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Fluctuations of the glacier calving front have an important influence over the ice flow of whole glacier systems. It is therefore important to precisely monitor the position of the calving front. However, the manual delineation of SAR images is a difficult, laborious and subjective task. Convolutional neural networks have previously shown promising results in automating the glacier segmentation in SAR images, making them desirable for further exploration of their possibilities. In this work, we propose to compute uncertainty and use it in an Uncertainty Optimization regime as a novel two-stage process. By using dropout as a random sampling layer in a U-Net architecture, we create a probabilistic Bayesian Neural Network. With several forward passes, we create a sampling distribution, which can estimate the model uncertainty for each pixel in the segmentation mask. The additional uncertainty map information can serve as a guideline for the experts in the manual annotation of the data. Furthermore, feeding the uncertainty map to the network leads to 95.24% Dice similarity, which is an overall improvement in the segmentation performance compared to the state-of-the-art deterministic U-Net-based glacier segmentation pipelines.
We study nested variational inequalities, which are variational inequalities whose feasible set is the solution set of another variational inequality. We present a projected averaging Tikhonov algorithm requiring the weakest conditions in the literature to guarantee the convergence to solutions of the nested variational inequality. Specifically, we only need monotonicity of the upper- and the lower-level variational inequalities. Also, we provide the first complexity analysis for nested variational inequalities considering optimality of both the upper- and lower-level.
Evolving trees arise in many real-life scenarios from computer file systems and dynamic call graphs, to fake news propagation and disease spread. Most layout algorithms for static trees, however, do not work well in an evolving setting (e.g., they are not designed to be stable between time steps). Dynamic graph layout algorithms are better suited to this task, although they often introduce unnecessary edge crossings. With this in mind we propose two methods for visualizing evolving trees that guarantee no edge crossings, while optimizing (1) desired edge length realization, (2) layout compactness, and (3) stability. We evaluate the two new methods, along with four prior approaches (two static and two dynamic), on real-world datasets using quantitative metrics: stress, desired edge length realization, layout compactness, stability, and running time. The new methods are fully functional and available on github.
We discuss a remarkable correspondence between the description of Black Holes as highly occupied condensates of $N$ weakly interacting gravitons and that of Color Glass Condensates (CGCs) as highly occupied gluon states. In both cases, the dynamics of "wee partons" in Regge asymptotics is controlled by emergent semi-hard scales that lead to perturbative unitarization and classicalization of $2\rightarrow N$ particle amplitudes at weak coupling. In particular, they attain a maximal entropy permitted by unitarity, bounded by the inverse coupling $\alpha$ of the respective constituents. Strikingly, this entropy is equal to the area measured in units of the Goldstone constant corresponding to the spontaneous breaking of Poincar{\'{e}} symmetry by the corresponding graviton or gluon condensate. In gravity, the Goldstone constant is the Planck scale, and gives rise to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. Likewise, in the CGC, the corresponding Goldstone scale is determined by the onset of gluon screening. We point to further similarities in Black Hole formation, thermalization and decay, to that of the Glasma matter formed from colliding CGCs in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions, which decays into a Quark-Gluon Plasma.
In this study, we present the ro-vibrationally resolved gas-phase spectrum of the diatomic molecule TiO around 1000\,cm$^{-1}$. Molecules were produced in a laser ablation source by vaporizing a pure titanium sample in the atmosphere of gaseous nitrous oxide. Adiabatically expanded gas, containing TiO, formed a supersonic jet and was probed perpendicularly to its propagation by infrared radiation from quantum cascade lasers. Fundamental bands of $^{46-50}$TiO and vibrational hotbands of $^{48}$TiO are identified and analyzed. In a mass-independent fitting procedure combining the new infrared data with pure rotational and electronic transitions from the literature, a Dunham-like parameterization is obtained. From the present data set, the multi-isotopic analysis allows to determine the spin-rotation coupling constant $\gamma$ and the Born-Oppenheimer correction coefficient $\Delta_{\rm U_{10}}^{\mathrm{Ti}}$ for the first time. The parameter set enables to calculate the Born-Oppenheimer correction coefficients $\Delta_{\rm U_{02}}^{\mathrm{Ti}}$ and $\Delta_{\rm U_{02}}^{\mathrm{O}}$. In addition, the vibrational transition moments for the observed vibrational transitions are reported.
Most real world applications require dealing with stochasticity like sensor noise or predictive uncertainty, where formal specifications of desired behavior are inherently probabilistic. Despite the promise of formal verification in ensuring the reliability of neural networks, progress in the direction of probabilistic specifications has been limited. In this direction, we first introduce a general formulation of probabilistic specifications for neural networks, which captures both probabilistic networks (e.g., Bayesian neural networks, MC-Dropout networks) and uncertain inputs (distributions over inputs arising from sensor noise or other perturbations). We then propose a general technique to verify such specifications by generalizing the notion of Lagrangian duality, replacing standard Lagrangian multipliers with "functional multipliers" that can be arbitrary functions of the activations at a given layer. We show that an optimal choice of functional multipliers leads to exact verification (i.e., sound and complete verification), and for specific forms of multipliers, we develop tractable practical verification algorithms. We empirically validate our algorithms by applying them to Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) and MC Dropout Networks, and certifying properties such as adversarial robustness and robust detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) data. On these tasks we are able to provide significantly stronger guarantees when compared to prior work -- for instance, for a VGG-64 MC-Dropout CNN trained on CIFAR-10, we improve the certified AUC (a verified lower bound on the true AUC) for robust OOD detection (on CIFAR-100) from $0\% \rightarrow 29\%$. Similarly, for a BNN trained on MNIST, we improve on the robust accuracy from $60.2\% \rightarrow 74.6\%$. Further, on a novel specification -- distributionally robust OOD detection -- we improve the certified AUC from $5\% \rightarrow 23\%$.
In-situ X-ray diffraction was used to investigate the structural rearrangements during annealing from 77 K up to the crystallization temperature of $\mathit{Cu_{44}Zr_{44}Al_8Hf_2Co_2}$ bulk metallic glass rejuvenated by high pressure torsion performed at cryogenic temperatures and at room temperature. The structural evolution was evaluated by dynamic mechanical analysis as well as by differential scanning calorimetry to determine relaxation dynamics and crystallization behaviour. Using a measure of the configurational entropy calculated from the X-ray pair correlation function the structural footprint of the deformation-induced rejuvenation in bulk metallic glass is revealed. With synchrotron radiation temperature and time resolutions comparable to calorimetric experiments are possible. This opens new experimental possibilities allowing to unambiguously correlate changes in atomic configuration and structure to calorimetrically observed signals and can attribute those to changes of the dynamic and vibrational relaxations in glassy materials. The results confirm that the structural footprint of the $\mathit{\beta}$-transition is related to entropic relaxation with characteristics of a first-order transition. The DMA data shows that in the range of the $\mathit{\beta}$-transition non-reversible structural rearrangements are preferentially activated. The low temperature $\mathit{\gamma}$-transition is mostly triggering reversible deformations and shows a change of slope in the entropic footprint with second order characteristics.
Consider the geometric range space $(X, \mathcal{H}_d)$ where $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and $\mathcal{H}_d$ is the set of ranges defined by $d$-dimensional halfspaces. In this setting we consider that $X$ is the disjoint union of a red and blue set. For each halfspace $h \in \mathcal{H}_d$ define a function $\Phi(h)$ that measures the "difference" between the fraction of red and fraction of blue points which fall in the range $h$. In this context the maximum discrepancy problem is to find the $h^* = \arg \max_{h \in (X, \mathcal{H}_d)} \Phi(h)$. We aim to instead find an $\hat{h}$ such that $\Phi(h^*) - \Phi(\hat{h}) \le \varepsilon$. This is the central problem in linear classification for machine learning, in spatial scan statistics for spatial anomaly detection, and shows up in many other areas. We provide a solution for this problem in $O(|X| + (1/\varepsilon^d) \log^4 (1/\varepsilon))$ time, which improves polynomially over the previous best solutions. For $d=2$ we show that this is nearly tight through conditional lower bounds. For different classes of $\Phi$ we can either provide a $\Omega(|X|^{3/2 - o(1)})$ time lower bound for the exact solution with a reduction to APSP, or an $\Omega(|X| + 1/\varepsilon^{2-o(1)})$ lower bound for the approximate solution with a reduction to 3SUM. A key technical result is a $\varepsilon$-approximate halfspace range counting data structure of size $O(1/\varepsilon^d)$ with $O(\log (1/\varepsilon))$ query time, which we can build in $O(|X| + (1/\varepsilon^d) \log^4 (1/\varepsilon))$ time.
In this paper we study the possibility of having a wormhole (WH) as a candidate for the Sgr A$^\star$ central object and test this idea by constraining their geometry using the motion of S2 star and the reconstructed shadow images. In particular, we consider three WH models, including WHs in Einstein theory, brane-world gravity, and Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell theory. To this end, we have constrained the WH throat using the motion of S2 star and shown that the flare out condition is satisfied. We also consider the accretion of infalling gas model and study the accretion rate and the intensity of the electromagnetic radiation as well as the shadow images.
Motivated by experiments on colloidal membranes composed of chiral rod-like viruses, we use Monte Carlo methods to determine the phase diagram for the liquid crystalline order of the rods and the membrane shape. We generalize the Lebwohl-Lasher model for a nematic with a chiral coupling to a curved surface with edge tension and a resistance to bending, and include an energy cost for tilting of the rods relative to the local membrane normal. The membrane is represented by a triangular mesh of hard beads joined by bonds, where each bead is decorated by a director. The beads can move, the bonds can reconnect and the directors can rotate at each Monte Carlo step. When the cost of tilt is small, the membrane tends to be flat, with the rods only twisting near the edge for low chiral coupling, and remaining parallel to the normal in the interior of the membrane. At high chiral coupling, the rods twist everywhere, forming a cholesteric state. When the cost of tilt is large, the emergence of the cholesteric state at high values of the chiral coupling is accompanied by the bending of the membrane into a saddle shape. Increasing the edge tension tends to flatten the membrane. These results illustrate the geometric frustration arising from the inability of a surface normal to have twist.
Spectral gaps in the vibrational modes of disordered solids are key design elements in the synthesis and control of phononic metamaterials that exhibit a plethora of novel elastic and mechanical properties. However, reliably producing these gaps often require a high degree of network specificity through complex control optimization procedures. In this work, we present as an additional tool to the existing repertoire, a numerical scheme that rapidly generates sizeable spectral gaps in absence of any fine tuning of the network structure or elastic parameters. These gaps occur even in disordered polydisperse systems consisting of relatively few particles ($N \sim 10^2-10^3$). Our proposed procedure exploits sticky potentials that have recently been shown to suppress the formation of soft modes, thus effectively recovering the linear elastic regime where band structures appear, at much shorter length scales than in conventional models of disordered solids. Our approach is relevant to design and realization of gapped spectra in a variety of physical setups ranging from colloidal suspensions to 3D-printed elastic networks.
Quantum many-body systems are characterized by their correlations. While equal-time correlators and unequal-time commutators between operators are standard observables, the direct access to unequal-time anti-commutators poses a formidable experimental challenge. Here, we propose a general technique for measuring unequal-time anti-commutators using the linear response of a system to a non-Hermitian perturbation. We illustrate the protocol at the example of a Bose-Hubbard model, where the approach to thermal equilibrium in a closed quantum system can be tracked by measuring both sides of the fluctuation-dissipation relation. We relate the scheme to the quantum Zeno effect and weak measurements, and illustrate possible implementations at the example of a cold-atom system. Our proposal provides a way of characterizing dynamical correlations in quantum many-body systems with potential applications in understanding strongly correlated matter as well as for novel quantum technologies.
This thesis is dedicated to study the thermodynamic properties of a magnetized neutral vector boson gas at any temperature, with the aim to provide equations of state that allow more general and precise descriptions of astrophysical phenomena. The all temperature analytical expressions for the thermodynamic magnitudes, as well as their non relativistic limits, are obtained starting from the energy spectrum given by Proca's theory. With these expressions, and considering the system under astrophysical conditions (particle densities, temperatures and magnetic fields in the order of the estimated for Neutron Stars), we investigate the Bose Einstein condensation, the magnetic properties and the equations of state of the gas, making a special emphasis on the influence of antiparticles and magnetic field. In all cases, the results are compared with their analogues in the low temperature and the non relativistic limits. This allows us to establish the ranges of validity of these approximations and to achieve a better understanding of their effects on the studied system.
In this letter, we reanalyze the multi-component strongly interacting massive particle (mSIMP) scenario using an effective operator approach. As in the single-component SIMP case, the total relic abundance of mSIMP dark matter (DM) is determined by the coupling strengths of $3 \to 2$ processes achieved by a five-point effective operator. Intriguingly, we find that there is an unavoidable $2 \to 2$ process induced by the corresponding five-point interaction in the dark sector, which would reshuffle the mass densities of SIMP DM after the chemical freeze-out. We dub this DM scenario as reshuffled SIMP (rSIMP). Given this observation, we then numerically solve the coupled Boltzmann equations including the $3 \to 2$ and $2 \to 2$ processes to get the correct yields of rSIMP DM. It turns out that the masses of rSIMP DM must be nearly degenerate for them to contribute sizable abundances. On the other hand, we also introduce effective operators to bridge the dark sector and visible sector via a vector portal coupling. Since the signal strength of detecting DM is proportional to the individual densities, thereby, obtaining the right amount of DM particles is crucial in the rSIMP scenario. The cosmological and theoretical constraints for rSIMP models are discussed as well.
We have derived the stellar atmospheric parameters, the effective temperature T$_{eff}$, the microturbulent velocity $\zeta$, the surface gravity log g, and the metallicity [Fe/H] for HE 0017+0055, HE 2144-1832, HE 2339-0837, HD 145777, and CD-27 14351 from local thermodynamic equilibrium analyses using model atmospheres. Elemental abundances of C, N, $\alpha$-elements, iron-peak elements, and several neutron-capture elements are estimated using the equivalent width measurement technique as well as spectrum synthesis calculations in some cases. In the context of the double enhancement observed in four of the programme stars, we have critically examined whether the literature i-process model yields ([X/Fe]) of heavy elements can explain the observed abundance distribution. The estimated metallicity [Fe/H] of the programme stars ranges from -1.63 to -2.74. All five stars show enhanced abundance for Ba, and four of them exhibit enhanced abundance for Eu. Based on our analysis, HE 0017+0055, HE 2144-1832, and HE 2339-0837 are found to be CEMP-r/s stars, whereas HD 145777 and CD-27 14351 show characteristic properties of CEMP-s stars. From a detailed analysis of different classifiers of CEMP stars, using a large sample of similar stars from the literature, we have identified the one which best describes the CEMP-s and CEMP-r/s stars. We have also examined if [hs/ls] alone can be used as a classifier, and if there are any limiting values for [hs/ls] ratio that can be used to distinguish CEMP-s and CEMP-r/s stars. In spite of peaking at different values of [hs/ls], CEMP-s and CEMP-r/s stars show an overlap in the range 0.0 < [hs/ls] < 1.5 and hence this ratio alone can not be used to distinguish CEMP-s and CEMP-r/s stars.
We present near-infrared [Fe II] images of four Class 0/I jets (HH 1/2, HH 34, HH 111, HH 46/47) observed with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3. The unprecedented angular resolution allows us to measure proper motions, jet widths and trajectories, and extinction along the jets. In all cases, we detect the counter-jet which was barely visible or invisible at shorter wavelengths. We measure tangential velocities of a few hundred km/s, consistent with previous HST measurements over 10 years ago. We measure the jet width as close as a few tens of au from the star, revealing high collimations of about 2 degrees for HH 1, HH 34, HH 111 and about 8 degrees for HH 46, all of which are preserved up to large distances. For HH 34, we find evidence of a larger initial opening angle of about 7 degrees. Measurement of knot positions reveals deviations in trajectory of both the jet and counter-jet of all sources. Analysis of asymmetries in the inner knot positions for HH 111 suggests the presence of a low mass stellar companion at separation 20-30 au. Finally, we find extinction values of 15-20 mag near the source which gradually decreases moving downstream along the jet. These observations have allowed us to study the counter-jet at unprecedented high angular resolution, and will be a valuable reference for planning future JWST mid-infrared observations which will peer even closer into the jet engine.
Hereditary hemolytic anemias are genetic disorders that affect the shape and density of red blood cells. Genetic tests currently used to diagnose such anemias are expensive and unavailable in the majority of clinical labs. Here, we propose a method for identifying hereditary hemolytic anemias based on a standard biochemistry method, called Percoll gradient, obtained by centrifuging a patient's blood. Our hybrid approach consists on using spatial data-driven features, extracted with a convolutional neural network and spectral handcrafted features obtained from fast Fourier transform. We compare late and early feature fusion with AlexNet and VGG16 architectures. AlexNet with late fusion of spectral features performs better compared to other approaches. We achieved an average F1-score of 88% on different classes suggesting the possibility of diagnosing of hereditary hemolytic anemias from Percoll gradients. Finally, we utilize Grad-CAM to explore the spatial features used for classification.
We prove existence and uniqueness of solutions of a class of abstract fully nonlinear mean field game systems. We justify that such problems are related to controlled local or nonlocal diffusions, or more specifically, controlled time change rates of stochastic (L\'evy) processes. Both the system of equations and the precise control interpretation seem to be new. We show that the results apply for degenerate equations of low fractional order, and some nondegenerate equations, local and nonlocal.
We obtain a sufficient condition for benign overfitting of linear regression problem. Our result does not rely on concentration argument but on small-ball assumption and thus can holds in heavy-tailed case. The basic idea is to establish a coordinate small-ball estimate in terms of effective rank so that we can calibrate the balance of epsilon-Net and exponential probability. Our result indicates that benign overfitting is not depending on concentration property of the input vector. Finally, we discuss potential difficulties for benign overfitting beyond linear model and a benign overfitting result without truncated effective rank.
We present a simple short proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, without complex analysis and with a minimal use of topology. It can be taught in a first year calculus class.
Shaped by human movement, place connectivity is quantified by the strength of spatial interactions among locations. For decades, spatial scientists have researched place connectivity, applications, and metrics. The growing popularity of social media provides a new data stream where spatial social interaction measures are largely devoid of privacy issues, easily assessable, and harmonized. In this study, we introduced a global multi-scale place connectivity index (PCI) based on spatial interactions among places revealed by geotagged tweets as a spatiotemporal-continuous and easy-to-implement measurement. The multi-scale PCI, demonstrated at the US county level, exhibits a strong positive association with SafeGraph population movement records (10 percent penetration in the US population) and Facebook's social connectedness index (SCI), a popular connectivity index based on social networks. We found that PCI has a strong boundary effect and that it generally follows the distance decay, although this force is weaker in more urbanized counties with a denser population. Our investigation further suggests that PCI has great potential in addressing real-world problems that require place connectivity knowledge, exemplified with two applications: 1) modeling the spatial spread of COVID-19 during the early stage of the pandemic and 2) modeling hurricane evacuation destination choice. The methodological and contextual knowledge of PCI, together with the launched visualization platform and open-sourced PCI datasets at various geographic levels, are expected to support research fields requiring knowledge in human spatial interactions.
The well known phenomenon of exponential contraction for solutions to the viscous Hamilton-Jacobi equation in the space-periodic setting is based on the Markov mechanism. However, the corresponding Lyapunov exponent $\lambda(\nu)$ characterizing the exponential rate of contraction depends on the viscosity $\nu$. The Markov mechanism provides only a lower bound for $\lambda(\nu)$ which vanishes in the limit $\nu \to 0$. At the same time, in the inviscid case $\nu=0$ one also has exponential contraction based on a completely different dynamical mechanism. This mechanism is based on hyperbolicity of action-minimizing orbits for the related Lagrangian variational problem. In this paper we consider the discrete time case (kicked forcing), and establish a uniform lower bound for $\lambda(\nu)$ which is valid for all $\nu\geq 0$. The proof is based on a nontrivial interplay between the dynamical and Markov mechanisms for exponential contraction. We combine PDE methods with the ideas from the Weak KAM theory.
Let $U\not\equiv \pm\infty$ be a $\delta$-subharmonic function on a closed disc of radius $R$ centered at zero. In the previous two parts of our paper, we obtained general and explicit estimates of the integral of the positive part of the radial maximum growth characteristic ${\mathsf M}_U(t):= \sup\bigl\{U(z)\bigm| |z|=r\bigr\}$ over the increasing integration function $m$ on the segment $[0, r]\subset [0,R)$ through the difference characteristic of Nevanlinna and the quantities associated with the integration function $m$. The third part of our paper contains estimates of these quantities in terms of the Hausdorff $h$-measure and $h$-content of compact subset $S\subset [0, r]$ such that the integration function $m$ is constant on each open component of the connectivity of the complement $[0, r]\setminus S$. The case of the d-dimensional Hausdorff measure is highlighted separately.
Many software engineering tasks, such as testing, and anomaly detection can benefit from the ability to infer a behavioral model of the software.Most existing inference approaches assume access to code to collect execution sequences. In this paper, we investigate a black-box scenario, where the system under analysis cannot be instrumented, in this granular fashion.This scenario is particularly prevalent with control systems' log analysis in the form of continuous signals. In this situation, an execution trace amounts to a multivariate time-series of input and output signals, where different states of the system correspond to different `phases` in the time-series. The main challenge is to detect when these phase changes take place. Unfortunately, most existing solutions are either univariate, make assumptions on the data distribution, or have limited learning power.Therefore, we propose a hybrid deep neural network that accepts as input a multivariate time series and applies a set of convolutional and recurrent layers to learn the non-linear correlations between signals and the patterns over time.We show how this approach can be used to accurately detect state changes, and how the inferred models can be successfully applied to transfer-learning scenarios, to accurately process traces from different products with similar execution characteristics. Our experimental results on two UAV autopilot case studies indicate that our approach is highly accurate (over 90% F1 score for state classification) and significantly improves baselines (by up to 102% for change point detection).Using transfer learning we also show that up to 90% of the maximum achievable F1 scores in the open-source case study can be achieved by reusing the trained models from the industrial case and only fine tuning them using as low as 5 labeled samples, which reduces the manual labeling effort by 98%.
The simultaneous advancement of high resolution integral field unit spectroscopy and robust full-spectral fitting codes now make it possible to examine spatially-resolved kinematic, chemical composition, and star-formation history from nearby galaxies. We take new MUSE data from the Snapshot Optical Spectroscopic Imaging of Mergers and Pairs for Legacy Exploration (SOSIMPLE) survey to examine NGC 7135. With counter-rotation of gas, disrupted kinematics and asymmetric chemical distribution, NGC 7135 is consistent with an ongoing merger. Though well hidden by the current merger, we are able to distinguish stars originating from an older merger, occurring 6-10 Gyr ago. We further find a gradient in ex-situ material with galactocentric radius, with the accreted fraction rising from 0% in the galaxy centre, to ~7% within 0.6 effective radii.
Ultra Diffuse Galaxies (UDGs), a type of large Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies with particularly large effective radii (r_eff > 1.5 kpc), are now routinely studied in the local (z<0.1) universe. While they are found to be abundant in clusters, groups, and in the field, their formation mechanisms remain elusive and an active topic of debate. New insights may be found by studying their counterparts at higher redshifts (z>1.0), even though cosmological surface brightness dimming makes them particularly diffcult to detect and study there. This work uses the deepest Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging stacks of z > 1 clusters, namely: SPT-CL J2106-5844 and MOO J1014+0038. These two clusters, at z=1.13 and z=1.23, were monitored as part of the HST See-Change program. Compared to the Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) as reference field, we find statistical over-densities of large LSB galaxies in both clusters. Based on stellar population modelling and assuming no size evolution, we find that the faintest sources we can detect are about as bright as expected for the progenitors of the brightest local UDGs. We find that the LSBs we detect in SPT-CL J2106-5844 and MOO J1014-5844 already have old stellar populations that place them on the red sequence. Correcting for incompleteness, and based on an extrapolation of local scaling relations, we estimate that distant UDGs are relatively under-abundant compared to local UDGs by a factor ~ 3. A plausible explanation for the implied increase with time would be a significant size growth of these galaxies in the last ~ 8 Gyr, as also suggested by hydrodynamical simulations.
In this work, 1272 superflares on 311 stars are collected from 22,539 solar-type stars from the second-year observation of Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which almost covered the northern hemisphere of the sky. Three superflare stars contain hot Jupiter candidates or ultrashort-period planet candidates. We obtain $\gamma = -1.76\pm 0.11$ of the correlation between flare frequency and flare energy ($dN/dE\propto E^{-\gamma}$) for all superflares and get $\beta=0.42\pm0.01$ of the correlation between superflare duration and energy ($T_{\text {duration }} \propto E^{\beta}$), which supports that a similar mechanism is shared by stellar superflares and solar flares. Stellar photometric variability ($R_{\rm var}$) is estimated for all solar-type stars, and the relation of $E\propto {R_{\rm var}}^{3/2}$ is included. An indicator of chromospheric activity ($S$-index) is obtained by using data from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) for 7454 solar-type stars. Distributions of these two properties indicate that the Sun is generally less active than superflare stars. We find that saturation-like feature of $R_{\rm var}\sim 0.1$ may be the reason for superflare energy saturating around $10^{36}$ erg. Object TIC 93277807 was captured by the TESS first-year mission and generated the most energetic superflare. This superflare is valuable and unique that can be treated as an extreme event, which may be generated by different mechanisms rather than other superflares.
A number of challenges of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model has been emerging during the past few years as the accuracy of cosmological observations improves. In this review we discuss in a unified manner many existing signals in cosmological and astrophysical data that appear to be in some tension ($2\sigma$ or larger) with the standard $\Lambda$CDM model as defined by the Planck18 parameter values. In addition to the major well studied $5\sigma$ challenge of $\Lambda$CDM (the Hubble $H_0$ crisis) and other well known tensions (the growth tension and the lensing amplitude $A_L$ anomaly), we discuss a wide range of other less discussed less-standard signals which appear at a lower statistical significance level than the $H_0$ tension (also known as 'curiosities' in the data) which may also constitute hints towards new physics. For example such signals include cosmic dipoles (the fine structure constant $\alpha$, velocity and quasar dipoles), CMB asymmetries, BAO Ly$\alpha$ tension, age of the Universe issues, the Lithium problem, small scale curiosities like the core-cusp and missing satellite problems, quasars Hubble diagram, oscillating short range gravity signals etc. The goal of this pedagogical review is to collectively present the current status of these signals and their level of significance, with emphasis to the Hubble crisis and refer to recent resources where more details can be found for each signal. We also briefly discuss possible theoretical approaches that can potentially explain the non-standard nature of some of these signals.
We test the theoretical free energy surface (FES) for two-step nucleation (TSN) proposed by Iwamatsu [J. Chem. Phys. 134, 164508 (2011)] by comparing the predictions of the theory to numerical results for the FES recently reported from Monte Carlo simulations of TSN in a simple lattice system [James, et al., J. Chem. Phys. 150, 074501 (2019)]. No adjustable parameters are used to make this comparison. That is, all the parameters of the theory are evaluated directly for the model system, yielding a predicted FES which we then compare to the FES obtained from simulations. We find that the theoretical FES successfully predicts the numerically-evaluated FES over a range of thermodynamic conditions that spans distinct regimes of behavior associated with TSN. All the qualitative features of the FES are captured by the theory and the quantitative comparison is also very good. Our results demonstrate that Iwamatsu's extension of classical nucleation theory provides an excellent framework for understanding the thermodynamics of TSN.
For solving large-scale consistent linear system, we combine two efficient row index selection strategies with Kaczmarz-type method with oblique projection, and propose a greedy randomized Kaczmarz method with oblique projection (GRKO) and the maximal weighted residual Kaczmarz method with oblique projection (MWRKO) . Through those method, the number of iteration steps and running time can be reduced to a greater extent to find the least-norm solution, especially when the rows of matrix A are close to linear correlation. Theoretical proof and numerical results show that GRKO method and MWRKO method are more effective than greedy randomized Kaczmarz method and maximal weighted residual Kaczmarz method respectively.
We present the new software OpDiLib, a universal add-on for classical operator overloading AD tools that enables the automatic differentiation (AD) of OpenMP parallelized code. With it, we establish support for OpenMP features in a reverse mode operator overloading AD tool to an extent that was previously only reported on in source transformation tools. We achieve this with an event-based implementation ansatz that is unprecedented in AD. Combined with modern OpenMP features around OMPT, we demonstrate how it can be used to achieve differentiation without any additional modifications of the source code; neither do we impose a priori restrictions on the data access patterns, which makes OpDiLib highly applicable. For further performance optimizations, restrictions like atomic updates on the adjoint variables can be lifted in a fine-grained manner for any parts of the code. OpDiLib can also be applied in a semi-automatic fashion via a macro interface, which supports compilers that do not implement OMPT. In a detailed performance study, we demonstrate the applicability of OpDiLib for a pure operator overloading approach in a hybrid parallel environment. We quantify the cost of atomic updates on the adjoint vector and showcase the speedup and scaling that can be achieved with the different configurations of OpDiLib in both the forward and the reverse pass.
We propose a new mechanism to communicate between fermion dark matter and the Standard Model (SM) only through the four-form flux. The four-form couplings are responsible for the relaxation of the Higgs mass to the correct value and the initial displacement of the reheating pseudo-scalar field from the minimum. We show that the simultaneous presence of the pseudo-scalar coupling to fermion dark matter and the flux-induced Higgs mixing gives rise to unsuppressed annihilations of dark matter into the SM particles at present, whereas the direct detection bounds from XENON1T can be avoided. We suggest exploring the interesting bulk parameter space of the model for which dark matter annihilates dominantly into a pair of singlet-like scalars with similar mass as for dark matter.
As it is said by Van Gogh, great things are done by a series of small things brought together. Aesthetic experience arises from the aggregation of underlying visual components. However, most existing deep image aesthetic assessment (IAA) methods over-simplify the IAA process by failing to model image aesthetics with clearly-defined visual components as building blocks. As a result, the connection between resulting aesthetic predictions and underlying visual components is mostly invisible and hard to be explicitly controlled, which limits the model in both performance and interpretability. This work aims to model image aesthetics from the level of visual components. Specifically, object-level regions detected by a generic object detector are defined as visual components, namely object-level visual components (OVCs). Then generic features representing OVCs are aggregated for the aesthetic prediction based upon proposed object-level and graph attention mechanisms, which dynamically determines the importance of individual OVCs and relevance between OVC pairs, respectively. Experimental results confirm the superiority of our framework over previous relevant methods in terms of SRCC and PLCC on the aesthetic rating distribution prediction. Besides, quantitative analysis is done towards model interpretation by observing how OVCs contribute to aesthetic predictions, whose results are found to be supported by psychology on aesthetics and photography rules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at the interpretation of a deep IAA model.
A recent line of work has shown that end-to-end optimization of Bayesian filters can be used to learn state estimators for systems whose underlying models are difficult to hand-design or tune, while retaining the core advantages of probabilistic state estimation. As an alternative approach for state estimation in these settings, we present an end-to-end approach for learning state estimators modeled as factor graph-based smoothers. By unrolling the optimizer we use for maximum a posteriori inference in these probabilistic graphical models, we can learn probabilistic system models in the full context of an overall state estimator, while also taking advantage of the distinct accuracy and runtime advantages that smoothers offer over recursive filters. We study this approach using two fundamental state estimation problems, object tracking and visual odometry, where we demonstrate a significant improvement over existing baselines. Our work comes with an extensive code release, which includes training and evaluation scripts, as well as Python libraries for Lie theory and factor graph optimization: https://sites.google.com/view/diffsmoothing/
Spatial relations between objects in an image have proved useful for structural object recognition. Structural constraints can act as regularization in neural network training, improving generalization capability with small datasets. Several relations can be modeled as a morphological dilation of a reference object with a structuring element representing the semantics of the relation, from which the degree of satisfaction of the relation between another object and the reference object can be derived. However, dilation is not differentiable, requiring an approximation to be used in the context of gradient-descent training of a network. We propose to approximate dilations using convolutions based on a kernel equal to the structuring element. We show that the proposed approximation, even if slightly less accurate than previous approximations, is definitely faster to compute and therefore more suitable for computationally intensive neural network applications.
The present study examines to what extent cultural background determines sensorimotor synchronization in humans
Understanding how the magnetic activity of low-mass stars depends on their fundamental parameters is an important goal of stellar astrophysics. Previous studies show that activity levels are largely determined by the stellar Rossby number which is defined as the rotation period divided by the convective turnover time. However, we currently have little information on the role that chemical composition plays. In this work, we investigate how metallicity affects magnetic activity using photometric variability as an activity proxy. Similarly to other proxies, we demonstrate that the amplitude of photometric variability is well parameterised by the Rossby number, although in a more complex way. We also show that variability amplitude and metallicity are generally positively correlated. This trend can be understood in terms of the effect that metallicity has on stellar structure and, hence, the convective turnover time (or, equivalently, the Rossby number). Lastly, we demonstrate that the metallicity dependence of photometric variability results in a rotation period detection bias whereby the periods of metal-rich stars are more easily recovered for stars of a given mass.
Hadamard matrices in $\{0,1\}$ presentation are square $m\times m$ matrices whose entries are zeros and ones and whose rows considered as vectors in $\Bbb R^m$ produce the Gram matrix of a special form with respect to the standard scalar product in $\Bbb R^m$. The concept of Hadamard matrices is extended in the present paper. As a result pseudo-Hadamard matrices of the first generation are defined and investigated. An algorithm for generating these pseudo-Hadamard matrices is designed and is used for testing some conjectures.
In this paper we investigate a novel set of polarizing agents -- mixed-valence compounds -- by theoretical and experimental methods and demonstrate their performance in high-field Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) experiments in the solid state. Mixed-valence compounds constitute a group of molecules, in which molecular mobility persists even in solids. Consequently, such polarizing agents can be used to perform Overhauser-DNP experiments in solid-state, with favorable conditions for dynamic nuclear polarization formation at ultra-high magnetic fields.
Parafermions are a natural generalization of Majorana fermions. We consider a breathing Kagome lattice with complex hoppings by imposing $\mathbb{Z}_{3}$ clock symmetry in the complex energy plane. It is a non-Hermitian generalization of the second-order topological insulator characterized by the emergence of topological corner states. We demonstrate that the topological corner states are parafermions in the present $\mathbb{Z}_{3}$ clock-symmetric model. It is also shown that the model is realized in electric circuits properly designed, where the parafermion corner states are observed by impedance resonance. We also construct $\mathbb{Z}_{4}$ and $\mathbb{Z}_{6}$ parafermions on breathing square and honeycomb lattices, respectively.
Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a challenging task because the code review effectiveness depends on the code reading and analytical skills of a reviewer. While several studies have investigated the code reading techniques that students should use to find defects during code review, little has focused on a learning activity that involves analytical skills. Indeed, developing a code review checklist should stimulate students to develop their analytical skills to anticipate potential issues (i.e., software defects). Yet, it is unclear whether students can anticipate potential issues given their limited experience in software development (programming, testing, etc.). We perform a qualitative analysis to investigate whether students are capable of creating code review checklists, and if the checklists can be used to guide reviewers to find defects. In addition, we identify common mistakes that students make when developing a code review checklist. Our results show that while there are some misconceptions among students about the purpose of code review, students are able to anticipate potential defects and create a relatively good code review checklist. Hence, our results lead us to conclude that developing a code review checklist can be a part of the learning activities for code review in order to scaffold students' skills.
Level 5 autonomy for self-driving cars requires a robust visual perception system that can parse input images under any visual condition. However, existing semantic segmentation datasets are either dominated by images captured under normal conditions or are small in scale. To address this, we introduce ACDC, the Adverse Conditions Dataset with Correspondences for training and testing semantic segmentation methods on adverse visual conditions. ACDC consists of a large set of 4006 images which are equally distributed between four common adverse conditions: fog, nighttime, rain, and snow. Each adverse-condition image comes with a high-quality fine pixel-level semantic annotation, a corresponding image of the same scene taken under normal conditions, and a binary mask that distinguishes between intra-image regions of clear and uncertain semantic content. Thus, ACDC supports both standard semantic segmentation and the newly introduced uncertainty-aware semantic segmentation. A detailed empirical study demonstrates the challenges that the adverse domains of ACDC pose to state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised approaches and indicates the value of our dataset in steering future progress in the field. Our dataset and benchmark are publicly available.
For the validation of safety-critical systems regarding safety and comfort, e.g., in the context of automated driving, engineers often have to cope with large (parametric) test spaces for which it is infeasible to test through all possible parameter configurations. At the same time, critical behavior of a well-engineered system with respect to prescribed safety and comfort requirements tends to be extremely rare, speaking of probabilities of order $10^{-6}$ or less, but clearly has to be examined carefully for valid argumentation. Hence, common approaches such as boundary value analysis are insufficient while methods based on random sampling from the parameter space (simple Monte Carlo) lack the ability to detect these rare critical events efficiently, i.e., with appropriate simulation budget. For this reason, a more sophisticated simulation-based approach is proposed which employs optimistic optimization on an objective function called "criticality" in order to identify effectively the set of critical parameter configurations. Within the scope of the ITEA 3 TESTOMAT project (http://www.testomatproject.eu/) the collaboration partners OFFIS e.V. and AKKA Germany GmbH conducted a case study on applying criticality-based rare event simulation to the charging process of an automotive battery management system given as a model. The present technical report documents the industrial use case, the approach, application and experimental results, as well as lessons learned from the case study.
Homonym identification is important for WSD that require coarse-grained partitions of senses. The goal of this project is to determine whether contextual information is sufficient for identifying a homonymous word. To capture the context, BERT embeddings are used as opposed to Word2Vec, which conflates senses into one vector. SemCor is leveraged to retrieve the embeddings. Various clustering algorithms are applied to the embeddings. Finally, the embeddings are visualized in a lower-dimensional space to understand the feasibility of the clustering process.
Quantum computers are a leading platform for the simulation of many-body physics. This task has been recently facilitated by the possibility to program directly the time-dependent pulses sent to the computer. Here, we use this feature to simulate quantum lattice models with long-range hopping. Our approach is based on an exact mapping between periodically driven quantum systems and one-dimensional lattices in the synthetic Floquet direction. By engineering a periodic drive with a power-law spectrum, we simulate a lattice with long-range hopping, whose decay exponent is freely tunable. We propose and realize experimentally two protocols to probe the long tails of the Floquet eigenfunctions and to identify a scaling transition between weak and strong long-range couplings. Our work offers a useful benchmark of pulse engineering and opens the route towards quantum simulations of rich nonequilibrium effects.
A technique is presented, which creates MCB junctions that can be pivoted to any desirable angle. The MCB junction equipped with a specific glass liquid cell can be used to produce a MCB junction, of which the electrodes are covered with a microscopic layer of fluid, thus producing a partially wet phase MCB junction.
We report the results of the first search for the decay $B_s^0 \rightarrow \eta^\prime \eta$ using $121.4~\textrm{fb}^{-1}$ of data collected at the $\Upsilon(5S)$ resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy $e^+e^-$ collider. We observe no significant signal and set a 90\% confidence-level upper limit of %$7.1 \times 10^{-5}$ $6.5 \times 10^{-5}$ on the branching fraction of this decay.
Path planning is a key component in mobile robotics. A wide range of path planning algorithms exist, but few attempts have been made to benchmark the algorithms holistically or unify their interface. Moreover, with the recent advances in deep neural networks, there is an urgent need to facilitate the development and benchmarking of such learning-based planning algorithms. This paper presents PathBench, a platform for developing, visualizing, training, testing, and benchmarking of existing and future, classical and learned 2D and 3D path planning algorithms, while offering support for Robot Oper-ating System (ROS). Many existing path planning algorithms are supported; e.g. A*, wavefront, rapidly-exploring random tree, value iteration networks, gated path planning networks; and integrating new algorithms is easy and clearly specified. We demonstrate the benchmarking capability of PathBench by comparing implemented classical and learned algorithms for metrics, such as path length, success rate, computational time and path deviation. These evaluations are done on built-in PathBench maps and external path planning environments from video games and real world databases. PathBench is open source.
This paper studies a dynamical system, which contains two contours. There is a cluster on each contour. The cluster contains particles, located in adjacent cells. The clusters move under prescribed rules. The delays of clusters are due to that the clusters cannot pass through the node simultaneously. The dynamical system belongs to the class of contour networks introduced by A. P. Buslaev.
We adapt and extend Yosida's parametrix method, originally introduced for the construction of the fundamental solution to a parabolic operator on a Riemannian manifold, to derive Varadhan-type asymptotic estimates for the transition density of a degenerate diffusion under the weak H\"ormander condition. This diffusion process, widely studied by Yor in a series of papers, finds direct application in the study of a class of path-dependent financial derivatives known as Asian options. We obtain the Varadhan formula \begin{equation} \frac{-2 \log p(t,x;T,y) } { \Psi(t,x;T,y) } \to 1, \qquad \text{as } \quad T-t \to 0^+, \end{equation} where $p$ denotes the transition density and $\Psi$ denotes the optimal cost function of a deterministic control problem associated to the diffusion. We provide a partial proof of this formula, and present numerical evidence to support the validity of an intermediate inequality that is required to complete the proof. We also derive an asymptotic expansion of the cost function $\Psi$, expressed in terms of elementary functions, which is useful in order to design efficient approximation formulas for the transition density.
Investigating how the cutoff energy $E_{\rm cut}$ varies with X-ray flux and photon index $\Gamma$ in individual AGNs opens a new window to probe the yet unclear coronal physics. So far $E_{\rm cut}$ variations have only been detected in several AGNs but different patterns have been reported. Here we report new detections of $E_{\rm cut}$ variations in two Seyfert galaxies with multiple NuSTAR exposures. While in NGC 3227 $E_{\rm cut}$ monotonically increases with $\Gamma$, the $E_{\rm cut}$-$\Gamma$ relation exhibits a $\Lambda$ shape in SWIFT J2127.4+5654 ($E_{\rm cut}$ increasing with $\Gamma$ at $\Gamma$ $\lesssim$ 2.05, but reversely decreasing at $\Gamma$ $\gtrsim$ 2.05), indicating more than a single underlying mechanism is involved. Meanwhile both galaxies show softer spectra while they brighten in X-ray, a common phenomenon in Seyfert galaxies. Plotting all 7 AGNs with $E_{\rm cut}$ variations ever reported with NuSTAR observations in the $E_{\rm cut}$-$\Gamma$ diagram, we find they could be unified with the $\Lambda$ pattern. Although the sample is small and SWIFT J2127.4+5654 is the only source with $\Gamma$ varying across the break point thus the only one exhibiting the complete $\Lambda$ pattern in a single source, the discoveries shed new light on the coronal physics in AGNs. Possible underlying physical mechanisms are discussed.
We consider exact and averaged control problem for a system of quasi-linear ODEs and SDEs with a non-negative definite symmetric matrix of the system. The strategy of the proof is the standard linearization of the system by fixing the function appearing in the nonlinear part of the system, and then applying the Leray-Schauder fixed point theorem. We shall also need the continuous induction arguments to prolong the control to the final state which is a novel approach in the field. This enables us to obtain controllability for arbitrarily large initial data (so called global controllability).
A common challenge across all areas of machine learning is that training data is not distributed like test data, due to natural shifts, "blind spots," or adversarial examples; such test examples are referred to as out-of-distribution (OOD) test examples. We consider a model where one may abstain from predicting, at a fixed cost. In particular, our transductive abstention algorithm takes labeled training examples and unlabeled test examples as input, and provides predictions with optimal prediction loss guarantees. The loss bounds match standard generalization bounds when test examples are i.i.d. from the training distribution, but add an additional term that is the cost of abstaining times the statistical distance between the train and test distribution (or the fraction of adversarial examples). For linear regression, we give a polynomial-time algorithm based on Celis-Dennis-Tapia optimization algorithms. For binary classification, we show how to efficiently implement it using a proper agnostic learner (i.e., an Empirical Risk Minimizer) for the class of interest. Our work builds on a recent abstention algorithm of Goldwasser, Kalais, and Montasser (2020) for transductive binary classification.
Helical symmetry of massive Dirac fermions is broken explicitly in the presence of electric and magnetic fields. Here we present two equations for the divergence of helical and axial-vector currents following the Jackiw-Johnson approach to the anomaly of the neutral axial vector current. We discover the contribution from the helical symmetry breaking is attributed to the occupancy of the two states at the top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band. The explicit symmetry breaking fully cancels the anomalous correction from the quantum fluctuation in the band gap. The chiral anomaly can be derived from the helical symmetry breaking. It provides an alternative route to understand the chiral anomaly from the point of view of the helical symmetry breaking. The pertinent physical consequences in condensed matter are the helical magnetic effect which means a charge current circulating at the direction of the magnetic field, and the mass-dependent positive longitudinal magnetoconductivity as a transport signature. The discovery not only reflects anomalous magneto-transport properties of massive Dirac materials but also reveals the close relation between the helical symmetry breaking and the physics of chiral anomaly in quantum field theory and high energy physics.
The study deals with the methods and means of checking the reliability of usernames of online communities on the basis of computer-linguistic analysis of the results of their communicative interaction. The methodological basis of the study is a combination of general scientific methods and special approaches to the study of the data verification of online communities in the Ukrainian segment of the global information environment. The algorithm of functioning of the utility Verifier of online community username is developed. The informational model of the automated means of checking the usernames of online community is designed. The utility Verifier of online community username data validation system approbation is realized in the online community. The indicator of the data verification system effectiveness is determined.
Deep learning is a powerful approach with good performance on many different tasks. However, these models often require massive computational resources. It is a worrying trend that we increasingly need models that work well on more complex problems. In this paper, we propose and verify the effectiveness and efficiency of SCNN, an innovative neural network inspired by the swarm concept. In addition to introducing the relevant theories, our detailed experiments suggest that fewer parameters may perform better than models with more parameters. Besides, our experiments show that SCNN needs less data than traditional models. That could be an essential hint for problems where there is not much data.
FO transductions, aperiodic deterministic two-way transducers, as well as aperiodic streaming string transducers are all equivalent models for first order definable functions. In this paper, we solve the long standing open problem of expressions capturing first order definable functions, thereby generalizing the seminal SF=AP (star free expressions = aperiodic languages) result of Sch\"utzenberger. Our result also generalizes a lesser known characterization by Sch\"utzenberger of aperiodic languages by SD-regular expressions (SD=AP). We show that every first order definable function over finite words captured by an aperiodic deterministic two-way transducer can be described with an SD-regular transducer expression (SDRTE). An SDRTE is a regular expression where Kleene stars are used in a restricted way: they can appear only on aperiodic languages which are prefix codes of bounded synchronization delay. SDRTEs are constructed from simple functions using the combinators unambiguous sum (deterministic choice), Hadamard product, and unambiguous versions of the Cauchy product and the k-chained Kleene-star, where the star is restricted as mentioned. In order to construct an SDRTE associated with an aperiodic deterministic two-way transducer, (i) we concretize Sch\"utzenberger's SD=AP result, by proving that aperiodic languages are captured by SD-regular expressions which are unambiguous and stabilising; (ii) by structural induction on the unambiguous, stabilising SD-regular expressions describing the domain of the transducer, we construct SDRTEs. Finally, we also look at various formalisms equivalent to SDRTEs which use the function composition, allowing to trade the k-chained star for a 1-star.
Cassegrain designs can be used to build thin lenses. We analyze the relationships between system thickness and aperture sizes of the two mirrors as well as FoV size. Our analysis shows that decrease in lens thickness imposes tight constraint on the aperture and FoV size. To mitigate this limitation, we propose to fill the gaps between the primary and the secondary with high index material. The Gassegrain optics cuts the track length into half and high index material reduces ray angle and height, consequently the incident ray angle can be increased, i.e., the FoV angle is extended. Defining telephoto ratio as the ratio of lens thickness to focal length, we achieve telephoto ratios as small as 0.43 for a visible Cassegrain thin lens and 1.20 for an infrared Cassegrain thin lens. To achieve an arbitrary FoV coverage, we present an strategy by integrating multiple thin lenses on one plane with each unit covering a different FoV region. To avoid physically tilting each unit, we propose beam steering with metasurface. By image stitching, we obtain wide FoV images.
Deep neural networks have been widely studied in autonomous driving applications such as semantic segmentation or depth estimation. However, training a neural network in a supervised manner requires a large amount of annotated labels which are expensive and time-consuming to collect. Recent studies leverage synthetic data collected from a virtual environment which are much easier to acquire and more accurate compared to data from the real world, but they usually suffer from poor generalization due to the inherent domain shift problem. In this paper, we propose a Domain-Agnostic Contrastive Learning (DACL) which is a two-stage unsupervised domain adaptation framework with cyclic adversarial training and contrastive loss. DACL leads the neural network to learn domain-agnostic representation to overcome performance degradation when there exists a difference between training and test data distribution. Our proposed approach achieves better performance in the monocular depth estimation task compared to previous state-of-the-art methods and also shows effectiveness in the semantic segmentation task.
Class imbalance is an inherent problem in many machine learning classification tasks. This often leads to trained models that are unusable for any practical purpose. In this study we explore an unsupervised approach to address these imbalances by leveraging transfer learning from pre-trained image classification models to encoder-based Generative Adversarial Network (eGAN). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle this problem using GAN without needing to augment with synthesized fake images. In the proposed approach we use the discriminator network to output a negative or positive score. We classify as minority, test samples with negative scores and as majority those with positive scores. Our approach eliminates epistemic uncertainty in model predictions, as the P(minority) + P(majority) need not sum up to 1. The impact of transfer learning and combinations of different pre-trained image classification models at the generator and discriminator is also explored. Best result of 0.69 F1-score was obtained on CIFAR-10 classification task with imbalance ratio of 1:2500. Our approach also provides a mechanism of thresholding the specificity or sensitivity of our machine learning system. Keywords: Class imbalance, Transfer Learning, GAN, nash equilibrium
Continuous-depth neural models, where the derivative of the model's hidden state is defined by a neural network, have enabled strong sequential data processing capabilities. However, these models rely on advanced numerical differential equation (DE) solvers resulting in a significant overhead both in terms of computational cost and model complexity. In this paper, we present a new family of models, termed Closed-form Continuous-depth (CfC) networks, that are simple to describe and at least one order of magnitude faster while exhibiting equally strong modeling abilities compared to their ODE-based counterparts. The models are hereby derived from the analytical closed-form solution of an expressive subset of time-continuous models, thus alleviating the need for complex DE solvers all together. In our experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that CfC networks outperform advanced, recurrent models over a diverse set of time-series prediction tasks, including those with long-term dependencies and irregularly sampled data. We believe our findings open new opportunities to train and deploy rich, continuous neural models in resource-constrained settings, which demand both performance and efficiency.
We examine the dynamics of electron beams that, in free space, are self-accelerating, in the presence of an additional magnetic field. We focus our attention in the case of Airy beams that follow parabolic trajectories and in generalized classes of beams associated with power-law trajectories. We study the interplay between beam self-acceleration and the circular motion caused by the magnetic field. In the case of Airy beams, using an integral representation, we find closed-form solutions for the electron wavefunction. We also derive asymptotic formulas for the beam trajectories both for Airy beams and for self-accelerating power-law beams. A ray optics description is rather useful for the interpretation of the beam dynamics. Our results are in excellent comparison with direct numerical simulations.
We report on a Python-toolbox for unbiased statistical analysis of fluorescence intermittency properties of single emitters. Intermittency, i.e., step-wise temporal variations in the instantaneous emission intensity and fluorescence decay rate properties are common to organic fluorophores, II-VI quantum dots and perovskite quantum dots alike. Unbiased statistical analysis of intermittency switching time distributions, involved levels and lifetimes is important to avoid interpretation artefacts. This work provides an implementation of Bayesian changepoint analysis and level clustering applicable to time-tagged single-photon detection data of single emitters that can be applied to real experimental data and as tool to verify the ramifications of hypothesized mechanistic intermittency models. We provide a detailed Monte Carlo analysis to illustrate these statistics tools, and to benchmark the extent to which conclusions can be drawn on the photophysics of highly complex systems, such as perovskite quantum dots that switch between a plethora of states instead of just two.
Self-adaptive software systems continuously adapt in response to internal and external changes in their execution environment, captured as contexts. The COP paradigm posits a technique for the development of self-adaptive systems, capturing their main characteristics with specialized programming language constructs. COP adaptations are specified as independent modules composed in and out of the base system as contexts are activated and deactivated in response to sensed circumstances from the surrounding environment. However, the definition of adaptations, their contexts and associated specialized behavior, need to be specified at design time. In complex CPS this is intractable due to new unpredicted operating conditions. We propose Auto-COP, a new technique to enable generation of adaptations at run time. Auto-COP uses RL options to build action sequences, based on the previous instances of the system execution. Options are explored in interaction with the environment, and the most suitable options for each context are used to generate adaptations exploiting COP. To validate Auto-COP, we present two case studies exhibiting different system characteristics and application domains: a driving assistant and a robot delivery system. We present examples of Auto-COP code generated at run time, to illustrate the types of circumstances (contexts) requiring adaptation, and the corresponding generated adaptations for each context. We confirm that the generated adaptations exhibit correct system behavior measured by domain-specific performance metrics, while reducing the number of required execution/actuation steps by a factor of two showing that the adaptations are regularly selected by the running system as adaptive behavior is more appropriate than the execution of primitive actions.
We consider second order differential equations with real coefficients that are in the limit circle case at infinity. Using the semiclassical Ansatz, we construct solutions (the Jost solutions) of such equations with a prescribed asymptotic behavior for $x\to\infty$. It turns out that in the limit circle case, this Ansatz can be chosen common for all values of the spectral parameter $z$. This leads to asymptotic formulas for all solutions of considered differential equations, both homogeneous and non-homogeneous. We also efficiently describe all self-adjoint realizations of the corresponding differential operators in terms of boundary conditions at infinity and find a representation for their resolvents.
In order to detect unknown intrusions and runtime errors of computer programs, the cyber-security community has developed various detection techniques. Anomaly detection is an approach that is designed to profile the normal runtime behavior of computer programs in order to detect intrusions and errors as anomalous deviations from the observed normal. However, normal but unobserved behavior can trigger false positives. This limitation has significantly decreased the practical viability of anomaly detection techniques. Reported approaches to this limitation span a simple alert threshold definition to distribution models for approximating all normal behavior based on the limited observation. However, each assumption or approximation poses the potential for even greater false positive rates. This paper presents our study on how to explain the presence of anomalies using a neural network, particularly Long Short-Term Memory, independent of actual data distributions. We present and compare three anomaly detection models, and report on our experience running different types of attacks on an Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol server. We performed a comparative study, focusing on each model's ability to detect the onset of each attack while avoiding false positives resulting from unknown normal behavior. Our best-performing model detected the true onset of every attack with zero false positives.
Weakly coupled ferroelectric/dielectric superlattice thin film heterostructures exhibit complex nanoscale polarization configurations that arise from a balance of competing electrostatic, elastic, and domain-wall contributions to the free energy. A key feature of these configurations is that the polarization can locally have a significant component that is not along the thin-film surface normal direction, while maintaining zero net in-plane polarization. PbTiO3/SrTiO3 thin-film superlattice heterostructures on a conducting SrRuO3 bottom electrode on SrTiO3 have a room-temperature stripe nanodomain pattern with nanometer-scale lateral period. Ultrafast time-resolved x-ray free electron laser diffraction and scattering experiments reveal that above-bandgap optical pulses induce rapidly propagating acoustic pulses and a perturbation of the domain diffuse scattering intensity arising from the nanoscale stripe domain configuration. With 400 nm optical excitation, two separate acoustic pulses are observed: a high-amplitude pulse resulting from strong optical absorption in the bottom electrode and a weaker pulse arising from the depolarization field screening effect due to absorption directly within the superlattice. The picosecond scale variation of the nanodomain diffuse scattering intensity is consistent with a larger polarization change than would be expected due to the polarization-tetragonality coupling of uniformly polarized ferroelectrics. The polarization change is consistent instead with polarization rotation facilitated by the reorientation of the in-plane component of the polarization at the domain boundaries of the striped polarization structure. The complex steady-state configuration within these ferroelectric heterostructures leads to polarization rotation phenomena that have been previously available only through the selection of bulk crystal composition.
We introduce a novel method for the implementation of shape optimziation in fluid dynamics applications, where we propose to use the shape derivative to determine deformation fields with the help of the $p-$ Laplacian for $p > 2$. This approach is closely related to the computation of steepest descent directions of the shape functional in the $W^{1,\infty}-$ topology. Our approach is demonstrated for shape optimization related to drag-minimal free floating bodies. The method is validated against existing approaches with respect to convergence of the optimization algorithm, the obtained shape, and regarding the quality of the computational grid after large deformations. Our numerical results strongly indicate that shape optimization related to the $W^{1,\infty}$-topology -- though numerically more demanding -- seems to be superior over the classical approaches invoking Hilbert space methods, concerning the convergence, the obtained shapes and the mesh quality after large deformations, in particular when the optimal shape features sharp corners.
We consider a Nicholson's equation with multiple pairs of time-varying delays and nonlinear terms given by mixed monotone functions. Sufficient conditions for the permanence, local stability and global attractivity of its positive equilibrium are established. Our criteria depend on the size of some delays, improve results in recent literature and provide answers to some open problems.
Underactuated systems like sea vessels have degrees of motion that are insufficiently matched by a set of independent actuation forces. In addition, the underlying trajectory-tracking control problems grow in complexity in order to decide the optimal rudder and thrust control signals. This enforces several difficult-to-solve constraints that are associated with the error dynamical equations using classical optimal tracking and adaptive control approaches. An online machine learning mechanism based on integral reinforcement learning is proposed to find a solution for a class of nonlinear tracking problems with partial prior knowledge of the system dynamics. The actuation forces are decided using innovative forms of temporal difference equations relevant to the vessel's surge and angular velocities. The solution is implemented using an online value iteration process which is realized by employing means of the adaptive critics and gradient descent approaches. The adaptive learning mechanism exhibited well-functioning and interactive features in react to different desired reference-tracking scenarios.
The inverse problem of finding the optimal network structure for a specific type of dynamical process stands out as one of the most challenging problems in network science. Focusing on the susceptible-infected-susceptible type of dynamics on annealed networks whose structures are fully characterized by the degree distribution, we develop an analytic framework to solve the inverse problem. We find that, for relatively low or high infection rates, the optimal degree distribution is unique, which consists of no more than two distinct nodal degrees. For intermediate infection rates, the optimal degree distribution is multitudinous and can have a broader support. We also find that, in general, the heterogeneity of the optimal networks decreases with the infection rate. A surprising phenomenon is the existence of a specific value of the infection rate for which any degree distribution would be optimal in generating maximum spreading prevalence. The analytic framework and the findings provide insights into the interplay between network structure and dynamical processes with practical implications.
Quantum entanglement between two or more bipartite entities is a core concept in quantum information areas limited to microscopic regimes directly governed by Heisenberg uncertainty principle via quantum superposition, resulting in nondeterministic and probabilistic quantum features. Such quantum features cannot be generated by classical means. Here, a pure classical method of on-demand entangled light-pair generation is presented in a macroscopic regime via basis randomness. This conflicting idea of conventional quantum mechanics invokes a fundamental question about both classicality and quantumness, where superposition is key to its resolution.
In this paper we consider the problem of transmission power allocation for remote estimation of a dynamical system in the case where the estimator is able to simultaneously receive packets from multiple interfering sensors, as it is possible e.g. with the latest wireless technologies such as 5G and WiFi. To this end we introduce a general model where packet arrival probabilities are determined based on the received Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise Ratio and with two different receivers design schemes, one implementing standard multi-packet reception technique and one implementing Successive Interference Cancellation decoding algorithm in addition. Then we cast the power allocation problem as an optimization task where the mean error covariance at the remote estimator is minimized, while penalizing the mean transmission power consumption. For the infinite-horizon problem we show the existence of a stationary optimal policy, while for the finite-horizon case we derive some structural properties under the special scenario where the overall system to be estimated can be seen as a set of independent subsystems. Numerical simulations illustrate the improvement given by the proposed receivers over orthogonal schemes that schedules only one sensor transmission at a time in order to avoid interference.
Cloud-Radio Access Networks (Cloud-RANs) are separating the mobile networks base station functions into three units, the connection between the two of them is referred to as the fronthaul network. This work demonstrates the transmission of user data transport blocks between the distributed Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and local Physical (PHY) layer in the radiounit over a Passive Optical Network (PON). PON networks provide benefits in terms of economy and flexibility when used for Cloud-RAN fronthaul transport. However, the PON upstream scheduling can introduce additional latency that might not satisfy the requirements imposed by Cloud-RAN functional split. In this work we demonstrate how our virtual Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation(DBA) concept can be used to effectively communicate with the mobile Long Term Evolution (LTE) scheduler, adopting the well known cooperative DBA mechanism, to reduce the PON latency to satisfactory values. Thus, our results show the feasibility ofusing PON technology as transport medium of the fronthaul for the MAC/PHY functional split, in a fully virtualised environment.Further background traffic is added, so that measurements show a more realistic scenario. The obtained round trip times indicates that using PON at fronthaul might be limited to the distance of 11km for a synchronised scenario, or no compliance for a non-synchronised scenario.
This paper studied the faint, diffuse extended X-ray emission associated with the radio lobes and the hot gas in the intracluster medium (ICM) environment for a sample of radio galaxies. We used shallow ($\sim 10$ ks) archival Chandra observations for 60 radio galaxies (7 FR I and 53 FR II) with $0.0222 \le z \le 1.785$ selected from the 298 extragalactic radio sources identified in the 3CR catalog. We used Bayesian statistics to look for any asymmetry in the extended X-ray emission between regions that contain the radio lobes and regions that contain the hot gas in the ICM. In the Chandra broadband ($0.5 - 7.0$ keV), which has the highest detected X-ray flux and the highest signal-to-noise ratio, we found that the non-thermal X-ray emission from the radio lobes dominates the thermal X-ray emission from the environment for $\sim 77\%$ of the sources in our sample. We also found that the relative amount of on-jet axis non-thermal emission from the radio lobes tends to increase with redshift compared to the off-jet axis thermal emission from the environment. This suggests that the dominant X-ray mechanism for the non-thermal X-ray emission in the radio lobes is due to the inverse Compton upscattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) seed photons by relativistic electrons in the radio lobes, a process for which the observed flux is roughly redshift independent due to the increasing CMB energy density with increasing redshift.
We investigate what can be learned about a population of distant KBOs by studying the statistical properties of their light curves. Whereas others have successfully inferred the properties of individual, highly variable KBOs, we show that the fraction of KBOs with low amplitudes also provides fundamental information about a population. Each light curve is primarily the result of two factors: shape and orientation. We consider contact binaries and ellipsoidal shapes, with and without flattening. After developing the mathematical framework, we apply it to the existing body of KBO light curve data. Principal conclusions are as follows. (1) When using absolute magnitude H as a proxy for size, it is more accurate to use the maximum of the light curve rather than the mean. (2) Previous investigators have noted that smaller KBOs have higher-amplitude light curves, and have interpreted this as evidence that they are systematically more irregular in shape than larger KBOs; we show that a population of flattened bodies with uniform proportions could also explain this result. (3) Our analysis indicates that prior assessments of the fraction of contact binaries in the Kuiper Belt may be artificially low. (4) The pole orientations of some KBOs can be inferred from observed changes in their light curves; however, these KBOs constitute a biased sample, whose pole orientations are not representative of the population overall. (5) Although surface topography, albedo patterns, limb darkening, and other surface properties can affect individual light curves, they do not have a strong influence on the statistics overall. (6) Photometry from the OSSOS survey is incompatible with previous results and its statistical properties defy easy interpretation. We also discuss the promise of this approach for the analysis of future, much larger data sets such as the one anticipated from the Rubin Observatory.
We study the relation (and differences) between stability and Property (S) in the simple and stably finite framework. This leads us to characterize stable elements in terms of its support, and study these concepts from different sides : hereditary subalgebras, projections in the multiplier algebra and order properties in the Cuntz semigroup. We use these approaches to show both that cancellation at infinity on the Cuntz semigroup just holds when its Cuntz equivalence is given by isomorphism at the level of Hilbert right-modules, and that different notions as Regularity, $\omega$-comparison, Corona Factorization Property, property R, etc.. are equivalent under mild assumptions.
Engineered dynamical maps that combine not only coherent, but also unital and dissipative transformations of quantum states, have demonstrated a number of technological applications, and promise to be a beneficial tool also in quantum thermodynamic processes. Here, we exploit control of a spin qutrit to investigate energy exchange fluctuations of an open quantum system. The qutrit engineer dynamics can be understood as an autonomous feedback process, where random measurement events condition the subsequent dissipative evolution. To analyze this dynamical process, we introduce a generalization of the Sagawa-Ueda-Tasaki relation for dissipative dynamics and verify it experimentally. Not only we characterize the efficacy of the autonomous feedback protocol, but also find that the characteristic function of energy variations $G(\eta)$ becomes insensitive to the process details at a single specific value of its argument. This allows us to demonstrate that a fluctuation theorem of the Jarzynski type holds for this general dissipative feedback dynamics, while previous relations were limited to unital dynamics. Moreover, in addition to the feedback efficacy, we find a witness of unitality associated with the fixed point of the dynamics.
We present high-pressure electrical transport measurements on the newly discovered V-based superconductors $A$V$_3$Sb$_5$ ($A$ = Rb and K), which have an ideal Kagome lattice of vanadium. Two superconducting domes under pressure are observed in both compounds, as previously observed in their sister compound CsV$_3$Sb$_5$. For RbV$_3$Sb$_5$, the $T_c$ increases from 0.93 K at ambient pressure to the maximum of 4.15 K at 0.38 GPa in the first dome. The second superconducting dome has the highest $T_c$ of 1.57 K at 28.8 GPa. KV$_3$Sb$_5$ displays a similar double-dome phase diagram, however, its two maximum $T_c$s are lower, and the $T_c$ drops faster in the second dome than RbV$_3$Sb$_5$. An integrated temperature-pressure phase diagram of $A$V$_3$Sb$_5$ ($A$ = Cs, Rb and K) is constructed, showing that the ionic radius of the intercalated alkali-metal atoms has a significant effect. Our work demonstrates that double-dome superconductivity under pressure is a common feature of these V-based Kagome metals.
We present a new algorithm for efficiently computing the $N$-point correlation functions (NPCFs) of a 3D density field for arbitrary $N$. This can be applied both to a discrete spectroscopic galaxy survey and a continuous field. By expanding the statistics in a separable basis of isotropic functions built from spherical harmonics, the NPCFs can be estimated by counting pairs of particles in space, leading to an algorithm with complexity $\mathcal{O}(N_{\rm g}^2)$ for $N_{\rm g}$ particles, or $\mathcal{O}\left(N_\mathrm{FFT}\log N_\mathrm{FFT}\right)$ when using a Fast Fourier Transform with $N_\mathrm{FFT}$ grid-points. In practice, the rate-limiting step for $N>3$ will often be the summation of the histogrammed spherical harmonic coefficients, particularly if the number of radial and angular bins is large. In this case, the algorithm scales linearly with $N_{\rm g}$. The approach is implemented in the ENCORE code, which can compute the 3PCF, 4PCF, 5PCF, and 6PCF of a BOSS-like galaxy survey in $\sim$ $100$ CPU-hours, including the corrections necessary for non-uniform survey geometries. We discuss the implementation in depth, along with its GPU acceleration, and provide practical demonstration on realistic galaxy catalogs. Our approach can be straightforwardly applied to current and future datasets to unlock the potential of constraining cosmology from the higher-point functions.
We unveil the microscopic origin of the topologically ordered counterpart of the s-wave superconductor in this work. For this, we employ the recently developed unitary renormalisation group (URG) method on a generalised model of 2D electrons attractive interactions. The effective Hamiltonian obtained at the stable low-energy fixed point of the RG flow corresponds to a gapped, insulating state of quantum matter we call the Cooper pair insulator (CPI). We show that the CPI ground state manifold displays several signatures of topological order, including a four-fold degeneracy when placed on the torus. Spectral flow arguments reveal the emergent gauge-theoretic structure of the effective Hamiltonian, as it can be written entirely in terms of non-local Wilson loops. It also contains a topological $\theta$-term whose coefficient is quantised, in keeping with the requirement of invariance of the ground state under large gauge transformations. We find that the long-ranged many-particle entanglement content of the CPI ground state is driven by inter-helicity two-particle scattering processes. Analysis of the passage from CPI to BCS superconducting ground state shows the RG flow promotes fluctuations in the number of condensed Cooper pairs and lowers those in the conjugate global phase. Consequently, the distinct signatures of long-ranged entanglement in the CPI are replaced by the well-known short-ranged entanglement of the BCS state. Finally, we study the renormalisation of the entanglement in $k$-space for both the CPI and BCS ground states. The topologically ordered CPI state is shown to possess an emergent hierarchy of scales of entanglement, and that this hierarchy collapses in the BCS state. Our work offers clear evidence for the microscopic origins of topological order in this prototypical system, and lays the foundation for similar investigations in other systems of correlated electrons.
In this paper, we develop a compositional vector-based semantics of positive transitive sentences in quantum natural language processing for a non-English language, i.e. Persian, to compare the parametrized quantum circuits of two synonymous sentences in two languages, English and Persian. By considering grammar+meaning of a transitive sentence, we translate DisCoCat diagram via ZX-calculus into quantum circuit form. Also, we use a bigraph method to rewrite DisCoCat diagram and turn into quantum circuit in the semantic side.
This paper details the FPGA implementation methodology for Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks (CSNN) and applies this methodology to low-power radioisotope identification using high-resolution data. Power consumption of 75 mW has been achieved on an FPGA implementation of a CSNN, with an inference accuracy of 90.62% on a synthetic dataset. The chip validation method is presented. Prototyping was accelerated by evaluating SNN parameters using SpiNNaker neuromorphic platform.
We present a comprehensive review of the structural chemistry of hybrid lead halides of stoichiometry APbX4, A2PbX4 or AAPbX4, where A and A are organic ammonium cations and X = Cl, Br or I. These compounds may be considered as layered perovskites, containing isolated, infinite layers of corner-sharing PbX4 octahedra separated by the organic species. We first extract over 250 crystal structures from the CCDC and classify them in terms of unit cell metrics and crystal symmetry. Symmetry mode analysis is then used to identify the nature of key structural distortions of the [PbX4] layers. Two generic types of distortion are prevalent in this family: tilting of the octahedral units and shifts of the inorganic layers relative to each other. Although the octahedral tilting modes are well-known in the crystallography of purely inorganic perovskites, the additional layer shift modes are shown to enrich enormously the structural options available in layered hybrid perovskites. Some examples and trends are discussed in more detail in order to show how the nature of the interlayer organic species can influence the overall structural architecture, although the main aim of the paper is to encourage workers in the field to make use of the systematic crystallographic methods used here to further understand and rationalise their own compounds, and perhaps to be able to design-in particular structural features in future work.
Many different types of fractional calculus have been proposed, which can be organised into some general classes of operators. For a unified mathematical theory, results should be proved in the most general possible setting. Two important classes of fractional-calculus operators are the fractional integrals and derivatives with respect to functions (dating back to the 1970s) and those with general analytic kernels (introduced in 2019). To cover both of these settings in a single study, we can consider fractional integrals and derivatives with analytic kernels with respect to functions, which have never been studied in detail before. Here we establish the basic properties of these general operators, including series formulae, composition relations, function spaces, and Laplace transforms. The tools of convergent series, from fractional calculus with analytic kernels, and of operational calculus, from fractional calculus with respect to functions, are essential ingredients in the analysis of the general class that covers both.
The twin group $TW_n$ on $n$ strands is the group generated by $t_1, \dots, t_{n-1}$ with defining relations $t_i^2=1$, $t_it_j = t_jt_i$ if $|i-j|>1$. We find a new instance of semisimple Schur--Weyl duality for tensor powers of a natural $n$-dimensional reflection representation of $TW_n$, depending on a parameter $q$. At $q=1$ the representation coincides with the natural permutation representation of the symmetric group, so the new Schur--Weyl duality may be regarded as a $q$-analogue of the one motivating the definition of the partition algebra.
Developing theoretical models for nonequilibrium quantum systems poses significant challenges. Here we develop and study a multimode model of a driven-dissipative Josephson junction chain of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, as realised in the experiment of Labouvie et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 235302 (2016)]. The model is based on c-field theory, a beyond-mean-field approach to Bose-Einstein condensates that incorporates fluctuations due to finite temperature and dissipation. We find the c-field model is capable of capturing all key features of the nonequilibrium phase diagram, including bistability and a critical slowing down in the lower branch of the bistable region. Our model is closely related to the so-called Lugiato-Lefever equation, and thus establishes new connections between nonequilibrium dynamics of ultracold atoms with nonlinear optics, exciton-polariton superfluids, and driven damped sine-Gordon systems.
Motivated by applications in unsourced random access, this paper develops a novel scheme for the problem of compressed sensing of binary signals. In this problem, the goal is to design a sensing matrix $A$ and a recovery algorithm, such that the sparse binary vector $\mathbf{x}$ can be recovered reliably from the measurements $\mathbf{y}=A\mathbf{x}+\sigma\mathbf{z}$, where $\mathbf{z}$ is additive white Gaussian noise. We propose to design $A$ as a parity check matrix of a low-density parity-check code (LDPC), and to recover $\mathbf{x}$ from the measurements $\mathbf{y}$ using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, which runs relatively fast due to the sparse structure of $A$. The performance of our scheme is comparable to state-of-the-art schemes, which use dense sensing matrices, while enjoying the advantages of using a sparse sensing matrix.
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to design machine learning algorithms that can continually learn new concepts from a few data points, without forgetting knowledge of old classes. The difficulty lies in that limited data from new classes not only lead to significant overfitting issues but also exacerbate the notorious catastrophic forgetting problems. Moreover, as training data come in sequence in FSCIL, the learned classifier can only provide discriminative information in individual sessions, while FSCIL requires all classes to be involved for evaluation. In this paper, we address the FSCIL problem from two aspects. First, we adopt a simple but effective decoupled learning strategy of representations and classifiers that only the classifiers are updated in each incremental session, which avoids knowledge forgetting in the representations. By doing so, we demonstrate that a pre-trained backbone plus a non-parametric class mean classifier can beat state-of-the-art methods. Second, to make the classifiers learned on individual sessions applicable to all classes, we propose a Continually Evolved Classifier (CEC) that employs a graph model to propagate context information between classifiers for adaptation. To enable the learning of CEC, we design a pseudo incremental learning paradigm that episodically constructs a pseudo incremental learning task to optimize the graph parameters by sampling data from the base dataset. Experiments on three popular benchmark datasets, including CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and Caltech-USCD Birds-200-2011 (CUB200), show that our method significantly outperforms the baselines and sets new state-of-the-art results with remarkable advantages.
Instance contrast for unsupervised representation learning has achieved great success in recent years. In this work, we explore the idea of instance contrastive learning in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and propose a novel Category Contrast technique (CaCo) that introduces semantic priors on top of instance discrimination for visual UDA tasks. By considering instance contrastive learning as a dictionary look-up operation, we construct a semantics-aware dictionary with samples from both source and target domains where each target sample is assigned a (pseudo) category label based on the category priors of source samples. This allows category contrastive learning (between target queries and the category-level dictionary) for category-discriminative yet domain-invariant feature representations: samples of the same category (from either source or target domain) are pulled closer while those of different categories are pushed apart simultaneously. Extensive UDA experiments in multiple visual tasks ($e.g.$, segmentation, classification and detection) show that the simple implementation of CaCo achieves superior performance as compared with the highly-optimized state-of-the-art methods. Analytically and empirically, the experiments also demonstrate that CaCo is complementary to existing UDA methods and generalizable to other learning setups such as semi-supervised learning, unsupervised model adaptation, etc.
This paper presents the first wireless and programmable neural stimulator leveraging magnetoelectric (ME) effects for power and data transfer. Thanks to low tissue absorption, low misalignment sensitivity and high power transfer efficiency, the ME effect enables safe delivery of high power levels (a few milliwatts) at low resonant frequencies (~250 kHz) to mm-sized implants deep inside the body (30-mm depth). The presented MagNI (Magnetoelectric Neural Implant) consists of a 1.5-mm$^2$ 180-nm CMOS chip, an in-house built 4x2 mm ME film, an energy storage capacitor, and on-board electrodes on a flexible polyimide substrate with a total volume of 8.2 mm$^3$ . The chip with a power consumption of 23.7 $\mu$W includes robust system control and data recovery mechanisms under source amplitude variations (1-V variation tolerance). The system delivers fully-programmable bi-phasic current-controlled stimulation with patterns covering 0.05-to-1.5-mA amplitude, 64-to-512-$\mu$s pulse width, and 0-to-200Hz repetition frequency for neurostimulation.
Robot Assisted Therapy is a new paradigm in many therapies such as the therapy of children with autism spectrum disorder. In this paper we present the use of a parrot-like robot as an assistive tool in turn taking therapy. The therapy is designed in the form of a card game between a child with autism and a therapist or the robot. The intervention was implemented in a single subject study format and the effect sizes for different turn taking variables are calculated. The results show that the child robot interaction had larger effect size than the child trainer effect size in most of the turn taking variables. Furthermore the therapist point of view on the proposed Robot Assisted Therapy is evaluated using a questionnaire. The therapist believes that the robot is appealing to children which may ease the therapy process. The therapist suggested to add other functionalities and games to let children with autism to learn more turn taking tasks and better generalize the learned tasks
We present a new suite of atmosphere models with flexible cloud parameters to investigate the effects of clouds on brown dwarfs across the L/T transition. We fit these models to a sample of 13 objects with well-known masses, distances, and spectral types spanning L3-T5. Our modelling is guided by spatially-resolved photometry from the Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Telescopes covering visible to near-infrared wavelengths. We find that, with appropriate cloud parameters, the data can be fit well by atmospheric models with temperature and surface gravity in agreement with the predictions of evolutionary models. We see a clear trend in the cloud parameters with spectral type, with earlier-type objects exhibiting higher-altitude clouds with smaller grains (0.25-0.50 micron) and later-type objects being better fit with deeper clouds and larger grains ($\geq$1 micron). Our results confirm previous work that suggests L dwarfs are dominated by submicron particles, whereas T dwarfs have larger particle sizes.
Herein, design of false data injection attack on a distributed cyber-physical system is considered. A stochastic process with linear dynamics and Gaussian noise is measured by multiple agent nodes, each equipped with multiple sensors. The agent nodes form a multi-hop network among themselves. Each agent node computes an estimate of the process by using its sensor observation and messages obtained from neighboring nodes, via Kalman-consensus filtering. An external attacker, capable of arbitrarily manipulating the sensor observations of some or all agent nodes, injects errors into those sensor observations. The goal of the attacker is to steer the estimates at the agent nodes as close as possible to a pre-specified value, while respecting a constraint on the attack detection probability. To this end, a constrained optimization problem is formulated to find the optimal parameter values of a certain class of linear attacks. The parameters of linear attack are learnt on-line via a combination of stochastic approximation based update of a Lagrange multiplier, and an optimization technique involving either the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions or online stochastic gradient descent. The problem turns out to be convex for some special cases. Desired convergence of the proposed algorithms are proved by exploiting the convexity and properties of stochastic approximation algorithms. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of the attack.
Population protocols are a fundamental model in distributed computing, where many nodes with bounded memory and computational power have random pairwise interactions over time. This model has been studied in a rich body of literature aiming to understand the tradeoffs between the memory and time needed to perform computational tasks. We study the population protocol model focusing on the communication complexity needed to achieve consensus with high probability. When the number of memory states is $s = O(\log \log{n})$, the best upper bound known was given by a protocol with $O(n \log{n})$ communication, while the best lower bound was $\Omega(n \log(n)/s)$ communication. We design a protocol that shows the lower bound is sharp. When each agent has $s=O(\log{n}^{\theta})$ states of memory, with $\theta \in (0,1/2)$, consensus can be reached in time $O(\log(n))$ with $O(n \log{(n)}/s)$ communications with high probability.
We show that nonparaxial polarized light beams propagating in a bulk nonlinear Kerr medium naturally exhibit a coupling between the motional and the polarization degrees of freedom, realizing a spin-orbit-coupled mixture of fluids of light. We investigate the impact of this mechanism on the Bogoliubov modes of the fluid, using a suitable density-phase formalism built upon a linearization of the exact Helmholtz equation. The Bogoliubov spectrum is found to be anisotropic, and features both low-frequency gapless branches and high-frequency gapped ones. We compute the amplitudes of these modes and propose a couple of experimental protocols to study their excitation mechanisms. This allows us to highlight a phenomenon of hybridization between density and spin modes, which is absent in the paraxial description and represents a typical fingerprint of spin-orbit coupling.
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL by using imaginary trajectories generated by the learned dynamics model. When the model is inaccurate or biased, imaginary trajectories may be deleterious for training the action-value and policy functions. To alleviate such problem, this paper proposes to adaptively reweight the imaginary transitions, so as to reduce the negative effects of poorly generated trajectories. More specifically, we evaluate the effect of an imaginary transition by calculating the change of the loss computed on the real samples when we use the transition to train the action-value and policy functions. Based on this evaluation criterion, we construct the idea of reweighting each imaginary transition by a well-designed meta-gradient algorithm. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art model-based and model-free RL algorithms on multiple tasks. Visualization of our changing weights further validates the necessity of utilizing reweight scheme.
We present a learning-based planner that aims to robustly drive a vehicle by mimicking human drivers' driving behavior. We leverage a mid-to-mid approach that allows us to manipulate the input to our imitation learning network freely. With that in mind, we propose a novel feedback synthesizer for data augmentation. It allows our agent to gain more driving experience in various previously unseen environments that are likely to encounter, thus improving overall performance. This is in contrast to prior works that rely purely on random synthesizers. Furthermore, rather than completely commit to imitating, we introduce task losses that penalize undesirable behaviors, such as collision, off-road, and so on. Unlike prior works, this is done by introducing a differentiable vehicle rasterizer that directly converts the waypoints output by the network into images. This effectively avoids the usage of heavyweight ConvLSTM networks, therefore, yields a faster model inference time. About the network architecture, we exploit an attention mechanism that allows the network to reason critical objects in the scene and produce better interpretable attention heatmaps. To further enhance the safety and robustness of the network, we add an optional optimization-based post-processing planner improving the driving comfort. We comprehensively validate our method's effectiveness in different scenarios that are specifically created for evaluating self-driving vehicles. Results demonstrate that our learning-based planner achieves high intelligence and can handle complex situations. Detailed ablation and visualization analysis are included to further demonstrate each of our proposed modules' effectiveness in our method.
In numerous practical applications, especially in medical image reconstruction, it is often infeasible to obtain a large ensemble of ground-truth/measurement pairs for supervised learning. Therefore, it is imperative to develop unsupervised learning protocols that are competitive with supervised approaches in performance. Motivated by the maximum-likelihood principle, we propose an unsupervised learning framework for solving ill-posed inverse problems. Instead of seeking pixel-wise proximity between the reconstructed and the ground-truth images, the proposed approach learns an iterative reconstruction network whose output matches the ground-truth in distribution. Considering tomographic reconstruction as an application, we demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised approach not only performs on par with its supervised variant in terms of objective quality measures but also successfully circumvents the issue of over-smoothing that supervised approaches tend to suffer from. The improvement in reconstruction quality comes at the expense of higher training complexity, but, once trained, the reconstruction time remains the same as its supervised counterpart.
Transmon qubits fabricated with tantalum metal have been shown to possess energy relaxation times greater than 300 $\mu$s and, as such, present an attractive platform for high precision, correlated noise studies across multiple higher energy transitions. Tracking the multi-level fluctuating qudit frequencies with a precision enabled by the high coherence of the device allows us to extract the charge offset and quasi-particle dynamics. We observe qualitatively different charge offset behavior in the tantalum device than those measured in previous low frequency charge noise studies. In particular, we find the charge offset dynamics are dominated by rare, discrete jumps between a finite number of quasi-stationary charge configurations, a previously unobserved charge noise process in superconducting qubits.