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Chao Chen

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preprint2026arXiv

Amplitude analysis and branching fraction measurement of $J/ψ\to Λ\barΣ^0η+\mathrm{c.c}$

Based on a sample of $(10087\pm44)\times10^{6}$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector, a partial-wave analysis of $ J/ψ\to Λ\bar{ Σ}^0η+\mathrm{c.c} $ is performed for the first time. The dominant contributions are found to be excited $Λ$ states with $J^P=1/2^-$ and $J^P=1/2^+$ in the $ηΛ$ mass spectra. The measured masses and widths are $M=1668.8\pm3.1\pm21.2$ MeV/$c^2$ and $Γ=52.7\pm4.2\pm17.8$ MeV for the $Λ(1670)$, and $M=1881.5\pm16.5\pm20.3$ MeV/$c^2$ and $Γ=82.4\pm18.2\pm8.9$ MeV for the $Λ(1810)$, respectively. The branching fraction is determined to be $ \mathcal{B}(J/ψ\to Λ\bar{ Σ}^0η+\mathrm{c.c}) $ = $(3.44 \pm 0.11 \pm 0.13) \times 10^{-5}$. The first uncertainties are statistical and the second systematic.

preprint2026arXiv

Cross section measurement of $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow π^{0}π^{0}ψ(3686)$ from $\sqrt{s}=$ 4.008 GeV to 4.951 GeV

Using data samples with a total integrated luminosity of $22.1~\rm fb^{-1}$ at center-of-mass energies between 4.008 and 4.951~GeV collected with the BESIII detector, the cross sections of $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow π^{0}π^{0}ψ(3686)$ process are measured. The obtained cross sections are found to be approximately one-half of those of $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow π^{+}π^{-}ψ(3686)$, consistent with the isospin symmetry expectation. A coherent fit to the dressed cross sections is performed, with the $Y(4230)$~parameters fixed at the values measured in $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow π^{+}π^{-}ψ(3686)$. The significances of the $Y(4390)$ and $Y(4660)$ are both larger than $5σ$, and their masses and widths are consistent with the previous measurement in the $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow π^{+}π^{-}ψ(3686)$ process.

preprint2026arXiv

EnvFactory: Scaling Tool-Use Agents via Executable Environments Synthesis and Robust RL

Equipping LLMs with tool-use capabilities via Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) is bottlenecked by two challenges: the lack of scalable, robust execution environments and the scarcity of realistic training data that captures implicit human reasoning. Existing approaches depend on costly real-world APIs, hallucination-prone LLM simulators, or synthetic environments that are often single-turn or depend on pre-collected documents. Moreover, synthetic trajectories are frequently over-specified, resembling instruction sequences rather than natural human intents, reducing their effectiveness for RL training. We introduce EnvFactory, a fully automated framework that addresses both challenges. EnvFactory autonomously explores and verifies stateful, executable tool environments from authentic resources, and synthesizes natural multi-turn trajectories through topology-aware sampling and calibrated refinement, producing grounded queries with implicit intents. Using only 85 verified environments across 7 domains, EnvFactory generates 2,575 SFT and RL trajectories. Despite using significantly fewer environments than prior work, which are often 5 times more, EnvFactory achieves superior training efficiency and downstream performance, improving Qwen3-series models by up to +15% on BFCLv3, +8.6% on MCP-Atlas, and +6% on conversational benchmarks including $τ^2$-Bench and VitaBench. By fully automating both environment construction and trajectory synthesis, EnvFactory provides a scalable, extensible, and robust foundation for Agentic RL.

preprint2026arXiv

First Measurement of the Absolute Branching Fraction of $η_c \to γγ$

We apply a tag-and-probe method to precisely measure the absolute branching fraction of the decay $η_c \to γγ$ with the BESIII experiment at BEPCII. Starting with a large initial sample of $2712.4\pm 14.3$ million $ψ(3686)$ events, a sample of 0.16 million $η_c$ events are tagged via the golden channel $ψ(3686)\to π^0 h_c$, $h_c\to γη_c$, effectively avoiding interference effects. The absolute branching fraction of $η_c \to γγ$ is measured for the first time to be $\mathcal{B}(η_c \to γγ) = (2.45 \pm 0.48_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.09_{\rm syst.}) \times 10^{-4}$. Using the world average value of the total width of the $η_c$, the partial decay width of $η_c \to γγ$ is calculated to be $Γ(η_c \to γγ) = (7.48 \pm 1.48_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.30_{\rm syst.})~{\rm keV}$.

preprint2026arXiv

First Observation of $D^{0(+)}\to \bar Kωe^+ν_e$ and Determination of the Branching Fraction of $\bar K_1(1270)\to \bar K ω$

Using 20.3~fb$^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ annihilation data collected at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773~GeV with the BESIII detector, we report the first observation of the semileptonic decays $D^0\to K^-ωe^+ν_e$ and $D^+\to K_S^0ωe^+ν_e$ with significances of $8.0σ$ and $5.8σ$, respectively, including systematic uncertainties. Their decay branching fractions are measured to be ${\cal B}(D^0\to K^-ωe^+ν_e)=(9.3^{+2.1}_{-1.9}\pm 0.7)\times10^{-5}$ and ${\cal B}(D^+\to K_S^0ωe^+ν_e)=(6.6^{+2.0}_{-1.8}\pm 0.6)\times10^{-5}$. Combining with the latest measurements of $D^{0(+)}\to K^-π^+π^{-(0)} e^+ν_e$ and assuming $\bar{K}_1(1270)$ to be the sole mediating resonance in all processes, the branching ratios are determined to be $\frac{Γ(K_1(1270)^-\to K^-π^+π^-)}{Γ(K_1(1270)^-\to K^-ω)} = 3.4^{+0.8}_{-0.7} \pm 0.3$ and $\frac{Γ(\bar{K}_1(1270)^0\to K^-π^+π^0)}{Γ(\bar{K}_1(1270)^0\to \bar{K}^0ω)} = 9.6^{+3.0}_{-2.7} \pm 0.8$. The combined branching fraction is determined to be $\mathcal B(\bar{K}_1(1270)\to \bar{K}ω) = (7.5\pm 1.3 \pm 0.5)\%$, which is the most precise measurement from a collider experiment. The first uncertainties are statistical, and the second are systematic.

preprint2026arXiv

Improved Streaming Algorithm for Fair $k$-Center Clustering

Many real-world applications pose challenges in incorporating fairness constraints into the $k$-center clustering problem, where the dataset consists of $m$ demographic groups, each with a specified upper bound on the number of centers to ensure fairness. Focusing on big data scenarios, this paper addresses the problem in a streaming setting, where data points arrive one by one sequentially in a continuous stream. Leveraging a structure called the $λ$-independent center set, we propose a one-pass streaming algorithm that first computes a reserved set of points during the streaming process. Then, for the post-streaming process, we propose an approach for selecting centers from the reserved point set by analyzing all three possible cases, transforming the most complicated one into a specially constrained vertex cover problem in an auxiliary graph. Our algorithm achieves a tight approximation ratio of 5 while consuming $O(k\log n)$ memory. It can also be readily adapted to solve the offline fair $k$-center problem, achieving a 3-approximation ratio that matches the current state of the art. Furthermore, we extend our approach to a semi-structured data stream, where data points from each group arrive in batches. In this setting, we present a 3-approximation algorithm for $m = 2$ and a 4-approximation algorithm for general $m$. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our approaches, demonstrating that they outperform existing baselines in both clustering cost and runtime efficiency.

preprint2026arXiv

Measurements of the absolute branching fractions of the $Λ_{c}^{+}$ hadronic decays

Based on 4.5 fb$^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ collision data collected at center-of-mass energies between 4599.53 MeV and 4698.82 MeV with the BESIII detector, the absolute branching fractions of twelve $Λ_{c}^{+}$ hadronic decay modes are measured with a double-tag technique. A global least-square fit is implemented simultaneously among different decay modes at different energy points. This paper gives the most precise results on the branching fractions of different decay modes to date, with precision improved by a factor of 2 to 3. Among them, the branching fraction of $Λ_{c}^{+}\to pK^{-}π^+$ is determined to be $(6.61\pm0.11\pm0.12)\%$, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. In addition, the $e^+e^-\toΛ_c^+\barΛ_c^-$ Born cross sections and the effective form factors ($|G_{\rm eff}|$) at different energy points have been determined with the highest precision to date.

preprint2026arXiv

Measurements of the branching fractions of $χ_{cJ}\to 2K^+ 2K^- ω$ and $ϕK^+ K^- ω$ decays

Using a data sample of $(2712.4 \pm 14.3) \times 10^{6}$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII collider, we report the first observation of the decays $χ_{cJ}\to 2K^+ 2K^- ω$ and $χ_{cJ}\to ϕK^{+}K^{-} ω$ ($J = 0,1,2$) via the radiative transitions $ψ(3686) \to γχ_{cJ}$. The branching fractions of these decays are measured for the first time, and the statistical significance for each signal exceeds $10σ$.

preprint2026arXiv

Observation of Polarization and Determination of Electric and Magnetic Moments of $Ξ(1530)^0$ in $ψ(3686)\toΞ(1530)^0\barΞ(1530)^0$

Using the data sample of $2.7\times10^9$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider, we present an observation of the $Ξ(1530)^0$ polarization in the decay $ψ(3686)\toΞ(1530)^0\barΞ(1530)^0$ with a significance larger than $20σ$ compared with all other tested hypotheses. The helicity amplitudes for the process $ψ(3686)\toΞ(1530)^0\barΞ(1530)^0$ and the moduli of form factors including electric charge, magnetic dipole, electric quadrupole, and magnetic octupole are measured for the first time by performing an angular distribution analysis. Additionally, the polarization correlations between $Ξ(1530)^0$ and $\barΞ(1530)^0$ are measured.

preprint2026arXiv

Optimized Algorithms for Text Clustering with LLM-Generated Constraints

Clustering is a fundamental tool that has garnered significant interest across a wide range of applications including text analysis. To improve clustering accuracy, many researchers have incorporated background knowledge, typically in the form of must-link and cannot-link constraints, to guide the clustering process. With the recent advent of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in improving clustering quality through LLM-based automatic constraint generation. In this paper, we propose a novel constraint-generation approach that reduces resource consumption by generating constraint sets rather than using traditional pairwise constraints. This approach improves both query efficiency and constraint accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. We further introduce a constrained clustering algorithm tailored to the characteristics of LLM-generated constraints. Our method incorporates a confidence threshold and a penalty mechanism to address potentially inaccurate constraints. We evaluate our approach on five text datasets, considering both the cost of constraint generation and the overall clustering performance. The results show that our method achieves clustering accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms while reducing the number of LLM queries by more than 20 times.

preprint2026arXiv

ORCE: Order-Aware Alignment of Verbalized Confidence in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) often produce answers with high certainty even when they are incorrect, making reliable confidence estimation essential for deployment in real-world scenarios. Verbalized confidence, where models explicitly state their confidence in natural language, provides a flexible and user-facing uncertainty signal that can be applied even when token logits are unavailable. However, existing verbalized-confidence methods often optimize answer generation and confidence generation jointly, which can cause confidence-alignment objectives to interfere with answer accuracy. In this work, we propose a decoupled and order-aware framework for verbalized confidence calibration. Our method first generates an answer and then estimates confidence conditioned on the fixed question--answer pair, allowing confidence optimization without directly perturbing the answer-generation process. To align confidence with correctness likelihood, we construct a sampling-based surrogate from multiple model completions and optimize rank-based reinforcement learning objectives that encourage responses with higher estimated correctness likelihood to receive higher verbalized confidence. Experiments on reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that our method improves calibration and failure prediction performance while largely preserving answer accuracy. These results demonstrate that verbalized confidence can be more reliably aligned by decoupling confidence estimation from answer generation and optimizing the relative ordering of confidence across responses.

preprint2026arXiv

Search for a dark baryon in the $Ξ^-\rightarrowπ^-+{\rm invisible}$ decay

A search for a dark baryon is performed for the first time in the two-body decay $Ξ^-\rightarrowπ^-+{\rm invisible}$ using $(10.087\pm0.044)\times10^{9}$ $J/ψ$ events collected at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=3.097\,\mbox{GeV}$ with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider. No significant signal is observed, and the 90% (95%) confidence level upper limits on the branching fraction $B(Ξ^-\rightarrowπ^-+{\rm invisible})$ are determined to be $4.2\times10^{-5}$ ($5.2\times10^{-5}$), $6.9\times10^{-5}$ ($8.4\times10^{-5}$), $6.5\times10^{-4}$ ($7.6\times10^{-4}$), $1.1\times10^{-4}$ ($1.3\times10^{-4}$) and $4.5\times10^{-5}$ ($5.5\times10^{-5}$), under the dark baryon mass hypotheses of 1.07$\,\mbox{GeV}/c^2$, 1.10$\,\mbox{GeV}/c^2$, $m_Λ$ (1.116$\,\mbox{GeV}/c^2$), 1.13$\,\mbox{GeV}/c^2$, and 1.16$\,\mbox{GeV}/c^2$, respectively. The constraints obtained on the Wilson coefficients $C_{u s, s}^L$ and $C_{u s, s}^R$ are more stringent than the previous limits derived from the LHC searches for the colored mediators.

preprint2025arXiv

Heteroscedastic Bayesian Optimization-Based Dynamic PID Tuning for Accurate and Robust UAV Trajectory Tracking

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play an important role in various applications, where precise trajectory tracking is crucial. However, conventional control algorithms for trajectory tracking often exhibit limited performance due to the underactuated, nonlinear, and highly coupled dynamics of quadrotor systems. To address these challenges, we propose HBO-PID, a novel control algorithm that integrates the Heteroscedastic Bayesian Optimization (HBO) framework with the classical PID controller to achieve accurate and robust trajectory tracking. By explicitly modeling input-dependent noise variance, the proposed method can better adapt to dynamic and complex environments, and therefore improve the accuracy and robustness of trajectory tracking. To accelerate the convergence of optimization, we adopt a two-stage optimization strategy that allow us to more efficiently find the optimal controller parameters. Through experiments in both simulation and real-world scenarios, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Compared to SOTA methods, it improves the position accuracy by 24.7% to 42.9%, and the angular accuracy by 40.9% to 78.4%.

preprint2025arXiv

MambaSeg: Harnessing Mamba for Accurate and Efficient Image-Event Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision with wide-ranging applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. While RGB-based methods have achieved strong performance with CNNs and Transformers, their effectiveness degrades under fast motion, low-light, or high dynamic range conditions due to limitations of frame cameras. Event cameras offer complementary advantages such as high temporal resolution and low latency, yet lack color and texture, making them insufficient on their own. To address this, recent research has explored multimodal fusion of RGB and event data; however, many existing approaches are computationally expensive and focus primarily on spatial fusion, neglecting the temporal dynamics inherent in event streams. In this work, we propose MambaSeg, a novel dual-branch semantic segmentation framework that employs parallel Mamba encoders to efficiently model RGB images and event streams. To reduce cross-modal ambiguity, we introduce the Dual-Dimensional Interaction Module (DDIM), comprising a Cross-Spatial Interaction Module (CSIM) and a Cross-Temporal Interaction Module (CTIM), which jointly perform fine-grained fusion along both spatial and temporal dimensions. This design improves cross-modal alignment, reduces ambiguity, and leverages the complementary properties of each modality. Extensive experiments on the DDD17 and DSEC datasets demonstrate that MambaSeg achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance while significantly reducing computational cost, showcasing its promise for efficient, scalable, and robust multimodal perception.

preprint2025arXiv

Measurement of branching fractions of $Λ_{c}^{+}$ decays to $Σ^{+} η$ and $Σ^{+} η'$

By analyzing $e^+e^-$ collision data taken at center-of-mass energies $\sqrt{s}$ between 4.600 and 4.699 GeV with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $\rm 4.5~fb^{-1}$, we study the hadronic decays $Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η$ and $Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η^{\prime}$ using the single-tag method. The branching fraction ratio of $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ η$ relative to $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ π^0$ is determined to be $0.305 \pm 0.046_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.007_{\rm syst.}$, and that of $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ η'$ relative to $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ ω$ is $0.336 \pm 0.094_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.037_{\rm syst.}$. The ratio of $\frac{\mathcal{B}\left(Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η'\right)}{\mathcal{B}\left(Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η\right)} $ is determined to be $1.73 \pm 0.22_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.16_{\rm syst.}$. These results enrich our knowledge of charmed baryon decays.

preprint2025arXiv

SLTNet: Efficient Event-based Semantic Segmentation with Spike-driven Lightweight Transformer-based Networks

Event-based semantic segmentation has great potential in autonomous driving and robotics due to the advantages of event cameras, such as high dynamic range, low latency, and low power cost. Unfortunately, current artificial neural network (ANN)-based segmentation methods suffer from high computational demands, the requirements for image frames, and massive energy consumption, limiting their efficiency and application on resource-constrained edge/mobile platforms. To address these problems, we introduce SLTNet, a spike-driven lightweight transformer-based network designed for event-based semantic segmentation. Specifically, SLTNet is built on efficient spike-driven convolution blocks (SCBs) to extract rich semantic features while reducing the model's parameters. Then, to enhance the long-range contextural feature interaction, we propose novel spike-driven transformer blocks (STBs) with binary mask operations. Based on these basic blocks, SLTNet employs a high-efficiency single-branch architecture while maintaining the low energy consumption of the Spiking Neural Network (SNN). Finally, extensive experiments on DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic datasets demonstrate that SLTNet outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNN-based methods by at most 9.06% and 9.39% mIoU, respectively, with extremely 4.58x lower energy consumption and 114 FPS inference speed. Our code is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/longxianlei/SLTNet-v1.0.

preprint2024arXiv

Investigation of the $ΔI = 1/2$ rule and test of CP violation through the measurement of decay asymmetry parameters in $Ξ^-$ decays

Using $(10087\pm44)\times 10^{6}$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector, numerous $Ξ^-$ and $Λ$ decay asymmetry parameters are simultaneously determined from the process $J/ψ\to Ξ^- \barΞ^+ \to Λ(pπ^-) π^- \barΛ(\bar{n} π^0) π^+$ and its charge-conjugate channel. The precisions of $α_0$ for $Λ\to nπ^0$ and $\barα_0$ for $\barΛ \to \bar{n}π^0$ compared to world averages are improved by factors of 4 and 1.7, respectively. The ratio of decay asymmetry parameters of $Λ\to nπ^0$ to that of $Λ\to pπ^-$, $\langle α_0 \rangle/ \langle α_{Λ-} \rangle $, is determined to be $ 0.873 \pm 0.012^{+0.011}_{-0.010}$, where the first and the second uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively. The ratio is smaller than unity more than $5σ$, which signifies the existence of the $ΔI = 3/2$ transition in $Λ$ for the first time. Beside, we test for CP violation in $Ξ^- \to Λπ^-$ and in $Λ\to n π^{0}$ with the best precision to date.

preprint2023arXiv

Federated Learning with Domain Generalization

Federated Learning (FL) enables a group of clients to jointly train a machine learning model with the help of a centralized server. Clients do not need to submit their local data to the server during training, and hence the local training data of clients is protected. In FL, distributed clients collect their local data independently, so the dataset of each client may naturally form a distinct source domain. In practice, the model trained over multiple source domains may have poor generalization performance on unseen target domains. To address this issue, we propose FedADG to equip federated learning with domain generalization capability. FedADG employs the federated adversarial learning approach to measure and align the distributions among different source domains via matching each distribution to a reference distribution. The reference distribution is adaptively generated (by accommodating all source domains) to minimize the domain shift distance during alignment. In FedADG, the alignment is fine-grained since each class is aligned independently. In this way, the learned feature representation is supposed to be universal, so it can generalize well on the unseen domains. Intensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that FedADG has comparable performance with the state-of-the-art.

preprint2023arXiv

Search for hidden-charm tetraquark with strangeness in $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow K^+ D_{s}^{-} D^{0}+c.c.$

We report a search for a heavier partner of the recently observed $Z_{cs}(3985)^{-}$ state, denoted as $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$, in the process $e^{+} e^{-}\rightarrow K^{+}D_{s}^{*-}D^{* 0}+c.c.$, based on $e^+e^-$ collision data collected at the center-of-mass energies of $\sqrt{s}=4.661$, 4.682 and 4.699 GeV with the BESIII detector. The $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$ is of interest as it is expected to be a candidate for a hidden-charm and open-strange tetraquark. A partial-reconstruction technique is used to isolate $K^+$ recoil-mass spectra, which are probed for a potential contribution from $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}\to D_{s}^{*-}D^{* 0}$ ($c.c.$). We find an excess of $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}\rightarrow D_{s}^{*-}D^{*0}$ ($c.c.$) candidates with a significance of $2.1σ$, after considering systematic uncertainties, at a mass of $(4123.5\pm0.7_\mathrm{stat.}\pm4.7_\mathrm{syst.})\ \mathrm{MeV}/c^{2}$. As the data set is limited in size, the upper limits are evaluated at the 90\% confidence level on the product of the Born cross sections ($σ^{\mathrm{Born}}$) and the branching fraction ($\mathcal{B}$) of $Z_{cs}^{\prime-}\rightarrow D_{s}^{*-}D^{* 0}$, under different assumptions of the $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$ mass from 4.120 to 4.140 MeV and of the width from 10 to 50 MeV at the three center-of-mass energies. The upper limits of $σ^{\rm Born}\cdot\mathcal{B}$ are found to be at the level of $\mathcal{O}(1)$ pb at each energy. Larger data samples are needed to confirm the $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$ state and clarify its nature in the coming years.

preprint2022arXiv

A Manifold View of Adversarial Risk

The adversarial risk of a machine learning model has been widely studied. Most previous works assume that the data lies in the whole ambient space. We propose to take a new angle and take the manifold assumption into consideration. Assuming data lies in a manifold, we investigate two new types of adversarial risk, the normal adversarial risk due to perturbation along normal direction, and the in-manifold adversarial risk due to perturbation within the manifold. We prove that the classic adversarial risk can be bounded from both sides using the normal and in-manifold adversarial risks. We also show with a surprisingly pessimistic case that the standard adversarial risk can be nonzero even when both normal and in-manifold risks are zero. We finalize the paper with empirical studies supporting our theoretical results. Our results suggest the possibility of improving the robustness of a classifier by only focusing on the normal adversarial risk.

preprint2022arXiv

A Study of the Attention Abnormality in Trojaned BERTs

Trojan attacks raise serious security concerns. In this paper, we investigate the underlying mechanism of Trojaned BERT models. We observe the attention focus drifting behavior of Trojaned models, i.e., when encountering an poisoned input, the trigger token hijacks the attention focus regardless of the context. We provide a thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of this phenomenon, revealing insights into the Trojan mechanism. Based on the observation, we propose an attention-based Trojan detector to distinguish Trojaned models from clean ones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to analyze the Trojan mechanism and to develop a Trojan detector based on the transformer's attention.

preprint2022arXiv

A Topological Filter for Learning with Label Noise

Noisy labels can impair the performance of deep neural networks. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a new method for filtering label noise. Unlike most existing methods relying on the posterior probability of a noisy classifier, we focus on the much richer spatial behavior of data in the latent representational space. By leveraging the high-order topological information of data, we are able to collect most of the clean data and train a high-quality model. Theoretically we prove that this topological approach is guaranteed to collect the clean data with high probability. Empirical results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts and is robust to a broad spectrum of noise types and levels.

preprint2022arXiv

A Topology-Attention ConvLSTM Network and Its Application to EM Images

Structural accuracy of segmentation is important for finescale structures in biomedical images. We propose a novel TopologyAttention ConvLSTM Network (TACNet) for 3D image segmentation in order to achieve high structural accuracy for 3D segmentation tasks. Specifically, we propose a Spatial Topology-Attention (STA) module to process a 3D image as a stack of 2D image slices and adopt ConvLSTM to leverage contextual structure information from adjacent slices. In order to effectively transfer topology-critical information across slices, we propose an Iterative-Topology Attention (ITA) module that provides a more stable topology-critical map for segmentation. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our proposed method outperforms various baselines in terms of topology-aware evaluation metrics.

preprint2022arXiv

AirCode: A Robust Object Encoding Method

Object encoding and identification are crucial for many robotic tasks such as autonomous exploration and semantic relocalization. Existing works heavily rely on the tracking of detected objects but have difficulty recalling revisited objects precisely. In this paper, we propose a novel object encoding method, which is named as AirCode, based on a graph of key-points. To be robust to the number of key-points detected, we propose a feature sparse encoding and object dense encoding method to ensure that each key-point can only affect a small part of the object descriptors, leading it to be robust to viewpoint changes, scaling, occlusion, and even object deformation. In the experiments, we show that it achieves superior performance for object identification than the state-of-the-art algorithms and is able to provide reliable semantic relocalization. It is a plug-and-play module and we expect that it will play an important role in various applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Amplitude analysis and branching-fraction measurement of $D_{s}^{+} \to π^{+}π^{0}η^{\prime}$

Using data collected with the BESIII detector in $e^+e^-$ collisions at center-of-mass energies between 4.178 and 4.226 GeV and corresponding to 6.32~fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, we report the amplitude analysis and branching-fraction measurement of the $D^+_s \to π^+ π^0 η^{\prime}$ decay. We find that the dominant intermediate process is $D^+_s \toρ^+ η^{\prime}$ and the significances of other resonant and nonresonant processes are all less than $3σ$. The upper limits on the branching fractions of $S$-wave and $P$-wave nonresonant components are set to $0.10\%$ and $0.74\%$ at the $90\%$ confidence level, respectively. In addition, the branching fraction of the $D^+_s \to π^+ π^0 η^{\prime}$ decay is measured to be $(6.15\pm0.25(\rm stat.)\pm0.18(\rm syst.))\%$, which receives significant contribution only from $D_s^+\to ρ^+η^{\prime}$ according to the amplitude analysis.

preprint2022arXiv

Attention Hijacking in Trojan Transformers

Trojan attacks pose a severe threat to AI systems. Recent works on Transformer models received explosive popularity and the self-attentions are now indisputable. This raises a central question: Can we reveal the Trojans through attention mechanisms in BERTs and ViTs? In this paper, we investigate the attention hijacking pattern in Trojan AIs, \ie, the trigger token ``kidnaps'' the attention weights when a specific trigger is present. We observe the consistent attention hijacking pattern in Trojan Transformers from both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) domains. This intriguing property helps us to understand the Trojan mechanism in BERTs and ViTs. We also propose an Attention-Hijacking Trojan Detector (AHTD) to discriminate the Trojan AIs from the clean ones.

preprint2022arXiv

Cycle Representation Learning for Inductive Relation Prediction

In recent years, algebraic topology and its modern development, the theory of persistent homology, has shown great potential in graph representation learning. In this paper, based on the mathematics of algebraic topology, we propose a novel solution for inductive relation prediction, an important learning task for knowledge graph completion. To predict the relation between two entities, one can use the existence of rules, namely a sequence of relations. Previous works view rules as paths and primarily focus on the searching of paths between entities. The space of rules is huge, and one has to sacrifice either efficiency or accuracy. In this paper, we consider rules as cycles and show that the space of cycles has a unique structure based on the mathematics of algebraic topology. By exploring the linear structure of the cycle space, we can improve the searching efficiency of rules. We propose to collect cycle bases that span the space of cycles. We build a novel GNN framework on the collected cycles to learn the representations of cycles, and to predict the existence/non-existence of a relation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

Discovering Governing Equations by Machine Learning implemented with Invariance

The partial differential equation (PDE) plays a significantly important role in many fields of science and engineering. The conventional case of the derivation of PDE mainly relies on first principles and empirical observation. However, the development of machine learning technology allows us to mine potential control equations from the massive amounts of stored data in a fresh way. Although there has been considerable progress in the data-driven discovery of PDE, the extant literature mostly focuses on the improvements of discovery methods, without substantial breakthroughs in the discovery process itself, including the principles for the construction of candidates and how to incorporate physical priors. In this paper, through rigorous derivation of formulas, novel physically enhanced machining learning discovery methods for control equations: GSNN (Galileo Symbolic Neural Network) and LSNN (Lorentz Symbolic Neural Network) are firstly proposed based on Galileo invariance and Lorentz invariance respectively, setting forth guidelines for building the candidates of discovering equations. The adoption of mandatory embedding of physical constraints is fundamentally different from PINN in the form of the loss function, thus ensuring that the designed Neural Network strictly obeys the physical prior of invariance and enhancing the interpretability of the network. By comparing the results with PDE-NET in numerical experiments of Burgers equation and Sine-Gordon equation, it shows that the method presented in this study has better accuracy, parsimony, and interpretability.

preprint2022arXiv

FAAG: Fast Adversarial Audio Generation through Interactive Attack Optimisation

Automatic Speech Recognition services (ASRs) inherit deep neural networks' vulnerabilities like crafted adversarial examples. Existing methods often suffer from low efficiency because the target phases are added to the entire audio sample, resulting in high demand for computational resources. This paper proposes a novel scheme named FAAG as an iterative optimization-based method to generate targeted adversarial examples quickly. By injecting the noise over the beginning part of the audio, FAAG generates adversarial audio in high quality with a high success rate timely. Specifically, we use audio's logits output to map each character in the transcription to an approximate position of the audio's frame. Thus, an adversarial example can be generated by FAAG in approximately two minutes using CPUs only and around ten seconds with one GPU while maintaining an average success rate over 85%. Specifically, the FAAG method can speed up around 60% compared with the baseline method during the adversarial example generation process. Furthermore, we found that appending benign audio to any suspicious examples can effectively defend against the targeted adversarial attack. We hope that this work paves the way for inventing new adversarial attacks against speech recognition with computational constraints.

preprint2022arXiv

First Observation of the Semileptonic Decay $Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^- e^+ν_e$

Using $4.5~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ annihilation data samples collected at the center-of-mass energies ranging from 4.600~GeV to 4.699~GeV with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider, a first study of the semileptonic decays $Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^-e^+ν_e$, $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1520) e^+ν_e$ and $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1405) e^+ν_e$ is performed. The $Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^-e^+ν_e$ decay is observed with a significance of $8.2σ$ and the branching fraction is measured to be $\mathcal{B}(Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^- e^+ν_e)=(0.88\pm0.17_{\rm stat.}\pm0.07_{\rm syst.})\times 10^{-3}$. We also report evidence of $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1520)e^+ν_e$ and $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1405)e^+ν_e$ with significances of $3.3σ$ and $3.2σ$, respectively, and measure $\mathcal B(Λ^+_c\rightarrow Λ(1520)e^+ν_e)=(1.02\pm0.52_{\rm stat.}\pm0.11_{\rm syst.})\times10^{-3}$ and $\mathcal B(Λ^+_c\rightarrow Λ(1405)[\rightarrow pK^-]e^+ν_e)=(0.42\pm0.19_{\rm stat.}\pm0.04_{\rm syst.})\times10^{-3}$. Combining these with the inclusive semileptonic $Λ_c^+$ branching fraction measured by BESIII, the relative fraction is determined to be $[\mathcal{B}(Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^-e^+ν_e)/\mathcal{B}(Λ_c^+\rightarrow X e^+ν_e)]=(2.1\pm0.4_{\rm stat.}\pm0.2_{\rm syst.})\%$, which provides a clear confirmation that semileptonic $Λ_c^+$ decays are not saturated by the $Λ\ell^+ν_{\ell}$ final state.

preprint2022arXiv

HOB-CNN: Hallucination of Occluded Branches with a Convolutional Neural Network for 2D Fruit Trees

Orchard automation has attracted the attention of researchers recently due to the shortage of global labor force. To automate tasks in orchards such as pruning, thinning, and harvesting, a detailed understanding of the tree structure is required. However, occlusions from foliage and fruits can make it challenging to predict the position of occluded trunks and branches. This work proposes a regression-based deep learning model, Hallucination of Occluded Branch Convolutional Neural Network (HOB-CNN), for tree branch position prediction in varying occluded conditions. We formulate tree branch position prediction as a regression problem towards the horizontal locations of the branch along the vertical direction or vice versa. We present comparative experiments on Y-shaped trees with two state-of-the-art baselines, representing common approaches to the problem. Experiments show that HOB-CNN outperform the baselines at predicting branch position and shows robustness against varying levels of occlusion. We further validated HOB-CNN against two different types of 2D trees, and HOB-CNN shows generalization across different trees and robustness under different occluded conditions.

preprint2022arXiv

Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference between Two Hyper-Entangled Photons Enables Observation of Symmetric and Anti-Symmetric Particle Exchange Phases

Two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is a fundamental quantum effect with no classical counterpart. The exiting researches on two-photon interference were mainly limited in one degree of freedom (DoF), hence it is still a challenge to realize the quantum interference in multiple DoFs. Here we demonstrate the HOM interference between two hyper-entangled photons in two DoFs of polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) for all the sixteen hyper-entangled Bell states. We observe hyper-entangled two-photon interference with bunching effect for ten symmetric states (nine Boson-Boson states, one Fermion-Fermion state) and anti-bunching effect for six anti-symmetric states (three Boson-Fermion states, three Fermion-Boson states). More interestingly, expanding the Hilbert space by introducing an extra DoF for two photons enables to transfer the unmeasurable external phase in the initial DoF to a measurable internal phase in the expanded two DoFs. We directly measured the symmetric exchange phases being $0.012 \pm 0.002$, $0.025 \pm 0.002$ and $0.027 \pm 0.002$ in radian for the three Boson states in OAM and the anti-symmetric exchange phase being $0.991 π\pm 0.002$ in radian for the other Fermion state, as theoretical predictions. Our work may not only pave the way for more wide applications of quantum interference, but also develop new technologies by expanding Hilbert space in more DoFs.

preprint2022arXiv

Induced gravitational waves from statistically anisotropic scalar perturbations

Scalar-induced gravitational waves (SIGWs) are attracting growing attention for probing extremely short-scale scalar perturbations via gravitational wave measurements. In this paper, we investigate the SIGWs from statistically anisotropic scalar perturbations, which are motivated in inflationary scenarios in the presence of, e.g., a vector field. While the ensemble average of the SIGW energy spectrum is isotropic for the standard statistically isotropic scalar perturbations, the statistical anisotropy in the source introduces the multipole moments of the differential SIGW energy spectrum. We consider quadrupole anisotropy in the scalar power spectrum and show that the SIGW spectrum has anisotropies up to $\ell=4$. We present generic formulas of the multipole moments and then apply them to the delta-function-like and log-normal source spectra. We find analytic expressions for the former case and show that the infrared scalings of the multipole moments are the same as the isotropic SIGWs. Interestingly, the monopole has an additional local minimum in the high-$k$ tail, a key feature to distinguish from the isotropic SIGWs. The latter log-normal case is analytic for the narrow-peak source, and we perform the numerical calculation for the broad peak. As one expects, the multipole moments become broader with increasing source width. Our results are helpful to test the isotropy of primordial density perturbations at extremely small scales through SIGWs.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Self-Modulating Attention in Continuous Time Space with Applications to Sequential Recommendation

User interests are usually dynamic in the real world, which poses both theoretical and practical challenges for learning accurate preferences from rich behavior data. Among existing user behavior modeling solutions, attention networks are widely adopted for its effectiveness and relative simplicity. Despite being extensively studied, existing attentions still suffer from two limitations: i) conventional attentions mainly take into account the spatial correlation between user behaviors, regardless the distance between those behaviors in the continuous time space; and ii) these attentions mostly provide a dense and undistinguished distribution over all past behaviors then attentively encode them into the output latent representations. This is however not suitable in practical scenarios where a user's future actions are relevant to a small subset of her/his historical behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel attention network, named self-modulating attention, that models the complex and non-linearly evolving dynamic user preferences. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on top-N sequential recommendation tasks, and the results on three large-scale real-world datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Topological Interactions for Multi-Class Medical Image Segmentation

Deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance for multi-class medical image segmentation. However, they are limited in their ability to encode topological interactions among different classes (e.g., containment and exclusion). These constraints naturally arise in biomedical images and can be crucial in improving segmentation quality. In this paper, we introduce a novel topological interaction module to encode the topological interactions into a deep neural network. The implementation is completely convolution-based and thus can be very efficient. This empowers us to incorporate the constraints into end-to-end training and enrich the feature representation of neural networks. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated on different types of interactions. We also demonstrate the generalizability of the method on both proprietary and public challenge datasets, in both 2D and 3D settings, as well as across different modalities such as CT and Ultrasound. Code is available at: https://github.com/TopoXLab/TopoInteraction

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$ cross section and observation of a resonant structure

Based on $e^{+}e^{-}$ collision data collected by the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider at center-of-mass energies from 2.000 to 3.080 GeV, a partial-wave analysis is performed for the process $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$. The Born cross section of the process $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$ and its subprocesses $e^{+}e^{-} \to ϕπ^{0}$, $K^{*}(892)K$ and $K^{*}_{2}(1430)K$ are measured. The results for $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$ and $ϕπ^{0}$ are consistent with the BaBar measurements and with improved precision. By analyzing the cross section, of the subprocesses $e^{+}e^{-} \to$ $K^{*}(892)K$ and $K^{*}_{2}(1430)K$, a structure with mass $M_R$ = (2208 $\pm$ 19 $\pm$ 24) MeV/$c^{2}$ and width $Γ_R$ = (168 $\pm$ 24 $\pm$ 39) MeV is observed with a combined statistical significance of 7.6$σ$. The measured resonance parameters suggest it can be identified as the $ϕ(2170)$, thus the results provide valuable input to understand the internal nature of this state.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the branching fraction and decay asymmetry of $Λ\to nγ$

The radiative hyperon decay $Λ\to nγ$ is studied using $(10087\pm44)\times 10^6$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector operating at BEPCII. The absolute branching fraction of the decay $Λ\to nγ$ is determined with a significance of 5.6$σ$ to be $[0.832\pm0.038(\rm stat.)\pm0.054(\rm syst.)]\times10^{-3}$, which lies significantly below the current PDG value. By analyzing the joint angular distribution of the decay products, the first determination of the decay asymmetry $α_γ$ is reported with a value of $-0.16\pm0.10(\rm stat.)\pm0.05(\rm syst.)$.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the cross section of $e^{+}e^{-}\toηπ^{+}π^{-}$ at center-of-mass energies from 3.872 GeV to 4.700 GeV

Using data samples with an integrated luminosity of 19 fb$^{-1}$ at twenty-eight center-of-mass energies from 3.872 GeV to 4.700 GeV collected with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII electron--positron collider, the process $e^{+}e^{-}\toηπ^{+}π^{-}$ and the intermediate process $e^{+}e^{-}\toηρ^{0}$ are studied for the first time. The Born cross sections are measured. No significant resonance structure is observed in the cross section lineshape.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the total and leptonic decay widths of the $J/ψ$ resonance with an energy scan method at BESIII

Using $e^+e^-$ annihilation data sets collected with the BESIII detector, we measure the cross sections of the processes $e^+e^- \to e^+e^-$ and $e^+e^- \to μ^+μ^-$ at fifteen center-of-mass energy points in the vicinity of the $J/ψ$ resonance. By a simultaneous fit to the measured, center-of-mass energy dependent cross sections of the two processes, the combined quantities $Γ_{ee} Γ_{ee} / Γ_{\rm tot}$ and $Γ_{ee} Γ_{μμ} / Γ_{\rm tot}$ are determined to be ($0.346 \pm 0.009$) and ($0.335 \pm 0.006$) keV, respectively, where $Γ_{ee}$, $Γ_{μμ}$, and $Γ_{\rm tot}$ are the electronic, muonic, and total decay widths of the $J/ψ$ resonance, respectively. Using the resultant $Γ_{ee} Γ_{μμ} / Γ_{\rm tot}$ and $Γ_{ee} Γ_{ee} / Γ_{\rm tot}$, the ratio $Γ_{ee} / Γ_{μμ}$ is calculated to be $1.031 \pm 0.015$, which is consistent with the expectation of lepton universality within about two standard deviations. Assuming lepton universality and using the branching fraction of the $J/ψ$ leptonic decay measured by BESIII in 2013, $Γ_{\rm tot}$ and $Γ_{ll}$ are determined to be ($93.0 \pm 2.1$) and ($5.56 \pm 0.11$) keV, respectively, where $Γ_{ll}$ is the average leptonic decay width of the $J/ψ$ resonance.

preprint2022arXiv

Modeling Dynamic User Preference via Dictionary Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Capturing the dynamics in user preference is crucial to better predict user future behaviors because user preferences often drift over time. Many existing recommendation algorithms -- including both shallow and deep ones -- often model such dynamics independently, i.e., user static and dynamic preferences are not modeled under the same latent space, which makes it difficult to fuse them for recommendation. This paper considers the problem of embedding a user's sequential behavior into the latent space of user preferences, namely translating sequence to preference. To this end, we formulate the sequential recommendation task as a dictionary learning problem, which learns: 1) a shared dictionary matrix, each row of which represents a partial signal of user dynamic preferences shared across users; and 2) a posterior distribution estimator using a deep autoregressive model integrated with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), which can select related rows of the dictionary to represent a user's dynamic preferences conditioned on his/her past behaviors. Qualitative studies on the Netflix dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can capture the user preference drifts over time and quantitative studies on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve higher accuracy compared with state-of-the-art factorization and neural sequential recommendation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/cchao0116/S2PNM-TKDE2021.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-Class Cell Detection Using Spatial Context Representation

In digital pathology, both detection and classification of cells are important for automatic diagnostic and prognostic tasks. Classifying cells into subtypes, such as tumor cells, lymphocytes or stromal cells is particularly challenging. Existing methods focus on morphological appearance of individual cells, whereas in practice pathologists often infer cell classes through their spatial context. In this paper, we propose a novel method for both detection and classification that explicitly incorporates spatial contextual information. We use the spatial statistical function to describe local density in both a multi-class and a multi-scale manner. Through representation learning and deep clustering techniques, we learn advanced cell representation with both appearance and spatial context. On various benchmarks, our method achieves better performance than state-of-the-arts, especially on the classification task. We also create a new dataset for multi-class cell detection and classification in breast cancer and we make both our code and data publicly available.

preprint2022arXiv

NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Efficient Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2022 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The task of the challenge was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of $\times$4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high resolution images. The aim was to design a network for single image super-resolution that achieved improvement of efficiency measured according to several metrics including runtime, parameters, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining the PSNR of 29.00dB on DIV2K validation set. IMDN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 3 tracks including the main track (runtime), sub-track one (model complexity), and sub-track two (overall performance). In the main track, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated. The rank of the teams were determined directly by the absolute value of the average runtime on the validation set and test set. In sub-track one, the number of parameters and FLOPs were considered. And the individual rankings of the two metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking in this track. In sub-track two, all of the five metrics mentioned in the description of the challenge including runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption were considered. Similar to sub-track one, the rankings of five metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking. The challenge had 303 registered participants, and 43 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution.

preprint2022arXiv

Nuclear Norm Maximization Based Curiosity-Driven Learning

To handle the sparsity of the extrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning, researchers have proposed intrinsic reward which enables the agent to learn the skills that might come in handy for pursuing the rewards in the future, such as encouraging the agent to visit novel states. However, the intrinsic reward can be noisy due to the undesirable environment's stochasticity and directly applying the noisy value predictions to supervise the policy is detrimental to improve the learning performance and efficiency. Moreover, many previous studies employ $\ell^2$ norm or variance to measure the exploration novelty, which will amplify the noise due to the square operation. In this paper, we address aforementioned challenges by proposing a novel curiosity leveraging the nuclear norm maximization (NNM), which can quantify the novelty of exploring the environment more accurately while providing high-tolerance to the noise and outliers. We conduct extensive experiments across a variety of benchmark environments and the results suggest that NNM can provide state-of-the-art performance compared with previous curiosity methods. On 26 Atari games subset, when trained with only intrinsic reward, NNM achieves a human-normalized score of 1.09, which doubles that of competitive intrinsic rewards-based approaches. Our code will be released publicly to enhance the reproducibility.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of $η_c(2S) \to 3(π^+π^-)$ and measurements of $χ_{cJ} \to 3(π^+π^-)$ in $ψ(3686)$ radiative transitions

The hadronic decay $η_c(2S) \to 3(π^+π^-)$ is observed with a statistical significance of 9.3 standard deviations using $(448.1\pm2.9)\times10^6$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected by the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider. The measured mass and width of $η_c(2S)$ are $(3643.4 \pm 2.3 (\rm stat.) \pm 4.4 (\rm syst.))$ MeV/$c^2$ and $(19.8 \pm 3.9 (\rm stat.) \pm 3.1 (\rm syst.))$ MeV, respectively, which are consistent with the world average values within two standard deviations. The product branching fraction $\mathcal{B}[ψ(3686)\to γη_c(2S)]\times\mathcal{B}[η_c(2S)\to3(π^+π^-)]$ is measured to be $(9.2 \pm 1.0 (\rm stat.) \pm 0.9 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-6}$. Using $\mathcal{B}[ψ(3686)\to γη_c(2S)]=(7.0^{+3.4}_{-2.5})\times10^{-4}$, we obtain $\mathcal{B}[η_c(2S) \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (1.31 \pm 0.15 (\rm stat.) \pm 0.13 (\rm syst.)(^{+0.64}_{-0.47}) (\rm extr))\times10^{-2}$, where the third uncertainty is from $\mathcal{B}[ψ(3686) \to γη_c(2S)]$. We also measure the $χ_{cJ} \to 3(π^+π^-)$ ($J=0, 1, 2$) decays via $ψ(3686) \to γχ_{cJ}$ transitions. The branching fractions are $\mathcal{B}[χ_{c0} \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (2.080\pm0.006 (\rm stat.)\pm0.068 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-2}$, $\mathcal{B}[χ_{c1} \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (1.092\pm0.004 (\rm stat.)\pm0.035 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-2}$, and $\mathcal{B}[χ_{c2} \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (1.565\pm0.005 (\rm stat.)\pm0.048 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-2}$.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of the double Dalitz decay $η'\to e^+e^-e^+e^-$

Based on $(10087 \pm 44)\times10^6$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector at BEPCII, the double Dalitz decay $η'\to e^+e^-e^+e^-$ is observed for the first time via the $J/ψ\toγη'$ decay process. The significance is found to be 5.7$σ$ with systematic uncertainties taken into consideration. Its branching fraction is determined to be $\mathcal{B}(η'\to e^+ e^- e^+ e^-) =(4.5\pm1.0(\mathrm{stat.})\pm0.5(\mathrm{sys.})) \times 10^{-6}$.

preprint2022arXiv

Open-source Framework for Transonic Boundary Layer Natural Transition Analysis over Complex Geometries in Nektar++

We introduce an open-source and unified framework for transition analysis for laminar boundary layer natural transition at transonic conditions and over complex geometries, where surface irregularities may be present. Different computational tools are integrated in the framework, and therefore overcomes the difficulties of two separate and usually quite disparate processes when using $e^N$ method for transition analysis. To generate a baseflow with desired pressure distribution, appropriate pressure compatible inflow boundary condition needs to be developed and enforced. We first derive the system for 1D numerical stability analysis for boundary conditions, and construct three types of pressure compatible inflow. We demonstrate that the entropy-pressure compatible inflow is stable unlike other choices. Compared with the steady baseflow computation, the unsteady simulation for the disturbance field is more challenging for compressible flows because of complex wave reflections, which can easily contaminate the results. We therefore introduce the two main sources of wave decontamination and corresponding methods to obtain clean signal. The workflow within the framework is then verified by computing the disturbance development in 2D flat plate boundary layer flows at Mach $0.8$. The $N$-factors over a clean flat plate and a flat plate with a forward-facing step are generated, and agree well with the results from the reference. Following the verified workflow, We then analyze the disturbance growth on a wing section of the CRM-NLF model. The N-factor on a 2D simulation is generated and studied.

preprint2022arXiv

Overlapping Domain Decomposition Preconditioner for Integral Equations

The discretization of certain integral equations, e.g., the first-kind Fredholm equation of Laplace's equation, leads to symmetric positive-definite linear systems, where the coefficient matrix is dense and often ill-conditioned. We introduce a new preconditioner based on a novel overlapping domain decomposition that can be combined efficiently with fast direct solvers. Empirically, we observe that the condition number of the preconditioned system is $O(1)$, independent of the problem size. Our domain decomposition is designed so that we can construct approximate factorizations of the subproblems efficiently. In particular, we apply the recursive skeletonization algorithm to subproblems associated with every subdomain. We present numerical results on problem sizes up to $16\,384^2$ in 2D and $256^3$ in 3D, which were solved in less than 16 hours and three hours, respectively, on an Intel Xeon Platinum 8280M.

preprint2022arXiv

PixelFolder: An Efficient Progressive Pixel Synthesis Network for Image Generation

Pixel synthesis is a promising research paradigm for image generation, which can well exploit pixel-wise prior knowledge for generation. However, existing methods still suffer from excessive memory footprint and computation overhead. In this paper, we propose a progressive pixel synthesis network towards efficient image generation, coined as PixelFolder. Specifically, PixelFolder formulates image generation as a progressive pixel regression problem and synthesizes images via a multi-stage structure, which can greatly reduce the overhead caused by large tensor transformations. In addition, we introduce novel pixel folding operations to further improve model efficiency while maintaining pixel-wise prior knowledge for end-to-end regression. With these innovative designs, we greatly reduce the expenditure of pixel synthesis, e.g., reducing 89% computation and 53% parameters compared with the latest pixel synthesis method CIPS. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, namely FFHQ and LSUN Church. The experimental results show that with much less expenditure, PixelFolder obtains new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two benchmark datasets, i.e., 3.77 FID and 2.45 FID on FFHQ and LSUN Church, respectively.Meanwhile, PixelFolder is also more efficient than the SOTA methods like StyleGAN2, reducing about 72% computation and 31% parameters, respectively. These results greatly validate the effectiveness of the proposed PixelFolder.

preprint2022arXiv

Resistance Training using Prior Bias: toward Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to build a structured representation of a scene using objects and pairwise relationships, which benefits downstream tasks. However, current SGG methods usually suffer from sub-optimal scene graph generation because of the long-tailed distribution of training data. To address this problem, we propose Resistance Training using Prior Bias (RTPB) for the scene graph generation. Specifically, RTPB uses a distributed-based prior bias to improve models' detecting ability on less frequent relationships during training, thus improving the model generalizability on tail categories. In addition, to further explore the contextual information of objects and relationships, we design a contextual encoding backbone network, termed as Dual Transformer (DTrans). We perform extensive experiments on a very popular benchmark, VG150, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for the unbiased scene graph generation. In specific, our RTPB achieves an improvement of over 10% under the mean recall when applied to current SGG methods. Furthermore, DTrans with RTPB outperforms nearly all state-of-the-art methods with a large margin.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for $X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c0}$ and $X(3872)\toππχ_{c0}$ at BESIII

Using 9.9 fb$^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ collision data collected by the BESIII detector at center-of-mass energies between 4.15 and 4.30 GeV, we search for the processes $e^+e^-\toγX(3872)$ with $X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0χ_{c0}$ and $X(3872)\rightarrowππχ_{c0}$. Depending on the fitting model, the statistical significance for $X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c0}$ ranges from 1.3$σ$ to 2.8$σ$. We set upper limits (at 90\% C.L.) of $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^+π^-J/ψ)}<3.6$, $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^+π^-χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^+π^-J/ψ)}<0.68$, and $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0π^0χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^+π^-J/ψ)}<1.7$. Combined with the BESIII measurement of $X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c1}$, we also set an upper limit of $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c1})}<4.4$.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for baryon and lepton number violation decay $D^{\pm}\to n(\bar{n})e^{\pm}$

Using a data set of electron-positron collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of ${\rm 2.93~fb^{-1}}$ taken with the BESIII detector at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV, a search for the baryon ($B$) and lepton ($L$) number violating decays $D^{\pm}\to n(\bar{n})e^{\pm}$ is performed. No signal is observed and the upper limits on the branching fractions at the $90\%$ confidence level are set to be $1.43\times10^{-5}$ for the decays $D^{+(-)}\to \bar{n}(n)e^{+(-)}$ with $Δ|B-L|=0$, and $2.91\times10^{-5}$ for the decays $D^{+(-)}\to n(\bar{n})e^{+(-)}$ with $Δ|B-L|=2$ , where $Δ|B-L|$ denotes the change in the difference between baryon and lepton numbers.

preprint2022arXiv

Solving Linear Systems on a GPU with Hierarchically Off-Diagonal Low-Rank Approximations

We are interested in solving linear systems arising from three applications: (1) kernel methods in machine learning, (2) discretization of boundary integral equations from mathematical physics, and (3) Schur complements formed in the factorization of many large sparse matrices. The coefficient matrices are often data-sparse in the sense that their off-diagonal blocks have low numerical ranks; specifically, we focus on "hierarchically off-diagonal low-rank (HODLR)" matrices. We introduce algorithms for factorizing HODLR matrices and for applying the factorizations on a GPU. The algorithms leverage the efficiency of batched dense linear algebra, and they scale nearly linearly with the matrix size when the numerical ranks are fixed. The accuracy of the HODLR-matrix approximation is a tunable parameter, so we can construct high-accuracy fast direct solvers or low-accuracy robust preconditioners. Numerical results show that we can solve problems with several millions of unknowns in a couple of seconds on a single GPU.

preprint2022arXiv

Synthesizing MR Image Contrast Enhancement Using 3D High-resolution ConvNets

\textit{Objective:} Gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCAs) have been widely used to better visualize disease in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, gadolinium deposition within the brain and body has raised safety concerns about the use of GBCAs. Therefore, the development of novel approaches that can decrease or even eliminate GBCA exposure while providing similar contrast information would be of significant use clinically. \textit{Methods:} In this work, we present a deep learning based approach for contrast-enhanced T1 synthesis on brain tumor patients. A 3D high-resolution fully convolutional network (FCN), which maintains high resolution information through processing and aggregates multi-scale information in parallel, is designed to map pre-contrast MRI sequences to contrast-enhanced MRI sequences. Specifically, three pre-contrast MRI sequences, T1, T2 and apparent diffusion coefficient map (ADC), are utilized as inputs and the post-contrast T1 sequences are utilized as target output. To alleviate the data imbalance problem between normal tissues and the tumor regions, we introduce a local loss to improve the contribution of the tumor regions, which leads to better enhancement results on tumors. \textit{Results:} Extensive quantitative and visual assessments are performed, with our proposed model achieving a PSNR of 28.24dB in the brain and 21.2dB in tumor regions. \textit{Conclusion and Significance:} Our results suggest the potential of substituting GBCAs with synthetic contrast images generated via deep learning. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/chenchao666/Contrast-enhanced-MRI-Synthesis

preprint2022arXiv

Temporal Context Matters: Enhancing Single Image Prediction with Disease Progression Representations

Clinical outcome or severity prediction from medical images has largely focused on learning representations from single-timepoint or snapshot scans. It has been shown that disease progression can be better characterized by temporal imaging. We therefore hypothesized that outcome predictions can be improved by utilizing the disease progression information from sequential images. We present a deep learning approach that leverages temporal progression information to improve clinical outcome predictions from single-timepoint images. In our method, a self-attention based Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) is used to learn a representation that is most reflective of the disease trajectory. Meanwhile, a Vision Transformer is pretrained in a self-supervised fashion to extract features from single-timepoint images. The key contribution is to design a recalibration module that employs maximum mean discrepancy loss (MMD) to align distributions of the above two contextual representations. We train our system to predict clinical outcomes and severity grades from single-timepoint images. Experiments on chest and osteoarthritis radiography datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques.

preprint2022arXiv

Topological spin texture of chiral edge states in photonic two-dimensional quantum walks

Topological insulators host topology-linked boundary states, whose spin and charge degrees of freedom could be exploited to design topological devices with enhanced functionality. We experimentally observe that dissipationless chiral edge states in a spin-orbit coupled anomalous Floquet topological phase exhibit topological spin texture on boundaries, realized via a two-dimensional quantum walk. Our experiment shows that, for a walker traveling around a closed loop along the boundary in real space, its spin evolves and winds through a great circle on the Bloch sphere, which implies that edge-spin texture has nontrivial winding. This winding is linked to the bulk Dirac Hamiltonian around the energy-gap opening point. Our experiment confirms that two-dimensional anomalous Floquet topological systems exhibit topological spin texture on the boundary, which could inspire novel topology-based spintronic phenomena and devices.

preprint2022arXiv

Trigger Hunting with a Topological Prior for Trojan Detection

Despite their success and popularity, deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable when facing backdoor attacks. This impedes their wider adoption, especially in mission critical applications. This paper tackles the problem of Trojan detection, namely, identifying Trojaned models -- models trained with poisoned data. One popular approach is reverse engineering, i.e., recovering the triggers on a clean image by manipulating the model's prediction. One major challenge of reverse engineering approach is the enormous search space of triggers. To this end, we propose innovative priors such as diversity and topological simplicity to not only increase the chances of finding the appropriate triggers but also improve the quality of the found triggers. Moreover, by encouraging a diverse set of trigger candidates, our method can perform effectively in cases with unknown target labels. We demonstrate that these priors can significantly improve the quality of the recovered triggers, resulting in substantially improved Trojan detection accuracy as validated on both synthetic and publicly available TrojAI benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

Ultrahigh-energy Gamma Rays and Gravitational Waves from Primordial Exotic Stellar Bubbles

We put forward a novel class of exotic celestial objects that can be produced through phase transitions occurred in the primordial Universe. These objects appear as bubbles of stellar sizes and can be dominated by primordial black holes (PBHs). We report that, due to the processes of Hawking radiation and binary evolution of PBHs inside these stellar bubbles, both electromagnetic and gravitational radiations can be emitted that are featured on the gamma-ray spectra and stochastic gravitational waves (GWs). Our results reveal that, depending on the mass distribution, the exotic stellar bubbles consisting of PBHs provide not only a decent fit for the ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray spectrum reported by the recent LHAASO experiment, but also predict GW signals that are expected to be tested by the forthcoming GW surveys.

preprint2022arXiv

Video is All You Need: Attacking PPG-based Biometric Authentication

Unobservable physiological signals enhance biometric authentication systems. Photoplethysmography (PPG) signals are convenient owning to its ease of measurement and are usually well protected against remote adversaries in authentication. Any leaked PPG signals help adversaries compromise the biometric authentication systems, and the advent of remote PPG (rPPG) enables adversaries to acquire PPG signals through restoration. While potentially dangerous, rPPG-based attacks are overlooked because existing methods require the victim's PPG signals. This paper proposes a novel spoofing attack approach that uses the waveforms of rPPG signals extracted from video clips to fool the PPG-based biometric authentication. We develop a new PPG restoration model that does not require leaked PPG signals for adversarial attacks. Test results on state-of-art PPG-based biometric authentication show that the signals recovered through rPPG pose a severe threat to PPG-based biometric authentication.

preprint2021arXiv

Alignment dependence of photoelectron momentum distributions for diatomic molecules N$_2$ in strong elliptical laser fields

We study ionization dynamics of aligned diatomic molecules N$_2$ in strong elliptical laser fields experimentally and theoretically. The alignment dependence of photoelectron momentum distributions (PMDs) of N$_2$ measured in experiments is highlighted with comparing to Ar measured synchronously. Our results show that the PMDs of N$_2$ depend strongly on the alignment of the molecule, relative to the main axis of the laser ellipse. In particular, the most-probable electron-emission angle which is often used in attosecond measurement, differs remarkably when changing the molecular alignment. We show that the interplay of two-center interference and tunneling when the electron goes through the laser-Coulomb-formed barrier, plays an important role in these phenomena. Our work gives suggestions on studying ultrafast electron motion inside aligned molecules.

preprint2021arXiv

Differentiable Nonparametric Belief Propagation

We present a differentiable approach to learn the probabilistic factors used for inference by a nonparametric belief propagation algorithm. Existing nonparametric belief propagation methods rely on domain-specific features encoded in the probabilistic factors of a graphical model. In this work, we replace each crafted factor with a differentiable neural network enabling the factors to be learned using an efficient optimization routine from labeled data. By combining differentiable neural networks with an efficient belief propagation algorithm, our method learns to maintain a set of marginal posterior samples using end-to-end training. We evaluate our differentiable nonparametric belief propagation (DNBP) method on a set of articulated pose tracking tasks and compare performance with a recurrent neural network. Results from this comparison demonstrate the effectiveness of using learned factors for tracking and suggest the practical advantage over hand-crafted approaches. The project webpage is available at: progress.eecs.umich.edu/projects/dnbp.

preprint2021arXiv

Geometry-Aware Fruit Grasping Estimation for Robotic Harvesting in Orchards

Field robotic harvesting is a promising technique in recent development of agricultural industry. It is vital for robots to recognise and localise fruits before the harvesting in natural orchards. However, the workspace of harvesting robots in orchards is complex: many fruits are occluded by branches and leaves. It is important to estimate a proper grasping pose for each fruit before performing the manipulation. In this study, a geometry-aware network, A3N, is proposed to perform end-to-end instance segmentation and grasping estimation using both color and geometry sensory data from a RGB-D camera. Besides, workspace geometry modelling is applied to assist the robotic manipulation. Moreover, we implement a global-to-local scanning strategy, which enables robots to accurately recognise and retrieve fruits in field environments with two consumer-level RGB-D cameras. We also evaluate the accuracy and robustness of proposed network comprehensively in experiments. The experimental results show that A3N achieves 0.873 on instance segmentation accuracy, with an average computation time of 35 ms. The average accuracy of grasping estimation is 0.61 cm and 4.8$^{\circ}$ in centre and orientation, respectively. Overall, the robotic system that utilizes the global-to-local scanning and A3N, achieves success rate of harvesting ranging from 70\% - 85\% in field harvesting experiments.

preprint2021arXiv

Human-in-the-loop Auditory Cueing Strategy for Gait Modification

External feedback in the form of visual, auditory and tactile cues has been used to assist patients to overcome mobility challenges. However, these cues can become less effective over time. There is limited research on adapting cues to account for inter and intra-personal variations in cue responsiveness. We propose a cue-provision framework that consists of a gait performance monitoring algorithm and an adaptive cueing strategy to improve gait performance. The proposed approach learns a model of the person's response to cues using Gaussian Process regression. The model is then used within an on-line optimization algorithm to generate cues to improve gait performance. We conduct a study with healthy participants to evaluate the ability of the adaptive cueing strategy to influence human gait, and compare its effectiveness to two other cueing approaches: the standard fixed cue approach and a proportional cue approach. The results show that adaptive cueing is more effective in changing the person's gait state once the response model is learned compared to the other methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Near-zero Downtime Recovery from Transient-error-induced Crashes

Due to the system scaling, transient errors caused by external noises, e.g., heat fluxes and particle strikes, have become a growing concern for the current and upcoming extreme-scale high-performance-computing (HPC) systems. However, since such errors are still quite rare as compared to no-fault cases, desirable solutions call for low/no-overhead systems that do not compromise the performance under no-fault conditions and also allow very fast fault recovery to minimize downtime. In this paper, we present IterPro, a light-weight compiler-assisted resilience technique to quickly and accurately recover processes from transient-error-induced crashes. IterPro repairs the corrupted process states on-the-fly upon occurrences of errors, enabling applications to continue their executions instead of being terminated. IterPro also exploits side effects introduced by induction variable based code optimization techniques to improve its recovery capability. To this end, two new code transformation passes are introduced to expose the side effects for resilience purposes. We evaluated IterPro with 4 scientific workloads as well as the NPB benchmarks suite. During their normal execution, IterPro incurs almost zero runtime overhead and a small, fixed 27MB memory overhead. Meanwhile, IterPro can recover on an average 83.55% of crash-causing errors within dozens of milliseconds with negligible downtime. With such an effective recovery mechanism, IterPro could tremendously mitigate the overheads and resource requirements of the resilience subsystem in future extreme-scale systems.

preprint2021arXiv

Reachability-based Trajectory Safeguard (RTS): A Safe and Fast Reinforcement Learning Safety Layer for Continuous Control

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have achieved remarkable performance in decision making and control tasks due to their ability to reason about long-term, cumulative reward using trial and error. However, during RL training, applying this trial-and-error approach to real-world robots operating in safety critical environment may lead to collisions. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a Reachability-based Trajectory Safeguard (RTS), which leverages reachability analysis to ensure safety during training and operation. Given a known (but uncertain) model of a robot, RTS precomputes a Forward Reachable Set of the robot tracking a continuum of parameterized trajectories. At runtime, the RL agent selects from this continuum in a receding-horizon way to control the robot; the FRS is used to identify if the agent's choice is safe or not, and to adjust unsafe choices. The efficacy of this method is illustrated on three nonlinear robot models, including a 12-D quadrotor drone, in simulation and in comparison with state-of-the-art safe motion planning methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Stability of SGD: Tightness Analysis and Improved Bounds

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based methods have been widely used for training large-scale machine learning models that also generalize well in practice. Several explanations have been offered for this generalization performance, a prominent one being algorithmic stability [18]. However, there are no known examples of smooth loss functions for which the analysis can be shown to be tight. Furthermore, apart from the properties of the loss function, data distribution has also been shown to be an important factor in generalization performance. This raises the question: is the stability analysis of [18] tight for smooth functions, and if not, for what kind of loss functions and data distributions can the stability analysis be improved? In this paper we first settle open questions regarding tightness of bounds in the data-independent setting: we show that for general datasets, the existing analysis for convex and strongly-convex loss functions is tight, but it can be improved for non-convex loss functions. Next, we give a novel and improved data-dependent bounds: we show stability upper bounds for a large class of convex regularized loss functions, with negligible regularization parameters, and improve existing data-dependent bounds in the non-convex setting. We hope that our results will initiate further efforts to better understand the data-dependent setting under non-convex loss functions, leading to an improved understanding of the generalization abilities of deep networks.

preprint2021arXiv

Strong-field response time and its implications on attosecond measurement

To measure and control the electron motion in atoms and molecules by the strong laser field on the attosecond time scale is one of the research frontiers of atomic and molecular photophysics. It involves many new phenomena and processes and raises a series of questions of concepts, theories and methods. Recent studies show that the Coulomb potential can cause the ionization time lag (about 100 attoseconds) between instants of the field maximum and the ionization-rate maximum. This lag can be understood as the response time of the electronic wave function to the strong-field-induced ionization event. It has a profound influence on the subsequent ultrafast dynamics of the ionized electron and can significantly change the time-frequency properties of electron trajectory (an important theoretical tool for attosecond measurement). Here, the research progress of response time and its implications on attosecond measurement are briefly introduced.

preprint2021arXiv

Training Federated GANs with Theoretical Guarantees: A Universal Aggregation Approach

Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated their potential in federated learning, i.e., learning a centralized model from data privately hosted by multiple sites. A federatedGAN jointly trains a centralized generator and multiple private discriminators hosted at different sites. A major theoretical challenge for the federated GAN is the heterogeneity of the local data distributions. Traditional approaches cannot guarantee to learn the target distribution, which isa mixture of the highly different local distributions. This paper tackles this theoretical challenge, and for the first time, provides a provably correct framework for federated GAN. We propose a new approach called Universal Aggregation, which simulates a centralized discriminator via carefully aggregating the mixture of all private discriminators. We prove that a generator trained with this simulated centralized discriminator can learn the desired target distribution. Through synthetic and real datasets, we show that our method can learn the mixture of largely different distributions where existing federated GAN methods fail.

preprint2020arXiv

An Algebraic Sparsified Nested Dissection Algorithm Using Low-Rank Approximations

We propose a new algorithm for the fast solution of large, sparse, symmetric positive-definite linear systems, spaND -- sparsified Nested Dissection. It is based on nested dissection, sparsification and low-rank compression. After eliminating all interiors at a given level of the elimination tree, the algorithm sparsifies all separators corresponding to the interiors. This operation reduces the size of the separators by eliminating some degrees of freedom but without introducing any fill-in. This is done at the expense of a small and controllable approximation error. The result is an approximate factorization that can be used as an efficient preconditioner. We then perform several numerical experiments to evaluate this algorithm. We demonstrate that a version using orthogonal factorization and block-diagonal scaling takes fewer CG iterations to converge than previous similar algorithms on various kinds of problems. Furthermore, this algorithm is provably guaranteed to never break down and the matrix stays symmetric positive-definite throughout the process. We evaluate the algorithm on some large problems and show it exhibits near-linear scaling. The factorization time is roughly O(N) and the number of iterations grows slowly with N.

preprint2020arXiv

Attention-Guided Discriminative Region Localization and Label Distribution Learning for Bone Age Assessment

Bone age assessment (BAA) is clinically important as it can be used to diagnose endocrine and metabolic disorders during child development. Existing deep learning based methods for classifying bone age use the global image as input, or exploit local information by annotating extra bounding boxes or key points. However, training with the global image underutilizes discriminative local information, while providing extra annotations is expensive and subjective. In this paper, we propose an attention-guided approach to automatically localize the discriminative regions for BAA without any extra annotations. Specifically, we first train a classification model to learn the attention maps of the discriminative regions, finding the hand region, the most discriminative region (the carpal bones), and the next most discriminative region (the metacarpal bones). Guided by those attention maps, we then crop the informative local regions from the original image and aggregate different regions for BAA. Instead of taking BAA as a general regression task, which is suboptimal due to the label ambiguity problem in the age label space, we propose using joint age distribution learning and expectation regression, which makes use of the ordinal relationship among hand images with different individual ages and leads to more robust age estimation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the RSNA pediatric bone age data set. Using no training annotations, our method achieves competitive results compared with existing state-of-the-art semi-automatic deep learning-based methods that require manual annotation. Code is available at https: //github.com/chenchao666/Bone-Age-Assessment.

preprint2020arXiv

BuildSenSys: Reusing Building Sensing Data for Traffic Prediction with Cross-domain Learning

With the rapid development of smart cities, smart buildings are generating a massive amount of building sensing data by the equipped sensors. Indeed, building sensing data provides a promising way to enrich a series of data-demanding and cost-expensive urban mobile applications. In this paper, we study how to reuse building sensing data to predict traffic volume on nearby roads. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to achieve accurate prediction on such cross-domain data with two major challenges. First, relationships between building sensing data and traffic data are not unknown as prior, and the spatio-temporal complexities impose more difficulties to uncover the underlying reasons behind the above relationships. Second, it is even more daunting to accurately predict traffic volume with dynamic building-traffic correlations, which are cross-domain, non-linear, and time-varying. To address the above challenges, we design and implement BuildSenSys, a first-of-its-kind system for nearby traffic volume prediction by reusing building sensing data. First, we conduct a comprehensive building-traffic analysis based on multi-source datasets, disclosing how and why building sensing data is correlated with nearby traffic volume. Second, we propose a novel recurrent neural network for traffic volume prediction based on cross-domain learning with two attention mechanisms. Specifically, a cross-domain attention mechanism captures the building-traffic correlations and adaptively extracts the most relevant building sensing data at each predicting step. Then, a temporal attention mechanism is employed to model the temporal dependencies of data across historical time intervals. The extensive experimental studies demonstrate that BuildSenSys outperforms all baseline methods with up to 65.3% accuracy improvement (e.g., 2.2% MAPE) in predicting nearby traffic volume.

preprint2020arXiv

DRWR: A Differentiable Renderer without Rendering for Unsupervised 3D Structure Learning from Silhouette Images

Differentiable renderers have been used successfully for unsupervised 3D structure learning from 2D images because they can bridge the gap between 3D and 2D. To optimize 3D shape parameters, current renderers rely on pixel-wise losses between rendered images of 3D reconstructions and ground truth images from corresponding viewpoints. Hence they require interpolation of the recovered 3D structure at each pixel, visibility handling, and optionally evaluating a shading model. In contrast, here we propose a Differentiable Renderer Without Rendering (DRWR) that omits these steps. DRWR only relies on a simple but effective loss that evaluates how well the projections of reconstructed 3D point clouds cover the ground truth object silhouette. Specifically, DRWR employs a smooth silhouette loss to pull the projection of each individual 3D point inside the object silhouette, and a structure-aware repulsion loss to push each pair of projections that fall inside the silhouette far away from each other. Although we omit surface interpolation, visibility handling, and shading, our results demonstrate that DRWR achieves state-of-the-art accuracies under widely used benchmarks, outperforming previous methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, our training times are significantly lower due to the simplicity of DRWR.

preprint2020arXiv

End-to-End AI-Based Point-of-Care Diagnosis System for Classifying Respiratory Illnesses and Early Detection of COVID-19

Respiratory symptoms can be a caused by different underlying conditions, and are often caused by viral infections, such as Influenza-like illnesses or other emerging viruses like the Coronavirus. These respiratory viruses, often, have common symptoms, including coughing, high temperature, congested nose, and difficulty breathing. However, early diagnosis of the type of the virus, can be crucial, especially in cases such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. One of the factors that contributed to the spread of the pandemic, was the late diagnosis or confusing it with regular flu-like symptoms. Science has proved that one of the possible differentiators of the underlying causes of these different respiratory diseases is coughing, which comes in different types and forms. Therefore, a reliable lab-free tool for early and more accurate diagnosis that can differentiate between different respiratory diseases is very much needed. This paper proposes an end-to-end portable system that can record data from patients with symptom, including coughs (voluntary or involuntary) and translate them into health data for diagnosis, and with the aid of machine learning, classify them into different respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19. With the ongoing efforts to stop the spread of the COVID-19 disease everywhere today, and against similar diseases in the future, our proposed low cost and user-friendly solution can play an important part in the early diagnosis.

preprint2020arXiv

Learn distributed GAN with Temporary Discriminators

In this work, we propose a method for training distributed GAN with sequential temporary discriminators. Our proposed method tackles the challenge of training GAN in the federated learning manner: How to update the generator with a flow of temporary discriminators? We apply our proposed method to learn a self-adaptive generator with a series of local discriminators from multiple data centers. We show our design of loss function indeed learns the correct distribution with provable guarantees. The empirical experiments show that our approach is capable of generating synthetic data which is practical for real-world applications such as training a segmentation model.

preprint2020arXiv

Local Causal Structure Learning and its Discovery Between Type 2 Diabetes and Bone Mineral Density

Type 2 diabetes (T2DM), one of the most prevalent chronic diseases, affects the glucose metabolism of the human body, which decreases the quantity of life and brings a heavy burden on social medical care. Patients with T2DM are more likely to suffer bone fragility fracture as diabetes affects bone mineral density (BMD). However, the discovery of the determinant factors of BMD in a medical way is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, Prior-Knowledge-driven local Causal structure Learning (PKCL), to discover the underlying causal mechanism between BMD and its factors from the clinical data. Since there exist limited data but redundant prior knowledge for medicine, PKCL adequately utilize the prior knowledge to mine the local causal structure for the target relationship. Combining the medical prior knowledge with the discovered causal relationships, PKCL can achieve more reliable results without long-standing medical statistical experiments. Extensive experiments are conducted on a newly provided clinical data set. The experimental study of PKCL on the data is proved to highly corresponding with existing medical knowledge, which demonstrates the superiority and effectiveness of PKCL. To illustrate the importance of prior knowledge, the result of the algorithm without prior knowledge is also investigated.

preprint2020arXiv

Rigorous Explanation of Inference on Probabilistic Graphical Models

Probabilistic graphical models, such as Markov random fields (MRF), exploit dependencies among random variables to model a rich family of joint probability distributions. Sophisticated inference algorithms, such as belief propagation (BP), can effectively compute the marginal posteriors. Nonetheless, it is still difficult to interpret the inference outcomes for important human decision making. There is no existing method to rigorously attribute the inference outcomes to the contributing factors of the graphical models. Shapley values provide an axiomatic framework, but naively computing or even approximating the values on general graphical models is challenging and less studied. We propose GraphShapley to integrate the decomposability of Shapley values, the structure of MRFs, and the iterative nature of BP inference in a principled way for fast Shapley value computation, that 1) systematically enumerates the important contributions to the Shapley values of the explaining variables without duplicate; 2) incrementally compute the contributions without starting from scratches. We theoretically characterize GraphShapley regarding independence, equal contribution, and additivity. On nine graphs, we demonstrate that GraphShapley provides sensible and practical explanations.

preprint2020arXiv

Selective Transfer with Reinforced Transfer Network for Partial Domain Adaptation

One crucial aspect of partial domain adaptation (PDA) is how to select the relevant source samples in the shared classes for knowledge transfer. Previous PDA methods tackle this problem by re-weighting the source samples based on their high-level information (deep features). However, since the domain shift between source and target domains, only using the deep features for sample selection is defective. We argue that it is more reasonable to additionally exploit the pixel-level information for PDA problem, as the appearance difference between outlier source classes and target classes is significantly large. In this paper, we propose a reinforced transfer network (RTNet), which utilizes both high-level and pixel-level information for PDA problem. Our RTNet is composed of a reinforced data selector (RDS) based on reinforcement learning (RL), which filters out the outlier source samples, and a domain adaptation model which minimizes the domain discrepancy in the shared label space. Specifically, in the RDS, we design a novel reward based on the reconstruct errors of selected source samples on the target generator, which introduces the pixel-level information to guide the learning of RDS. Besides, we develope a state containing high-level information, which used by the RDS for sample selection. The proposed RDS is a general module, which can be easily integrated into existing DA models to make them fit the PDA situation. Extensive experiments indicate that RTNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance for PDA tasks on several benchmark datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Synthetic Learning: Learn From Distributed Asynchronized Discriminator GAN Without Sharing Medical Image Data

In this paper, we propose a data privacy-preserving and communication efficient distributed GAN learning framework named Distributed Asynchronized Discriminator GAN (AsynDGAN). Our proposed framework aims to train a central generator learns from distributed discriminator, and use the generated synthetic image solely to train the segmentation model.We validate the proposed framework on the application of health entities learning problem which is known to be privacy sensitive. Our experiments show that our approach: 1) could learn the real image's distribution from multiple datasets without sharing the patient's raw data. 2) is more efficient and requires lower bandwidth than other distributed deep learning methods. 3) achieves higher performance compared to the model trained by one real dataset, and almost the same performance compared to the model trained by all real datasets. 4) has provable guarantees that the generator could learn the distributed distribution in an all important fashion thus is unbiased.

preprint2020arXiv

Topological Hall effect in single thick SrRuO3 layers induced by defect engineering

The topological Hall effect (THE) has been discovered in ultrathin SrRuO3 (SRO) films, where the interface between the SRO layer and another oxide layer breaks the inversion symmetry resulting in the appearance of THE. Thus, THE only occurs in ultra-thin SRO films of several unit cells. In addition to employing a heterostructure, the inversion symmetry can be broken intrinsically in bulk SRO by introducing defects. In this study THE is observed in 60 nm thick SRO films, in which defects and lattice distortions are introduced by helium ion irradiation. The irradiated SRO films exhibit a pronounced THE in a wide temperature range from 5 K to 80 K. These observations can be attributed to the emergence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction as a result of artificial inversion symmetry breaking associated to the lattice defect engineering. The creation and control of the THE in oxide single layers can be realized by ex situ film processing. Therefore, this work provides new insights into the THE and illustrates a promising strategy to design novel spintronics devices.

preprint2019arXiv

Parallelization of the inverse fast multipole method with an application to boundary element method

We present an algorithm to parallelize the inverse fast multipole method (IFMM), which is an approximate direct solver for dense linear systems. The parallel scheme is based on a greedy coloring algorithm, where two nodes in the hierarchy with the same color are separated by at least $σ$ nodes. We proved that when $σ\ge 6$, the workload associated with one color is embarrassingly parallel. However, the number of nodes in a group (color) may be small when $σ= 6$. Therefore, we also explored $σ= 3$, where a small fraction of the algorithm needs to be serialized, and the overall parallel efficiency was improved. We implemented the parallel IFMM using OpenMP for shared-memory machines. Successively, we applied it to a fast-multipole accelerated boundary element method (FMBEM) as a preconditioner, and compared its efficiency with (a) the original IFMM parallelized by linking a multi-threaded linear algebra library and (b) the commonly used parallel block-diagonal preconditioner. Our results showed that our parallel IFMM achieved at most $4\times$ and $11\times$ speedups over the reference method (a) and (b), respectively, in realistic examples involving more than one million variables.

preprint2018arXiv

Manipulation of Conductive Domain Walls in Confined Ferroelectric Nano-islands

Conductive ferroelectric domain walls--ultra-narrow and configurable conduction paths, have been considered as essential building blocks for future programmable domain wall electronics. For applications in high density devices, it is imperative to explore the conductive domain walls in small confined systems while earlier investigations have hitherto focused on thin films or bulk single crystals, noting that the size-confined effects will certainly modulate seriously the domain structure and wall transport. Here, we demonstrate an observation and manipulation of conductive domain walls confined within small BiFeO3 nano-islands aligned in high density arrays. Using conductive atomic force microscopy (CAFM), we are able to distinctly visualize various types of conductive domain walls, including the head-to-head charged walls (CDWs), zigzag walls (zigzag-DWs), and typical 71° head-to-tail neutral walls (NDWs). The CDWs exhibit remarkably enhanced metallic conductivity with current of ~ nA order in magnitude and 104 times larger than that inside domains (0.01 ~ 0.1 pA), while the semiconducting NDWs allow also much smaller current ~ 10 pA than the CDWs. The substantially difference in conductivity for dissimilar walls enables additional manipulations of various wall conduction states for individual addressable nano-islands via electrically tuning of their domain structures. A controllable writing of four distinctive states by applying various scanning bias voltages is achieved, offering opportunities for developing multilevel high density memories.

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

Partial Membership Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Topic models (e.g., pLSA, LDA, sLDA) have been widely used for segmenting imagery. However, these models are confined to crisp segmentation, forcing a visual word (i.e., an image patch) to belong to one and only one topic. Yet, there are many images in which some regions cannot be assigned a crisp categorical label (e.g., transition regions between a foggy sky and the ground or between sand and water at a beach). In these cases, a visual word is best represented with partial memberships across multiple topics. To address this, we present a partial membership latent Dirichlet allocation (PM-LDA) model and an associated parameter estimation algorithm. This model can be useful for imagery where a visual word may be a mixture of multiple topics. Experimental results on visual and sonar imagery show that PM-LDA can produce both crisp and soft semantic image segmentations; a capability previous topic modeling methods do not have.

preprint2016arXiv

Partial Membership Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Topic models (e.g., pLSA, LDA, SLDA) have been widely used for segmenting imagery. These models are confined to crisp segmentation. Yet, there are many images in which some regions cannot be assigned a crisp label (e.g., transition regions between a foggy sky and the ground or between sand and water at a beach). In these cases, a visual word is best represented with partial memberships across multiple topics. To address this, we present a partial membership latent Dirichlet allocation (PM-LDA) model and associated parameter estimation algorithms. Experimental results on two natural image datasets and one SONAR image dataset show that PM-LDA can produce both crisp and soft semantic image segmentations; a capability existing methods do not have.

preprint2015arXiv

Are You Really Hidden? Predicting Current City from Profile and Social Relationship

Privacy has become a major concern in Online Social Networks (OSNs) due to threats such as advertising spam, online stalking and identity theft. Although many users hide or do not fill out their private attributes in OSNs, prior studies point out that the hidden attributes may be inferred from some other public information. Thus, users' private information could still be at stake to be exposed. Hitherto, little work helps users to assess the exposure probability/risk that the hidden attributes can be correctly predicted, let alone provides them with pointed countermeasures. In this article, we focus our study on the exposure risk assessment by a particular privacy-sensitive attribute - current city - in Facebook. Specifically, we first design a novel current city prediction approach that discloses users' hidden `current city' from their self-exposed information. Based on 371,913 Facebook users' data, we verify that our proposed prediction approach can predict users' current city more accurately than state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we inspect the prediction results and model the current city exposure probability via some measurable characteristics of the self-exposed information. Finally, we construct an exposure estimator to assess the current city exposure risk for individual users, given their self-exposed information. Several case studies are presented to illustrate how to use our proposed estimator for privacy protection.

preprint2015arXiv

Electrical control of exchange spring in antiferromagnetic metals

Manipulation of antiferromagnetic (AFM) spins by electrical means is on great demand to develop the AFM spintronics with low power consumption. In spite of the electrical modulation of insulated AFMs through coupling between their intrinsic ferroelectricity and antiferromagnetism, direct electrical control of AFM metals remains challenging due to the screening effect by the surface charge, and the manipulation is confined to a limited depth of atomic dimensions, which is insufficient to form a stable AFM exchange spring. In the present letter we primarily report a reversible electrical control of exchange spring in AFM metals, using an ionic liquid to exert a substantial electric-field effect. The exchange spring could transfer the force to the ferromagnet/antiferromagnet interface, enabling a deeper modulation depth in AFM metals. The manipulation of AFM moments by gate voltage is demonstrated in [Co/Pt]/IrMn model system and a single IrMn layer with the IrMn thickness up to 5 nm. Besides the fundamental significance of modulating the spin structures in metallic AFM via all-electrical fashion, the present finding would advance the development of low-power-consumption AFM spintronics.

preprint2015arXiv

Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing: When Participatory Sensing Meets Participatory Social Media

With the development of mobile sensing and mobile social networking techniques, Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing (MCSC), which leverages heterogeneous crowdsourced data for large-scale sensing, has become a leading paradigm. Built on top of the participatory sensing vision, MCSC has two characterizing features: (1) it leverages heterogeneous crowdsourced data from two data sources: participatory sensing and participatory social media; and (2) it presents the fusion of human and machine intelligence (HMI) in both the sensing and computing process. This paper characterizes the unique features and challenges of MCSC. We further present early efforts on MCSC to demonstrate the benefits of aggregating heterogeneous crowdsourced data.

preprint2015arXiv

Photon-counting Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry based on up-conversion detector and fiber Fabry-Perot scanning interferometer

A direct-detection Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry (BOTDR) is proposed and demonstrated by using an up-conversion single-photon detector and a fiber Fabry-Perot scanning interferometer (FFP-SI). Taking advantage of high signal-to-noise ratio of the detector and high spectrum resolution of the FFP-SI, the Brillouin spectrum along a polarization maintaining fiber (PMF) is recorded on a multiscaler with a small data size directly. In contrast with conventional BOTDR adopting coherent detection, photon-counting BOTDR is simpler in structure and easier in data processing. In the demonstration experiment, characteristic parameters of the Brillouin spectrum including its power, spectral width and frequency center are analyzed simultaneously along a 10 km PMF at different temperature and stain conditions.

preprint2014arXiv

An ontology-based approach to the optimization of non-binary (2,v)-regular LDPC codes

A non-binary (2,v)-regular LDPC code is defined by a parity-check matrix with column weight 2 and row weight v. In this report, we give an ontology-based approach to the optimization for this class of codes. All possible inter-connected cycle patterns that lead to low symbol-weight codewords are identified to put together the ontology. The optimization goal is to improve the distance property of equivalent binary images. Using the proposed method, the estimation and optimization of bit-distance spectrum becomes easily handleable. Three codes in the CCSDS recommendation are analyzed and several codes with good minimum bit-distance are designed.

preprint2014arXiv

Electrical manipulation of orbital occupancy and magnetic anisotropy in manganites

Electrical manipulation of lattice, charge, and spin has been realized respectively by the piezoelectric effect, field-effect transistor, and electric field control of ferromagnetism, bringing about dramatic promotions both in fundamental research and industrial production. However, it is generally accepted that the orbital of materials are impossible to be altered once they have been made. Here we use electric-field to dynamically tune the electronic phase transition in (La,Sr)MnO3 films with different Mn^4+/(Mn^3+ + Mn^4+) ratios. The orbital occupancy and corresponding magnetic anisotropy of these thin films are manipulated by gate voltage in a reversible and quantitative manner. Positive gate voltage increases the proportion of occupancy of the orbital and magnetic anisotropy that were initially favored by strain (irrespective of tensile and compressive), while negative gate voltage reduces the concomitant preferential orbital occupancy and magnetic anisotropy. Besides its fundamental significance in orbital physics, our findings might advance the process towards practical oxide-electronics based on orbital.

preprint2014arXiv

Two Dimensional Subsonic Euler Flow. Past a Wall or a Symmetric Body

The existence and uniqueness of two dimensional steady compressible Euler flows past a wall or a symmetric body are established. More precisely, given positive convex horizontal veloicty in the upstream, there exists a critical value $ρ_{cr}$ such that if the incoming density in the upstream is larger than $ρ_{cr}$, then there exists a subsonic flow past a wall. Furthermore, $ρ_{cr}$ is critical in the sense that there is no such subsonic flow if the density of the incoming flow is less than $ρ_{cr}$. The subsonic flows possess large vorticity and positive horizontal velocity above the wall except at the corner points on the boundary. Moreover, the existence and uniqueness of a two dimensional subsonic Euler flow past a symmetric body are also obtained when the incoming velocity field is a general small perturbation of a constant velocity field and the density of the incoming flow is larger than a critical value. The asymptotic behavior of the flows is obtained with the aid of some integral estimates for the velocity field and its far field states.

preprint2013arXiv

A Markov Decision Model for Adaptive Scheduling of Stored Scalable Videos

We propose two scheduling algorithms that seek to optimize the quality of scalably coded videos that have been stored at a video server before transmission.} The first scheduling algorithm is derived from a Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation developed here. We model the dynamics of the channel as a Markov chain and reduce the problem of dynamic video scheduling to a tractable Markov decision problem over a finite state space. Based on the MDP formulation, a near-optimal scheduling policy is computed that minimize the mean square error. Using insights taken from the development of the optimal MDP-based scheduling policy, the second proposed scheduling algorithm is an online scheduling method that only requires easily measurable knowledge of the channel dynamics, and is thus viable in practice. Simulation results show that the performance of both scheduling algorithms is close to a performance upper bound also derived in this paper.

preprint2013arXiv

Comparison and Analysis of Twist Pitch Length Test Methods for ITER Nb3Sn and NbTi Strands

A twisted multifilamentary structure is needed for Nb3Sn and NbTi strands to be used in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) magnets. As important parameters for the superconducting strands design and production, the twist pitch length and direction of strands must meet the requirements according to ITER Procurement Arrangement (PA) and this must be verified. The technical requirements are 15mm+/-2mm for twist pitch length and right hand twist for direction. The strand twist pitch and the twist direction can be measured on straight sections of strand, which is recognized by the repetition of filament bundles or by the angle of the filaments. Several test methods and results are described and compared in this paper. The accuracy, uncertainty and feasibility of different methods are analyzed and recommended measurement methods are proposed for ITER strands verification.

preprint2013arXiv

Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network for Energy Measurement and Control at Home

This paper describes the design, implementation, and testing of a wireless sensor and actuator network for monitoring the energy use of electric appliances in a home environment. The network includes energy measurement nodes and a central server, where the nodes read the energy use of connected appliance, and wirelessly report their readings to the central server for processing. The server displays the readings from these nodes via a user visual interface in real time. Through this system, users can easily understand their electricity usage patterns and adapt their behavior to reduce their energy consumption and costs. Moreover, users are able to remotely power on/off individual devices to actively control the power use of certain appliances. The system allows for inexpensive monitoring of home energy use and illustrates a practical way to control the energy consumption through user interaction.

preprint2013arXiv

Modeling the Time-varying Subjective Quality of HTTP Video Streams with Rate Adaptations

Newly developed HTTP-based video streaming technologies enable flexible rate-adaptation under varying channel conditions. Accurately predicting the users' Quality of Experience (QoE) for rate-adaptive HTTP video streams is thus critical to achieve efficiency. An important aspect of understanding and modeling QoE is predicting the up-to-the-moment subjective quality of a video as it is played, which is difficult due to hysteresis effects and nonlinearities in human behavioral responses. This paper presents a Hammerstein-Wiener model for predicting the time-varying subjective quality (TVSQ) of rate-adaptive videos. To collect data for model parameterization and validation, a database of longer-duration videos with time-varying distortions was built and the TVSQs of the videos were measured in a large-scale subjective study. The proposed method is able to reliably predict the TVSQ of rate adaptive videos. Since the Hammerstein-Wiener model has a very simple structure, the proposed method is suitable for on-line TVSQ prediction in HTTP based streaming.

preprint2013arXiv

Rate Adaptation and Admission Control for Video Transmission with Subjective Quality Constraints

Adapting video data rate during streaming can effectively reduce the risk of playback interruptions caused by channel throughput fluctuations. The variations in rate, however, also introduce video quality fluctuations and thus potentially affects viewers' Quality of Experience (QoE). We show how the QoE of video users can be improved by rate adaptation and admission control. We conducted a subjective study wherein we found that viewers' QoE was strongly correlated with the empirical cumulative distribution function (eCDF) of the predicted video quality. Based on this observation, we propose a rate-adaptation algorithm that can incorporate QoE constraints on the empirical cumulative quality distribution per user. We then propose a threshold-based admission control policy to block users whose empirical cumulative quality distribution is not likely to satisfy their QoE constraint. We further devise an online adaptation algorithm to automatically optimize the threshold. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce network resource consumption by $40\%$ over conventional average-quality maximized rate-adaptation algorithms.

preprint2013arXiv

Three Dimensional Steady Subsonic Euler Flows in Bounded Nozzles

In this paper, we study the existence and uniqueness of three dimensional steady Euler flows in rectangular nozzles when prescribing normal component of momentum at both the entrance and exit. If, in addition, the normal component of the voriticity and the variation of Bernoulli's function at the exit are both zero, then there exists a unique subsonic potential flow when the magnitude of the normal component of the momentum is less than a critical number. As the magnitude of the normal component of the momentum approaches the critical number, the associated flows converge to a subsonic-sonic flow. Furthermore, when the normal component of vorticity and the variation of Bernoulli's function are both small, the existence of subsonic Euler flows is established. The proof of these results is based on a new formulation for the Euler system, a priori estimate for nonlinear elliptic equations with nonlinear boundary conditions, detailed study for a linear div-curl system, and delicate estimate for the transport equations.

preprint2012arXiv

Annotating Simplices with a Homology Basis and Its Applications

Let $K$ be a simplicial complex and $g$ the rank of its $p$-th homology group $H_p(K)$ defined with $Z_2$ coefficients. We show that we can compute a basis $H$ of $H_p(K)$ and annotate each $p$-simplex of $K$ with a binary vector of length $g$ with the following property: the annotations, summed over all $p$-simplices in any $p$-cycle $z$, provide the coordinate vector of the homology class $[z]$ in the basis $H$. The basis and the annotations for all simplices can be computed in $O(n^ω)$ time, where $n$ is the size of $K$ and $ω<2.376$ is a quantity so that two $n\times n$ matrices can be multiplied in $O(n^ω)$ time. The pre-computation of annotations permits answering queries about the independence or the triviality of $p$-cycles efficiently. Using annotations of edges in 2-complexes, we derive better algorithms for computing optimal basis and optimal homologous cycles in 1-dimensional homology. Specifically, for computing an optimal basis of $H_1(K)$, we improve the time complexity known for the problem from $O(n^4)$ to $O(n^ω+n^2g^{ω-1})$. Here $n$ denotes the size of the 2-skeleton of $K$ and $g$ the rank of $H_1(K)$. Computing an optimal cycle homologous to a given 1-cycle is NP-hard even for surfaces and an algorithm taking $2^{O(g)}n\log n$ time is known for surfaces. We extend this algorithm to work with arbitrary 2-complexes in $O(n^ω)+2^{O(g)}n^2\log n$ time using annotations.

preprint2012arXiv

Driving Droplets by Curvi-Propulsion

How to make small liquid droplets move spontaneously and directionally on solid surfaces is a challenge in lab-on-chip technologies, DNA analysis, and heat exchangers. The best-known mechanism, a wettability gradient, does not move droplets rapidly enough for most purposes and cannot move droplets smaller than a critical size defined by the contact angle hysteresis. Here we report on a mechanism using curvature gradients, which we show is particularly effective at accelerating small droplets, and works for both hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. Experiments for water droplets on glass cones in the sub-millimeter range show a maximum speed of 0.28 m/s, two orders of magnitude higher than obtained by wettability gradient. From simple considerations of droplet surface area change, we show that the force exerted on a droplet on a conical surface scales as the curvature gradient. This force therefore diverges for small droplets near the tip of a cone. We illustrate this using molecular dynamics simulations, and describe nanometer-scale droplets moving spontaneously at over 100 m/s on nano-cones.

preprint2012arXiv

Layered Subspace Codes for Network Coding

Subspace codes were introduced by Kötter and Kschischang for error control in random linear network coding. In this paper, a layered type of subspace codes is considered, which can be viewed as a superposition of multiple component subspace codes. Exploiting the layered structure, we develop two decoding algorithms for these codes. The first algorithm operates by separately decoding each component code. The second algorithm is similar to the successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm for conventional superposition coding, and further permits an iterative version. We show that both algorithms decode not only deterministically up to but also probabilistically beyond the error-correction capability of the overall code. Finally we present possible applications of layered subspace codes in several network coding scenarios.

preprint2012arXiv

The Most Persistent Soft-Clique in a Set of Sampled Graphs

When searching for characteristic subpatterns in potentially noisy graph data, it appears self-evident that having multiple observations would be better than having just one. However, it turns out that the inconsistencies introduced when different graph instances have different edge sets pose a serious challenge. In this work we address this challenge for the problem of finding maximum weighted cliques. We introduce the concept of most persistent soft-clique. This is subset of vertices, that 1) is almost fully or at least densely connected, 2) occurs in all or almost all graph instances, and 3) has the maximum weight. We present a measure of clique-ness, that essentially counts the number of edge missing to make a subset of vertices into a clique. With this measure, we show that the problem of finding the most persistent soft-clique problem can be cast either as: a) a max-min two person game optimization problem, or b) a min-min soft margin optimization problem. Both formulations lead to the same solution when using a partial Lagrangian method to solve the optimization problems. By experiments on synthetic data and on real social network data, we show that the proposed method is able to reliably find soft cliques in graph data, even if that is distorted by random noise or unreliable observations.

preprint2012arXiv

Ultrafast Spontaneous Motion of Nanodroplets

Making liquid droplets move spontaneously on solid surfaces is a key challenge in lab-on-chip and heat exchanger technologies. The best-known mechanism, a wettability gradient, does not generally move droplets rapidly enough and cannot drive droplets smaller than a critical size. Here we report how a curvature gradient is particularly effective at accelerating small droplets, and works for both hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. Experiments for water droplets on tapered surfaces with curvature radii in the sub-millimeter range show a maximum speed of 0.28 m/s, two orders of magnitude higher than obtained by wettability gradient. We show that the force exerted on a droplet scales as the surface curvature gradient. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we observe nanoscale droplets moving spontaneously at over 100 m/s on tapered surfaces.

preprint2011arXiv

Curvature Gradient Driving Droplets in Fast Motion

Earlier works found out spontaneous directional motion of liquid droplets on hydrophilic conical surfaces, however, not hydrophobic case. Here we show that droplets on any surface may take place spontaneous directional motion without considering contact angle property. The driving force is found to be proportional to the curvature gradient of the surface. Fast motion can be lead at surfaces with small curvature radii. The above discovery can help to create more effective transportation technology of droplets, and better understand some observed natural phenomena.

preprint2011arXiv

Existence of Steady Subsonic Euler Flows through Infinitely Long Periodic Nozzles

In this paper, we study the global existence of steady subsonic Euler flows through infinitely long nozzles which are periodic in $x_1$ direction with the period $L$. It is shown that when the variation of Bernoulli function at some given section is small and mass flux is in a suitable regime, there exists a unique global subsonic flow in the nozzle. Furthermore, the flow is also periodic in $x_1$ direction with the period $L$. If, in particular, the Bernoulli function is a constant, we also get the existence of subsonic-sonic flows when the mass flux takes the critical value.

preprint2011arXiv

The generalized quadratic covariation for fractional Brownian motion with Hurst index less than 1/2

Let $B^H$ be a fractional Brownian motion with Hurst index $0<H<1/2$. In this paper we study the {\it generalized quadratic covariation} $[f(B^H),B^H]^{(W)}$ defined by $$ [f(B^H),B^H]^{(W)}_t=\lim_{ε\downarrow 0}\frac{2H}{ε^{2H}}\int_0^t\{f(B^{H}_{s+ε})-f(B^{H}_s)\}(B^{H}_{s+ε}- B^{H}_s)s^{2H-1}ds, $$ where the limit is uniform in probability and $x\mapsto f(x)$ is a deterministic function. We construct a Banach space ${\mathscr H}$ of measurable functions such that the generalized quadratic covariation exists in $L^2$ and the Bouleau-Yor identity takes the form $$ [f(B^H),B^H]_t^{(W)}=-\int_{\mathbb {R}}f(x){\mathscr L}^{H}(dx,t) $$ provided $f\in {\mathscr H}$, where ${\mathscr L}^{H}(x,t)$ is the weighted local time of $B^H$. This allows us to write the fractional Itô formula for absolutely continuous functions with derivative belonging to ${\mathscr H}$. These are also extended to the time-dependent case.

preprint2011arXiv

Ultrafast Drop Movements Arising from Curvature Gradient

We report experimental observation of a kind of fast spontaneous movements of water drops on surfaces of cones with diameters from 0.1 to 1.5 mm. The observed maximum speed (0.22 m/s) under ambient conditions were at least two orders of magnitude higher than that resulting from any known single spontaneous movement mechanism, for example, Marangoni effect due to gradient of surface tension. We trapped even higher spontaneous movement speeds (up to 125 m/s) in virtual experiments for drops on nanoscale cones by using molecular dynamics simulations. The underlying mechanism is found to be universally effective - drops on any surface either hydrophilic or hydrophobic with varying mean curvature are subject to driving forces toward the gradient direction of the mean curvature. The larger the mean curvature of the surface and the lower the contact angle of the liquid are, the stronger the driving force will be. This discovery can lead to more effective techniques for transporting droplets.

preprint2011arXiv

Viscous damping of nanobeam resonators: humidity, thermal noise and the paddling effect

The nanobeam resonator is the key mechanical component in the nano-electromechanical system. In addition to its high frequency originating from its low dimension, the performance is significantly influenced by the circumstances, especially at nanoscale where a large surface area of the material is exposed. Molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical analysis are used for a quantitative prediction on the damping behavior, such as the critical damping condition and lifetime, of nanobeam resonators that directly maps the fluid-structure properties and interaction information into dynamical behaviors. We show here how the humidity defines the critical damping condition through viscous forces, marking the transition from under-damping to over-damping regime at elevated humidity. Novel phenomena such as the thermal fluctuation and paddling effects are also discussed.

preprint2010arXiv

Characterizing Internet Worm Infection Structure

Internet worm infection continues to be one of top security threats and has been widely used by botnets to recruit new bots. In this work, we attempt to quantify the infection ability of individual hosts and reveal the key characteristics of the underlying topology formed by worm infection, i.e., the number of children and the generation of the worm infection family tree. Specifically, we first apply probabilistic modeling methods and a sequential growth model to analyze the infection tree of a wide class of worms. We analytically and empirically find that the number of children has asymptotically a geometric distribution with parameter 0.5. As a result, on average half of infected hosts never compromise any vulnerable host, over 98% of infected hosts have no more than five children, and a small portion of infected hosts have a large number of children. We also discover that the generation follows closely a Poisson distribution and the average path length of the worm infection family tree increases approximately logarithmically with the total number of infected hosts. Next, we empirically study the infection structure of localized-scanning worms and surprisingly find that most of the above observations also apply to localized-scanning worms. Finally, we apply our findings to develop bot detection methods and study potential countermeasures for a botnet (e.g., Conficker C) that uses scan-based peer discovery to form a P2P-based botnet. Specifically, we demonstrate that targeted detection that focuses on the nodes with the largest number of children is an efficient way to expose bots. For example, our simulation shows that when 3.125% nodes are examined, targeted detection can reveal 22.36% bots. However, we also point out that future botnets may limit the maximum number of children to weaken targeted detection, without greatly slowing down the speed of worm infection.

preprint2010arXiv

Darknet-Based Inference of Internet Worm Temporal Characteristics

Internet worm attacks pose a significant threat to network security and management. In this work, we coin the term Internet worm tomography as inferring the characteristics of Internet worms from the observations of Darknet or network telescopes that monitor a routable but unused IP address space. Under the framework of Internet worm tomography, we attempt to infer Internet worm temporal behaviors, i.e., the host infection time and the worm infection sequence, and thus pinpoint patient zero or initially infected hosts. Specifically, we introduce statistical estimation techniques and propose method of moments, maximum likelihood, and linear regression estimators. We show analytically and empirically that our proposed estimators can better infer worm temporal characteristics than a naive estimator that has been used in the previous work. We also demonstrate that our estimators can be applied to worms using different scanning strategies such as random scanning and localized scanning.

preprint2010arXiv

Implementing and Evaluating a Wireless Body Sensor System for Automated Physiological Data Acquisition at Home

Advances in embedded devices and wireless sensor networks have resulted in new and inexpensive health care solutions. This paper describes the implementation and the evaluation of a wireless body sensor system that monitors human physiological data at home. Specifically, a waist-mounted triaxial accelerometer unit is used to record human movements. Sampled data are transmitted using an IEEE 802.15.4 wireless transceiver to a data logger unit. The wearable sensor unit is light, small, and consumes low energy, which allows for inexpensive and unobtrusive monitoring during normal daily activities at home. The acceleration measurement tests show that it is possible to classify different human motion through the acceleration reading. The 802.15.4 wireless signal quality is also tested in typical home scenarios. Measurement results show that even with interference from nearby IEEE 802.11 signals and microwave ovens, the data delivery performance is satisfactory and can be improved by selecting an appropriate channel. Moreover, we found that the wireless signal can be attenuated by housing materials, home appliances, and even plants. Therefore, the deployment of wireless body sensor systems at home needs to take all these factors into consideration.

preprint2010arXiv

Surface Curvature-Induced Directional Movement of Water Droplets

Here we report a surface curvature-induced directional movement phenomenon, based on molecular dynamics simulations, that a nanoscale water droplet at the outer surface of a graphene cone always spontaneously moves toward the larger end of the cone, and at the inner surface toward the smaller end. The analysis on the van der Waals interaction potential between a single water molecule and a curved graphene surface reveals that the curvature with its gradient does generate the driving force resulting in the above directional motion. Furthermore, we found that the direction of the above movement is independent of the wettability, namely is regardless of either hydrophobic or hydrophilic of the surface. However, the latter surface is in general leading to higher motion speed than the former. The above results provide a basis for a better understanding of many reported observations, and helping design of curved surfaces with desired directional surface water transportation.

preprint2007arXiv

Quantifying Homology Classes II: Localization and Stability

In the companion paper, we measured homology classes and computed the optimal homology basis. This paper addresses two related problems, namely, localization and stability. We localize a class with the cycle minimizing a certain objective function. We explore three different objective functions, namely, volume, diameter and radius. We show that it is NP-hard to compute the smallest cycle using the former two. We also prove that the measurement defined in the companion paper is stable with regard to small changes of the geometry of the concerned space.

Chao Chen

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111 published item(s)

Amplitude analysis and branching fraction measurement of $J/ψ\to Λ\barΣ^0η+\mathrm{c.c}$

Cross section measurement of $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow π^{0}π^{0}ψ(3686)$ from $\sqrt{s}=$ 4.008 GeV to 4.951 GeV

EnvFactory: Scaling Tool-Use Agents via Executable Environments Synthesis and Robust RL

First Measurement of the Absolute Branching Fraction of $η_c \to γγ$

First Observation of $D^{0(+)}\to \bar Kωe^+ν_e$ and Determination of the Branching Fraction of $\bar K_1(1270)\to \bar K ω$

Improved Streaming Algorithm for Fair $k$-Center Clustering

Measurements of the absolute branching fractions of the $Λ_{c}^{+}$ hadronic decays

Measurements of the branching fractions of $χ_{cJ}\to 2K^+ 2K^- ω$ and $ϕK^+ K^- ω$ decays

Observation of Polarization and Determination of Electric and Magnetic Moments of $Ξ(1530)^0$ in $ψ(3686)\toΞ(1530)^0\barΞ(1530)^0$

Optimized Algorithms for Text Clustering with LLM-Generated Constraints

ORCE: Order-Aware Alignment of Verbalized Confidence in Large Language Models

Search for a dark baryon in the $Ξ^-\rightarrowπ^-+{\rm invisible}$ decay

Heteroscedastic Bayesian Optimization-Based Dynamic PID Tuning for Accurate and Robust UAV Trajectory Tracking

MambaSeg: Harnessing Mamba for Accurate and Efficient Image-Event Semantic Segmentation

Measurement of branching fractions of $Λ_{c}^{+}$ decays to $Σ^{+} η$ and $Σ^{+} η'$

SLTNet: Efficient Event-based Semantic Segmentation with Spike-driven Lightweight Transformer-based Networks

Investigation of the $ΔI = 1/2$ rule and test of CP violation through the measurement of decay asymmetry parameters in $Ξ^-$ decays

Federated Learning with Domain Generalization

Search for hidden-charm tetraquark with strangeness in $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow K^+ D_{s}^{*-} D^{*0}+c.c.$

A Manifold View of Adversarial Risk

A Study of the Attention Abnormality in Trojaned BERTs

A Topological Filter for Learning with Label Noise

A Topology-Attention ConvLSTM Network and Its Application to EM Images

AirCode: A Robust Object Encoding Method

Amplitude analysis and branching-fraction measurement of $D_{s}^{+} \to π^{+}π^{0}η^{\prime}$

Attention Hijacking in Trojan Transformers

Cycle Representation Learning for Inductive Relation Prediction

Discovering Governing Equations by Machine Learning implemented with Invariance

FAAG: Fast Adversarial Audio Generation through Interactive Attack Optimisation

First Observation of the Semileptonic Decay $Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^- e^+ν_e$

HOB-CNN: Hallucination of Occluded Branches with a Convolutional Neural Network for 2D Fruit Trees

Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference between Two Hyper-Entangled Photons Enables Observation of Symmetric and Anti-Symmetric Particle Exchange Phases

Induced gravitational waves from statistically anisotropic scalar perturbations

Learning Self-Modulating Attention in Continuous Time Space with Applications to Sequential Recommendation

Learning Topological Interactions for Multi-Class Medical Image Segmentation

Measurement of $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$ cross section and observation of a resonant structure

Measurement of the branching fraction and decay asymmetry of $Λ\to nγ$

Measurement of the cross section of $e^{+}e^{-}\toηπ^{+}π^{-}$ at center-of-mass energies from 3.872 GeV to 4.700 GeV

Measurement of the total and leptonic decay widths of the $J/ψ$ resonance with an energy scan method at BESIII

Modeling Dynamic User Preference via Dictionary Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Multi-Class Cell Detection Using Spatial Context Representation

NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Efficient Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

Nuclear Norm Maximization Based Curiosity-Driven Learning

Observation of $η_c(2S) \to 3(π^+π^-)$ and measurements of $χ_{cJ} \to 3(π^+π^-)$ in $ψ(3686)$ radiative transitions

Observation of the double Dalitz decay $η'\to e^+e^-e^+e^-$

Open-source Framework for Transonic Boundary Layer Natural Transition Analysis over Complex Geometries in Nektar++

Overlapping Domain Decomposition Preconditioner for Integral Equations

PixelFolder: An Efficient Progressive Pixel Synthesis Network for Image Generation

Resistance Training using Prior Bias: toward Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Search for $X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c0}$ and $X(3872)\toππχ_{c0}$ at BESIII

Search for baryon and lepton number violation decay $D^{\pm}\to n(\bar{n})e^{\pm}$

Solving Linear Systems on a GPU with Hierarchically Off-Diagonal Low-Rank Approximations

Synthesizing MR Image Contrast Enhancement Using 3D High-resolution ConvNets

Temporal Context Matters: Enhancing Single Image Prediction with Disease Progression Representations

Topological spin texture of chiral edge states in photonic two-dimensional quantum walks

Trigger Hunting with a Topological Prior for Trojan Detection

Ultrahigh-energy Gamma Rays and Gravitational Waves from Primordial Exotic Stellar Bubbles

Video is All You Need: Attacking PPG-based Biometric Authentication

Alignment dependence of photoelectron momentum distributions for diatomic molecules N$_2$ in strong elliptical laser fields

Differentiable Nonparametric Belief Propagation

Geometry-Aware Fruit Grasping Estimation for Robotic Harvesting in Orchards

Human-in-the-loop Auditory Cueing Strategy for Gait Modification

Near-zero Downtime Recovery from Transient-error-induced Crashes

Reachability-based Trajectory Safeguard (RTS): A Safe and Fast Reinforcement Learning Safety Layer for Continuous Control

Stability of SGD: Tightness Analysis and Improved Bounds

Strong-field response time and its implications on attosecond measurement

Training Federated GANs with Theoretical Guarantees: A Universal Aggregation Approach

An Algebraic Sparsified Nested Dissection Algorithm Using Low-Rank Approximations

Attention-Guided Discriminative Region Localization and Label Distribution Learning for Bone Age Assessment

BuildSenSys: Reusing Building Sensing Data for Traffic Prediction with Cross-domain Learning

DRWR: A Differentiable Renderer without Rendering for Unsupervised 3D Structure Learning from Silhouette Images

End-to-End AI-Based Point-of-Care Diagnosis System for Classifying Respiratory Illnesses and Early Detection of COVID-19

Learn distributed GAN with Temporary Discriminators

Local Causal Structure Learning and its Discovery Between Type 2 Diabetes and Bone Mineral Density

Search for hidden-charm tetraquark with strangeness in $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow K^+ D_{s}^{-} D^{0}+c.c.$