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The use of few-femtosecond, extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulses, produced by high-order harmonic generation, in combination with few-femtosecond infrared (IR) pulses in pump-probe experiments has great potential to disclose ultrafast dynamics in molecules, nanostructures and solids. A crucial prerequisite is a reliable characterization of the temporal properties of the XUV and IR pulses. Several techniques have been developed. The majority of them applies phase reconstruction algorithms to a photoelectron spectrogram obtained by ionizing an atomic target in a pump-probe fashion. If the ionizing radiation is a single harmonic, all the information is encoded in a two-color two-photon signal called sideband (SB). In this work, we present a simplified model to interpret the time-frequency mapping of the SB signal and we show that the temporal dispersion of the pulses directly maps onto the shape of its spectrogram. Finally, we derive an analytical solution, which allows us to propose a novel procedure to estimate the second-order dispersion of the XUV and IR pulses in real time and with no need for iterative algorithms.
We prove a slab theorem for convex ancient solutions to mean curvature flow without any additional hypotheses (such as concavity of the arrival time, bounded curvature on compact time intervals, or noncollapsing in the sense of inscribed radii). By carefully exploiting this, we are able to obtain a Harnack-type inequality and a corresponding compactness theorem for the entire solutions. Using the compactness theorem, we are then able to give a short proof of the equivalence of noncollapsing in the sense of inscribed radii and entire arrival times for convex ancient mean curvature flows. Finally, we provide a useful characterization of the non-entire solutions. In particular, we prove that they are necessarily asymptotic to at least one Grim hyperplane. As a consequence, we rule out collapsing singularity models in (not necessarily embedded) compact $(n-1)$-convex mean curvature flow. We also remove the noncollapsing hypothesis from certain recent classification results for ancient solutions.
*The following abbreviates the abstract. Please refer to the thesis for the full abstract.* After a disaster, locating and extracting victims quickly is critical because mortality rises rapidly after the first two days. To assist search and rescue teams and improve response times, teams of camera-equipped aerial robots can engage in tasks such as mapping buildings and locating victims. These sensing tasks encapsulate difficult (NP-Hard) problems. One way to simplify planning for these tasks is to focus on maximizing sensing performance over a short time horizon. Specifically, consider the problem of how to select motions for a team of robots to maximize a notion of sensing quality (the sensing objective) over the near future, say by maximizing the amount of unknown space in a map that robots will observe over the next several seconds. By repeating this process regularly, the team can react quickly to new observations as they work to complete the sensing task. In technical terms, this planning and control process forms an example of receding-horizon control. Fortunately, common sensing objectives benefit from well-known monotonicity properties (e.g. submodularity), and greedy algorithms can exploit these monotonicity properties to solve the receding-horizon optimization problems that we study near-optimally. However, greedy algorithms typically force robots to make decisions sequentially so that planning time grows with the number of robots. Further, recent works that investigate sequential greedy planning, have demonstrated that reducing the number of sequential steps while retaining suboptimality guarantees can be hard or impossible. We demonstrate that halting growth in planning time is sometimes possible. To do so, we introduce novel greedy algorithms involving fixed numbers of sequential steps.
Backdoor attacks are a kind of insidious security threat against machine learning models. After being injected with a backdoor in training, the victim model will produce adversary-specified outputs on the inputs embedded with predesigned triggers but behave properly on normal inputs during inference. As a sort of emergent attack, backdoor attacks in natural language processing (NLP) are investigated insufficiently. As far as we know, almost all existing textual backdoor attack methods insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, which causes the trigger-embedded samples to be detected and the backdoor attacks to be blocked without much effort. In this paper, we propose to use the syntactic structure as the trigger in textual backdoor attacks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the syntactic trigger-based attack method can achieve comparable attack performance (almost 100% success rate) to the insertion-based methods but possesses much higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses. These results also reveal the significant insidiousness and harmfulness of textual backdoor attacks. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/HiddenKiller.
Symmetries have proven to be important ingredients in the analysis of neural networks. So far their use has mostly been implicit or seemingly coincidental. We undertake a systematic study of the role that symmetry plays. In particular, we clarify how symmetry interacts with the learning algorithm. The key ingredient in our study is played by Noether's celebrated theorem which, informally speaking, states that symmetry leads to conserved quantities (e.g., conservation of energy or conservation of momentum). In the realm of neural networks under gradient descent, model symmetries imply restrictions on the gradient path. E.g., we show that symmetry of activation functions leads to boundedness of weight matrices, for the specific case of linear activations it leads to balance equations of consecutive layers, data augmentation leads to gradient paths that have "momentum"-type restrictions, and time symmetry leads to a version of the Neural Tangent Kernel. Symmetry alone does not specify the optimization path, but the more symmetries are contained in the model the more restrictions are imposed on the path. Since symmetry also implies over-parametrization, this in effect implies that some part of this over-parametrization is cancelled out by the existence of the conserved quantities. Symmetry can therefore be thought of as one further important tool in understanding the performance of neural networks under gradient descent.
Sensors are being extensively deployed and are expected to expand at significant rates in the coming years. They typically generate a large volume of data on the internet of things (IoT) application areas like smart cities, intelligent traffic systems, smart grid, and e-health. Cloud, edge and fog computing are potential and competitive strategies for collecting, processing, and distributing IoT data. However, cloud, edge, and fog-based solutions need to tackle the distribution of a high volume of IoT data efficiently through constrained and limited resource network infrastructures. This paper addresses the issue of conveying a massive volume of IoT data through a network with limited communications resources (bandwidth) using a cognitive communications resource allocation based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with SARSA algorithm. The proposed network infrastructure (PSIoTRL) uses a Publish/ Subscribe architecture to access massive and highly distributed IoT data. It is demonstrated that the PSIoTRL bandwidth allocation for buffer flushing based on SARSA enhances the IoT aggregator buffer occupation and network link utilization. The PSIoTRL dynamically adapts the IoT aggregator traffic flushing according to the Pub/Sub topic's priority and network constraint requirements.
We study odd parity perturbations of spherically symmetric black holes with time-dependent scalar hair in shift-symmetric higher-order scalar-tensor theories. The analysis is performed in a general way without assuming the degeneracy conditions. Nevertheless, we end up with second-order equations for a single master variable, similarly to cosmological tensor modes. We thus identify the general form of the quadratic Lagrangian for the odd parity perturbations, leading to a generalization of the Regge-Wheeler equation. We also investigate the structure of the effective metric for the master variable and refine the stability conditions. As an application of our generalized Regge-Wheeler equation, we compute the quasi-normal modes of a certain nontrivial black hole solution. Finally, our result is extended to include the matter energy-momentum tensor as a source term.
Superconducting qubits are a promising platform for building a larger-scale quantum processor capable of solving otherwise intractable problems. In order for the processor to reach practical viability, the gate errors need to be further suppressed and remain stable for extended periods of time. With recent advances in qubit control, both single- and two-qubit gate fidelities are now in many cases limited by the coherence times of the qubits. Here we experimentally employ closed-loop feedback to stabilize the frequency fluctuations of a superconducting transmon qubit, thereby increasing its coherence time by 26\% and reducing the single-qubit error rate from $(8.5 \pm 2.1)\times 10^{-4}$ to $(5.9 \pm 0.7)\times 10^{-4}$. Importantly, the resulting high-fidelity operation remains effective even away from the qubit flux-noise insensitive point, significantly increasing the frequency bandwidth over which the qubit can be operated with high fidelity. This approach is helpful in large qubit grids, where frequency crowding and parasitic interactions between the qubits limit their performance.
In this paper, we develop a method to assess the sensitivity of local average treatment effect estimates to potential violations of the monotonicity assumption of Imbens and Angrist (1994). We parameterize the degree to which monotonicity is violated using two sensitivity parameters: the first one determines the share of defiers in the population, and the second one measures differences in the distributions of outcomes between compliers and defiers. For each pair of values of these sensitivity parameters, we derive sharp bounds on the outcome distributions of compliers in the first-order stochastic dominance sense. We identify the robust region that is the set of all values of sensitivity parameters for which a given empirical conclusion, e.g. that the local average treatment effect is positive, is valid. Researchers can assess the credibility of their conclusion by evaluating whether all the plausible sensitivity parameters lie in the robust region. We obtain confidence sets for the robust region through a bootstrap procedure and illustrate the sensitivity analysis in an empirical application. We also extend this framework to analyze treatment effects of the entire population.
We report the discovery of an extended very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray source around the location of the middle-aged (207.8 kyr) pulsar PSR J0622+3749 with the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). The source is detected with a significance of $8.2\sigma$ for $E>25$~TeV assuming a Gaussian template. The best-fit location is (R.A., Dec.)$=(95^{\circ}\!.47\pm0^{\circ}\!.11,\,37^{\circ}\!.92 \pm0^{\circ}\!.09)$, and the extension is $0^{\circ}\!.40\pm0^{\circ}\!.07$. The energy spectrum can be described by a power-law spectrum with an index of ${-2.92 \pm 0.17_{\rm stat} \pm 0.02_{\rm sys} }$. No clear extended multi-wavelength counterpart of the LHAASO source has been found from the radio to sub-TeV bands. The LHAASO observations are consistent with the scenario that VHE electrons escaped from the pulsar, diffused in the interstellar medium, and scattered the interstellar radiation field. If interpreted as the pulsar halo scenario, the diffusion coefficient, inferred for electrons with median energies of $\sim160$~TeV, is consistent with those obtained from the extended halos around Geminga and Monogem and much smaller than that derived from cosmic ray secondaries. The LHAASO discovery of this source thus likely enriches the class of so-called pulsar halos and confirms that high-energy particles generally diffuse very slowly in the disturbed medium around pulsars.
This paper develops probabilistic PV forecasters by taking advantage of recent breakthroughs in deep learning. It tailored forecasting tool, named encoder-decoder, is implemented to compute intraday multi-output PV quantiles forecasts to efficiently capture the time correlation. The models are trained using quantile regression, a non-parametric approach that assumes no prior knowledge of the probabilistic forecasting distribution. The case study is composed of PV production monitored on-site at the University of Li\`ege (ULi\`ege), Belgium. The weather forecasts from the regional climate model provided by the Laboratory of Climatology are used as inputs of the deep learning models. The forecast quality is quantitatively assessed by the continuous ranked probability and interval scores. The results indicate this architecture improves the forecast quality and is computationally efficient to be incorporated in an intraday decision-making tool for robust optimization.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) shielding constants of transition metals in solvated complexes are computed at the relativistic density functional theory (DFT) level. The solvent effects evaluated with subsystem-DFT approaches are compared with the reference solvent shifts predicted from supermolecular calculations. Two subsystem-DFT approaches are analyzed -- in the standard frozen density embedding (FDE) scheme the transition metal complexes are embedded in an environment of solvent molecules whose density is kept frozen, in the second approach the densities of the complex and of its environment are relaxed in the "freeze-and-thaw" procedure. The latter approach improves the description of the solvent effects in most cases, nevertheless the FDE deficiencies are rather large in some cases.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is a popular quality assurance technique in software engineering. However, integrating SAST tools into industry-level product development and security assessment poses various technical and managerial challenges. In this work, we reported a longitudinal case study of adopting SAST as a part of a human-driven security assessment for an open-source e-government project. We described how SASTs are selected, evaluated, and combined into a novel approach for software security assessment. The approach was preliminarily evaluated using semi-structured interviews. Our result shows that (1) while some SAST tools out-perform others, it is possible to achieve better performance by combining more than one SAST tools and (2) SAST tools should be used towards a practical performance and in the combination with triangulated approaches for human-driven vulnerability assessment in real-world projects.
This is the opening article of the abstract book of conference "Set-Theoretic Topology and Topological Algebra" in honor of professor Alexander Arhangelskii on the occasion of his 80th birthday held in 2018 at Moscow State University.
For a non-negative separable random field $Z(t), t\in \mathbb{R}^d$ satisfying some mild assumptions we show that \begin{eqnarray*} H_Z^\delta = \lim_{T\to\infty} \frac{1}{T^d} E \{\sup_{ t\in [0,T]^d \cap \delta \mathbb{Z}^d } Z(t) \} <\infty \end{eqnarray*} for $\delta \ge 0$ where $0 \mathbb{Z}^d := \mathbb{R}^d$ and prove that $H_Z^0$ can be approximated by $H_Z^\delta$ if $\delta$ tends to 0. These results extend the classical findings for the Pickands constants $H_{Z}^\delta$, defined for $Z(t)= \exp\left( \sqrt{ 2} B_\alpha (t)- |t|^{2\alpha }\right), t\in \mathbb{R}$ with $B_\alpha$ a standard fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter $\alpha \in (0,1]$. The continuity of $H_{Z}^\delta$ at $\delta=0$ is additionally shown for two particular extensions of Pickands constants.
Characterizing plasticity mechanisms below the ductile-to-brittle transition temperature is traditionally difficult to accomplish in asystematic fashion. Here, we use a new experimental setup to perform in situ cryogenic mechanical testing of pure Sn micropillars at room temperature and at 142{\deg}C. Subsequent electron microscopy characterization of the micropillars shows a clear difference in the deformation mechanisms at room temperature and at cryogenic temperatures. At room temperature, the Sn micropillars deformed through dislocation plasticity, while at142{\deg}C they exhibited both higher strength and deformation twinning. Two different orientations were tested, a symmetric (100) orientation and a non-symmetric (451) orientation. The deformation mechanisms were found to be the same for both orientations
Semiconductor emitter can possibly achieve sharp cutoff wavelength due to its intrinsic bandgap absorption and almost zero sub-bandgap emission without doping. A germanium wafer based selective emitter with front-side antireflection and backside metal coating is studied here for thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion. Optical simulation predicts the spectral emittance above 0.9 in the wavelengths from 1 to 1.85 um and below 0.2 in the sub-bandgap range with sharp cutoff around the bandgap, indicating superior spectral selectivity behavior. This is confirmed by excellent agreement with indirectly measured spectral emittance of the fabricated Ge-based selective emitter sample. Furthermore, the TPV efficiency by paring the Ge-based selective emitter with a GaSb cell is theoretically analyzed at different temperatures. This work will facilitate the development of the semiconductor-based selective emitters for enhancing TPV performance.
We prove the equivalence in the covariant phase space of the metric and connection formulations for Palatini gravity, with nonmetricity and torsion, on a spacetime manifold with boundary. To this end, we will rely on the cohomological approach provided by the relative bicomplex framework. Finally, we discuss some of the physical implications derived from this equivalence in the context of singularity identification through curvature invariants.
A common observation in data-driven applications is that high dimensional data has a low intrinsic dimension, at least locally. In this work, we consider the problem of estimating a $d$ dimensional sub-manifold of $\mathbb{R}^D$ from a finite set of noisy samples. Assuming that the data was sampled uniformly from a tubular neighborhood of $\mathcal{M}\in \mathcal{C}^k$, a compact manifold without boundary, we present an algorithm that takes a point $r$ from the tubular neighborhood and outputs $\hat p_n\in \mathbb{R}^D$, and $\widehat{T_{\hat p_n}\mathcal{M}}$ an element in the Grassmanian $Gr(d, D)$. We prove that as the number of samples $n\to\infty$ the point $\hat p_n$ converges to $p\in \mathcal{M}$ and $\widehat{T_{\hat p_n}\mathcal{M}}$ converges to $T_p\mathcal{M}$ (the tangent space at that point) with high probability. Furthermore, we show that the estimation yields asymptotic rates of convergence of $n^{-\frac{k}{2k + d}}$ for the point estimation and $n^{-\frac{k-1}{2k + d}}$ for the estimation of the tangent space. These rates are known to be optimal for the case of function estimation.
Understanding the limits of list-decoding and list-recovery of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is of prime interest in coding theory and has attracted a lot of attention in recent decades. However, the best possible parameters for these problems are still unknown, and in this paper, we take a step in this direction. We show the existence of RS codes that are list-decodable or list-recoverable beyond the Johnson radius for \emph{any} rate, with a polynomial field size in the block length. In particular, we show that for any $\epsilon\in (0,1)$ there exist RS codes that are list-decodable from radius $1-\epsilon$ and rate less than $\frac{\epsilon}{2-\epsilon}$, with constant list size. We deduce our results by extending and strengthening a recent result of Ferber, Kwan, and Sauermann on puncturing codes with large minimum distance and by utilizing the underlying code's linearity.
In this research, we propose a new low-precision framework, TENT, to leverage the benefits of a tapered fixed-point numerical format in TinyML models. We introduce a tapered fixed-point quantization algorithm that matches the numerical format's dynamic range and distribution to that of the deep neural network model's parameter distribution at each layer. An accelerator architecture for the tapered fixed-point with TENT framework is proposed. Results show that the accuracy on classification tasks improves up to ~31 % with an energy overhead of ~17-30 % as compared to fixed-point, for ConvNet and ResNet-18 models.
Determining the clumpiness of matter around galaxies is pivotal to a full understanding of the spatially inhomogeneous, multi-phase gas in the circumgalactic medium (CGM). We combine high spatially resolved 3D observations with hydrodynamical cosmological simulations to measure the cold circumgalactic gas clumpiness. We present new adaptive-optics-assisted VLT/MUSE observations of a quadruply lensed quasar, targeting the CGM of 2 foreground $z\sim$1 galaxies observed in absorption. We additionally use zoom-in FOGGIE simulations with exquisite resolution ($\sim$0.1 kpc scales) in the CGM of galaxies to compute the physical properties of cold gas traced by Mg\,II absorbers. By contrasting these mock-observables with the VLT/MUSE observations, we find a large spread of fractional variations of Mg\,II equivalent widths with physical separation, both in observations and simulations. The simulations indicate a dependence of the Mg\,II coherence length on the underlying gas morphology (filaments vs clumps). The $z_{\rm abs}$=1.168 Mg\,II system shows coherence over $\gtrsim$ 6 kpc and is associated with an [O\,II] emitting galaxy situated 89 kpc away, with SFR $\geq$ 4.6 $\pm$ {1.5} $\rm M_{\odot}$/yr and $M_{*}=10^{9.6\pm0.2} M_{\odot}$. Based on this combined analysis, we determine that the absorber is consistent with being an inflowing filament. The $z_{\rm abs}$=1.393 Mg\,II system traces dense CGM gas clumps varying in strength over $\lesssim$ 2 kpc physical scales. Our findings suggest that this absorber is likely related to an outflowing clump. Our joint approach combining 3D-spectroscopy observations of lensed systems and simulations with extreme resolution in the CGM put new constraints on the clumpiness of cold CGM gas, a key diagnostic of the baryon cycle.
We investigate how the addition of quantum resources changes the statistical complexity of quantum circuits by utilizing the framework of quantum resource theories. Measures of statistical complexity that we consider include the Rademacher complexity and the Gaussian complexity, which are well-known measures in computational learning theory that quantify the richness of classes of real-valued functions. We derive bounds for the statistical complexities of quantum circuits that have limited access to certain resources and apply our results to two special cases: (1) stabilizer circuits that are supplemented with a limited number of T gates and (2) instantaneous quantum polynomial-time Clifford circuits that are supplemented with a limited number of CCZ gates. We show that the increase in the statistical complexity of a quantum circuit when an additional quantum channel is added to it is upper bounded by the free robustness of the added channel. Finally, we derive bounds for the generalization error associated with learning from training data arising from quantum circuits.
We analyze the interaction with uniform external fields of nematic liquid crystals within a recent generalized free-energy posited by Virga and falling in the class of quartic functionals in the spatial gradients of the nematic director. We review some known interesting solutions, i. e., uniform heliconical structures, which correspond to the so-called twist-bend nematic phase and we also study the transition between this phase and the standard uniform nematic one. Moreover, we find liquid crystal configurations, which closely resemble some novel, experimentally detected, structures called Skyrmion Tubes. Skyrmion Tubes are characterized by a localized cylindrically-symmetric pattern surrounded by either twist-bend or uniform nematic phase. We study the equilibrium differential equations and find numerical solutions and analytical approximations.
In the pursuit of natural language understanding, there has been a long standing interest in tracking state changes throughout narratives. Impressive progress has been made in modeling the state of transaction-centric dialogues and procedural texts. However, this problem has been less intensively studied in the realm of general discourse where ground truth descriptions of states may be loosely defined and state changes are less densely distributed over utterances. This paper proposes to turn to simplified, fully observable systems that show some of these properties: Sports events. We curated 2,263 soccer matches including time-stamped natural language commentary accompanied by discrete events such as a team scoring goals, switching players or being penalized with cards. We propose a new task formulation where, given paragraphs of commentary of a game at different timestamps, the system is asked to recognize the occurrence of in-game events. This domain allows for rich descriptions of state while avoiding the complexities of many other real-world settings. As an initial point of performance measurement, we include two baseline methods from the perspectives of sentence classification with temporal dependence and current state-of-the-art generative model, respectively, and demonstrate that even sophisticated existing methods struggle on the state tracking task when the definition of state broadens or non-event chatter becomes prevalent.
We consider Sobolev mappings $f\in W^{1,q}(\Omega,\IC)$, $1<q<\infty$, between planar domains $\Omega\subset \IC$. We analyse the Radon-Riesz property for convex functionals of the form \[f\mapsto \int_\Omega \Phi(|Df(z)|,J(z,f)) \; dz \] and show that under certain criteria, which hold in important cases, weak convergence in $W_{loc}^{1,q}(\Omega)$ of (for instance) a minimising sequence can be improved to strong convergence. This finds important applications in the minimisation problems for mappings of finite distortion and the $L^p$ and $Exp$\,-Teichm\"uller theories.
Athreya, Bufetov, Eskin and Mirzakhani have shown the number of mapping class group lattice points intersecting a closed ball of radius $R$ in Teichm\"{u}ller space is asymptotic to $e^{hR}$, where $h$ is the dimension of the Teichm\"{u}ller space. We show for any pseudo-Anosov mapping class $f$, there exists a power $n$, such that the number of lattice points of the $f^n$ conjugacy class intersecting a closed ball of radius $R$ is coarsely asymptotic to $e^{\frac{h}{2}R}$.
Clinical diagnostic and treatment decisions rely upon the integration of patient-specific data with clinical reasoning. Cancer presents a unique context that influence treatment decisions, given its diverse forms of disease evolution. Biomedical imaging allows noninvasive assessment of disease based on visual evaluations leading to better clinical outcome prediction and therapeutic planning. Early methods of brain cancer characterization predominantly relied upon statistical modeling of neuroimaging data. Driven by the breakthroughs in computer vision, deep learning became the de facto standard in the domain of medical imaging. Integrated statistical and deep learning methods have recently emerged as a new direction in the automation of the medical practice unifying multi-disciplinary knowledge in medicine, statistics, and artificial intelligence. In this study, we critically review major statistical and deep learning models and their applications in brain imaging research with a focus on MRI-based brain tumor segmentation. The results do highlight that model-driven classical statistics and data-driven deep learning is a potent combination for developing automated systems in clinical oncology.
Multi-Schur functions are symmetric functions that generalize the supersymmetric Schur functions, the flagged Schur functions, and the refined dual Grothendieck functions, which have been intensively studied by Lascoux. In this paper, we give a new free-fermionic presentation of them. The multi-Schur functions are indexed by a partition and two ``tuples of tuples'' of indeterminates. We construct a family of linear bases of the fermionic Fock space that are indexed by such data and prove that they correspond to the multi-Schur functions through the boson-fermion correspondence. By focusing on some special bases, which we call refined bases, we give a straightforward method of expanding a multi-Schur function in the refined dual Grothendieck polynomials. We also present a sufficient condition for a multi-Schur function to have its Hall-dual function in the completed ring of symmetric functions.
Real-time sensing of ultra-wideband radio-frequency signal with high frequency resolution is challenging, which is confined by the sampling rate of electronic analog-to-digital converter and the capability of digital signal processing. By combining quantum mechanics with compressed sensing, quantum compressed sensing is proposed for wideband radio-frequency signal frequency measurement. By using an electro-optical crystal as a sensor which modulates the wave function of the coherent photons with the signal to be measured. The frequency spectrum could be recovered by detecting the modulated sparse photons with a low time-jitter single-photon detector and a time-to-digital converter. More than 50 GHz real-time analysis bandwidth is demonstrated with the Fourier transform limit resolution. The further simulation shows it can be extended to more than 300 GHz with the present technologies.
The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired unprecedented data collection and computer vision modelling efforts worldwide, focusing on diagnosis and stratification of COVID-19 from medical images. Despite this large-scale research effort, these models have found limited practical application due in part to unproven generalization of these models beyond their source study. This study investigates the generalizability of key published models using the publicly available COVID-19 Computed Tomography data through cross dataset validation. We then assess the predictive ability of these models for COVID-19 severity using an independent new dataset that is stratified for COVID-19 lung involvement. Each inter-dataset study is performed using histogram equalization, and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization with and without a learning Gabor filter. The study shows high variability in the generalization of models trained on these datasets due to varied sample image provenances and acquisition processes amongst other factors. We show that under certain conditions, an internally consistent dataset can generalize well to an external dataset despite structural differences between these datasets with f1 scores up to 86%. Our best performing model shows high predictive accuracy for lung involvement score for an independent dataset for which expertly labelled lung involvement stratification is available. Creating an ensemble of our best model for disease positive prediction with our best model for disease negative prediction using a min-max function resulted in a superior model for lung involvement prediction with average predictive accuracy of 75% for zero lung involvement and 96% for 75-100% lung involvement with almost linear relationship between these stratifications.
It is still nontrivial to develop a new fast COVID-19 screening method with the easier access and lower cost, due to the technical and cost limitations of the current testing methods in the medical resource-poor districts. On the other hand, there are more and more ocular manifestations that have been reported in the COVID-19 patients as growing clinical evidence[1]. This inspired this project. We have conducted the joint clinical research since January 2021 at the ShiJiaZhuang City, Heibei province, China, which approved by the ethics committee of The fifth hospital of ShiJiaZhuang of Hebei Medical University. We undertake several blind tests of COVID-19 patients by Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. Meantime as an important part of the ongoing globally COVID-19 eye test program by AIMOMICS since February 2020, we propose a new fast screening method of analyzing the eye-region images, captured by common CCD and CMOS cameras. This could reliably make a rapid risk screening of COVID-19 with the sustainable stable high performance in different countries and races. Our model for COVID-19 rapid prescreening have the merits of the lower cost, fully self-performed, non-invasive, importantly real-time, and thus enables the continuous health surveillance. We further implement it as the open accessible APIs, and provide public service to the world. Our pilot experiments show that our model is ready to be usable to all kinds of surveillance scenarios, such as infrared temperature measurement device at airports and stations, or directly pushing to the target people groups smartphones as a packaged application.
Approximately 75% of energy used in petrochemical and refining industries is consumed by furnaces. Operating furnaces at optimal conditions results in huge amounts of savings. In this paper, we model the furnace efficiency optimization as a multi-objective problem involving multiple interactions among the controlled variables and propose a cooperative game based formulation for the factory of future. The controlled variables are Absorbed Duty and Coil Outlet Temperature. We propose a comprehensive solution to select the best combination of manipulated variables (fired duty, throughput and coil inlet temperature) satisfying multiple criteria using a cooperative game theory approach. We compare this approach with the standard multi-objective optimization using NSGA-II and RNSGA-II algorithms.
One of the long-standing goals of quantum transport is to use the noise, rather than the average current, for information processing. However, achieving this requires on-demand control of quantum fluctuations in the electric current. In this paper, we demonstrate theoretically that transport through a molecular spin-valve provides access to many different statistics of electron tunneling events. Simply by changing highly tunable parameters, such as electrode spin-polarization, magnetization angle, and voltage, one is able to switch between Poisson behavior, bunching and anti-bunching of electron tunnelings, and positive and negative temporal correlations. The molecular spin-valve is modeled by a single spin-degenerate molecular orbital with local electronic repulsion coupled to two ferromagnetic leads with magnetization orientations allowed to rotate relative to each other. The electron transport is described via Born-Markov master equation and fluctuations are studied with higher-order waiting time distributions. For highly magnetized parallel-aligned electrodes, we find that strong positive temporal correlations emerge in the voltage range where the second transport channel is partially open. These are caused by a spin-induced electron-bunching, which does not manifest in the stationary current alone.
Recent technological advancements have proliferated the use of small embedded devices for collecting, processing, and transferring the security-critical information. The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled remote access and control of these network-connected devices. Consequently, an attacker can exploit security vulnerabilities and compromise these devices. In this context, the secure boot becomes a useful security mechanism to verify the integrity and authenticity of the software state of the devices. However, the current secure boot schemes focus on detecting the presence of potential malware on the device but not on disinfecting and restoring the soft-ware to a benign state. This manuscript presents CARE- the first secure boot framework that provides detection, resilience, and onboard recovery mechanism for the com-promised devices. The framework uses a prototype hybrid CARE: Code Authentication and Resilience Engine to verify the software state and restore it to a benign state. It uses Physical Memory Protection (PMP) and other security enchaining techniques of RISC-V processor to pro-vide resilience from modern attacks. The state-of-the-art comparison and performance analysis results indicate that the proposed secure boot framework provides a promising resilience and recovery mechanism with very little 8 % performance and resource overhead
Rigid electron rotation of a fully penetrated Rotamak-FRC produces a pressure flux function that is more peaked than the Solov'ev flux function. This paper explores the implications of this peaked pressure flux function, including the isothermal case, which appear when the temperature profile is broader than the density profile, creating both benefits and challenges to a Rotamak-FRC based fusion reactor. In this regime, the density distribution becomes very peaked, enhancing the fusion power. The separatrix has a tendency to become oblate, which can be mitigated by flux conserving current loops. Plasma extends outside the separatrix, notably in the open field line region. This model does not apply to very kinetic FRCs or FRCs in which there are significant ion flows, but it may have some applicability to their outer layers.
We apply unsupervised learning techniques to classify the different phases of the $J_1-J_2$ antiferromagnetic Ising model on the honeycomb lattice. We construct the phase diagram of the system using convolutional autoencoders. These neural networks can detect phase transitions in the system via `anomaly detection', without the need for any label or a priori knowledge of the phases. We present different ways of training these autoencoders and we evaluate them to discriminate between distinct magnetic phases. In this process, we highlight the case of high temperature or even random training data. Finally, we analyze the capability of the autoencoder to detect the ground state degeneracy through the reconstruction error.
A key assumption in the theory of nonlinear adaptive control is that the uncertainty of the system can be expressed in the linear span of a set of known basis functions. While this assumption leads to efficient algorithms, it limits applications to very specific classes of systems. We introduce a novel nonparametric adaptive algorithm that learns an infinite-dimensional density over parameters to cancel an unknown disturbance in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Surprisingly, the resulting control input admits an analytical expression that enables its implementation despite its underlying infinite-dimensional structure. While this adaptive input is rich and expressive -- subsuming, for example, traditional linear parameterizations -- its computational complexity grows linearly with time, making it comparatively more expensive than its parametric counterparts. Leveraging the theory of random Fourier features, we provide an efficient randomized implementation that recovers the complexity of classical parametric methods while provably retaining the expressivity of the nonparametric input. In particular, our explicit bounds only depend polynomially on the underlying parameters of the system, allowing our proposed algorithms to efficiently scale to high-dimensional systems. As an illustration of the method, we demonstrate the ability of the randomized approximation algorithm to learn a predictive model of a 60-dimensional system consisting of ten point masses interacting through Newtonian gravitation.
Framing involves the positive or negative presentation of an argument or issue depending on the audience and goal of the speaker (Entman 1983). Differences in lexical framing, the focus of our work, can have large effects on peoples' opinions and beliefs. To make progress towards reframing arguments for positive effects, we create a dataset and method for this task. We use a lexical resource for "connotations" to create a parallel corpus and propose a method for argument reframing that combines controllable text generation (positive connotation) with a post-decoding entailment component (same denotation). Our results show that our method is effective compared to strong baselines along the dimensions of fluency, meaning, and trustworthiness/reduction of fear.
Recent observational missions have uncovered a significant number of compact multi-exoplanet systems. The tight orbital spacing of these systems has led to much effort being applied to the understanding of their stability; however, a key limitation of the majority of these studies is the termination of simulations as soon as the orbits of two planets cross. In this work we explore the stability of compact, three-planet systems and continue our simulations all the way to the first collision of planets to yield a better understanding of the lifetime of these systems. We perform over $25,000$ integrations of a Sun-like star orbited by three Earth-like secondaries for up to a billion orbits to explore a wide parameter space of initial conditions in both the co-planar and inclined cases, with a focus on the initial orbital spacing. We calculate the probability of collision over time and determine the probability of collision between specific pairs of planets. We find systems that persist for over $10^8$ orbits after an orbital crossing and show how the post-instability survival time of systems depends upon the initial orbital separation, mutual inclination, planetary radius, and the closest encounter experienced. Additionally, we examine the effects of very small changes in the initial positions of the planets upon the time to collision and show the effect that the choice of integrator can have upon simulation results. We generalise our results throughout to show both the behaviour of systems with an inner planet initially located at $1$ AU and $0.25$ AU.
Visual information extraction (VIE) has attracted considerable attention recently owing to its various advanced applications such as document understanding, automatic marking and intelligent education. Most existing works decoupled this problem into several independent sub-tasks of text spotting (text detection and recognition) and information extraction, which completely ignored the high correlation among them during optimization. In this paper, we propose a robust visual information extraction system (VIES) towards real-world scenarios, which is a unified end-to-end trainable framework for simultaneous text detection, recognition and information extraction by taking a single document image as input and outputting the structured information. Specifically, the information extraction branch collects abundant visual and semantic representations from text spotting for multimodal feature fusion and conversely, provides higher-level semantic clues to contribute to the optimization of text spotting. Moreover, regarding the shortage of public benchmarks, we construct a fully-annotated dataset called EPHOIE (https://github.com/HCIILAB/EPHOIE), which is the first Chinese benchmark for both text spotting and visual information extraction. EPHOIE consists of 1,494 images of examination paper head with complex layouts and background, including a total of 15,771 Chinese handwritten or printed text instances. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our VIES shows significant superior performance on the EPHOIE dataset and achieves a 9.01% F-score gain on the widely used SROIE dataset under the end-to-end scenario.
We prove a Liouville type theorem for the linearly perturbed Paneitz equation: For $\epsilon>0$ small enough, if $u_\epsilon$ is a positive smooth solution of $$P_{S^3} u_\epsilon+\epsilon u_\epsilon=-u_\epsilon^{-7} \qquad \mathrm{~~on~~}S^3,$$ where $P_{S^3}$ is the Paneitz operator of the round metric $g_{S^3}$, then $u_\epsilon$ is constant. This confirms a conjecture proposed by Fengbo Hang and Paul Yang in [ Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN, 2020 (11) ].
This paper proposes an $SE_2(3)$ based extended Kalman filtering (EKF) framework for the inertial-integrated state estimation problem. The error representation using the straight difference of two vectors in the inertial navigation system may not be reasonable as it does not take the direction difference into consideration. Therefore, we choose to use the $SE_2(3)$ matrix Lie group to represent the state of the inertial-integrated navigation system which consequently leads to the common frame error representation. With the new velocity and position error definition, we leverage the group affine dynamics with the autonomous error properties and derive the error state differential equation for the inertial-integrated navigation on the north-east-down (NED) navigation frame and the earth-centered earth-fixed (ECEF) frame, respectively, the corresponding EKF, terms as $SE_2(3)$ based EKF has also been derived. It provides a new perspective on the geometric EKF with a more sophisticated formula for the inertial-integrated navigation system. Furthermore, we design two new modified error dynamics on the NED frame and the ECEF frame respectively by introducing new auxiliary vectors. Finally the equivalence of the left-invariant EKF and left $SE_2(3)$ based EKF have been shown in navigation frame and ECEF frame.
Fine-tuning pre-trained cross-lingual language models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the others. In this work, we propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization. Specifically, we use example consistency regularization to penalize the prediction sensitivity to four types of data augmentations, i.e., subword sampling, Gaussian noise, code-switch substitution, and machine translation. In addition, we employ model consistency to regularize the models trained with two augmented versions of the same training set. Experimental results on the XTREME benchmark show that our method significantly improves cross-lingual fine-tuning across various tasks, including text classification, question answering, and sequence labeling.
Image denoising is of great importance for medical imaging system, since it can improve image quality for disease diagnosis and downstream image analyses. In a variety of applications, dynamic imaging techniques are utilized to capture the time-varying features of the subject, where multiple images are acquired for the same subject at different time points. Although signal-to-noise ratio of each time frame is usually limited by the short acquisition time, the correlation among different time frames can be exploited to improve denoising results with shared information across time frames. With the success of neural networks in computer vision, supervised deep learning methods show prominent performance in single-image denoising, which rely on large datasets with clean-vs-noisy image pairs. Recently, several self-supervised deep denoising models have been proposed, achieving promising results without needing the pairwise ground truth of clean images. In the field of multi-image denoising, however, very few works have been done on extracting correlated information from multiple slices for denoising using self-supervised deep learning methods. In this work, we propose Deformed2Self, an end-to-end self-supervised deep learning framework for dynamic imaging denoising. It combines single-image and multi-image denoising to improve image quality and use a spatial transformer network to model motion between different slices. Further, it only requires a single noisy image with a few auxiliary observations at different time frames for training and inference. Evaluations on phantom and in vivo data with different noise statistics show that our method has comparable performance to other state-of-the-art unsupervised or self-supervised denoising methods and outperforms under high noise levels.
In an intelligent transportation system, the key problem of traffic forecasting is how to extract the periodic temporal dependencies and complex spatial correlation. Current state-of-the-art methods for traffic flow forecasting are based on graph architectures and sequence learning models, but they do not fully exploit spatial-temporal dynamic information in the traffic system. Specifically, the temporal dependence of the short-range is diluted by recurrent neural networks, and the existing sequence model ignores local spatial information because the convolution operation uses global average pooling. Besides, there will be some traffic accidents during the transitions of objects causing congestion in the real world that trigger increased prediction deviation. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Conv-sequence Learning (STCL), in which a focused temporal block uses unidirectional convolution to effectively capture short-term periodic temporal dependence, and a spatial-temporal fusion module is able to extract the dependencies of both interactions and decrease the feature dimensions. Moreover, the accidents features impact on local traffic congestion, and position encoding is employed to detect anomalies in complex traffic situations. We conduct a large number of experiments on real-world tasks and verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.
In the segmentation of fine-scale structures from natural and biomedical images, per-pixel accuracy is not the only metric of concern. Topological correctness, such as vessel connectivity and membrane closure, is crucial for downstream analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose a new approach to train deep image segmentation networks for better topological accuracy. In particular, leveraging the power of discrete Morse theory (DMT), we identify global structures, including 1D skeletons and 2D patches, which are important for topological accuracy. Trained with a novel loss based on these global structures, the network performance is significantly improved especially near topologically challenging locations (such as weak spots of connections and membranes). On diverse datasets, our method achieves superior performance on both the DICE score and topological metrics.
This paper presents a one-sided immersed boundary (IB) method using kernel functions constructed via a moving least squares (MLS) method. The resulting kernels effectively couple structural degrees of freedom to fluid variables on only one side of the fluid-structure interface. This reduces spurious feedback forcing and internal flows that are typically observed in IB models that use isotropic kernel functions to couple the structure to fluid degrees of freedom on both sides of the interface. The method developed here extends the original MLS methodology introduced by Vanella and Balaras (J Comput Phys, 2009). Prior IB/MLS methods have used isotropic kernel functions that coupled fluid variables on both sides of the boundary to the interfacial degrees of freedom. The original IB/MLS approach converts the cubic spline weights typically employed in MLS reconstruction into an IB kernel function that satisfies particular discrete moment conditions. This paper shows that the same approach can be used to construct one-sided kernel functions (kernel functions are referred to as generating functions in the MLS literature). We also examine the performance of the new approach for a family of kernel functions introduced by Peskin. It is demonstrated that the one-sided MLS construction tends to generate non-monotone interpolation kernels with large over- and undershoots. We present two simple weight shifting strategies to construct generating functions that are positive and monotone, which enhances the stability of the resulting IB methodology. Benchmark cases are used to test the order of accuracy and verify the one-sided IB/MLS simulations in both two and three spatial dimensions. This new IB/MLS method is also used to simulate flow over the Ahmed car model, which highlights the applicability of this methodology for modeling complex engineering flows.
Most of the existing spoken language understanding systems can perform only semantic frame parsing based on a single-round user query. They cannot take users' feedback to update/add/remove slot values through multiround interactions with users. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-step spoken language understanding system based on adversarial learning that can leverage the multiround user's feedback to update slot values. We perform two experiments on the benchmark ATIS dataset and demonstrate that the new system can improve parsing performance by at least $2.5\%$ in terms of F1, with only one round of feedback. The improvement becomes even larger when the number of feedback rounds increases. Furthermore, we also compare the new system with state-of-the-art dialogue state tracking systems and demonstrate that the new interactive system can perform better on multiround spoken language understanding tasks in terms of slot- and sentence-level accuracy.
While compressing a colloidal state by optical means alone has been previously achieved through a specific time-dependence of the trap stiffness, realizing quickly the reverse transformation stumbles upon the necessity of a transiently expulsive trap. To circumvent this difficulty, we propose to drive the colloids by a combination of optical trapping and diffusiophoretic forces, both time-dependent. Forcing via diffusiophoresis is enforced by controlling the salt concentration at the boundary of the domain where the colloids are confined. The method takes advantage of the separation of time scales between salt and colloidal dynamics, and realizes a fast decompression in an optical trap that remains confining at all times. We thereby obtain a so-called shortcut to adiabaticity protocol where colloidal dynamics, enslaved to salt dynamics, can nevertheless be controlled as desired.
Classical scaling relationships for rheological quantities such as the $\mu(J)$-rheology have become increasingly popular for closures of two-phase flow modeling. However, these frameworks have been derived for monodisperse particles. We aim to extend these considerations to sediment transport modeling by using a more realistic sediment composition. We investigate the rheological behavior of sheared sediment beds composed of polydisperse spherical particles in a laminar Couette-type shear flow. The sediment beds consist of particles with a diameter size ratio of up to ten, which corresponds to grains ranging from fine to coarse sand. The data was generated using fully coupled, grain resolved direct numerical simulations using a combined lattice Boltzmann - discrete element method. These highly-resolved data yield detailed depth-resolved profiles of the relevant physical quantities that determine the rheology, i.e., the local shear rate of the fluid, particle volume fraction, total shear, and granular pressure. A comparison against experimental data shows excellent agreement for the monodisperse case. We improve upon the parameterization of the $\mu(J)$-rheology by expressing its empirically derived parameters as a function of the maximum particle volume fraction. Furthermore, we extend these considerations by exploring the creeping regime for viscous numbers much lower than used by previous studies to calibrate these correlations. Considering the low viscous numbers of our data, we found that the friction coefficient governing the quasi-static state in the creeping regime tends to a finite value for vanishing shear, which decreases the critical friction coefficient by a factor of three for all cases investigated.
There has been increasing attention to semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches in machine learning to forming a classifier in situations where the training data for a classifier consists of a limited number of classified observations but a much larger number of unclassified observations. This is because the procurement of classified data can be quite costly due to high acquisition costs and subsequent financial, time, and ethical issues that can arise in attempts to provide the true class labels for the unclassified data that have been acquired. We provide here a review of statistical SSL approaches to this problem, focussing on the recent result that a classifier formed from a partially classified sample can actually have smaller expected error rate than that if the sample were completely classified.
We study the effects caused by Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling over the thermoelectric transport properties of a single-electron transistor, viz., a quantum dot connected to one-dimensional leads. Using linear response theory and employing the numerical renormalization group method, we calculate the thermopower, electrical and thermal conductances, dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit, and study the Wiedemann-Franz law, showing their temperature maps. Our results for all those properties indicate that spin-orbit coupling drives the system into the Kondo regime. We show that the thermoelectric transport properties, in the presence of spin-orbit coupling, obey the expected universality of the Kondo strong coupling fixed point. In addition, our results show a notable increase in the thermoelectric figure of merit, caused by the spin-orbit coupling in the one-dimensional quantum dot leads.
In the class of reduced Abelian torsion-free groups $G$ of finite rank, we describe TI-groups, this means that every associative ring on $G$ is filial. If every associative multiplication on $G$ is the zero multiplication, then $G$ is called a $nil_a$-group. It is proved that a reduced Abelian torsion-free group $G$ of finite rank is a $TI$-group if and only if $G$ is a homogeneous Murley group or $G$ is a $nil_a$-group. We also study the interrelations between the class of homogeneous Murley groups and the class of $nil_a$-groups. For any type $t\ne (\infty,\infty,\ldots)$ and every integer $n>1$, there exist $2^{\aleph_0}$ pairwise non-quasi-isomorphic homogeneous Murley groups of type $t$ and rank $n$ which are $nil_a$-groups. We describe types $t$ such that there exists a homogeneous Murley group of type $t$ which is not a $nil_a$-group. This paper will be published in Beitr\"{a}ge zur Algebra und Geometrie / Contributions to Algebra and Geometry.
The present paper is devoted to an algebraic treatment of the joint spectral theory within the framework of Noetherian modules over an algebra finite extension of an algebraically closed field. We prove the spectral mapping theorem and analyze the index of tuples in purely algebraic case. The index function over tuples from the coordinate ring of a variety is naturally extended up to a numerical Tor-polynomial. Based on Serre's multiplicity formula, we deduce that Tor-polynomial is just the Samuel polynomial of the local algebra.
We address aspects of coarse-graining in classical Statistical Physics from the viewpoint of the symplectic non-squeezing theorem. We make some comments regarding the implications of the symplectic non-squeezing theorem for the BBGKY hierarchy. We also see the cubic cells appearing in coarse-graining as a direct consequence of the uniqueness of Hofer's metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of the phase space.
Next generation wireless networks are expected to be extremely complex due to their massive heterogeneity in terms of the types of network architectures they incorporate, the types and numbers of smart IoT devices they serve, and the types of emerging applications they support. In such large-scale and heterogeneous networks (HetNets), radio resource allocation and management (RRAM) becomes one of the major challenges encountered during system design and deployment. In this context, emerging Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques are expected to be one of the main enabling technologies to address the RRAM in future wireless HetNets. In this paper, we conduct a systematic in-depth, and comprehensive survey of the applications of DRL techniques in RRAM for next generation wireless networks. Towards this, we first overview the existing traditional RRAM methods and identify their limitations that motivate the use of DRL techniques in RRAM. Then, we provide a comprehensive review of the most widely used DRL algorithms to address RRAM problems, including the value- and policy-based algorithms. The advantages, limitations, and use-cases for each algorithm are provided. We then conduct a comprehensive and in-depth literature review and classify existing related works based on both the radio resources they are addressing and the type of wireless networks they are investigating. To this end, we carefully identify the types of DRL algorithms utilized in each related work, the elements of these algorithms, and the main findings of each related work. Finally, we highlight important open challenges and provide insights into several future research directions in the context of DRL-based RRAM. This survey is intentionally designed to guide and stimulate more research endeavors towards building efficient and fine-grained DRL-based RRAM schemes for future wireless networks.
Quantum Computing has been evolving in the last years. Although nowadays quantum algorithms performance has shown superior to their classical counterparts, quantum decoherence and additional auxiliary qubits needed for error tolerance routines have been huge barriers for quantum algorithms efficient use. These restrictions lead us to search for ways to minimize algorithms costs, i.e the number of quantum logical gates and the depth of the circuit. For this, quantum circuit synthesis and quantum circuit optimization techniques are explored. We studied the viability of using Projective Simulation, a reinforcement learning technique, to tackle the problem of quantum circuit synthesis for noise quantum computers with limited number of qubits. The agent had the task of creating quantum circuits up to 5 qubits to generate GHZ states in the IBM Tenerife (IBM QX4) quantum processor. Our simulations demonstrated that the agent had a good performance but its capacity for learning new circuits decreased as the number of qubits increased.
In this era of Gaia and ALMA, dynamical stellar mass measurements provide benchmarks that are independent of observations of stellar characteristics and their uncertainties. These benchmarks can then be used to validate and improve stellar evolutionary models, which can lead to both imprecise and inaccurate mass predictions for pre-main-sequence, low-mass stars. We present the dynamical stellar masses derived from disks around three M-stars (FP Tau, J0432+1827, and J1100-7619) using ALMA observations of $^{12}$CO (J=2--1) and $^{13}$CO (J=2--1) emission. These are the first dynamical stellar mass measurements for J0432+1827 and J1100-7619 and the most precise measurement for FP Tau. Fiducial stellar evolutionary model tracks, which do not include any treatment of magnetic activity, agree with the dynamical measurement of J0432+1827 but underpredict the mass by $\sim$60\% for FP Tau and $\sim$80\% for J1100-7619. Possible explanations for the underpredictions include inaccurate assumptions of stellar effective temperature, undetected binarity for J1100-7619, and that fiducial stellar evolutionary models are not complex enough to represent these stars. In the former case, the stellar effective temperatures would need to be increased by $\sim$40K to $\sim$340K to reconcile the fiducial model predictions with the dynamically-measured masses. In the latter case, we show that the dynamical masses can be reproduced using results from stellar evolutionary models with starspots, which incorporate fractional starspot coverage to represent the manifestation of magnetic activity. Folding in low-mass M-stars from the literature and assuming that the stellar effective temperatures are imprecise but accurate, we find tentative evidence of a relationship between fractional starspot coverage and observed effective temperature for these young, cool stars.
Understanding the physical processes involved in interfacial heat transfer is critical for the interpretation of thermometric measurements and the optimization of heat dissipation in nanoelectronic devices that are based on transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors. We model the phononic and electronic contributions to the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) variability for the MoS$_{2}$-SiO$_{2}$ and WS$_{2}$-SiO$_{2}$ interface. A phenomenological theory to model diffuse phonon transport at disordered interfaces is introduced and yields $G$=13.5 and 12.4 MW/K/m$^{2}$ at 300 K for the MoS$_{2}$-SiO$_{2}$ and WS$_{2}$-SiO$_{2} $ interface, respectively. We compare its predictions to those of the coherent phonon model and find that the former fits the MoS$_{2}$-SiO$_{2}$ data from experiments and simulations significantly better. Our analysis suggests that heat dissipation at the TMD-SiO$_{2}$ interface is dominated by phonons scattered diffusely by the rough interface although the electronic TBC contribution can be significant even at low electron densities ($n\leq10^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$) and may explain some of the variation in the experimental TBC data from the literature. The physical insights from our study can be useful for the development of thermally aware designs in TMD-based nanoelectronics.
Large-scale finite element simulations of complex physical systems governed by partial differential equations crucially depend on adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to allocate computational budget to regions where higher resolution is required. Existing scalable AMR methods make heuristic refinement decisions based on instantaneous error estimation and thus do not aim for long-term optimality over an entire simulation. We propose a novel formulation of AMR as a Markov decision process and apply deep reinforcement learning (RL) to train refinement policies directly from simulation. AMR poses a new problem for RL in that both the state dimension and available action set changes at every step, which we solve by proposing new policy architectures with differing generality and inductive bias. The model sizes of these policy architectures are independent of the mesh size and hence scale to arbitrarily large and complex simulations. We demonstrate in comprehensive experiments on static function estimation and the advection of different fields that RL policies can be competitive with a widely-used error estimator and generalize to larger, more complex, and unseen test problems.
We investigate wave-vortex interaction emerging from an expanding compact vortex cluster in a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate. We adapt techniques developed for compact gravitational objects to derive the characteristic modes of the wave-vortex interaction perturbatively around an effective vortex flow field. We demonstrate the existence of orbits or sound-rings, in analogy to gravitational light-rings, and compute the characteristic spectrum for the out-of-equilibrium vortex cluster. The spectrum obtained from numerical simulations of a stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation exhibiting an expanding vortex cluster is in excellent agreement with analytical predictions. Our findings are relevant for 2d-quantum turbulence, the semi-classical limit around fluid flows, and rotating compact objects exhibiting discrete circulation.
A $C^*$-algebra satisfies the Universal Coefficient Theorem (UCT) of Rosenberg and Schochet if it is equivalent in Kasparov's $KK$-theory to a commutative $C^*$-algebra. This paper is motivated by the problem of establishing the range of validity of the UCT, and in particular, whether the UCT holds for all nuclear $C^*$-algebras. We introduce the idea of a $C^*$-algebra that "decomposes" over a class $\mathcal{C}$ of $C^*$-algebras. Roughly, this means that locally, there are approximately central elements that approximately cut the $C^*$-algebra into two $C^*$-subalgebras from $\mathcal{C}$ that have well-behaved intersection. We show that if a $C^*$-algebra decomposes over the class of nuclear, UCT $C^*$-algebras, then it satisfies the UCT. The argument is based on controlled $KK$-theory, as introduced by the authors in earlier work. Nuclearity is used via Kasparov's Hilbert module version of Voiculescu's theorem, and Haagerup's theorem that nuclear $C^*$-algebras are amenable We say that a $C^*$-algebra has finite complexity if it is in the smallest class of $C^*$-algebras containing the finite-dimensional $C^*$-algebras, and closed under decomposability; our main result implies that all $C^*$-algebras in this class satisfy the UCT. The class of $C^*$-algebras with finite complexity is large, and comes with an ordinal-number invariant measuring the complexity level. We conjecture that a $C^*$-algebra of finite nuclear dimension and real rank zero has finite complexity; this (and several other related conjectures) would imply the UCT for all separable nuclear $C^*$-algebras. We also give new local formulations of the UCT, and some other necessary and sufficient conditions for the UCT to hold for all nuclear $C^*$-algebras.
How to effectively remove the noise while preserving the image structure features is a challenging issue in the field of image denoising. In recent years, fractional PDE based methods have attracted more and more research efforts due to the ability to balance the noise removal and the preservation of image edges and textures. Among the existing fractional PDE algorithms, there are only a few using spatial fractional order derivatives, and all the fractional derivatives involved are one-sided derivatives. In this paper, an efficient feature-preserving fractional PDE algorithm is proposed for image denoising based on a nonlinear spatial-fractional anisotropic diffusion equation. Two-sided Grumwald-Letnikov fractional derivatives were used in the PDE model which are suitable to depict the local self-similarity of images. The Short Memory Principle is employed to simplify the approximation scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed method is of a satisfactory performance, i.e. it keeps a remarkable balance between noise removal and feature preserving, and has an extremely high structural retention property.
The electronic and superconducting properties of Fe1-xSe single-crystal flakes grown hydrothermally are studied by the transport measurements under zero and high magnetic fields up to 38.5 T. The results contrast sharply with those previously reported for nematically ordered FeSe by chemical-vapor-transport (CVT) growth. No signature of the electronic nematicity, but an evident metal-to-nonmetal crossover with increasing temperature, is detected in the normal state of the present hydrothermal samples. Interestingly, a higher superconducting critical temperature Tc of 13.2 K is observed compared to a suppressed Tc of 9 K in the presence of the nematicity in the CVT FeSe. Moreover, the upper critical field in the zero-temperature limit is found to be isotropic with respect to the field direction and to reach a higher value of ~42 T, which breaks the Pauli limit by a factor of 1.8.
We establish limit laws for the distribution in small intervals of the roots of the quadratic congruence $\mu^2 \equiv D \bmod m$, with $D > 0$ square-free and $D\not\equiv 1 \bmod 4$. This is achieved by translating the problem to convergence of certain geodesic random line processes in the hyperbolic plane. This geometric interpretation allows us in particular to derive an explicit expression for the pair correlation density of the roots.
Cathodes are critical components of rechargeable batteries. Conventionally, the search for cathode materials relies on experimental trial-and-error and a traversing of existing computational/experimental databases. While these methods have led to the discovery of several commercially-viable cathode materials, the chemical space explored so far is limited and many phases will have been overlooked, in particular those that are metastable. We describe a computational framework for battery cathode exploration, based on ab initio random structure searching (AIRSS), an approach that samples local minima on the potential energy surface to identify new crystal structures. We show that, by delimiting the search space using a number of constraints, including chemically aware minimum interatomic separations, cell volumes, and space group symmetries, AIRSS can efficiently predict both thermodynamically stable and metastable cathode materials. Specifically, we investigate LiCoO2, LiFePO4, and LixCuyFz to demonstrate the efficiency of the method by rediscovering the known crystal structures of these cathode materials. The effect of parameters, such as minimum separations and symmetries, on the efficiency of the sampling is discussed in detail. The adaptation of the minimum interatomic distances, on a species-pair basis, from low-energy optimized structures to efficiently capture the local coordination environment of atoms, is explored. A family of novel cathode materials based, on the transition-metal oxalates,is proposed. They demonstrate superb energy density, oxygen-redox stability, and lithium diffusion properties. This article serves both as an introduction to the computational framework, and as a guide to battery cathode material discovery using AIRSS.
For a given Finsler-Minkowski norm $\mathcal{F}$ in $\mathbb{R}^N$ and a bounded smooth domain $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^N$ $\big(N\geq 2\big)$, we establish the following weighted anisotropic Sobolev inequality $$ S\left(\int_{\Omega}|u|^q f\,dx\right)^\frac{1}{q}\leq\left(\int_{\Omega}\mathcal{F}(\nabla u)^p w\,dx\right)^\frac{1}{p},\quad\forall\,u\in W_0^{1,p}(\Omega,w)\leqno{\mathcal{(P)}} $$ where $W_0^{1,p}(\Omega,w)$ is the weighted Sobolev space under a class of $p$-admissible weights $w$, where $f$ is some nonnegative integrable function in $\Omega$. We discuss the case $0<q<1$ and observe that $$ \mu(\Omega):=\inf_{u\in W_{0}^{1,p}(\Omega,w)}\Bigg\{\int_{\Omega}\mathcal{F}(\nabla u)^p w\,dx:\int_{\Omega}|u|^{q}f\,dx=1\Bigg\}\leqno{\mathcal{(Q)}} $$ is associated with singular weighted anisotropic $p$-Laplace equations. To this end, we also study existence and regularity properties of solutions for weighted anisotropic $p$-Laplace equations under the mixed and exponential singularities.
Neural network (NN) training and generalization in the infinite-width limit are well-characterized by kernel methods with a neural tangent kernel (NTK) that is stationary in time. However, finite-width NNs consistently outperform corresponding kernel methods, suggesting the importance of feature learning, which manifests as the time evolution of NTKs. Here, we analyze the phenomenon of kernel alignment of the NTK with the target functions during gradient descent. We first provide a mechanistic explanation for why alignment between task and kernel occurs in deep linear networks. We then show that this behavior occurs more generally if one optimizes the feature map over time to accelerate learning while constraining how quickly the features evolve. Empirically, gradient descent undergoes a feature learning phase, during which top eigenfunctions of the NTK quickly align with the target function and the loss decreases faster than power law in time; it then enters a kernel gradient descent (KGD) phase where the alignment does not improve significantly and the training loss decreases in power law. We show that feature evolution is faster and more dramatic in deeper networks. We also found that networks with multiple output nodes develop separate, specialized kernels for each output channel, a phenomenon we termed kernel specialization. We show that this class-specific alignment is does not occur in linear networks.
Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a generalized q-Weyl algebra, it is generated by $u,v,Z,Z^{-1}$ with relations $ZuZ^{-1}=q^2u$, $ZvZ^{-1}=q^{-2}v$, $uv=P(q^{-1}Z)$, $vu=P(qZ)$, where $P$ is a Laurent polynomial. A Hermitian form $(\cdot,\cdot)$ on $\mathcal{A}$ is called invariant if $(Za,b)=(a,bZ^{-1})$, $(ua,b)=(a,sbv)$, $(va,b)=(a,s^{-1}bu)$ for some $s\in \mathbb{C}$ with $|s|=1$ and all $a,b\in \mathcal{A}$. In this paper we classify positive definite invariant Hermitian forms on generalized q-Weyl algebras.
Forest roads in Romania are unique natural wildlife sites used for recreation by countless tourists. In order to protect and maintain these roads, we propose RovisLab AMTU (Autonomous Mobile Test Unit), which is a robotic system designed to autonomously navigate off-road terrain and inspect if any deforestation or damage occurred along tracked route. AMTU's core component is its embedded vision module, optimized for real-time environment perception. For achieving a high computation speed, we use a learning system to train a multi-task Deep Neural Network (DNN) for scene and instance segmentation of objects, while the keypoints required for simultaneous localization and mapping are calculated using a handcrafted FAST feature detector and the Lucas-Kanade tracking algorithm. Both the DNN and the handcrafted backbone are run in parallel on the GPU of an NVIDIA AGX Xavier board. We show experimental results on the test track of our research facility.
Tokenization is fundamental to pretrained language models (PLMs). Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs typically treat each character as an indivisible token. However, they ignore the unique feature of the Chinese writing system where additional linguistic information exists below the character level, i.e., at the sub-character level. To utilize such information, we propose sub-character (SubChar for short) tokenization. Specifically, we first encode the input text by converting each Chinese character into a short sequence based on its glyph or pronunciation, and then construct the vocabulary based on the encoded text with sub-word tokenization. Experimental results show that SubChar tokenizers have two main advantages over existing tokenizers: 1) They can tokenize inputs into much shorter sequences, thus improving the computational efficiency. 2) Pronunciation-based SubChar tokenizers can encode Chinese homophones into the same transliteration sequences and produce the same tokenization output, hence being robust to all homophone typos. At the same time, models trained with SubChar tokenizers perform competitively on downstream tasks. We release our code at https://github.com/thunlp/SubCharTokenization to facilitate future work.
Space weather phenomena such as solar flares, have massive destructive power when reaches certain amount of magnitude. Such high magnitude solar flare event can interfere space-earth radio communications and neutralize space-earth electronics equipment. In the current study, we explorer the deep learning approach to build a solar flare forecasting model and examine its limitations along with the ability of features extraction, based on the available time-series data. For that purpose, we present a multi-layer 1D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to forecast solar flare events probability occurrence of M and X classes at 1,3,6,12,24,48,72,96 hours time frame. In order to train and evaluate the performance of the model, we utilised the available Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) X-ray time series data, ranged between July 1998 and January 2019, covering almost entirely the solar cycles 23 and 24. The forecasting model were trained and evaluated in two different scenarios (1) random selection and (2) chronological selection, which were compare afterward. Moreover we compare our results to those considered as state-of-the-art flare forecasting models, both with similar approaches and different ones.The majority of the results indicates that (1) chronological selection obtain a degradation factor of 3\% versus the random selection for the M class model and elevation factor of 2\% for the X class model. (2) When consider utilizing only X-ray time-series data, the suggested model achieve high score results compare to other studies. (3) The suggested model combined with solely X-ray time-series fails to distinguish between M class magnitude and X class magnitude solar flare events. All source code are available at https://github.com/vladlanda/Low-Dimensional-Convolutional-Neural-Network-For-Solar-Flares-GOES-Time-Series-Classification
Powerful new, high resolution, high sensitivity, multi-frequency, wide-field radio surveys such as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) are emerging. They will offer fresh opportunities to undertake new determinations of useful parameters for various kinds of extended astrophysical phenomena. Here, we consider specific application to angular size determinations of Planetary Nebulae (PNe) via a new radio continuum Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) fitting technique. We show that robust determinations of angular size can be obtained, comparable to the best optical and radio observations but with the potential for consistent application across the population. This includes unresolved and/or heavily obscured PNe that are extremely faint or even non-detectable in the optical.
Plant reflectance spectra - the profile of light reflected by leaves across different wavelengths - supply the spectral signature for a species at a spatial location to enable estimation of functional and taxonomic diversity for plants. We consider leaf spectra as "responses" to be explained spatially. These spectra/reflectances are functions over a wavelength band that respond to the environment. Our motivating data are gathered for several families from the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) in South Africa and lead us to develop rich novel spatial models that can explain spectra for genera within families. Wavelength responses for an individual leaf are viewed as a function of wavelength, leading to functional data modeling. Local environmental features become covariates. We introduce wavelength - covariate interaction since the response to environmental regressors may vary with wavelength, so may variance. Formal spatial modeling enables prediction of reflectances for genera at unobserved locations with known environmental features. We incorporate spatial dependence, wavelength dependence, and space-wavelength interaction (in the spirit of space-time interaction). We implement out-of-sample validation to select a best model, discovering that the model features listed above are all informative for the functional data analysis. We then supply interpretation of the results under the selected model.
Using the Yebes 40m and IRAM 30m radiotelescopes, we detected two series of harmonically related lines in space that can be fitted to a symmetric rotor. The lines have been seen towards the cold dense cores TMC-1, L483, L1527, and L1544. High level of theory ab initio calculations indicate that the best possible candidate is the acetyl cation, CH3CO+, which is the most stable product resulting from the protonation of ketene. We have produced this species in the laboratory and observed its rotational transitions Ju = 10 up to Ju = 27. Hence, we report the discovery of CH3CO+ in space based on our observations, theoretical calculations, and laboratory experiments. The derived rotational and distortion constants allow us to predict the spectrum of CH3CO+ with high accuracy up to 500 GHz. We derive an abundance ratio N(H2CCO)/N(CH3CO+) = 44. The high abundance of the protonated form of H2CCO is due to the high proton affinity of the neutral species. The other isomer, H2CCOH+, is found to be 178.9 kJ/mol above CH3CO+. The observed intensity ratio between the K=0 and K=1 lines, 2.2, strongly suggests that the A and E symmetry states have suffered interconversion processes due to collisions with H and/or H2, or during their formation through the reaction of H3+ with H2CCO.
Modular symmetry offers the possibility to provide an origin of discrete flavour symmetry and to break it along particular symmetry preserving directions without introducing flavons or driving fields. It is also possible to use a weighton field to account for charged fermion mass hierarchies rather than a Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism. Such an approach can be applied to flavoured Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) which can be greatly simplified using modular forms. As an example, we consider a modular version of a previously proposed $S_4\times SU(5)$ GUT, with Gatto-Sartori-Tonin and Georgi-Jarlskog relations, in which all flavons and driving fields are removed, with their effect replaced by modular forms with moduli assumed to be at various fixed points, rendering the theory much simpler. In the neutrino sector there are two right-handed neutrinos constituting a Littlest Seesaw model satisfying Constrained Sequential Dominance (CSD) where the two columns of the Dirac neutrino mass matrix are proportional to $(0,1, -1)$ and $(1, n, 2-n)$ respectively, and $n=1+\sqrt{6}\approx 3.45$ is prescribed by the modular symmetry, with predictions subject to charged lepton mixing corrections. We perform a numerical analysis, showing quark and lepton mass and mixing correlations around the best fit points.
The security of code-based cryptography usually relies on the hardness of the syndrome decoding (SD) problem for the Hamming weight. The best generic algorithms are all improvements of an old algorithm by Prange, and they are known under the name of Information Set Decoding (ISD) algorithms. This work aims to extend ISD algorithms' scope by changing the underlying weight function and alphabet size of SD. More precisely, we show how to use Wagner's algorithm in the ISD framework to solve SD for a wide range of weight functions. We also calculate the asymptotic complexities of ISD algorithms both in the classical and quantum case. We then apply our results to the Lee metric, which currently receives a significant amount of attention. By providing the parameters of SD for which decoding in the Lee weight seems to be the hardest, our study could have several applications for designing code-based cryptosystems and their security analysis, especially against quantum adversaries.
Identifying universal properties of non-equilibrium quantum states is a major challenge in modern physics. A fascinating prediction is that classical hydrodynamics emerges universally in the evolution of any interacting quantum system. Here, we experimentally probe the quantum dynamics of 51 individually controlled ions, realizing a long-range interacting spin chain. By measuring space-time resolved correlation functions in an infinite temperature state, we observe a whole family of hydrodynamic universality classes, ranging from normal diffusion to anomalous superdiffusion, that are described by L\'evy flights. We extract the transport coefficients of the hydrodynamic theory, reflecting the microscopic properties of the system. Our observations demonstrate the potential for engineered quantum systems to provide key insights into universal properties of non-equilibrium states of quantum matter.
We report results from searches for anisotropic stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds using data from the first three observing runs of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. For the first time, we include Virgo data in our analysis and run our search with a new efficient pipeline called {\tt PyStoch} on data folded over one sidereal day. We use gravitational-wave radiometry (broadband and narrow band) to produce sky maps of stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and to search for gravitational waves from point sources. A spherical harmonic decomposition method is employed to look for gravitational-wave emission from spatially-extended sources. Neither technique found evidence of gravitational-wave signals. Hence we derive 95\% confidence-level upper limit sky maps on the gravitational-wave energy flux from broadband point sources, ranging from $F_{\alpha, \Theta} < {\rm (0.013 - 7.6)} \times 10^{-8} {\rm erg \, cm^{-2} \, s^{-1} \, Hz^{-1}},$ and on the (normalized) gravitational-wave energy density spectrum from extended sources, ranging from $\Omega_{\alpha, \Theta} < {\rm (0.57 - 9.3)} \times 10^{-9} \, {\rm sr^{-1}}$, depending on direction ($\Theta$) and spectral index ($\alpha$). These limits improve upon previous limits by factors of $2.9 - 3.5$. We also set 95\% confidence level upper limits on the frequency-dependent strain amplitudes of quasimonochromatic gravitational waves coming from three interesting targets, Scorpius X-1, SN 1987A and the Galactic Center, with best upper limits range from $h_0 < {\rm (1.7-2.1)} \times 10^{-25},$ a factor of $\geq 2.0$ improvement compared to previous stochastic radiometer searches.
Advances in differentiable numerical integrators have enabled the use of gradient descent techniques to learn ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In the context of machine learning, differentiable solvers are central for Neural ODEs (NODEs), a class of deep learning models with continuous depth, rather than discrete layers. However, these integrators can be unsatisfactorily slow and inaccurate when learning systems of ODEs from long sequences, or when solutions of the system vary at widely different timescales in each dimension. In this paper we propose an alternative approach to learning ODEs from data: we represent the underlying ODE as a vector field that is related to another base vector field by a differentiable bijection, modelled by an invertible neural network. By restricting the base ODE to be amenable to integration, we can drastically speed up and improve the robustness of integration. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method in training and evaluating continuous neural networks models, as well as in learning benchmark ODE systems. We observe improvements of up to two orders of magnitude when integrating learned ODEs with GPUs computation.
We examine the structure of global conformal multiplets in 2D celestial CFT. For a 4D bulk theory containing massless particles of spin $s=\{0,\frac{1}{2},1,\frac{3}{2},2\}$ we classify and construct all SL(2,$\mathbb{C}$) primary descendants which are organized into 'celestial diamonds'. This explicit construction is achieved using a wavefunction-based approach that allows us to map 4D scattering amplitudes to celestial CFT correlators of operators with SL(2,$\mathbb{C}$) conformal dimension $\Delta$ and spin $J$. Radiative conformal primary wavefunctions have $J=\pm s$ and give rise to conformally soft theorems for special values of $\Delta \in \frac{1}{2}\mathbb{Z}$. They are located either at the top of celestial diamonds, where they descend to trivial null primaries, or at the left and right corners, where they descend both to and from generalized conformal primary wavefunctions which have $|J|\leq s$. Celestial diamonds naturally incorporate degeneracies of opposite helicity particles via the 2D shadow transform relating radiative primaries and account for the global and asymptotic symmetries in gauge theory and gravity.
Many studies on machine learning (ML) for computer-aided diagnosis have so far been mostly restricted to high-quality research data. Clinical data warehouses, gathering routine examinations from hospitals, offer great promises for training and validation of ML models in a realistic setting. However, the use of such clinical data warehouses requires quality control (QC) tools. Visual QC by experts is time-consuming and does not scale to large datasets. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the automatic QC of 3D T1-weighted brain MRI for a large heterogeneous clinical data warehouse. To that purpose, we used the data warehouse of the hospitals of the Greater Paris area (Assistance Publique-H\^opitaux de Paris [AP-HP]). Specifically, the objectives were: 1) to identify images which are not proper T1-weighted brain MRIs; 2) to identify acquisitions for which gadolinium was injected; 3) to rate the overall image quality. We used 5000 images for training and validation and a separate set of 500 images for testing. In order to train/validate the CNN, the data were annotated by two trained raters according to a visual QC protocol that we specifically designed for application in the setting of a data warehouse. For objectives 1 and 2, our approach achieved excellent accuracy (balanced accuracy and F1-score \textgreater 90\%), similar to the human raters. For objective 3, the performance was good but substantially lower than that of human raters. Nevertheless, the automatic approach accurately identified (balanced accuracy and F1-score \textgreater 80\%) low quality images, which would typically need to be excluded. Overall, our approach shall be useful for exploiting hospital data warehouses in medical image computing.
Although depth extraction with passive sensors has seen remarkable improvement with deep learning, these approaches may fail to obtain correct depth if they are exposed to environments not observed during training. Online adaptation, where the neural network trains while deployed, with unsupervised learning provides a convenient solution. However, online adaptation causes a neural network to forget the past. Thus, past training is wasted and the network is not able to provide good results if it observes past scenes. This work deals with practical online-adaptation where the input is online and temporally-correlated, and training is completely unsupervised. Regularization and replay-based methods without task boundaries are proposed to avoid catastrophic forgetting while adapting to online data. Experiments are performed on different datasets with both structure-from-motion and stereo. Results of forgetting as well as adaptation are provided, which are superior to recent methods. The proposed approach is more inline with the artificial general intelligence paradigm as the neural network learns the scene where it is deployed without any supervision (target labels and tasks) and without forgetting about the past. Code is available at github.com/umarKarim/cou_stereo and github.com/umarKarim/cou_sfm.
Consider the setting where there are B>1 candidate statistical models, and one is interested in model selection. Two common approaches to solve this problem are to select a single model or to combine the candidate models through model averaging. Instead, we select a subset of the combined parameter space associated with the models. Specifically, a model averaging perspective is used to increase the parameter space, and a model selection criterion is used to select a subset of this expanded parameter space. We account for the variability of the criterion by adapting Yekutieli (2012)'s method to Bayesian model averaging (BMA). Yekutieli (2012)'s method treats model selection as a truncation problem. We truncate the joint support of the data and the parameter space to only include small values of the covariance penalized error (CPE) criterion. The CPE is a general expression that contains several information criteria as special cases. Simulation results show that as long as the truncated set does not have near zero probability, we tend to obtain lower mean squared error than BMA. Additional theoretical results are provided that provide the foundation for these observations. We apply our approach to a dataset consisting of American Community Survey (ACS) period estimates to illustrate that this perspective can lead to improvements of a single model.
Deep learning classifiers are now known to have flaws in the representations of their class. Adversarial attacks can find a human-imperceptible perturbation for a given image that will mislead a trained model. The most effective methods to defend against such attacks trains on generated adversarial examples to learn their distribution. Previous work aimed to align original and adversarial image representations in the same way as domain adaptation to improve robustness. Yet, they partially align the representations using approaches that do not reflect the geometry of space and distribution. In addition, it is difficult to accurately compare robustness between defended models. Until now, they have been evaluated using a fixed perturbation size. However, defended models may react differently to variations of this perturbation size. In this paper, the analogy of domain adaptation is taken a step further by exploiting optimal transport theory. We propose to use a loss between distributions that faithfully reflect the ground distance. This leads to SAT (Sinkhorn Adversarial Training), a more robust defense against adversarial attacks. Then, we propose to quantify more precisely the robustness of a model to adversarial attacks over a wide range of perturbation sizes using a different metric, the Area Under the Accuracy Curve (AUAC). We perform extensive experiments on both CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets and show that our defense is globally more robust than the state-of-the-art.
As governments around the world decide to deploy digital health passports as a tool to curb the spread of Covid-19, it becomes increasingly important to consider how these can be constructed with privacy-by-design. In this paper we discuss the privacy and security issues of common approaches for constructing digital health passports. We then show how to construct, and deploy, secure and private digital health passports, in a simple and efficient manner. We do so by using a protocol for distributed password-based token issuance, secret sharing and by leveraging modern smart phones' secure hardware. Our solution only requires a constant amount of asymmetric cryptographic operations and a single round of communication between the user and the party verifying the user's digital health passport, and only two rounds between the user and the server issuing the digital health passport.
According to Freud "words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power". By words, behaviors are transformed and problems are solved. The way we use words reveals our intentions, goals and values. Novel tools for text analysis help understand the magical power of words. This power is multiplied, if it is combined with the study of social networks, i.e. with the analysis of relationships among social units. This special issue of the International Journal of Information Management, entitled "Combining Social Network Analysis and Text Mining: from Theory to Practice", includes heterogeneous and innovative research at the nexus of text mining and social network analysis. It aims to enrich work at the intersection of these fields, which still lags behind in theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations. The nine articles accepted for inclusion in this special issue all present methods and tools that have business applications. They are summarized in this editorial introduction.
Neural networks for stock price prediction(NNSPP) have been popular for decades. However, most of its study results remain in the research paper and cannot truly play a role in the securities market. One of the main reasons leading to this situation is that the prediction error(PE) based evaluation results have statistical flaws. Its prediction results cannot represent the most critical financial direction attributes. So it cannot provide investors with convincing, interpretable, and consistent model performance evaluation results for practical applications in the securities market. To illustrate, we have used data selected from 20 stock datasets over six years from the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market in China, and 20 stock datasets from NASDAQ and NYSE in the USA. We implement six shallow and deep neural networks to predict stock prices and use four prediction error measures for evaluation. The results show that the prediction error value only partially reflects the model accuracy of the stock price prediction, and cannot reflect the change in the direction of the model predicted stock price. This characteristic determines that PE is not suitable as an evaluation indicator of NNSPP. Otherwise, it will bring huge potential risks to investors. Therefore, this paper establishes an experiment platform to confirm that the PE method is not suitable for the NNSPP evaluation, and provides a theoretical basis for the necessity of creating a new NNSPP evaluation method in the future.
The Radar Echo Telescope for Cosmic Rays (RET-CR) is a recently initiated experiment designed to detect the englacial cascade of a cosmic-ray initiated air shower via in-ice radar, toward the goal of a full-scale, next-generation experiment to detect ultra high energy neutrinos in polar ice. For cosmic rays with a primary energy greater than 10 PeV, roughly 10% of an air-shower's energy reaches the surface of a high elevation ice-sheet ($\gtrsim$2 km) concentrated into a radius of roughly 10 cm. This penetrating shower core creates an in-ice cascade many orders of magnitude more dense than the preceding in-air cascade. This dense cascade can be detected via the radar echo technique, where transmitted radio is reflected from the ionization deposit left in the wake of the cascade. RET-CR will test the radar echo method in nature, with the in-ice cascade of a cosmic-ray initiated air-shower serving as a test beam. We present the projected event rate and sensitivity based upon a three part simulation using CORSIKA, GEANT4, and RadioScatter. RET-CR expects $\sim$1 radar echo event per day.
The near-infinite chemical diversity of natural and artificial macromolecules arises from the vast range of possible component monomers, linkages, and polymers topologies. This enormous variety contributes to the ubiquity and indispensability of macromolecules but hinders the development of general machine learning methods with macromolecules as input. To address this, we developed GLAMOUR, a framework for chemistry-informed graph representation of macromolecules that enables quantifying structural similarity, and interpretable supervised learning for macromolecules.
Understanding the formation of lead halide (LH) perovskite solution precursors is crucial to gain insight into the evolution of these materials to thin films for solar cells. Using density-functional theory in conjunction with the polarizable continuum model, we investigate 18 complexes with chemical formula PbX$_2$M$_4$, where X = Cl, Br, I and M are common solvent molecules. Through the analysis of structural properties, binding energies, and charge distributions, we clarify the role of halogen species and solvent molecules in the formation of LH perovskite precursors. We find that interatomic distances are critically affected by the halogen species, while the energetic stability is driven by the solvent coordination to the backbones. Regardless of the solvent, lead iodide complexes are more strongly bound than the others. Based on the charge distribution analysis, we find that all solvent molecules bind covalently with the LH backbones and that Pb-I and Pb-Br bonds lose ionicity in solution. Our results contribute to clarify the physical properties of LH perovskite solution precursors and offer a valuable starting point for further investigations on their crystalline intermediates.
We investigate the effect of the population III (Pop III) stars supernova explosion~(SN) on the high redshifts reionization history using the latest Planck data. It is predicted that massive Pop~III stars~($130M_\odot\leq M\leq 270M_\odot$) explode energetically at the end of their stellar life as pair-instability supernovae (PISNe). In the explosion, supernova remnants grow as hot ionized bubbles and enhance the ionization fraction in the early stage of the reionization history. This enhancement affects the optical depth of the cosmic microwave background~(CMB) and generates the additional anisotropy of the CMB polarization on large scales. Therefore, analyzing the Planck polarization data allows us to examine the Pop III star SNe and the abundance of their progenitors, massive Pop III stars. In order to model the SN contribution to reionization, we introduce a new parameter $\zeta$, which relates to the abundance of the SNe to the collapse fraction of the Universe. Using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method with the latest Planck polarization data, we obtain the constraint on our model parameter, $\zeta$. Our constraint tells us that observed CMB polarization is consistent with the abundance of PISNe predicted from the star formation rate and initial mass function of Pop III stars in recent cosmological simulations. We also suggest that combining further observations on the late reionization history such as high redshift quasi-stellar object~(QSO) observations can provide tighter constraints and important information on the nature of Pop III stars.
Neural Networks (NNs) can be used to solve Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations (ODEs and PDEs) by redefining the question as an optimization problem. The objective function to be optimized is the sum of the squares of the PDE to be solved and of the initial/boundary conditions. A feed forward NN is trained to minimise this loss function evaluated on a set of collocation points sampled from the domain where the problem is defined. A compact and smooth solution, that only depends on the weights of the trained NN, is then obtained. This approach is often referred to as PINN, from Physics Informed Neural Network~\cite{raissi2017physics_1, raissi2017physics_2}. Despite the success of the PINN approach in solving various classes of PDEs, an implementation of this idea that is capable of solving a large class of ODEs and PDEs with good accuracy and without the need to finely tune the hyperparameters of the network, is not available yet. In this paper, we introduce a new implementation of this concept - called dNNsolve - that makes use of dual Neural Networks to solve ODEs/PDEs. These include: i) sine and sigmoidal activation functions, that provide a more efficient basis to capture both secular and periodic patterns in the solutions; ii) a newly designed architecture, that makes it easy for the the NN to approximate the solution using the basis functions mentioned above. We show that dNNsolve is capable of solving a broad range of ODEs/PDEs in 1, 2 and 3 spacetime dimensions, without the need of hyperparameter fine-tuning.
In the status quo, dementia is yet to be cured. Precise diagnosis prior to the onset of the symptoms can prevent the rapid progression of the emerging cognitive impairment. Recent progress has shown that Electroencephalography (EEG) is the promising and cost-effective test to facilitate the detection of neurocognitive disorders. However, most of the existing works have been using only resting-state EEG. The efficiencies of EEG signals from various cognitive tasks, for dementia classification, have yet to be thoroughly investigated. In this study, we designed four cognitive tasks that engage different cognitive performances: attention, working memory, and executive function. We investigated these tasks by using statistical analysis on both time and frequency domains of EEG signals from three classes of human subjects: Dementia (DEM), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Normal Control (NC). We also further evaluated the classification performances of two features extraction methods: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Filter Bank Common Spatial Pattern (FBCSP). We found that the working memory related tasks yielded good performances for dementia recognition in both cases using PCA and FBCSP. Moreover, FBCSP with features combination from four tasks revealed the best sensitivity of 0.87 and the specificity of 0.80. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that concurrently investigated several cognitive tasks for dementia recognition using both statistical analysis and classification scores. Our results yielded essential information to design and aid in conducting further experimental tasks to early diagnose dementia patients.
Frailty models are survival analysis models which account for heterogeneity and random effects in the data. In these models, the random effect (the frailty) is assumed to have a multiplicative effect on the hazard. In this paper, we present frailty models using phase-type distributions as the frailties. We explore the properties of the proposed frailty models and derive expectation-maximization algorithms for maximum-likelihood estimation. The algorithms' performance is illustrated in several numerical examples of practical significance.
Is it possible to use convolutional neural networks pre-trained without any natural images to assist natural image understanding? The paper proposes a novel concept, Formula-driven Supervised Learning. We automatically generate image patterns and their category labels by assigning fractals, which are based on a natural law existing in the background knowledge of the real world. Theoretically, the use of automatically generated images instead of natural images in the pre-training phase allows us to generate an infinite scale dataset of labeled images. Although the models pre-trained with the proposed Fractal DataBase (FractalDB), a database without natural images, does not necessarily outperform models pre-trained with human annotated datasets at all settings, we are able to partially surpass the accuracy of ImageNet/Places pre-trained models. The image representation with the proposed FractalDB captures a unique feature in the visualization of convolutional layers and attentions.
Node classification and link prediction are widely studied in graph representation learning. While both transductive node classification and link prediction operate over a single input graph, they have so far been studied separately. Node classification models take an input graph with node features and incomplete node labels, and implicitly assume that the graph is relationally complete, i.e., no edges are missing. By contrast, link prediction models are solely motivated by relational incompleteness of the input graphs, and do not typically leverage node features or classes. We propose a unifying perspective and study the problems of (i) transductive node classification over incomplete graphs and (ii) link prediction over graphs with node features, introduce a new dataset for this setting, WikiAlumni, and conduct an extensive benchmarking study.
Fourier phase retrieval is the problem of reconstructing a signal given only the magnitude of its Fourier transformation. Optimization-based approaches, like the well-established Gerchberg-Saxton or the hybrid input output algorithm, struggle at reconstructing images from magnitudes that are not oversampled. This motivates the application of learned methods, which allow reconstruction from non-oversampled magnitude measurements after a learning phase. In this paper, we want to push the limits of these learned methods by means of a deep neural network cascade that reconstructs the image successively on different resolutions from its non-oversampled Fourier magnitude. We evaluate our method on four different datasets (MNIST, EMNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and KMNIST) and demonstrate that it yields improved performance over other non-iterative methods and optimization-based methods.
Let $(R,\frak m)$ be a Noetherian local ring of prime characteristic $p>0$, and $t$ an integer such that $H_{\frak m}^j(R)/0^F_{H^j_{\frak m}(R)}$ has finite length for all $j<t$. The aim of this paper is to show that there exists an uniform bound for Frobenius test exponents of ideals generated by filter regular sequences of length at most $t$.