in each local data center, respectively. A server learns a global fPAD model by only aggregating domain-invariant parts of the fPAD models from data centers and thus a more generalized fPAD model can be aggregated in server. We introduce the experimental setting to evaluate the proposed FedPAD and FedGPAD frameworks and carry out extensive experiments to provide various insights about federated learning for fPAD.
We present how we formalize the waiting tables task in a restaurant as a robot planning problem. This formalization was used to test our recently developed algorithms that allow for optimal planning for achieving multiple independent tasks that are partially observable and evolve over time [1], [2].
Recently, a number of backdoor attacks against Federated Learning (FL) have been proposed. In such attacks, an adversary injects poisoned model updates into the federated model aggregation process with the goal of manipulating the aggregated model to provide false predictions on specific adversary-chosen inputs. A number of defenses have been proposed; but none of them can effectively protect the FL process also against so-called multi-backdoor attacks in which multiple different backdoors are injected by the adversary simultaneously without severely impacting the benign performance of the aggregated model. To overcome this challenge, we introduce FLGUARD, a poisoning defense framework that is able to defend FL against state-of-the-art backdoor attacks while simultaneously maintaining the benign performance of the aggregated model. Moreover, FL is also vulnerable to inference attacks, in which a malicious aggregator can infer information about clients' training data from their model updates. To thwart such attacks, we augment FLGUARD with state-of-the-art secure computation techniques that securely evaluate the FLGUARD algorithm. We provide formal argumentation for the effectiveness of our FLGUARD and extensively evaluate it against known backdoor attacks on several datasets and applications (including image classification, word prediction, and IoT intrusion detection), demonstrating that FLGUARD can entirely remove backdoors with a negligible effect on accuracy. We also show that private FLGUARD achieves practical runtimes.
To demonstrate the ability in standard arithmetic operations to perform a variety of digit manipulation tasks, a closed-form representation of the Conway Base-13 Function over the integers is given.
Missing data is a challenge in many applications, including intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In this paper, we study traffic speed and travel time estimations in ITS, where portions of the collected data are missing due to sensor instability and communication errors at collection points. These practical issues can be remediated by missing data analysis, which are mainly categorized as either statistical or machine learning(ML)-based approaches. Statistical methods require the prior probability distribution of the data which is unknown in our application. Therefore, we focus on an ML-based approach, Multi-Directional Recurrent Neural Network (M-RNN). M-RNN utilizes both temporal and spatial characteristics of the data. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach on a TomTom dataset containing spatio-temporal measurements of average vehicle speed and travel time in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). We evaluate the method under various conditions, where the results demonstrate that M-RNN outperforms existing solutions,e.g., spline interpolation and matrix completion, by up to 58% decreases in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).
When baryon-quark continuity is formulated in terms of a topology change without invoking "explicit " QCD degrees of freedom at a density higher than twice the nuclear matter density $n_0$ the core of massive compact stars can be described in terms of fractionally charged particles, behaving neither like pure baryons nor deconfined quarks. Hidden symmetries, both local gauge and pseudo-conformal (or broken scale), lead to the pseudo-conformal (PC) sound velocity $v_{pcs}^2/c^2\approx 1/3$ at $\gsim 3n_0$ in compact stars. We argue these symmetries are "emergent" from strong nuclear correlations and conjecture that they reflect hidden symmetries in QCD proper exposed by nuclear correlations. We establish a possible link between the quenching of $g_A$ in superallowed Gamow-Teller transitions in nuclei and the precocious onset at $n\gsim 3n_0$ of the PC sound velocity predicted at the dilaton limit fixed point. We propose that bringing in explicit quark degrees of freedom as is done in terms of the "quarkyonic" and other hybrid hadron-quark structure and our topology-change strategy represent the "hadron-quark duality" formulated in terms of the Cheshire-Cat mechanism~\cite{CC} for the smooth cross-over between hadrons and quarks. Confrontation with currently available experimental observations is discussed to support this notion.
The particle momentum anisotropy ($v_n$) produced in relativistic nuclear collisions is considered to be a response of the initial geometry or the spatial anisotropy $\epsilon_n$ of the system formed in these collisions. The linear correlation between $\epsilon_n$ and $v_n$ quantifies the efficiency at which the initial spatial eccentricity is converted to final momentum anisotropy in heavy ion collisions. We study the transverse momentum, collision centrality, and beam energy dependence of this correlation for different charged particles using a hydrodynamical model framework. The ($\epsilon_n -v_n$) correlation is found to be stronger for central collisions and also for n=2 compared to that for n=3 as expected. However, the transverse momentum ($p_T$) dependent correlation coefficient shows interesting features which strongly depends on the mass as well as $p_T$ of the emitted particle. The correlation strength is found to be larger for lighter particles in the lower $p_T$ region. We see that the relative fluctuation in anisotropic flow depends strongly in the value of $\eta/s$ specially in the region $p_T <1$ GeV unlike the correlation coefficient which does not show significant dependence on $\eta/s$.
Multi-party computation (MPC) is promising for privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms at edge networks, like federated learning. Despite their potential, existing MPC algorithms fail short of adapting to the limited resources of edge devices. A promising solution, and the focus of this work, is coded computation, which advocates the use of error-correcting codes to improve the performance of distributed computing through "smart" data redundancy. In this paper, we focus on coded privacy-preserving computation using Shamir's secret sharing. In particular, we design novel coded privacy-preserving computation mechanisms; MatDot coded MPC (MatDot-CMPC) and PolyDot coded MPC (PolyDot-CMPC) by employing recently proposed coded computation algorithms; MatDot and PolyDot. We take advantage of the "garbage terms" that naturally arise when polynomials are constructed in the design of MatDot-CMPC and PolyDot-CMPC to reduce the number of workers needed for privacy-preserving computation. Also, we analyze MatDot-CMPC and PolyDot-CMPC in terms of their computation, storage, communication overhead as well as recovery threshold, so they can easily adapt to the limited resources of edge devices.
In label-noise learning, the transition matrix plays a key role in building statistically consistent classifiers. Existing consistent estimators for the transition matrix have been developed by exploiting anchor points. However, the anchor-point assumption is not always satisfied in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework for solving label-noise learning without anchor points, in which we simultaneously optimize two objectives: the cross entropy loss between the noisy label and the predicted probability by the neural network, and the volume of the simplex formed by the columns of the transition matrix. Our proposed framework can identify the transition matrix if the clean class-posterior probabilities are sufficiently scattered. This is by far the mildest assumption under which the transition matrix is provably identifiable and the learned classifier is statistically consistent. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.
We study the dimer model on subgraphs of the square lattice in which vertices on a prescribed part of the boundary (the free boundary) are possibly unmatched. Each such unmatched vertex is called a monomer and contributes a fixed multiplicative weight $z>0$ to the total weight of the configuration. A bijection described by Giuliani, Jauslin and Lieb relates this model to a standard dimer model but on a non-bipartite graph. The Kasteleyn matrix of this dimer model describes a walk with transition weights that are negative along the free boundary. Yet under certain assumptions, which are in particular satisfied in the infinite volume limit in the upper half-plane, we prove an effective, true random walk representation for the inverse Kasteleyn matrix. In this case we further show that, independently of the value of $z>0$, the scaling limit of the height function is the Gaussian free field with Neumann (or free) boundary conditions, thereby answering a question of Giuliani et al.
In this paper, we present a deep learning model that exploits the power of self-supervision to perform 3D point cloud completion, estimating the missing part and a context region around it. Local and global information are encoded in a combined embedding. A denoising pretext task provides the network with the needed local cues, decoupled from the high-level semantics and naturally shared over multiple classes. On the other hand, contrastive learning maximizes the agreement between variants of the same shape with different missing portions, thus producing a representation which captures the global appearance of the shape. The combined embedding inherits category-agnostic properties from the chosen pretext tasks. Differently from existing approaches, this allows to better generalize the completion properties to new categories unseen at training time. Moreover, while decoding the obtained joint representation, we better blend the reconstructed missing part with the partial shape by paying attention to its known surrounding region and reconstructing this frame as auxiliary objective. Our extensive experiments and detailed ablation on the ShapeNet dataset show the effectiveness of each part of the method with new state of the art results. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis confirms how our approach is able to work on novel categories without relying neither on classification and shape symmetry priors, nor on adversarial training procedures.
In the largest, currently known, class of one Quadrillion globally consistent F-theory Standard Models with gauge coupling unification and no chiral exotics, the vector-like spectra are counted by cohomologies of root bundles. In this work, we apply a previously proposed method to identify toric base 3-folds, which are promising to establish F-theory Standard Models with exactly three quark-doublets and no vector-like exotics in this representation. The base spaces in question are obtained from triangulations of 708 polytopes. By studying root bundles on the quark doublet curve $C_{(\mathbf{3},\mathbf{2})_{1/6}}$ and employing well-known results about desingularizations of toric K3-surfaces, we derive a \emph{triangulation independent lower bound} $\check{N}_P^{(3)}$ for the number $N_P^{(3)}$ of root bundles on $C_{(\mathbf{3},\mathbf{2})_{1/6}}$ with exactly three sections. The ratio $\check{N}_P^{(3)} / N_P$, where $N_P$ is the total number of roots on $C_{(\mathbf{3},\mathbf{2})_{1/6}}$, is largest for base spaces associated with triangulations of the 8-th 3-dimensional polytope $\Delta^\circ_8$ in the Kreuzer-Skarke list. For each of these $\mathcal{O}( 10^{15} )$ 3-folds, we expect that many root bundles on $C_{(\mathbf{3},\mathbf{2})_{1/6}}$ are induced from F-theory gauge potentials and that at least every 3000th root on $C_{(\mathbf{3},\mathbf{2})_{1/6}}$ has exactly three global sections and thus no exotic vector-like quark-doublet modes.
Thomson's multitaper method estimates the power spectrum of a signal from $N$ equally spaced samples by averaging $K$ tapered periodograms. Discrete prolate spheroidal sequences (DPSS) are used as tapers since they provide excellent protection against spectral leakage. Thomson's multitaper method is widely used in applications, but most of the existing theory is qualitative or asymptotic. Furthermore, many practitioners use a DPSS bandwidth $W$ and number of tapers that are smaller than what the theory suggests is optimal because the computational requirements increase with the number of tapers. We revisit Thomson's multitaper method from a linear algebra perspective involving subspace projections. This provides additional insight and helps us establish nonasymptotic bounds on some statistical properties of the multitaper spectral estimate, which are similar to existing asymptotic results. We show using $K=2NW-O(\log(NW))$ tapers instead of the traditional $2NW-O(1)$ tapers better protects against spectral leakage, especially when the power spectrum has a high dynamic range. Our perspective also allows us to derive an $\epsilon$-approximation to the multitaper spectral estimate which can be evaluated on a grid of frequencies using $O(\log(NW)\log\tfrac{1}{\epsilon})$ FFTs instead of $K=O(NW)$ FFTs. This is useful in problems where many samples are taken, and thus, using many tapers is desirable.
Low frequency gravitational waves (GWs) are keys to understanding cosmological inflation and super massive blackhole (SMBH) formation via blackhole mergers, while it is difficult to identify the low frequency GWs with ground-based GW experiments such as the advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and VIRGO due to the seismic noise. Although quasi-stellar object (QSO) proper motions produced by the low frequency GWs are measured by pioneering studies of very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations with good positional accuracy, the low frequency GWs are not strongly constrained by the small statistics with 711 QSOs (Darling et al. 2018). Here we present the proper motion field map of 400,894 QSOs of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with optical {\it Gaia} EDR3 proper motion measurements whose positional accuracy is $< 0.4$ milli-arcsec comparable with the one of the radio VLBI observations. We obtain the best-fit spherical harmonics with the typical field strength of $\mathcal{O}(0.1)\, \mu$arcsec, and place a tight constraint on the energy density of GWs, $\Omega_{\rm gw}=(0.964 \pm 3.804) \times 10^{-4}$ (95 \% confidence level), that is significantly stronger than the one of the previous VLBI study by two orders of magnitude at the low frequency regime of $f <10^{-9}\,{\rm [Hz]}\simeq (30\,{\rm yr})^{-1}$ unexplored by the pulsar timing technique. Our upper limit rules out the existence of SMBH binary systems at the distance $r < 400$ kpc from the Earth where the Milky Way center and local group galaxies are included. Demonstrating the limit given by our optical QSO study, we claim that astrometric satellite data including the forthcoming {\it Gaia} DR5 data with small systematic errors are powerful to constrain low frequency GWs.
When reasoning about tasks that involve large amounts of data, a common approach is to represent data items as objects in the Hamming space where operations can be done efficiently and effectively. Object similarity can then be computed by learning binary representations (hash codes) of the objects and computing their Hamming distance. While this is highly efficient, each bit dimension is equally weighted, which means that potentially discriminative information of the data is lost. A more expressive alternative is to use real-valued vector representations and compute their inner product; this allows varying the weight of each dimension but is many magnitudes slower. To fix this, we derive a new way of measuring the dissimilarity between two objects in the Hamming space with binary weighting of each dimension (i.e., disabling bits): we consider a field-agnostic dissimilarity that projects the vector of one object onto the vector of the other. When working in the Hamming space, this results in a novel projected Hamming dissimilarity, which by choice of projection, effectively allows a binary importance weighting of the hash code of one object through the hash code of the other. We propose a variational hashing model for learning hash codes optimized for this projected Hamming dissimilarity, and experimentally evaluate it in collaborative filtering experiments. The resultant hash codes lead to effectiveness gains of up to +7% in NDCG and +14% in MRR compared to state-of-the-art hashing-based collaborative filtering baselines, while requiring no additional storage and no computational overhead compared to using the Hamming distance.
We report muon spin rotation ($\mu$SR) and neutron diffraction on the rare-earth based magnets (Mo$_{2/3}$RE$_{1/3}$)$_2$AlC, also predicted as parent materials for 2D derivatives, where RE = Nd, Gd (only ($\mu$SR), Tb, Dy, Ho and Er. By crossing information between the two techniques, we determine the magnetic moment ($m$), structure, and dynamic properties of all compounds. We find that only for RE = Nd and Gd the moments are frozen on a microsecond time scale. Out of these two, the most promising compound for a potential 2D high ($m$) magnet is the Gd variant, since the parent crystals are pristine with $m = 6.5 \pm 0.5 \mu_B$, N\'eel temperature of $29 \pm 1$ K, and the magnetic anisotropy between in and out of plane coupling is smaller than $10^{-8}$. This result suggests that magnetic ordering in the Gd variant is dominated by in-plane magnetic interactions and should therefore remain stable if exfoliated into 2D sheets.
learning algorithms. In this paper, we review the classification algorithms used in the health care system (chronic diseases) and present the neural network-based Ensemble learning method. We briefly describe the commonly used algorithms and describe their critical properties. Materials and Methods: In this study, modern classification algorithms used in healthcare, examine the principles of these methods and guidelines, and to accurately diagnose and predict chronic diseases, superior machine learning algorithms with the neural network-based ensemble learning Is used. To do this, we use experimental data, real data on chronic patients (diabetes, heart, cancer) available on the UCI site. Results: We found that group algorithms designed to diagnose chronic diseases can be more effective than baseline algorithms. It also identifies several challenges to further advancing the classification of machine learning in the diagnosis of chronic diseases. Conclusion: The results show the high performance of the neural network-based Ensemble learning approach for the diagnosis and prediction of chronic diseases, which in this study reached 98.5, 99, and 100% accuracy, respectively.
Video salient object detection (VSOD) aims to locate and segment the most attractive object by exploiting both spatial cues and temporal cues hidden in video sequences. However, spatial and temporal cues are often unreliable in real-world scenarios, such as low-contrast foreground, fast motion, and multiple moving objects. To address these problems, we propose a new framework to adaptively capture available information from spatial and temporal cues, which contains Confidence-guided Adaptive Gate (CAG) modules and Dual Differential Enhancement (DDE) modules. For both RGB features and optical flow features, CAG estimates confidence scores supervised by the IoU between predictions and the ground truths to re-calibrate the information with a gate mechanism. DDE captures the differential feature representation to enrich the spatial and temporal information and generate the fused features. Experimental results on four widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method against thirteen state-of-the-art methods.
We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes actions in each time step based on the current state, the principal's advice/signal, and beliefs about the external parameter. The action of the agent updates the state according to a stochastic process. The model arises naturally in many applications, e.g., an app (the principal) can advice the user (the agent) on possible choices between actions based on additional real-time information the app has. We study the problem of designing a signaling strategy from the principal's point of view. We show that the principal has an optimal strategy against a myopic agent, who only optimizes their rewards locally, and the optimal strategy can be computed in polynomial time. In contrast, it is NP-hard to approximate an optimal policy against a far-sighted agent. Further, we show that if the principal has the power to threaten the agent by not providing future signals, then we can efficiently design a threat-based strategy. This strategy guarantees the principal's payoff as if playing against an agent who is far-sighted but myopic to future signals.
Scalable quantum information processing requires the ability to tune multi-qubit interactions. This makes the precise manipulation of quantum states particularly difficult for multi-qubit interactions because tunability unavoidably introduces sensitivity to fluctuations in the tuned parameters, leading to erroneous multi-qubit gate operations. The performance of quantum algorithms may be severely compromised by coherent multi-qubit errors. It is therefore imperative to understand how these fluctuations affect multi-qubit interactions and, more importantly, to mitigate their influence. In this study, we demonstrate how to implement dynamical-decoupling techniques to suppress the two-qubit analogue of the dephasing on a superconducting quantum device featuring a compact tunable coupler, a trending technology that enables the fast manipulation of qubit--qubit interactions. The pure-dephasing time shows an up to ~14 times enhancement on average when using robust sequences. The results are in good agreement with the noise generated from room-temperature circuits. Our study further reveals the decohering processes associated with tunable couplers and establishes a framework to develop gates and sequences robust against two-qubit errors.
The Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi (DCF) method is widely used to indirectly estimate the magnetic field strength from the plane-of-sky field orientation. In this work, we present a set of 3D MHD simulations and synthetic polarization images using radiative transfer of clustered massive star-forming regions. We apply the DCF method on the synthetic polarization maps to investigate its reliability in high-density molecular clumps and dense cores where self-gravity is significant. We investigate the validity of the assumptions of the DCF method step by step and compare the model and estimated field strength to derive the correction factors for the estimated uniform and total (rms) magnetic field strength at clump and core scales. The correction factors in different situations are catalogued. We find the DCF method works well in strong field cases. However, the magnetic field strength in weak field cases could be significantly overestimated by the DCF method when the turbulent magnetic energy is smaller than the turbulent kinetic energy. We investigate the accuracy of the angular dispersion function (ADF, a modified DCF method) method on the effects that may affect the measured angular dispersion and find that the ADF method correctly accounts for the ordered field structure, the beam-smoothing, and the interferometric filtering, but may not be applicable to account for the signal integration along the line of sight in most cases. Our results suggest that the DCF methods should be avoided to be applied below $\sim$0.1 pc scales if the effect of line-of-sight signal integration is not properly addressed.
Pedestrian attribute recognition aims to assign multiple attributes to one pedestrian image captured by a video surveillance camera. Although numerous methods are proposed and make tremendous progress, we argue that it is time to step back and analyze the status quo of the area. We review and rethink the recent progress from three perspectives. First, given that there is no explicit and complete definition of pedestrian attribute recognition, we formally define and distinguish pedestrian attribute recognition from other similar tasks. Second, based on the proposed definition, we expose the limitations of the existing datasets, which violate the academic norm and are inconsistent with the essential requirement of practical industry application. Thus, we propose two datasets, PETA\textsubscript{$ZS$} and RAP\textsubscript{$ZS$}, constructed following the zero-shot settings on pedestrian identity. In addition, we also introduce several realistic criteria for future pedestrian attribute dataset construction. Finally, we reimplement existing state-of-the-art methods and introduce a strong baseline method to give reliable evaluations and fair comparisons. Experiments are conducted on four existing datasets and two proposed datasets to measure progress on pedestrian attribute recognition.
This paper uses both experimental and numerical approaches to revisit the concept of current transfer length (CTL) in second-generation high-temperature superconductor coated conductors with a current flow diverter (CFD) architecture. The CFD architecture has been implemented on eight commercial coated conductors samples from THEVA. In order to measure the 2-D current distribution in the silver stabilizer layer of the samples, we first used a custom-made array of 120 voltage taps to measure the surface potential distribution. Then, the so-called "static" CTL ($\lambda_s$) was extracted using a semi-analytical model that fitted well the experimental data. As defined in this paper, the static CTL on a 2-D domain is a generalization of the definition commonly used in literature. In addition, we used a 3-D finite element model to simulate the normal zone propagation in our CFD samples, in order to quantify their "dynamic" CTL ($\lambda_d$), a new concept introduced in this paper and defined as the CTL observed during the propagation of a quenched region. The results show that, for a CFD architecture, $\lambda_d$ is always larger than $\lambda_s$, whereas $\lambda_d = \lambda_s$ when the interfacial resistance between the stabilizer and the superconductor layers is the same everywhere. We proved that the cause of these different behaviors is related to the shape of the normal zone, which is curved for the CFD architecture, and rectangular otherwise. Finally, we showed that the NZPV is proportional to $\lambda_d$, not with $\lambda_s$, which suggests that the dynamic CTL $\lambda_d$ is the most general definition of the CTL and should always be used when current crowding and non-uniform heat generation occurs around a normal zone.
Understanding the dynamics of a quantum bit's environment is essential for the realization of practical systems for quantum information processing and metrology. We use single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond to study the dynamics of a disordered spin ensemble at the diamond surface. Specifically, we tune the density of "dark" surface spins to interrogate their contribution to the decoherence of shallow NV center spin qubits. When the average surface spin spacing exceeds the NV center depth, we find that the surface spin contribution to the NV center free induction decay can be described by a stretched exponential with variable power n. We show that these observations are consistent with a model in which the spatial positions of the surface spins are fixed for each measurement, but some of them reconfigure between measurements. In particular, we observe a depth-dependent critical time associated with a dynamical transition from Gaussian (n=2) decay to n=2/3, and show that this transition arises from the competition between the small decay contributions of many distant spins and strong coupling to a few proximal spins at the surface. These observations demonstrate the potential of a local sensor for understanding complex systems and elucidate pathways for improving and controlling spin qubits at the surface.
Let $a$ and $b$ be relatively prime positive integers. In this paper the weighted sum $\sum_{n\in{\rm NR}(a,b)}\lambda^{n-1}n^m$ is given explicitly or in terms of the Apostol-Bernoulli numbers, where $m$ is a nonnegative integer, and ${\rm NR}(a,b)$ denotes the set of positive integers nonrepresentable in terms of $a$ and $b$.
A recently developed model chemistry (jun-Cheap) has been slightly modified and proposed as an effective, reliable and parameter-free scheme for the computation of accurate reaction rates with special reference to astrochemical and atmospheric processes. Benchmarks with different sets of state-of-the-art energy barriers spanning a wide range of values show that, in the absence of strong multi-reference contributions, the proposed model outperforms the most well-known model chemistries, reaching a sub-chemical accuracy without any empirical parameter and with affordable computer times. Some test cases show that geometries, energy barriers, zero point energies and thermal contributions computed at this level can be used in the framework of the master equation approach based on ab-initio transition state theory (AITSTME) for obtaining accurate reaction rates.
Recent research in differential privacy demonstrated that (sub)sampling can amplify the level of protection. For example, for $\epsilon$-differential privacy and simple random sampling with sampling rate $r$, the actual privacy guarantee is approximately $r\epsilon$, if a value of $\epsilon$ is used to protect the output from the sample. In this paper, we study whether this amplification effect can be exploited systematically to improve the accuracy of the privatized estimate. Specifically, assuming the agency has information for the full population, we ask under which circumstances accuracy gains could be expected, if the privatized estimate would be computed on a random sample instead of the full population. We find that accuracy gains can be achieved for certain regimes. However, gains can typically only be expected, if the sensitivity of the output with respect to small changes in the database does not depend too strongly on the size of the database. We only focus on algorithms that achieve differential privacy by adding noise to the final output and illustrate the accuracy implications for two commonly used statistics: the mean and the median. We see our research as a first step towards understanding the conditions required for accuracy gains in practice and we hope that these findings will stimulate further research broadening the scope of differential privacy algorithms and outputs considered.
It is well known that a universal set of gates for classical computation augmented with the Hadamard gate results in universal quantum computing. While this requires the addition of a genuine quantum element to the set of passive classical gates, here we ask the following: can the same result be attained by adding a quantum control unit while keeping the circuit itself completely classical? In other words, can we get universal quantum computation by coherently controlling classical operations? In this work we provide an affirmative answer to this question, by considering a computational model that consists of $2n$ target bits together with a set of classical gates, controlled by log$(2n+1)$ ancillary qubits. We show that this model is equivalent to a quantum computer operating on $n$ qubits. Furthermore, we show that even a primitive computer that is capable of implementing only SWAP gates, can be lifted to universal quantum computing, if aided with an appropriate quantum control of logarithmic size. Our results thus exemplify the information processing power brought forth by the quantum control system.
We establish new examples of augmentations of Legendrian twist knots that cannot be induced by orientable Lagrangian fillings. To do so, we use a version of the Seidel-Ekholm-Dimitroglou Rizell isomorphism with local coefficients to show that any Lagrangian filling point in the augmentation variety of a Legendrian knot must lie in the injective image of an algebraic torus with dimension equal to the first Betti number of the filling. This is a Floer-theoretic version of a result from microlocal sheaf theory. For the augmentations in question, we show that no such algebraic torus can exist.
Departure time choice models play a crucial role in determining the traffic load in transportation systems. This paper introduces a new framework to model and analyze the departure time user equilibrium (DTUE) problem based on the so-called Mean Field Games (MFGs) theory. The proposed framework is the combination of two main components including (i) the reaction of travelers to the traffic congestion by choosing their departure times to optimize their travel cost; and (ii) the aggregation of the actions of the travelers, which determines the system level of service. In this paper, we first present a continuous departure time choice model and investigate the equilibria of the system. Specifically, we demonstrate the existence of the equilibrium and characterize the DTUE. Then, a discrete approximation of the system is provided based on deterministic differential game models to numerically obtain the equilibrium of the system. To examine the efficiency of the proposed model, we compare it with the departure time choice models in the literature. We apply our framework to a standard test case and observe that the solutions obtained based on our model are 5.6\% better in terms of relative cost compared to the solutions determined based on models in the literature. Moreover, our proposed model converges with less number of iterations than the reference solution method in the literature. Finally, the model is scaled up to the real test case corresponding to the whole Lyon Metropolis with real demand pattern. The results show that the proposed framework is able to tackle much larger test case than usual to includes multiple preferred travel times and heterogeneous trip lengths more accurately than existing models in the literature.
The $S=1$ Haldane state is constructed from a product of local singlet dimers in the bulk and topological states at the edges of a chain. It is a fundamental representative of topological quantum matter. Its well-known representative, the quasi-one-dimensional SrNi$_2$V$_2$O$_8$ shows both conventional as well as unconventional magnetic Raman scattering. The former is observed as one- and two-triplet excitations with small linewidths and energies corresponding to the Haldane gap $\Delta_H$ and the exchange coupling $J_c$ along the chain, respectively. Well-defined magnetic quasiparticles are assumed to be stabilized by interchain interactions and uniaxial single-ion anisotropy. Unconventional scattering exists as broad continua of scattering with an intensity $I(T)$ that shows a mixed bosonic / fermionic statistic. Such a mixed statistic has also been observed in Kitaev spin liquids and could point to a non-Abelian symmetry. As the ground state in the bulk of SrNi$_2$V$_2$O$_8$ is topologically trivial, we suggest its fractionalization to be due to light-induced interchain exchange processes. These processes are supposed to be enhanced due to a proximity to an Ising ordered state with a quantum critical point. A comparison with SrCo$_2$V$_2$O$_8$, the $S=1/2$ analogue to our title compound, supports these statements.
We present a "learning to learn" approach for automatically constructing white-box classification loss functions that are robust to label noise in the training data. We parameterize a flexible family of loss functions using Taylor polynomials, and apply evolutionary strategies to search for noise-robust losses in this space. To learn re-usable loss functions that can apply to new tasks, our fitness function scores their performance in aggregate across a range of training dataset and architecture combinations. The resulting white-box loss provides a simple and fast "plug-and-play" module that enables effective noise-robust learning in diverse downstream tasks, without requiring a special training procedure or network architecture. The efficacy of our method is demonstrated on a variety of datasets with both synthetic and real label noise, where we compare favourably to previous work.
In 2003, Deutsch and Elizalde defined bijective maps between Dyck paths which are beneficial in investigating some statistics distributions of Dyck paths and pattern-avoiding permutations. In this paper, we give a generalization of the maps so that they are generated by permutations in $S_{2n}$. The construction induces several novel ways to partition $S_{2n}$ which give a new interpretation of an existing combinatorial identity involving double factorials and a new integer sequence. Although the generalization does not in general retain bijectivity, we are able to characterize a class of permutations that generates bijections and furthermore imposes an algebraic structure to a certain class of bijections. As a result, we introduce statistics of a Dyck path involving the number of unpaired steps in some subpath whose distribution is identical to other well-known height statistics.
We investigate the spectrum of linearized excitations of global vortices in $2+1$ dimensions. After identifying the existence of localized excitation modes, we compute the decay time scale of the first two and compare the results to the numerical evolution of the full non-linear equations. We show numerically how the interaction of vortices with an external source of radiation or other vortices can excite these modes dynamically. We then simulate the formation of vortices in a phase transition and their interaction with a thermal bath estimating the amplitudes of these modes in each case. These numerical experiments indicate that even though, in principle, vortices are capable of storing a large amount of energy in these internal excitations, this does not seem to happen dynamically. We then explore the evolution of a network of vortices in an expanding (2+1) dimensional background, in particular in a radiation dominated universe. We find that vortices are still excited after the course of the cosmological evolution but again the level of excitation is very small. The extra energy in the vortices in these cosmological simulations never exceeds the $1\%$ level of the total mass of the core of the vortex.
In this paper we show that if S is a simple classical group, a group G is contained in inner-diagonal automorphisms of S and contains S, and H is a solvable Hall subgroup of G, then there exists five conjugates of H, whose intersection is trivial.
We study Markov-modulated affine processes (abbreviated MMAPs), a class of Markov processes that are created from affine processes by allowing some of their coefficients to be a function of an exogenous Markov process. MMAPs allow for richer models in various applications. At the same time MMAPs largely preserve the tractability of standard affine processes, as their characteristic function has a computationally convenient functional form. Our setup is a substantial generalization of earlier work, since we consider the case where the generator of the exogenous process $X$ is an unbounded operator (as is the case for diffusions or jump processes with infinite activity). We prove existence of MMAPs via a martingale problem approach, we derive the formula for their characteristic function and we study various mathematical properties of MMAPs. The paper closes with a discussion of several applications of MMAPs in finance.
The vision community is witnessing a modeling shift from CNNs to Transformers, where pure Transformer architectures have attained top accuracy on the major video recognition benchmarks. These video models are all built on Transformer layers that globally connect patches across the spatial and temporal dimensions. In this paper, we instead advocate an inductive bias of locality in video Transformers, which leads to a better speed-accuracy trade-off compared to previous approaches which compute self-attention globally even with spatial-temporal factorization. The locality of the proposed video architecture is realized by adapting the Swin Transformer designed for the image domain, while continuing to leverage the power of pre-trained image models. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on a broad range of video recognition benchmarks, including on action recognition (84.9 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400 and 86.1 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-600 with ~20x less pre-training data and ~3x smaller model size) and temporal modeling (69.6 top-1 accuracy on Something-Something v2). The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SwinTransformer/Video-Swin-Transformer.
As an autonomous vehicles, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are subjected to several challenges. One of the challenges is for UAV to be able to avoid collision. Many collision avoidance methods have been proposed to address this issue. Furthermore, in a multi-UAV system, it is also important to address communication issue among UAVs for cooperation and collaboration. This issue can be addressed by setting up an ad-hoc network among UAVs. There is also a need to consider the challenges in the deployment of UAVs, as well as, in the development of collision avoidance methods and the establishment of communication for cooperation and collaboration in a multi-UAV system. In this paper, we present general challenges in the deployment of UAV and comparison of UAV communication services based on its operating frequency. We also present major collision avoidance approaches, and specifically discuss collision avoidance approaches that are suitable for indoor applications. We also present the Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANET) network architecture, communication and routing protocols for each Open System Interconnection (OSI) communication layers.
Purpose: To update and extend the Carleton Laboratory for Radiotherapy Physics (CLRP) Eye Plaque (EP) dosimetry database for low-energy photon-emitting brachytherapy sources using egs_brachy, an open-source EGSnrc application. The previous database, CLRP_EPv1, contained datasets for the Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study (COMS) plaques (2008). The new database, CLRP EPv2, consists of newly-calculated 3D dose distributions for 17 plaques [8 COMS, 5 Eckert & Ziegler BEBIG, and 4 other representative models] for Pd-103, I-125, and Cs-131 seeds. Methods: Plaque models are developed with egs_brachy, based on published/manufacturer dimensions and material data. The BEBIG plaques are identical in dimensions to COMS plaques but differ in elemental composition and/or density. Eye plaques and seeds are simulated at the centre of full-scatter water phantoms, scoring in (0.05 cm)^3 voxels spanning the eye for scenarios: (i) HOMO: simulated TG43 conditions; (ii) HETERO: eye plaques and seeds fully modelled; (iii) HETsi (BEBIG only): one seed is active at a time with other seed geometries present but not emitting photons (inactive). For validation, doses are compared to those from CLRP_EPv1 and published data. Data Format and Access: Data are available at https://physics.carleton.ca/ clrp/eye_plaque_v2, http://doi.org/10.22215/clrp/EPv2. The data consist of 3D dose distributions (text-based EGSnrc 3ddose file) and graphical presentations of the comparisons to previously published data. Potential Applications: The CLRP EPv2 database provides accurate reference 3D dose distributions to advance ocular brachytherapy dose evaluations. The fully-benchmarked eye plaque models will be freely-distributed with egs brachy, supporting adoption of model-based dose evaluations as recommended by TG-129, TG-186, and TG-221.
In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) were studied as an alternative to traditional acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) algorithms. The proposed models achieved remarkable performance for the separate tasks of AEC and residual echo suppression (RES). A promising network topology is a fully convolutional recurrent network (FCRN) structure, which has already proven its performance on both noise suppression and AEC tasks, individually. However, the combination of AEC, postfiltering, and noise suppression to a single network typically leads to a noticeable decline in the quality of the near-end speech component due to the lack of a separate loss for echo estimation. In this paper, we propose a two-stage model (Y$^2$-Net) which consists of two FCRNs, each with two inputs and one output (Y-Net). The first stage (AEC) yields an echo estimate, which - as a novelty for a DNN AEC model - is further used by the second stage to perform RES and noise suppression. While the subjective listening test of the Interspeech 2021 AEC Challenge mostly yielded results close to the baseline, the proposed method scored an average improvement of 0.46 points over the baseline on the blind testset in double-talk on the instrumental metric DECMOS, provided by the challenge organizers.
Convolutional Neural Networks have achieved unprecedented success in image classification, recognition, or detection applications. However, their large-scale deployment in embedded devices is still limited by the huge computational requirements, i.e., millions of MAC operations per layer. In this article, MinConvNets where the multiplications in the forward propagation are approximated by minimum comparator operations are introduced. Hardware implementation of minimum operation is much simpler than multipliers. Firstly, a methodology to find approximate operations based on statistical correlation is presented. We show that it is possible to replace multipliers by minimum operations in the forward propagation under certain constraints, i.e. given similar mean and variances of the feature and the weight vectors. A modified training method which guarantees the above constraints is proposed. And it is shown that equivalent precision can be achieved during inference with MinConvNets by using transfer learning from well trained exact CNNs.
The existence of soliton families in non-parity-time-symmetric complex potentials remains poorly understood, especially in two spatial dimensions. In this article, we analytically investigate the bifurcation of soliton families from linear modes in one- and two-dimensional nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations with localized Wadati-type non-parity-time-symmetric complex potentials. By utilizing the conservation law of the underlying non-Hamiltonian wave system, we convert the complex soliton equation into a new real system. For this new real system, we perturbatively construct a continuous family of low-amplitude solitons bifurcating from a linear eigenmode to all orders of the small soliton amplitude. Hence, the emergence of soliton families in these non-parity-time-symmetric complex potentials is analytically explained. We also compare these analytically constructed soliton solutions with high-accuracy numerical solutions in both one and two dimensions, and the asymptotic accuracy of these perturbation solutions is confirmed.
We study imaging of point sources with a quadrupole gravitational lens while focusing on the formation and evolution of the Einstein cross formed on the image sensor of an imaging telescope. We use a new type of a diffraction integral that we developed to study generic, opaque, weakly aspherical gravitational lenses. To evaluate this integral, we use the method of stationary phase that yields a quartic equation with respect to a Cartesian projection of the observer's position vector with respect to the vector of the impact parameter. The resulting quartic equation can be solved analytically using the method first published by Cardano in 1545. We find that the resulting solution provides a good approximation of the electromagnetic (EM) field almost everywhere in the image plane, yielding the well-known astroid caustic of the quadrupole lens. The sole exception is the immediate vicinity of the caustic boundary, where a numerical treatment of the diffraction integral yields better results. We also convolve the quartic solution for the EM field on the image plane with the point-spread function of a thin lens imaging telescope. By doing so, we are able to explore the direct relationship between the algebraic properties of the quartic solution for the EM field, the geometry of the astroid caustic, and the geometry and shape of the resulting Einstein-cross that appear on the image plane of the thin lens telescope. The new quartic solution leads to significant improvements in numerical modeling as evaluation of this solution is computationally far less expensive than a direct numerical treatment of the new diffraction integral. In the case of the solar gravitational lens (SGL), the new results drastically improve the speed of numerical simulations related to sensitivity analysis performed in the context of high-resolution imaging of exoplanets.
The Lipschitz constant of neural networks plays an important role in several contexts of deep learning ranging from robustness certification and regularization to stability analysis of systems with neural network controllers. Obtaining tight bounds of the Lipschitz constant is therefore important. We introduce LipBaB, a branch and bound framework to compute certified bounds of the local Lipschitz constant of deep neural networks with ReLU activation functions up to any desired precision. We achieve this by bounding the norm of the Jacobians, corresponding to different activation patterns of the network caused within the input domain. Our algorithm can provide provably exact computation of the Lipschitz constant for any p-norm.
Understanding the fluctuations of observables is one of the main goals in science, be it theoretical or experimental, quantum or classical. We investigate such fluctuations when only a subregion of the full system can be observed, focusing on geometries with sharp corners. We report that the dependence on the opening angle is super-universal: up to a numerical prefactor, this function does not depend on anything, provided the system under study is uniform, isotropic, and correlations do not decay too slowly. The prefactor contains important physical information: we show in particular that it gives access to the long-wavelength limit of the structure factor. We illustrate our findings with several examples, including fractional quantum Hall states, scale invariant quantum critical theories, and metals. Finally, we discuss connections with quantum entanglement, extensions to three dimensions, as well as experiments to probe the geometry of fluctuations.
Interior permanent magnet synchronous machine drives are widely employed in electric traction systems and various industrial processes. However, prolonged exposure to high temperatures while operating can demagnetize the permanent magnets to the point of irreversible demagnetization. In addition, direct measurements with infrared sensors or contact-type sensors with wireless communication can be expensive and intrusive to the motor drive systems. This paper thus proposes a nonintrusive thermal monitoring scheme for the permanent magnets inside the direct-torque-controlled interior permanent magnet synchronous machines. By applying an external high-frequency rotating flux or torque signal to the hysteresis torque controller in the motor drive, the high-frequency currents can be injected into the stator windings. The permanent magnet temperature can thus be monitored based on the induced high-frequency resistance. The nonintrusive nature of the method is indicated by the elimination of the extra sensors and no hardware change to the existing system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated with experimental results.
In domains where users tend to develop long-term preferences that do not change too frequently, the stability of recommendations is an important factor of the perceived quality of a recommender system. In such cases, unstable recommendations may lead to poor personalization experience and distrust, driving users away from a recommendation service. We propose an incremental learning scheme that mitigates such problems through the dynamic modeling approach. It incorporates a generalized matrix form of a partial differential equation integrator that yields a dynamic low-rank approximation of time-dependent matrices representing user preferences. The scheme allows extending the famous PureSVD approach to time-aware settings and significantly improves its stability without sacrificing the accuracy in standard top-$n$ recommendations tasks.
In a recent paper, the last three authors showed that a game-theoretic $p$-harmonic function $v$ is characterized by an asymptotic mean value property with respect to a kind of mean value $\nu_p^r[v](x)$ defined variationally on balls $B_r(x)$. In this paper, in a domain $\Om\subset\RR^N$, $N\ge 2$, we consider the operator $\mu_p^\ve$, acting on continuous functions on $\ol{\Om}$, defined by the formula $\mu_p^\ve[v](x)=\nu^{r_\ve(x)}_p[v](x)$, where $r_\ve(x)=\min[\ve,\dist(x,\Ga)]$ and $\Ga$ denotes the boundary of $\Omega$. We first derive various properties of $\mu^\ve_p$ such as continuity and monotonicity. Then, we prove the existence and uniqueness of a function $u^\ve\in C(\ol{\Om})$ satisfying the Dirichlet-type problem: $$ u(x)=\mu_p^\ve[u](x) \ \mbox{ for every } \ x\in\Om,\quad u=g \ \mbox{ on } \ \Ga, $$ for any given function $g\in C(\Ga)$. This result holds, if we assume the existence of a suitable notion of barrier for all points in $\Ga$. That $u^\ve$ is what we call the \textit{variational} $p$-harmonious function with Dirichlet boundary data $g$, and is obtained by means of a Perron-type method based on a comparison principle. \par We then show that the family $\{ u^\ve\}_{\ve>0}$ gives an approximation scheme for the viscosity solution $u\in C(\ol{\Om})$ of $$ \De_p^G u=0 \ \mbox{ in }\Om, \quad u=g \ \mbox{ on } \ \Ga, $$ where $\De_p^G$ is the so-called game-theoretic (or homogeneous) $p$-Laplace operator. In fact, we prove that $u^\ve$ converges to $u$, uniformly on $\ol{\Om}$ as $\ve\to 0$.
We carry out a detailed large-scale data analysis of price response functions in the spot foreign exchange market for different years and different time scales. Such response functions provide quantitative information on the deviation from Markovian behavior. The price response functions show an increase to a maximum followed by a slow decrease as the time lag grows, in trade time scale and in physical time scale, for all analyzed years. Furthermore, we use a price increment point (pip) bid-ask spread definition to group different foreign exchange pairs and analyze the impact of the spread in the price response functions. We find that large pip spreads have a stronger impact on the response. This is similar to what has been found in stock markets.
We consider the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) on $\mathbb{Z}$ started from step initial data and obtain the exact Lyapunov exponents for $H_0(t)$, the integrated current of ASEP. As a corollary, we derive an explicit formula for the upper-tail large deviation rate function for $-H_0(t)$. Our result matches with the rate function for the integrated current of the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) obtained in [Johansson 00](arXiv:math/9903134).