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Published work

277 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

3D Dynamic Radio Map Prediction Using Vision Transformers for Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

Low-altitude wireless networks (LAWN) are rapidly expanding with the growing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for logistics, surveillance, and emergency response. Reliable connectivity remains a critical yet challenging task due to three-dimensional (3D) mobility, time-varying user density, and limited power budgets. The transmit power of base stations (BSs) fluctuates dynamically according to user locations and traffic demands, leading to a highly non-stationary 3D radio environment. Radio maps (RMs) have emerged as an effective means to characterize spatial power distributions and support radio-aware network optimization. However, most existing works construct static or offline RMs, overlooking real-time power variations and spatio-temporal dependencies in multi-UAV networks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a 3D dynamic radio map (3D-DRM) framework that learns and predicts the spatio-temporal evolution of received power. Specially, a Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder extracts high-dimensional spatial representations from 3D RMs, while a Transformer-based module models sequential dependencies to predict future power distributions. Experiments unveil that 3D-DRM accurately captures fast-varying power dynamics and substantially outperforms baseline models in both RM reconstruction and short-term prediction.

preprint2026arXiv

Beyond Factor Aggregation: Gauge-Aware Low-Rank Server Representations for Federated LoRA

Federated LoRA enables parameter-efficient adaptation of large language models under decentralized data and limited client resources.However, directly averaging LoRA factors is representation-dependent: the same intrinsic update admits infinitely many gauge-equivalent factorizations, so factor-level aggregation can change under arbitrary coordinate choices while the underlying update remains unchanged. This reveals a semantic mismatch in existing federated LoRA aggregation rules. We propose \textbf{GLoRA}, a gauge-aware server representation for federated LoRA.Instead of aggregating raw factors, GLoRA estimates a consensus update subspace from client projectors and aggregates client updates in shared reference coordinates, thereby representing semantic update aggregation entirely in low-rank form. To support heterogeneous client capacities, GLoRA further provides a rank-compatible readout that instantiates adapters of different ranks from the same server state without dense update reconstruction. Experiments on GLUE and SuperNI show that GLoRA consistently outperforms federated LoRA baselines under data, resource, and task heterogeneity, including heterogeneous client ranks, sparse participation, larger backbones, and unseen-task evaluation. GLoRA also achieves a favorable efficiency--performance trade-off, suggesting that effective federated LoRA requires not merely averaging low-rank factors, but defining a semantically meaningful server-side representation for aggregation.

preprint2026arXiv

Biosignal Fingerprinting: A Cross-Modal PPG-ECG Foundation Model

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of global mortality, yet scalable cardiac monitoring is hindered by the gap between diagnostic-rich ECG and ubiquitous wearable PPG. Bridging this gap requires representations that are compact, transferable across modalities and devices, and deployable without task-specific retraining. Here we introduce biosignal fingerprints: compact latent representations of cardiovascular state derived from a cross-modal foundation model, the Multi-modal Masked Autoencoder (M2AE), trained on over 3.4 million paired ECG and PPG signals. M2AE integrates modality-specific encoders with a shared bottleneck and dual decoders, jointly optimized using reconstruction and cross-modal contrastive objectives, yielding generalizable fingerprints that retain intra- and inter-modality features. Like a biometric fingerprint, these representations uniquely encode an individual's cardiovascular state in a modality-agnostic, privacy-preserving form reusable across clinical tasks without exposing raw waveform data or requiring model retraining. Across 7 downstream tasks, spanning cross-modal reconstruction, cardiovascular disease classification, hypertension detection, mortality prediction, and demographic inference, biosignal fingerprints achieve competitive or superior performance compared to leading domain-specialist foundation models in frozen settings, including an AUROC of 0.974 for five-class CVD classification and 0.877 for hypertension detection, with a maximum improvement of 27.7% in AUROC across 5 classification tasks. Critically, strong performance is maintained with only a single modality, enabling deployment in resource-constrained, single-sensor environments typical of real-world wearable monitoring, with direct implications for continuous cardiovascular monitoring across clinical and consumer health settings.

preprint2026arXiv

Bridging Cognitive Gap: Hierarchical Description Learning for Artistic Image Aesthetics Assessment

The aesthetic quality assessment task is crucial for developing a human-aligned quantitative evaluation system for AIGC. However, its inherently complex nature, spanning visual perception, cognition, and emotion, poses fundamental challenges. Although aesthetic descriptions offer a viable representation of this complexity, two critical challenges persist: (1) data scarcity and imbalance: existing dataset overly focuses on visual perception and neglects deeper dimensions due to the expensive manual annotation; and (2) model fragmentation: current visual networks isolate aesthetic attributes with multi-branch encoder, while multimodal methods represented by contrastive learning struggle to effectively process long-form textual descriptions. To resolve challenge (1), we first present the Refined Aesthetic Description (RAD) dataset, a large-scale (70k), multi-dimensional structured dataset, generated via an iterative pipeline without heavy annotation costs and easy to scale. To address challenge (2), we propose ArtQuant, an aesthetics assessment framework for artistic images which not only couples isolated aesthetic dimensions through joint description generation, but also better models long-text semantics with the help of LLM decoders. Besides, theoretical analysis confirms this symbiosis: RAD's semantic adequacy (data) and generation paradigm (model) collectively minimize prediction entropy, providing mathematical grounding for the framework. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets while requiring only 33% of conventional training epochs, narrowing the cognitive gap between artistic images and aesthetic judgment. We will release both code and dataset to support future research.

preprint2026arXiv

Bridging Distance and Spectral Positional Encodings via Anchor-Based Diffusion Geometry Approximation

Molecular graph learning benefits from positional signals that capture both local neighborhoods and global topology. Two widely used families are spectral encodings derived from Laplacian or diffusion operators and anchor-based distance encodings built from shortest-path information, yet their precise relationship is poorly understood. We interpret distance encodings as a low-rank surrogate of diffusion geometry and derive an explicit trilateration map that reconstructs truncated diffusion coordinates from transformed anchor distances and anchor spectral positions, with pointwise and Frobenius-gap guarantees on random regular graphs. On DrugBank molecular graphs using a shared GNP-based DDI prediction backbone, a distance-driven Nyström scheme closely recovers diffusion geometry, and both Laplacian and distance encodings substantially outperform a no-encoding baseline.

preprint2026arXiv

Chain-based Distillation for Effective Initialization of Variable-Sized Small Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance but remain costly to deploy in resource-constrained settings. Training small language models (SLMs) from scratch is computationally expensive, while conventional knowledge distillation requires repeated access to large teachers for different target sizes, leading to poor scalability. To solve these problems, we propose \textbf{Chain-based Distillation (CBD)}, a scalable paradigm for efficiently initializing variable-sized language models. A sparse and limited sequence of intermediate models (called anchors) is constructed via stepwise distillation, forming a distillation chain that progressively transfers knowledge from the source LLMs. To support heterogeneous settings, we introduce \emph{bridge distillation} for cross-architecture and cross-vocabulary transfer. Models of variable sizes are initialized via parameter interpolation between adjacent anchors, eliminating repeated large teacher inference. Experiments show that the proposed method substantially improves efficiency and downstream performance. A 138M-parameter SLM without recovery pre-training, outperforms scratch-trained models on a 10B-token corpus on the specific task. CBD also demonstrates versatility in heterogeneous settings for initialize models with different architectures and vocabularies.

preprint2026arXiv

CoINS: Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-Aware VLM

Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in robotic planning. However, they typically function as semantic reasoners, lacking an intrinsic understanding of the specific robot's physical capabilities. This limitation is particularly critical in interactive navigation, where robots must actively modify cluttered environments to create traversable paths. Existing VLM-based navigators are predominantly confined to passive obstacle avoidance, failing to reason about when and how to interact with objects to clear blocked paths. To bridge this gap, we propose Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-aware VLM (CoINS), a hierarchical framework that integrates skill-aware reasoning and robust low-level execution. Specifically, we fine-tune a VLM, named InterNav-VLM, which incorporates skill affordance and concrete constraint parameters into the input context and grounds them into a metric-scale environmental representation. By internalizing the logic of counterfactual reasoning through fine-tuning on the proposed InterNav dataset, the model learns to implicitly evaluate the causal effects of object removal on navigation connectivity, thereby determining interaction necessity and target selection. To execute the generated high-level plans, we develop a comprehensive skill library through reinforcement learning, specifically introducing traversability-oriented strategies to manipulate diverse objects for path clearance. A systematic benchmark in Isaac Sim is proposed to evaluate both the reasoning and execution aspects of interactive navigation. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that CoINS significantly outperforms representative baselines, achieving a 17\% higher overall success rate and over 80\% improvement in complex long-horizon scenarios compared to the best-performing baseline

preprint2026arXiv

Count Anything at Any Granularity

Open-world object counting remains brittle: despite rapid advances in vision-language models (VLMs), reliably counting the objects a user intends is far from solved. We argue that a central reason is that counting granularity is left implicit; users may refer to a specific identity, an attribute, an instance type, a category, or an abstract concept, yet most methods treat "what to count" as a single, category-level matching problem. In this work, we redefine open-world counting as multi-grained counting, where visual exemplars specify target appearance and fine-grained text, with optional negative prompts, specifies the intended semantic granularity across five explicit levels. Making granularity explicit, however, exposes a critical data bottleneck: existing counting datasets lack the multi-category scenes, controlled distractors, and instance-level annotations needed to verify fine-grained prompt semantics. To address this, we propose the first fully automatic data-scaling pipeline that integrates controllable 3D synthesis with consistent image editing and VLM-based filtering, and use it to construct KubriCount, the largest and most comprehensively annotated counting dataset to date, supporting both training and multi-grained evaluation. Systematic benchmarking reveals that both multimodal large language models and specialist counting models exhibit severe prompt-following failures under fine-grained distinctions. Motivated by these findings, we train HieraCount, a multi-grained counting model that jointly leverages text and visual exemplars as complementary target specifications. HieraCount substantially improves multi-grained counting accuracy and generalizes robustly to challenging real-world scenarios. The project page is available here: https://verg-avesta.github.io/KubriCount/.

preprint2026arXiv

DCGL: Dual-Channel Graph Learning with Large Language Models for Knowledge-Aware Recommendation

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have proven highly effective for recommendation systems by capturing latent item relationships, while recent integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has further enhanced semantic understanding and addressed knowledge sparsity issues. Nevertheless, current KG-and-LLM-based methods still face three main limitations: 1) inadequate modeling of implicit semantic relationships beyond explicit KG links; 2) suboptimal single-channel fusion of ID and LLM embeddings, which often leads to signal interference and blurred representations; and 3) insufficient consideration of user-item interaction frequency variations in recommendation strategies. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-Channel Graph Learning (DCGL) framework, featuring three key innovations: 1) a dual-channel architecture that structurally decouples rich semantic information from user behavioral patterns, preventing early interference; 2) a multi-level contrastive learning mechanism that enhances robustness against KG noise through intra-view contrasts and bridges semantic gaps between channels via inter-view alignment; and 3) a dynamic fusion mechanism that adaptively balances semantic generalization and behavioral specificity based on interaction frequency, resolving the cascading limitation. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that DCGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding substantial improvements in sparse scenarios while maintaining precision for active users. Our code is available at https://github.com/XinchiZou/DCGL.

preprint2026arXiv

Diffusion Model-Enhanced Environment Reconstruction in ISAC

Recently, environment reconstruction (ER) in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems has emerged as a promising approach for achieving high-resolution environmental perception. However, the initial results obtained from ISAC systems are coarse and often unsatisfactory due to the high sparsity of the point clouds and significant noise variance. To address this problem, we propose a noise-sparsity-aware diffusion model (NSADM) post-processing framework. Leveraging the powerful data recovery capabilities of diffusion models, the proposed scheme exploits spatial features and the additive nature of noise to enhance point cloud density and denoise the initial input. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing model-based and deep learning-based approaches in terms of Chamfer distance and root mean square error.

preprint2026arXiv

Dynamic Water-Wave Tweezers

Following a recent demonstration of stable trapping of floating particles by stationary (monochromatic) structured water waves [Nature 638, 394 (2025)], we report dynamic water-wave tweezers that enable controllable transport of trapped particles along arbitrary trajectories on the water surface. We employ a triangular lattice formed by the interference of three plane waves, which can trap particles, depending on parameters, either at intensity maxima or at intensity zeros (vortices). By introducing small frequency detunings between the interfering waves, we control 2D motion of the lattice and trapped particles. This approach is robust and effective over a relatively broad range of particle sizes and wave frequencies, offering remarkable new possibilities for noncontact manipulation of floating (e.g., biological and soft-matter) objects in fluidic environments.

preprint2026arXiv

EgoIntrospect: An Egocentric Dataset and Benchmark for User-Centric Internal State Reasoning

Despite extensive efforts on egocentric video datasets and benchmarks, understanding users' internal states, which is crucial for enabling seamless AI assistant experiences, remains largely overlooked. In this work, we introduce EgoIntrospect, the first egocentric dataset captured in user-driven scenarios with self-annotations that explicitly reveal users' interactive intentions with AI assistants. EgoIntrospect was collected using a cross-device setup, providing synchronized video, audio, gaze, motion, and physiological signals. It consists of 180 hours of recordings from 60 subjects, with an average recording duration of 3 hours per subject. Leveraging EgoIntrospect, we formalize a suite of tasks centered on user internal states, including affective experience, interactive intent, and cognitive memory. We further process the annotations to construct benchmarks that evaluate the ability of modern multimodal large language models to reason about users' internal states from egocentric observations. Experiments on our benchmark suggest that existing multimodal large language models struggle to effectively leverage multimodal signals to infer users' subjective internal states. The dataset and annotations will be made publicly available to advance research in egocentric vision and wearable AI assistants. Project page: https://ego-introspect.github.io/

preprint2026arXiv

FinDeepForecast: A Live Multi-Agent System for Benchmarking Deep Research Agents in Financial Forecasting

Deep Research (DR) Agents powered by advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally shifted the paradigm for completing complex research tasks. Yet, a comprehensive and live evaluation of their forecasting performance on real-world, research-oriented tasks in high-stakes domains (e.g., finance) remains underexplored. We introduce FinDeepForecast, the first live, end-to-end multi-agent system for automatically evaluating DR agents by continuously generating research-oriented financial forecasting tasks. This system is equipped with a dual-track taxonomy, enabling the dynamic generation of recurrent and non-recurrent forecasting tasks at both corporate and macro levels. With this system, we generate FinDeepForecastBench, a weekly evaluation benchmark over a ten-week horizon, encompassing 8 global economies and 1,314 listed companies, and evaluate 13 representative methods. Extensive experiments show that, while DR agents consistently outperform strong baselines, their performance still falls short of genuine forward-looking financial reasoning. We expect the proposed FinDeepForecast system to consistently facilitate future advancements of DR agents in research-oriented financial forecasting tasks. The benchmark and leaderboard are publicly available on the OpenFinArena Platform.

preprint2026arXiv

FinDeepResearch: Evaluating Deep Research Agents in Rigorous Financial Analysis

Deep Research (DR) agents, powered by advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), have recently garnered increasing attention for their capability in conducting complex research tasks. However, existing literature lacks a rigorous and systematic evaluation of DR Agent's capabilities in critical research analysis. To address this gap, we first propose HisRubric, a novel evaluation framework with a hierarchical analytical structure and a fine-grained grading rubric for rigorously assessing DR agents' capabilities in corporate financial analysis. This framework mirrors the professional analyst's workflow, progressing from data recognition to metric calculation, and finally to strategic summarization and interpretation. Built on this framework, we construct a FinDeepResearch benchmark that comprises 64 listed companies from 8 financial markets across 4 languages, encompassing a total of 15,808 grading items. We further conduct extensive experiments on the FinDeepResearch using 16 representative methods, including 6 DR agents, 5 LLMs equipped with both deep reasoning and search capabilities, and 5 LLMs with deep reasoning capabilities only. The results reveal the strengths and limitations of these approaches across diverse capabilities, financial markets, and languages, offering valuable insights for future research and development. The benchmark and evaluation code is publicly available at https://OpenFinArena.com/.

preprint2026arXiv

FML-bench: A Controlled Study of AI Research Agent Strategies from the Perspective of Search Dynamics

AI research agents accelerate ML research by automating hypothesis generation, experimentation, and empirical refinement. Existing agent strategies range from greedy hill-climbing to tree search and evolutionary optimization, yet which strategy choices drive performance remains unclear. Answering this question requires a benchmark that separates agent strategy (e.g., search topology) from execution infrastructure (e.g., code editor), so that performance differences are attributable to strategy rather than infrastructure, and that provides process-level metrics beyond final scores to analyze exploration behaviors. Existing benchmarks offer limited support. We propose FML-Bench, a benchmark of 18 fundamental ML research tasks across 10 domains that separates agent strategy from execution infrastructure and defines 12 process-level behavioral metrics. Evaluating six representative agents, we find that: (1) strategy complexity alone does not guarantee strong performance: a simple greedy hill-climber nearly matches the best-performing tree-search agent, both well above the remaining agents; (2) our analysis suggests this pattern relates to improvement opportunity structure: greedy search tends to be more effective when opportunities are dense, while tree-search and evolutionary strategies tend to be more effective when opportunities are sparse; an adaptive agent built on this insight switches to broader exploration upon detecting improvement stagnation and outperforms the other six agents, lending initial support to this observation; and (3) process-level analysis reveals that early convergence and directionally focused exploration are significantly associated with final performance, while solution diversity and compute cost are not. Our benchmark is available at: https://github.com/qrzou/FML-bench.

preprint2026arXiv

FreeText: Training-Free Text Rendering in Diffusion Transformers via Attention Localization and Spectral Glyph Injection

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models excel at open-domain synthesis but still struggle with precise text rendering, especially for multi-line layouts, dense typography, and long-tailed scripts such as Chinese. Prior solutions typically require costly retraining or rigid external layout constraints, which can degrade aesthetics and limit flexibility. We propose \textbf{FreeText}, a training-free, plug-and-play framework that improves text rendering by exploiting intrinsic mechanisms of \emph{Diffusion Transformer (DiT)} models. \textbf{FreeText} decomposes the problem into \emph{where to write} and \emph{what to write}. For \emph{where to write}, we localize writing regions by reading token-wise spatial attribution from endogenous image-to-text attention, using sink-like tokens as stable spatial anchors and topology-aware refinement to produce high-confidence masks. For \emph{what to write}, we introduce Spectral-Modulated Glyph Injection (SGMI), which injects a noise-aligned glyph prior with frequency-domain band-pass modulation to strengthen glyph structure and suppress semantic leakage (rendering the concept instead of the word). Extensive experiments on Qwen-Image, FLUX.1-dev, and SD3 variants across longText-Benchmark, CVTG, and our CLT-Bench show consistent gains in text readability while largely preserving semantic alignment and aesthetic quality, with modest inference overhead.

preprint2026arXiv

Generative structure search for efficient and diverse discovery of molecular and crystal structures

Predicting stable and metastable structures is central to molecular and materials discovery, but remains limited by the cost of searching high-dimensional energy landscapes. Deep generative models offer efficient structure sampling, yet their outputs remain shaped by training data and can underexplore minima that are rare but physically relevant. We introduce generative structure search (GSS), a unified framework that formulates diffusion-based generation and random structure search (RSS) as limiting regimes of a common sampling process driven by learned score fields and physical forces. Coupling these drivers lets GSS use data priors to accelerate sampling while retaining energy-guided exploration of local minima. Across molecular and crystalline systems, GSS recovers diverse metastable structures with more than tenfold lower sampling cost than RSS for broad coverage and remains effective for compositions outside the training distribution. The results establish a physically grounded generative search strategy for discovering structures beyond the reach of data-driven sampling alone.

preprint2026arXiv

GREx: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation, Comprehension, and Generation

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) and Comprehension (REC) respectively segment and detect the object described by an expression, while Referring Expression Generation (REG) generates an expression for the selected object. Existing datasets and methods commonly support single-target expressions only, i.e., one expression refers to one object, not considering multi-target and no-target expressions. This greatly limits the real applications of REx (RES/REC/REG). This paper introduces three new benchmarks called Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES), Comprehension (GREC), and Generation (GREG), collectively denoted as GREx, which extend the classic REx to allow expressions to identify an arbitrary number of objects. We construct the first large-scale GREx dataset gRefCOCO that contains multi-target, no-target, and single-target expressions and their corresponding images with labeled targets. GREx and gRefCOCO are designed to be backward-compatible with REx, facilitating extensive experiments to study the performance gap of the existing REx methods on GREx tasks. One of the challenges of GRES/GREC is complex relationship modeling, for which we propose a baseline ReLA that adaptively divides the image into regions with sub-instance clues and explicitly models the region-region and region-language dependencies. The proposed ReLA achieves the state-of-the-art results on the both GRES and GREC tasks. The proposed gRefCOCO dataset and method are available at https://henghuiding.github.io/GREx.

preprint2026arXiv

Improving Human Image Animation via Semantic Representation Alignment

The field of image-to-video generation has made remarkable progress. However, challenges such as human limb twisting and facial distortion persist, especially when generating long videos or modeling intensive motions. Existing human image animation works address these issues by incorporating human-specific semantic representations, e.g., dense poses or ID embeddings, as additional conditions. However, conditioning on these representations could decrease the generation flexibility. Moreover, their reliance on RGB pixel supervision also lacks emphasis on learning necessary 3D geometric relationships and temporal coherence. In contrast, we introduce a novel approach named SemanticREPA that leverages these semantic representations as supervision signals through representation alignment. Specifically, we begin by training a structure alignment module that aligns the structure representations obtained from video latents with video depth estimation features. We then fix the pretrained module, and utilize it to provide additional supervision on the structure representations of the diffusion models, achieving structure rectification to generate coherent and stable human structures. Simultaneously, we develop an ID alignment module to align the ID representations of the generated videos to face recognition features. We further propose to use the predicted structure representations to refine identity restoration in relevant regions. With structure and ID alignment, our method demonstrates superior quality on extended character motions and enhanced character consistency.

preprint2026arXiv

Learngene Search Across Multiple Datasets for Building Variable-Sized Models

Deep learning methods are widely used under diverse resource constraints, resulting in models of varying sizes, such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) series. Deploying these models typically requires costly pretraining and finetuning. The Learngene paradigm addresses this issue by extracting transferable components, called learngenes, from a pretrained ancestry model (Ans-Net) to initialize variable-sized descendant models (Des-Nets).Existing learngene extraction methods rely on a single dataset, limiting downstream performance. To address this limitation, we propose Learngene Search Across Multiple Datasets for Building Variable-Sized Models (LSAMD). LSAMD expands the Ans-Net into a searchable super Ans-Net with dataset-specific blocks and dataset adapters (DADs). During training, LSAMD searches for an optimal architecture path for each dataset. The base blocks most frequently selected across datasets are extracted as learngenes for initializing Des-Nets.Experiments on multiple datasets show that LSAMD achieves performance comparable to pretrain-finetune methods while significantly reducing storage and training costs.

preprint2026arXiv

Mamoda2.5: Enhancing Unified Multimodal Model with DiT-MoE

We present Mamoda2.5, a unified AR-Diffusion framework that seamlessly integrates multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture. To efficiently enhance the model's generation capability, we equip the Diffusion Transformer backbone with a fine-grained Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design (128 experts, Top-8 routing), yielding a 25B-parameter model that activates only 3B parameters, significantly reducing training costs while scaling up the model capacity. Mamoda2.5 achieves top-tier generation performance on VBench 2.0 and sets a new record in video editing quality, surpassing evaluated open-source models and matching the performance of current top-tier proprietary models, including the Kling O1 on OpenVE-Bench. Furthermore, we introduce a joint few-step distillation and reinforcement learning framework that compresses the 30-step editing model into a 4-step model and greatly accelerates model inference. Compared to open-source baselines, Mamoda2.5 achieves up to $95.9\times$ faster video editing inference. In real-world applications, Mamoda2.5 has been successfully deployed for content moderation and creative restoration tasks in advertising scenarios, achieving a 98% success rate in internal advertising video editing scenario.

preprint2026arXiv

Masked Next-Scale Prediction for Self-supervised Scene Text Recognition

Scene Text Recognition requires modeling visual structures that evolve from coarse layouts to fine-grained character strokes. Training such models relies on large amounts of annotated data. Recent self-supervised approaches, such as Masked Image Modeling (MIM), alleviate this dependency by leveraging large-scale unlabeled data. Yet most existing MIM methods operate at a single spatial scale and fail to capture the hierarchical nature of scene text. In this work, we introduce Masked Next-Scale Prediction (MNSP), a unified self-supervised framework designed to explicitly model cross-scale structural evolution. The framework incorporates Next-Scale Prediction (NSP), which learns hierarchical representations by predicting higher-resolution features from lower-resolution contexts. Naive scale prediction, however, tends to produce spatially diffuse attention, directing the model toward background regions rather than textual structures. MNSP resolves this limitation by jointly learning cross-scale prediction and masked image reconstruction. NSP captures global layout priors across resolutions, while masked reconstruction imposes strong local constraints that guide attention toward informative text regions. A Multi-scale Linguistic Alignment module further maintains semantic consistency across different resolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MNSP achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 86.2\% average accuracy on the challenging Union14M benchmark and 96.7\% across six standard datasets. Additional analyses show that our method improves robustness under extreme scale and layout variations. Code is available at https://github.com/CzhczhcHczh/MNSP

preprint2026arXiv

Motivating Effort with Information about Future Rewards

This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and provides information over time to motivate effort. We provide a unified framework and derive the optimal information policy in closed form across stationary and nonstationary environments. Within this framework, we identify two precise conditions, each of which guarantees that dynamic disclosure is strictly valuable. First, if the principal is impatient compared to the agent, she prefers the front-loaded effort schedule induced by dynamic disclosure; in a stationary environment, dynamic disclosure is beneficial if and only if the principal is less patient. Second, in an environment where the agent would become pessimistic over time absent any disclosure, dynamic information provision can counteract this downward trend and encourage longer effort. Notably, patience remains a crucial determinant of the structure of the optimal policy.

preprint2026arXiv

Report of the 5th PVUW Challenge: Towards More Diverse Modalities in Pixel-Level Understanding

This report summarizes the objectives, datasets, and top-performing methodologies of the 2026 Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild (PVUW) Challenge, hosted at CVPR 2026, which evaluates state-of-the-art models under highly unconstrained conditions. To provide a comprehensive assessment, the 2026 edition features three specialized tracks: the MOSE track for tracking objects within densely cluttered and severely occluded scenarios; the MeViS-Text track for localizing targets via motion-focused linguistic expressions; and the newly inaugurated MeViS-Audio track, which pioneers acoustic-driven object segmentation. By introducing previously unreleased challenging data and analyzing the cutting-edge, multimodal solutions submitted by participants, this report highlights the community's latest technical advancements and charts promising future directions for robust video scene comprehension.

preprint2026arXiv

SAM3-DMS: Decoupled Memory Selection for Multi-target Video Segmentation of SAM3

Segment Anything 3 (SAM3) has established a powerful foundation that robustly detects, segments, and tracks specified targets in videos. However, in its original implementation, its group-level collective memory selection is suboptimal for complex multi-object scenarios, as it employs a synchronized decision across all concurrent targets conditioned on their average performance, often overlooking individual reliability. To this end, we propose SAM3-DMS, a training-free decoupled strategy that utilizes fine-grained memory selection on individual objects. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves robust identity preservation and tracking stability. Notably, our advantage becomes more pronounced with increased target density, establishing a solid foundation for simultaneous multi-target video segmentation in the wild.

preprint2026arXiv

SEED: Targeted Data Selection by Weighted Independent Set

Data selection seeks to identify a compact yet informative subset from large-scale training corpora, balancing sample quality against collection diversity. We formulate this problem as a Weighted Independent Set (WIS) on a similarity graph, where nodes represent data samples weighted by influence, and edges connect semantically redundant pairs. This formulation naturally yields subsets that are simultaneously high-quality and diverse. However, two challenges arise in practice: naive node weights fail to distinguish informative signals from gradient noise, and edge construction under heterogeneous domain distributions produces structurally imbalanced graphs that bias selection toward sparse regions. To address these issues, we introduce two principled refinements from a unified graph perspective: (1) \textit{node value calibration} that restricts influence estimation to the bilateral salient subspace to ground node importance in task-relevant signals rather than surface-level statistics; (2) \textit{local scale normalization} that adapts edge thresholds to local neighborhood density, mitigating graph imbalance induced by cross-domain distribution shifts. Together, these components yield a robust and scalable data selection pipeline dubbed SEED. We further construct \texttt{Honeybee-Remake-SEED-200K}, a compact multimodal dataset curated by SEED. Extensive experiments show that SEED consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on instruction tuning, visual instruction tuning, and semantic segmentation across diverse model families.

preprint2026arXiv

Self-organized MT Direction Maps Emerge from Spatiotemporal Contrastive Optimization

The spatial and functional organization of the primate visual cortex is a fundamental problem in neuroscience. While recent computational frameworks like the Topographic Deep Artificial Neural Network (TDANN) have successfully modeled spatial organization in the ventral stream, the computational origins of the dorsal stream's distinct topographies, such as direction-selective maps in the middle temporal (MT) area, remain largely unresolved. In this work, we present a spatiotemporal TDANN to investigate whether MT topography is governed by the same universal principles. By training a 3D ResNet on naturalistic videos via a Momentum Contrast (MoCo) self-supervised paradigm alongside a biologically inspired spatial loss, we demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of brain-like direction maps and topological pinwheel structures. Crucially, we reveal that MT tuning properties, characterized by strong direction selectivity paired with a residual axial component, arise from a strict optimization trade-off between task-driven discriminative pressure and spatial regularization. The model's representations quantitatively match in vivo macaque MT physiological baselines, including direction selectivity index, circular variance, and pinwheel density. These findings unify the computational origins of the ventral and dorsal streams, establishing a general mechanism for cortical self-organization.

preprint2026arXiv

Structure preservation and emergent dissipation in stochastic wave equations with transport noise

We study nonlinear wave equations perturbed by transport noise acting either on the displacement or on the velocity. Such noise models random advection and, under suitable scaling of space covariance, may generate an effective dissipative term. We establish well-posedness in both cases and analyse the associated scaling limits. When the noise acts on the displacement, the system preserves its original structure and converges to the deterministic nonlinear wave equation, whereas if it acts on the velocity, the rescaled dynamics produce an additional Laplacian damping term, leading to a stochastic derivation of a Westervelt-type acoustic model.

preprint2026arXiv

Understanding Cross-Language Transfer Improvements in Low-Resource HTR: The Role of Sequence Modeling

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script languages benefits from cross-language joint training under low-resource conditions, particularly when using CRNN-based models that combine convolutional encoders with sequence modeling. However, it remains unclear whether these improvements are better explained by shared visual representations or sequence-level dependencies. In this work, we conduct a controlled architectural study of line-level Arabic-script HTR, comparing CNN-only models with CTC decoding and CRNN models under identical single-script and multi-script training regimes. Experiments are performed on Arabic (KHATT), Urdu (NUST-UHWR), and Persian (PHTD) datasets under low-resource settings (K in {100, 500, 1000}). Our results show a clear divergence in transfer behavior: while CNN-only models exhibit limited or unstable improvements, CRNN models achieve better performance under multi-script training, particularly in the most data-constrained regimes. Focusing on transfer improvements (delta CER) rather than absolute performance, we find that cross-language improvements are associated with sequence-level modeling, while sharing visual representations learned by the CNN encoder, corresponding to similarities in character shapes across scripts, alone appears to be insufficient. This finding suggests that contextual modeling plays an important role in enabling effective transfer in low-resource scenarios, and that similar behavior may extend to other low-resource language settings.

preprint2026arXiv

Understanding Performance Collapse in Layer-Pruned Large Language Models via Decision Representation Transitions

Layer pruning efficiently reduces Large Language Model (LLM) computational costs but often triggers sudden performance collapse. Existing representation-based analyses struggle to explain this mechanism. We propose studying pruning through decision representation. Focusing on multiple-choice tasks, we introduce two metrics, Decision Margin and Option Frequency, and an Iterative Pruning method to analyze layer-wise decision dynamics. Our findings reveal a sharp decision transition that partitions the network into two stages: a Silent Phase, where the model cannot yet predict the correct answer, and a Decisive Phase, where the correct prediction emerges. We also find that pruning the Decisive Phase has minimal impact, whereas pruning the Silent Phase triggers immediate performance collapse, highlighting its extreme sensitivity to structural changes. Therefore, we conclude that pruning-induced collapse stems from disrupting the Silent Phase, which prevents the critical decision transition from occurring.

preprint2026arXiv

Video Generation with Predictive Latents

Video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) enables latent video generative modeling by mapping the visual world into compact spatiotemporal latent spaces, improving training efficiency and stability. While existing video VAEs achieve commendable reconstruction quality, continued optimization of reconstruction does not necessarily translate into improved generative performance. How to enhance the diffusability of video latents remains a critical and unresolved challenge. In this work, inspired by principles of predictive world modeling, we investigate the potential of predictive learning to improve the video generative modeling. To this end, we introduce a simple and effective predictive reconstruction objective that unifies predictive learning with video reconstruction. Specifically, we randomly discard future frames and encode only partial past observations, while training the decoder to reconstruct the observed frames and predict future ones simultaneously. This design encourages the latent space to encode temporally predictive structures and build a more coherent understanding of video dynamics, thereby improving generation quality. Our model, termed Predictive Video VAE (PV-VAE), achieves superior performance on video generation, with 52% faster convergence and a 34.42 FVD improvement over the Wan2.2 VAE on UCF101. Furthermore, comprehensive analyses demonstrate that PV-VAE not only exhibits favorable scalability, with generative performance improving alongside VAE training, but also yields consistent gains in downstream video understanding, underscoring a latent space that effectively captures temporal coherence and motion priors.

preprint2026arXiv

ViewSAM: Learning View-aware Cross-modal Semantics for Weakly Supervised Cross-view Referring Multi-Object Tracking

Cross-view Referring Multi-Object Tracking (CRMOT) aims to track multiple objects specified by natural language across multiple camera views, with globally consistent identities. Despite recent progress, existing methods rely heavily on costly frame-level spatial annotations and cross-view identity supervision. To reduce such reliance, we explore CRMOT under weak supervision by leveraging the capabilities of foundation models. However, our empirical study shows that directly applying foundation models such as SAM2 and SAM3, even with task-specific modifications, fails to accurately understand referring expressions and maintain consistent identities across views. Yet, they remain effective at producing reliable object tracklets that can serve as pseudo supervision. We therefore repurpose foundation models as pseudo-label generators and propose a two-stage framework for weakly supervised CRMOT, using only object category labels as coarse-grained supervision. In the first stage, we design an Affinity-guided Cross-view Re-prompting strategy to refine and associate SAM3-generated tracklets across cameras, producing reliable cross-view pseudo labels for subsequent training. In the second stage, we introduce ViewSAM, a CRMOT model built upon SAM2 that explicitly models view-aware cross-modal semantics. By formulating view-induced variations as learnable conditions, ViewSAM bridges the gap between view-variant visual observations and view-invariant textual expressions, enabling robust cross-view referring tracking with only approximately 10% additional parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViewSAM achieves SOTA performance under weak supervision and remains competitive with fully supervised methods.

preprint2026arXiv

VLingNav: Embodied Navigation with Adaptive Reasoning and Visual-Assisted Linguistic Memory

VLA models have shown promising potential in embodied navigation by unifying perception and planning while inheriting the strong generalization abilities of large VLMs. However, most existing VLA models rely on reactive mappings directly from observations to actions, lacking the explicit reasoning capabilities and persistent memory required for complex, long-horizon navigation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose VLingNav, a VLA model for embodied navigation grounded in linguistic-driven cognition. First, inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, we introduce an adaptive chain-of-thought mechanism, which dynamically triggers explicit reasoning only when necessary, enabling the agent to fluidly switch between fast, intuitive execution and slow, deliberate planning. Second, to handle long-horizon spatial dependencies, we develop a visual-assisted linguistic memory module that constructs a persistent, cross-modal semantic memory, enabling the agent to recall past observations to prevent repetitive exploration and infer movement trends for dynamic environments. For the training recipe, we construct Nav-AdaCoT-2.9M, the largest embodied navigation dataset with reasoning annotations to date, enriched with adaptive CoT annotations that induce a reasoning paradigm capable of adjusting both when to think and what to think about. Moreover, we incorporate an online expert-guided reinforcement learning stage, enabling the model to surpass pure imitation learning and to acquire more robust, self-explored navigation behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLingNav achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of embodied navigation benchmarks. Notably, VLingNav transfers to real-world robotic platforms in a zero-shot manner, executing various navigation tasks and demonstrating strong cross-domain and cross-task generalization.

preprint2026arXiv

WaveFormer: Frequency-Time Decoupled Vision Modeling with Wave Equation

Vision modeling has advanced rapidly with Transformers, whose attention mechanisms capture visual dependencies but lack a principled account of how semantic information propagates spatially. We revisit this problem from a wave-based perspective: feature maps are treated as spatial signals whose evolution over an internal propagation time (aligned with network depth) is governed by an underdamped wave equation. In this formulation, spatial frequency-from low-frequency global layout to high-frequency edges and textures-is modeled explicitly, and its interaction with propagation time is controlled rather than implicitly fixed. We derive a closed-form, frequency-time decoupled solution and implement it as the Wave Propagation Operator (WPO), a lightweight module that models global interactions in O(N log N) time-far lower than attention. Building on WPO, we propose a family of WaveFormer models as drop-in replacements for standard ViTs and CNNs, achieving competitive accuracy across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, while delivering up to 1.6x higher throughput and 30% fewer FLOPs than attention-based alternatives. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that wave propagation introduces a complementary modeling bias to heat-based methods, effectively capturing both global coherence and high-frequency details essential for rich visual semantics. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ZishanShu/WaveFormer.

preprint2026arXiv

XPERT: Expert Knowledge Transfer for Effective Training of Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models organize knowledge into explicitly routed expert modules, making expert-level representations traceable and analyzable. By analyzing expert activation patterns in MoE large language models (LLMs), we find that a subset of experts is consistently activated across diverse knowledge domains. These common experts encode cross-domain, generalizable knowledge that is closely related to model generalization, naturally raising the question of how such identifiable expert knowledge can be practically reused. Motivated by this observation, we propose XPERT, a framework that extracts, consolidates, and reuses expert knowledge from pre-trained MoE LLMs to support more effective training of language models across different model scales. XPERT identifies cross-domain experts via inference-only analysis, refines their representations through tensor decomposition, and adapts the extracted knowledge to reuse in downstream models. Experiments on language understanding and dialogue generation benchmarks show that models benefiting from reused expert knowledge achieve consistently stronger performance and faster convergence compared to strong baselines. These results highlight MoE LLMs as structured and reusable knowledge sources, and demonstrate the value of expert-level knowledge reuse for improving model training.

preprint2025arXiv

AINav: Large Language Model-Based Adaptive Interactive Navigation

Robotic navigation in complex environments remains a critical research challenge. Traditional navigation methods focus on optimal trajectory generation within fixed free workspace, therefore struggling in environments lacking viable paths to the goal, such as disaster zones or cluttered warehouses. To address this problem, we propose AINav, an adaptive interactive navigation approach that proactively interacts with environments to create feasible paths to achieve originally unreachable goals. Specifically, we present a primitive skill tree for task planning with large language models (LLMs), facilitating effective reasoning to determine interaction objects and sequences. To ensure robust subtask execution, we adopt reinforcement learning to pre-train a comprehensive skill library containing versatile locomotion and interaction behaviors for motion planning. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive replanning approach featuring two LLM-based modules: an advisor serving as a flexible replanning trigger and an arborist for autonomous plan adjustment. Integrated with the tree structure, the replanning mechanism allows for convenient node addition and pruning, enabling rapid plan adaptation in a priori unknown environments. Comprehensive simulations and experiments have demonstrated AINav's effectiveness and adaptivity in diverse scenarios. The supplementary video is available at: https://youtu.be/CjXm5KFx9AI.

preprint2025arXiv

Influence of ambient temperature on cavitation bubble dynamics

We investigate the influence of ambient temperature on the dynamics of spark-generated cavitation bubbles over a broad temperature range of 23 to 90$^\circ \text{C}$. Increasing temperature, the attenuation of collapse intensity of a bubble in a free field is quantitatively characterised through the Rayleigh factor, minimum bubble volume, and maximum collapse velocity. In scenarios where the bubble is initiated near a rigid boundary, this temperature-dependent weakening effect manifests further as a reduction in jet velocity and bubble migration. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that when ambient temperature exceeds 70$^\circ \text{C}$, secondary cavitation forms near the bubble surface around the moment of maximum bubble expansion, followed by coalescence-induced surface wrinkles. These perturbations trigger Rayleigh-Taylor instability and enhance bubble fission. We determine the internal gas pressure of the bubble at its maximum expansion via the Rayleigh-Plesset equation with the input of bubble radius from experimental measurements. It reveals that the secondary cavitation is derived from the gas pressure descending below the saturated vapor pressure, which provides nucleation-favorable conditions. This study sheds light on the physics behind erosion mitigation in high-temperature fluids from the perspective of cavitation bubble dynamics.

preprint2025arXiv

MiMo-Audio: Audio Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

Existing audio language models typically rely on task-specific fine-tuning to accomplish particular audio tasks. In contrast, humans are able to generalize to new audio tasks with only a few examples or simple instructions. GPT-3 has shown that scaling next-token prediction pretraining enables strong generalization capabilities in text, and we believe this paradigm is equally applicable to the audio domain. By scaling MiMo-Audio's pretraining data to over one hundred million of hours, we observe the emergence of few-shot learning capabilities across a diverse set of audio tasks. We develop a systematic evaluation of these capabilities and find that MiMo-Audio-7B-Base achieves SOTA performance on both speech intelligence and audio understanding benchmarks among open-source models. Beyond standard metrics, MiMo-Audio-7B-Base generalizes to tasks absent from its training data, such as voice conversion, style transfer, and speech editing. MiMo-Audio-7B-Base also demonstrates powerful speech continuation capabilities, capable of generating highly realistic talk shows, recitations, livestreaming and debates. At the post-training stage, we curate a diverse instruction-tuning corpus and introduce thinking mechanisms into both audio understanding and generation. MiMo-Audio-7B-Instruct achieves open-source SOTA on audio understanding benchmarks (MMSU, MMAU, MMAR, MMAU-Pro), spoken dialogue benchmarks (Big Bench Audio, MultiChallenge Audio) and instruct-TTS evaluations, approaching or surpassing closed-source models. Model checkpoints and full evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Audio.

preprint2025arXiv

MTSP-LDP: A Framework for Multi-Task Streaming Data Publication under Local Differential Privacy

The proliferation of streaming data analytics in data-driven applications raises critical privacy concerns, as directly collecting user data may compromise personal privacy. Although existing $w$-event local differential privacy (LDP) mechanisms provide formal guarantees without relying on trusted third parties, their practical deployment is hindered by two key limitations. First, these methods are designed primarily for publishing simple statistics at each timestamp, making them inherently unsuitable for complex queries. Second, they handle data at each timestamp independently, failing to capture temporal correlations and consequently degrading the overall utility. To address these issues, we propose MTSP-LDP, a novel framework for \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{T}ask \textbf{S}treaming data \textbf{P}ublication under $w$-event LDP. MTSP-LDP adopts an \emph{Optimal Privacy Budget Allocation} algorithm to dynamically allocate privacy budgets by analyzing temporal correlations within each window. It then constructs a \emph{data-adaptive private binary tree structure} to support complex queries, which is further refined by cross-timestamp grouping and smoothing operations to enhance estimation accuracy. Furthermore, a unified \emph{Budget-Free Multi-Task Processing} mechanism is introduced to support a variety of streaming queries without consuming additional privacy budget. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that MTSP-LDP consistently achieves high utility across various streaming tasks, significantly outperforming existing methods.

preprint2025arXiv

ReSPIRe: Informative and Reusable Belief Tree Search for Robot Probabilistic Search and Tracking in Unknown Environments

Target search and tracking (SAT) is a fundamental problem for various robotic applications such as search and rescue and environmental exploration. This paper proposes an informative trajectory planning approach, namely ReSPIRe, for SAT in unknown cluttered environments under considerably inaccurate prior target information and limited sensing field of view. We first develop a novel sigma point-based approximation approach to fast and accurately estimate mutual information reward under non-Gaussian belief distributions, utilizing informative sampling in state and observation spaces to mitigate the computational intractability of integral calculation. To tackle significant uncertainty associated with inadequate prior target information, we propose the hierarchical particle structure in ReSPIRe, which not only extracts critical particles for global route guidance, but also adjusts the particle number adaptively for planning efficiency. Building upon the hierarchical structure, we develop the reusable belief tree search approach to build a policy tree for online trajectory planning under uncertainty, which reuses rollout evaluation to improve planning efficiency. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that ReSPIRe outperforms representative benchmark methods with smaller MI approximation error, higher search efficiency, and more stable tracking performance, while maintaining outstanding computational efficiency.

preprint2025arXiv

Tailoring Neel orders in Layered Topological Antiferromagnets

In the two-dimensional limit, the interplay between Neel order and band topology in van der Waals topological antiferromagnets can give rise to novel quantum phenomena in the quantum anomalous Hall state, including the cascaded quantum phase transition and spin-modulation effect. However, due to the absence of net magnetization in antiferromagnets, probing the energetically degenerate Neel orders has long remained a significant challenge. Inspired by recent advances in realizing the quantum anomalous Hall effect in AlOx-capped layered topological antiferromagnet MnBi2Te4, we demonstrate deterministic control over the Neel order through surface anisotropy engineering enabled by the AlOx capping layer. By tuning the surface anisotropy, we uncover paritydependent symmetry breaking states that manifest as distinct odd-even boundary architectures, including 180 degree domain walls or continuous spin structures. Comparative studies between AlOx-capped and pristine odd-layer MnBi2Te4 flakes using domain-resolved magnetic force microscopy reveal pronounced differences in coercivity and magnetization-reversal dynamics. Notably, an unconventional giant exchange bias, which arises from perpendicular magnetic anisotropy rather than traditional interface pinning mechanisms, is observed for the first time. Our findings establish a pathway for manipulating Neel order through surface modification in A-type antiferromagnets, offering new opportunities for spintronic devices and quantum information technologies.

preprint2024arXiv

Foundation Model for Endoscopy Video Analysis via Large-scale Self-supervised Pre-train

Foundation models have exhibited remarkable success in various applications, such as disease diagnosis and text report generation. To date, a foundation model for endoscopic video analysis is still lacking. In this paper, we propose Endo-FM, a foundation model specifically developed using massive endoscopic video data. First, we build a video transformer, which captures both local and global long-range dependencies across spatial and temporal dimensions. Second, we pre-train our transformer model using global and local views via a self-supervised manner, aiming to make it robust to spatial-temporal variations and discriminative across different scenes. To develop the foundation model, we construct a large-scale endoscopy video dataset by combining 9 publicly available datasets and a privately collected dataset from Baoshan Branch of Renji Hospital in Shanghai, China. Our dataset overall consists of over 33K video clips with up to 5 million frames, encompassing various protocols, target organs, and disease types. Our pre-trained Endo-FM can be easily adopted for a given downstream task via fine-tuning by serving as the backbone. With experiments on 3 different types of downstream tasks, including classification, segmentation, and detection, our Endo-FM surpasses the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) self-supervised pre-training and adapter-based transfer learning methods by a significant margin, such as VCL (3.1% F1, 4.8% Dice, and 5.5% F1 for classification, segmentation, and detection) and ST-Adapter (5.9% F1, 9.6% Dice, and 9.9% F1 for classification, segmentation, and detection). Code, datasets, and models are released at https://github.com/med-air/Endo-FM.

preprint2024arXiv

LaCon: Late-Constraint Diffusion for Steerable Guided Image Synthesis

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating photo-realistic and creative images. To offer more controllability for the generation process, existing studies, termed as early-constraint methods in this paper, leverage extra conditions and incorporate them into pre-trained diffusion models. Particularly, some of them adopt condition-specific modules to handle conditions separately, where they struggle to generalize across other conditions. Although follow-up studies present unified solutions to solve the generalization problem, they also require extra resources to implement, e.g., additional inputs or parameter optimization, where more flexible and efficient solutions are expected to perform steerable guided image synthesis. In this paper, we present an alternative paradigm, namely Late-Constraint Diffusion (LaCon), to simultaneously integrate various conditions into pre-trained diffusion models. Specifically, LaCon establishes an alignment between the external condition and the internal features of diffusion models, and utilizes the alignment to incorporate the target condition, guiding the sampling process to produce tailored results. Experimental results on COCO dataset illustrate the effectiveness and superior generalization capability of LaCon under various conditions and settings. Ablation studies investigate the functionalities of different components in LaCon, and illustrate its great potential to serve as an efficient solution to offer flexible controllability for diffusion models.

preprint2023arXiv

Benchmarking Graphormer on Large-Scale Molecular Modeling Datasets

This technical note describes the recent updates of Graphormer, including architecture design modifications, and the adaption to 3D molecular dynamics simulation. With these simple modifications, Graphormer could attain better results on large-scale molecular modeling datasets than the vanilla one, and the performance gain could be consistently obtained on 2D and 3D molecular graph modeling tasks. In addition, we show that with a global receptive field and an adaptive aggregation strategy, Graphormer is more powerful than classic message-passing-based GNNs. Empirically, Graphormer could achieve much less MAE than the originally reported results on the PCQM4M quantum chemistry dataset used in KDD Cup 2021. In the meanwhile, it greatly outperforms the competitors in the recent Open Catalyst Challenge, which is a competition track on NeurIPS 2021 workshop, and aims to model the catalyst-adsorbate reaction system with advanced AI models. All codes could be found at https://github.com/Microsoft/Graphormer.

preprint2023arXiv

Unified Gas-Kinetic Particle Method for Frequency-dependent Radiation Transport

This paper proposes a unified gas-kinetic particle (UGKP) method for the frequency-dependent photon transport process. The photon transport is a typical multiscale process governed by the nonlinear radiative transfer equations (RTE). The flow regime of photon transport varies from the ballistic regime to the diffusive regime with respect to optical depth and photon frequency. The UGKP method is an asymptotic preserving (AP) scheme and a regime adaptive scheme. The teleportation error is significantly reduced, and the computational efficiency is remarkably improved in the diffusive regime. Distinguished from the standard multigroup treatment, the proposed UGKP method solves the frequency space in a non-discretized way. Therefore the Rosseland diffusion system can be precisely preserved in the optically thick regime. Taking advantage of the local integral solution of RTE, the distribution of the emitted photon can be constructed from its macroscopic moments. The Monte Carlo particles in the UGKP method need only be tracked before their first collision events, and a re-sampling process is performed to close the photon distribution for each time step. The large computational cost of excessive scattering events can be saved, especially in the optically thick regime. The proposed UGKP method is implicit and removes the light speed constraint on the time step. The particle tracking approach combining the implicit formulation makes the proposed UGKP method an efficient solution algorithm for frequency-dependent radiative transfer problems. We demonstrate with numerical examples the capability of the proposed multi-frequency UGKP method.

preprint2022arXiv

6GAN: IPv6 Multi-Pattern Target Generation via Generative Adversarial Nets with Reinforcement Learning

Global IPv6 scanning has always been a challenge for researchers because of the limited network speed and computational power. Target generation algorithms are recently proposed to overcome the problem for Internet assessments by predicting a candidate set to scan. However, IPv6 custom address configuration emerges diverse addressing patterns discouraging algorithmic inference. Widespread IPv6 alias could also mislead the algorithm to discover aliased regions rather than valid host targets. In this paper, we introduce 6GAN, a novel architecture built with Generative Adversarial Net (GAN) and reinforcement learning for multi-pattern target generation. 6GAN forces multiple generators to train with a multi-class discriminator and an alias detector to generate non-aliased active targets with different addressing pattern types. The rewards from the discriminator and the alias detector help supervise the address sequence decision-making process. After adversarial training, 6GAN's generators could keep a strong imitating ability for each pattern and 6GAN's discriminator obtains outstanding pattern discrimination ability with a 0.966 accuracy. Experiments indicate that our work outperformed the state-of-the-art target generation algorithms by reaching a higher-quality candidate set.

preprint2022arXiv

A Comprehensive Study of Accelerating IPv6 Deployment

Since the lack of IPv6 network development, China is currently accelerating IPv6 deployment. In this scenario, traffic and network structure show a huge shift. However, due to the long-term prosperity, we are ignorant of the problems behind such outbreak of traffic and performance improvement events in accelerating deployment. IPv6 development in some regions will still face similar challenges in the future. To contribute to solving this problem, in this paper, we produce a new measurement framework and implement a 5-month passive measurement on the IPv6 network during the accelerating deployment in China. We combine 6 global-scale datasets to form the normal status of IPv6 network, which is against to the accelerating status formed by the passive traffic. Moreover, we compare with the traffic during World IPv6 Day 2011 and Launch 2012 to discuss the common nature of accelerating deployment. Finally, the results indicate that the IPv6 accelerating deployment is often accompanied by an unbalanced network status. It exposes unresolved security issues including the challenge of user privacy and inappropriate access methods. According to the investigation, we point the future IPv6 development after accelerating deployment.

preprint2022arXiv

A Survey for Solving Mixed Integer Programming via Machine Learning

This paper surveys the trend of leveraging machine learning to solve mixed integer programming (MIP) problems. Theoretically, MIP is an NP-hard problem, and most of the combinatorial optimization (CO) problems can be formulated as the MIP. Like other CO problems, the human-designed heuristic algorithms for MIP rely on good initial solutions and cost a lot of computational resources. Therefore, we consider applying machine learning methods to solve MIP, since ML-enhanced approaches can provide the solution based on the typical patterns from the historical data. In this paper, we first introduce the formulation and preliminaries of MIP and several traditional algorithms to solve MIP. Then, we advocate further promoting the different integration of machine learning and MIP and introducing related learning-based methods, which can be classified into exact algorithms and heuristic algorithms. Finally, we propose the outlook for learning-based MIP solvers, direction towards more combinatorial optimization problems beyond MIP, and also the mutual embrace of traditional solvers and machine learning components.

preprint2022arXiv

An efficient and easy-to-extend Matlab code of the Moving Morphable Component (MMC) method for three-dimensional topology optimization

Explicit topology optimization methods have received ever-increasing interest in recent years. In particular, a 188-line Matlab code of the two-dimensional (2D) Moving Morphable Component (MMC)-based topology optimization method was released by Zhang et al. (Struct Multidiscip Optim 53(6):1243-1260, 2016). The present work aims to propose an efficient and easy-to-extend 256-line Matlab code of the MMC method for three-dimensional (3D) topology optimization implementing some new numerical techniques. To be specific, by virtue of the function aggregation technique, accurate sensitivity analysis, which is also easy-to-extend to other problems, is achieved. Besides, based on an efficient identification algorithm for load transmission path, the degrees of freedoms (DOFs) not belonging to the load transmission path are removed in finite element analysis (FEA), which significantly accelerates the optimization process. As a result, compared to the corresponding 188-line 2D code, the performance of the optimization results, the computational efficiency of FEA, and the convergence rate and the robustness of optimization process are greatly improved. For the sake of completeness, a refined 218-line Matlab code implementing the 2D-MMC method is also provided.

preprint2022arXiv

An Empirical Study of Graphormer on Large-Scale Molecular Modeling Datasets

This technical note describes the recent updates of Graphormer, including architecture design modifications, and the adaption to 3D molecular dynamics simulation. The "Graphormer-V2" could attain better results on large-scale molecular modeling datasets than the vanilla one, and the performance gain could be consistently obtained on downstream tasks. In addition, we show that with a global receptive field and an adaptive aggregation strategy, Graphormer is more powerful than classic message-passing-based GNNs. Graphormer-V2 achieves much less MAE than the vanilla Graphormer on the PCQM4M quantum chemistry dataset used in KDD Cup 2021, where the latter one won the first place in this competition. In the meanwhile, Graphormer-V2 greatly outperforms the competitors in the recent Open Catalyst Challenge, which is a competition track on NeurIPS 2021 workshop, and aims to model the catalyst-adsorbate reaction system with advanced AI models. All models could be found at \url{https://github.com/Microsoft/Graphormer}.

preprint2022arXiv

An Extendable Maneuver Management Framework with Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Vehicle Platoon Control System in Highway Scenario

Vehicle platoon often face the problem of lack of scalability of maneuvers in practical applications. Once a new scenario is added, the original program may no longer be available. To deal with this problem, this paper introduces a two-dimensional maneuver management framework with a fault-tolerant mechanism on the basis of the proposed hierarchical architecture for the platoon control system. Maneuvers and roles are two dimensions, based on which the management strategies are decoupled. This makes each vehicle in the platoon has the ability to execute management strategies of various maneuvers and the new maneuver could be extended without revising the existing part. The fault-tolerant mechanism is designed as a maneuver triggered by hardware failures to keep safe before taking over. Furthermore, three typical maneuvers are selected for case studies to illustrate how the management strategies in this framework work. Finally, a comprehensive simulation scenario integrating different maneuvers is designed and a real-world implementation using micro-vehicles is conducted. Results show that the propose two-dimensional framework could effectively deal with various maneuvers and satisfy the computational real-time requirements

preprint2022arXiv

Atom-Specific Probing of Electron Dynamics in an Atomic Adsorbate by Time-Resolved X-ray Spectroscopy

The electronic excitation occurring on adsorbates at ultrafast time scales from optical lasers that initiate surface chemical reactions is still an open question. Here, we report the ultrafast temporal evolution of X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) of a simple well known adsorbate prototype system, namely carbon (C) atoms adsorbed on a nickel (Ni(100)) surface, following intense laser optical pumping at 400 nm. We observe ultrafast (~100 fs) changes in both XAS and XES showing clear signatures of the formation of a hot electron-hole pair distribution on the adsorbate. This is followed by slower changes on a few ps time scale, shown to be consistent with thermalization of the complete C/Ni system. Density functional theory spectrum simulations support this interpretation.

preprint2022arXiv

Bayesian Sequential Stacking Algorithm for Concurrently Designing Molecules and Synthetic Reaction Networks

In the last few years, de novo molecular design using machine learning has made great technical progress but its practical deployment has not been as successful. This is mostly owing to the cost and technical difficulty of synthesizing such computationally designed molecules. To overcome such barriers, various methods for synthetic route design using deep neural networks have been studied intensively in recent years. However, little progress has been made in designing molecules and their synthetic routes simultaneously. Here, we formulate the problem of simultaneously designing molecules with the desired set of properties and their synthetic routes within the framework of Bayesian inference. The design variables consist of a set of reactants in a reaction network and its network topology. The design space is extremely large because it consists of all combinations of purchasable reactants, often in the order of millions or more. In addition, the designed reaction networks can adopt any topology beyond simple multistep linear reaction routes. To solve this hard combinatorial problem, we present a powerful sequential Monte Carlo algorithm that recursively designs a synthetic reaction network by sequentially building up single-step reactions. In a case study of designing drug-like molecules based on commercially available compounds, compared with heuristic combinatorial search methods, the proposed method shows overwhelming performance in terms of computational efficiency and coverage and novelty with respect to existing compounds.

preprint2022arXiv

Constrained Deep One-Class Feature Learning For Classifying Imbalanced Medical Images

Medical image data are usually imbalanced across different classes. One-class classification has attracted increasing attention to address the data imbalance problem by distinguishing the samples of the minority class from the majority class. Previous methods generally aim to either learn a new feature space to map training samples together or to fit training samples by autoencoder-like models. These methods mainly focus on capturing either compact or descriptive features, where the information of the samples of a given one class is not sufficiently utilized. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based method to learn compact features by adding constraints on the bottleneck features, and to preserve descriptive features by training an autoencoder at the same time. Through jointly optimizing the constraining loss and the autoencoder's reconstruction loss, our method can learn more relevant features associated with the given class, making the majority and minority samples more distinguishable. Experimental results on three clinical datasets (including the MRI breast images, FFDM breast images and chest X-ray images) obtains state-of-art performance compared to previous methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Crystal structure prediction with machine learning-based element substitution

The prediction of energetically stable crystal structures formed by a given chemical composition is a central problem in solid-state physics. In principle, the crystalline state of assembled atoms can be determined by optimizing the energy surface, which in turn can be evaluated using first-principles calculations. However, performing the iterative gradient descent on the potential energy surface using first-principles calculations is prohibitively expensive for complex systems, such as those with many atoms per unit cell. Here, we present a unique methodology for crystal structure prediction (CSP) that relies on a machine learning algorithm called metric learning. It is shown that a binary classifier, trained on a large number of already identified crystal structures, can determine the isomorphism of crystal structures formed by two given chemical compositions with an accuracy of approximately 96.4\%. For a given query composition with an unknown crystal structure, the model is used to automatically select from a crystal structure database a set of template crystals with nearly identical stable structures to which element substitution is to be applied. Apart from the local relaxation calculation of the identified templates, the proposed method does not use ab initio calculations. The potential of this substation-based CSP is demonstrated for a wide variety of crystal systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Direct Molecular Conformation Generation

Molecular conformation generation aims to generate three-dimensional coordinates of all the atoms in a molecule and is an important task in bioinformatics and pharmacology. Previous methods usually first predict the interatomic distances, the gradients of interatomic distances or the local structures (e.g., torsion angles) of a molecule, and then reconstruct its 3D conformation. How to directly generate the conformation without the above intermediate values is not fully explored. In this work, we propose a method that directly predicts the coordinates of atoms: (1) the loss function is invariant to roto-translation of coordinates and permutation of symmetric atoms; (2) the newly proposed model adaptively aggregates the bond and atom information and iteratively refines the coordinates of the generated conformation. Our method achieves the best results on GEOM-QM9 and GEOM-Drugs datasets. Further analysis shows that our generated conformations have closer properties (e.g., HOMO-LUMO gap) with the groundtruth conformations. In addition, our method improves molecular docking by providing better initial conformations. All the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and the great potential of the direct approach. The code is released at https://github.com/DirectMolecularConfGen/DMCG

preprint2022arXiv

Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation for Efficient Masked Image Modeling

Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.

preprint2022arXiv

DMF-Net: Dual-Branch Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Network for copy forgery identification of anti-counterfeiting QR code

Anti-counterfeiting QR codes are widely used in people's work and life, especially in product packaging. However, the anti-counterfeiting QR code has the risk of being copied and forged in the circulation process. In reality, copying is usually based on genuine anti-counterfeiting QR codes, but the brands and models of copiers are diverse, and it is extremely difficult to determine which individual copier the forged anti-counterfeiting code come from. In response to the above problems, this paper proposes a method for copy forgery identification of anti-counterfeiting QR code based on deep learning. We first analyze the production principle of anti-counterfeiting QR code, and convert the identification of copy forgery to device category forensics, and then a Dual-Branch Multi-Scale Feature Fusion network is proposed. During the design of the network, we conducted a detailed analysis of the data preprocessing layer, single-branch design, etc., combined with experiments, the specific structure of the dual-branch multi-scale feature fusion network is determined. The experimental results show that the proposed method has achieved a high accuracy of copy forgery identification, which exceeds the current series of methods in the field of image forensics.

preprint2022arXiv

Electromagnetic Follow-up Observations of Binary Neutron Star Mergers with Early Warnings from Decihertz Gravitational-wave Observatories

We investigate the prospects of electromagnetic follow-up observations for binary neutron star (BNS) mergers, with the help of early warnings from decihertz gravitational-wave (GW) observatories, B-DECIGO and DO-Optimal. Extending the previous work, we not only give quick assessments of joint short $γ$-ray burst (sGRB) detection rates for different $γ$-ray satellites and BNS population models, but also elaborate on the analyses and results on multi-band kilonova detections for survey telescopes with different limiting magnitudes. During an assumed 4-year mission time for decihertz GW observatories, we find that for the goals of electromagnetic follow-ups, DO-Optimal performs better than B-DECIGO as a whole on the detection rate, and has a larger detectable distance for joint sGRB/kilonova searches. Taking the log-normal population model for BNS mergers and a one-day early-warning time as an example, we discuss the accuracy in localization and timing, as well as the redshift distributions for various synergy observations with electromagnetic facilities and decihertz GW detectors. Based on our analyses, we propose a feasible "wait-for" pattern as a novel detecting mode for future multi-messenger astrophysics.

preprint2022arXiv

Extending the Fisher Information Matrix in Gravitational-wave Data Analysis

The Fisher information matrix (FM) plays an important role in forecasts and inferences in many areas of physics. While giving fast parameter estimation with the Gaussian likelihood approximation in the parameter space, the FM can only give the ellipsoidal posterior contours of parameters and lose the higher-order information beyond Gaussianity. We extend the FM in gravitational-wave (GW) data analysis using the Derivative Approximation for LIkelihoods (DALI), a method to expand the likelihood while keeping it positive definite and normalizable at every order, for more accurate forecasts and inferences. When applied to the two real GW events, GW150914 and GW170817, DALI can reduce the difference between FM approximation and the real posterior by 5 times in the best case. The calculation time of DALI and FM is at the same order of magnitude, while obtaining the real full posterior will take several orders of magnitude longer. Besides more accurate approximations, higher-order correction from DALI provides a fast assessment on the FM analysis and gives suggestions for complex sampling techniques which are computationally intensive. We recommend using the DALI method as an extension to the FM method in GW data analysis to pursue better accuracy while still keeping the speed.

preprint2022arXiv

Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization

Machine learning systems generally assume that the training and testing distributions are the same. To this end, a key requirement is to develop models that can generalize to unseen distributions. Domain generalization (DG), i.e., out-of-distribution generalization, has attracted increasing interests in recent years. Domain generalization deals with a challenging setting where one or several different but related domain(s) are given, and the goal is to learn a model that can generalize to an unseen test domain. Great progress has been made in the area of domain generalization for years. This paper presents the first review of recent advances in this area. First, we provide a formal definition of domain generalization and discuss several related fields. We then thoroughly review the theories related to domain generalization and carefully analyze the theory behind generalization. We categorize recent algorithms into three classes: data manipulation, representation learning, and learning strategy, and present several popular algorithms in detail for each category. Third, we introduce the commonly used datasets, applications, and our open-sourced codebase for fair evaluation. Finally, we summarize existing literature and present some potential research topics for the future.

preprint2022arXiv

Hot-tail electrons' impact on assimilation and injection penetration of D2 Shattered Pellet Injections

The fragment ablation rate plays significant roles in the mitigation efficiency of Shattered Pellet Injection (SPI) as a Disruption Mitigation System (DMS). Current mainstream 3D MHD codes modelling SPIs mostly assume instantaneous thermalization between the previously hot ambient electrons and the newly released cold electrons, which results in underestimation of the ablation rate if the hot electron thermalization time is comparable or even longer than the fragment flying time. To resolve this doubt, we hereby investigate the thermalization dynamics and the overall hot-electron impact. The finite-time collisional thermalization of hot-tail electrons in a rapidly cooling plasma, as well as the so-called ``self-limiting'' effect are considered. The former effect tends to deplete the colder population within a hot-tail species, while the latter is found to preferentially deplete the higher energy population. The combined result is found to cause an almost self-similar decay of the hot electron distribution function, while its shape does not deviate much from that of Maxwellian distribution and the mean energy does not change much during the thermalization process. Based on this observation, axisymmetric JOREK D2 SPI simulations were carried out with additional hot-tail contribution to evaluate their overall impact onto the injection assimilation and penetration. It is found that the hot-tail effect indeed causes enhanced assimilation and shallower penetration, although the overall effect depends on the exact injection configuration, with the slow injection showing negligible hot-tail effect while the fast single non-shattered pellet case shows drastic hot-tail ablation enhancement. For ITER-like SPI parameters, there is no significant deviation in the total assimilation, but some deviation in the injection penetration is observed for the fast injection velocity cases.

preprint2022arXiv

Improving the Robustness of Adversarial Attacks Using an Affine-Invariant Gradient Estimator

As designers of artificial intelligence try to outwit hackers, both sides continue to hone in on AI's inherent vulnerabilities. Designed and trained from certain statistical distributions of data, AI's deep neural networks (DNNs) remain vulnerable to deceptive inputs that violate a DNN's statistical, predictive assumptions. Before being fed into a neural network, however, most existing adversarial examples cannot maintain malicious functionality when applied to an affine transformation. For practical purposes, maintaining that malicious functionality serves as an important measure of the robustness of adversarial attacks. To help DNNs learn to defend themselves more thoroughly against attacks, we propose an affine-invariant adversarial attack, which can consistently produce more robust adversarial examples over affine transformations. For efficiency, we propose to disentangle current affine-transformation strategies from the Euclidean geometry coordinate plane with its geometric translations, rotations and dilations; we reformulate the latter two in polar coordinates. Afterwards, we construct an affine-invariant gradient estimator by convolving the gradient at the original image with derived kernels, which can be integrated with any gradient-based attack methods. Extensive experiments on ImageNet, including some experiments under physical condition, demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the affine invariance of adversarial examples and, as a byproduct, improve the transferability of adversarial examples, compared with alternative state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Increased Phase Coherence Length in a Porous Topological Insulator

The surface area of Bi2Te3 thin films was increased by introducing nanoscale porosity. Temperature dependent resistivity and magnetotransport measurements were conducted both on as-grown and porous samples (23 and 70 nm). The longitudinal resistivity of the porous samples became more metallic, indicating the increased surface area resulted in transport that was more surface-like. Weak antilocalization (WAL) was present in all samples, and remarkably the phase coherence length doubled in the porous samples. This increase is likely due to the large Fermi velocity of the Dirac surface states. Our results show that the introduction of nanoporosity does not destroy the topological surface states but rather enhances them, making these nanostructured materials promising for low energy electronics, spintronics and thermoelectrics.

preprint2022arXiv

Influences of the dissipative topological edge state on quantized transport in MnBi2Te4

The beauty of quantum Hall (QH) effect is the metrological precision of Hall resistance quantization that originates from the topological edge states. Understanding the factors that lead to quantization breakdown not only provides important insights on the nature of the topological protection of these edge states, but is beneficial for device applications involving such quantized transport. In this work, we combine conventional transport and real space conductivity mapping to investigate whether the quantization breakdown is tied to the disappearance of edge state in the hotly studied MnBi2Te4 system. Our experimental results unambiguously show that topological edge state does exist when quantization breakdown occurs. Such edge state is dissipative in nature and could lead to a quantization breakdown due to its diffusive character causing overlapping with bulk and other edge states in real devices. Our findings bring attentions to issues that are generally inaccessible in the transport study of QH, but can play important roles in practical measurements and device applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Infrared Radiation of Graphene Electrothermal Film Triggered Alpha and Theta Brainwaves

The alpha and theta frequency brainwave activity in Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal has been correlated with attention, inhibitory processes, memory, perceptual abilities, and sleep. The enhanced alpha and theta brainwave activity may bring positive behavioral modifications such as promoting creativity and a quick sleep. Herein, we discover that infrared radiation from multilayer graphene electrothermal film can obviously promote the appearance of alpha and theta brainwave in human mind. In particular, the occurrence frequency of the alpha and theta waves in EEG can be effectively enhanced up to 2.3 and 3.0 times, respectively. And the duration time of the alpha and theta waves in EEG can also be effectively extended. The mechanism may be attributed to the efficient infrared radiation caused by graphene mainly focused on the range from 7 to 14 micron, coinciding with the radiation wavelength of natural human body, which can be effectively absorbed by the human skin and speed up the blood microcirculation and metabolism. The comparative effect of different working temperature and heating materials such as water, Cu and even monolayer graphene are systematically investigated, indicating the infrared radiation from the multilayer graphene electrothermal film at 50 degrees has the largest enhancement effect of alpha and theta brainwaves. The multilayer graphene film electrical heater represents a convenient and surprising way for triggering the alpha and theta brainwaves, which has many potential applications in the area of enlarged health cerements.

preprint2022arXiv

Instance-Specific Feature Propagation for Referring Segmentation

Referring segmentation aims to generate a segmentation mask for the target instance indicated by a natural language expression. There are typically two kinds of existing methods: one-stage methods that directly perform segmentation on the fused vision and language features; and two-stage methods that first utilize an instance segmentation model for instance proposal and then select one of these instances via matching them with language features. In this work, we propose a novel framework that simultaneously detects the target-of-interest via feature propagation and generates a fine-grained segmentation mask. In our framework, each instance is represented by an Instance-Specific Feature (ISF), and the target-of-referring is identified by exchanging information among all ISFs using our proposed Feature Propagation Module (FPM). Our instance-aware approach learns the relationship among all objects, which helps to better locate the target-of-interest than one-stage methods. Comparing to two-stage methods, our approach collaboratively and interactively utilizes both vision and language information for synchronous identification and segmentation. In the experimental tests, our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on all three RefCOCO series datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning-based Predictive Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication in Vehicular Networks

This paper investigates the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks. To realize ISAC, an effective beamforming design is essential which however, highly depends on the availability of accurate channel tracking requiring large training overhead and computational complexity. Motivated by this, we adopt a deep learning (DL) approach to implicitly learn the features of historical channels and directly predict the beamforming matrix to be adopted for the next time slot to maximize the average achievable sum-rate of an ISAC system. The proposed method can bypass the need of explicit channel tracking process and reduce the signaling overhead significantly. To this end, a general sum-rate maximization problem with Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs)-based sensing constraints is first formulated for the considered ISAC system taking into account the multiple access interference. Then, by exploiting the penalty method, a versatile unsupervised DL-based predictive beamforming design framework is developed to address the formulated design problem. As a realization of the developed framework, a historical channels-based convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) network (HCL-Net) is devised for predictive beamforming in the ISAC-based V2I network. Specifically, the convolution and LSTM modules are successively adopted in the proposed HCL-Net to exploit the spatial and temporal dependencies of communication channels to further improve the learning performance. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed predictive method not only guarantees the required sensing performance, but also achieves a satisfactory sum-rate that can approach the upper bound obtained by the genie-aided scheme with the perfect instantaneous channel state information available.

preprint2022arXiv

MAP-Gen: An Automated 3D-Box Annotation Flow with Multimodal Attention Point Generator

Manually annotating 3D point clouds is laborious and costly, limiting the training data preparation for deep learning in real-world object detection. While a few previous studies tried to automatically generate 3D bounding boxes from weak labels such as 2D boxes, the quality is sub-optimal compared to human annotators. This work proposes a novel autolabeler, called multimodal attention point generator (MAP-Gen), that generates high-quality 3D labels from weak 2D boxes. It leverages dense image information to tackle the sparsity issue of 3D point clouds, thus improving label quality. For each 2D pixel, MAP-Gen predicts its corresponding 3D coordinates by referencing context points based on their 2D semantic or geometric relationships. The generated 3D points densify the original sparse point clouds, followed by an encoder to regress 3D bounding boxes. Using MAP-Gen, object detection networks that are weakly supervised by 2D boxes can achieve 94~99% performance of those fully supervised by 3D annotations. It is hopeful this newly proposed MAP-Gen autolabeling flow can shed new light on utilizing multimodal information for enriching sparse point clouds.

preprint2022arXiv

Medical Knowledge-Guided Deep Learning for Imbalanced Medical Image Classification

Deep learning models have gained remarkable performance on a variety of image classification tasks. However, many models suffer from limited performance in clinical or medical settings when data are imbalanced. To address this challenge, we propose a medical-knowledge-guided one-class classification approach that leverages domain-specific knowledge of classification tasks to boost the model's performance. The rationale behind our approach is that some existing prior medical knowledge can be incorporated into data-driven deep learning to facilitate model learning. We design a deep learning-based one-class classification pipeline for imbalanced image classification, and demonstrate in three use cases how we take advantage of medical knowledge of each specific classification task by generating additional middle classes to achieve higher classification performances. We evaluate our approach on three different clinical image classification tasks (a total of 8459 images) and show superior model performance when compared to six state-of-the-art methods. All codes of this work will be publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

preprint2022arXiv

Multimodal Transformer for Automatic 3D Annotation and Object Detection

Despite a growing number of datasets being collected for training 3D object detection models, significant human effort is still required to annotate 3D boxes on LiDAR scans. To automate the annotation and facilitate the production of various customized datasets, we propose an end-to-end multimodal transformer (MTrans) autolabeler, which leverages both LiDAR scans and images to generate precise 3D box annotations from weak 2D bounding boxes. To alleviate the pervasive sparsity problem that hinders existing autolabelers, MTrans densifies the sparse point clouds by generating new 3D points based on 2D image information. With a multi-task design, MTrans segments the foreground/background, densifies LiDAR point clouds, and regresses 3D boxes simultaneously. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the MTrans for improving the quality of the generated labels. By enriching the sparse point clouds, our method achieves 4.48\% and 4.03\% better 3D AP on KITTI moderate and hard samples, respectively, versus the state-of-the-art autolabeler. MTrans can also be extended to improve the accuracy for 3D object detection, resulting in a remarkable 89.45\% AP on KITTI hard samples. Codes are at \url{https://github.com/Cliu2/MTrans}.

preprint2022arXiv

Nonlinear inhomogeneous Fokker-Planck models: energetic-variational structures and long time behavior

Inspired by the modeling of grain growth in polycrystalline materials, we consider a nonlinear Fokker-Plank model, with inhomogeneous diffusion and with variable mobility parameters. We develop large time asymptotic analysis of such nonstandard models by reformulating and extending the classical entropy method, under the assumption of periodic boundary condition. In addition, illustrative numerical tests are presented to highlight the essential points of the current analytical results and to motivate future analysis.

preprint2022arXiv

NTIRE 2022 Challenge on High Dynamic Range Imaging: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the challenge on constrained high dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2022. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, datasets, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating an HDR image from multiple respective low dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed of two tracks with an emphasis on fidelity and complexity constraints: In Track 1, participants are asked to optimize objective fidelity scores while imposing a low-complexity constraint (i.e. solutions can not exceed a given number of operations). In Track 2, participants are asked to minimize the complexity of their solutions while imposing a constraint on fidelity scores (i.e. solutions are required to obtain a higher fidelity score than the prescribed baseline). Both tracks use the same data and metrics: Fidelity is measured by means of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth HDR image (computed both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation), while complexity metrics include the number of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations and runtime (in seconds).

preprint2022arXiv

On the $α$-spectral radius of the $k$-uniform supertrees

Let $G$ be a $k$-uniform hypergraph with vertex set $V(G)$ and edge set $E(G)$. A connected and acyclic hypergraph is called a supertree. For $0\leqα<1$, the $α$-spectral radius of $G$ is the largest $H$-eigenvalue of $αD(G)+(1-α)A(G)$, where $D(G)$ and $A(G)$ are the diagonal tensor of the degrees and the adjacency tensor of $G$, respectively. In this paper, we determine the unique supertrees with the maximum $α$-spectral radius among all $k$-uniform supertrees with $m$ edges and independence number $β$ for $\lceil\frac{m(k-1)+1}{k}\rceil\leqβ\leq m$, among all $k$-uniform supertrees with given degree sequences, and among all $k$-uniform supertrees with $m$ edges and matching number $μ$ for $1\leqμ\leq\lfloor\frac{m(k-1)+1}{k}\rfloor$, respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

Open-set Text Recognition via Character-Context Decoupling

The open-set text recognition task is an emerging challenge that requires an extra capability to cognize novel characters during evaluation. We argue that a major cause of the limited performance for current methods is the confounding effect of contextual information over the visual information of individual characters. Under open-set scenarios, the intractable bias in contextual information can be passed down to visual information, consequently impairing the classification performance. In this paper, a Character-Context Decoupling framework is proposed to alleviate this problem by separating contextual information and character-visual information. Contextual information can be decomposed into temporal information and linguistic information. Here, temporal information that models character order and word length is isolated with a detached temporal attention module. Linguistic information that models n-gram and other linguistic statistics is separated with a decoupled context anchor mechanism. A variety of quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method achieves promising performance on open-set, zero-shot, and close-set text recognition datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Orientation-Discriminative Feature Representation for Decentralized Pedestrian Tracking

This paper focuses on the problem of decentralized pedestrian tracking using a sensor network. Traditional works on pedestrian tracking usually use a centralized framework, which becomes less practical for robotic applications due to limited communication bandwidth. Our paper proposes a communication-efficient, orientation-discriminative feature representation to characterize pedestrian appearance information, that can be shared among sensors. Building upon that representation, our work develops a cross-sensor track association approach to achieve decentralized tracking. Extensive evaluations are conducted on publicly available datasets and results show that our proposed approach leads to improved performance in multi-sensor tracking.

preprint2022arXiv

Predictive Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication in Vehicular Networks: A Deep Learning Approach

The implementation of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) highly depends on the effective beamforming design exploiting accurate instantaneous channel state information (ICSI). However, channel tracking in ISAC requires large amount of training overhead and prohibitively large computational complexity. To address this problem, in this paper, we focus on ISAC-assisted vehicular networks and exploit a deep learning approach to implicitly learn the features of historical channels and directly predict the beamforming matrix for the next time slot to maximize the average achievable sum-rate of system, thus bypassing the need of explicit channel tracking for reducing the system signaling overhead. To this end, a general sum-rate maximization problem with Cramer-Rao lower bounds-based sensing constraints is first formulated for the considered ISAC system. Then, a historical channels-based convolutional long short-term memory network is designed for predictive beamforming that can exploit the spatial and temporal dependencies of communication channels to further improve the learning performance. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed method can satisfy the requirement of sensing performance, while its achievable sum-rate can approach the upper bound obtained by a genie-aided scheme with perfect ICSI available.

preprint2022arXiv

Preferred Spin Excitations in the Bilayer Iron-Based Superconductor CaK(Fe$_{0.96}$Ni$_{0.04}$)$_4$As$_4$ with Spin-Vortex Crystal Order

The spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is a key to understand the magnetically driven superconductivity in iron-based superconductors, where both local and itinerant electrons are present and the orbital angular momentum is not completely quenched. Here, we report a neutron scattering study on the bilayer compound CaK(Fe$_{0.96}$Ni$_{0.04}$)$_4$As$_4$ with superconductivity coexisting with a non-collinear spin-vortex crystal magnetic order that preserves the tetragonal symmetry of Fe-Fe plane. In the superconducting state, two spin resonance modes with odd and even $L$ symmetries due to the bilayer coupling are found similar to the undoped compound CaKFe$_4$As$_4$ but at lower energies. Polarization analysis reveals that the odd mode is $c-$axis polarized, and the low-energy spin anisotropy can persist to the paramagnetic phase at high temperature, which closely resembles other systems with in-plane collinear and $c-$axis biaxial magnetic orders. These results provide the missing piece of the puzzle on the SOC effect in iron-pnictide superconductors, and also establish a common picture of $c-$axis preferred magnetic excitations below $T_c$ regardless of the details of magnetic pattern or lattice symmetry.

preprint2022arXiv

Primal-dual Estimator Learning: an Offline Constrained Moving Horizon Estimation Method with Feasibility and Near-optimality Guarantees

This paper proposes a primal-dual framework to learn a stable estimator for linear constrained estimation problems leveraging the moving horizon approach. To avoid the online computational burden in most existing methods, we learn a parameterized function offline to approximate the primal estimate. Meanwhile, a dual estimator is trained to check the suboptimality of the primal estimator during execution time. Both the primal and dual estimators are learned from data using supervised learning techniques, and the explicit sample size is provided, which enables us to guarantee the quality of each learned estimator in terms of feasibility and optimality. This in turn allows us to bound the probability of the learned estimator being infeasible or suboptimal. Furthermore, we analyze the stability of the resulting estimator with a bounded error in the minimization of the cost function. Since our algorithm does not require the solution of an optimization problem during runtime, state estimates can be generated online almost instantly. Simulation results are presented to show the accuracy and time efficiency of the proposed framework compared to online optimization of moving horizon estimation and Kalman filter. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first learning-based state estimator with feasibility and near-optimality guarantees for linear constrained systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Pronunciation Dictionary-Free Multilingual Speech Synthesis by Combining Unsupervised and Supervised Phonetic Representations

This paper proposes a multilingual speech synthesis method which combines unsupervised phonetic representations (UPR) and supervised phonetic representations (SPR) to avoid reliance on the pronunciation dictionaries of target languages. In this method, a pretrained wav2vec 2.0 model is adopted to extract UPRs and a language-independent automatic speech recognition (LI-ASR) model is built with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss to extract segment-level SPRs from the audio data of target languages. Then, an acoustic model is designed, which first predicts UPRs and SPRs from texts separately and then combines the predicted UPRs and SPRs to generate mel-spectrograms. The results of our experiments on six languages show that the proposed method outperformed the methods that directly predicted mel-spectrograms from character or phoneme sequences and the ablated models that utilized only UPRs or SPRs.

preprint2022arXiv

Realistic Detection and Early Warning of Binary Neutron Stars with Decihertz Gravitational-wave Observatories

We investigated the detection rates and early warning parameters of binary neutron star (BNS) populations with decihertz gravitational-wave observatories in a realistic detecting strategy. Assuming 4 years' operation of B-DECIGO, we based on parameter precision to classify the detectable BNSs into three categories: (a) sources that merge within 1 year, which could be localized with an uncertainty of $ΔΩ\sim 10^{0}$ deg$^2$; (b) sources that merge in 1-4 years, which take up three quarters of the total events and yield the most precise angular resolution with $ΔΩ\sim 10^{-2}$ deg$^2$ and time-of-merger accuracy with $Δt_c\sim 10^{-1}$ s; and (c) sources that do not merge during the 4-yr mission window, which enable possible early warnings, with $ΔΩ\sim 10^{-1}$ deg$^2$ and $Δt_c\sim 10^{0}$ s. Furthermore, we compared the pros and cons of B-DECIGO with the third-generation ground-based detectors, and explored the prospects of detections using 3 other decihertz observatories and 4 BNS population models. In realistic observing scenarios, we found that decihertz detectors could even provide early-warning alerts to a source decades before its merger while their localizations are still as accurate as ground-based facilities. Finally we found a decrease of events when considering the confusion noise, but this could be partially solved by a proper noise subtraction.

preprint2022arXiv

Robust quantum control for the manipulation of solid-state spins

Robust and high-fidelity control of electron spins in solids is the cornerstone for facilitating applications of solid-state spins in quantum information processing and quantum sensing. However, precise control of spin systems is always challenging due to the presence of a variety of noises originating from the environment and control fields. Herein, noise-resilient quantum gates, designed with robust optimal control (ROC) algorithms, are demonstrated experimentally with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond to realize tailored robustness against detunings and Rabi errors simultaneously. In the presence of both 10% off-resonant detuning and deviation of a Rabi frequency, we achieve an average single-qubit gate fidelity of up to 99.97%. Our experiments also show that, ROCbased multipulse quantum sensing sequences can suppress spurious responses resulting from finite widths and imperfections of microwave pulses, which provides an efficient strategy for enhancing the performance of existing multipulse quantum sensing sequences.

preprint2022arXiv

Sampling with Mirrored Stein Operators

We introduce a new family of particle evolution samplers suitable for constrained domains and non-Euclidean geometries. Stein Variational Mirror Descent and Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Descent minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to constrained target distributions by evolving particles in a dual space defined by a mirror map. Stein Variational Natural Gradient exploits non-Euclidean geometry to more efficiently minimize the KL divergence to unconstrained targets. We derive these samplers from a new class of mirrored Stein operators and adaptive kernels developed in this work. We demonstrate that these new samplers yield accurate approximations to distributions on the simplex, deliver valid confidence intervals in post-selection inference, and converge more rapidly than prior methods in large-scale unconstrained posterior inference. Finally, we establish the convergence of our new procedures under verifiable conditions on the target distribution.

preprint2022arXiv

Self-driven water or polarized liquid based ultraviolet photodetector

Traditionally, photodetector is based on solid materials constructed PN junction, which needs many delicate growth technologies. Herein, we demonstrate the feasibility of polarized liquid triggered photodetector where the liquid is sandwiched between P-type or N-type semiconductor which can be chosen freely according to the requirement of the specific response wavelength. Under the multiple cycles of optical switching, transient photo-polarized current, steady state photo-polarized current and depolarized current are repeatably observed in semiconductor/polar liquids/semiconductor structure. The responsivity and specific detectivity of transient photo-polarized current in N-GaN/water/P-GaN reach values of 104.2 mA/W and 4.4*10^12 Jones at 365 nm, and 52.8 mA/W and 1.9*10^12 Jones at 254 nm illumination under zero voltage bias. We anticipate that our research will have a profound impact on integrating self-powered photodetector with freely selectable wavelength bands.

preprint2022arXiv

SiamHAN: IPv6 Address Correlation Attacks on TLS Encrypted Traffic via Siamese Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network

Unlike IPv4 addresses, which are typically masked by a NAT, IPv6 addresses could easily be correlated with user activity, endangering their privacy. Mitigations to address this privacy concern have been deployed, making existing approaches for address-to-user correlation unreliable. This work demonstrates that an adversary could still correlate IPv6 addresses with users accurately, even with these protection mechanisms. To do this, we propose an IPv6 address correlation model - SiamHAN. The model uses a Siamese Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network to measure whether two IPv6 client addresses belong to the same user even if the user's traffic is protected by TLS encryption. Using a large real-world dataset, we show that, for the tasks of tracking target users and discovering unique users, the state-of-the-art techniques could achieve only 85% and 60% accuracy, respectively. However, SiamHAN exhibits 99% and 88% accuracy.

preprint2022arXiv

Spatial input-output analysis of large-scale structures in actuated turbulent boundary layers

This paper develops a spatial input-output approach to investigate the dynamics of a turbulent boundary layer subject to a localized single frequency excitation. This method uses one-way spatial integration to reformulate the problem in terms of spatial evolution equations. The technique is used to examine the effect of localized periodic actuation at a given temporal frequency, based on an experimental set-up in which an active large-scale is introduced into the outer layer of a turbulent boundary layer. First, the large-scale structures associated with the phase-locked modal velocity field obtained from spatial input-output analysis are shown to closely match those computed based on hot-wire measurements. The approach is then used to further investigate the response of the boundary layer to the synthetically generated large-scale. A quadrant trajectory analysis indicates that the spatial input-output response produces shear stress distributions consistent with those in canonical wall-bounded turbulent flows in terms of both the order and types of events observed. The expected correspondence between the dominance of different quadrant behavior and actuation frequency is also observed. These results highlight the promise of a spatial input-output framework for analyzing the formation and streamwise evolution of structures in actuated wall-bounded turbulent flows.

preprint2022arXiv

Strain-driven valley states and phase transitions in Janus VSiGeN4 monolayer

The interplay between topology and valley degree of freedom has attracted much interest because it can realize new phenomena and applications. Here, based on first-principles calculations, we demonstrate intrinsically valley-polarized quantum anomalous Hall effect in monolayer ferrovalley material: Janus VSiGeN4, of which the edge states are chiral-spin-valley locking. Besides, a small tensile or compressive strain can drive phase transition in the material from valley-polarized quantum anomalous Hall state to half-valley-metal state. With the increase of the strain, the material turns into ferrovalley semiconductor with valley anomalous Hall effect. The origin of phase transition is sequent band inversion of V d orbital at K valley. Moreover, we find that phase transition causes the sign reversal of Berry curvature and induces different polarized light absorption in different valley states. Our work provides an ideal material platform for practical applications and experimental exploration of the interplay between topology, spintronics, and valleytronics.

preprint2022arXiv

TANet: Transformer-based Asymmetric Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

Existing RGB-D SOD methods mainly rely on a symmetric two-stream CNN-based network to extract RGB and depth channel features separately. However, there are two problems with the symmetric conventional network structure: first, the ability of CNN in learning global contexts is limited; second, the symmetric two-stream structure ignores the inherent differences between modalities. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based asymmetric network (TANet) to tackle the issues mentioned above. We employ the powerful feature extraction capability of Transformer (PVTv2) to extract global semantic information from RGB data and design a lightweight CNN backbone (LWDepthNet) to extract spatial structure information from depth data without pre-training. The asymmetric hybrid encoder (AHE) effectively reduces the number of parameters in the model while increasing speed without sacrificing performance. Then, we design a cross-modal feature fusion module (CMFFM), which enhances and fuses RGB and depth features with each other. Finally, we add edge prediction as an auxiliary task and propose an edge enhancement module (EEM) to generate sharper contours. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over 14 state-of-the-art RGB-D methods on six public datasets. Our code will be released at https://github.com/lc012463/TANet.

preprint2022arXiv

Test-time Fourier Style Calibration for Domain Generalization

The topic of generalizing machine learning models learned on a collection of source domains to unknown target domains is challenging. While many domain generalization (DG) methods have achieved promising results, they primarily rely on the source domains at train-time without manipulating the target domains at test-time. Thus, it is still possible that those methods can overfit to source domains and perform poorly on target domains. Driven by the observation that domains are strongly related to styles, we argue that reducing the gap between source and target styles can boost models' generalizability. To solve the dilemma of having no access to the target domain during training, we introduce Test-time Fourier Style Calibration (TF-Cal) for calibrating the target domain style on the fly during testing. To access styles, we utilize Fourier transformation to decompose features into amplitude (style) features and phase (semantic) features. Furthermore, we present an effective technique to Augment Amplitude Features (AAF) to complement TF-Cal. Extensive experiments on several popular DG benchmarks and a segmentation dataset for medical images demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

The maximum $A_α$-spectral radius of $t$-connected graphs with bounded matching number

Let $G$ be a graph with adjacency matrix $A(G)$ and let $D(G)$ be a diagonal matrix of the degrees of $G$. In 2017, Nikiforov defined the $A_α$-matrix of $G$ as \begin{equation*} A_α(G)=αG)+(1-α)A(G), \end{equation*}d where $α\in[0,1]$ is an arbitrary real number. The largest eigenvalue of $A_α(G)$ is called the $A_α$-spectral radius of $G$. Let $n$, $t$, $k$ be positive integers, satisfying $t\geq1$, $k\geq2$, $n\geq k+2$, and $n\equiv k$ (mod $2$). In this paper, for $α\in[0,\frac{1}{2}]$, we determine the extremal graphs with the maximum $A_α$-spectral radius among all $t$-connected graphs on $n$ vertices with matching number $\frac{n-k}{2}$ at most. This generalizes some results of O (2021) and Zhang (2022).

preprint2022arXiv

Time-Frequency Mask Aware Bi-directional LSTM: A Deep Learning Approach for Underwater Acoustic Signal Separation

The underwater acoustic signals separation is a key technique for the underwater communications. The existing methods are mostly model-based, and could not accurately characterise the practical underwater acoustic communication environment. They are only suitable for binary signal separation, but cannot handle multivariate signal separation. On the other hand, the recurrent neural network (RNN) shows powerful capability in extracting the features of the temporal sequences. Inspired by this, in this paper, we present a data-driven approach for underwater acoustic signals separation using deep learning technology. We use the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) to explore the features of Time-Frequency (T-F) mask, and propose a T-F mask aware Bi-LSTM for signal separation. Taking advantage of the sparseness of the T-F image, the designed Bi-LSTM network is able to extract the discriminative features for separation, which further improves the separation performance. In particular, this method breaks through the limitations of the existing methods, not only achieves good results in multivariate separation, but also effectively separates signals when mixed with 40dB Gaussian noise signals. The experimental results show that this method can achieve a $97\%$ guarantee ratio (PSR), and the average similarity coefficient of the multivariate signal separation is stable above 0.8 under high noise conditions.

preprint2022arXiv

Topology optimization on complex surfaces based on the moving morphable component (MMC) method and computational conformal mapping (CCM)

In the present paper, an integrated paradigm for topology optimization on complex surfaces with arbitrary genus is proposed. The approach is constructed based on the two-dimensional (2D) Moving Morphable Component (MMC) framework, where a set of structural components are used as the basic units of optimization, and computational conformal mapping (CCM) technique, with which a complex surface represented by an unstructured triangular mesh can be mapped into a set of regular 2D parameter domains numerically. A multi-patch stitching scheme is also developed to achieve an MMC-friendly global parameterization through a number of local parameterizations. Numerical examples including a saddle-shaped shell, a torus-shape shell and a tee-branch pipe are solved to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed approach. It is found that compared with traditional approaches for topology optimization on 2D surfaces, optimized designs with clear load transmission paths can be obtained with much fewer numbers of design variables and degrees of freedom for finite element analysis (FEA) via the proposed approach.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Open-Set Text Recognition via Label-to-Prototype Learning

Scene text recognition is a popular topic and extensively used in the industry. Although many methods have achieved satisfactory performance for the close-set text recognition challenges, these methods lose feasibility in open-set scenarios, where collecting data or retraining models for novel characters could yield a high cost. For example, annotating samples for foreign languages can be expensive, whereas retraining the model each time when a novel character is discovered from historical documents costs both time and resources. In this paper, we introduce and formulate a new open-set text recognition task which demands the capability to spot and recognize novel characters without retraining. A label-to-prototype learning framework is also proposed as a baseline for the proposed task. Specifically, the framework introduces a generalizable label-to-prototype mapping function to build prototypes (class centers) for both seen and unseen classes. An open-set predictor is then utilized to recognize or reject samples according to the prototypes. The implementation of rejection capability over out-of-set characters allows automatic spotting of unknown characters in the incoming data stream. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves promising performance on a variety of zero-shot, close-set, and open-set text recognition datasets

preprint2022arXiv

Tri-branched gels: Rubbery materials with the lowest branching factor approach the ideal elastic limit

Unlike hard materials such as metals and ceramics, rubbery materials can endure large deformations due to the large conformational degree of freedom of the crosslinked three-dimensional polymer network. However, the effect of the branching factor of the network on the ultimate mechanical properties of rubbery materials has not yet been clarified. This study shows that tri-branching, which entails the lowest branching factor, results in a large elastic deformation near the theoretical upper bound. This ideal elastic limit is realized by reversible strain-induced crystallization, providing on-demand reinforcement. The findings indicate that the polymer chain is highly orientated along the stretching axis, whereat enhanced reversible strain-induced crystallization is observed in the tri-branched and not in the tetra-branched network. A mathematical theory of structural rigidity is used to explain the difference in the chain orientation. Although tetra-branched polymers have been preferred since the development of vulcanization, these findings highlighting the merits of tri-branching will prompt a paradigm shift in the development of rubbery materials.

preprint2022arXiv

TTAGN: Temporal Transaction Aggregation Graph Network for Ethereum Phishing Scams Detection

In recent years, phishing scams have become the most serious type of crime involved in Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain platform. The existing phishing scams detection technology on Ethereum mostly uses traditional machine learning or network representation learning to mine the key information from the transaction network to identify phishing addresses. However, these methods adopt the last transaction record or even completely ignore these records, and only manual-designed features are taken for the node representation. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Transaction Aggregation Graph Network (TTAGN) to enhance phishing scams detection performance on Ethereum. Specifically, in the temporal edges representation module, we model the temporal relationship of historical transaction records between nodes to construct the edge representation of the Ethereum transaction network. Moreover, the edge representations around the node are aggregated to fuse topological interactive relationships into its representation, also named as trading features, in the edge2node module. We further combine trading features with common statistical and structural features obtained by graph neural networks to identify phishing addresses. Evaluated on real-world Ethereum phishing scams datasets, our TTAGN (92.8% AUC, and 81.6% F1score) outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, and the effectiveness of temporal edges representation and edge2node module is also demonstrated.

preprint2022arXiv

Variational Policy Propagation for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

We propose a \emph{collaborative} multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm named variational policy propagation (VPP) to learn a \emph{joint} policy through the interactions over agents. We prove that the joint policy is a Markov Random Field under some mild conditions, which in turn reduces the policy space effectively. We integrate the variational inference as special differentiable layers in policy such that the actions can be efficiently sampled from the Markov Random Field and the overall policy is differentiable. We evaluate our algorithm on several large scale challenging tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms previous state-of-the-arts.

preprint2021arXiv

A Computational Design and Evaluation Tool for 3D Structures with Planar Surfaces

Three dimensional (3D) structures composed of planar surfaces can be build out of accessible materials using easier fabrication technique with shorter fabrication time. To better design 3D structures with planar surfaces, realistic models are required to understand and evaluate mechanical behaviors. Existing design tools are either effort-consuming (e.g. finite element analysis) or bounded by assumptions (e.g. numerical solutions). In this project, We have built a computational design tool that is (1) capable of rapidly and inexpensively evaluating planar surfaces in 3D structures, with sufficient computational efficiency and accuracy; (2) applicable to complex boundary conditions and loading conditions, both isotropic materials and orthotropic materials; and (3) suitable for rapid accommodation when design parameters need to be adjusted. We demonstrate the efficiency and necessity of this design tool by evaluating a glass table as well as a wood bookcase, and iteratively designing an origami gripper to satisfy performance requirements. This design tool gives non-expert users as well as engineers a simple and effective modus operandi in structural design.

preprint2021arXiv

Ambi-chiral anomalous Hall effect in magnetically doped topological insulators

The chirality associated with broken time reversal symmetry in magnetically doped topological insulators has important implications to the quantum transport phenomena. Here we report the anomalous Hall effect studies in Mn- and Cr-doped Bi$_2$Te$_3$ topological insulators with varied thickness and doping content. By tracing the chirality of the Hall loops, we find that the Mn-type anomalous Hall effect with clockwise chirality is strengthened by the reduction of film thickness, which is opposite to that of the Cr-type anomalous Hall effect with counterclockwise chirality. We provide a phenomenological model to explain the evolution of magnetic order and anomalous Hall effect chirality in magnetically doped topological insulators.

preprint2021arXiv

Bridge the Vision Gap from Field to Command: A Deep Learning Network Enhancing Illumination and Details

With the goal of tuning up the brightness, low-light image enhancement enjoys numerous applications, such as surveillance, remote sensing and computational photography. Images captured under low-light conditions often suffer from poor visibility and blur. Solely brightening the dark regions will inevitably amplify the blur, thus may lead to detail loss. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective two-stream framework named NEID to tune up the brightness and enhance the details simultaneously without introducing many computational costs. Precisely, the proposed method consists of three parts: Light Enhancement (LE), Detail Refinement (DR) and Feature Fusing (FF) module, which can aggregate composite features oriented to multiple tasks based on channel attention mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our method and its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Conformal Wavefunctions for Graviton Amplitudes

The extended-BMS algebra of asymptotically flat spacetime contains an SO(3,1) subgroup that acts by conformal transformations on the celestial sphere. It is of interest to study the representations of this subgroup associated with gravitons. To reduce the equation of motion to a Schrodinger-like equation it is necessary to impose a non-covariant gauge condition. Using these solutions, leading-order gauge invariant Weyl scalars are then computed and decomposed into families of unitary principal series representations. An invertible holographic mapping is constructed between these unitary principal series operators and massless spin-2 perturbations of flat spacetime.

preprint2021arXiv

Descriptors of intrinsic hydrodynamic thermal transport: screening a phonon database in a machine learning approach

Machine learning techniques are used to explore the intrinsic origins of the hydrodynamic thermal transport and to find new materials interesting for science and engineering. The hydrodynamic thermal transport is governed intrinsically by the hydrodynamic scale and the thermal conductivity. The correlations between these intrinsic properties and harmonic and anharmonic properties, and a large number of compositional (290) and structural (1224) descriptors of 131 crystal compound materials are obtained, revealing some of the key descriptors that determines the magnitude of the intrinsic hydrodynamic effects, most of them related with the phonon relaxation times. Then, a trained black-box model is applied to screen more than 5000 materials. The results identify materials with potential technological applications. Understanding the properties correlated to hydrodynamic thermal transport can help to find new thermoelectric materials and on the design of new materials to ease the heat dissipation in electronic devices.

preprint2021arXiv

Dirac Fermion Cloning, Moir$\bf{é}$ Flat Bands and Magic Lattice Constants in Epitaxial Monolayer Graphene

Tuning interactions between Dirac states in graphene has attracted enormous interest because it can modify the electronic spectrum of the two-dimensional material, enhance electron correlations, and give rise to novel condensed-matter phases such as superconductors, Mott insulators, Wigner crystals and quantum anomalous Hall insulators. Previous works predominantly focus on the flat band dispersion of coupled Dirac states from different graphene layers. In this work, we propose a new route to realizing flat band physics in monolayer graphene under a periodic modulation from substrates. We take gaphene/SiC heterostructure as a role model and demonstrate experimentally the substrate modulation leads to Dirac fermion cloning and consequently, the proximity of the two Dirac cones of monolayer graphene in momentum space. Our theoretical modeling captures the cloning mechanism of Dirac states and indicates that flat bands can emerge at certain magic lattice constants of substrate when the period of modulation becomes nearly commensurate with the $(\sqrt{3}\times\sqrt{3})R30^{\circ}$ supercell of graphene. The results show that the epitaxial monolayer graphene is a promising platform for exploring exotic many-body quantum phases arising from interactions between Dirac electrons.

preprint2021arXiv

Extreme Suppression of Antiferromagnetic Order and Critical Scaling in a Two-Dimensional Random Quantum Magnet

Sr$_2$CuTeO$_6$ is a square-lattice Néel antiferromagnet with superexchange between first-neighbor $S=1/2$ Cu spins mediated by plaquette centered Te ions. Substituting Te by W, the affected impurity plaquettes have predominantly second-neighbor interactions, thus causing local magnetic frustration. Here we report a study of Sr$_2$CuTe$_{1-x}$W$_x$O$_6$ using neutron diffraction and $μ$SR techniques, showing that the Néel order vanishes already at $x = 0.025 \pm 0.005$. We explain this extreme order suppression using a two-dimensional Heisenberg spin model, demonstrating that a W-type impurity induces a deformation of the order parameter that decays with distance as $1/r^2$ at temperature $T=0$. The associated logarithmic singularity leads to loss of order for any $x>0$. Order for small $x>0$ and $T>0$ is induced by weak interplane couplings. In the nonmagnetic phase of Sr$_2$CuTe$_{1-x}$W$_x$O$_6$, the $μ$SR relaxation rate exhibits quantum critical scaling with a large dynamic exponent, $z \approx 3$, consistent with a random-singlet state.

preprint2021arXiv

Gaussian Process-Based Model Predictive Control for Overtaking

This paper proposes a novel framework for addressing the challenge of autonomous overtaking and obstacle avoidance, which incorporates the overtaking path planning into Gaussian Process-based model predictive control (GPMPC). Compared with the conventional control strategies, this approach has two main advantages. Firstly, combining Gaussian Process (GP) regression with a nominal model allows for learning from model mismatch and unmodeled dynamics, which enhances a simple model and delivers significantly better results. Due to the approximation for propagating uncertainties, we can furthermore satisfy the constraints and thereby safety of the vehicle is ensured. Secondly, we convert the geometric relationship between the ego vehicle and other obstacle vehicles into the constraints. Without relying on a higherlevel path planner, this approach substantially reduces the computational burden. In addition, we transform the state constraints under the model predictive control (MPC) framework into a soft constraint and incorporate it as relaxed barrier function into the cost function, which makes the optimizer more efficient. Simulation results reveal the usefulness of the proposed approach.

preprint2021arXiv

Hybrid simulation of energetic particles interacting with magnetohydrodynamics using a slow manifold algorithm and GPU acceleration

The hybrid method combining particle-in-cell and magnetohydrodynamics can be used to study the interaction between energetic particles and global plasma modes. In this paper we introduce the M3D-C1-K code, which is developed based on the M3D-C1 finite element code solving the magnetohydrodynamics equations, with a newly developed kinetic module simulating energetic particles. The particle pushing is done using a new algorithm by applying the Boris pusher to the classical Pauli particles to simulate the slow-manifold of particle orbits, with long-term accuracy and fidelity. The particle pushing can be accelerated using GPUs with a significant speedup. The moments of the particles are calculated using the $δf$ method, and are coupled into the magnetohydrodynamics simulation through pressure or current coupling schemes. Several linear simulations of magnetohydrodynamics modes driven by energetic particles have been conducted using M3D-C1-K, including fishbone, toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes and reversed shear Alfvén eigenmodes. Good agreement with previous results from other eigenvalue, kinetic and hybrid codes has been achieved.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning Invariant Representations across Domains and Tasks

Being expensive and time-consuming to collect massive COVID-19 image samples to train deep classification models, transfer learning is a promising approach by transferring knowledge from the abundant typical pneumonia datasets for COVID-19 image classification. However, negative transfer may deteriorate the performance due to the feature distribution divergence between two datasets and task semantic difference in diagnosing pneumonia and COVID-19 that rely on different characteristics. It is even more challenging when the target dataset has no labels available, i.e., unsupervised task transfer learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Task Adaptation Network (TAN) to solve this unsupervised task transfer problem. In addition to learning transferable features via domain-adversarial training, we propose a novel task semantic adaptor that uses the learning-to-learn strategy to adapt the task semantics. Experiments on three public COVID-19 datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance. Especially on COVID-DA dataset, TAN significantly increases the recall and F1 score by 5.0% and 7.8% compared to recently strong baselines. Moreover, we show that TAN also achieves superior performance on several public domain adaptation benchmarks.

preprint2021arXiv

Non-invasive Self-attention for Side Information Fusion in Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommender systems aim to model users' evolving interests from their historical behaviors, and hence make customized time-relevant recommendations. Compared with traditional models, deep learning approaches such as CNN and RNN have achieved remarkable advancements in recommendation tasks. Recently, the BERT framework also emerges as a promising method, benefited from its self-attention mechanism in processing sequential data. However, one limitation of the original BERT framework is that it only considers one input source of the natural language tokens. It is still an open question to leverage various types of information under the BERT framework. Nonetheless, it is intuitively appealing to utilize other side information, such as item category or tag, for more comprehensive depictions and better recommendations. In our pilot experiments, we found naive approaches, which directly fuse types of side information into the item embeddings, usually bring very little or even negative effects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the NOninVasive self-attention mechanism (NOVA) to leverage side information effectively under the BERT framework. NOVA makes use of side information to generate better attention distribution, rather than directly altering the item embedding, which may cause information overwhelming. We validate the NOVA-BERT model on both public and commercial datasets, and our method can stably outperform the state-of-the-art models with negligible computational overheads.

preprint2021arXiv

Recreation of the Periodic Table with an Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithm

In 1869, the first draft of the periodic table was published by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. In terms of data science, his achievement can be viewed as a successful example of feature embedding based on human cognition: chemical properties of all known elements at that time were compressed onto the two-dimensional grid system for tabular display. In this study, we seek to answer the question of whether machine learning can reproduce or recreate the periodic table by using observed physicochemical properties of the elements. To achieve this goal, we developed a periodic table generator (PTG). The PTG is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm based on the generative topographic mapping (GTM), which can automate the translation of high-dimensional data into a tabular form with varying layouts on-demand. The PTG autonomously produced various arrangements of chemical symbols, which organized a two-dimensional array such as Mendeleev's periodic table or three-dimensional spiral table according to the underlying periodicity in the given data. We further showed what the PTG learned from the element data and how the element features, such as melting point and electronegativity, are compressed to the lower-dimensional latent spaces.

preprint2021arXiv

Shed Various Lights on a Low-Light Image: Multi-Level Enhancement Guided by Arbitrary References

It is suggested that low-light image enhancement realizes one-to-many mapping since we have different definitions of NORMAL-light given application scenarios or users' aesthetic. However, most existing methods ignore subjectivity of the task, and simply produce one result with fixed brightness. This paper proposes a neural network for multi-level low-light image enhancement, which is user-friendly to meet various requirements by selecting different images as brightness reference. Inspired by style transfer, our method decomposes an image into two low-coupling feature components in the latent space, which allows the concatenation feasibility of the content components from low-light images and the luminance components from reference images. In such a way, the network learns to extract scene-invariant and brightness-specific information from a set of image pairs instead of learning brightness differences. Moreover, information except for the brightness is preserved to the greatest extent to alleviate color distortion. Extensive results show strong capacity and superiority of our network against existing methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Towards Enhancing Fine-grained Details for Image Matting

In recent years, deep natural image matting has been rapidly evolved by extracting high-level contextual features into the model. However, most current methods still have difficulties with handling tiny details, like hairs or furs. In this paper, we argue that recovering these microscopic details relies on low-level but high-definition texture features. However, {these features are downsampled in a very early stage in current encoder-decoder-based models, resulting in the loss of microscopic details}. To address this issue, we design a deep image matting model {to enhance fine-grained details. Our model consists of} two parallel paths: a conventional encoder-decoder Semantic Path and an independent downsampling-free Textural Compensate Path (TCP). The TCP is proposed to extract fine-grained details such as lines and edges in the original image size, which greatly enhances the fineness of prediction. Meanwhile, to leverage the benefits of high-level context, we propose a feature fusion unit(FFU) to fuse multi-scale features from the semantic path and inject them into the TCP. In addition, we have observed that poorly annotated trimaps severely affect the performance of the model. Thus we further propose a novel term in loss function and a trimap generation method to improve our model's robustness to the trimaps. The experiments show that our method outperforms previous start-of-the-art methods on the Composition-1k dataset.

preprint2021arXiv

Unified gas-kinetic wave-particle methods VI: Disperse dilute gas-particle multiphase flow

In this paper, a unified gas-kinetic wave-particle scheme (UGKWP) for the disperse dilute gas-particle multiphase flow is proposed. The gas phase is always in the hydrodynamic regime. However, the particle phase covers different flow regimes from particle trajectory crossing to the hydrodynamic wave interaction with the variation of local particle phase Knudsen number. The UGKWP is an appropriate method for the capturing of the multiscale transport mechanism in the particle phase through its coupled wave-particle formulation. In the regime with intensive particle collision, the evolution of solid particle will be followed by the analytic wave with quasi-equilibrium distribution; while in the rarefied regime the non-equilibrium particle phase will be captured through particle tracking and collision, which plays a decisive role in recovering particle trajectory crossing behavior. The gas-kinetic scheme (GKS) is employed for the simulation of gas flow. In the highly collision regime for the particles, no particles will be sampled in UGKWP and the wave formulation for solid particle with the hydrodynamic gas phase will reduce the system to the two-fluid Eulerian model. On the other hand, in the collisionless regime for the solid particle, the free transport of solid particle will be followed in UGKWP, and coupled system will return to the Eulerian-Lagrangian formulation for the gas and particle. The scheme will be tested for in all flow regimes, which include the non-equilibrium particle trajectory crossing, the particle concentration under different Knudsen number, and the dispersion of particle flow with the variation of Stokes number. A experiment of shock-induced particle bed fluidization is simulated and the results are compared with experimental measurements. These numerical solutions validate suitability of the proposed scheme for the simulation of gas-particle multiphase flow.

preprint2020arXiv

A Closed-form Solution for the Kinematics of Asymmetric Miura Vertices

The Miura vertex is a versatile origami pattern found in a variety of mechanisms. Previous papers have derived and validated a closed-form solution for the kinematics of a symmetric Miura vertex, but the motion of an asymmetric vertex has only been shown numerically. In this paper, we present the trigonometric derivation of a closed-form solution for the folding of an asymmetric Miura vertex.

preprint2020arXiv

A Deep Dive into Understanding Tumor Foci Classification using Multiparametric MRI Based on Convolutional Neural Network

Deep learning models have had a great success in disease classifications using large data pools of skin cancer images or lung X-rays. However, data scarcity has been the roadblock of applying deep learning models directly on prostate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI). Although model interpretation has been heavily studied for natural images for the past few years, there has been a lack of interpretation of deep learning models trained on medical images. This work designs a customized workflow for the small and imbalanced data set of prostate mpMRI where features were extracted from a deep learning model and then analyzed by a traditional machine learning classifier. In addition, this work contributes to revealing how deep learning models interpret mpMRI for prostate cancer patients stratification.

preprint2020arXiv

A New Comprehensive Data Set of Solar Filaments of 100 yr Interval. I

Filaments are very common physical phenomena on the Sun and are often taken as important proxies of solar magnetic activities. The study of filaments has become a hot topic in the space weather research. For a more comprehensive understanding of filaments, especially for an understanding of solar activities of multiple solar cycles, it is necessary to perform a combined multifeature analysis by constructing a data set of multiple solar cycle data. To achieve this goal, we constructed a centennial data set that covers the H$α$ data from five observatories around the world. During the data set construction, we encountered varieties of problems, such as data fusion, accurate determination of the solar edge, classifying data by quality, dynamic threshold, and so on, which arose mainly due to multiple sources and a large time span of data. But fortunately, these problems were well solved. The data set includes seven types of data products and eight types of feature parameters with which we can implement the functions of data searching and statistical analyses. It has the characteristics of better continuity and highly complementary to space observation data, especially in the wavelengths not covered by space observations, and covers many solar cycles (including more than 60 yr of high-cadence data). We expect that this new comprehensive data set as well as the tools will help researchers to significantly speed up their search for features or events of interest, for either statistical or case study purposes, and possibly help them get a better and more comprehensive understanding of solar filament mechanisms.

preprint2020arXiv

A Unified Gas-kinetic Scheme for Micro Flow Simulation Based on Linearized Kinetic Equation

The flow regime of micro flow varies from collisionless regime to hydrodynamic regime according to the Knudsen number. On the kinetic scale, the dynamics of micro flow can be described by the linearized kinetic equation. In the continuum regime, hydrodynamic equations such as linearized Navier-Stokes equations and Euler equations can be derived from the linearized kinetic equation by the Chapman-Enskog asymptotic analysis. In this paper, based on the linearized kinetic equation we are going to propose a unified gas kinetic scheme scheme (UGKS) for micro flow simulation, which is an effective multiscale scheme in the whole micro flow regime. The important methodology of UGKS is the following. Firstly, the evolution of microscopic distribution function is coupled with the evolution of macroscopic flow quantities. Secondly, the numerical flux of UGKS is constructed based on the integral solution of kinetic equation, which provides a genuinely multiscale and multidimensional numerical flux. The UGKS recovers the linear kinetic solution in the rarefied regime, and converges to the linear hydrodynamic solution in the continuum regime. An outstanding feature of UGKS is its capability of capturing the accurate viscous solution even when the cell size is much larger than the kinetic kinetic length scale, such as the capturing of the viscous boundary layer with a cell size ten times larger than the particle mean free path. Such a multiscale property is called unified preserving (UP) which has been studied in \cite{guo2019unified}. In this paper, we are also going to give a mathematical proof for the UP property of UGKS.

preprint2020arXiv

Adaptive Online Distributed Optimal Control of Very-Large-Scale Robotic Systems

This paper presents an adaptive online distributed optimal control approach that is applicable to optimal planning for very-large-scale robotics systems in highly uncertain environments. This approach is developed based on the optimal mass transport theory. It is also viewed as an online reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic programming approach in the Wasserstein-GMM space, where a novel value functional is defined based on the probability density functions of robots and the time-varying obstacle map functions describing the changing environmental information. The proposed approach is demonstrated on the path planning problem of very-largescale robotic systems where the approximated layout of obstacles in the workspace is incrementally updated by the observations of robots, and compared with some existing state-of-the-art approaches. The numerical simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms these approaches in aspects of the average traveling distance and the energy cost.

preprint2020arXiv

Adaptive Precision Training: Quantify Back Propagation in Neural Networks with Fixed-point Numbers

Adaptive Precision Training: Quantify Back Propagation in Neural Networks with Fixed-point Numbers. Recent emerged quantization technique has been applied to inference of deep neural networks for fast and efficient execution. However, directly applying quantization in training can cause significant accuracy loss, thus remaining an open challenge.

preprint2020arXiv

An Eruptive Circular-ribbon Flare with Extended Remote Brightenings

We study an eruptive X1.1 circular-ribbon flare on 2013 November 10, combining multiwavelength observations with a coronal field reconstruction using a non-force-free field method. In the first stage, a filament forms via magnetic reconnection between two mildly twisted sheared arcades, which are embedded under the fan dome associated with a null point. This reconnection seems to be driven by photospheric shearing and converging flows around the inner two arcade footpoints, consistent with the flare-related changes of transverse field. The southern portion of the filament rises upward due to torus instability and pushes against the null point. The induced null point reconnection then generates the circular ribbon and the initial remote brightening in the west, as accelerated electrons precipitate along the fan and propagate outward along quasi-separatix surfaces with high values of the squashing factor (Q) in the envelope fields, which have a curtain-like shape here. In the second stage, the southern end of the flux rope breaks away from the surface, sequentially disrupts the dome and overlying fields, and erupts in a whipping-like fashion to become a partial halo coronal mass ejection. This leads to an enhanced flare emission and fast-moving remote brightenings at the footpoints of the magnetic curtain, which span a remarkably broad region and are also associated with coronal dimmings. This is a rare example of eruptive circular-ribbon flares, in which the evolution of a flux rope from its formation to successful eruption out of the dome and the resulting unusually extended remote brightenings are completely observed.

preprint2020arXiv

An input-output inspired method for permissible perturbation amplitude of transitional wall-bounded shear flows

The precise set of parameters governing the transition to turbulence in wall-bounded shear flows remains an open question; many theoretical bounds have been obtained, but there is not yet a consensus between these bounds and experimental/simulation results. In this work, we focus on a method to provide a provable Reynolds number dependent bound on the amplitude of perturbations a flow can sustain while maintaining the laminar state. Our analysis relies on an input--output approach that partitions the dynamics into a feedback interconnection of the linear and nonlinear dynamics (i.e., a Luré system that represents the nonlinearity as static feedback). We then construct quadratic constraints of the nonlinear term that is restricted by system physics to be energy-conserving (lossless) and to have bounded input--output energy. Computing the region of attraction of the laminar state (set of safe perturbations) and permissible perturbation amplitude are then reformulated as Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI), which provides a more computationally efficient solution than prevailing nonlinear approaches based on the sum of squares programming. The proposed framework can also be used for energy method computations and linear stability analysis. We apply our approach to low dimensional nonlinear shear flow models for a range of Reynolds numbers. The results from our analytically derived bounds are consistent with the bounds identified through exhaustive simulations. However, they have the added benefit of being achieved at a much lower computational cost and providing a provable guarantee that a certain level of perturbation is permissible.

preprint2020arXiv

Analytical solution for the surface states of antiferromagnetic topological insulator MnBi$_2$Te$_4$

Recently, the intrinsic magnetic topological insulator MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ has attracted great attention. It has an out-of-plane antiferromagnetic order, which is believed to open a sizable energy gap in the surface states. This gap, however, was not always observable in the latest angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiments. To address this issue, we analytically derive an effective model for the two-dimensional (2D) surface states by starting from a three-dimensional (3D) Hamiltonian for bulk MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ and taking into account the spatial profile of the bulk magnetization. Our calculations suggest that the diminished surface gap may be caused by a much smaller and more localized intralayer ferromagnetic order. In addition, we calculate the spatial distribution and penetration depth of the surface states, which indicates that the surface states are mainly embedded in the first two septuple layers from the terminating surface. From our analytical results, the influence of the bulk parameters on the surface states can be found explicitly. Furthermore, we derive a $\bf{k}\cdot \bf{p}$ model for MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ thin films and show the oscillation of the Chern number between odd and even septuple layers. Our results will be helpful for the ongoing explorations of the MnBi$_x$Te$_y$ family.

preprint2020arXiv

Attribute-conditioned Layout GAN for Automatic Graphic Design

Modeling layout is an important first step for graphic design. Recently, methods for generating graphic layouts have progressed, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, the problem of specifying the locations and sizes of design elements usually involves constraints with respect to element attributes, such as area, aspect ratio and reading-order. Automating attribute conditional graphic layouts remains a complex and unsolved problem. In this paper, we introduce Attribute-conditioned Layout GAN to incorporate the attributes of design elements for graphic layout generation by forcing both the generator and the discriminator to meet attribute conditions. Due to the complexity of graphic designs, we further propose an element dropout method to make the discriminator look at partial lists of elements and learn their local patterns. In addition, we introduce various loss designs following different design principles for layout optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize graphic layouts conditioned on different element attributes. It can also adjust well-designed layouts to new sizes while retaining elements' original reading-orders. The effectiveness of our method is validated through a user study.

preprint2020arXiv

Cross-Lingual Low-Resource Set-to-Description Retrieval for Global E-Commerce

With the prosperous of cross-border e-commerce, there is an urgent demand for designing intelligent approaches for assisting e-commerce sellers to offer local products for consumers from all over the world. In this paper, we explore a new task of cross-lingual information retrieval, i.e., cross-lingual set-to-description retrieval in cross-border e-commerce, which involves matching product attribute sets in the source language with persuasive product descriptions in the target language. We manually collect a new and high-quality paired dataset, where each pair contains an unordered product attribute set in the source language and an informative product description in the target language. As the dataset construction process is both time-consuming and costly, the new dataset only comprises of 13.5k pairs, which is a low-resource setting and can be viewed as a challenging testbed for model development and evaluation in cross-border e-commerce. To tackle this cross-lingual set-to-description retrieval task, we propose a novel cross-lingual matching network (CLMN) with the enhancement of context-dependent cross-lingual mapping upon the pre-trained monolingual BERT representations. Experimental results indicate that our proposed CLMN yields impressive results on the challenging task and the context-dependent cross-lingual mapping on BERT yields noticeable improvement over the pre-trained multi-lingual BERT model.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection

Arbitrary shape text detection is a challenging task due to the high variety and complexity of scenes texts. In this paper, we propose a novel unified relational reasoning graph network for arbitrary shape text detection. In our method, an innovative local graph bridges a text proposal model via Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a deep relational reasoning network via Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), making our network end-to-end trainable. To be concrete, every text instance will be divided into a series of small rectangular components, and the geometry attributes (e.g., height, width, and orientation) of the small components will be estimated by our text proposal model. Given the geometry attributes, the local graph construction model can roughly establish linkages between different text components. For further reasoning and deducing the likelihood of linkages between the component and its neighbors, we adopt a graph-based network to perform deep relational reasoning on local graphs. Experiments on public available datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Residual Learning-Assisted Channel Estimation in Ambient Backscatter Communications

Channel estimation is a challenging problem for realizing efficient ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) systems. In this letter, channel estimation in AmBC is modeled as a denoising problem and a convolutional neural network-based deep residual learning denoiser (CRLD) is developed to directly recover the channel coefficients from the received noisy pilot signals. To simultaneously exploit the spatial and temporal features of the pilot signals, a novel three-dimension (3D) denoising block is specifically designed to facilitate denoising in CRLD. In addition, we provide theoretical analysis to characterize the properties of the proposed CRLD. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method approaches the performance of the optimal minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator with perfect statistical channel correlation matrix.

preprint2020arXiv

Discretization-Aware Architecture Search

The search cost of neural architecture search (NAS) has been largely reduced by weight-sharing methods. These methods optimize a super-network with all possible edges and operations, and determine the optimal sub-network by discretization, \textit{i.e.}, pruning off weak candidates. The discretization process, performed on either operations or edges, incurs significant inaccuracy and thus the quality of the final architecture is not guaranteed. This paper presents discretization-aware architecture search (DA\textsuperscript{2}S), with the core idea being adding a loss term to push the super-network towards the configuration of desired topology, so that the accuracy loss brought by discretization is largely alleviated. Experiments on standard image classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach, in particular, under imbalanced target network configurations that were not studied before.

preprint2020arXiv

Distinct Topological Surface States on the Two Terminations of MnBi$_4$Te$_7$

The recent discovered intrinsic magnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4 have been met with unusual success in hosting emergent phenomena such as the quantum anomalous Hall effect and the axion insulator states. However, the surface-bulk correspondence of the Mn-Bi-Te family, composed by the superlattice-like MnBi2Te4/(Bi2Te3)n (n = 0, 1, 2, 3 ...) layered structure, remains intriguing but elusive. Here, by using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) techniques, we unambiguously assign the two distinct surface states of MnBi4Te7 (n = 1) to the quintuple-layer (QL) Bi2Te3 termination and the septuple-layer (SL) MnBi2Te4 termination, respectively. A comparison of the experimental observations with theoretical calculations reveals the diverging topological behaviors, especially the hybridization effect between magnetic and nonmagnetic layers, on the two terminations: a gap on the QL termination originating from the topological surface states of the QL hybridizing with the bands of the beneath SL, and a gapless Dirac-cone band structure on the SL termination with time-reversal symmetry. The quasi-particle interference patterns further confirm the topological nature of the surface states for both terminations, continuing far above the Fermi energy. The QL termination carries a spin-helical Dirac state with hexagonal warping, while at the SL termination, a strongly canted helical state from the surface lies between a pair of Rashba-split states from its neighboring layer. Our work elucidates an unprecedented hybridization effect between the building blocks of the topological surface states, and also reveals the termination-dependent time-reversal symmetry breaking in a magnetic topological insulator, rendering an ideal platform to realize the half-integer quantum Hall effect and relevant quantum phenomena.

preprint2020arXiv

DWM: A Decomposable Winograd Method for Convolution Acceleration

Winograd's minimal filtering algorithm has been widely used in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to reduce the number of multiplications for faster processing. However, it is only effective on convolutions with kernel size as 3x3 and stride as 1, because it suffers from significantly increased FLOPs and numerical accuracy problem for kernel size larger than 3x3 and fails on convolution with stride larger than 1. In this paper, we propose a novel Decomposable Winograd Method (DWM), which breaks through the limitation of original Winograd's minimal filtering algorithm to a wide and general convolutions. DWM decomposes kernels with large size or large stride to several small kernels with stride as 1 for further applying Winograd method, so that DWM can reduce the number of multiplications while keeping the numerical accuracy. It enables the fast exploring of larger kernel size and larger stride value in CNNs for high performance and accuracy and even the potential for new CNNs. Comparing against the original Winograd, the proposed DWM is able to support all kinds of convolutions with a speedup of ~2, without affecting the numerical accuracy.

preprint2020arXiv

Enhancing Intrinsic Adversarial Robustness via Feature Pyramid Decoder

Whereas adversarial training is employed as the main defence strategy against specific adversarial samples, it has limited generalization capability and incurs excessive time complexity. In this paper, we propose an attack-agnostic defence framework to enhance the intrinsic robustness of neural networks, without jeopardizing the ability of generalizing clean samples. Our Feature Pyramid Decoder (FPD) framework applies to all block-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs). It implants denoising and image restoration modules into a targeted CNN, and it also constraints the Lipschitz constant of the classification layer. Moreover, we propose a two-phase strategy to train the FPD-enhanced CNN, utilizing $ε$-neighbourhood noisy images with multi-task and self-supervised learning. Evaluated against a variety of white-box and black-box attacks, we demonstrate that FPD-enhanced CNNs gain sufficient robustness against general adversarial samples on MNIST, SVHN and CALTECH. In addition, if we further conduct adversarial training, the FPD-enhanced CNNs perform better than their non-enhanced versions.

preprint2020arXiv

Freestanding n-Doped Graphene via Intercalation of Calcium and Magnesium into the Buffer Layer - SiC(0001) Interface

The intercalation of epitaxial graphene on SiC(0001) with Ca has been studied extensively, yet precisely where the Ca resides remains elusive. Furthermore, the intercalation of Mg underneath epitaxial graphene on SiC(0001) has not been reported. Here, we use low energy electron diffraction, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, secondary electron cut-off photoemission and scanning tunneling microscopy to elucidate the physical and electronic structure of both Ca- and Mg-intercalated epitaxial graphene on 6H-SiC(0001). We find that Ca intercalates underneath the buffer layer and bonds to the Si-terminated SiC surface, breaking the C-Si bonds of the buffer layer i.e. 'freestanding' the buffer layer to form Ca-intercalated quasi-freestanding bilayer graphene (Ca-QFSBLG). The situation is similar for the Mg-intercalation of epitaxial graphene on SiC(0001), where an ordered Mg-terminated reconstruction at the SiC surface and Mg bonds to the Si-terminated SiC surface are formed, resulting in Mg-intercalated quasi-freestanding bilayer graphene (Mg-QFSBLG). Ca-intercalation underneath the buffer layer has not been considered in previous studies of Ca-intercalated epitaxial graphene. Furthermore, we find no evidence that either Ca or Mg intercalates between graphene layers. However, we do find that both Ca-QFSBLG and Mg-QFSBLG exhibit very low workfunctions of 3.68 and 3.78 eV, respectively, indicating high n-type doping. Upon exposure to ambient conditions, we find Ca-QFSBLG degrades rapidly, whereas Mg-QFSBLG remains remarkably stable.

preprint2020arXiv

GeneraLight: Improving Environment Generalization of Traffic Signal Control via Meta Reinforcement Learning

The heavy traffic congestion problem has always been a concern for modern cities. To alleviate traffic congestion, researchers use reinforcement learning (RL) to develop better traffic signal control (TSC) algorithms in recent years. However, most RL models are trained and tested in the same traffic flow environment, which results in a serious overfitting problem. Since the traffic flow environment in the real world keeps varying, these models can hardly be applied due to the lack of generalization ability. Besides, the limited number of accessible traffic flow data brings extra difficulty in testing the generalization ability of the models. In this paper, we design a novel traffic flow generator based on Wasserstein generative adversarial network to generate sufficient diverse and quality traffic flows and use them to build proper training and testing environments. Then we propose a meta-RL TSC framework GeneraLight to improve the generalization ability of TSC models. GeneraLight boosts the generalization performance by combining the idea of flow clustering and model-agnostic meta-learning. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets to show the superior performance of GeneraLight on generalizing to different traffic flows.

preprint2020arXiv

Half-Magnetic Topological Insulator

Topological magnets are a new family of quantum materials providing great potential to realize emergent phenomena, such as quantum anomalous Hall effect and axion-insulator state. Here we present our discovery that stoichiometric ferromagnet MnBi8Te13 with natural heterostructure MnBi2Te4-(Bi2Te3)3 is an unprecedented half-magnetic topological insulator, with the magnetization existing at the MnBi2Te4 surface but not at the opposite surface terminated by triple Bi2Te3 layers. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements unveil a massive Dirac gap at the MnBi2Te4 surface, and gapless Dirac cone on the other side. Remarkably, the Dirac gap (~28 meV) at MnBi2Te4 surface decreases monotonically with increasing temperature and closes right at the Curie temperature, thereby representing the first smoking-gun spectroscopic evidence of magnetization-induced topological surface gap among all known magnetic topological materials. We further demonstrate theoretically that the half-magnetic topological insulator is desirable to realize the half-quantized surface anomalous Hall effect, which serves as a direct proof of the general concept of axion electrodynamics in condensed matter systems.

preprint2020arXiv

Heating and Eruption of a Solar Circular Ribbon Flare

We studied a circular-ribbon flare, SOL2014-12-17T04:51, with emphasis on its thermal evolution as determined by the Differential Emission Measure (DEM) inversion analysis of the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Both temperature and emission measure start to rise much earlier than the flare, along with an eruption and formation of a hot halo over the fan structure. In the main flare phase, another set of ribbons forms inside the circular ribbon, and expands as expected for ribbons at the footpoints of a postflare arcade. An additional heating event further extends the decay phase, which is also characteristic of some eruptive flares. The basic magnetic configuration appears to be a fan-spine topology, rooted in a minority-polarity patch surrounded by majority-polarity flux. We suggest that reconnection at the null point begins well before the impulsive phase, when the null is distorted into a breakout current sheet, and that both flare and breakout reconnection are necessary in order to explain the subsequent local thermal evolution and the eruptive activities in this confined magnetic structure. Using local DEMs, we found a postflare temperature increase inside the fan surface, indicating that the so-called EUV late phase is due to continued heating in the flare loops.

preprint2020arXiv

High-resolution Observations of Small-scale Flux Emergence by GST

Recent observations demonstrated that emerging flux regions, which constitute the early stage of solar active regions, consist of emergence of numerous small-scale magnetic elements. They in turn interact, merge, and form mature sunspots. However, observations of fine magnetic structures on photosphere with sub-arcsecond resolution are very rare due to limitations of observing facilities. In this work, taking advantage of the high resolution of the 1.6 m Goode Solar Telescope, we jointly analyze vector magnetic fields, continuum images, and Hα observations of NOAA AR 12665 on 2017 July 13, with the goal of understanding the signatures of small-scale flux emergence, as well as their atmospheric responses as they emerge through multiple heights in photosphere and chromosphere. Under such a high resolution of 0.1" to 0.2", our results confirm two kinds of small-scale flux emergence: magnetic flux sheet emergence associated with the newly forming granules, and the traditional magnetic flux loop emergence. With direct imaging in the broadband TiO, we observe that both types of flux emergence are associated with darkening of granular boundaries, while only flux sheets elongate granules along the direction of emerging magnetic fields and expand laterally. With a life span of 10--15 minutes, the total emerged vertical flux is in order of 10$^{18}$ Mx for both types of emergence. The magnitudes of the vertical and horizontal fields are comparable in the flux sheets, while the former is stronger in flux loops. Hα observations reveal transient brightenings in the wings in the events of magnetic loop emergence, which are most probably the signatures of Ellerman bombs.

preprint2020arXiv

HyperSTAR: Task-Aware Hyperparameters for Deep Networks

While deep neural networks excel in solving visual recognition tasks, they require significant effort to find hyperparameters that make them work optimally. Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) approaches have automated the process of finding good hyperparameters but they do not adapt to a given task (task-agnostic), making them computationally inefficient. To reduce HPO time, we present HyperSTAR (System for Task Aware Hyperparameter Recommendation), a task-aware method to warm-start HPO for deep neural networks. HyperSTAR ranks and recommends hyperparameters by predicting their performance conditioned on a joint dataset-hyperparameter space. It learns a dataset (task) representation along with the performance predictor directly from raw images in an end-to-end fashion. The recommendations, when integrated with an existing HPO method, make it task-aware and significantly reduce the time to achieve optimal performance. We conduct extensive experiments on 10 publicly available large-scale image classification datasets over two different network architectures, validating that HyperSTAR evaluates 50% less configurations to achieve the best performance compared to existing methods. We further demonstrate that HyperSTAR makes Hyperband (HB) task-aware, achieving the optimal accuracy in just 25% of the budget required by both vanilla HB and Bayesian Optimized HB~(BOHB).

preprint2020arXiv

Identifying and Tracking Solar Magnetic Flux Elements with Deep Learning

Deep learning has drawn a lot of interest in recent years due to its effectiveness in processing big and complex observational data gathered from diverse instruments. Here we propose a new deep learning method, called SolarUnet, to identify and track solar magnetic flux elements or features in observed vector magnetograms based on the Southwest Automatic Magnetic Identification Suite (SWAMIS). Our method consists of a data pre-processing component that prepares training data from the SWAMIS tool, a deep learning model implemented as a U-shaped convolutional neural network for fast and accurate image segmentation, and a post-processing component that prepares tracking results. SolarUnet is applied to data from the 1.6 meter Goode Solar Telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. When compared to the widely used SWAMIS tool, SolarUnet is faster while agreeing mostly with SWAMIS on feature size and flux distributions, and complementing SWAMIS in tracking long-lifetime features. Thus, the proposed physics-guided deep learning-based tool can be considered as an alternative method for solar magnetic tracking.

preprint2020arXiv

Impact of an Active Sgr A* on the Synthesis of Water and Organic Molecules Throughout the Milky Way

Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in our Galaxy, is dormant today, but it should have gone through multiple gas-accretion episodes in the past billions of years to grow to its current mass of $4\times10^6\,M_\odot$. Each episode temporarily ignites the SMBH and turns the Galactic Center into an active galactic nucleus (AGN). Recently, we showed that the AGN could produce large amount of hard X-rays that can penetrate the dense interstellar medium in the Galactic plane. Here we further study the impact of the X-rays on the molecular chemistry in our Galaxy. We use a chemical reaction network to simulate the evolution of several molecular species including H2O, CH3OH, and H2CO, both in the gas phase and on the surface of dust grains. We find that the X-ray irradiation could significantly enhance the abundances of these species. The effect is the most significant in those young, high-density molecular clouds, and could be prominent at a Galactic distance of $8$ kpc or smaller. The imprint in the chemical abundance is visible even several million years after the AGN turns off.

preprint2020arXiv

Inferring Vector Magnetic Fields from Stokes Profiles of GST/NIRIS Using a Convolutional Neural Network

We propose a new machine learning approach to Stokes inversion based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) and the Milne-Eddington (ME) method. The Stokes measurements used in this study were taken by the Near InfraRed Imaging Spectropolarimeter (NIRIS) on the 1.6 m Goode Solar Telescope (GST) at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. By learning the latent patterns in the training data prepared by the physics-based ME tool, the proposed CNN method is able to infer vector magnetic fields from the Stokes profiles of GST/NIRIS. Experimental results show that our CNN method produces smoother and cleaner magnetic maps than the widely used ME method. Furthermore, the CNN method is 4~6 times faster than the ME method, and is able to produce vector magnetic fields in near real-time, which is essential to space weather forecasting. Specifically, it takes ~50 seconds for the CNN method to process an image of 720 x 720 pixels comprising Stokes profiles of GST/NIRIS. Finally, the CNN-inferred results are highly correlated to the ME-calculated results and are closer to the ME's results with the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (PPMCC) being closer to 1 on average than those from other machine learning algorithms such as multiple support vector regression and multilayer perceptrons (MLP). In particular, the CNN method outperforms the current best machine learning method (MLP) by 2.6% on average in PPMCC according to our experimental study. Thus, the proposed physics-assisted deep learning-based CNN tool can be considered as an alternative, efficient method for Stokes inversion for high resolution polarimetric observations obtained by GST/NIRIS.

preprint2020arXiv

Invertible Image Rescaling

High-resolution digital images are usually downscaled to fit various display screens or save the cost of storage and bandwidth, meanwhile the post-upscaling is adpoted to recover the original resolutions or the details in the zoom-in images. However, typical image downscaling is a non-injective mapping due to the loss of high-frequency information, which leads to the ill-posed problem of the inverse upscaling procedure and poses great challenges for recovering details from the downscaled low-resolution images. Simply upscaling with image super-resolution methods results in unsatisfactory recovering performance. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by modeling the downscaling and upscaling processes from a new perspective, i.e. an invertible bijective transformation, which can largely mitigate the ill-posed nature of image upscaling. We develop an Invertible Rescaling Net (IRN) with deliberately designed framework and objectives to produce visually-pleasing low-resolution images and meanwhile capture the distribution of the lost information using a latent variable following a specified distribution in the downscaling process. In this way, upscaling is made tractable by inversely passing a randomly-drawn latent variable with the low-resolution image through the network. Experimental results demonstrate the significant improvement of our model over existing methods in terms of both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of image upscaling reconstruction from downscaled images.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning to Match Distributions for Domain Adaptation

When the training and test data are from different distributions, domain adaptation is needed to reduce dataset bias to improve the model's generalization ability. Since it is difficult to directly match the cross-domain joint distributions, existing methods tend to reduce the marginal or conditional distribution divergence using predefined distances such as MMD and adversarial-based discrepancies. However, it remains challenging to determine which method is suitable for a given application since they are built with certain priors or bias. Thus they may fail to uncover the underlying relationship between transferable features and joint distributions. This paper proposes Learning to Match (L2M) to automatically learn the cross-domain distribution matching without relying on hand-crafted priors on the matching loss. Instead, L2M reduces the inductive bias by using a meta-network to learn the distribution matching loss in a data-driven way. L2M is a general framework that unifies task-independent and human-designed matching features. We design a novel optimization algorithm for this challenging objective with self-supervised label propagation. Experiments on public datasets substantiate the superiority of L2M over SOTA methods. Moreover, we apply L2M to transfer from pneumonia to COVID-19 chest X-ray images with remarkable performance. L2M can also be extended in other distribution matching applications where we show in a trial experiment that L2M generates more realistic and sharper MNIST samples.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning to Respond with Stickers: A Framework of Unifying Multi-Modality in Multi-Turn Dialog

Stickers with vivid and engaging expressions are becoming increasingly popular in online messaging apps, and some works are dedicated to automatically select sticker response by matching text labels of stickers with previous utterances. However, due to their large quantities, it is impractical to require text labels for the all stickers. Hence, in this paper, we propose to recommend an appropriate sticker to user based on multi-turn dialog context history without any external labels. Two main challenges are confronted in this task. One is to learn semantic meaning of stickers without corresponding text labels. Another challenge is to jointly model the candidate sticker with the multi-turn dialog context. To tackle these challenges, we propose a sticker response selector (SRS) model. Specifically, SRS first employs a convolutional based sticker image encoder and a self-attention based multi-turn dialog encoder to obtain the representation of stickers and utterances. Next, deep interaction network is proposed to conduct deep matching between the sticker with each utterance in the dialog history. SRS then learns the short-term and long-term dependency between all interaction results by a fusion network to output the the final matching score. To evaluate our proposed method, we collect a large-scale real-world dialog dataset with stickers from one of the most popular online chatting platform. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all commonly-used metrics. Experiments also verify the effectiveness of each component of SRS. To facilitate further research in sticker selection field, we release this dataset of 340K multi-turn dialog and sticker pairs.

preprint2020arXiv

Location-aware Predictive Beamforming for UAV Communications: A Deep Learning Approach

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communication becomes a promising technique to realize the beyond fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, due to the high mobility and maneuverability of UAVs which can adapt to heterogeneous requirements of different applications. However, the movement of UAVs impose challenge for accurate beam alignment between the UAV and the ground user equipment (UE). In this letter, we propose a deep learning-based location-aware predictive beamforming scheme to track the beam for UAV communications in a dynamic scenario. Specifically, a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based recurrent neural network (LRNet) is designed for UAV location prediction. Based on the predicted location, a predicted angle between the UAV and the UE can be determined for effective and fast beam alignment in the next time slot, which enables reliable communications between the UAV and the UE. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve a satisfactory UAV-to-UE communication rate, which is close to the upper bound of communication rate obtained by the perfect genie-aided alignment scheme.

preprint2020arXiv

LRNNet: A Light-Weighted Network with Efficient Reduced Non-Local Operation for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

The recent development of light-weighted neural networks has promoted the applications of deep learning under resource constraints and mobile applications. Many of these applications need to perform a real-time and efficient prediction for semantic segmentation with a light-weighted network. This paper introduces a light-weighted network with an efficient reduced non-local module (LRNNet) for efficient and realtime semantic segmentation. We proposed a factorized convolutional block in ResNet-Style encoder to achieve more lightweighted, efficient and powerful feature extraction. Meanwhile, our proposed reduced non-local module utilizes spatial regional dominant singular vectors to achieve reduced and more representative non-local feature integration with much lower computation and memory cost. Experiments demonstrate our superior trade-off among light-weight, speed, computation and accuracy. Without additional processing and pretraining, LRNNet achieves 72.2% mIoU on Cityscapes test dataset only using the fine annotation data for training with only 0.68M parameters and with 71 FPS on a GTX 1080Ti card.

preprint2020arXiv

Machine Learning in Heliophysics and Space Weather Forecasting: A White Paper of Findings and Recommendations

The authors of this white paper met on 16-17 January 2020 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, for a 2-day workshop that brought together a group of heliophysicists, data providers, expert modelers, and computer/data scientists. Their objective was to discuss critical developments and prospects of the application of machine and/or deep learning techniques for data analysis, modeling and forecasting in Heliophysics, and to shape a strategy for further developments in the field. The workshop combined a set of plenary sessions featuring invited introductory talks interleaved with a set of open discussion sessions. The outcome of the discussion is encapsulated in this white paper that also features a top-level list of recommendations agreed by participants.

preprint2020arXiv

Many-Body Localization from Dynamical Gauge Fields

A recent experiment [Nature Physics 10, 1 (2019)] has realized a dynamical gauge system with $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge symmetry in a double-well potential. In this work we propose a method to generalize this model from a single double well to a one-dimensional chain. We show that although there is no disordered potential in the original model, the phenomenon of many-body localization can occur. The key ingredient is that different symmetry sectors with different local gauge charges play the role of different disorder configurations, which becomes clear after exactly mapping our model to a transverse Ising model in a random longitudinal field. We show that both the ergodic regime and the many-body localized regime exist in this model from four different metrics, which include level statistics, volume law versus area law of entanglement entropy of eigenstates, quench dynamics of entanglement entropy and physical observables.

preprint2020arXiv

Mixed Reinforcement Learning with Additive Stochastic Uncertainty

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using dual representations of environmental dynamics to search the optimal policy with the purpose of improving both learning accuracy and training speed. The dual representations indicate the environmental model and the state-action data: the former can accelerate the learning process of RL, while its inherent model uncertainty generally leads to worse policy accuracy than the latter, which comes from direct measurements of states and actions. In the framework design of the mixed RL, the compensation of the additive stochastic model uncertainty is embedded inside the policy iteration RL framework by using explored state-action data via iterative Bayesian estimator (IBE). The optimal policy is then computed in an iterative way by alternating between policy evaluation (PEV) and policy improvement (PIM). The convergence of the mixed RL is proved using the Bellman's principle of optimality, and the recursive stability of the generated policy is proved via the Lyapunov's direct method. The effectiveness of the mixed RL is demonstrated by a typical optimal control problem of stochastic non-affine nonlinear systems (i.e., double lane change task with an automated vehicle).

preprint2020arXiv

Modeling Lost Information in Lossy Image Compression

Lossy image compression is one of the most commonly used operators for digital images. Most recently proposed deep-learning-based image compression methods leverage the auto-encoder structure, and reach a series of promising results in this field. The images are encoded into low dimensional latent features first, and entropy coded subsequently by exploiting the statistical redundancy. However, the information lost during encoding is unfortunately inevitable, which poses a significant challenge to the decoder to reconstruct the original images. In this work, we propose a novel invertible framework called Invertible Lossy Compression (ILC) to largely mitigate the information loss problem. Specifically, ILC introduces an invertible encoding module to replace the encoder-decoder structure to produce the low dimensional informative latent representation, meanwhile, transform the lost information into an auxiliary latent variable that won't be further coded or stored. The latent representation is quantized and encoded into bit-stream, and the latent variable is forced to follow a specified distribution, i.e. isotropic Gaussian distribution. In this way, recovering the original image is made tractable by easily drawing a surrogate latent variable and applying the inverse pass of the module with the sampled variable and decoded latent features. Experimental results demonstrate that with a new component replacing the auto-encoder in image compression methods, ILC can significantly outperform the baseline method on extensive benchmark datasets by combining with the existing compression algorithms.

preprint2020arXiv

Multiband Observation of LIGO/Virgo Binary Black Hole Mergers in the Gravitational-wave Transient Catalog GWTC-1

The Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors opened a new era to study black holes (BHs) in our Universe. A population of stellar-mass binary BHs (BBHs) are discovered to be heavier than previously expected. These heavy BBHs provide us an opportunity to achieve multiband observation with ground-based and space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors. In this work, we use BBHs discovered by the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration as indubitable examples, and study in great detail the prospects for multiband observation with GW detectors in the near future. We apply the Fisher matrix to spinning, non-precessing inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms, while taking the motion of space-based GW detectors fully into account. Our analysis shows that, detectors with decihertz sensitivity are expected to log stellar-mass BBH signals with very large signal-to-noise ratio, and provide accurate parameter estimation, including the sky location and time to coalescence. Furthermore, the combination of multiple detectors will achieve unprecedented measurement of BBH properties. As an explicit example, we present the multiband sensitivity to the generic dipole radiation for BHs, which is vastly important for the equivalence principle in the foundation of gravitation, in particular for those theories that predict curvature-induced scalarization of BHs.

preprint2020arXiv

PolSAR Image Classification Based on Dilated Convolution and Pixel-Refining Parallel Mapping network in the Complex Domain

Efficient and accurate polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification with a limited number of prior labels is always full of challenges. For general supervised deep learning classification algorithms, the pixel-by-pixel algorithm achieves precise yet inefficient classification with a small number of labeled pixels, whereas the pixel mapping algorithm achieves efficient yet edge-rough classification with more prior labels required. To take efficiency, accuracy and prior labels into account, we propose a novel pixel-refining parallel mapping network in the complex domain named CRPM-Net and the corresponding training algorithm for PolSAR image classification. CRPM-Net consists of two parallel sub-networks: a) A transfer dilated convolution mapping network in the complex domain (C-Dilated CNN) activated by a complex cross-convolution neural network (Cs-CNN), which is aiming at precise localization, high efficiency and the full use of phase information; b) A complex domain encoder-decoder network connected parallelly with C-Dilated CNN, which is to extract more contextual semantic features. Finally, we design a two-step algorithm to train the Cs-CNN and CRPM-Net with a small number of labeled pixels for higher accuracy by refining misclassified labeled pixels. We verify the proposed method on AIRSAR and E-SAR datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that CRPM-Net achieves the best classification results and substantially outperforms some latest state-of-the-art approaches in both efficiency and accuracy for PolSAR image classification. The source code and trained models for CRPM-Net is available at: https://github.com/PROoshio/CRPM-Net.

preprint2020arXiv

Predicting Coronal Mass Ejections Using SDO/HMI Vector Magnetic Data Products and Recurrent Neural Networks

We present two recurrent neural networks (RNNs), one based on gated recurrent units and the other based on long short-term memory, for predicting whether an active region (AR) that produces an M- or X-class flare will also produce a coronal mass ejection (CME). We model data samples in an AR as time series and use the RNNs to capture temporal information of the data samples. Each data sample has 18 physical parameters, or features, derived from photospheric vector magnetic field data taken by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). We survey M- and X-class flares that occurred from 2010 May to 2019 May using the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite's X-ray flare catalogs provided by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), and select those flares with identified ARs in the NCEI catalogs. In addition, we extract the associations of flares and CMEs from the Space Weather Database Of Notifications, Knowledge, Information (DONKI). We use the information gathered above to build the labels (positive versus negative) of the data samples at hand. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our RNNs over closely related machine learning methods in predicting the labels of the data samples. We also discuss an extension of our approach to predict a probabilistic estimate of how likely an M- or X-class flare will initiate a CME, with good performance results. To our knowledge this is the first time that RNNs have been used for CME prediction.

preprint2020arXiv

Progressive Cluster Purification for Unsupervised Feature Learning

In unsupervised feature learning, sample specificity based methods ignore the inter-class information, which deteriorates the discriminative capability of representation models. Clustering based methods are error-prone to explore the complete class boundary information due to the inevitable class inconsistent samples in each cluster. In this work, we propose a novel clustering based method, which, by iteratively excluding class inconsistent samples during progressive cluster formation, alleviates the impact of noise samples in a simple-yet-effective manner. Our approach, referred to as Progressive Cluster Purification (PCP), implements progressive clustering by gradually reducing the number of clusters during training, while the sizes of clusters continuously expand consistently with the growth of model representation capability. With a well-designed cluster purification mechanism, it further purifies clusters by filtering noise samples which facilitate the subsequent feature learning by utilizing the refined clusters as pseudo-labels. Experiments on commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed PCP improves baseline method with significant margins. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zhangyifei0115/PCP.

preprint2020arXiv

Prototype Mixture Models for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation is challenging because objects within the support and query images could significantly differ in appearance and pose. Using a single prototype acquired directly from the support image to segment the query image causes semantic ambiguity. In this paper, we propose prototype mixture models (PMMs), which correlate diverse image regions with multiple prototypes to enforce the prototype-based semantic representation. Estimated by an Expectation-Maximization algorithm, PMMs incorporate rich channel-wised and spatial semantics from limited support images. Utilized as representations as well as classifiers, PMMs fully leverage the semantics to activate objects in the query image while depressing background regions in a duplex manner. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and MS-COCO datasets show that PMMs significantly improve upon state-of-the-arts. Particularly, PMMs improve 5-shot segmentation performance on MS-COCO by up to 5.82\% with only a moderate cost for model size and inference speed.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantum Transport in Air-stable Na3Bi Thin Films

Na3Bi has attracted significant interest in both bulk form as a three-dimensional topological Dirac semimetal and in ultra-thin form as a wide-bandgap two-dimensional topological insulator. Its extreme air sensitivity has limited experimental efforts on thin- and ultra-thin films grown via molecular beam epitaxy to ultra-high vacuum environments. Here we demonstrate air-stable Na3Bi thin films passivated with magnesium difluoride (MgF2) or silicon (Si) capping layers. Electrical measurements show that deposition of MgF2 or Si has minimal impact on the transport properties of Na3Bi whilst in ultra-high vacuum. Importantly, the MgF2-passivated Na3Bi films are air-stable and remain metallic for over 100 hours after exposure to air, as compared to near instantaneous degradation when they are unpassivated. Air stability enables transfer of films to a conventional high-magnetic field cryostat, enabling quantum transport measurements which verify that the Dirac semimetal character of Na3Bi films is retained after air exposure.

preprint2020arXiv

Relative Entropy Regularised TDLAS Tomography for Robust Temperature Imaging

Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Spectroscopy (TDLAS) tomography has been widely used for in situ combustion diagnostics, yielding images of both species concentration and temperature. The temperature image is generally obtained from the reconstructed absorbance distributions for two spectral transitions, i.e. two-line thermometry. However, the inherently ill-posed nature of tomographic data inversion leads to noise in each of the reconstructed absorbance distributions. These noise effects propagate into the absorbance ratio and generate artefacts in the retrieved temperature image. To address this problem, we have developed a novel algorithm, which we call Relative Entropy Tomographic RecOnstruction (RETRO), for TDLAS tomography. A relative entropy regularisation is introduced for high-fidelity temperature image retrieval from jointly reconstructed two-line absorbance distributions. We have carried out numerical simulations and proof-of-concept experiments to validate the proposed algorithm. Compared with the well-established Simultaneous Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (SART), the RETRO algorithm significantly improves the quality of the tomographic temperature images, exhibiting excellent robustness against TDLAS tomographic measurement noise. RETRO offers great potential for industrial field applications of TDLAS tomography, where it is common for measurements to be performed in very harsh environments.

preprint2020arXiv

Rethinking Privacy Preserving Deep Learning: How to Evaluate and Thwart Privacy Attacks

This paper investigates capabilities of Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning (PPDL) mechanisms against various forms of privacy attacks. First, we propose to quantitatively measure the trade-off between model accuracy and privacy losses incurred by reconstruction, tracing and membership attacks. Second, we formulate reconstruction attacks as solving a noisy system of linear equations, and prove that attacks are guaranteed to be defeated if condition (2) is unfulfilled. Third, based on theoretical analysis, a novel Secret Polarization Network (SPN) is proposed to thwart privacy attacks, which pose serious challenges to existing PPDL methods. Extensive experiments showed that model accuracies are improved on average by 5-20% compared with baseline mechanisms, in regimes where data privacy are satisfactorily protected.

preprint2020arXiv

Robust axion insulator and Chern insulator phases in a two-dimensional antiferromagnetic topological insulator

The intricate interplay between nontrivial topology and magnetism in two-dimensional (2D) materials has led to the emergence of many novel phenomena and functionalities. An outstanding example is the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect, which was realized in magnetically doped topological insulators (TIs) in the absence of magnetic field. Recently, the layered van der Waals compound MnBi2Te4 has been theoretically predicted and experimentally verified to be a TI with interlayer antiferromagnetic (AFM) order. It is a rare stoichiometric material with coexisting topology and magnetism, thus represents a perfect building block for complex topological-magnetic structures. Here we investigate the quantum transport behaviors of both bulk crystal and exfoliated MnBi2Te4 flakes in a field effect transistor geometry. In the 6 septuple layers (SLs) device tuned into the insulating regime, we observe a large longitudinal resistance and zero Hall plateau, which are characteristic of the axion insulator state. The robust axion insulator state occurs in zero magnetic field, over a wide magnetic field range, and at relatively high temperatures. Moreover, a moderate magnetic field drives a quantum phase transition from the axion insulator phase to a Chern insulator phase with zero longitudinal resistance and quantized Hall resistance h/e2 (h is the Plank constant and e is the elemental charge). These results pave the road for using even-number-SL MnBi2Te4 to realize the quantized topological magnetoelectric effect and axion electrodynamics in condensed matter systems.

preprint2020arXiv

Rumor-robust Decentralized Gaussian Process Learning, Fusion, and Planning for Modeling Multiple Moving Targets

This paper presents a decentralized Gaussian Process (GP) learning, fusion, and planning (RESIN) formalism for mobile sensor networks to actively learn target motion models. RESIN is characterized by both computational and communication efficiency, and the robustness to rumor propagation in sensor networks. By using the weighted exponential product rule and the Chernoff information, a rumor-robust decentralized GP fusion approach is developed to generate a globally consistent target trajectory prediction from local GP models. A decentralized information-driven path planning approach is then proposed for mobile sensors to generate informative sensing paths. A novel, constant-sized information sharing strategy is developed for path coordination between sensors, and an analytical objective function is derived that significantly reduces the computational complexity of the path planning. The effectiveness of RESIN is demonstrated in various numerical simulations.

preprint2020arXiv

SCNet: A Neural Network for Automated Side-Channel Attack

The side-channel attack is an attack method based on the information gained about implementations of computer systems, rather than weaknesses in algorithms. Information about system characteristics such as power consumption, electromagnetic leaks and sound can be exploited by the side-channel attack to compromise the system. Much research effort has been directed towards this field. However, such an attack still requires strong skills, thus can only be performed effectively by experts. Here, we propose SCNet, which automatically performs side-channel attacks. And we also design this network combining with side-channel domain knowledge and different deep learning model to improve the performance and better to explain the result. The results show that our model achieves good performance with fewer parameters. The proposed model is a useful tool for automatically testing the robustness of computer systems.

preprint2020arXiv

Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Adaptive Dispatching for Ridesharing Systems

Nowadays, ridesharing has become one of the most popular services offered by online ride-hailing platforms (e.g., Uber and Didi Chuxing). Existing ridesharing platforms adopt the strategy that dispatches orders over the entire city at a uniform time interval. However, the uneven spatio-temporal order distributions in real-world ridesharing systems indicate that such an approach is suboptimal in practice. Thus, in this paper, we exploit adaptive dispatching intervals to boost the platform's profit under a guarantee of the maximum passenger waiting time. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical approach, which generates clusters of geographical areas suitable to share the same dispatching intervals, and then makes online decisions of selecting the appropriate time instances for order dispatch within each spatial cluster. Technically, we prove the impossibility of designing constant-competitive-ratio algorithms for the online adaptive interval problem, and propose online algorithms under partial or even zero future order knowledge that significantly improve the platform's profit over existing approaches. We conduct extensive experiments with a large-scale ridesharing order dataset, which contains all of the over 3.5 million ridesharing orders in Beijing, China, received by Didi Chuxing from October 1st to October 31st, 2018. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform existing approaches.

preprint2020arXiv

Spin Excitations and Spin Wave Gap in the Ferromagnetic Weyl Semimetal Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$

We report a comprehensive neutron scattering study on the spin excitations in the magnetic Weyl semimetal Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$ with quasi-two-dimensional structure. Both in-plane and out-of-plane dispersions of the spin waves are revealed in the ferromagnetic state, similarly dispersive but damped spin excitations persist into the paramagnetic state. The effective exchange interactions have been estimated by a semi-classical Heisenberg model to consistently reproduce the experimental $T_C$ and spin stiffness. However, a full spin wave gap below $E_g=2.3$ meV is observed at $T=4$ K, much larger than the estimated magnetic anisotropy energy ($\sim0.6$ meV), while its temperature dependence indicates a significant contribution from the Weyl fermions. These results suggest that Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$ is a three-dimensional correlated system with large spin stiffness, and the low-energy spin dynamics could interplay with the topological electron states.

preprint2020arXiv

Spin-Excitations Anisotropy in the Bilayer Iron-Based Superconductor CaKFe$_4$As$_4$

We use polarized inelastic neutron scattering to study the spin-excitations anisotropy in the bilayer iron-based superconductor CaKFe$_4$As$_4$ ($T_c$ = 35 K). In the superconducting state, both odd and even $L-$modulations of spin resonance have been observed in our previous unpolarized neutron scattering experiments (T. Xie {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 120}, 267003 (2018)). Here we find that the high-energy even mode ($\sim 18$ meV) is isotropic in spin space, but the low-energy odd modes consist of a $c-$axis polarized mode around 9 meV along with another partially overlapped in-plane mode around 12 meV. We argue that such spin anisotropy is induced by the spin-orbit coupling in the spin-vortex-type fluctuations of this unique compound. The spin anisotropy is strongly affected by the superconductivity, where it is weak below 6 meV in the normal state and then transferred to higher energy and further enhanced in the odd mode of spin resonance below $T_c$.

preprint2020arXiv

Spontaneous Surface Collapse and Reconstruction in Antiferromagnetic Topological Insulator MnBi$_2$Te$_4$

MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ is an antiferromagnetic topological insulator which stimulates intense interests due to the exotic quantum phenomena and promising device applications. Surface structure is a determinant factor to understand the novel magnetic and topological behavior of MnBi2Te4, yet its precise atomic structure remains elusive. Here, we discovered a spontaneous surface collapse and reconstruction in few-layer MnBi2Te4 exfoliated under delicate protection. Instead of the ideal septuple-layer structure in the bulk, the collapsed surface is shown to reconstruct as Mn-doped Bi$_2$Te$_3$ quintuple-layer and Mn$_x$Bi$_y$Te double-layer with a clear van der Waals gap in between. Combining with first-principles calculations, such spontaneous surface collapse is attributed to the abundant intrinsic Mn-Bi antisite defects and tellurium vacancy in the exfoliated surface, which is further supported by in-situ annealing and electron irradiation experiments. Our results shed light on the understanding of the intricate surface-bulk correspondence of MnBi$_2$Te$_4$, and provide insightful perspective of the surface-related quantum measurements in MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ few-layer devices.

preprint2020arXiv

Strain-tunable magnetism and nodal loops in monolayer MnB

Designing two-dimensional (2D) materials with magnetic and topological properties has continuously attracted intense interest in fundamental science and potential applications. Here, on the basis of first-principles calculations, we predict the coexistence of antiferromagnetism and Dirac nodal loop (NL) in the monolayer MnB, where the band crossing points are very close to the Fermi Level. Remarkably, a moderate strain can induce an antiferromagnetic to ferromagnetic phase transition, driving the monolayer MnB to a ferromagnetic metal with Weyl NLs. Such a type of topological quantum phase transition has not been observed before. In addition, the symmetry-protected properties of the two types of NLs as well as the magnetic critical temperatures are investigated. The controllable magnetic and topological order in monolayer MnB offers a unique platform for exploring topological quantum phase transitions and realizing nanospintronic devices.

preprint2020arXiv

Structure and overstability of resistive modes with runaway electrons

We investigate the effects of runaway electron current on the dispersion relation of resistive magnetohydrodynamic modes in tokamaks. We present a new theoretical model to derive the dispersion relation, which is based on the asymptotic analysis of the resistive layer structure of the modes. It is found that in addition to the conventional resistive layer, a new runaway current layer can emerge whose properties depend on the ratio of the Alfvén velocity to the runaway electron convection speed. Due to the contribution from this layer, both the tearing mode and kink mode will have a real frequency in addition to a growth rate. The derived dispersion relation has been compared with numerical results using both a simplified eigenvalue calculation and a M3D-C1 linear simulation, and good agreement is found in both cases.

preprint2020arXiv

Triaxially-deformed Freely-precessing Neutron Stars: Continuous electromagnetic and gravitational radiation

The shape of a neutron star (NS) is closely linked to its internal structure and the equation of state of supranuclear matters. A rapidly rotating, asymmetric NS in the Milky Way undergoes free precession, making it a potential source for multimessenger observation. The free precession could manifest in (i) the spectra of continuous gravitational waves (GWs) in the kilohertz band for ground-based GW detectors, and (ii) the timing behavior and pulse-profile characteristics if the NS is monitored as a pulsar with radio and/or X-ray telescopes. We extend previous work and investigate in great detail the free precession of a triaxially deformed NS with analytical and numerical approaches. In particular, its associated continuous GWs and pulse signals are derived. Explicit examples are illustrated for the continuous GWs, as well as timing residuals in both time and frequency domains. These results are ready to be used for future multimessenger observation of triaxially-deformed freely-precessing NSs, in order to extract scientific implication as much as possible.

preprint2020arXiv

Unified Gas-kinetic Wave-Particle Method IV: Multi-species Gas Mixture and Plasma Transport

In this paper, we extend the unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method to the multi-species gas mixture and multiscale plasma transport. The construction of the scheme is based on the direct modeling on the mesh size and time step scales, and the local cell's Knudsen number determines the flow physics. The proposed scheme has the multiscale and asymptotic complexity diminishing properties. The multiscale property means that according to cell's Knudsen number the scheme can capture the non-equilibrium flow physics in the rarefied flow regime, and preserve the asymptotic Euler, Navier-Stokes, and magnetohydrodynamics limit in the continuum regime. The asymptotic complexity diminishing property means that the total degree of freedom of the scheme automatically decreases as cell's Knudsen number decreases. In the continuum regime, the scheme automatically degenerates from a kinetic solver to a hydrodynamic solver. In UGKWP, the evolution of microscopic velocity distribution is coupled with the evolution of macroscopic variables, and the particle evolution as well as the macroscopic fluxes are modeled from the time accumulating solution up to a time step scale from the kinetic model equation. For plasma transport, current scheme provides a smooth transition from particle in cell (PIC) method in the rarefied regime to the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) solver in the continuum regime. In the continuum limit, the cell size and time step of the UGKWP method is not restricted to be less than the mean free path and mean collision time. In the highly magnetized regime, the cell size and time step are not restricted by the Debye length and plasma cyclotron period. The multiscale and asymptotic complexity diminishing properties of the scheme are verified by numerical tests in multiple flow regimes.

preprint2020arXiv

Video Cloze Procedure for Self-Supervised Spatio-Temporal Learning

We propose a novel self-supervised method, referred to as Video Cloze Procedure (VCP), to learn rich spatial-temporal representations. VCP first generates "blanks" by withholding video clips and then creates "options" by applying spatio-temporal operations on the withheld clips. Finally, it fills the blanks with "options" and learns representations by predicting the categories of operations applied on the clips. VCP can act as either a proxy task or a target task in self-supervised learning. As a proxy task, it converts rich self-supervised representations into video clip operations (options), which enhances the flexibility and reduces the complexity of representation learning. As a target task, it can assess learned representation models in a uniform and interpretable manner. With VCP, we train spatial-temporal representation models (3D-CNNs) and apply such models on action recognition and video retrieval tasks. Experiments on commonly used benchmarks show that the trained models outperform the state-of-the-art self-supervised models with significant margins.

preprint2020arXiv

Video Playback Rate Perception for Self-supervisedSpatio-Temporal Representation Learning

In self-supervised spatio-temporal representation learning, the temporal resolution and long-short term characteristics are not yet fully explored, which limits representation capabilities of learned models. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised method, referred to as video Playback Rate Perception (PRP), to learn spatio-temporal representation in a simple-yet-effective way. PRP roots in a dilated sampling strategy, which produces self-supervision signals about video playback rates for representation model learning. PRP is implemented with a feature encoder, a classification module, and a reconstructing decoder, to achieve spatio-temporal semantic retention in a collaborative discrimination-generation manner. The discriminative perception model follows a feature encoder to prefer perceiving low temporal resolution and long-term representation by classifying fast-forward rates. The generative perception model acts as a feature decoder to focus on comprehending high temporal resolution and short-term representation by introducing a motion-attention mechanism. PRP is applied on typical video target tasks including action recognition and video retrieval. Experiments show that PRP outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised models with significant margins. Code is available at github.com/yuanyao366/PRP

preprint2019arXiv

Neural Network Model Extraction Attacks in Edge Devices by Hearing Architectural Hints

As neural networks continue their reach into nearly every aspect of software operations, the details of those networks become an increasingly sensitive subject. Even those that deploy neural networks embedded in physical devices may wish to keep the inner working of their designs hidden -- either to protect their intellectual property or as a form of protection from adversarial inputs. The specific problem we address is how, through heavy system stack, given noisy and imperfect memory traces, one might reconstruct the neural network architecture including the set of layers employed, their connectivity, and their respective dimension sizes. Considering both the intra-layer architecture features and the inter-layer temporal association information introduced by the DNN design empirical experience, we draw upon ideas from speech recognition to solve this problem. We show that off-chip memory address traces and PCIe events provide ample information to reconstruct such neural network architectures accurately. We are the first to propose such accurate model extraction techniques and demonstrate an end-to-end attack experimentally in the context of an off-the-shelf Nvidia GPU platform with full system stack. Results show that the proposed techniques achieve a high reverse engineering accuracy and improve the one's ability to conduct targeted adversarial attack with success rate from 14.6\%$\sim$25.5\% (without network architecture knowledge) to 75.9\% (with extracted network architecture).

preprint2019arXiv

Optimal design of shell-graded-infill structures by a hybrid MMC-MMV approach

In the present work, a hybrid MMC-MMV approach is developed for designing additive manufacturing-oriented shell-graded-infill structures. The key idea is to describe the geometry of a shell-graded-infill structure explicitly using some geometry parameters. To this end, a set of morphable voids is adopted to describe the boundary of the coating shell, while a set of morphable components combing with a coordinate perturbation technique are introduced to represent the graded infill distribution. Under such treatment, both the crisp boundary of the coating shell and the graded infill can be optimized simultaneously, with a small number of design variables. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

preprint2019arXiv

Signatures of Helical Edge Transport in Millimetre-Scale Thin Films of Na3Bi

A two-dimensional topological insulator (2DTI) has an insulating bulk and helical spin-polarised edge modes robust to backscattering by non-magnetic disorder. While ballistic transport has been demonstrated in 2DTIs over short distances, larger samples show significant backscattering and a nearly temperature-independent resistance whose origin is unclear. 2DTI edges have shown a spin polarisation, however the degree of helicity is difficult to quantify from spin measurements. Here, we study 2DTI few-layer Na3Bi on insulating Al2O3. A non-local conductance measurement geometry enables sensitive detection of the edge conductance in the topological regime, with an edge mean free path ~100 nm. Magnetic field suppresses spin-flip scattering in the helical edges, resulting in a giant negative magnetoresistance (GNMR), up to 80% at 0.9 T. Comparison to theory indicates >98% of scattering is helical spin scattering significantly exceeding the maximum (67%) expected for a non-helical metal. GNMR, coupled with non-local measurements demonstrating edge conduction, thus provides an unambiguous experimental signature of helical edges that we expect to be generically useful in understanding 2DTIs.

preprint2019arXiv

The LISA-Taiji network: precision localization of massive black hole binaries

A space-based gravitational-wave detector, LISA, consists of a triangle of three spacecrafts with a separation distance of 2.5 million kilometers in a heliocentric orbit behind the Earth. Like LISA, Taiji is compose of a triangle of three spacecrafts with a separation distance of 3 million kilometers in a heliocentric orbit ahead of the Earth. They are expected to launch in 2030-2035. Assuming a one-year overlap, we propose the LISA-Taiji network in space to fast and accurately localize the gravitational-wave sources. We use the Fisher information matrix approach to analyze the sky localization for coalescing massive black hole binaries. For an equal-mass black hole binary located at redshift of 1 with a total intrinsic mass of $10^5 M_{\odot}$, the LISA-Taiji network may achieves about four orders of magnitude improvement on the event localization region compared to an individual detector. The precision measurement of sky location from the gravitational-wave signal may completely identify the host galaxy with low redshifts prior to the final black hole merger. Such the identification of the host galaxy is helpful for the follow-up change in electromagnetic emissions of the accretion disk when the massive black hole binary merges to a single massive black hole, and enables the coalescing massive black hole binaries to be used as a standard siren.

preprint2019arXiv

Unified Gas-kinetic Wave-Particle Methods II: Multiscale Simulation on Unstructured Mesh

In this paper, we present a unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method on unstructured mesh for multiscale simulation of continuum and rarefied flow. Inheriting from the multicale transport in the unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS), the integral solution of kinetic model equation is employed in the construction of UGKWP method to model the flow physics in the cell size and time step scales. A novel wave-particle adaptive formulation is introduced in the UGKWP method to describe the flow dynamics in each control volume. The local gas evolution is constructed through the dynamical interaction of the deterministic hydrodynamic wave and the stochastic kinetic particle. Within the resolution of cell size and time step, the decomposition, interaction, and evolution of the hydrodynamic wave and the kinetic particle depend on the ratio of the time step to the local particle collision time. In the rarefied flow regime, the flow physics is mainly recovered by the discrete particles and the UGKWP method performs as a stochastic particle method. In the continuum flow regime, the flow behavior is solely followed by macroscopic variable evolution and the UGKWP method becomes a gas-kinetic hydrodynamic flow solver for the viscous and heat-conducting Navier--Stokes solutions. In different flow regimes, many numerical test cases are computed to validate the UGKWP method on unstructured mesh. The UGKWP method can get the same UGKS solutions in all Knudsen regimes without the requirement of the time step and mesh size being less than than the particle collision time and mean free path. With an automatic wave-particle decomposition, the UGKWP method becomes very efficient. For example, at Mach number 30 and Knudsen number 0.1, in comparison with UGKS several-order-of-magnitude reductions in computational cost and memory requirement have been achieved by UGKWP.

preprint2019arXiv

Unified Gas-kinetic Wave-Particle Methods III: Multiscale Photon Transport

In this paper, we extend the unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method to the multiscale photon transport. In this method, the photon free streaming and scattering processes are treated in an un-splitting way. The duality descriptions, namely the simulation particle and distribution function, are utilized to describe the photon. By accurately recovering the governing equations of the unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS), the UGKWP preserves the multiscale dynamics of photon transport from optically thin to optically thick regime. In the optically thin regime, the UGKWP becomes a Monte Carlo type particle tracking method, while in the optically thick regime, the UGKWP becomes a diffusion equation solver. The local photon dynamics of the UGKWP, as well as the proportion of wave-described and particle-described photons are automatically adapted according to the numerical resolution and transport regime. Compared to the $S_n$ -type UGKS, the UGKWP requires less memory cost and does not suffer ray effect. Compared to the implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) method, the statistical noise of UGKWP is greatly reduced and computational efficiency is significantly improved in the optically thick regime. Several numerical examples covering all transport regimes from the optically thin to optically thick are computed to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the UGKWP method. In comparison to the $S_n$ -type UGKS and IMC method, the UGKWP method may have several-order-of-magnitude reduction in computational cost and memory requirement in solving some multsicale transport problems.

preprint2018arXiv

Bayesian inference in high-dimensional linear models using an empirical correlation-adaptive prior

In the context of a high-dimensional linear regression model, we propose the use of an empirical correlation-adaptive prior that makes use of information in the observed predictor variable matrix to adaptively address high collinearity, determining if parameters associated with correlated predictors should be shrunk together or kept apart. Under suitable conditions, we prove that this empirical Bayes posterior concentrates around the true sparse parameter at the optimal rate asymptotically. A simplified version of a shotgun stochastic search algorithm is employed to implement the variable selection procedure, and we show, via simulation experiments across different settings and a real-data application, the favorable performance of the proposed method compared to existing methods.

preprint2016arXiv

A new form of (unexpected) Dirac fermions in the strongly-correlated cerium monopnictides

Discovering Dirac fermions with novel properties has become an important front in condensed matter and materials sciences. Here, we report the observation of unusual Dirac fermion states in a strongly-correlated electron setting, which are uniquely distinct from those of graphene and conventional topological insulators. In strongly-correlated cerium monopnictides, we find two sets of highly anisotropic Dirac fermions that interpenetrate each other with negligible hybridization, and show a peculiar four-fold degeneracy where their Dirac nodes overlap. Despite the lack of protection by crystalline or time-reversal symmetries, this four-fold degeneracy is robust across magnetic phase transitions. Comparison of these experimental findings with our theoretical calculations suggests that the observed surface Dirac fermions arise from bulk band inversions at an odd number of high-symmetry points, which is analogous to the band topology which describes a $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$-topological phase. Our findings open up an unprecedented and long-sought-for platform for exploring novel Dirac fermion physics in a strongly-correlated semimetal.

preprint2016arXiv

Adjoint Fokker-Planck equation and runaway electron dynamics

The adjoint Fokker-Planck equation method is applied to study the runaway probability function and the expected slowing-down time for highly relativistic runaway electrons, including the loss of energy due to synchrotron radiation. In direct correspondence to Monte Carlo simulation methods, the runaway probability function has a smooth transition across the runaway separatrix, which can be attributed to effect of the pitch angle scattering term in the kinetic equation. However, for the same numerical accuracy, the adjoint method is more efficient than the Monte Carlo method. The expected slowing-down time gives a novel method to estimate the runaway current decay time in experiments. A new result from this work is that the decay rate of high energyelectrons is very slow when E is close to the critical electric field. This effect contributes further to a hysteresis previously found in the runaway electron population.

preprint2016arXiv

An Alternative Analysis of Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Hyperbolic Conservation Law

The development and application of the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method have attracted great attention in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) com- munity in the past decades. The underlying reason for such an intensive investigation is due to favorable properties of the DG method, such as higher order, compactness, and easy parallelization. However, for the compressible flow simulations, the DG method is also associated with unfavorable prop- erties, such as the frequent instabilities in non-smooth regions. Due to the finite element formulation, except the update of the cell averaged conserva- tive flow variable, it becomes rather difficulty to fully understand the physical mechanism in the DG method for the updates of other degrees of freedom in- side each element. In this short note, based on the linear advection equation we are going to analyze the DG method in an alternative way. The results obtained may be useful for the CFD community for its further development of the DG methods.

preprint2016arXiv

Automated Inference on Sociopsychological Impressions of Attractive Female Faces

This article is a sequel to our earlier work [25]. The main objective of our research is to explore the potential of supervised machine learning in face-induced social computing and cognition, riding on the momentum of much heralded successes of face processing, analysis and recognition on the tasks of biometric-based identification. We present a case study of automated statistical inference on sociopsychological perceptions of female faces controlled for race, attractiveness, age and nationality. Our empirical evidences point to the possibility of training machine learning algorithms, using example face images characterized by internet users, to predict perceptions of personality traits and demeanors.

preprint2016arXiv

DeepFood: Deep Learning-Based Food Image Recognition for Computer-Aided Dietary Assessment

Worldwide, in 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these, over 600 million were obese. Accurately documenting dietary caloric intake is crucial to manage weight loss, but also presents challenges because most of the current methods for dietary assessment must rely on memory to recall foods eaten. The ultimate goal of our research is to develop computer-aided technical solutions to enhance and improve the accuracy of current measurements of dietary intake. Our proposed system in this paper aims to improve the accuracy of dietary assessment by analyzing the food images captured by mobile devices (e.g., smartphone). The key technique innovation in this paper is the deep learning-based food image recognition algorithms. Substantial research has demonstrated that digital imaging accurately estimates dietary intake in many environments and it has many advantages over other methods. However, how to derive the food information (e.g., food type and portion size) from food image effectively and efficiently remains a challenging and open research problem. We propose a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based food image recognition algorithm to address this problem. We applied our proposed approach to two real-world food image data sets (UEC-256 and Food-101) and achieved impressive results. To the best of our knowledge, these results outperformed all other reported work using these two data sets. Our experiments have demonstrated that the proposed approach is a promising solution for addressing the food image recognition problem. Our future work includes further improving the performance of the algorithms and integrating our system into a real-world mobile and cloud computing-based system to enhance the accuracy of current measurements of dietary intake.

preprint2016arXiv

Experimental ten-photon entanglement

Quantum entanglement among multiple spatially separated particles is of fundamental interest, and can serve as central resources for studies in quantum nonlocality, quantum-to-classical transition, quantum error correction, and quantum simulation. The ability of generating an increasing number of entangled particles is an important benchmark for quantum information processing. The largest entangled states were previously created with fourteen trapped ions, eight photons, and five superconducting qubits. Here, based on spontaneous parametric down-converted two-photon entanglement source with simultaneously a high brightness of ~12 MHz/W, a collection efficiency of ~70% and an indistinguishability of ~91% between independent photons, we demonstrate, for the first time, genuine and distillable entanglement of ten single photons under different pump power. Our work creates a state-of-the-art platform for multi-photon experiments, and provide enabling technologies for challenging optical quantum information tasks such as high-efficiency scattershot boson sampling with many photons.

preprint2016arXiv

Go-With-The-Winner: Client-Side Server Selection for Content Delivery

Content delivery networks deliver much of the web and video content in the world by deploying a large distributed network of servers. We model and analyze a simple paradigm for client-side server selection that is commonly used in practice where each user independently measures the performance of a set of candidate servers and selects the one that performs the best. For web (resp., video) delivery, we propose and analyze a simple algorithm where each user randomly chooses two or more candidate servers and selects the server that provided the best hit rate (resp., bit rate). We prove that the algorithm converges quickly to an optimal state where all users receive the best hit rate (resp., bit rate), with high probability. We also show that if each user chose just one random server instead of two, some users receive a hit rate (resp., bit rate) that tends to zero. We simulate our algorithm and evaluate its performance with varying choices of parameters, system load, and content popularity.

preprint2016arXiv

Induced robust topological order on an ordinary insulator hetero-structured with a strong topological insulator

Topological states of matter originate from distinct topological electronic structures of materials. As for strong topological insulators (STIs), the topological surface (interface) is a direct consequence of electronic structure transition between materials categorized to different topological genus. Therefore, it is fundamentally interesting if such topological character can be manipulated. Besides tuning the crystal field and the strength of spin-orbital coupling (e.g., by external strain, or chemical doping), there is currently rare report on topological state induced in ordinary insulators (OIs) by the heterostructure of OI/STI. Here we report the observation of a Dirac cone topological surface state (TSS) induced on the Sb2Se3 layer up to 15 nm thick in the OI/STI heterostructure, in sharp contrast with the OI/OI heterostructure where no sign of TSS can be observed. This is evident for an induced topological state in an OI by heterostructure.

preprint2016arXiv

Irreversible Rapid Changes of Magnetic Field Associated with the 2012 October 23 Circular Near-limb X1.8 Flare

It has been found that photospheric magnetic fields can change in accordance with the three-dimensional magnetic field restructuring following solar eruptions. Previous studies mainly use vector magnetic field data taken for events near the disk center. In this paper, we analyze the magnetic field evolution associated with the 2012 October 23 X1.8 flare in NOAA AR 11598 that is close to the solar limb, using both the 45 s cadence line-of-sight and 12 minute cadence vector magnetograms from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on board Solar Dynamic Observatory. This flare is classified as a circular-ribbon flare with spine-fan type magnetic topology containing a null point. In the line-of-sight magnetograms, there are two apparent polarity inversion lines (PIL). The PIL closer to the limb is affected more by the projection effect. Between these two PILs there lie positive polarity magnetic fields, which are surrounded by negative polarity fields outside the PILs. We find that after the flare, both the apparent limb-ward and disk-ward negative fluxes decrease, while the positive flux in-between increases. We also find that the horizontal magnetic fields have a significant increase along the disk-ward PIL, while in surrounding area, they decrease. Synthesizing the observed field changes, we conclude that the magnetic fields collapse toward the surface above the disk-ward PIL as depicted in the coronal implosion scenario, while the peripheral field turns to a more vertical configuration after the flare. We also suggest that this event is an asymmetric circular-ribbon flare: a flux rope is likely present above the disk-ward PIL. Its eruption causes the instability of the entire fan-spine structure and the implosion near that PIL.

preprint2016arXiv

Latent Attention For If-Then Program Synthesis

Automatic translation from natural language descriptions into programs is a longstanding challenging problem. In this work, we consider a simple yet important sub-problem: translation from textual descriptions to If-Then programs. We devise a novel neural network architecture for this task which we train end-to-end. Specifically, we introduce Latent Attention, which computes multiplicative weights for the words in the description in a two-stage process with the goal of better leveraging the natural language structures that indicate the relevant parts for predicting program elements. Our architecture reduces the error rate by 28.57% compared to prior art. We also propose a one-shot learning scenario of If-Then program synthesis and simulate it with our existing dataset. We demonstrate a variation on the training procedure for this scenario that outperforms the original procedure, significantly closing the gap to the model trained with all data.

preprint2016arXiv

Privacy Knowledge Modelling for Internet of Things: A Look Back

Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing together give us the ability to sense, collect, process, and analyse data so we can use them to better understand behaviours, habits, preferences and life patterns of users and lead them to consume resources more efficiently. In such knowledge discovery activities, privacy becomes a significant challenge due to the extremely personal nature of the knowledge that can be derived from the data and the potential risks involved. Therefore, understanding the privacy expectations and preferences of stakeholders is an important task in the IoT domain. In this paper, we review how privacy knowledge has been modelled and used in the past in different domains. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT. Finally, we discuss major research challenges and opportunities.

preprint2016arXiv

Robust High-Dimensional Linear Regression

The effectiveness of supervised learning techniques has made them ubiquitous in research and practice. In high-dimensional settings, supervised learning commonly relies on dimensionality reduction to improve performance and identify the most important factors in predicting outcomes. However, the economic importance of learning has made it a natural target for adversarial manipulation of training data, which we term poisoning attacks. Prior approaches to dealing with robust supervised learning rely on strong assumptions about the nature of the feature matrix, such as feature independence and sub-Gaussian noise with low variance. We propose an integrated method for robust regression that relaxes these assumptions, assuming only that the feature matrix can be well approximated by a low-rank matrix. Our techniques integrate improved robust low-rank matrix approximation and robust principle component regression, and yield strong performance guarantees. Moreover, we experimentally show that our methods significantly outperform state of the art both in running time and prediction error.

preprint2016arXiv

Secret sharing of a quantum state

Secret sharing of a quantum state, or quantum secret sharing, in which a dealer wants to share certain amount of quantum information with a few players, has wide applications in quantum information. The critical criterion in a threshold secret sharing scheme is confidentiality, with less than the designated number of players, no information can be recovered. Furthermore, in a quantum scenario, one additional critical criterion exists, the capability of sharing entangled and unknown quantum information. Here by employing a six-photon entangled state, we demonstrate a quantum threshold scheme, where the shared quantum secrecy can be efficiently reconstructed with a state fidelity as high as 93%. By observing that any one or two parties cannot recover the secrecy, we show that our scheme meets the confidentiality criterion. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that entangled quantum information can be shared and recovered via our setting, which demonstrates that our implemented scheme is fully quantum. Moreover, our experimental setup can be treated as a decoding circuit of the 5-qubit quantum error-correcting code with two erasure errors.

preprint2016arXiv

Self-regular black holes quantized by means of an analogue to hydrogen atoms

We suggest a quantum black hole model that is based on an analogue to hydrogen atoms. A self-regular Schwarzschild-AdS black hole is investigated, where the mass density of the extreme black hole is given by the probability density of the ground state of hydrogen atoms and the mass densities of non-extreme black holes are given by the probability densities of excited states with no angular momenta. Such an analogue is inclined to adopt quantization of black hole horizons. In this way, the total mass of black holes is quantized. Furthermore, the quantum hoop conjecture and the Correspondence Principle are discussed.

preprint2016arXiv

Structural and magnetic phase transitions in Ca$_{0.73}$La$_{0.27}$FeAs$_2$ with electron overdoped FeAs layers

We report a study of the Ca$_{0.73}$La$_{0.27}$FeAs$_2$ single crystals. We unravel a monoclinic to triclinic phase transition at 58 K, and a paramagnetic to stripe antiferromagnetic (AFM) phase transition at 54 K, below which spins order 45$^\circ$ away from the stripe direction. Furthermore, we demonstrate this material is substantially structurally untwinned at ambient pressure with the formation of spin rotation walls (S-walls). Finally, in addition to the central-hole and corner-electron Fermi pockets usually appearing in Fe pnictide superconductors, angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES) measurements resolve a Fermiology where an extra electron pocket of mainly As chain character exists at the Brillouin zone edge.

preprint2016arXiv

Ultra-narrow Negative Flare Front Observed in Helium-10830~Å using the 1.6 m New Solar Telescope

Solar flares are sudden flashes of brightness on the Sun and are often associated with coronal mass ejections and solar energetic particles which have adverse effects in the near Earth environment. By definition, flares are usually referred to bright features resulting from excess emission. Using the newly commissioned 1.6~m New Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory, here we show a striking "negative" flare with a narrow, but unambiguous "dark" moving front observed in He I 10830 Å, which is as narrow as 340 km and is associated with distinct spectral characteristics in H-alpha and Mg II lines. Theoretically, such negative contrast in He I 10830 Å can be produced under special circumstances, by nonthermal-electron collisions, or photoionization followed by recombination. Our discovery, made possible due to unprecedented spatial resolution, confirms the presence of the required plasma conditions and provides unique information in understanding the energy release and radiative transfer in astronomical objects.

preprint2016arXiv

Unprecedented Fine Structure of a Solar Flare Revealed by the 1.6~m New Solar Telescope

Solar flares signify the sudden release of magnetic energy and are sources of so called space weather. The fine structures (below 500 km) of flares are rarely observed and are accessible to only a few instruments world-wide. Here we present observation of a solar flare using exceptionally high resolution images from the 1.6~m New Solar Telescope (NST) equipped with high order adaptive optics at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). The observation reveals the process of the flare in unprecedented detail, including the flare ribbon propagating across the sunspots, coronal rain (made of condensing plasma) streaming down along the post-flare loops, and the chromosphere's response to the impact of coronal rain, showing fine-scale brightenings at the footpoints of the falling plasma. Taking advantage of the resolving power of the NST, we measure the cross-sectional widths of flare ribbons, post-flare loops and footpoint brighenings, which generally lie in the range of 80-200 km, well below the resolution of most current instruments used for flare studies. Confining the scale of such fine structure provides an essential piece of information in modeling the energy transport mechanism of flares, which is an important issue in solar and plasma physics.

preprint2015arXiv

600-T Magnetic Fields due to Cold Electron Flow in a simple Cu-Coil irradiated by High Power Laser pulses

A new simple mechanism due to cold electron flow to produce strong magnetic field is proposed. A 600-T strong magnetic field is generated in the free space at the laser intensity of 5.7x10^15 Wcm^-2. Theoretical analysis indicates that the magnetic field strength is proportional to laser intensity. Such a strong magnetic field offers a new experimental test bed to study laser-plasma physics, in particular, fast-ignition laser fusion research and laboratory astrophysics.

preprint2015arXiv

A Circular-ribbon Solar Flare Following an Asymmetric Filament Eruption

The dynamic properties of flare ribbons and the often associated filament eruptions can provide crucial information on the flaring coronal magnetic field. This Letter analyzes the GOES-class X1.0 flare on 2014 March 29 (SOL2014-03-29T17:48), in which we found an asymmetric eruption of a sigmoidal filament and an ensuing circular flare ribbon. Initially both EUV images and a preflare nonlinear force-free field model show that the filament is embedded in magnetic fields with a fan-spine-like structure. In the first phase, which is defined by a weak but still increasing X-ray emission, the western portion of the sigmoidal filament arches upward and then remains quasi-static for about five minutes. The western fan-like and the outer spine-like fields display an ascending motion, and several associated ribbons begin to brighten. Also found is a bright EUV flow that streams down along the eastern fan-like field. In the second phase that includes the main peak of hard X-ray (HXR) emission, the filament erupts, leaving behind two major HXR sources formed around its central dip portion and a circular ribbon brightened sequentially. The expanding western fan-like field interacts intensively with the outer spine-like field, as clearly seen in running difference EUV images. We discuss these observations in favor of a scenario where the asymmetric eruption of the sigmoidal filament is initiated due to an MHD instability and further facilitated by reconnection at a quasi-null in corona; the latter is in turn enhanced by the filament eruption and subsequently produces the circular flare ribbon.

preprint2015arXiv

An experimental algorithm for identifying the topological nature of Kondo and mixed valence insulators

Possible topological nature of Kondo and mixed valence insulators has been a recent topic of interest in condensed matter physics. Attention has focused on SmB6, which has long been known to exhibit low temperature transport anomaly, whose origin is of independent interest. We argue that it is possible to resolve the topological nature of surface states by uniquely accessing the surface electronic structure of the low temperature anomalous transport regime through combining state-of-the-art laser- and synchrotron-based angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) with or without spin resolution. A combination of low temperature and ultra-high resolution (laser) which is lacking in previous ARPES studies of this compound is the key to resolve the possible existence of topological surface state in SmB6. Here we outline an experimental algorithm to systematically explore the topological versus trivial or mixed (topological and trivial surface state admixture as in the first 3D TI Bi$_{1-x}$Sb$_x$) nature of the surface states in Kondo and mixed valence insulators. We conclude based on this methodology that the observed topology of the surface Fermi surface in our low temperature data considered within the level of current resolution is consistent with the theoretically predicted topological picture, suggesting a topological origin of the dominant in-gap ARPES signal in SmB6.}

preprint2015arXiv

Blow-up for the 1D nonlinear Schrödinger equation with point nonlinearity I: Basic theory

We consider the 1D nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) with focusing point nonlinearity, $$ (δ\text{NLS}) \qquad i\partial_tψ+ \partial_x^2ψ+ δ|ψ|^{p-1}ψ= 0, $$ where $δ=δ(x)$ is the delta function supported at the origin. We show that $δ$NLS shares many properties in common with those previously established for the focusing autonomous translationally-invariant NLS $$ (\text{NLS}) \qquad i\partial_t ψ+ Δψ+ |ψ|^{p-1}ψ=0 \,. $$ The critical Sobolev space $\dot H^{σ_c}$ for $δ$NLS is $σ_c=\frac12-\frac{1}{p-1}$, whereas for NLS it is $σ_c=\frac{d}{2}-\frac{2}{p-1}$. In particular, the $L^2$ critical case for $δ$NLS is $p=3$. We prove several results pertaining to blow-up for $δ$NLS that correspond to key classical results for NLS. Specifically, we (1) obtain a sharp Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality analogous to Weinstein (1983), (2) apply the sharp Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality and a local virial identity to obtain a sharp global existence/blow-up threshold analogous to Weinstein (1983), Glassey (1977) in the case $σ_c=0$ and Duyckaerts, Holmer, & Roudenko (2008), Guevara (2014), and Fang, Xie, & Cazenave (2011) for $0<σ_c<1$, (3) prove a sharp mass concentration result in the $L^2$ critical case analogous to Tsutsumi (1990), Merle & Tsutsumi (1990) and (4) show that minimal mass blow-up solutions in the $L^2$ critical case are pseudoconformal transformations of the ground state, analogous to Merle (1993).

preprint2015arXiv

Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Real-Time Application QoS Monitoring and Benchmarking As-a-Service Framework

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (databases, application servers and data processing frameworks) platforms with features such as elasticity, pay-per-use, low upfront investment and low time to market. This has led to the proliferation of business critical applications that leverage various cloud platforms. Such applications hosted on single or multiple cloud provider platforms have diverse characteristics requiring extensive monitoring and benchmarking mechanisms to ensure run-time Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., latency and throughput). This paper proposes, develops and validates CLAMBS:Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring and Benchmarking as-a-Service for efficient QoS monitoring and benchmarking of cloud applications hosted on multi-clouds environments. The major highlight of CLAMBS is its capability of monitoring and benchmarking individual application components such as databases and web servers, distributed across cloud layers, spread among multiple cloud providers. We validate CLAMBS using prototype implementation and extensive experimentation and show that CLAMBS efficiently monitors and benchmarks application components on multi-cloud platforms including Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.

preprint2015arXiv

Development of Technique to Detect and Classify Small-Scale Magnetic Flux Cancellation and Rapid Blueshifted Excursions

We present a set of tools for detecting small-scale solar magnetic cancellations and the disk counterpart of type II spicules (the so-called Rapid Blueshifted Excursions (RBEs)), using line-of-sight photospheric magnetograms and chromospheric spectroscopic observations, respectively. For tracking magnetic cancellation, we improve the Southwest Automatic Magnetic Identification Suite (SWAMIS) so that it is able to detect certain obscure cancellations that can be easily missed. For detecting RBEs, we use a normalized reference profile to reduce false-positive detections caused by the non-uniform background and seeing condition. Similar to the magnetic feature tracking in SWAMIS, we apply a dual-threshold method to enhance the accuracy of RBE detection. These tools are employed to analyze our coordinated observations using the Interferometric BIdimensional Spectrometer at Dunn Solar Telescope (DST) of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and Hinode. We present the statistical properties of magnetic cancellations and RBEs, and explore their correlation using this data set.

preprint2015arXiv

Fast Average-Case Pattern Matching on Weighted Sequences

A weighted string over an alphabet of size $σ$ is a string in which a set of letters may occur at each position with respective occurrence probabilities. Weighted strings, also known as position weight matrices or uncertain sequences, naturally arise in many contexts. In this article, we study the problem of weighted string matching with a special focus on average-case analysis. Given a weighted pattern string $x$ of length $m$, a text string $y$ of length $n>m$, and a cumulative weight threshold $1/z$, defined as the minimal probability of occurrence of factors in a weighted string, we present an algorithm requiring average-case search time $o(n)$ for pattern matching for weight ratio $\frac{z}{m} < \min\{\frac{1}{\log z},\frac{\log σ}{\log z (\log m + \log \log σ)}\}$. For a pattern string $x$ of length $m$, a weighted text string $y$ of length $n>m$, and a cumulative weight threshold $1/z$, we present an algorithm requiring average-case search time $o(σn)$ for the same weight ratio. The importance of these results lies on the fact that these algorithms work in average-case sublinear search time in the size of the text, and in linear preprocessing time and space in the size of the pattern, for these ratios.

preprint2015arXiv

Feature Selection Based on Confidence Machine

In machine learning and pattern recognition, feature selection has been a hot topic in the literature. Unsupervised feature selection is challenging due to the loss of labels which would supply the related information.How to define an appropriate metric is the key for feature selection. We propose a filter method for unsupervised feature selection which is based on the Confidence Machine. Confidence Machine offers an estimation of confidence on a feature'reliability. In this paper, we provide the math model of Confidence Machine in the context of feature selection, which maximizes the relevance and minimizes the redundancy of the selected feature. We compare our method against classic feature selection methods Laplacian Score, Pearson Correlation and Principal Component Analysis on benchmark data sets. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method.

preprint2015arXiv

Gigantic surface life-time of an intrinsic topological insulator revealed via time-resolved (pump-probe) ARPES

The interaction between light and novel two-dimensional electronic states holds promise to realize new fundamental physics and optical devices. Here, we use pump-probe photoemission spectroscopy to study the optically-excited Dirac surface states in the bulk-insulating topological insulator Bi2Te2Se, and reveal optical properties that are in sharp contrast to those of bulk-metallic topological insulators. We observe a gigantic optical life-time exceeding 4 micro-sec for the surface states in Bi2Te2Se, whereas the life-time in most topological insulators such as Bi2Se3 has been limited to a few picoseconds. Moreover, we discover a surface photo-voltage in topological materials, a shift of the chemical potential of the Dirac surface states, as large as 100 mV. Our results demonstrate a rare platform to study charge excitation and relaxation in energy and momentum space in a two dimensional quantum system.

preprint2015arXiv

Lifshitz transition and van Hove singularity in a Topological Dirac Semimetal

A topological Dirac semimetal is a novel state of quantum matter which has recently attracted much attention as an apparent 3D version of graphene. In this paper, we report critically important results on the electronic structure of the 3D Dirac semimetal Na3Bi at a surface that reveals its nontrivial groundstate. Our studies, for the first time, reveal that the two 3D Dirac cones go through a topological change in the constant energy contour as a function of the binding energy, featuring a Lifshitz point, which is missing in a strict 3D analog of graphene (in other words Na3Bi is not a true 3D analog of graphene). Our results identify the first example of a band saddle point singularity in 3D Dirac materials. This is in contrast to its 2D analogs such as graphene and the helical Dirac surface states of a topological insulator. The observation of multiple Dirac nodes in Na3Bi connecting via a Lifshitz point along its crystalline rotational axis away from the Kramers point serves as a decisive signature for the symmetry-protected nature of the Dirac semimetal's topological groundstate.

preprint2015arXiv

Non-Kondo-like Electronic Structure in the Correlated Rare-Earth Hexaboride YbB$_6$

We present angle-resolved photoemission studies on the rare-earth hexaboride YbB$_6$, which has recently been predicted to be a topological Kondo insulator. Our data do not agree with the prediction and instead show that YbB$_6$ exhibits a novel topological insulator state in the absence of a Kondo mechanism. We find that the Fermi level electronic structure of YbB$_6$ has three 2D Dirac cone like surface states enclosing the Kramers' points, while the f-orbital which would be relevant for the Kondo mechanism is $\sim1$ eV below the Fermi level. Our first-principles calculation shows that the topological state which we observe in YbB$_6$ is due to an inversion between Yb $d$ and B $p$ bands. These experimental and theoretical results provide a new approach for realizing novel correlated topological insulator states in rare-earth materials.

preprint2015arXiv

Nonlinear frequency shift of electrostatic waves in general collisionless plasma: unifying theory of fluid and kinetic nonlinearities

The nonlinear frequency shift is derived in a transparent asymptotic form for intense Langmuir waves in general collisionless plasma. The formula describes both fluid and kinetic effects simultaneously. The fluid nonlinearity is expressed, for the first time, through the plasma dielectric function, and the kinetic nonlinearity accounts for both smooth distributions and trapped-particle beams. Various known limiting scalings are reproduced as special cases. The calculation avoids differential equations and can be extended straightforwardly to other nonlinear plasma waves.

preprint2015arXiv

Observation of a topological 3D Dirac semimetal phase in high-mobility Cd3As2

Experimental identification of three-dimensional (3D) Dirac semimetals in solid state systems is critical for realizing exotic topological phenomena and quantum transport such as the Weyl phases, high temperature linear quantum magnetoresistance and topological magnetic phases. Using high resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we performed systematic electronic structure studies on well-known compound Cd3As2. For the first time, we observe a highly linear bulk Dirac cone located at the Brillouin zone center projected onto the (001) surface which is consistent with a 3D Dirac semimetal phase in Cd3As2. Remarkably, an unusually high Dirac Fermion velocity up to 10.2 \textrmÅ{\cdot}$eV (1.5 \times 10^{6} ms^-1) is seen in samples where the mobility far exceeds 40,000 cm^2/V.s suggesting that Cd3As2 can be a promising candidate as a hypercone analog of graphene in many device-applications which can also incorporate topological quantum phenomena in a large gap setting. Our experimental identification of this novel topological 3D Dirac semimetal phase, distinct from a 3D topological insulator phase discovered previously, paves the way for exploring higher dimensional relativistic physics in bulk transport and for realizing novel Fermionic matter such as a Fermi arc nodal metal.

preprint2015arXiv

Observation of the zero Hall plateau in a quantum anomalous Hall insulator

Quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect in magnetic topological insulator (TI) is a novel transport phenomenon in which the Hall resistance reaches the quantum plateau in the absence of external magnetic field. Recently, this exotic effect has been discovered experimentally in an ultrathin film of the Bi2Te3 family TI with spontaneous ferromagnetic (FM) order. An important question concerning the QAH state is whether it is simply a zero-magnetic-field version of the quantum Hall (QH) effect, or if there is new physics beyond the conventional paradigm. Here we report experimental investigations on the quantum phase transition between the two opposite Hall plateaus of a QAH insulator caused by magnetization reversal. We observe a well-defined plateau with zero Hall conductivity over a range of magnetic field around coercivity, consistent with a recent theoretical prediction. The features of the zero Hall plateau are shown to be closely related to that of the QAH effect, but its temperature evolution exhibits quantitative differences from the network model for conventional QH plateau transition. We propose that the chiral edge states residing at the magnetic domain boundaries, which are unique to a QAH insulator, are responsible for the zero Hall plateau. The rich magnetic domain dynamics makes the QAH effect a distinctive class of quantum phenomenon that may find novel applications in spintronics.

preprint2015arXiv

Onset of the Meissner effect at 65 K in FeSe thin film grown on Nb doped SrTiO3 substrate

We report the Meissner effect studies on an FeSe thin film grown on Nb doped SrTiO3 substrate by molecular beam epitaxy. Two-coil mutual inductance measurement clearly demonstrates the onset of diamagnetic screening at 65 K, which is consistent with the gap opening temperature determined by previous angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy results. The applied magnetic field causes a broadening of the superconducting transition near the onset temperature, which is the typical behavior for quasi-two-dimensional superconductors. Our results provide direct evidence that FeSe thin film grown on Nb doped SrTiO3 substrate has an onset TC ~ 65 K, which is the highest among all iron based superconductors discovered so far.

preprint2015arXiv

Strain effects on electronic and optic properties of monolayer C$_2$N holey two-dimensional crystals

A new two-dimensional material, the C$_2$N holey 2D (C$_2$N-$h$2D) crystal, has recently been synthesized. Here we investigate the strain effects on the properties of this new material by first-principles calculations. We show that the material is quite soft with a small stiffness constant and can sustain large strains $\geq 12\%$. It remains a direct gap semiconductor under strain and the bandgap size can be tuned in a wide range as large as 1 eV. Interestingly, for biaxial strain, a band crossing effect occurs at the valence band maximum close to a 8\% strain, leading to a dramatic increase of the hole effective mass. Strong optical absorption can be achieved by strain tuning with absorption coefficient $\sim10^6$ cm$^{-1}$ covering a wide spectrum. Our findings suggest the great potential of strain-engineered C$_2$N-$h$2D in electronic and optoelectronic device applications.

preprint2015arXiv

Structure, Stability, and Evolution of Magnetic Flux Ropes from the Perspective of Magnetic Twist

We investigate the evolution of NOAA Active Region 11817 during 2013 August 10--12, when it developed a complex field configuration and produced four confined, followed by two eruptive, flares. These C-and-above flares are all associated with a magnetic flux rope (MFR) located along the major polarity inversion line, where shearing and converging photospheric flows are present. Aided by the nonlinear force-free field modeling, we identify the MFR through mapping magnetic connectivities and computing the twist number $\mathcal{T}_w$ for each individual field line. The MFR is moderately twisted ($|\mathcal{T}_w| < 2$) and has a well-defined boundary of high squashing factor $Q$. We found that the field line with the extremum $|\mathcal{T}_w|$ is a reliable proxy of the rope axis, and that the MFR's peak $|\mathcal{T}_w|$ temporarily increases within half an hour before each flare while it decreases after the flare peak for both confined and eruptive flares. This pre-flare increase in $|\mathcal{T}_w|$ has little effect on the active region's free magnetic energy or any other parameters derived for the whole region, due to its moderate amount and the MFR's relatively small volume, while its decrease after flares is clearly associated with the stepwise decrease in free magnetic energy due to the flare. We suggest that $\mathcal{T}_w$ may serve as a useful parameter in forewarning the onset of eruption, and therefore, the consequent space weather effects. The helical kink instability is identified as the prime candidate onset mechanism for the considered flares.

preprint2015arXiv

Surface Versus Bulk Dirac States Tuning in a Three-Dimensional Topological Dirac Semimetal

Recently, crystalline-symmetry-protected three-dimensional (3D) bulk Dirac semimetal phase has been experimentally identified in a stoichiometric high-mobility compound, Cd3As2. The Dirac state observed in Cd3As2 has been attributed to originate mostly from the bulk state while calculations show that the bulk and surface states overlap over the entire Dirac dispersion energy range. In this study, we unambiguously reveal doping induced evolution of the ground state of surface and bulk electron dynamics in a 3D Dirac semimetal. We develop a systematic technique to isolate the surface and bulk states in Cd3As2, by simultaneously utilizing angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and in-situ surface deposition. Our experimental results provide a method for tuning the chemical potential as well as to observe surface states degenerate with bulk states, which will be useful for future applications of 3D Dirac semimetal.

preprint2015arXiv

The Role of Erupting Sigmoid in Triggering a Flare with Parallel and Large-Scale Quasi-Circular Ribbons

In this paper, we present observations and analysis of an interesting sigmoid formation, eruption and the associated flare that occurred on 2014 April 18 using multi-wavelength data sets. We discuss the possible role of the sigmoid eruption in triggering the flare, which consists of two different set of ribbons: parallel ribbons as well as a large-scale quasi-circular ribbon. Several observational evidence and nonlinear force-free field extrapolation results show the existence of a large-scale fan-spine type magnetic configuration with a sigmoid lying under a section of the fan dome. The event can be explained with the following two phases. During the pre-flare phase, we observed the formation and appearance of sigmoid via tether-cutting reconnection between the two sets of sheared fields under the fan dome. The second, main flare phase, features the eruption of the sigmoid, the subsequent flare with parallel ribbons, and a quasi-circular ribbon. We propose the following multi-stage successive reconnections scenario for the main flare. First, tether-cutting reconnection is responsible for the formation and the eruption of the sigmoid structure. Second, the reconnection occurred in the wake of the erupting sigmoid produces the parallel flare ribbons on the both sides of the circular polarity inversion line. Third, the null-type reconnection higher in the corona, possibly triggered by the erupting sigmoid, leads to the formation of a large quasi-circular ribbon. For the first time we suggest a mechanism for this type of flare consisting of a double set of ribbons triggered by an erupting sigmoid in a large scale fan-spine type magnetic configuration.

preprint2015arXiv

Unconventional transformation of spin Dirac phase across a topological quantum phase transition

The topology of a topological material can be encoded in its surface states. These surface states can only be removed by a bulk topological quantum phase transition into a trivial phase. Here we use photoemission spectroscopy to image the formation of protected surface states in a topological insulator as we chemically tune the system through a topological transition. Surprisingly, we discover an exotic spin-momentum locked, gapped surface state in the trivial phase that shares many important properties with the actual topological surface state in anticipation of the change of topology. Using a spin-resolved measurement, we show that apart from a surface band-gap these states develop spin textures similar to the topological surface states well-before the transition. Our results offer a general paradigm for understanding how surface states in topological phases arise and are suggestive for future realizing Weyl arcs, condensed matter supersymmetry and other fascinating phenomena in the vicinity of topological quantum criticality.

preprint2014arXiv

A Neutron Scattering Study of the H-T Phase Diagram of the Bond Frustrated ZnCr2S4

Detailed neutron scattering measurements on the bond frustrated magnet ZnCr2S4 reveal a rich H-T phase diagram. The field dependence of the two subsequent antiferromagnetic transitions follows closely that of recently reported structural instabilities, providing further evidence for spin driven Jahn-Teller physics. The incommensurate helical ordered phase below TN1 = 15.5 K exhibits gapless spin wave excitations, whereas a spin wave gap (about 2 meV) opens below TN2 = 8 K as the system undergoes a first-order transition to a commensurate collinear ordered phase. The spin wave gap is closed by a strong magnetic field.

preprint2014arXiv

Chromospheric Rapid Blueshifted Excursions Observed with IBIS and Their Association with Photospheric Magnetic Field Evolution

Chromospheric rapid blueshifted excursions (RBEs) are suggested to be the disk counterparts of type II spicules at the limb and believed to contribute to the coronal heating process. Previous identification of RBEs was mainly based on feature detection using Dopplergrams. In this paper, we study RBEs on 2011 October 21 in a very quiet region at the disk center, which were observed with the high-cadence imaging spectroscopy of the Ca II 8542 A line from the Interferometric Bidimensional Spectrometer (IBIS). By using an automatic spectral analysis algorithm, a total of 98 RBEs are identified during a 11 minute period. Most of these RBEs have either a round or elongated shape, with an average area of 1.2 arcsec^2. The detailed temporal evolution of spectra from IBIS makes possible a quantitative determination of the velocity (~16 km/s) and acceleration (~400 m/s^2) of Ca II 8542 RBEs, and reveal an additional deceleration (~-160 m/s^2) phase that usually follows the initial acceleration. In addition, we also investigate the association of RBEs with the concomitant photospheric magnetic field evolution, using coordinated high-resolution and high-sensitivity magnetograms made by Hinode. Clear examples are found where RBEs appear to be associated with the preceding magnetic flux emergence and/or the subsequent flux cancellation. However, a further analysis with the aid of the Southwest Automatic Magnetic Identification Suite does not yield a significant statistical association between these RBEs and magnetic field evolution. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of understanding the driving mechanism of RBEs.

preprint2014arXiv

Classification of three dimensional complex omega-Lie algebras

A complex $ω$-Lie algebra is a vector space $L$ over the complex field, equipped with a skew symmetric bracket $[-,-]$ and a bilinear form $ω$ such that $$[[x,y],z]+[[y,z],x]+ [[z,x],y]=ω(x,y)z+ω(y,z)x+ω(z,x)y$$ for all $x,y,z\in L$. The notion of $ω$-Lie algebras, as a generalization of Lie algebras, was introduced in Nurowski \cite{Nur2007}. Fundamental results about finite-dimensional $ω$-Lie algebras were developed by Zusmanovich \cite{Zus2010}. In \cite{Nur2007}, all three dimensional non-Lie real $ω$-Lie algebras were classified. The purpose of this note is to provide an approach to classify all three dimensional non-Lie complex $ω$-Lie algebras. Our method also gives a new proof of the classification in Nurowski \cite{Nur2007}.

preprint2014arXiv

Controlling and distinguishing electronic transport of topological and trivial surface states in a topological insulator

Topological insulators (TI), with characteristic Dirac-fermion topological surface states (TSS), have emerged as a new class of electronic materials with rich potentials for both novel physics and device applications. However, a major challenge with realistic TI materials is to access, distinguish and manipulate the electronic transport of TSS often obscured by other possible parallel conduction channels that include the bulk as well as a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) formed near the surface due to bending of the bulk bands. Such a (Schrodinger-fermion) 2DEG represents topologically-trivial surface states, whose coexistence with the TSS has been revealed by angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Here we show that simple manipulations of surface conditions can be used to access and control both types of surface states and their coexistence in bulk-insulating Bi2Te2Se, whose surface conduction is prominently manifested in temperature dependent resistance and nonlocal transport. The trivial 2DEG and TSS can both exhibit clear Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in magnetoresistance, with different Berry phases ~0 and ~pi that distinguish their different topological characters. We also report a deviation from the typical weak antilocalization behavior, possibly due to high mobility TSS. Our study enables distinguishing, controlling and harnessing electronic transport of TI surface carriers with different topological natures.

preprint2014arXiv

Feasibility of Simultaneous Information and Energy Transfer in LTE-A Small Cell Networks

Simultaneous information and energy transfer is attracting much attention as an effective method to provide green energy supply for mobiles. However the very low power level of the harvested energy from RF spectrum limits the application of such technique. Thanks to the improvement of sensitivity and efficiency of RF energy harvesting circuit as well as the dense deployment of small cells base stations, the SIET becomes more practical. In this paper, we propose a unified receiver model for SIET in LTE-A small cell base staion networks, formulate the feasibility problem with Poisson point process model and analysis the feasibility for a special and practical senario. The results shows that it is feasible for mobiles to charge the secondary battery wih harvested energy from BSs, but it is still infeasible to directly charge the primary battery or operate without any battery at all.

preprint2014arXiv

Latent Feature Based FM Model For Rating Prediction

Rating Prediction is a basic problem in Recommender System, and one of the most widely used method is Factorization Machines(FM). However, traditional matrix factorization methods fail to utilize the benefit of implicit feedback, which has been proved to be important in Rating Prediction problem. In this work, we consider a specific situation, movie rating prediction, where we assume that watching history has a big influence on his/her rating behavior on an item. We introduce two models, Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA) and word2vec, both of which perform state-of-the-art results in training latent features. Based on that, we propose two feature based models. One is the Topic-based FM Model which provides the implicit feedback to the matrix factorization. The other is the Vector-based FM Model which expresses the order info of watching history. Empirical results on three datasets demonstrate that our method performs better than the baseline model and confirm that Vector-based FM Model usually works better as it contains the order info.

preprint2014arXiv

Momentum space imaging of Cooper pairing in a half-Dirac-gas topological superconductor (a helical 2D topological superconductor)

Superconductivity in Dirac electrons has recently been proposed as a new platform between novel concepts in high-energy and condensed matter physics. It has been proposed that supersymmetry and exotic quasiparticles, both of which remain elusive in particle physics, may be realized as emergent particles in superconducting Dirac electron systems. Using artificially fabricated topological insulator-superconductor heterostructures, we present direct spectroscopic evidence for the existence of Cooper pairing in a half Dirac gas 2D topological superconductor. Our studies reveal that superconductivity in a helical Dirac gas is distinctly different from that of in an ordinary two-dimensional superconductor while considering the spin degrees of freedom of electrons. We further show that the pairing of Dirac electrons can be suppressed by time-reversal symmetry breaking impurities removing the distinction. Our demonstration and momentum-space imaging of Cooper pairing in a half Dirac gas and its magnetic behavior taken together serve as a critically important 2D topological superconductor platform for future testing of novel fundamental physics predictions such as emergent supersymmetry and quantum criticality in topological systems.

preprint2014arXiv

Neutrino Production via $e^-e^+$ Collision at $Z$-boson Peak

The production of the three normal neutrinos via $e^-e+$ collision at $Z$-boson peak (neutrino production in a Z-factory) is investigated thoroughly. The differences of $ν_e$-pair production from $ν_μ$-pair and $ν_τ$-pair production are presented in various aspects. Namely the total cross sections, relevant differential cross sections and the forward-backward asymmetry etc for these neutrinos are presented in terms of figures as well as numerical tables. The restriction on the room for the mixing of the three species of light neutrinos with possible externals (heavy neutral leptons and/or stereos) from refined measurements of the invisible width of $Z$-boson is discussed.

preprint2014arXiv

Observation of metallic surface states in the strongly correlated Kitaev-Heisenberg candidate Na2IrO3

We report high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements on the honeycomb iridate Na2IrO3. Our measurements reveal the existence of a metallic surface band feature crossing the Fermi level with nearly linear dispersion and an estimated surface carrier density of 3.2 $\times$ 10$^{13}$ cm$^{-2}$, which has not been theoretically predicted or experimentally observed, and provides the first evidence for metallic behavior on the boundary of this material, whereas the bulk bands exhibit a robust insulating gap. We further show the lack of theoretically predicted Dirac cones at the $\overline{M}$ points of the surface Brillouin zone, which confirms the absence of a stacked quantum spin Hall phase in this material. Our data indicates that the surface ground state of this material is exotic and metallic, unlike as predicted in theory, and establishes Na2IrO3 as a rare example of a strongly correlated spin-orbit insulator with surface metallicity.

preprint2014arXiv

Observation of monolayer valence band spin-orbit effect and induced quantum well states (QWS) in MoX2

Transition metal dichalcogenides have attracted much attention recently due to their potential applications in spintronics and photonics as a result of the indirect to direct band gap transition and the emergence of the spin-valley coupling phenomenon upon moving from the bulk to monolayer limit. Here, we report high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy on MoSe2 (molybdenum diselenide) single crystals and monolayer films of MoS2 grown on Highly Ordered Pyrolytic Graphite substrate. Our experimental results, for the first time, resolve the two distinct bands at the Brillouin zone corner of the bulk MoSe2, and provide evidence for the critically important spin-orbit split bands of the monolayer MoS2. Moreover, by depositing potassium on cleaved surfaces of these materials, the process through which quantum well states form on the surfaces of transition metal dichalcogenides is systematically imaged. We present a theoretical model to account for the observed spin-orbit splitting and the rich spectrum of the quantum well states observed in our experiments. Our findings taken together provide important insights into future applications of transition metal dichalcogenides in nanoelectronics, spintronics, and photonics devices as they critically depend on the spin-orbit physics of these materials.

preprint2014arXiv

Observation of topological surface state quantum Hall effect in an intrinsic three-dimensional topological insulator

A three-dimensional (3D) topological insulator (TI) is a quantum state of matter with a gapped insulating bulk yet a conducting surface hosting topologically-protected gapless surface states. One of the most distinct electronic transport signatures predicted for such topological surface states (TSS) is a well-defined half-integer quantum Hall effect (QHE) in a magnetic field, where the surface Hall conductivities become quantized in units of (1/2)e2/h (e being the electron charge, h the Planck constant) concomitant with vanishing resistance. Here, we observe well-developed QHE arising from TSS in an intrinsic TI of BiSbTeSe2. Our samples exhibit surface dominated conduction even close to room temperature, while the bulk conduction is negligible. At low temperatures and high magnetic fields perpendicular to the top and bottom surfaces, we observe well-developed integer quantized Hall plateaus, where the two parallel surfaces each contributing a half integer e2/h quantized Hall (QH) conductance, accompanied by vanishing longitudinal resistance. When the bottom surface is gated to match the top surface in carrier density, only odd integer QH plateaus are observed, representing a half-integer QHE of two degenerate Dirac gases. This system provides an excellent platform to pursue a plethora of exotic physics and novel device applications predicted for TIs, ranging from magnetic monopoles and Majorana particles to dissipationless electronics and fault-tolerant quantum computers.

preprint2014arXiv

Saddle point singularity and topological phase diagram in a tunable topological crystalline insulator (TCI)

A topological crystalline insulator (TCI) is a new phase of topological matter, which is predicted to exhibit distinct topological quantum phenomena, since space group symmetries replace the role of time-reversal symmetry in the much-studied Z$_2$ topological insulators. Utilizing high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), we reveal the momentum space nature of interconnectivity of the Fermi surface pockets leading to a saddle point singularity within the topological surface state alone in the TCI Pb$_{0.7}$Sn$_{0.3}$Se. Moreover, we show that the measured momentum-integrated density of states exhibits pronounced peaks at the saddle point energies, demonstrating the van Hove singularities (VHSs) in the topological surface states, whose surface chemical potential, as we show, can be tuned via surface chemical gating, providing access to the topological correlated physics on the surface. Our experimental data reveal a delicate relationship among lattice constant, band gap and spin-orbit coupling strength associated with the topological phase transition in Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_{x}$Se. Furthermore, we explore the robustness of the TCI phase with VHS in Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_{x}$Se, which shows a variety of distinct topological phase transitions driven by either thermal instability or broken crystalline symmetry, and thus revealing a rich topological phase diagram connectivity in Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_{x}$Se for the first time.

preprint2014arXiv

Slow Rise and Partial Eruption of a Double-Decker Filament. II. Modeling by a Double Flux Rope Equilibrium

Force-free equilibria containing two vertically arranged magnetic flux ropes of like chirality and current direction are considered as a model for split filaments/prominences and filament-sigmoid systems. Such equilibria are constructed analytically through an extension of the methods developed in Titov & Démoulin (1999) and numerically through an evolutionary sequence including shear flows, flux emergence, and flux cancellation in the photospheric boundary. It is demonstrated that the analytical equilibria are stable if an external toroidal (shear) field component exceeding a threshold value is included. If this component decreases sufficiently, then both flux ropes turn unstable for conditions typical of solar active regions, with the lower rope typically being unstable first. Either both flux ropes erupt upward, or only the upper rope erupts while the lower rope reconnects with the ambient flux low in the corona and is destroyed. However, for shear field strengths staying somewhat above the threshold value, the configuration also admits evolutions which lead to partial eruptions with only the upper flux rope becoming unstable and the lower one remaining in place. This can be triggered by a transfer of flux and current from the lower to the upper rope, as suggested by the observations of a split filament in Paper~I (Liu et al. 2012). It can also result from tether-cutting reconnection with the ambient flux at the X-type structure between the flux ropes, which similarly influences their stability properties in opposite ways. This is demonstrated for the numerically constructed equilibrium.

preprint2014arXiv

Spin correlated electronic state on the surface of a spin-orbit Mott system (Layered Iridates)

Novel phases of two dimensional electron systems resulting from new surface or interface modified electronic structures have generated significant interest in material science. We utilize photoemission spectroscopy to show that the near-surface electronic structure of a bulk insulating iridate Sr$_3$Ir$_2$O$_7$ lying near metal-Mott insulator transition exhibit weak metallicity signified by finite electronic spectral weight at the Fermi level. The surface electrons exhibit a unique spin structure resulting from an interplay of spin-orbit, Coulomb interaction and surface quantum magnetism, distinct from a topological insulator state. Our results suggest the experimental realization of a novel quasi two dimensional interacting electron surface ground state, opening the door for exotic quantum entanglement and transport phenomena in iridate-based oxide devices.

preprint2014arXiv

Structure and Evolution of Magnetic Fields Associated with Solar Eruptions (Invited Review)

This paper reviews the studies of solar photospheric magnetic field evolution in active regions and its relationship to solar flares. It is divided into two topics, the magnetic structure and evolution leading to solar eruptions and the rapid changes of photospheric magnetic field associated with eruptions. For the first topic, we describe the magnetic complexity, new flux emergence, flux cancellation, shear motions, sunspot rotation, and magnetic helicity injection, which may all contribute to the storage and buildup of energy and triggering of solar eruptions. For the second topic, we concentrate on the observations of rapid and irreversible changes of photospheric magnetic field associated with flares, and the implication on the restructuring of three-dimensional magnetic field. In particular, we emphasize the recent advances in observations of photospheric magnetic field, as state-of-the-art observing facilities (such as Hinode and Solar Dynamic Observatory) become available. The linkage between observations and theories and future prospectives in this research area are also discussed.

preprint2014arXiv

Sudden Photospheric Motion and Sunspot Rotation Associated with the X2.2 Flare on 2011 February 15

The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager provides 45 s cadence intensity images and 720 s cadence vector magnetograms. These unprecedented high-cadence and high-resolution data give us a unique opportunity to study the change of photospheric flows and sunspot rotations associated with flares. By using the differential affine velocity estimator method and the Fourier local correlation tracking method separately, we calculate velocity and vorticity of photospheric flows in the flaring NOAA AR 11158, and investigate their temporal evolution around the X2.2 flare on 2011 February 15. It is found that the shear flow around the flaring magnetic polarity inversion line exhibits a sudden decrease, and both of the two main sunspots undergo a sudden change in rotational motion during the impulsive phase of the flare. These results are discussed in the context of the Lorentz-force change that was proposed by Hudson et al. (2008) and Fisher et al. (2012). This mechanism can explain the connections between the rapid and irreversible photospheric vector magnetic field change and the observed short-term motions associated with the flare. In particular, the torque provided by the horizontal Lorentz force change agrees with what is required for the measured angular acceleration.

preprint2014arXiv

Target Density Normalization for Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms

Techniques for evaluating the normalization integral of the target density for Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are described and tested numerically. It is assumed that the Markov Chain algorithm has converged to the target distribution and produced a set of samples from the density. These are used to evaluate sample mean, harmonic mean and Laplace algorithms for the calculation of the integral of the target density. A clear preference for the sample mean algorithm applied to a reduced support region is found, and guidelines are given for implementation.

preprint2014arXiv

Three-dimensional Magnetic Restructuring in Two Homologous Solar Flares in the Seismically Active NOAA AR 11283

We carry out a comprehensive investigation comparing the three-dimensional magnetic field restructuring, flare energy release, and the helioseismic response, of two homologous flares, the 2011 September 6 X2.1 (FL1) and September 7 X1.8 (FL2) flares in NOAA AR 11283. In our analysis, (1) a twisted flux rope (FR) collapses onto the surface at a speed of 1.5 km/s after a partial eruption in FL1. The FR then gradually grows to reach a higher altitude and collapses again at 3 km/s after a fuller eruption in FL2. Also, FL2 shows a larger decrease of the flux-weighted centroid separation of opposite magnetic polarities and a greater change of the horizontal field on the surface. These imply a more violent coronal implosion with corresponding more intense surface signatures in FL2. (2) The FR is inclined northward, and together with the ambient fields, it undergoes a southward turning after both events. This agrees with the asymmetric decay of the penumbra observed in the peripheral regions. (3) The amounts of free magnetic energy and nonthermal electron energy released during FL1 are comparable to those of FL2 within the uncertainties of the measurements. (4) No sunquake was detected in FL1; in contrast, FL2 produced two seismic emission sources S1 and S2 both lying in the penumbral regions. Interestingly, S1 and S2 are connected by magnetic loops, and the stronger source S2 has weaker vertical magnetic field. We discuss these results in relation to the implosion process in the low corona and the sunquake generation.

preprint2013arXiv

Evidence for Solar Tether-cutting Magnetic Reconnection from Coronal Field Extrapolations

Magnetic reconnection is one of the primary mechanisms for triggering solar eruptive events, but direct observation of its rapid process has been of challenge. In this Letter we present, using a nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) extrapolation technique, a visualization of field line connectivity changes resulting from tether-cutting reconnection over about 30 minutes during the 2011 February 13 M6.6 flare in NOAA AR 11158. Evidence for the tether-cutting reconnection was first collected through multiwavelength observations and then by the analysis of the field lines traced from positions of four conspicuous flare 1700 A footpoints observed at the event onset. Right before the flare, the four footpoints are located very close to the regions of local maxima of magnetic twist index. Especially, the field lines from the inner two footpoints form two strongly twisted flux bundles (up to ~1.2 turns), which shear past each other and reach out close to the outer two footpoints, respectively. Immediately after the flare, the twist index of regions around the footpoints greatly diminish and the above field lines become low lying and less twisted (~0.6 turns), overarched by loops linking the later formed two flare ribbons. About 10% of the flux (~3x10^19 Mx) from the inner footpoints has undergone a footpoint exchange. This portion of flux originates from the edge regions of the inner footpoints that are brightened first. These rapid changes of magnetic field connectivity inferred from the NLFFF extrapolation are consistent with the tether-cutting magnetic reconnection model.

preprint2013arXiv

He I D3 Observation of the 1984 May 22 M6.3 Solar Flare

He I D3 line has a unique response to the flare impact on the low solar atmosphere and can be a powerful diagnostic tool for energy transport processes. Using images obtained from the recently digitized films of Big Bear Solar Observatory, we report D3 observation of the M6.3 flare on 1984 May 22, which occurred in an active region with a circular magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL). The impulsive phase of the flare starts with a main elongated source that darkens in D3, inside of which bright emission kernels appear at the time of the initial small peak in hard X-rays (HXRs). These flare cores subsequently evolve into a sharp emission strand lying within the dark halo simultaneously with the main peak in HXRs, reversing the overall source contrast from -5% to 5%. The radiated energy in D3 during the main peak is estimated to be about 10^30 ergs, which is comparable to that carried by nonthermal electrons above 20 keV. Afterwards the flare proceeds along the circular PIL in the counterclockwise direction to form a dark circular ribbon in D3, which apparently mirrors the bright ribbons in Halpha and He I 10830 A. All these ribbons last for over one hour in the late gradual phase. We suggest that the present event resembles the so-called black-light flare that is proposed based on continuum images, and that D3 darkening and brightening features herein may be due to, respectively, the thermal conduction heating and the direct precipitation of high-energy electrons.

preprint2013arXiv

High-Cadence and High-Resolution Halpha Imaging Spectroscopy of a Circular Flare's Remote Ribbon with IBIS

We present an unprecedented high-resolution \ha\ imaging spectroscopic observation of a C4.1 flare taken with IBIS on 2011 October 22. The flare consists of a main circular ribbon that occurred in a parasitic magnetic configuration and a remote ribbon that was observed by the IBIS. Such a circular-ribbon flare with a remote brightening is predicted in 3D fan-spine reconnection but so far has been rarely observed. During the flare impulsive phase, we define "core" and "halo" structures in the observed ribbon. Examining the \ha\ emission spectra averaged in the flare core and halo areas, we find that only those from the flare cores show typical nonthermal electron beam heating characteristics. These characteristics include: broad and centrally reversed emission spectra, excess emission in the red wing with regard to the blue wing (i.e., red asymmetry), and redshifted bisectors of the emission spectra. We also observe rather quick timescales for the heating (30 s) and cooling (14--33 s) in the flare core locations. Therefore, we suggest that the flare cores revealed by IBIS track the sites of electron beam precipitation with exceptional spatial and temporal resolution. The flare cores show two-stage motion (a parallel motion along the ribbon followed by an expansion motion perpendicular to the ribbon) during the two impulsive phases of the flare. Some cores jump quickly (30 \kms) between discrete magnetic elements implying reconnection involving different flux tubes. We observe a very high temporal correlation ($\gtrsim0.9$) between the integrated \ha\ and HXR emission during the flare impulsive phase. A short time delay (4.6 s) is also found in the \ha\ emission spikes relative to HXR bursts. The ionization timescale of the cool chromosphere and the extra time taken for the electrons to travel to the remote ribbon site may contribute to this delay.

preprint2013arXiv

Modeling of Multipath Transport

In this paper, we propose a model for evaluating the transmission performance of multipath transport. Previous researches focused exclusively on single pair users in simple scenarios. The distinct perspective in this paper is to build models for analyzing the performance when multipath transport is used in the entire network scope. We illustrate the influences on the transmission performance caused by the variation of network topologies, the services' arrival rate, the services' size and other parameters. We demonstrate through simulation that multipath transport could conditionally increase the throughput than single-path transport. And it has the capability to support higher services' arrival rate in various network topologies. And higher multi-parent probability will be beneficial for multipath transport to take its advantages.

preprint2013arXiv

Observation of a bulk 3D Dirac multiplet, Lifshitz transition, and nestled spin states in Na3Bi

Symmetry or topology protected Dirac fermion states in two and three dimensions constitute novel quantum systems that exhibit exotic physical phenomena. However, none of the studied spin-orbit materials are suitable for realizing bulk multiplet Dirac states for the exploration of interacting Dirac physics. Here we present experimental evidence, for the first time, that the compound Na3Bi hosts a bulk spin-orbit Dirac multiplet and their interaction or overlap leads to a Lifshitz transition in momentum space - a condition for realizing interactions involving Dirac states. By carefully preparing the samples at a non-natural-cleavage (100) crystalline surface, we uncover many novel electronic and spin properties in Na3Bi by utilizing high resolution angle- and spin-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements. We observe two bulk 3D Dirac nodes that locate on the opposite sides of the bulk zone center point $Γ$, which exhibit a Fermi surface Lifshitz transition and a saddle point singularity. Furthermore, our data shows evidence for the possible existence of theoretically predicted weak 2D nontrivial spin-orbit surface state with helical spin polarization that are nestled between the two bulk Dirac cones, consistent with the theoretically calculated (100) surface-arc-modes. Our main experimental observation of a rich multiplet of Dirac structure and the Lifshitz transition opens the door for inducing electronic instabilities and correlated physical phenomena in Na3Bi, and paves the way for the engineering of novel topological states using Na3Bi predicted in recent theory.

preprint2013arXiv

Oscillatory surface dichroism of an insulating topological insulator Bi2Te2Se

Using circular dichroism-angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (CD-ARPES), we report a study of the effect of angular momentum transfer between polarized photons and topological surface states on the surface of highly bulk insulating topological insulator Bi2Te2Se. The photoelectron dichroism is found to be strongly modulated by the frequency of the helical photons including a dramatic sign-flip. Our results suggest that the observed dichroism and its sign-flip are consequences of strong coupling between the photon field and the spin-orbit nature of the Dirac modes on the surface. Our studies reveal the intrinsic dichroic behavior of topological surface states and point toward the potential utility of bulk insulating topological insulators in device applications.

preprint2013arXiv

Quantum teleportation and entanglement distribution over 100-kilometre free-space channels

A long standing goal for quantum communication is to transfer a quantum state over arbitrary distances. Free-space quantum communication provides a promising solution towards this challenging goal. Here, through a 97-km free space channel, we demonstrate long distance quantum teleportation over a 35-53 dB loss one-link channel, and entanglement distribution over a 66-85 dB high-loss two-link channel. We achieve an average fidelity of {80.4(9)}% for teleporting six distinct initial states and observe the violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality after distributing entanglement. Besides being of fundamental interest, our result represents a significant step towards a global quantum network. Moreover, the high-frequency and high-accuracy acquiring, pointing and tracking technique developed in our experiment provides an essential tool for future satellite-based quantum communication.

preprint2013arXiv

Study of Rapid Formation of a Delta Sunspot Associated with the 2012 July 2 C7.4 Flare Using High-resolution Observations of New Solar Telescope

Rapid, irreversible changes of magnetic topology and sunspot structure associated with flares have been systematically observed in recent years. The most striking features include the increase of horizontal field at the polarity inversion line (PIL) and the co-spatial penumbral darkening. A likely explanation of the above phenomenon is the back reaction to the coronal restructuring after eruptions: a coronal mass ejection carries the upward momentum while the downward momentum compresses the field lines near the PIL. Previous studies could only use low resolution (above 1") magnetograms and white-light images. Therefore, the changes are mostly observed for X-class flares. Taking advantage of the 0.1" spatial resolution and 15s temporal cadence of the New Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory, we report in detail the rapid formation of sunspot penumbra at the PIL associated with the C7.4 flare on 2012 July 2. It is unambiguously shown that the solar granulation pattern evolves to alternating dark and bright fibril structure, the typical pattern of penumbra. Interestingly, the appearance of such a penumbra creates a new delta sunspot. The penumbral formation is also accompanied by the enhancement of horizontal field observed using vector magnetograms from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager. We explain our observations as due to the eruption of a flux rope following magnetic cancellation at the PIL. Subsequently the re-closed arcade fields are pushed down towards the surface to form the new penumbra. NLFFF extrapolation clearly shows both the flux rope close to the surface and the overlying fields.

preprint2013arXiv

Study of Two Successive Three-Ribbon Solar Flares on 2012 July 6

This Letter reports two rarely observed three-ribbon flares (M1.9 and C9.2) on 2012 July 6 in NOAA AR 11515, which we found with Halpha observations of 0.1" resolution from the New Solar Telescope and CaII H images from Hinode. The flaring site is characterized with an intriguing "fish-bone-like" morphology evidenced by both Halpha images and a nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) extrapolation, where two semi-parallel rows of low-lying, sheared loops connect an elongated, parasitic negative field with the sandwiching positive fields. The NLFFF model also shows that the two rows of loops are asymmetric in height and have opposite twists, and are enveloped by large-scale field lines including open fields. The two flares occurred in succession in half an hour and are located at the two ends of the flaring region. The three ribbons of each flare run parallel to the PIL, with the outer two lying in the positive field and the central one in the negative field. Both flares show surge-like flows in Halpha apparently toward the remote region, while the C9.2 flare is also accompanied by EUV jets possibly along the open field lines. Interestingly, the 12-25 keV hard X-ray sources of the C9.2 flare first line up with the central ribbon then shift to concentrate on the top of the higher branch of loops. These results are discussed in favor of reconnection along the coronal null-line producing the three flare ribbons and the associated ejections.

preprint2013arXiv

Surface electronic structure of a topological Kondo insulator candidate SmB6: insights from high-resolution ARPES

The Kondo insulator SmB6 has long been known to exhibit low temperature (T < 10K) transport anomaly and has recently attracted attention as a new topological insulator candidate. By combining low-temperature and high energy-momentum resolution of the laser-based ARPES technique, for the first time, we probe the surface electronic structure of the anomalous conductivity regime. We observe that the bulk bands exhibit a Kondo gap of 14 meV and identify in-gap low-lying states within a 4 meV window of the Fermi level on the (001)-surface of this material. The low-lying states are found to form electron-like Fermi surface pockets that enclose the X and the Gamma points of the surface Brillouin zone. These states disappear as temperature is raised above 15K in correspondence with the complete disappearance of the 2D conductivity channels in SmB6. While the topological nature of the in-gap metallic states cannot be ascertained without spin (spin-texture) measurements our bulk and surface measurements carried out in the transport-anomaly-temperature regime (T < 10K) are consistent with the first-principle predicted Fermi surface behavior of a topological Kondo insulator phase in this material.

preprint2013arXiv

Surface electronic structure of the topological Kondo insulator candidate correlated electron system SmB6

The Kondo insulator SmB6 has long been known to exhibit low temperature transport anomalies whose origin is of great interest. Here we uniquely access the surface electronic structure of the anomalous transport regime by combining state-of-the-art laser- and synchrotron-based angle-resolved photoemission techniques. We observe clear in-gap states (up to 4 meV), whose temperature dependence is contingent upon the Kondo gap formation. In addition, our observed in-gap Fermi surface oddness tied with the Kramers' points topology, their coexistence with the two-dimensional transport anomaly in the Kondo hybridization regime, as well as their robustness against thermal recycling, taken together, collectively provide by-far the strongest evidence for protected surface metallicity with a Fermi surface whose topology is consistent with the theoretically predicted topological surface Fermi surface (TSS). Our observations of systematic surface electronic structure provide the fundamental electronic parameters for the anomalous Kondo ground state of the correlated electron material SmB6.

preprint2013arXiv

Tunneling Tuned Spin Modulations in Ultrathin Topological Insulator Films

Quantitative understanding of the relationship between quantum tunneling and Fermi surface spin polarization is key to device design using topological insulator surface states. By using spin-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with p-polarized light in topological insulator Bi2Se3 thin films across the metal-to-insulator transition, we observe that for a given film thickness, the spin polarization is large for momenta far from the center of the surface Brillouin zone. In addition, the polarization decreases significantly with enhanced tunneling realized systematically in thin insulating films, whereas magnitude of the polarization saturates to the bulk limit faster at larger wavevectors in thicker metallic films. Our theoretical model calculations capture this delicate relationship between quantum tunneling and Fermi surface spin polarization. Our results suggest that the polarization current can be tuned to zero in thin insulating films forming the basis for a future spin-switch nano-device.

preprint2012arXiv

A topological crystalline insulator (TCI) phase via topological phase transition and crystalline mirror symmetry

A Z2 topological insulator protected by time-reversal symmetry is realized via spin-orbit interaction driven band inversion. For example, the topological phase in the Bi-Sb system is due to an odd number of band inversions. A related spin-orbit system, the (Pb/Sn)Te class, has been known to contain an even number of inversions based on band theory. Here we experimentally investigate the possibility of a mirror symmetry protected topological crystalline insulator phase in the (Pb/Sn)Te class of materials which has been theoretically predicted to exist in its non-alloyed version. Our experimental results show that at a finite-Pb composition above the topological inversion phase transition, the surface exhibits even number of spin-polarized Dirac cone states (as opposed to odd as observed in Bi-Sb alloy or Bi2Se3) revealing mirror protected topological order distinct from that observed in Bi-Sb or Bi2Se3. Our observation of the spin-polarized Dirac surface states in the inverted (Pb/Sn)Te and their absence in the non-inverted compounds related via a topological phase transition (spin-orbit induced band inversion type) provide the experimental groundwork for opening the research on novel topological order in future quantum devices.

preprint2012arXiv

Anomalous spin-momentum locked two-dimensional states in the vicinity of a topological phase transition

We perform spin-resolved and spin-integrated angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements on a series of compositions in the BiTl(S1-xSex)2 system, focusing on x-values in the vicinity of the critical point for the topological phase transition (the band inversion composition). We observe quasi two dimensional (2D) states on the outer boundary of the bulk electronic bands in the trivial side (non-inverted regime) of the transition. Systematic spin-sensitive measurements reveal that the observed 2D states are spin-momentum locked, whose spin texture resembles the helical spin texture on the surface of a topological insulator. These anomalous states are observed to be only prominent near the critical point, thus are possibly related to strong precursor states of topological phase transition near the relaxed surface.

preprint2012arXiv

Circular Ribbon Flares and Homologous Jets

Solar flare emissions in the chromosphere often appear as elongated ribbons on both sides of the magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL), which has been regarded as evidence of a typical configuration of magnetic reconnection. However, flares having a circular ribbon have rarely been reported, although it is expected in the fan--spine magnetic topology involving reconnection at a three-dimensional (3D) coronal null point. We present five circular ribbon flares with associated surges, using high-resolution and high-cadence halpha blue wing observations obtained from the recently digitized films of Big Bear Solar Observatory. In all the events, a central parasitic magnetic field is encompassed by the opposite polarity, forming a circular PIL traced by filament material. Consequently, a flare kernel at the center is surrounded by a circular flare ribbon. The four homologous jet-related flares on 1991 March 17 and 18 are of particular interest, as (1) the circular ribbons brighten sequentially, with co-spatial surges, rather than simultaneously, (2) the central flare kernels show an intriguing "round-trip" motion and become elongated, and (3) remote brightenings occur at a region with the same magnetic polarity as the central parasitic field and are co-temporal with a separate phase of flare emissions. In another flare on 1991 February 25, the circular flare emission and surge activity occur successively, and the event could be associated with magnetic flux cancellation across the circular PIL. We discuss the implications of these observations combining circular flare ribbons, homologous jets, and remote brightenings for understanding the dynamics of 3D magnetic restructuring.

preprint2012arXiv

Contracting and Erupting Components of Sigmoidal Active Regions

It is recently noted that solar eruptions can be associated with the contraction of coronal loops that are not involved in magnetic reconnection processes. In this paper, we investigate five coronal eruptions originating from four sigmoidal active regions, using high-cadence, high-resolution narrowband EUV images obtained by the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO}). The magnitudes of the flares associated with the eruptions range from the GOES-class B to X. Owing to the high-sensitivity and broad temperature coverage of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard SDO, we are able to identify both the contracting and erupting components of the eruptions: the former is observed in cold AIA channels as the contracting coronal loops overlying the elbows of the sigmoid, and the latter is preferentially observed in warm/hot AIA channels as an expanding bubble originating from the center of the sigmoid. The initiation of eruption always precedes the contraction, and in the energetically mild events (B and C flares), it also precedes the increase in GOES soft X-ray fluxes. In the more energetic events, the eruption is simultaneous with the impulsive phase of the nonthermal hard X-ray emission. These observations confirm the loop contraction as an integrated process in eruptions with partially opened arcades. The consequence of contraction is a new equilibrium with reduced magnetic energy, as the contracting loops never regain their original positions. The contracting process is a direct consequence of flare energy release, as evidenced by the strong correlation of the maximal contracting speed, and strong anti-correlation of the time delay of contraction relative to expansion, with the peak soft X-ray flux. This is also implied by the relationship between contraction and expansion, i.e., their timing and speed.

preprint2012arXiv

Dirac point spectral weight suppression and surface "gaps" in nonmagnetic and magnetic topological insulators

It is predicted that electrons on the surface of a topological insulator can acquire a mass (massive Dirac fermion) by opening up a gap at the Dirac point when time-reversal symmetry is broken via the out-of-plane magnetization. We report photoemission studies on a series of topological insulator materials focusing on the spectral behavior in the vicinity of the Dirac node. Our results show that the spectral intensity is suppressed resulting in a "gap"-like feature in materials with or without any magnetic impurity or doping. The Zeeman gap in magnetically doped samples, expected to be rather small, is likely masked by the non-magnetic strong spectral weight suppression involving a large energy scale we report. The photoemission spectral weight suppression observed around the Dirac node thus cannot be taken as the sole evidence for a time-reversal symmetry breaking magnetic gap. We discuss a few possible extrinsic and kinematic origins of the Dirac point spectral weight suppression ("gap") observed in many commonly studied topological materials.

preprint2012arXiv

Hedgehog Spin-texture and Berry's Phase tuning in a Magnetic Topological Insulator

Understanding and control of spin degrees of freedom on the surfaces of topological materials are key to future applications as well as for realizing novel physics such as the axion electrodynamics associated with time-reversal (TR) symmetry breaking on the surface. We experimentally demonstrate magnetically induced spin reorientation phenomena simultaneous with a Dirac-metal to gapped-insulator transition on the surfaces of manganese-doped Bi2Se3 thin films. The resulting electronic groundstate exhibits unique hedgehog-like spin textures at low energies, which directly demonstrate the mechanics of TR symmetry breaking on the surface. We further show that an insulating gap induced by quantum tunnelling between surfaces exhibits spin texture modulation at low energies but respects TR invariance. These spin phenomena and the control of their Fermi surface geometrical phase first demonstrated in our experiments pave the way for the future realization of many predicted exotic magnetic phenomena of topological origin.

preprint2012arXiv

Magnetically induced spin reorientation on the surface of a topological insulator (a surface magnetic topological insulator MBE film)

The surface of topological insulators is proposed as a promising platform for spintronics and quantum information applications. In particular, when time- reversal symmetry is broken, topological surface states are expected to exhibit a wide range of exotic spin phenomena for potential implementation in electronics. Such devices need to be fabricated using nanoscale artificial thin films. It is of critical importance to study the spin behavior of artificial topological MBE thin films associated with magnetic dopants, and with regards to quantum size effects related to surface-to-surface tunneling as well as experimentally isolate time-reversal breaking from non-intrinsic surface electronic gaps. Here we present observation of the first (and thorough) study of magnetically induced spin reorientation phenomena on the surface of a topological insulator. Our results reveal dramatic rearrangements of the spin configuration upon magnetic doping contrasted with chemically similar nonmagnetic doping as well as with quantum tunneling phenomena in ultra-thin high quality MBE films. While we observe that the spin rearrangement induced by quantum tunneling occurs in a time-reversal invariant fashion, we present critical and systematic observation of an out-of-plane spin texture evolution correlated with magnetic interactions, which breaks time-reversal symmetry, demonstrating microscopic TRB at a Kramers' point on the surface.

preprint2012arXiv

On the Relationship Between Coronal Magnetic Decay Index and CME Speed

Numerical simulations suggest that kink and torus instabilities are two potential contributors to the initiation and prorogation of eruptive events. A magnetic parameter named decay index (i.e., the coronal magnetic gradient of the overlying fields above the eruptive flux ropes) could play an important role in controlling kinematics of eruptions. Previous studies have identified a threshold range of the decay index that distinguishes between eruptive and confined configurations. Here we advance the study by investigating if there is a clear correlation between the decay index and CME speed. 38 CMEs associated with filament eruptions and/or two-ribbon flares are selected using the Halpha data from the Global Halpha Network. The filaments and flare ribbons observed in Halpha associated with the CMEs help to locate the magnetic polarity inversion line, along which the decay index is calculated based on the potential field extrapolation using MDI magnetograms as boundary conditions. The speeds of CMEs are obtained from the LASCO C2 CME catalog available online. We find that the mean decay index increases with CME speed for those CMEs with a speed below 1000 km/s, and stays flat around 2.2 for the CMEs with higher speeds. In addition, we present a case study of a partial filament eruption, in which the decay indexes show different values above the erupted/non-erupted part.

preprint2012arXiv

Optimal Storage and Retrieval of Single-Photon Waveforms

We report an experimental demonstration of optimal storage and retrieval of heralded single-photon wave packets using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in cold atoms at a high optical depth. We obtain an optimal storage efficiency of (49+/-3)% for single-photon waveforms with a temporal likeness of 96%. Our result brings the EIT quantum light-matter interface close to practical quantum information applications.

preprint2012arXiv

Rapid Transition of Uncombed Penumbrae to Faculae during Large Flares

In the past two decades, the complex nature of sunspots has been disclosed with high-resolution observations. One of the most important findings is the "uncombed" penumbral structure, where a more horizontal magnetic component carrying most of Evershed Flows is embedded in a more vertical magnetic background (Solanki & Montavon 1993). The penumbral bright grains are locations of hot upflows and dark fibrils are locations of horizontal flows that are guided by nearly horizontal magnetic field. On the other hand, it was found that flares may change the topology of sunspots in $δ$ configuration: the structure at the flaring polarity inversion line becomes darkened while sections of peripheral penumbrae may disappear quickly and permanently associated with flares (Liu et al. 2005). The high spatial and temporal resolution observations obtained with Hinode/ SOT provide an excellent opportunity to study the evolution of penumbral fine structure associated with major flares. Taking advantage of two near-limb events, we found that in sections of peripheral penumbrae swept by flare ribbons, the dark fibrils completely disappear, while the bright grains evolve into faculae that are signatures of vertical magnetic flux tubes. The corresponding magnetic fluxes measured in the decaying penumbrae show stepwise changes temporally correlated with the flares. These observations suggest that the horizontal magnetic field component of the penumbra could be straightened upward (i.e., turning from horizontal to vertical) due to magnetic field restructuring associated with flares, which results in the transition of penumbrae to faculae.

preprint2012arXiv

Slow Rise and Partial Eruption of a Double-Decker Filament. I Observations and Interpretation

We study an active-region dextral filament which was composed of two branches separated in height by about 13 Mm. This "double-decker" configuration sustained for days before the upper branch erupted with a GOES-class M1.0 flare on 2010 August 7. Analyzing this evolution, we obtain the following main results. 1) During hours before the eruption, filament threads within the lower branch were observed to intermittently brighten up, lift upward, and then merge with the upper branch. The merging process contributed magnetic flux and current to the upper branch, resulting in its quasi-static ascent. 2) This transfer might serve as the key mechanism for the upper branch to lose equilibrium by reaching the limiting flux that can be stably held down by the overlying field or by reaching the threshold of the torus instability. 3) The erupting branch first straightened from a reverse S shape that followed the polarity inversion line and then writhed into a forward S shape. This shows a transfer of left-handed helicity in a sequence of writhe-twist-writhe. The fact that the initial writhe is converted into the twist of the flux rope excludes the helical kink instability as the trigger process of the eruption, but supports the occurrence of the instability in the main phase, which is indeed indicated by the very strong writhing motion. 4) A hard X-ray sigmoid, likely of coronal origin, formed in the gap between the two original filament branches in the impulsive phase of the associated flare. This supports a model of transient sigmoids forming in the vertical flare current sheet. 5) Left-handed magnetic helicity is inferred for both branches of the dextral filament. 6) Two types of force-free magnetic configurations are compatible with the data, a double flux rope equilibrium and a single flux rope situated above a loop arcade.

preprint2012arXiv

The Relationship between the Sudden Change of the Lorentz Force and the Magnitude of Associated Flares

The rapid and irreversible change of photospheric magnetic fields associated with flares has been confirmed by many recent studies. These studies showed that the photospheric magnetic fields respond to coronal field restructuring and turn to a more horizontal state near the magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL) after eruptions. Recent theoretical work has shown that the change in the Lorentz force associated with a magnetic eruption will lead to such a field configuration at the photosphere. The Helioseismic Magnetic Imager has been providing unprecedented full-disk vector magnetograms covering the rising phase of the solar cycle 24. In this study, we analyze 18 flares in four active regions, with GOES X-ray class ranging from C4.7 to X5.4. We find that there are permanent and rapid changes of magnetic field around the flaring PIL, the most notable of which is the increase of the transverse magnetic field. The changes of fields integrated over the area and the derived change of Lorentz force both show a strong correlation with flare magnitude. It is the first time that such magnetic field changes have been observed even for C-class flares. Furthermore, for seven events with associated CMEs, we use an estimate of the impulse provided by the Lorentz force, plus the observed CME velocity, to estimate the CME mass. We find that if the time scale of the back reaction is short, i.e., in the order of 10 s, the derived values of CME mass (10^{15} g) generally agree with those reported in literature.

preprint2012arXiv

Topological insulator Bi2Te3 films synthesized by metal organic chemical vapor deposition

Topological insulator (TI) materials such as Bi2Te3 and Bi2Se3 have attracted strong recent interests. Large scale, high quality TI thin films are important for developing TI-based device applications. In this work, structural and electronic properties of Bi2Te3 thin films deposited by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) on GaAs (001) substrates were characterized via X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), and electronic transport measurements. The characteristic topological surface states (SS) with a single Dirac cone have been clearly revealed in the electronic band structure measured by ARPES, confirming the TI nature of the MOCVD Bi2Te3 films. Resistivity and Hall effect measurements have demonstrated relatively high bulk carrier mobility of ~350 cm^2/Vs at 300K and ~7,400 cm^2/Vs at 15 K. We have also measured the Seebeck coefficient of the films. Our demonstration of high quality topological insulator films grown by a simple and scalable method is of interests for both fundamental research and practical applications of thermoelectric and TI materials.

preprint2012arXiv

Topological Surface States and Dirac point tuning in ternary Bi2Te2Se class of topological insulators

Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we report electronic structure for representative members of ternary topological insulators. We show that several members of this family, such as Bi2Se2Te, Bi2Te2Se, and GeBi2Te4, exhibit a singly degenerate Dirac-like surface state, while Bi2Se2S is a fully gapped insulator with no measurable surface state. One of these compounds, Bi2Se2Te, shows tunable surface state dispersion upon its electronic alloying with Sb (SbxBi2-xSe2Te series). Other members of the ternary family such as GeBi2Te4 and BiTe1.5S1.5 show an in-gap surface Dirac point, the former of which has been predicted to show nonzero weak topological invariants such as (1;111); thus belonging to a different topological class than BiTe1.5S1.5. The measured band structure presented here will be a valuable guide for interpreting transport, thermoelectric, and thermopower measurements on these compounds. The unique surface band topology observed in these compounds contributes towards identifying designer materials with desired flexibility needed for thermoelectric and spintronic device fabrication.

preprint2012arXiv

Topological-Metal to Band-Insulator Transition in (Bi1-xInx)2Se3 Thin Films

By combining transport and photo emission measurements on (Bi1-xInx)2Se3 thin films, we report that this system transforms from a topologically non-trivial metal into a topologically trivial band insulator through three quantum phase transitions. At x = 3-7%, there is a transition from a topologically non-trivial metal to a trivial metal. At x = 15%, the metal becomes a variable-range-hopping insulator. Finally, above x = 25%, the system becomes a true band insulator with its resistance immeasurably large even at room temperature. This material provides a new venue to investigate topologically tunable physics and devices with seamless gating/tunneling insulators.

preprint2011arXiv

A standard-to-blowout jet

The commonly observed jets provide critical information on the small-scale energy release in the solar atmosphere. We report a near disk-center jet on 2010 July 20, observed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. In this event, the standard interchange magnetic reconnection between an emerging flux spanning 9 x 10^3 km and ambient open fields is followed by a blowout-like eruption. In the "standard" stage, as the emerging negative element approached the nearby positive network fields, a jet with a dome-like base in EUV grew for 30 minutes before the jet spire began to migrate laterally with enhanced flux emergence. In the "blowout" stage, the above converging fields collided and the subsequent cancellation produced a UV microflare lasting seven minutes, in which the dome of the jet seemed to be blown out as (1) the spire swung faster and exhibited an unwinding motion before vanishing, (2) a rising loop and a blob erupted leaving behind cusped structures, with the blob spiraling outward in acceleration after the flare maximum, and (3) ejecting material with a curtain-like structure at chromospheric to transition-region temperatures also underwent a transverse motion. It is thus suggested that the flare reconnection rapidly removes the outer fields of the emerging flux to allow its twisted core field to erupt, a scenario favoring the jet-scale magnetic breakout model as recently advocated by Moore et al. in 2010.

preprint2011arXiv

Fermi surface topology and low-lying electronic structure of a new iron-based superconductor Ca10(Pt3As8)(Fe2As2)5

We report a first study of low energy electronic structure and Fermi surface topology for the recently discovered iron-based superconductor Ca10(Pt3As8)(Fe2As2)5 (the 10-3-8 phase, with Tc = 8K), via angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). Despite its triclinic crystal structure, ARPES results reveal a fourfold symmetric band structure with the absence of Dirac-cone-like Fermi dots (related to magnetism) found around the Brillouin zone corners in other iron-based superconductors. Considering that the triclinic lattice and structural supercell arising from the Pt3As8 intermediary layers, these results indicate that those layers couple only weakly to the FeAs layers in this new superconductor, which has implications for the determination of its potentially novel pairing mechanism.

preprint2011arXiv

First Flare-related Rapid Change of Photospheric Magnetic Field Observed by Solar Dynamics Observatory

Photospheric magnetic field not only plays important roles in building up free energy and triggering solar eruptions, but also has been observed to change rapidly and permanently responding to the coronal magnetic field restructuring due to coronal transients. The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument (HMI) on board the newly launched Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) produces seeing-free full-disk vector magnetograms at consistently high resolution and high cadence, which finally makes possible an unambiguous and comprehensive study of this important back-reaction process. In this study, we present a near disk-center, GOES-class X2.2 flare occurred at NOAA AR 11158 on 2011 February 15 using the magnetic field measurements made by HMI. We obtained the first solid evidence of an enhancement in the transverse magnetic field at the flaring magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL) by a magnitude of 70%. This rapid and irreversible field evolution is unequivocally associated with the flare occurrence, with the enhancement area located in between the two chromospheric flare ribbons. Similar findings have been made for another two major flare events observed by SDO. These results strongly corroborate our previous suggestion that the photospheric magnetic field near the PIL must become more horizontal after eruptions. In-depth studies will follow to further link the photospheric magnetic field changes with the dynamics of coronal mass ejections, when full Stokes inversion is carried out to generate accurate magnetic field vectors.

preprint2011arXiv

Metallic surface electronic state in half-Heusler compounds RPtBi (R = Lu, Dy, Gd)

Rare-earth platinum bismuth (RPtBi) has been recently proposed to be a potential topological insulator. In this paper we present measurements of the metallic surface electronic structure in three members of this family, using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). Our data shows clear spin-orbit splitting of the surface bands and the Kramers' degeneracy of spins at the Gamma and M points, which is nicely reproduced with our full-potential augmented plane wave calculation for a surface electronic state. No direct indication of topologically non-trivial behavior is detected, except for a weak Fermi crossing detected in close vicinity to the Gamma point, making the total number of Fermi crossings odd. In the surface band calculation, however, this crossing is explained by another Kramers' pair where the two splitting bands are very close to each other. The classification of this family of materials as topological insulators remains an open question.

preprint2011arXiv

Rapid Changes of Photospheric Magnetic Field after Tether-Cutting Reconnection and Magnetic Implosion

The rapid, irreversible change of the photospheric magnetic field has been recognized as an important element of the solar flare process. This Letter reports such a rapid change of magnetic fields during the 2011 February 13 M6.6 flare in NOAA AR 11158 that we found from the vector magnetograms of the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager with 12-min cadence. High-resolution magnetograms of Hinode that are available at ~-5.5, -1.5, 1.5, and 4 hrs relative to the flare maximum are used to reconstruct three-dimensional coronal magnetic field under the nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) assumption. UV and hard X-ray images are also used to illuminate the magnetic field evolution and energy release. The rapid change is mainly detected by HMI in a compact region lying in the center of the magnetic sigmoid, where the mean horizontal field strength exhibited a significant increase by 28%. The region lies between the initial strong UV and hard X-ray sources in the chromosphere, which are cospatial with the central feet of the sigmoid according to the NLFFF model. The NLFFF model further shows that strong coronal currents are concentrated immediately above the region, and that more intriguingly, the coronal current system underwent an apparent downward collapse after the sigmoid eruption. These results are discussed in favor of both the tether-cutting reconnection producing the flare and the ensuing implosion of the coronal field resulting from the energy release.

preprint2011arXiv

Rapid Enhancement of Sheared Evershed Flow Along the Neutral Line Associated with an X6.5 Flare Observed by Hinode

We present G-band and Ca II H observations of NOAA AR 10930 obtained by Hinode/SOT on 2006 December 6 covering an X6.5 flare. Local Correlation Tracking (LCT) technique was applied to the foreshortening-corrected G-band image series to acquire horizontal proper motions in this complex beta-gamma-delta active region. With the continuous high quality, spatial and temporal resolution G-band data, we not only confirm the rapid decay of outer penumbrae and darkening of the central structure near the flaring neutral line, but also unambiguously detect for the first time the enhancement of the sheared Evershed flow (average horizontal flow speed increased from 330+-3.1 to 403+-4.6 m/s) along the neutral line right after the eruptive white-light flare. Post-flare Ca II H images indicate that the originally fanning out field lines at the two sides of the neutral line get connected. Since penumbral structure and Evershed flow are closely related to photospheric magnetic inclination or horizontal field strength, we interpret the rapid changes of sunspot structure and surface flow as the result of flare-induced magnetic restructuring down to the photosphere. The magnetic fields turn from fanning out to inward connection causing outer penumbrae decay, meanwhile those near the flaring neutral line become more horizontal leading to stronger Evershed flow there. The inferred enhancement of horizontal magnetic field near the neutral line is consistent with recent magnetic observations and theoretical predictions of flare-invoked photospheric magnetic field change.

preprint2011arXiv

Response of the Photospheric Magnetic Field to the X2.2 Flare on 2011 February 15

It is well known that the long-term evolution of the photospheric magnetic field plays an important role in building up free energy to power solar eruptions. Observations, despite being controversial, have also revealed a rapid and permanent variation of the photospheric magnetic field in response to the coronal magnetic field restructuring during the eruption. The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument (HMI) on board the newly launched Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) produces seeing-free full-disk vector magnetograms at consistently high resolution and high cadence, which finally makes possible an unambiguous and comprehensive study of this important back-reaction process. In this study, we present a near disk-center, GOES -class X2.2 flare, which occurred in NOAA AR 11158 on 2011 February 15. Using the magnetic field measurements made by HMI, we obtained the first solid evidence of a rapid (in about 30 minutes) and irreversible enhancement in the horizontal magnetic field at the flaring magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL) by a magnitude of ~30%. It is also shown that the photospheric field becomes more sheared and more inclined. This field evolution is unequivocally associated with the flare occurrence in this sigmoidal active region, with the enhancement area located in between the two chromospheric flare ribbons and the initial conjugate hard X-ray footpoints. These results strongly corroborate our previous conjecture that the photospheric magnetic field near the PIL must become more horizontal after eruptions, which could be related to the newly formed low-lying fields resulted from the tether-cutting reconnection.

preprint2011arXiv

The universal definition of spin current

The spin current $J_{S}$, orbit angular momentum current $J_{L}$ and total angular momentum current $J_{J}$ in a dyad form have been universally defined according to quantum electrodynamics. Their conservation quantities and the continuity equations have been discussed in different cases. Non-relativistic approximation forms are deduced in order to explain their physical meanings, and to analyze some experiment results. The spin current of helical edge states in HgTe/CdTe quantum wells is calculated to demonstrate the properties of spin current on the two dimensional quantum spin-Hall system. A generalized spin-orbit coupling term in the semiconductoring media is deduced based on the theory of the electrodynamics in the moving media. We recommend to use the effective total angular momentum current instead of the pure spin current to describe the polarizing distribution and transport phenomena in spintronic media.

preprint2011arXiv

What controls the phase diagram and superconductivity in Ru substituted BaFe$_2$As$_2$?

We use high resolution angle-resolved photoemission to study the electronic structure of the iron based high-temperature superconductors Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$Ru$_x$)$_2$As$_2$ as a function of Ru concentration. We find that substitution of Ru for Fe is isoelectronic, i. e., it does not change the value of the chemical potential. More interestingly, there are no measured, significant changes in the shape of the Fermi surface or in the Fermi velocity over a wide range of substitution levels ($0<x<0.55$). Given that the suppression of the antiferromagnetic and structural phase has been associated with the emergence of the superconducting state, Ru substitution must achieve this via a mechanism that does not involve changes of the Fermi surface. We speculate that this mechanism relies on magnetic dilution which leads to the reduction of the effective Stoner enhancement.

preprint2010arXiv

A Reconnecting Current Sheet Imaged in A Solar Flare

Magnetic reconnection changes the magnetic field topology and powers explosive events in astrophysical, space and laboratory plasmas. For flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in the solar atmosphere, the standard model predicts the presence of a reconnecting current sheet, which has been the subject of considerable theoretical and numerical modeling over the last fifty years, yet direct, unambiguous observational verification has been absent. In this Letter we show a bright sheet structure of global length (>0.25 Rsun) and macroscopic width ((5 - 10)x10^3 km) distinctly above the cusp-shaped flaring loop, imaged during the flare rising phase in EUV. The sheet formed due to the stretch of a transequatorial loop system, and was accompanied by various reconnection signatures that have been dispersed in the literature. This unique event provides a comprehensive view of the reconnection geometry and dynamics in the solar corona.

preprint2010arXiv

Gradual Inflation of Active-Region Coronal Arcades Building up to Coronal Mass Ejections

The pre-CME structure is of great importance to understanding the origin of CMEs, which, however, has been largely unknown for CMEs originating from active regions. In this paper, selected for studying are 16 active-region coronal arcades whose gradual inflation lead up to CMEs. 12 of them clearly build upon post-eruptive arcades resulting from a preceding eruption. The observed inflation sustains for 8.7 +/- 4.1 h, with the arcade rising from 1.15 +/- 0.06 Rsun to 1.36 +/- 0.07 Rsun within the EIT field of view (FOV). The rising speed is less than 5 km s-1 for most of the time. Only at the end of this quasi-static stage, it increases to tens of kilometers per second over tens of minutes. The arcade then erupts out of the EIT FOV as a CME with similar morphology. This pre-CME structure is apparently unaffected by the flares occurring during its quasi-static inflation phase, but is closely coupled with the flare occurring during its acceleration phase. For four events that were observed on the disk, it is found that the gradual inflation of the arcade is accompanied by significant helicity injection from photosphere. In particular, a swirling structure, which is reminiscent of a magnetic flux rope, was observed in one of the arcades over 4 h prior to the subsequent CME, and the growth of the arcade is associated with the injection of helicity of opposite sense into the active region via flux emergence. We propose a four-phase evolution paradigm for the observed CMEs, i.e., a quasi-static inflation phase which corresponds to the buildup of magnetic free energy in the corona, followed by the frequently observed three-phase paradigm, including an initial phase, an acceleration phase and a gradual phase.

preprint2010arXiv

Importance of Fermi surface topology for high temperature superconductivity in electron-doped iron arsenic superconductors

We used angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy and thermoelectric power to study the poorly explored, highly overdoped side of the phase diagram of Ba(Fe1-xCox)2As2 high temperature superconductor. Our data demonstrate that several Lifshitz transitions - topological changes of the Fermi surface - occur for large x. Tc starts to decrease with doping when the cylindrical, central hole pocket changes to ellipsoids centering at the Z point, and goes to zero before these ellipsoids disappear around x = 0.2. Changes in thermoelectric power occur at similar x-values. Beyond this doping level the central pocket changes to electron-like and superconductivity does not exist. Our observations reveal the crucial importance of the underlying Fermiology in this class of materials. A necessary condition for superconductivity is the presence of the central hole pockets rather than perfect nesting between central and corner pockets.

preprint2010arXiv

Motions of Hard X-ray Sources During an Asymmetric Eruption

Filament eruptions and hard X-ray (HXR) source motions are commonly observed in solar flares, which provides critical information on the coronal magnetic reconnection. This Letter reports an event on 2005 January 15, in which we found an asymmetric filament eruption and a subsequent coronal mass ejection together with complicated motions of HXR sources during the GOES-class X2.6 flare. The HXR sources initially converge to the magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL), and then move in directions either parallel or perpendicular to the PIL depending on the local field configuration. We distinguish the evolution of the HXR source motion in four phases and associate each of them with distinct regions of coronal magnetic fields as reconstructed using a non-linear force-free field extrapolation. It is found that the magnetic reconnection proceeds along the PIL toward the regions where the overlying field decreases with height more rapidly. It is also found that not only the perpendicular but the parallel motion of the HXR sources correlates well with the HXR lightcurve. These results are discussed in favor of the torus instability as an important factor in the eruptive process.

preprint2010arXiv

Observational Evidence of Back-reaction on the Solar Surface Associated with Coronal Magnetic Restructuring in Solar Eruptions

Most models of solar eruptions assume that coronal field lines are anchored in the dense photosphere and thus the photospheric magnetic fields would not have rapid, irreversible changes associated with eruptions resulted from the coronal magnetic reconnection. Motivated by the recent work of Hudson, Fisher & Welsch (2008) on quantitatively evaluating the back reaction due to energy release from the coronal fields, in this Letter we synthesize our previous studies and present analysis of new events about flare-related changes of photospheric magnetic fields. For the 11 X-class flares where vector magnetograms are available, we always find an increase of transverse field at the polarity inversion line (PIL) although only 4 events had measurements with 1 minute temporal resolution. We also discuss 18 events with 1 minute cadence line-of-sight magnetogram observation, which all show prominent changes of magnetic flux contained in the flaring Delta spot region. Except in one case, the observed limb-ward flux increases while disk-ward flux decreases rapidly and irreversibly after flares. This observational evidence provides support, either directly or indirectly, for the theory and prediction of Hudson, Fisher & Welsch that the photospheric magnetic fields must respond to coronal field restructuring and turn to a more horizontal state near the PIL after eruptions.

preprint2010arXiv

Sigmoid-to-Flux-Rope Transition Leading to A Loop-Like Coronal Mass Ejection

Sigmoids are one of the most important precursor structures for solar eruptions. In this Letter, we study a sigmoid eruption on 2010 August 1 with EUV data obtained by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO). In AIA 94 Å (Fe XVIII; 6 MK), topological reconfiguration due to tether-cutting reconnection is unambiguously observed for the first time, i.e., two opposite J-shaped loops reconnect to form a continuous S-shaped loop, whose central portion is dipped and aligned along the magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL), and a compact loop crossing the PIL. A causal relationship between photospheric flows and coronal tether-cutting reconnections is evidenced by the detection of persistent converging flows toward the PIL using line-of-sight magnetograms obtained by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on board SDO. The S-shaped loop remains in quasi-equilibrium in the lower corona for about 50 minutes, with the central dipped portion rising slowly at ~10 km s-1. The speed then increases to ~60 km s-1 about 10 minutes prior to the onset of a GOES-class C3.2 flare, as the S-shaped loop speeds up its transformation into an arch-shaped loop, which eventually leads to a loop-like coronal mass ejection (CME). The AIA observations combined with H? filtergrams as well as hard X-ray (HXR) imaging and spectroscopy are consistent with most flare loops being formed by reconnection of the stretched legs of less-sheared J-shaped loops that envelopes the rising flux rope, in agreement with the standard tether-cutting scenario.

preprint2010arXiv

Surface-driven electronic structure in LaFeAsO studied by angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy

We measured the electronic structure of an iron arsenic parent compound LaFeAsO using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). By comparing with a full-potential Linear Augmented PlaneWave calculation we show that the extra large Gamma hole pocket measured via ARPES comes from electronic structure at the sample surface. Based on this we discuss the strong polarization dependence of the band structure and a temperature-dependent hole-like band around the M point. The two phenomena give additional evidences for the existence of the surface-driven electronic structure.

preprint2009arXiv

Reconnection Electric Field and Hardness of X-Ray Emission of Solar Flares

Magnetic reconnection is believed to be the prime mechanism to trigger solar flares and accelerate electrons up to energies of MeV. In the classical two-dimensional reconnection model, the separation motion of chromospheric ribbons manifests the successive reconnection that takes place higher up in the corona. Meanwhile, downward traveling energetic electrons bombard the dense chromosphere and create hard X-ray (HXR) emissions, which provide a valuable diagnostic of electron acceleration. Analyses of ribbon dynamics and HXR spectrum have been carried out separately. In this Letter, we report a study of the comparison of reconnection electric field measured from ribbon motion and hardness (spectral index) of X-ray emission derived from X-ray spectrum. Our survey of the maximum average reconnection electric field and the minimum overall spectral index for 13 two-ribbon flares show that they are strongly anti-correlated. The former is also strongly correlated with flare magnitude measured using the peak flux of soft X-ray emissions. These provide strong support for electron acceleration models based on the electric field generated at reconnecting current sheet during flares.

preprint2009arXiv

Successive Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections on 2005 September 13 from Noaa Ar 10808

We present a multiwavelength study of the 2005 September 13 eruption from NOAA 10808 that produced total four flares and two fast coronal mass ejections (CMEs) within 1.5 hours. Our primary attention is paid to the fact that these eruptions occurred in close succession in time, and that all of them were located along an S-shaped magnetic polarity inversion line (PIL) of the active region. In our analysis, (1) the disturbance created by the first flare propagated southward along the PIL to cause a major filament eruption that led to the first CME and the associated second flare underneath. (2) The first CME partially removed the overlying magnetic fields over the northern Delta spot to allow the third flare and the second CME. (3) The ribbon separation during the fourth flare would indicate reclosing of the overlying field lines opened by the second CME. It is thus concluded that this series of flares and CMEs are interrelated to each other via magnetic reconnections between the expanding magnetic structure and the nearby magnetic fields. These results complement previous works made on this event with the suggested causal relationship among the successive eruptions.

preprint2009arXiv

Unusual Fermi surface nesting in parent compounds of iron arsenic high temperature superconductors revealed by Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy

We use angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) to study the band structure of BaFe2As2 and CaFe2As2, two of the parent compounds of the iron arsenic high temperature superconductors. We find clear evidence for band back folding and hybridization demonstrating that conduction electrons are strongly affected by the emergence of magnetic order. Our high quality data revealed that although the Fermi surface is strongly three-dimensional, it does indeed have long parallel segments along the kz direction that can lead to the emergence of magnetic order. More interestingly, we find very unusual incommensurate nesting of the Fermi surface in the a-b plane that is present only at low temperatures. We speculate that this is a signature of a failed Charge Density Wave (CDW) state that was predicted by renormalization group studies.