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Published work

72 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Pervasive Vulnerability Analysis and Defense for QKD-based Quantum Private Query

Quantum Private Query (QPQ) based on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is among the most practically viable quantum communication protocols, with application value second only to QKD itself. However, prevalent security vulnerabilities in the post-processing stages of most existing QKD-based QPQ protocols have been severely overlooked. This study focuses on hidden information extraction under undetermined signal bits, revealing that most such QPQ protocols face severe security threats even without complex quantum resources. Specifically, direct observation attack causes incremental information leakage, while the minimum error discrimination attack efficiently steals additional database inforamtion. To address these critical flaws, the proposed multi-encryption defense scheme is compatible with existing QPQ protocols. The study demonstrates the necessity of the multi-encryption strategy for the security of databases in QPQ, providing key theoretical and technical support for constructing practical QPQ protocols resistant to real-world attacks.

preprint2026arXiv

VECTOR-Drive: Tightly Coupled Vision-Language and Trajectory Expert Routing for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving requires models to understand traffic scenes, infer driving intent, and generate executable motion plans. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit semantic priors from large-scale vision-language pretraining, yet still face a coupling trade-off: fully shared backbones preserve multimodal interaction but may entangle language reasoning and trajectory prediction, whereas decou pled reasoning-action pipelines reduce task conflict but weaken semantic-motion coupling. We propose VECTOR-DRIVE, a tightly coupled VLA framework built on Qwen2.5-VL-3B. VECTOR-DRIVE keeps all tokens coupled through shared self attention and routes feed-forward computation according to token semantics. Vision and language tokens are processed by a Vision-Language Expert to preserve semantic priors, while target-point, ego-state, and noisy action tokens are routed to a Trajectory Expert for motion-specific computation. On the action-token pathway, a flow-matching planner refines noisy action tokens into future waypoints and speed profiles. This design couples semantic reasoning and motion planning within a single multimodal Transformer while separating task-specific FFN computation. On Bench2Drive, VECTOR-DRIVE achieves 88.91 Driving Score and outperforms representative end-to end and VLA-based baselines. Qualitative results and ablations further validate the benefits of shared attention, semantic-aware expert routing, progressive training, and flow-based action de coding.

preprint2025arXiv

CREPES-X: Hierarchical Bearing-Distance-Inertial Direct Cooperative Relative Pose Estimation System

Relative localization is critical for cooperation in autonomous multi-robot systems. Existing approaches either rely on shared environmental features or inertial assumptions or suffer from non-line-of-sight degradation and outliers in complex environments. Robust and efficient fusion of inter-robot measurements such as bearings, distances, and inertials for tens of robots remains challenging. We present CREPES-X (Cooperative RElative Pose Estimation System with multiple eXtended features), a hierarchical relative localization framework that enhances speed, accuracy, and robustness under challenging conditions, without requiring any global information. CREPES-X starts with a compact hardware design: InfraRed (IR) LEDs, an IR camera, an ultra-wideband module, and an IMU housed in a cube no larger than 6cm on each side. Then CREPES-X implements a two-stage hierarchical estimator to meet different requirements, considering speed, accuracy, and robustness. First, we propose a single-frame relative estimator that provides instant relative poses for multi-robot setups through a closed-form solution and robust bearing outlier rejection. Then a multi-frame relative estimator is designed to offer accurate and robust relative states by exploring IMU pre-integration via robocentric relative kinematics with loosely- and tightly-coupled optimization. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of CREPES-X, showing robustness to up to 90% bearing outliers, proving resilience in challenging conditions, and achieving RMSE of 0.073m and 1.817° in real-world datasets.

preprint2023arXiv

A Linear and Exact Algorithm for Whole-Body Collision Evaluation via Scale Optimization

Collision evaluation is of vital importance in various applications. However, existing methods are either cumbersome to calculate or have a gap with the actual value. In this paper, we propose a zero-gap whole-body collision evaluation which can be formulated as a low dimensional linear program. This evaluation can be solved analytically in O(m) computational time, where m is the total number of the linear inequalities in this linear program. Moreover, the proposed method is efficient in obtaining its gradient, making it easy to apply to optimization-based applications.

preprint2023arXiv

Generalizing the intention-to-treat effect of an active control against placebo from historical placebo-controlled trials to an active-controlled trial: A case study of the efficacy of daily oral TDF/FTC in the HPTN 084 study

In many clinical settings, an active-controlled trial design (e.g., a non-inferiority or superiority design) is often used to compare an experimental medicine to an active control (e.g., an FDA-approved, standard therapy). One prominent example is a recent phase 3 efficacy trial, HIV Prevention Trials Network Study 084 (HPTN 084), comparing long-acting cabotegravir, a new HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) agent, to the FDA-approved daily oral tenofovir disoproxil fumarate plus emtricitabine (TDF/FTC) in a population of heterosexual women in 7 African countries. One key complication of interpreting study results in an active-controlled trial like HPTN 084 is that the placebo arm is not present and the efficacy of the active control (and hence the experimental drug) compared to the placebo can only be inferred by leveraging other data sources. \bz{In this article, we study statistical inference for the intention-to-treat (ITT) effect of the active control using relevant historical placebo-controlled trials data under the potential outcomes (PO) framework}. We highlight the role of adherence and unmeasured confounding, discuss in detail identification assumptions and two modes of inference (point versus partial identification), propose estimators under identification assumptions permitting point identification, and lay out sensitivity analyses needed to relax identification assumptions. We applied our framework to estimating the intention-to-treat effect of daily oral TDF/FTC versus placebo in HPTN 084 using data from an earlier Phase 3, placebo-controlled trial of daily oral TDF/FTC (Partners PrEP).

preprint2022arXiv

A quantum algorithm for solving eigenproblem of the Laplacian matrix of a fully connected weighted graph

Solving eigenproblem of the Laplacian matrix of a fully connected weighted graph has wide applications in data science, machine learning, and image processing, etc. However, this is very challenging because it involves expensive matrix operations. Here, we propose an efficient quantum algorithm to solve it based on a assumption that the element of each vertex and its norms can be effectively accessed via a quantum random access memory data structure. Specifically, we adopt the optimal Hamiltonian simulation technique based on the block-encoding framework to implement the quantum simulation of the Laplacian matrix. Then, the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix are extracted by the quantum phase estimation algorithm. The core of our entire algorithm is to construct the block-encoding of the Laplacian matrix. To achieve this, we propose in detail how to construct the block-encodings of operators containing the information of the weight matrix and the degree matrix respectively, and further obtain the block-encoding of the Laplacian matrix. Compared with its classical counterpart, our algorithm has a polynomial speedup on the number of vertices and an exponential speedup on the dimension of each vertex. We also show that our algorithm can be extended to solve the eigenproblem of symmetric (non-symmetric) normalized Laplacian matrix.

preprint2022arXiv

ApolloRL: a Reinforcement Learning Platform for Autonomous Driving

We introduce ApolloRL, an open platform for research in reinforcement learning for autonomous driving. The platform provides a complete closed-loop pipeline with training, simulation, and evaluation components. It comes with 300 hours of real-world data in driving scenarios and popular baselines such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agents. We elaborate in this paper on the architecture and the environment defined in the platform. In addition, we discuss the performance of the baseline agents in the ApolloRL environment.

preprint2022arXiv

Automatic Parameter Adaptation for Quadrotor Trajectory Planning

Online trajectory planners enable quadrotors to safely and smoothly navigate in unknown cluttered environments. However, tuning parameters is challenging since modern planners have become too complex to mathematically model and predict their interaction with unstructured environments. This work takes humans out of the loop by proposing a planner parameter adaptation framework that formulates objectives into two complementary categories and optimizes them asynchronously. Objectives evaluated with and without trajectory execution are optimized using Bayesian Optimization (BayesOpt) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), respectively. By combining two kinds of objectives, the total convergence rate of the black-box optimization is accelerated while the dimension of optimized parameters can be increased. Benchmark comparisons demonstrate its superior performance over other strategies. Tests with changing obstacle densities validate its real-time environment adaption, which is difficult for prior manual tuning. Real-world flights with different drone platforms, environments, and planners show the proposed framework's scalability and effectiveness.

preprint2022arXiv

Autonomous and Adaptive Navigation for Terrestrial-Aerial Bimodal Vehicles

Terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles bloom in both academia and industry because they incorporate both the high mobility of aerial vehicles and the long endurance of ground vehicles. In this work, we present an autonomous and adaptive navigation framework to bring complete autonomy to this class of vehicles. The framework mainly includes 1) a hierarchical motion planner that generates safe and low-power terrestrial-aerial trajectories in unknown environments and 2) a unified motion controller which dynamically adjusts energy consumption in terrestrial locomotion. Extensive real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons are conducted on a customized robot platform to validate the proposed framework's robustness and performance. During the tests, the robot safely traverses complex environments with terrestrial-aerial integrated mobility, and achieves $7\times$ energy savings in terrestrial locomotion. Finally, we will release our code and hardware configuration for the reference of the community.

preprint2022arXiv

Bubble Planner: Planning High-speed Smooth Quadrotor Trajectories using Receding Corridors

Quadrotors are agile platforms. With human experts, they can perform extremely high-speed flights in cluttered environments. However, fully autonomous flight at high speed remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a motion planning algorithm based on the corridor-constrained minimum control effort trajectory optimization (MINCO) framework. Specifically, we use a series of overlapping spheres to represent the free space of the environment and propose two novel designs that enable the algorithm to plan high-speed quadrotor trajectories in real-time. One is a sampling-based corridor generation method that generates spheres with large overlapped areas (hence overall corridor size) between two neighboring spheres. The second is a Receding Horizon Corridors (RHC) strategy, where part of the previously generated corridor is reused in each replan. Together, these two designs enlarge the corridor spaces in accordance with the quadrotor's current state and hence allow the quadrotor to maneuver at high speeds. We benchmark our algorithm against other state-of-the-art planning methods to show its superiority in simulation. Comprehensive ablation studies are also conducted to show the necessity of the two designs. The proposed method is finally evaluated on an autonomous LiDAR-navigated quadrotor UAV in woods environments, achieving flight speeds over 13.7 m/s without any prior map of the environment or external localization facility.

preprint2022arXiv

Certifiably Optimal Mutual Localization with Anonymous Bearing Measurements

Mutual localization is essential for coordination and cooperation in multi-robot systems. Previous works have tackled this problem by assuming available correspondences between measurements and received odometry estimations, which are difficult to acquire, especially for unified robot teams. Furthermore, most local optimization methods ask for initial guesses and are sensitive to their quality. In this paper, we present a certifiably optimal algorithm that uses only anonymous bearing measurements to formulate a novel mixed-integer quadratically constrained quadratic problem (MIQCQP). Then, we relax the original nonconvex problem into a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem and obtain a certifiably global optimum using with off-the-shelf solvers. As a result, our method can determine bearing-pose correspondences and furthermore recover the initial relative poses between robots under a certain condition. We compare the performance with local optimization methods on extensive simulations under different noise levels to show our advantage in global optimality and robustness. Real-world experiments are conducted to show the practicality and robustness.

preprint2022arXiv

Characterization and manipulation of intervalley scattering induced by an individual monovacancy in graphene

Intervalley scattering involves microscopic processes that electrons are scattered by atomic-scale defects on nanometer length scales. Although central to our understanding of electronic properties of materials, direct characterization and manipulation of range and strength of the intervalley scattering induced by an individual atomic defect have so far been elusive. Using scanning tunneling microscope, we visualized and controlled intervalley scattering from an individual monovacancy in graphene. By directly imaging the affected range of intervalley scattering of the monovacancy, we demonstrated that it is inversely proportional to the energy, i.e., it is proportional to the wavelength of massless Dirac Fermions. A giant electron-hole asymmetry of the intervalley scattering is observed because that the monovacancy is charged. By further charging the monovacancy, the bended electronic potential around the monovacancy softened the scattering potential, which, consequently, suppressed the intervalley scattering of the monovacancy.

preprint2022arXiv

Cosmology meets functional QCD: First-order cosmic QCD transition induced by large lepton asymmetries

The lepton flavour asymmetries of the Universe are observationally almost unconstrained before the onset of neutrino oscillations. We calculate the cosmic trajectory during the cosmic QCD epoch in the presence of large lepton flavour asymmetries. By including QCD thermodynamic quantities derived from functional QCD methods in our calculation our work reveals for the first time the possibility of a first-order cosmic QCD transition. We specify the required values of the lepton flavour asymmetries for which a first-order transition occurs for a number of different benchmark scenarios.

preprint2022arXiv

Distributed Swarm Trajectory Optimization for Formation Flight in Dense Environments

For aerial swarms, navigation in a prescribed formation is widely practiced in various scenarios. However, the associated planning strategies typically lack the capability of avoiding obstacles in cluttered environments. To address this deficiency, we present an optimization-based method that ensures collision-free trajectory generation for formation flight. In this paper, a novel differentiable metric is proposed to quantify the overall similarity distance between formations. We then formulate this metric into an optimization framework, which achieves spatial-temporal planning using polynomial trajectories. Minimization over collision penalty is also incorporated into the framework, so that formation preservation and obstacle avoidance can be handled simultaneously. To validate the efficiency of our method, we conduct benchmark comparisons with other cutting-edge works. Integrated with an autonomous distributed aerial swarm system, the proposed method demonstrates its efficiency and robustness in real-world experiments with obstacle-rich surroundings. We will release the source code for the reference of the community.

preprint2022arXiv

Dynamic Free-Space Roadmap for Safe Quadrotor Motion Planning

Free-space-oriented roadmaps typically generate a series of convex geometric primitives, which constitute the safe region for motion planning. However, a static environment is assumed for this kind of roadmap. This assumption makes it unable to deal with dynamic obstacles and limits its applications. In this paper, we present a dynamic free-space roadmap, which provides feasible spaces and a navigation graph for safe quadrotor motion planning. Our roadmap is constructed by continuously seeding and extracting free regions in the environment. In order to adapt our map to environments with dynamic obstacles, we incrementally decompose the polyhedra intersecting with obstacles into obstacle-free regions, while the graph is also updated by our well-designed mechanism. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that our method is practically applicable and efficient.

preprint2022arXiv

Elastic Tracker: A Spatio-temporal Trajectory Planner Flexible Aerial Tracking

This paper proposes Elastic Tracker, a flexible trajectory planning framework that can deal with challenging tracking tasks with guaranteed safety and visibility. Firstly, an object detection and intension-free motion prediction method is designed. Then an occlusion-aware path finding method is proposed to provide a proper topology. A smart safe flight corridor generation strategy is designed with the guiding path. An analytical occlusion cost is evaluated. Finally, an effective trajectory optimization approach enables to generate a spatio-temporal optimal trajectory within the resultant flight corridor. Particular formulations are designed to guarantee both safety and visibility, with all the above requirements optimized jointly. The experimental results show that our method works more robustly but with less computation than the existing methods, even in some challenging tracking tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Gate-Tunable Spin-Orbit Coupling in a Germanium Hole Double Quantum Dot

Hole spins confined in semiconductor quantum dot systems have gained considerable interest for their strong spin-orbit interactions (SOIs) and relatively weak hyperfine interactions. Here we experimentally demonstrate a tunable SOI in a double quantum dot in a Germanium (Ge) hut wire (HW), which could help enable fast all-electric spin manipulations while suppressing unwanted decoherence. Specifically, we measure the transport spectra in the Pauli spin blockade regime in the double quantum dot device.By adjusting the interdot tunnel coupling, we obtain an electric field tuned spin-orbit length lso = 2.0 - 48.9 nm. This tunability of the SOI could pave the way toward the realization of high-fidelity qubits in Ge HW systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Generating Large-Scale Trajectories Efficiently using Double Descriptions of Polynomials

For quadrotor trajectory planning, describing a polynomial trajectory through coefficients and end-derivatives both enjoy their own convenience in energy minimization. We name them double descriptions of polynomial trajectories. The transformation between them, causing most of the inefficiency and instability, is formally analyzed in this paper. Leveraging its analytic structure, we design a linear-complexity scheme for both jerk/snap minimization and parameter gradient evaluation, which possesses efficiency, stability, flexibility, and scalability. With the help of our scheme, generating an energy optimal (minimum snap) trajectory only costs 1 $μs$ per piece at the scale up to 1,000,000 pieces. Moreover, generating large-scale energy-time optimal trajectories is also accelerated by an order of magnitude against conventional methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Geometrically Constrained Trajectory Optimization for Multicopters

We present an optimization-based framework for multicopter trajectory planning subject to geometrical configuration constraints and user-defined dynamic constraints. The basis of the framework is a novel trajectory representation built upon our novel optimality conditions for unconstrained control effort minimization. We design linear-complexity operations on this representation to conduct spatial-temporal deformation under various planning requirements. Smooth maps are utilized to exactly eliminate geometrical constraints in a lightweight fashion. A variety of state-input constraints are supported by the decoupling of dense constraint evaluation from sparse parameterization, and backward differentiation of flatness map. As a result, this framework transforms a generally constrained multicopter planning problem into an unconstrained optimization that can be solved reliably and efficiently. Our framework bridges the gaps among solution quality, planning efficiency, and constraint fidelity for a multicopter with limited resources and maneuvering capability. Its generality and robustness are both demonstrated by applications to different flight tasks. Extensive simulations and benchmarks are also conducted to show its capability of generating high-quality solutions while retaining the computation speed against other specialized methods by orders of magnitude. The source code of our framework is available at: https://github.com/ZJU-FAST-Lab/GCOPTER

preprint2022arXiv

Global boundedness and Allee effect for a nonlocal time fractional p-Laplacian reaction-diffusion equation

The global boundedness and asymptotic behavior are investigated for the solutions of a nonlocal time fractional p-Laplacian reaction-diffusion equation (NTFPLRDE) $$ \frac{\partial^{α}u}{\partial t^{α}}=Δ_{p} u+μu^{2}(1-kJ*u) -γu, \qquad(x,t)\in\mathbb{R}^{N}\times(0,+\infty)$$ with $0<α<1,β, μ,k>0,N\leq 2$ and $Δ_{p}u =div(\left| \bigtriangledown u \right|^{p-2}\bigtriangledown u)$. Under appropriate assumptions on $J$ and the conditions of $1<p<2$, it is proved that for any nonnegative and bounded initial conditions, the problem has a global bounded classical solution if $k^{*}=0$ for $N=1$ or $k^{*}=(μC^{2}_{GN}+1)η^{-1}$ for $N=2$, where $C_{GN}$ is the constant in Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality. With further assumptions on the initial datum, for small $μ$ values, the solution is shown to converge to $0$ exponentially or locally uniformly as $t \rightarrow \infty$, which is referred as the Allee effect in sense of Caputo derivative. Moreover, under the condition of $J \equiv 1$, it is proved that the nonlinear NTFPLRDE has a global bounded solution in any dimensional space with the nonlinear p-Laplacian diffusion terms $Δ_{p} u^{m}\, (2-\frac{2}{N}< m\leq 3)$.

preprint2022arXiv

Global boundedness and asymptotic behavior of time-space fractional nonlocal reaction-diffusion equation

The global boundedness and asymptotic behavior are investigate for the solution of time-space fractional non-local reaction-diffusion equation (TSFNRDE) $$ \frac{\partial^{α}u}{\partial t^{α}}=-(-Δ)^{s} u+μu^{2}(1-kJ*u)-γu, \qquad(x,t)\in\mathbb{R}^{N}\times(0,+\infty),$$ where $s\in(0,1),α\in(0,1), N \leq 2$. The operator $\partial_{t}^{α}$ is the Caputo fractional derivative, which $-(-Δ)^{s}$ is the fractional Laplacian operator. For appropriate assumptions on $J$, it is proved that for homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition, this problem admits a global bounded weak solution for $N=1$, while for $N=2$, global bounded weak solution exists for large $k$ values by Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality and fractional differential inequality. With further assumptions on the initial datum, for small $μ$ values, the solution is shown to converge to $0$ exponentially or locally uniformly as $t \rightarrow \infty$. Furthermore, under the condition of $J \equiv 1$, it is proved that the nonlinear TSFNRDE has a unique weak solution which is global bounded in fractional Sobolev space with the nonlinear fractional diffusion terms $-(-Δ)^{s} u^{m}\, (2-\frac{2}{N}<m<1)$.

preprint2022arXiv

Global existence, uniqueness and $L^{\infty}$-bound of weak solutions of fractional time-space Keller-Segel system

This paper studies the properties of weak solutions to a class of space-time fractional parabolic-elliptic Keller-Segel equations with logistic source terms in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$, $n\geq 2$. The global existence and $L^{\infty}$-bound of weak solutions are established. We mainly divide the damping coefficient into two cases: (i) $b>1-\fracα{n}$, for any initial value and birth rate; (ii) $0<b\leq 1-\fracα{n}$, for small initial value and small birth rate. The existence result is obtained by verifying the existence of a solution to the constructed regularization equation and incorporate the generalized compactness criterion of time fractional partial differential equation. At the same time, we get the $L^{\infty}$-bound of weak solutions by establishing the fractional differential inequality and using the Moser iterative method. Furthermore, we prove the uniqueness of weak solutions by using the hyper-contractive estimates when the damping coefficient is strong. Finally, we also propose a blow-up criterion for weak solutions, that is, if a weak solution blows up in finite time, then for all $h>q$, the $L^{h}$-norms of the weak solution blow up at the same time.

preprint2022arXiv

GPA-Teleoperation: Gaze Enhanced Perception-aware Safe Assistive Aerial Teleoperation

Gaze is an intuitive and direct way to represent the intentions of an individual. However, when it comes to assistive aerial teleoperation which aims to perform operators&#39; intention, rare attention has been paid to gaze. Existing methods obtain intention directly from the remote controller (RC) input, which is inaccurate, unstable, and unfriendly to non-professional operators. Further, most teleoperation works do not consider environment perception which is vital to guarantee safety. In this paper, we present GPA-Teleoperation, a gaze enhanced perception-aware assistive teleoperation framework, which addresses the above issues systematically. We capture the intention utilizing gaze information, and generate a topological path matching it. Then we refine the path into a safe and feasible trajectory which simultaneously enhances the perception awareness to the environment operators are interested in. Additionally, the proposed method is integrated into a customized quadrotor system. Extensive challenging indoor and outdoor real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons verify that the proposed system is reliable, robust and applicable to even unskilled users. We will release the source code of our system to benefit related researches.

preprint2022arXiv

Hand-held 3D Photoacoustic Imager with GPS

As an emerging medical diagnostic technology, photoacoustic imaging has been implemented for both preclinical and clinical applications. For clinical convenience, a handheld free scan photoacoustic tomography (PAT) system providing 3D imaging capability is essentially needed, which has potential for surgical navigation and disease diagnosis. In this paper, we proposed a free scan 3D PAT (fsPAT) system based on a handheld linear array ultrasound probe. A global positioning system (GPS) is applied for ultrasound probes coordinate acquisition. The proposed fsPAT can simultaneously realize real time 2D imaging, and large field of view 3D volumetric imaging, which is reconstructed from the multiple 2D images with coordinate information acquired by the GPS. To form a high quality 3D image, a dedicated space transformation method and reconstruction algorithm are used and validated by the proposed system. Both simulation and experimental studies have been performed to prove the feasibility of the proposed fsPAT. To explore its clinical potential, in vivo 3D imaging of human wrist vessels is also conducted, showing clear subcutaneous vessel network with high image contrast.

preprint2022arXiv

LF-VIO: A Visual-Inertial-Odometry Framework for Large Field-of-View Cameras with Negative Plane

Visual-inertial-odometry has attracted extensive attention in the field of autonomous driving and robotics. The size of Field of View (FoV) plays an important role in Visual-Odometry (VO) and Visual-Inertial-Odometry (VIO), as a large FoV enables to perceive a wide range of surrounding scene elements and features. However, when the field of the camera reaches the negative half plane, one cannot simply use [u,v,1]^T to represent the image feature points anymore. To tackle this issue, we propose LF-VIO, a real-time VIO framework for cameras with extremely large FoV. We leverage a three-dimensional vector with unit length to represent feature points, and design a series of algorithms to overcome this challenge. To address the scarcity of panoramic visual odometry datasets with ground-truth location and pose, we present the PALVIO dataset, collected with a Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL) system with an entire FoV of 360°x(40°-120°) and an IMU sensor. With a comprehensive variety of experiments, the proposed LF-VIO is verified on both the established PALVIO benchmark and a public fisheye camera dataset with a FoV of 360°x(0°-93.5°). LF-VIO outperforms state-of-the-art visual-inertial-odometry methods. Our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/flysoaryun/LF-VIO

preprint2022arXiv

Meeting-Merging-Mission: A Multi-robot Coordinate Framework for Large-Scale Communication-Limited Exploration

This letter presents a complete framework Meeting-Merging-Mission for multi-robot exploration under communication restriction. Considering communication is limited in both bandwidth and range in the real world, we propose a lightweight environment presentation method and an efficient cooperative exploration strategy. For lower bandwidth, each robot utilizes specific polytopes to maintains free space and super frontier information (SFI) as the source for exploration decision-making. To reduce repeated exploration, we develop a mission-based protocol that drives robots to share collected information in stable rendezvous. We also design a complete path planning scheme for both centralized and decentralized cases. To validate that our framework is practical and generic, we present an extensive benchmark and deploy our system into multi-UGV and multi-UAV platforms.

preprint2022arXiv

Mode-selective Single-dipole Excitation and Controlled Routing of Guided Waves in a Multi-mode Topological Waveguide

Topology-linked binary degrees of freedom of guided waves have been used to expand the channel capacity of and to ensure robust transmission through photonic waveguides. However, selectively exciting optical modes associated with the desired degree of freedom is challenging and typically requires spatially extended sources or filters. Both approaches are incompatible with the ultimate objective of developing compact mode-selective sources powered by single emitters. In addition, the implementation of highly desirable functionalities, such as controllable distribution of guided modes between multiple detectors, becomes challenging in highly-compact devices due to photon loss to reflections. Here, we demonstrate that a linearly-polarized dipole-like source can selectively excite a topologically robust edge mode with the desired valley degree of freedom. Reflection-free routing of valley-polarized edge modes into two spatially-separated detectors with reconfigurable splitting ratios is also presented. An optical implementation of such a source will have the potential to broaden the applications of topological photonic devices.

preprint2022arXiv

Mutual Adaptive Reasoning for Monocular 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation

Inter-person occlusion and depth ambiguity make estimating the 3D poses of monocular multiple persons as camera-centric coordinates a challenging problem. Typical top-down frameworks suffer from high computational redundancy with an additional detection stage. By contrast, the bottom-up methods enjoy low computational costs as they are less affected by the number of humans. However, most existing bottom-up methods treat camera-centric 3D human pose estimation as two unrelated subtasks: 2.5D pose estimation and camera-centric depth estimation. In this paper, we propose a unified model that leverages the mutual benefits of both these subtasks. Within the framework, a robust structured 2.5D pose estimation is designed to recognize inter-person occlusion based on depth relationships. Additionally, we develop an end-to-end geometry-aware depth reasoning method that exploits the mutual benefits of both 2.5D pose and camera-centric root depths. This method first uses 2.5D pose and geometry information to infer camera-centric root depths in a forward pass, and then exploits the root depths to further improve representation learning of 2.5D pose estimation in a backward pass. Further, we designed an adaptive fusion scheme that leverages both visual perception and body geometry to alleviate inherent depth ambiguity issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over a wide range of bottom-up methods. Our accuracy is even competitive with top-down counterparts. Notably, our model runs much faster than existing bottom-up and top-down methods.

preprint2022arXiv

NEDMP: Neural Enhanced Dynamic Message Passing

Predicting stochastic spreading processes on complex networks is critical in epidemic control, opinion propagation, and viral marketing. We focus on the problem of inferring the time-dependent marginal probabilities of states for each node which collectively quantifies the spreading results. Dynamic Message Passing (DMP) has been developed as an efficient inference algorithm for several spreading models, and it is asymptotically exact on locally tree-like networks. However, DMP can struggle in diffusion networks with lots of local loops. We address this limitation by using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to learn the dependency amongst messages implicitly. Specifically, we propose a hybrid model in which the GNN module runs jointly with DMP equations. The GNN module refines the aggregated messages in DMP iterations by learning from simulation data. We demonstrate numerically that after training, our model&#39;s inference accuracy substantially outperforms DMP in conditions of various network structure and dynamics parameters. Moreover, compared to pure data-driven models, the proposed hybrid model has a better generalization ability for out-of-training cases, profiting from the explicitly utilized dynamics priors in the hybrid model. A PyTorch implementation of our model is at https://github.com/FeiGSSS/NEDMP.

preprint2022arXiv

Parton distributions of light quarks and antiquarks in the proton

An algebraic Ansatz for the proton&#39;s Poincaré-covariant wave function, which includes both scalar and pseudovector diquark correlations, is used to calculate proton valence, sea, and glue distribution functions (DFs). Regarding contemporary data, a material pseudovector diquark component in the proton is necessary for an explanation of the neutron-proton structure function ratio; and a modest Pauli blocking effect in the gluon splitting function is sufficient to explain the proton&#39;s light-quark antimatter asymmetry. In comparison with pion DFs, the light-front momentum fractions carried by all identifiable parton classes are the same; on the other hand, the higher moments are different. Understanding these features may provide insights that explain distinctions between Nambu-Goldstone bosons and seemingly less complex hadrons.

preprint2022arXiv

Passive Photoacoustic Effect

Photoacoustic effect refers to the acoustic generation induced by laser irradiation, where nanosecond pulsed laser source is normally used to provide instantaneous heating and thermoelastic expansion of the sample. More generally, photoacoustic generation requires active intensity modulation of laser source to produce sharp temperature gradient, which is key to generate acoustic wave. In this paper, we propose a novel photoacoustic effect from moving droplet, which generates photoacoustic wave by a non-modulated continuous-wave laser. When the droplet moves through the laser spot area, it can be heated up and cooled down instantaneously, generating photoacoustic waves. We name it passive photoacoustic effect. Theoretical analysis and simulation study validated the existence of passive photoacoustic effect. This phenomenon may find potential application in high-throughput photoacoustic cytometry.

preprint2022arXiv

Photoacoustic Digital Skin: Generation and Simulation of Human Skin Vascular for Quantitative Image Analysis

Photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) is a hybrid imaging modality, which combines the high optical contrast of pure optical imaging and the high penetration depth of ultrasound imaging. However, photoacoustic image dataset with good quality and large quantity is lacking. In this paper, we mainly talk about how to generate a practical photoacoustic dataset. Firstly, we extracted 389 3D vessel volumes from CT whole-lung scan database, and enhanced the blood vessel structures. Then for each 3D vessel volume, we embedded it into a three-layer cubic phantom to formulate a skin tissue model, which includes epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. The vessel volume was placed randomly in dermis layer in 10 different ways. Thus, 3890 3D skin tissue phantoms were generated. Then we assigned optical properties for the four kinds of tissue types. Monte-Carlo optical simulations were deployed to obtain the optical fluence distribution. Then acoustic propagation simulations were deployed to obtain the photoacoustic initial pressure. Universal back-projection algorithm was used to reconstruct the photoacoustic images. This dataset could be used for deep learning-based photoacoustic image reconstruction, classification, registration, quantitative image analysis.

preprint2022arXiv

Photoacoustic Imaging Based on AlN MF-PMUT with Broadened Bandwidth

This paper reports an aluminum nitride (AlN) multi-frequency piezoelectric micromachined ultrasound transducers (MF-PMUT) array for photoacoustic (PA) imaging, where the broadened bandwidth is beneficial to improve imaging resolution. Specifically, PMUT based on micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology is suitable for PA endoscopic imaging of blood vessels and bronchi due to its miniature size. More importantly, AlN is a non-toxic material, which makes it harmless for biomedical applications. In this work, a MF-PMUT array are designed and fabricated for PAI. The device&#39;s vibration mode impedance and bandwidth are analyzed. The MF-PMUT sensor provides a wider bandwidth (65%) signal detection, which increases the resolution of PAI compared with traditional PMUT. We conduct an experiment on agar sample to present sensor&#39;s performance in images&#39; axial resolution.

preprint2022arXiv

Proposal for all-electrical spin manipulation and detection for a single molecule on boron-substituted graphene

All-electrical writing and reading of spin states attract considerable attention for their promising applications in energy-efficient spintronics devices. Here we show, based on rigorous first-principles calculations, that the spin properties can be manipulated and detected in molecular spinterfaces, where an iron tetraphenyl porphyrin (FeTPP) molecule is deposited on boron-substituted graphene (B-G). Notably, a reversible spin switching between the $S=1$ and $S=3/2$ states is achieved by a gate electrode. We can trace the origin to a strong hybridization between the Fe-$d_{{z}^2}$ and B-$p_z$ orbitals. Combining density functional theory with nonequilibrium Green&#39;s function formalism, we propose an experimentally feasible 3-terminal setup to probe the spin state. Furthermore, we show how the in-plane quantum transport for the B-G, which is non-spin polarized, can be modified by FeTPP, yielding a significant transport spin polarization near the Fermi energy ($>10\%$ for typical coverage). Our work paves the way to realize all-electrical spintronics devices using molecular spinterfaces.

preprint2022arXiv

Real-Time Trajectory Planning for Aerial Perching

This paper presents a novel trajectory planning method for aerial perching. Compared with the existing work, the terminal states and the trajectory durations can be adjusted adaptively, instead of being determined in advance. Furthermore, our planner is able to minimize the tangential relative speed on the premise of safety and dynamic feasibility. This feature is especially notable on micro aerial robots with low maneuverability or scenarios where the space is not enough. Moreover, we design a flexible transformation strategy to eliminate terminal constraints along with reducing optimization variables. Besides, we take precise SE(3) motion planning into account to ensure that the drone would not touch the landing platform until the last moment. The proposed method is validated onboard by a palm-sized micro aerial robot with quite limited thrust and moment (thrust-to-weight ratio 1.7) perching on a mobile inclined surface. Sufficient experimental results show that our planner generates an optimal trajectory within 20ms, and replans with warm start in 2ms.

preprint2022arXiv

Retrospective, Observational Studies for Estimating Vaccine Effects on the Secondary Attack Rate of SARS-CoV-2

COVID-19 vaccines are highly efficacious at preventing symptomatic infection, severe disease, and death. Most of the evidence that COVID-19 vaccines also reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is based on retrospective, observational studies. Specifically, an increasing number of studies are evaluating vaccine efficacy against the secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2 using data available in existing healthcare databases or contact tracing databases. Since these types of databases were designed for clinical diagnosis or management of COVID-19, they are limited in their ability to provide accurate information on infection, infection timing, and transmission events. In this manuscript, we highlight challenges with using existing databases to identify transmission units and confirm potential SARS-CoV-2 transmission events. We discuss the impact of common diagnostic testing strategies including event-prompted and infrequent testing and illustrate their potential biases in estimating vaccine efficacy against the secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2. We articulate the need for prospective observational studies of vaccine efficacy against the SARS-CoV-2 SAR, and we provide design and reporting considerations for studies using retrospective databases.

preprint2022arXiv

Solution of integrals with fractional Brownian motion for different Hurst indices

In this paper, we will evaluate integrals that define the conditional expectation, variance and characteristic function of stochastic processes with respect to fractional Brownian motion (fBm) for all relevant Hurst indices, i.e. $H \in (0,1)$. The fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (fOU) process, for example, gives rise to highly nontrivial integration formulas that need careful analysis when considering the whole range of Hurst indices. We will show that the classical technique of analytic continuation, from complex analysis, provides a way of extending the domain of validity of an integral, from $H\in(1/2,1)$, to the larger domain, $H\in(0,1)$. Numerical experiments for different Hurst indices confirm the robustness and efficiency of the integral formulations presented here. Moreover, we provide accurate and highly efficient financial option pricing results for processes that are related to the fOU process, with the help of Fourier cosine expansions.

preprint2022arXiv

Star-Convex Constrained Optimization for Visibility Planning with Application to Aerial Inspection

The visible capability is critical in many robot applications, such as inspection and surveillance, etc. Without the assurance of the visibility to targets, some tasks end up not being complete or even failing. In this paper, we propose a visibility guaranteed planner by star-convex constrained optimization. The visible space is modeled as star convex polytope (SCP) by nature and is generated by finding the visible points directly on point cloud. By exploiting the properties of the SCP, the visibility constraint is formulated for trajectory optimization. The trajectory is confined in the safe and visible flight corridor which consists of convex polytopes and SCPs. We further make a relaxation to the visibility constraints and transform the constrained trajectory optimization problem into an unconstrained one that can be reliably and efficiently solved. To validate the capability of the proposed planner, we present the practical application in site inspection. The experimental results show that the method is efficient, scalable, and visibility guaranteed, presenting the prospect of application to various other applications in the future.

preprint2022arXiv

Surface engineering for cellulose as a boosted Layer-by-Layer assembly: excellent flame retardancy and improved durability with introduction of bio-based &#34;molecular glue&#34;

Layer-by-Layer (LbL) assembly was attractive as a versatile tool to address the flammability of cotton, while the washing fastness of LbL coating stayed an issue. Aiming to tackle this issue, LbL layers consisted of phenylphosphonic acid (PHA) and 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) was deposited on polydopamine (PDA)-coated cotton. The prepared cotton reached 31.4% of limiting oxygen index (LOI), and extinguished immediately after removing the ignitor. Peak of heat release rate (pHRR) attenuated around 36 % compared with pure cotton. A combined barrier and quenching mechanisms were proposed. Moreover, enhanced washing durability (24.1% of LOI) was achieved even after 50 detergent laundering cycles. A facile, boosted LbL approach with proposed π-π stacking interactions between PDA abundant aromatic structures and benzene ring in PHA from LbL layers, is first to put forward to construct durable efficient flame retardant (FR) cotton. This work attempted to enlighten more thoughts and design for durable FR cotton fabrics.

preprint2022arXiv

The Visual-Inertial-Dynamical Multirotor Dataset

Recently, the community has witnessed numerous datasets built for developing and testing state estimators. However, for some applications such as aerial transportation or search-and-rescue, the contact force or other disturbance must be perceived for robust planning and control, which is beyond the capacity of these datasets. This paper introduces a Visual-Inertial-Dynamical (VID) dataset, not only focusing on traditional six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) pose estimation but also providing dynamical characteristics of the flight platform for external force perception or dynamics-aided estimation. The VID dataset contains hardware synchronized imagery and inertial measurements, with accurate ground truth trajectories for evaluating common visual-inertial estimators. Moreover, the proposed dataset highlights rotor speed and motor current measurements, control inputs, and ground truth 6-axis force data to evaluate external force estimation. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed VID dataset is the first public dataset containing visual-inertial and complete dynamical information in the real world for pose and external force evaluation. The dataset: https://github.com/ZJU-FAST-Lab/VID-Dataset and related files: https://github.com/ZJU-FAST-Lab/VID-Flight-Platform are open-sourced.

preprint2022arXiv

Topological metasurface: From passive toward active and beyond

Metasurfaces are subwavelength structured thin films consisting of arrays of units that allow the controls of polarization, phase and amplitude of light over a subwavelength thickness. The recent developments in topological photonics have greatly broadened the horizon in designing the metasurfaces for novel functional applications. In this review, we summarize recent progress in the research field of topological metasurfaces, firstly from the perspectives of passive and active in the classical regime, and then in the quantum regime. More specifically, we begin by examining the passive topological phenomena in two-dimensional photonic systems, including both time-reversal broken systems and time-reversal preserved systems. Subsequently, we move to discuss the cutting-edge studies of the active topological metasurfaces, including nonlinear topological metasurfaces and reconfigurable topological metasurfaces. After overviewing the topological metasurfaces in the classical regime, we show how the topological metasurfaces could provide a new platform for quantum information and quantum many-body physics. Finally, we conclude and describe some challenges and future directions of this fast-evolving field.

preprint2022arXiv

Ultrafast coherent control of a hole spin qubit in a germanium quantum dot

Operation speed and coherence time are two core measures for the viability of a qubit. Strong spin-orbit interaction (SOI) and relatively weak hyperfine interaction make holes in germanium (Ge) intriguing candidates for spin qubits with rapid, all-electrical coherent control. Here we report ultrafast single-spin manipulation in a hole-based double quantum dot in a germanium hut wire (GHW). Mediated by the strong SOI, a Rabi frequency exceeding 540 MHz is observed at a magnetic field of 100 mT, setting a record for ultrafast spin qubit control in semiconductor systems. We demonstrate that the strong SOI of heavy holes (HHs) in our GHW, characterized by a very short spin-orbit length of 1.5 nm, enables the rapid gate operations we accomplish. Our results demonstrate the potential of ultrafast coherent control of hole spin qubits to meet the requirement of DiVincenzo&#39;s criteria for a scalable quantum information processor.

preprint2022arXiv

Valence quark ratio in the proton

Beginning with precise data on the ratio of structure functions in deep inelastic scattering (DIS) from $^3$He and $^3$H, collected on the domain $0.19 \leq x_B \leq 0.83$, where $x_B$ is the Bjorken scaling variable, we employ a robust method for extrapolating such data to arrive at a model-independent result for the $x_B=1$ value of the ratio of neutron and proton structure functions. Combining this with information obtained in analyses of DIS from nuclei, corrected for target-structure dependence, we arrive at a prediction for the proton&#39;s valence-quark ratio: $\left. d_v/u_v \right|_{x_B\to 1} = 0.230 (57)$. Requiring consistency with this result presents a challenge to many descriptions of proton structure.

preprint2021arXiv

Bridging Unpaired Facial Photos And Sketches By Line-drawings

In this paper, we propose a novel method to learn face sketch synthesis models by using unpaired data. Our main idea is bridging the photo domain $\mathcal{X}$ and the sketch domain $Y$ by using the line-drawing domain $\mathcal{Z}$. Specially, we map both photos and sketches to line-drawings by using a neural style transfer method, i.e. $F: \mathcal{X}/\mathcal{Y} \mapsto \mathcal{Z}$. Consequently, we obtain \textit{pseudo paired data} $(\mathcal{Z}, \mathcal{Y})$, and can learn the mapping $G:\mathcal{Z} \mapsto \mathcal{Y}$ in a supervised learning manner. In the inference stage, given a facial photo, we can first transfer it to a line-drawing and then to a sketch by $G \circ F$. Additionally, we propose a novel stroke loss for generating different types of strokes. Our method, termed sRender, accords well with human artists&#39; rendering process. Experimental results demonstrate that sRender can generate multi-style sketches, and significantly outperforms existing unpaired image-to-image translation methods.

preprint2021arXiv

CMPCC: Corridor-based Model Predictive Contouring Control for Aggressive Drone Flight

In this paper, we propose an efficient, receding horizon, local adaptive low-level planner as the middle layer between our original planner and controller. Our method is named as corridor-based model predictive contouring control (CMPCC) since it builds upon on MPCC and utilizes the flight corridor as hard safety constraints. It optimizes the flight aggressiveness and tracking accuracy simultaneously, thus improving our system&#39;s robustness by overcoming unmeasured disturbances. Our method features its online flight speed optimization, strict safety and feasibility, and real-time performance, and will be released as a low-level plugin for a large variety of quadrotor systems.

preprint2021arXiv

Deep Learning Adapted Acceleration for Limited-view Photoacoustic Computed Tomography

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is a non-invasive imaging modality that detects the ultrasound signal generated from tissue with light excitation. Photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) uses unfocused large-area light to illuminate the target with ultrasound transducer array for PA signal detection. Limited-view issue could cause a low-quality image in PACT due to the limitation of geometric condition. The model-based method is used to resolve this problem, which contains different regularization. To adapt fast and high-quality reconstruction of limited-view PA data, in this paper, a model-based method that combines the mathematical variational model with deep learning is proposed to speed up and regularize the unrolled procedure of reconstruction. A deep neural network is designed to adapt the step of the gradient updated term of data consistency in the gradient descent procedure, which can obtain a high-quality PA image only with a few iterations. Note that all parameters and priors are automatically learned during the offline training stage. In experiments, we show that this method outperforms the other methods with half-view (180 degrees) simulation and real data. The comparison of different model-based methods show that our proposed scheme has superior performances (over 0.05 for SSIM) with same iteration (3 times) steps. Furthermore, an unseen data is used to validate the generalization of different methods. Finally, we find that our method obtains superior results (0.94 value of SSIM for in vivo) with a high robustness and accelerated reconstruction.

preprint2021arXiv

Defining and Estimating Subgroup Mediation Effects with Semi-Competing Risks Data

In many medical studies, an ultimate failure event such as death is likely to be affected by the occurrence and timing of other intermediate clinical events. Both event times are subject to censoring by loss-to-follow-up but the nonterminal event may further be censored by the occurrence of the primary outcome, but not vice versa. To study the effect of an intervention on both events, the intermediate event may be viewed as a mediator, but conventional definition of direct and indirect effects is not applicable due to semi-competing risks data structure. We define three principal strata based on whether the potential intermediate event occurs before the potential failure event, which allow proper definition of direct and indirect effects in one stratum whereas total effects are defined for all strata. We discuss the identification conditions for stratum-specific effects, and proposed a semiparametric estimator based on a multivariate logistic stratum membership model and within-stratum proportional hazards models for the event times. By treating the unobserved stratum membership as a latent variable, we propose an EM algorithm for computation. We study the asymptotic properties of the estimators by the modern empirical process theory and examine the performance of the estimators in numerical studies.

preprint2021arXiv

Integrating Fast Regional Optimization into Sampling-based Kinodynamic Planning for Multirotor Flight

For real-time multirotor kinodynamic motion planning, the efficiency of sampling-based methods is usually hindered by difficult-to-sample homotopy classes like narrow passages. In this paper, we address this issue by a hybrid scheme. We firstly propose a fast regional optimizer exploiting the information of local environments and then integrate it into a global sampling process to ensure faster convergence. The incorporation of local optimization on different sampling-based methods shows significantly improved success rates and less planning time in various types of challenging environments. We also present a refinement module that fully investigates the resulting trajectory of the global sampling and greatly improves its smoothness with negligible computation effort. Benchmark results illustrate that compared to the state-of-the-art ones, our proposed method can better exploit a previous trajectory. The planning methods are applied to generate trajectories for a simulated quadrotor system, and its capability is validated in real-time applications.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning Efficient, Explainable and Discriminative Representations for Pulmonary Nodules Classification

Automatic pulmonary nodules classification is significant for early diagnosis of lung cancers. Recently, deep learning techniques have enabled remarkable progress in this field. However, these deep models are typically of high computational complexity and work in a black-box manner. To combat these challenges, in this work, we aim to build an efficient and (partially) explainable classification model. Specially, we use \emph{neural architecture search} (NAS) to automatically search 3D network architectures with excellent accuracy/speed trade-off. Besides, we use the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) in the networks, which helps us understand the reasoning process. During training, we use A-Softmax loss to learn angularly discriminative representations. In the inference stage, we employ an ensemble of diverse neural networks to improve the prediction accuracy and robustness. We conduct extensive experiments on the LIDC-IDRI database. Compared with previous state-of-the-art, our model shows highly comparable performance by using less than 1/40 parameters. Besides, empirical study shows that the reasoning process of learned networks is in conformity with physicians&#39; diagnosis. Related code and results have been released at: https://github.com/fei-hdu/NAS-Lung.

preprint2021arXiv

Phase structure of 2+1-flavour QCD and the magnetic equation of state

We determine the chiral phase structure of $2+1$-flavour QCD in dependence of temperature and the light flavour quark mass with Dyson-Schwinger equations. Specifically, we compute the renormalised chiral condensate and its susceptibility. The latter is used to determine the (pseudo)critical temperature for general light current quark masses. In the chiral limit we obtain a critical temperature of about 141\,MeV. This result is in quantitative agreement with recent functional renormalisation group results in QCD, and is compatible with the respective lattice results. We also compute the order parameter potential of the light chiral condensate and map out the regime in the phase diagram which exhibits quasi-massless modes, and discuss the respective chiral dynamics.

preprint2021arXiv

Quantum algorithm for Neighborhood Preserving Embedding

Neighborhood Preserving Embedding (NPE) is an important linear dimensionality reduction technique that aims at preserving the local manifold structure. NPE contains three steps, i.e., finding the nearest neighbors of each data point, constructing the weight matrix, and obtaining the transformation matrix. Liang et al. proposed a variational quantum algorithm (VQA) for NPE [Phys. Rev. A 101, 032323 (2020)]. The algorithm consists of three quantum sub-algorithms, corresponding to the three steps of NPE, and was expected to have an exponential speedup on the dimensionality $n$. However, the algorithm has two disadvantages: (1) It is incomplete in the sense that the input of the third sub-algorithm cannot be obtained by the second sub-algorithm. (2) Its complexity cannot be rigorously analyzed because the third sub-algorithm in it is a VQA. In this paper, we propose a complete quantum algorithm for NPE, in which we redesign the three sub-algorithms and give a rigorous complexity analysis. It is shown that our algorithm can achieve a polynomial speedup on the number of data points $m$ and an exponential speedup on the dimensionality $n$ under certain conditions over the classical NPE algorithm, and achieve significant speedup compared to Liang et al.&#39;s algorithm even without considering the complexity of the VQA.

preprint2021arXiv

Quantum algorithms for anomaly detection using amplitude estimation

Anomaly detection plays a critical role in fraud detection, health care, intrusion detection, military surveillance, etc. Anomaly detection algorithm based on density estimation (called ADDE algorithm) is one of widely used algorithms. Liang et al. proposed a quantum version of the ADDE algorithm [Phys. Rev. A 99, 052310 (2019)] and it is believed that the algorithm has exponential speedups on both the number and the dimension of training data point over the classical algorithm. In this paper, we find that Liang et al.&#39;s algorithm doesn&#39;t actually execute. Then we propose a new quantum ADDE algorithm based on amplitude estimation. It is shown that our algorithm can achieves exponential speedup on the number $M$ of training data points compared with the classical counterpart. Besides, the idea of our algorithm can be applied to optimize the anomaly detection algorithm based on kernel principal component analysis (called ADKPCA algorithm). Different from the quantum ADKPCA proposed by Liu et al. [Phys. Rev. A 97, 042315 (2018)], compared with the classical counterpart, which offer exponential speedup on the dimension $d$ of data points, our algorithm achieves exponential speedup on $M$.

preprint2021arXiv

Radiation-tolerant high-entropy alloys via interstitial-solute-induced chemical heterogeneities

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) composed of multiple principal elements have been shown to offer improved radiation resistance over their elemental or dilute-solution counterparts. Using NiCoFeCrMn HEA as a model, here we introduce carbon and nitrogen interstitial alloying elements to impart chemical heterogeneities in the form of the local chemical order (LCO) and associated compositional variations. Density functional theory simulations predict chemical short-range order (CSRO) (nearest neighbors and the next couple of atomic shells) surrounding C and N, due to the chemical affinity of C with (Co, Fe) and N with (Cr, Mn). Atomic-resolution chemical mapping of the elemental distribution confirms marked compositional variations well beyond statistical fluctuations. Ni+ irradiation experiments at elevated temperatures demonstrate a remarkable reduction in void swelling by at least one order of magnitude compared to the base HEA without C and N alloying. The underlying mechanism is that the interstitial-solute-induced chemical heterogeneities roughen the lattice as well as the energy landscape, impeding the movements of, and constraining the path lanes for, the normally fast-moving self-interstitials and their clusters. The irradiation-produced interstitials and vacancies therefore recombine more readily, delaying void formation. Our findings thus open a promising avenue towards highly radiation-tolerant alloys.

preprint2021arXiv

Real-time Monaural Speech Enhancement With Short-time Discrete Cosine Transform

Speech enhancement algorithms based on deep learning have been improved in terms of speech intelligibility and perceptual quality greatly. Many methods focus on enhancing the amplitude spectrum while reconstructing speech using the mixture phase. Since the clean phase is very important and difficult to predict, the performance of these methods will be limited. Some researchers attempted to estimate the phase spectrum directly or indirectly, but the effect is not ideal. Recently, some studies proposed the complex-valued model and achieved state-of-the-art performance, such as deep complex convolution recurrent network (DCCRN). However, the computation of the model is huge. To reduce the complexity and further improve the performance, we propose a novel method using discrete cosine transform as the input in this paper, called deep cosine transform convolutional recurrent network (DCTCRN). Experimental results show that DCTCRN achieves state-of-the-art performance both on objective and subjective metrics. Compared with noisy mixtures, the mean opinion score (MOS) increased by 0.46 (2.86 to 3.32) absolute processed by the proposed model with only 2.86M parameters.

preprint2021arXiv

Statistical Considerations for Cross-Sectional HIV Incidence Estimation Based on Recency Test

Longitudinal cohorts to determine the incidence of HIV infection are logistically challenging, so researchers have sought alternative strategies. Recency test methods use biomarker profiles of HIV-infected subjects in a cross-sectional sample to infer whether they are &#34;recently&#34; infected and to estimate incidence in the population. Two main estimators have been used in practice: one that assumes a recency test is perfectly specific, and another that allows for false-recent results. To date, these commonly used estimators have not been rigorously studied with respect to their assumptions and statistical properties. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework with which to understand these estimators and interrogate their assumptions, and perform a simulation study to assess the performance of these estimators under realistic HIV epidemiological dynamics. We conclude with recommendations for the use of these estimators in practice and a discussion of future methodological developments to improve HIV incidence estimation via recency test.

preprint2020arXiv

Alternating Minimization Based Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Aggressive Flight

With much research has been conducted into trajectory planning for quadrotors, planning with spatial and temporal optimal trajectories in real-time is still challenging. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating large-scale piecewise polynomial trajectories for aggressive autonomous flights, with highlights on its superior computational efficiency and simultaneous spatial-temporal optimality. Exploiting the implicitly decoupled structure of the planning problem, we conduct alternating minimization between boundary conditions and time durations of trajectory pieces. In each minimization phase, we leverage the algebraic convenience of the sub-problem to escape poor local minima and achieve the lowest time consumption. Theoretical analysis for the global/local convergence rate of our proposed method is provided. Moreover, based on polynomial theory, an extremely fast feasibility check method is designed for various kinds of constraints. By incorporating the method into our alternating structure, a constrained minimization algorithm is constructed to optimize trajectories on the premise of feasibility. Benchmark evaluation shows that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods regarding efficiency, optimality, and scalability. Aggressive flight experiments in a limited space with dense obstacles are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. We release our implementation as an open-source ros-package.

preprint2020arXiv

Chiral plasmons with twisted atomic bilayers

Van der Waals heterostructures of atomically thin layers with rotational misalignments, such as twisted bilayer graphene, feature interesting structural moiré superlattices. Due to the quantum coupling between the twisted atomic layers, light-matter interaction is inherently chiral; as such, they provide a promising platform for chiral plasmons in the extreme nanoscale. However, while the interlayer quantum coupling can be significant, its influence on chiral plasmons still remains elusive. Here we present the general solutions from full Maxwell equations of chiral plasmons in twisted atomic bilayers, with the consideration of interlayer quantum coupling. We find twisted atomic bilayers have a direct correspondence to the chiral metasurface, which simultaneously possesses chiral and magnetic surface conductivities, besides the common electric surface conductivity. In other words, the interlayer quantum coupling in twisted van der Waals heterostructures may facilitate the construction of various (e.g., bi-anisotropic) atomically-thin metasurfaces. Moreover, the chiral surface conductivity, determined by the interlayer quantum coupling, determines the existence of chiral plasmons and leads to a unique phase relationship (i.e., +/-π/2 phase difference) between their TE and TM wave components. Importantly, such a unique phase relationship for chiral plasmons can be exploited to construct the missing longitudinal spin of plasmons, besides the common transverse spin of plasmons.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Learning Enables Robust and Precise Light Focusing on Treatment Needs

If light passes through the body tissues, focusing only on areas where treatment needs, such as tumors, will revolutionize many biomedical imaging and therapy technologies. So how to focus light through deep inhomogeneous tissues overcoming scattering is Holy Grail in biomedical areas. In this paper, we use deep learning to learn and accelerate the process of phase pre-compensation using wavefront shaping. We present an approach (LoftGAN, light only focuses on treatment needs) for learning the relationship between phase domain X and speckle domain Y . Our goal is not just to learn an inverse mapping F:Y->X such that we can know the corresponding X needed for imaging Y like most work, but also to make focusing that is susceptible to disturbances more robust and precise by ensuring that the phase obtained can be forward mapped back to speckle. So we introduce different constraints to enforce F(Y)=X and H(F(Y))=Y with the transmission mapping H:X->Y. Both simulation and physical experiments are performed to investigate the effects of light focusing to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and comparative experiments prove the crucial improvement of robustness and precision. Codes are available at https://github.com/ChangchunYang/LoftGAN.

preprint2020arXiv

Detailed Proofs of Alternating Minimization Based Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Aggressive Flight

This technical report provides detailed theoretical analysis of the algorithm used in \textit{Alternating Minimization Based Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Aggressive Flight}. An assumption is provided to ensure that settings for the objective function are meaningful. What&#39;s more, we explore the structure of the optimization problem and analyze the global/local convergence rate of the employed algorithm.

preprint2020arXiv

Dipole coupling of a tunable hole double quantum dot in germanium hut wire to a microwave resonator

The germanium (Ge) hut wire system has strong spin-orbit coupling, a long coherence time due to a very large heavy-light hole splitting, and the advantage of site-controlled large-scale hut wire positioning. These properties make the Ge hut wire a promising candidate for the realization of strong coupling of spin to superconducting resonators and scalability for multiple qubit coupling. We have coupled a reflection line resonator to a hole double quantum dot (DQD) formed in Ge hut wire. The amplitude and phase responses of the microwave resonator revealed that the charge stability diagrams of the DQD are in good agreement with those obtained from transport measurements. The DQD interdot tunneling rate is shown to be tunable from 6.2 GHz to 8.5 GHz, which demonstrates the ability to adjust the frequency detuning between the qubit and the resonator. Furthermore, we achieved a hole-resonator coupling strength of up to 15 MHz, with a charge qubit decoherence rate of 0.28 GHz. Meanwhile the hole spin-resonator coupling rate was estimated to be 3 MHz. These results suggest that holes of a DQD in a Ge hut wire are dipole coupled to microwave photons, potentially enabling tunable hole spin-photon interactions in Ge with an inherent spin-orbit coupling.

preprint2020arXiv

Hole spin in tunable Ge hut wire double quantum dot

Holes in germanium (Ge) exhibit strong spin-orbit interaction, which can be exploited for fast and all-electrical manipulation of spin states. Here, we report transport experiments in a tunable Ge hut wire hole double quantum dot. We observe the signatures of Pauli spin blockade (PSB) with a large singlet-triplet energy splitting of ~1.1 meV and extract the g factor. By analyzing the the PSB leakage current, we obtain a spin-orbit length l_so of ~ 40-100 nm. Furthermore, we demonstrate the electric dipole spin resonance. These results lay a solid foundation for implementing high quality tunable hole spin-orbit qubits.

preprint2020arXiv

Making Robots Draw A Vivid Portrait In Two Minutes

Significant progress has been made with artistic robots. However, existing robots fail to produce high-quality portraits in a short time. In this work, we present a drawing robot, which can automatically transfer a facial picture to a vivid portrait, and then draw it on paper within two minutes averagely. At the heart of our system is a novel portrait synthesis algorithm based on deep learning. Innovatively, we employ a self-consistency loss, which makes the algorithm capable of generating continuous and smooth brush-strokes. Besides, we propose a componential sparsity constraint to reduce the number of brush-strokes over insignificant areas. We also implement a local sketch synthesis algorithm, and several pre- and post-processing techniques to deal with the background and details. The portrait produced by our algorithm successfully captures individual characteristics by using a sparse set of continuous brush-strokes. Finally, the portrait is converted to a sequence of trajectories and reproduced by a 3-degree-of-freedom robotic arm. The whole portrait drawing robotic system is named AiSketcher. Extensive experiments show that AiSketcher can produce considerably high-quality sketches for a wide range of pictures, including faces in-the-wild and universal images of arbitrary content. To our best knowledge, AiSketcher is the first portrait drawing robot that uses neural style transfer techniques. AiSketcher has attended a quite number of exhibitions and shown remarkable performance under diverse circumstances.

preprint2020arXiv

Portable probe design for photoacoustic imaging in vivo

A low-cost adjustable illumination scheme for hand-held photoacoustic imaging probe is presented, manufactured and tested in this paper. Compared with traditional photoacoustic probe design, it has the following advantages: (1) Different excitation modes can be selected as needed. By tuning control parameters, it can achieve bright-field, dark-field, and hybrid field light illumination schemes. (2) The spot-adjustable unit (SAU) specifically designed for beam expansion, together with a water tank for transmitting ultrasonic waves, enable the device to break through the constraints of the transfer medium and is more widely used. The beam-expansion experiment is conducted to verify the function of SAU. After that, we built a PAT system based on our newly designed apparatus. Phantom and in vivo experimental results show different performance in different illumination schemes

preprint2020arXiv

Quantum restricted Boltzmann machine universal for quantum computation

The challenge posed by the many-body problem in quantum physics originates from the difficulty of describing the nontrivial correlations encoded in the many-body wave functions with high complexity. Quantum neural network provides a powerful tool to represent the large-scale wave function, which has aroused widespread concern in the quantum superiority era. A significant open problem is what exactly the representational power boundary of the single-layer quantum neural network is. In this paper, we design a 2-local Hamiltonian and then give a kind of Quantum Restricted Boltzmann Machine (QRBM, i.e. single-layer quantum neural network) based on it. The proposed QRBM has the following two salient features. (1) It is proved universal for implementing quantum computation tasks. (2) It can be efficiently implemented on the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. We successfully utilize the proposed QRBM to compute the wave functions for the notable cases of physical interest including the ground state as well as the Gibbs state (thermal state) of molecules on the superconducting quantum chip. The experimental results illustrate the proposed QRBM can compute the above wave functions with an acceptable error.

preprint2020arXiv

RAPTOR: Robust and Perception-aware Trajectory Replanning for Quadrotor Fast Flight

Recent advances in trajectory replanning have enabled quadrotor to navigate autonomously in unknown environments. However, high-speed navigation still remains a significant challenge. Given very limited time, existing methods have no strong guarantee on the feasibility or quality of the solutions. Moreover, most methods do not consider environment perception, which is the key bottleneck to fast flight. In this paper, we present RAPTOR, a robust and perception-aware replanning framework to support fast and safe flight. A path-guided optimization (PGO) approach that incorporates multiple topological paths is devised, to ensure finding feasible and high-quality trajectories in very limited time. We also introduce a perception-aware planning strategy to actively observe and avoid unknown obstacles. A risk-aware trajectory refinement ensures that unknown obstacles which may endanger the quadrotor can be observed earlier and avoid in time. The motion of yaw angle is planned to actively explore the surrounding space that is relevant for safe navigation. The proposed methods are tested extensively. We will release our implementation as an open-source package for the community.

preprint2020arXiv

Robust Real-time UAV Replanning Using Guided Gradient-based Optimization and Topological Paths

Gradient-based trajectory optimization (GTO) has gained wide popularity for quadrotor trajectory replanning. However, it suffers from local minima, which is not only fatal to safety but also unfavorable for smooth navigation. In this paper, we propose a replanning method based on GTO addressing this issue systematically. A path-guided optimization (PGO) approach is devised to tackle infeasible local minima, which improves the replanning success rate significantly. A topological path searching algorithm is developed to capture a collection of distinct useful paths in 3-D environments, each of which then guides an independent trajectory optimization. It activates a more comprehensive exploration of the solution space and output superior replanned trajectories. Benchmark evaluation shows that our method outplays state-of-the-art methods regarding replanning success rate and optimality. Challenging experiments of aggressive autonomous flight are presented to demonstrate the robustness of our method. We will release our implementation as an open-source package.

preprint2020arXiv

Self-controlled growth of highly uniform Ge/Si hut wires for scalable qubit devices

Semiconductor nanowires have been playing a crucial role in the development of nanoscale devices for the realization of spin qubits, Majorana fermions, single photon emitters, nanoprocessors, etc. The monolithic growth of site-controlled nanowires is a prerequisite towards the next generation of devices that will require addressability and scalability. Here, combining top-down nanofabrication and bottom-up self-assembly, we report on the growth of Ge wires on pre-patterned Si (001) substrates with controllable position, distance, length and structure. This is achieved by a novel growth process which uses a SiGe strain-relaxation template and can be generalized to other material combinations. Transport measurements show an electrically tunable spin-orbit coupling, with a spin-orbit length similar to that of III-V materials. Also, capacitive coupling between closely spaced wires is observed, which underlines their potential as a host for implementing two qubit gates. The reported results open a path towards scalable qubit devices with Si compatibility.

preprint2020arXiv

Thermal properties of $π$ and $ρ$ meson

We computed the pole masses and decay constants of $π$ and $ρ$ meson at finite temperature in the framework of Dyson-Schwinger equations and Bethe-Salpeter equations approach. Below transition temperature, pion pole mass increases monotonously, while $ρ$ meson seems to be temperature independent. Above transition temperature, pion mass approaches the free field limit, whereas $ρ$ meson is about twice as large as that limit. Pion and the longitudinal projection of $ρ$ meson decay constants have similar behaviour as the order parameter of chiral symmetry, whereas the transverse projection of $ρ$ meson decay constant rises monotonously as temperature increases. The inflection point of decay constant and the chiral susceptibility get the same phase transition temperature. Though there is no access to the thermal width of mesons within this scheme, it is discussed by analyzing the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner (GMOR) relation in medium. These thermal properties of hadron observables will help us understand the QCD phases at finite temperature and can be employed to improve the experimental data analysis and heavy ion collision simulations.

preprint2020arXiv

Towards Realistic Face Photo-Sketch Synthesis via Composition-Aided GANs

Face photo-sketch synthesis aims at generating a facial sketch/photo conditioned on a given photo/sketch. It is of wide applications including digital entertainment and law enforcement. Precisely depicting face photos/sketches remains challenging due to the restrictions on structural realism and textural consistency. While existing methods achieve compelling results, they mostly yield blurred effects and great deformation over various facial components, leading to the unrealistic feeling of synthesized images. To tackle this challenge, in this work, we propose to use the facial composition information to help the synthesis of face sketch/photo. Specially, we propose a novel composition-aided generative adversarial network (CA-GAN) for face photo-sketch synthesis. In CA-GAN, we utilize paired inputs including a face photo/sketch and the corresponding pixel-wise face labels for generating a sketch/photo. In addition, to focus training on hard-generated components and delicate facial structures, we propose a compositional reconstruction loss. Finally, we use stacked CA-GANs (SCA-GAN) to further rectify defects and add compelling details. Experimental results show that our method is capable of generating both visually comfortable and identity-preserving face sketches/photos over a wide range of challenging data. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art quality, reducing best previous Frechet Inception distance (FID) by a large margin. Besides, we demonstrate that the proposed method is of considerable generalization ability. We have made our code and results publicly available: https://fei-hdu.github.io/ca-gan/.

preprint2019arXiv

Pion and Kaon Structure at the Electron-Ion Collider

Understanding the origin and dynamics of hadron structure and in turn that of atomic nuclei is a central goal of nuclear physics. This challenge entails the questions of how does the roughly 1 GeV mass-scale that characterizes atomic nuclei appear; why does it have the observed value; and, enigmatically, why are the composite Nambu-Goldstone (NG) bosons in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) abnormally light in comparison? In this perspective, we provide an analysis of the mass budget of the pion and proton in QCD; discuss the special role of the kaon, which lies near the boundary between dominance of strong and Higgs mass-generation mechanisms; and explain the need for a coherent effort in QCD phenomenology and continuum calculations, in exa-scale computing as provided by lattice QCD, and in experiments to make progress in understanding the origins of hadron masses and the distribution of that mass within them. We compare the unique capabilities foreseen at the electron-ion collider (EIC) with those at the hadron-electron ring accelerator (HERA), the only previous electron-proton collider; and describe five key experimental measurements, enabled by the EIC and aimed at delivering fundamental insights that will generate concrete answers to the questions of how mass and structure arise in the pion and kaon, the Standard Model&#39;s NG modes, whose surprisingly low mass is critical to the evolution of our Universe.

preprint2018arXiv

Acoustic higher-order topological insulator on a Kagome lattice

High-order topological insulators (TIs) are a family of recently-predicted topological phases of matter obeying an extended topological bulk-boundary correspondence principle. For example, a two-dimensional (2D) second-order TI does not exhibit gapless one-dimensional (1D) topological edge states, like a standard 2D TI, but instead has topologically-protected zero-dimensional (0D) corner states. So far, higher-order TIs have been demonstrated only in classical mechanical and electromagnetic metamaterials exhibiting quantized quadrupole polarization. Here, we experimentally realize a second-order TI in an acoustic metamaterial. This is the first experimental realization of a new type of higher-order TI, based on a breathing Kagome lattice, that has zero quadrupole polarization but nontrivial bulk topology characterized by quantized Wannier centers (WCs). Unlike previous higher-order TI realizations, the corner states depend not only on the bulk topology but also on the corner shape; we show experimentally that they exist at acute-angled corners of the Kagome lattice, but not at obtuse-angled corners. This shape dependence allows corner states to act as topologically-protected but reconfigurable local resonances.

preprint2015arXiv

Constructing locally indistinguishable orthogonal product bases in an $m \otimes n$ system

Recently, Zhang et al [Phys. Rev. A 92, 012332 (2015)] presented $4d-4$ orthogonal product states that are locally indistinguishable and completable in a $d\otimes d$ quantum system. Later, Zhang et al. [arXiv: 1509.01814v2 (2015)] constructed $2n-1$ orthogonal product states that are locally indistinguishable in $m\otimes n$ ($3\leq m \leq n$). In this paper, we construct a locally indistinguishable and completable orthogonal product basis with $4p-4$ members in a general $m\otimes n$ ($3\leq m \leq n$) quantum system, where $p$ is an arbitrary integer from $3$ to $m$, and give a very simple but quite effective proof for its local indistinguishability. Specially, we get a completable orthogonal product basis with $8$ members that cannot be locally distinguished in $m\otimes n$ ($3\leq m \leq n$) when $p=3$. It is so far the smallest completable orthogonal product basis that cannot be locally distinguished in a $m\otimes n$ quantum system. On the other hand, we construct a small locally indistinguishable orthogonal product basis with $2p-1$ members, which is maybe uncompletable, in $m\otimes n$ ($3\leq m \leq n$ and $p$ is an arbitrary integer from $3$ to $m$). We also prove its local indistinguishability. As a corollary, we give an uncompletable orthogonal product basis with $5$ members that are locally indistinguishable in $m\otimes n$ ($3\leq m \leq n$). All the results can lead us to a better understanding of the structure of a locally indistinguishable product basis in $m \otimes n$.