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Published work

72 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Correcting Autonomous Driving Object Detection Misclassifications with Automated Commonsense Reasoning

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology has been heavily researched and sought after, yet there are no SAE Level 5 AVs available today in the marketplace. We contend that over-reliance on machine learning technology is the main reason. Use of automated commonsense reasoning technology, we believe, can help achieve SAE Level 5 autonomy. In this paper, we show how automated common-sense reasoning technology can be deployed in situations where there are not enough data samples available to train a deep learning-based AV model that can handle certain abnormal road scenarios. Specifically, we consider two situations where (i) a traffic signal is malfunctioning at an intersection and (ii) all the cars ahead are slowing down and steering away due to an unexpected obstruction (e.g., animals on the road). We show that in such situations, our commonsense reasoning-based solution accurately detects traffic light colors and obstacles not correctly captured by the AV's perception model. We also provide a pathway for efficiently invoking commonsense reasoning by measuring uncertainty in the computer vision model and using commonsense reasoning to handle uncertain scenarios. We describe our experiments conducted using the CARLA simulator and the results obtained. The main contribution of our research is to show that automated commonsense reasoning effectively corrects AV-based object detection misclassifications and that hybrid models provide an effective pathway to improving AV perception.

preprint2026arXiv

CoV: Chain-of-View Prompting for Spatial Reasoning

Embodied question answering (EQA) in 3D environments often requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints and partially occluded. However, most recent vision--language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views, which limits their ability to acquire question-relevant context at inference time and hinders complex spatial reasoning. We propose Chain-of-View (CoV) prompting, a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. CoV first employs a View Selection agent to filter redundant frames and identify question-aligned anchor views. It then performs fine-grained view adjustment by interleaving iterative reasoning with discrete camera actions, obtaining new observations from the underlying 3D scene representation until sufficient context is gathered or a step budget is reached. We evaluate CoV on OpenEQA across four mainstream VLMs and obtain an average +11.56% improvement in LLM-Match, with a maximum gain of +13.62% on Qwen3-VL-Flash. CoV further exhibits test-time scaling: increasing the minimum action budget yields an additional +2.51% average improvement, peaking at +3.73% on Gemini-2.5-Flash. On ScanQA and SQA3D, CoV delivers strong performance (e.g., 116 CIDEr / 31.9 EM@1 on ScanQA and 51.1 EM@1 on SQA3D). Overall, these results suggest that question-aligned view selection coupled with open-view search is an effective, model-agnostic strategy for improving spatial reasoning in 3D EQA without additional training. Code is available on https://github.com/ziplab/CoV .

preprint2026arXiv

Detecting PTSD in Clinical Interviews: A Comparative Analysis of NLP Methods and Large Language Models

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) remains underdiagnosed in clinical settings, presenting opportunities for automated detection to identify patients. This study evaluates natural language processing approaches for detecting PTSD from clinical interview transcripts. We compared general and mental health-specific transformer models (BERT/RoBERTa), embedding-based methods (SentenceBERT/LLaMA), and large language model prompting strategies (zero-shot/few-shot/chain-of-thought) using the DAIC-WOZ dataset. Domain-specific end-to-end models significantly outperformed general models (Mental-RoBERTa AUPRC=0.675+/-0.084 vs. RoBERTa-base 0.599+/-0.145). SentenceBERT embeddings with neural networks achieved the highest overall performance (AUPRC=0.758+/-0.128). Few-shot prompting using DSM-5 criteria yielded competitive results with two examples (AUPRC=0.737). Performance varied significantly across symptom severity and comorbidity status with depression, with higher accuracy for severe PTSD cases and patients with comorbid depression. Our findings highlight the potential of domain-adapted embeddings and LLMs for scalable screening while underscoring the need for improved detection of nuanced presentations and offering insights for developing clinically viable AI tools for PTSD assessment.

preprint2026arXiv

DeTrack: A Benchmark and Altitude-Aware Dual World Model for Drone-embodied Tracking

Aerial object tracking has broad applications in public safety, emergency rescue, wildlife monitoring, and related fields. However, existing aerial tracking benchmarks are mainly based on passive 2D video sequences captured from fixed camera locations or predefined flight paths, where drones are treated as passive cameras rather than embodied agents that actively perceive, interact, and control their motion in dynamic 3D scenes. In this paper, we define a new drone-embodied tracking task, termed DeTrack, which requires a drone to track a target in interactive 3D environments using online egocentric observations and active flight control in a closed loop. We build a large-scale benchmark containing 11,368 target trajectories across diverse scenes, rendering conditions, semantic regions, and moving distractors, together with evaluation metrics for target visibility, tracking accuracy, and trajectory success. We further propose AaDWorlds, an altitude-aware dual world model framework for drone-embodied tracking. AaDWorlds consists of an altitude-aware perception module and dual world models that imagine future states under both high- and low-altitude regimes. By combining pseudo altitude-aware observations and imagined future states, AaDWorlds alleviates the intrinsic altitude-mediated contradiction between target visibility and flight safety. Experiments on the DeTrack benchmark demonstrate that AaDWorlds improves closed-loop tracking performance across all evaluation metrics.

preprint2026arXiv

DexHoldem: Playing Texas Hold'em with Dexterous Embodied System

Evaluating embodied systems on real dexterous hardware requires more than isolated primitive skills: an agent must perceive a changing tabletop scene, choose a context-appropriate action, execute it with a dexterous hand, and leave the scene usable for later decisions. We introduce DexHoldem, a real-world system-level benchmark built around Texas Hold'em dexterous manipulation with a ShadowHand. DexHoldem provides 1,470 teleoperated demonstrations across 14 Texas Hold'em manipulation primitives, a standardized physical policy benchmark, and an agentic perception benchmark that tests whether agents can recover the structured game state needed for embodied decision making. On primitive execution, $π_{0.5}$ obtains the highest task completion rate ($61.2\%$), while $π_{0.5}$ and $π_0$ tie on scene-preserving success rate ($47.5\%$). On agentic perception, Opus 4.7 obtains the best strict problem-level accuracy ($34.3\%$), while GPT 5.5 obtains the best average field-wise accuracy ($66.8\%$), exposing a gap between isolated visual sub-capabilities and complete routing-relevant state recovery. Finally, we instantiate the full embodied-agent loop in three case studies, where waiting, recovery dispatches, human-help requests, and repeated primitive execution reveal how perception and policy errors accumulate during closed-loop deployment. DexHoldem therefore evaluates dexterous tabletop execution, agentic perception, and embodied decision routing in a shared physical setting. Project page: https://dexholdem.github.io/Dexholdem/.

preprint2026arXiv

Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly adopt action chunking, i.e., predicting and committing to a short horizon of consecutive low-level actions in a single forward pass, to amortize the inference cost of large-scale backbones and reduce per-step latency. However, committing these multi-step predictions to real-world execution requires balancing success rate against inference efficiency, a decision typically governed by fixed execution horizons tuned per task. Such heuristics ignore the state-dependent nature of predictive reliability, leading to brittle performance in dynamic or out-of-distribution settings. In this paper, we introduce A3, an Adaptive Action Acceptance mechanism that reframes dynamic execution commitment as a self-speculative prefix verification problem. A3 first computes a trajectory-wise consensus score of actions via group sampling, then selects a representative draft and prioritizes downstream verification. Specifically, it enforces: (1) consensus-ordered conditional invariance, which validates low-consensus actions by judging whether they remain consistent when re-decoded conditioned on high-consensus actions; and (2) prefix-closed sequential consistency, which guarantees physical rollout integrity by accepting only the longest continuous sequence of verified actions starting from the beginning. Consequently, the execution horizon emerges as the longest verifiable prefix satisfying both internal model logic and sequential execution constraints. Experiments across diverse VLA models and benchmarks demonstrate that A3 eliminates the need for manual horizon tuning while achieving a superior trade-off between execution robustness and inference throughput.

preprint2026arXiv

FlashAR: Efficient Post-Training Acceleration for Autoregressive Image Generation

Large-scale autoregressive models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image generation. However, their sequential raster-scan decoding relies on strictly next-token prediction, making inference prohibitively expensive. Existing acceleration methods typically either introduce entirely new generation paradigms that necessitate costly pre-training from scratch, or enable parallel generation at the expense of a training-inference gap or altered prediction objectives. In this paper, we introduce FlashAR, a lightweight post-training adaptation framework that efficiently adapts a pre-trained raster-scan autoregressive model into a highly parallel generator based on two-way next-token prediction. Our key insight is that effective adaptation should minimize modifications to the pre-trained model's original training objective to preserve its learned prior. Accordingly, we retain the original AR head as a horizontal head for row-wise prediction and introduce a complementary, lightweight vertical head for column-wise prediction. To facilitate efficient adaptation, we branch the vertical head from an intermediate layer rather than the final layer, bypassing the inherent horizontal head bias. Moreover, since horizontal and vertical predictions capture complementary dependencies whose relative importance varies across target positions, we employ a learnable fusion gate to dynamically combine the two predictions at each position. To further reduce adaptation cost, we propose a two-stage adaptation pipeline: the vertical head is first initialized through adaptation from the pre-trained autoregressive model before jointly fine-tuned with backbone to adapt to the new decoding paradigm. Extensive experiments on LlamaGen and Emu3.5 show that FlashAR achieves up to a 22.9x speedup for 512x512 image generation through a lightweight post-training with merely 0.05% of the original training data.

preprint2026arXiv

LEAD: Length-Efficient Adaptive and Dynamic Reasoning for Large Language Models

Large reasoning models, such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, tend to become increasingly verbose as their reasoning capabilities improve. These inflated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories often exceed what the underlying problems require, wasting compute, latency, and context budgets. While introducing length-based efficiency rewards during reinforcement learning offers a natural remedy, existing methods struggle with two fundamental challenges: the optimal balance between correctness and efficiency is non-stationary throughout training, and intrinsic reasoning budgets vary drastically across problems. Relying on static reward weights and global length constraints inevitably forces a compromise between degraded accuracy and unrealized compression. To overcome these limitations, we propose LEAD (Length-Efficient Adaptive and Dynamic reasoning), a method that replaces static heuristics with online, self-adaptive mechanisms. LEAD dynamically calibrates the correctness-efficiency trade-off at each step using a Potential-Scaled Instability, directing optimization capacity to the most informative learning signal. Furthermore, it estimates an adaptive per-problem target length online based on the model's own correct rollouts, applying a symmetric efficiency reward that penalizes both overthinking and over-compression. Evaluated on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, LEAD achieves the highest accuracy and Accuracy-Efficiency Score among RL-trained efficient-reasoning methods while producing substantially shorter outputs than the base model.

preprint2026arXiv

Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal Test-Time Intervention

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet underexplored phenomenon: reasoning uncertainty is highly localized-only a small subset of high-entropy tokens dominantly affects output correctness. Motivated by this, we propose Minimal Test-Time Intervention (MTI), a training-free framework that enhances reasoning accuracy and stability with minimal overhead. MTI includes: (i) Selective CFG intervention, applying classifier-free guidance only at uncertain positions; and (ii) Lightweight negative-prompt guidance, reusing the main model's KV cache to approximate unconditional decoding efficiently. MTI yields consistent gains across general, coding, and STEM tasks-e.g., +9.28% average improvement on six benchmarks for DeepSeek-R1-7B and +11.25% on AIME2024 using Ling-mini-2.0-while remaining highly efficient.

preprint2026arXiv

Self-DACE++: Robust Low-Light Enhancement via Efficient Adaptive Curve Estimation

In this paper, we present Self-DACE++, an improved unsupervised and lightweight framework for Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE), building upon our previous Self-Reference Deep Adaptive Curve Estimation (Self-DACE). To better address the trade-off between computational efficiency and restoration quality, Self-DACE++ introduces enhanced Adaptive Adjustment Curves (AACs). These curves, governed by minimal trainable parameters, flexibly adjust the dynamic range while preserving the color fidelity, structural integrity, and naturalness of the enhanced images. To achieve an extremely lightweight architecture without sacrificing performance, we propose a randomized order training strategy coupled with a network fusion mechanism, which compresses the model into an efficient iterative inference structure. Furthermore, we formulate a physics-grounded objective function based on Retinex theory and incorporate a dedicated denoising module to effectively estimate and suppress latent noise in dark regions. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on multiple real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that Self-DACE++ outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, delivering superior enhancement quality with real-time inference capability. The code is available at https://github.com/John-Wendell/Self-DACE.

preprint2026arXiv

Semantic-Enriched Latent Visual Reasoning

Multimodal latent-space reasoning aims to replace explicit thinking with images by performing visual reasoning directly in a compact latent space. However, existing approaches largely rely on visual supervision and produce latent representations that lack sufficient semantic richness, limiting their ability to support diverse region-level reasoning tasks. In this work, we introduce Semantic-Enriched Latent Visual Reasoning (SLVR), a two-stage learning framework that enriches latent representations with attribute-level visual semantics and aligns them with diverse reasoning objectives. In the first stage, SLVR learns semantically enriched region-centric latents under fine-grained attribute supervision. In the second stage, we design Multi-query Group Relative Policy Optimization (M-GRPO) to align latent representations across multiple queries grounded in the same region. To support this framework, we construct SLV-Set, comprising approximately 400K region-level attribute annotations and 800K multi-query question answering samples, and introduce SV-QA, a benchmark that evaluates latent reasoning under semantic variation. Experiments demonstrate that SLVR improves the robustness and semantic consistency of latent visual reasoning compared to existing baselines.

preprint2024arXiv

Preserving Silent Features for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) aims to improve the generalization ability of the model trained on several known training domains over unseen test domains. Previous work has shown that self-supervised contrastive pre-training improves the robustness of the model on downstream tasks. However, in this paper, we find that self-supervised models do not exhibit better generalization performance than supervised models pre-trained on the same dataset in the DG setting. We argue that this is owing to the fact that the richer intra-class discriminative features extracted by self-supervised contrastive learning, which we term silent features, are suppressed during supervised fine-tuning. These silent features are likely to contain features that are more generalizable on the test domain. In this work, we model and analyze this feature suppression phenomenon and theoretically prove that preserving silent features can achieve lower expected test domain risk under certain conditions. In light of this, we propose a simple yet effective method termed STEP (Silent Feature Preservation) to improve the generalization performance of the self-supervised contrastive learning pre-trained model by alleviating the suppression of silent features during the supervised fine-tuning process. Experimental results show that STEP exhibits state-of-the-art performance on standard DG benchmarks with significant distribution shifts.

preprint2024arXiv

Unmasking Bias in AI: A Systematic Review of Bias Detection and Mitigation Strategies in Electronic Health Record-based Models

Objectives: Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) in conjunction with electronic health records (EHRs) holds transformative potential to improve healthcare. Yet, addressing bias in AI, which risks worsening healthcare disparities, cannot be overlooked. This study reviews methods to detect and mitigate diverse forms of bias in AI models developed using EHR data. Methods: We conducted a systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, analyzing articles from PubMed, Web of Science, and IEEE published between January 1, 2010, and Dec 17, 2023. The review identified key biases, outlined strategies for detecting and mitigating bias throughout the AI model development process, and analyzed metrics for bias assessment. Results: Of the 450 articles retrieved, 20 met our criteria, revealing six major bias types: algorithmic, confounding, implicit, measurement, selection, and temporal. The AI models were primarily developed for predictive tasks in healthcare settings. Four studies concentrated on the detection of implicit and algorithmic biases employing fairness metrics like statistical parity, equal opportunity, and predictive equity. Sixty proposed various strategies for mitigating biases, especially targeting implicit and selection biases. These strategies, evaluated through both performance (e.g., accuracy, AUROC) and fairness metrics, predominantly involved data collection and preprocessing techniques like resampling, reweighting, and transformation. Discussion: This review highlights the varied and evolving nature of strategies to address bias in EHR-based AI models, emphasizing the urgent needs for the establishment of standardized, generalizable, and interpretable methodologies to foster the creation of ethical AI systems that promote fairness and equity in healthcare.

preprint2024arXiv

VGX: Large-Scale Sample Generation for Boosting Learning-Based Software Vulnerability Analyses

Accompanying the successes of learning-based defensive software vulnerability analyses is the lack of large and quality sets of labeled vulnerable program samples, which impedes further advancement of those defenses. Existing automated sample generation approaches have shown potentials yet still fall short of practical expectations due to the high noise in the generated samples. This paper proposes VGX, a new technique aimed for large-scale generation of high-quality vulnerability datasets. Given a normal program, VGX identifies the code contexts in which vulnerabilities can be injected, using a customized Transformer featured with a new value-flowbased position encoding and pre-trained against new objectives particularly for learning code structure and context. Then, VGX materializes vulnerability-injection code editing in the identified contexts using patterns of such edits obtained from both historical fixes and human knowledge about real-world vulnerabilities. Compared to four state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines (pattern-, Transformer-, GNN-, and pattern+Transformer-based), VGX achieved 99.09-890.06% higher F1 and 22.45%-328.47% higher label accuracy. For in-the-wild sample production, VGX generated 150,392 vulnerable samples, from which we randomly chose 10% to assess how much these samples help vulnerability detection, localization, and repair. Our results show SOTA techniques for these three application tasks achieved 19.15-330.80% higher F1, 12.86-19.31% higher top-10 accuracy, and 85.02-99.30% higher top-50 accuracy, respectively, by adding those samples to their original training data. These samples also helped a SOTA vulnerability detector discover 13 more real-world vulnerabilities (CVEs) in critical systems (e.g., Linux kernel) that would be missed by the original model.

preprint2022arXiv

Adaptive Fairness-Aware Online Meta-Learning for Changing Environments

The fairness-aware online learning framework has arisen as a powerful tool for the continual lifelong learning setting. The goal for the learner is to sequentially learn new tasks where they come one after another over time and the learner ensures the statistic parity of the new coming task across different protected sub-populations (e.g. race and gender). A major drawback of existing methods is that they make heavy use of the i.i.d assumption for data and hence provide static regret analysis for the framework. However, low static regret cannot imply a good performance in changing environments where tasks are sampled from heterogeneous distributions. To address the fairness-aware online learning problem in changing environments, in this paper, we first construct a novel regret metric FairSAR by adding long-term fairness constraints onto a strongly adapted loss regret. Furthermore, to determine a good model parameter at each round, we propose a novel adaptive fairness-aware online meta-learning algorithm, namely FairSAOML, which is able to adapt to changing environments in both bias control and model precision. The problem is formulated in the form of a bi-level convex-concave optimization with respect to the model's primal and dual parameters that are associated with the model's accuracy and fairness, respectively. The theoretic analysis provides sub-linear upper bounds for both loss regret and violation of cumulative fairness constraints. Our experimental evaluation on different real-world datasets with settings of changing environments suggests that the proposed FairSAOML significantly outperforms alternatives based on the best prior online learning approaches.

preprint2022arXiv

Adjacency constraint for efficient hierarchical reinforcement learning

Goal-conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach for scaling up reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. However, it often suffers from training inefficiency as the action space of the high-level, i.e., the goal space, is large. Searching in a large goal space poses difficulty for both high-level subgoal generation and low-level policy learning. In this paper, we show that this problem can be effectively alleviated by restricting the high-level action space from the whole goal space to a $k$-step adjacent region of the current state using an adjacency constraint. We theoretically prove that in a deterministic Markov Decision Process (MDP), the proposed adjacency constraint preserves the optimal hierarchical policy, while in a stochastic MDP the adjacency constraint induces a bounded state-value suboptimality determined by the MDP's transition structure. We further show that this constraint can be practically implemented by training an adjacency network that can discriminate between adjacent and non-adjacent subgoals. Experimental results on discrete and continuous control tasks including challenging simulated robot locomotion and manipulation tasks show that incorporating the adjacency constraint significantly boosts the performance of state-of-the-art goal-conditioned HRL approaches.

preprint2022arXiv

Calibrated Nonparametric Scan Statistics for Anomalous Pattern Detection in Graphs

We propose a new approach, the calibrated nonparametric scan statistic (CNSS), for more accurate detection of anomalous patterns in large-scale, real-world graphs. Scan statistics identify connected subgraphs that are interesting or unexpected through maximization of a likelihood ratio statistic; in particular, nonparametric scan statistics (NPSSs) identify subgraphs with a higher than expected proportion of individually significant nodes. However, we show that recently proposed NPSS methods are miscalibrated, failing to account for the maximization of the statistic over the multiplicity of subgraphs. This results in both reduced detection power for subtle signals, and low precision of the detected subgraph even for stronger signals. Thus we develop a new statistical approach to recalibrate NPSSs, correctly adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing and taking the underlying graph structure into account. While the recalibration, based on randomization testing, is computationally expensive, we propose both an efficient (approximate) algorithm and new, closed-form lower bounds (on the expected maximum proportion of significant nodes for subgraphs of a given size, under the null hypothesis of no anomalous patterns). These advances, along with the integration of recent core-tree decomposition methods, enable CNSS to scale to large real-world graphs, with substantial improvement in the accuracy of detected subgraphs. Extensive experiments on both semi-synthetic and real-world datasets are demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, in comparison with state-of-the-art counterparts.

preprint2022arXiv

Framing Algorithmic Recourse for Anomaly Detection

The problem of algorithmic recourse has been explored for supervised machine learning models, to provide more interpretable, transparent and robust outcomes from decision support systems. An unexplored area is that of algorithmic recourse for anomaly detection, specifically for tabular data with only discrete feature values. Here the problem is to present a set of counterfactuals that are deemed normal by the underlying anomaly detection model so that applications can utilize this information for explanation purposes or to recommend countermeasures. We present an approach -- Context preserving Algorithmic Recourse for Anomalies in Tabular data (CARAT), that is effective, scalable, and agnostic to the underlying anomaly detection model. CARAT uses a transformer based encoder-decoder model to explain an anomaly by finding features with low likelihood. Subsequently semantically coherent counterfactuals are generated by modifying the highlighted features, using the overall context of features in the anomalous instance(s). Extensive experiments help demonstrate the efficacy of CARAT.

preprint2022arXiv

Interacting Attention Graph for Single Image Two-Hand Reconstruction

Graph convolutional network (GCN) has achieved great success in single hand reconstruction task, while interacting two-hand reconstruction by GCN remains unexplored. In this paper, we present Interacting Attention Graph Hand (IntagHand), the first graph convolution based network that reconstructs two interacting hands from a single RGB image. To solve occlusion and interaction challenges of two-hand reconstruction, we introduce two novel attention based modules in each upsampling step of the original GCN. The first module is the pyramid image feature attention (PIFA) module, which utilizes multiresolution features to implicitly obtain vertex-to-image alignment. The second module is the cross hand attention (CHA) module that encodes the coherence of interacting hands by building dense cross-attention between two hand vertices. As a result, our model outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on InterHand2.6M benchmark. Moreover, ablation studies verify the effectiveness of both PIFA and CHA modules for improving the reconstruction accuracy. Results on in-the-wild images and live video streams further demonstrate the generalization ability of our network. Our code is available at https://github.com/Dw1010/IntagHand.

preprint2022arXiv

Lane detection with Position Embedding

Recently, lane detection has made great progress in autonomous driving. RESA (REcurrent Feature-Shift Aggregator) is based on image segmentation. It presents a novel module to enrich lane feature after preliminary feature extraction with an ordinary CNN. For Tusimple dataset, there is not too complicated scene and lane has more prominent spatial features. On the basis of RESA, we introduce the method of position embedding to enhance the spatial features. The experimental results show that this method has achieved the best accuracy 96.93% on Tusimple dataset.

preprint2022arXiv

Layer Adaptive Deep Neural Networks for Out-of-distribution Detection

During the forward pass of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), inputs gradually transformed from low-level features to high-level conceptual labels. While features at different layers could summarize the important factors of the inputs at varying levels, modern out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods mostly focus on utilizing their ending layer features. In this paper, we proposed a novel layer-adaptive OOD detection framework (LA-OOD) for DNNs that can fully utilize the intermediate layers' outputs. Specifically, instead of training a unified OOD detector at a fixed ending layer, we train multiple One-Class SVM OOD detectors simultaneously at the intermediate layers to exploit the full spectrum characteristics encoded at varying depths of DNNs. We develop a simple yet effective layer-adaptive policy to identify the best layer for detecting each potential OOD example. LA-OOD can be applied to any existing DNNs and does not require access to OOD samples during the training. Using three DNNs of varying depth and architectures, our experiments demonstrate that LA-OOD is robust against OODs of varying complexity and can outperform state-of-the-art competitors by a large margin on some real-world datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Invariable Semantical Representation from Language for Extensible Policy Generalization

Recently, incorporating natural language instructions into reinforcement learning (RL) to learn semantically meaningful representations and foster generalization has caught many concerns. However, the semantical information in language instructions is usually entangled with task-specific state information, which hampers the learning of semantically invariant and reusable representations. In this paper, we propose a method to learn such representations called element randomization, which extracts task-relevant but environment-agnostic semantics from instructions using a set of environments with randomized elements, e.g., topological structures or textures, yet the same language instruction. We theoretically prove the feasibility of learning semantically invariant representations through randomization. In practice, we accordingly develop a hierarchy of policies, where a high-level policy is designed to modulate the behavior of a goal-conditioned low-level policy by proposing subgoals as semantically invariant representations. Experiments on challenging long-horizon tasks show that (1) our low-level policy reliably generalizes to tasks against environment changes; (2) our hierarchical policy exhibits extensible generalization in unseen new tasks that can be decomposed into several solvable sub-tasks; and (3) by storing and replaying language trajectories as succinct policy representations, the agent can complete tasks in a one-shot fashion, i.e., once one successful trajectory has been attained.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-Agent Policy Transfer via Task Relationship Modeling

Team adaptation to new cooperative tasks is a hallmark of human intelligence, which has yet to be fully realized in learning agents. Previous work on multi-agent transfer learning accommodate teams of different sizes, heavily relying on the generalization ability of neural networks for adapting to unseen tasks. We believe that the relationship among tasks provides the key information for policy adaptation. In this paper, we try to discover and exploit common structures among tasks for more efficient transfer, and propose to learn effect-based task representations as a common space of tasks, using an alternatively fixed training scheme. We demonstrate that the task representation can capture the relationship among tasks, and can generalize to unseen tasks. As a result, the proposed method can help transfer learned cooperation knowledge to new tasks after training on a few source tasks. We also find that fine-tuning the transferred policies help solve tasks that are hard to learn from scratch.

preprint2022arXiv

Parallel plasma loops and the energization of the solar corona

The outer atmosphere of the Sun is composed of plasma heated to temperatures well in excess of the visible surface. We investigate short cool and warm (<1 MK) loops seen in the core of an active region to address the role of field-line braiding in energising these structures. We report observations from the High-resolution Coronal imager (Hi-C) that have been acquired in a coordinated campaign with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). In the core of the active region, the 172 A band of Hi-C and the 1400 A channel of IRIS show plasma loops at different temperatures that run in parallel. There is a small but detectable spatial offset of less than 1 arcsec between the loops seen in the two bands. Most importantly, we do not see observational signatures that these loops might be twisted around each other. Considering the scenario of magnetic braiding, our observations of parallel loops imply that the stresses put into the magnetic field have to relax while the braiding is applied: the magnetic field never reaches a highly braided state on these length-scales comparable to the separation of the loops. This supports recent numerical 3D models of loop braiding in which the effective dissipation is sufficiently large that it keeps the magnetic field from getting highly twisted within a loop.

preprint2022arXiv

PLATINUM: Semi-Supervised Model Agnostic Meta-Learning using Submodular Mutual Information

Few-shot classification (FSC) requires training models using a few (typically one to five) data points per class. Meta learning has proven to be able to learn a parametrized model for FSC by training on various other classification tasks. In this work, we propose PLATINUM (semi-suPervised modeL Agnostic meTa-learnIng usiNg sUbmodular Mutual information), a novel semi-supervised model agnostic meta-learning framework that uses the submodular mutual information (SMI) functions to boost the performance of FSC. PLATINUM leverages unlabeled data in the inner and outer loop using SMI functions during meta-training and obtains richer meta-learned parameterizations for meta-test. We study the performance of PLATINUM in two scenarios - 1) where the unlabeled data points belong to the same set of classes as the labeled set of a certain episode, and 2) where there exist out-of-distribution classes that do not belong to the labeled set. We evaluate our method on various settings on the miniImageNet, tieredImageNet and Fewshot-CIFAR100 datasets. Our experiments show that PLATINUM outperforms MAML and semi-supervised approaches like pseduo-labeling for semi-supervised FSC, especially for small ratio of labeled examples per class.

preprint2022arXiv

Radiative Magnetohydrodynamic Simulation of the Confined Eruption of a Magnetic Flux Rope: Magnetic Structure and Plasma Thermodynamics

It is widely believed that magnetic flux ropes are the key structure of solar eruptions; however, their observable counterparts are not clear yet. We study a flare associated with flux rope eruption in a comprehensive radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulation of flare-productive active regions, especially focusing on the thermodynamic properties of the plasma involved in the eruption and their relation to the magnetic flux rope. The pre-existing flux rope, which carries cold and dense plasma, rises quasi-statically before the eruption onsets. During this stage, the flux rope does not show obvious signatures in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) emission. After the flare onset, a thin `current shell' is generated around the erupting flux rope. Moreover, a current sheet is formed under the flux rope, where two groups of magnetic arcades reconnect and create a group of post-flare loops. The plasma within the `current shell', current sheet, and post-flare loops are heated to more than 10 MK. The post-flare loops give rise to abundant soft X-ray emission. Meanwhile a majority of the plasma hosted in the flux rope is heated to around 1 MK, and the main body of the flux rope is manifested as a bright arch in cooler EUV passbands such as AIA 171 Å~channel.

preprint2022arXiv

S4OD: Semi-Supervised learning for Single-Stage Object Detection

Single-stage detectors suffer from extreme foreground-background class imbalance, while two-stage detectors do not. Therefore, in semi-supervised object detection, two-stage detectors can deliver remarkable performance by only selecting high-quality pseudo labels based on classification scores. However, directly applying this strategy to single-stage detectors would aggravate the class imbalance with fewer positive samples. Thus, single-stage detectors have to consider both quality and quantity of pseudo labels simultaneously. In this paper, we design a dynamic self-adaptive threshold (DSAT) strategy in classification branch, which can automatically select pseudo labels to achieve an optimal trade-off between quality and quantity. Besides, to assess the regression quality of pseudo labels in single-stage detectors, we propose a module to compute the regression uncertainty of boxes based on Non-Maximum Suppression. By leveraging only 10% labeled data from COCO, our method achieves 35.0% AP on anchor-free detector (FCOS) and 32.9% on anchor-based detector (RetinaNet).

preprint2022arXiv

SEED: Sound Event Early Detection via Evidential Uncertainty

Sound Event Early Detection (SEED) is an essential task in recognizing the acoustic environments and soundscapes. However, most of the existing methods focus on the offline sound event detection, which suffers from the over-confidence issue of early-stage event detection and usually yield unreliable results. To solve the problem, we propose a novel Polyphonic Evidential Neural Network (PENet) to model the evidential uncertainty of the class probability with Beta distribution. Specifically, we use a Beta distribution to model the distribution of class probabilities, and the evidential uncertainty enriches uncertainty representation with evidence information, which plays a central role in reliable prediction. To further improve the event detection performance, we design the backtrack inference method that utilizes both the forward and backward audio features of an ongoing event. Experiments on the DESED database show that the proposed method can simultaneously improve 13.0\% and 3.8\% in time delay and detection F1 score compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Stochastic declustering of earthquakes with the spatiotemporal RETAS model

Epidemic-Type Aftershock Sequence (ETAS) models are point processes that have found prominence in seismological modeling. Its success has led to the development of a number of different versions of the ETAS model. Among these extensions is the RETAS model which has shown potential to improve the modeling capabilities of the ETAS class of models. The RETAS model endows the main-shock arrival process with a renewal process which serves as an alternative to the homogeneous Poisson process. Model fitting is performed using likelihood-based estimation by directly optimizing the exact likelihood. However, inferring the branching structure from the fitted RETAS model remains a challenging task since the declustering algorithm that is currently available for the ETAS model is not directly applicable. This article solves this problem by developing an iterative algorithm to calculate the smoothed main and aftershock probabilities conditional on all available information contained in the catalog. Consequently, an objective estimate of the spatial intensity function can be obtained and an iterative semi-parametric approach is implemented to estimate model parameters with information criteria used for tuning the smoothing parameters. The methods proposed herein are illustrated on simulated data and a New Zealand earthquake catalog.

preprint2021arXiv

A Primal-Dual Subgradient Approachfor Fair Meta Learning

The problem of learning to generalize to unseen classes during training, known as few-shot classification, has attracted considerable attention. Initialization based methods, such as the gradient-based model agnostic meta-learning (MAML), tackle the few-shot learning problem by "learning to fine-tune". The goal of these approaches is to learn proper model initialization, so that the classifiers for new classes can be learned from a few labeled examples with a small number of gradient update steps. Few shot meta-learning is well-known with its fast-adapted capability and accuracy generalization onto unseen tasks. Learning fairly with unbiased outcomes is another significant hallmark of human intelligence, which is rarely touched in few-shot meta-learning. In this work, we propose a Primal-Dual Fair Meta-learning framework, namely PDFM, which learns to train fair machine learning models using only a few examples based on data from related tasks. The key idea is to learn a good initialization of a fair model's primal and dual parameters so that it can adapt to a new fair learning task via a few gradient update steps. Instead of manually tuning the dual parameters as hyperparameters via a grid search, PDFM optimizes the initialization of the primal and dual parameters jointly for fair meta-learning via a subgradient primal-dual approach. We further instantiate examples of bias controlling using mean difference and decision boundary covariance as fairness constraints to each task for supervised regression and classification, respectively. We demonstrate the versatility of our proposed approach by applying our approach to various real-world datasets. Our experiments show substantial improvements over the best prior work for this setting.

preprint2021arXiv

Disambiguation of Vector Magnetograms by Stereoscopic Observations from the Solar Orbiter/Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) and the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO)/Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI)

Spectropolarimetric reconstructions of the photospheric vector magnetic field are intrinsically limited by the so-called 180$^\circ$ ambiguity in the orientation of the transverse component. The successful launch and operation of Solar Orbiter has made the removal of the 180$^\circ$ ambiguity possible using solely observations obtained from two different vantage points. While the exploitation of such a possibility is straightforward in principle, it is less so in practice and it is therefore important to assess the accuracy and limitations, as a function of both the satellites orbits and measurement principles. In this work we present a stereoscopic disambiguation method (SDM) and discuss a thorough testing of its accuracy in applications to modeled active regions and quiet Sun observations. In a first series of tests, we employ magnetograms extracted from three different numerical simulations as test fields, and model observations of the magnetograms from different angles and distances. In these more idealized tests, the SDM is proven to to reach a 100% disambiguation accuracy when applied to moderately-to-well resolved fields. Even in the case of disambiguation of quiet Sun magnetograms with significant under-resolved scale, the SDM provides an accuracy between 82% and 98% depending on the field strength. The accuracy of the SDM is found to be mostly sensitive to the variable resolution of Solar Orbiter on its highly elliptic orbit, as well as to the intrinsic scale of the observed field. Finally, as a more realistic test, we consider magnetograms that are obtained using a radiative transfer inversion code and the SOPHISM instrument simulator applied to a 3D simulation of a pore, and present a preliminary discussion of the effect of the viewing angle on the observed field.

preprint2021arXiv

Effects of the initial perturbations on the Rayleigh-Taylor-Kelvin-Helmholtz instability system

In the paper, the effects of initial perturbations on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI), Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), and the coupled Rayleigh-Taylor-Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (RTKHI) systems are investigated using a multiple-relaxation-time discrete Boltzmann model. Six different perturbation interfaces are designed to study the effects of the initial perturbations on the instability systems. Based on the mean heat flux strength $D_{3,1}$, the effects of initial interfaces on the coupled RTKHI are examined in detail. The research is focused on two aspects: (i) the main mechanism in the early stage of the RTKHI, (ii) the transition point from KHI-like to RTI-like for the case where the KHI dominates at earlier time and the RTI dominates at later time. It is found that the early main mechanism is related to the shape of the initial interface, which is represented by both the bilateral contact angle $θ_{1}$ and the middle contact angle $θ_{2}$. The influence of inverted parabolic and inverted ellipse perturbations ($θ_{1}<90$) on the transition point of the RTKHI system is greater than that of other interfaces.

preprint2021arXiv

Faster State Preparation across Quantum Phase Transition Assisted by Reinforcement Learning

An energy gap develops near quantum critical point of quantum phase transition in a finite many-body (MB) system, facilitating the ground state transformation by adiabatic parameter change. In real application scenarios, however, the efficacy for such a protocol is compromised by the need to balance finite system life time with adiabaticity, as exemplified in a recent experiment that prepares three-mode balanced Dicke state near deterministically [PNAS {\bf 115}, 6381 (2018)]. Instead of tracking the instantaneous ground state as unanimously required for most adiabatic crossing, this work reports a faster sweeping policy taking advantage of excited level dynamics. It is obtained based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) from a multi-step training scheme we develop. In the absence of loss, a fidelity $\ge 99\%$ between prepared and the target Dicke state is achieved over a small fraction of the adiabatically required time. When loss is included, training is carried out according to an operational benchmark, the interferometric sensitivity of the prepared state instead of fidelity, leading to better sensitivity in about half of the previously reported time. Implemented in a Bose-Einstein condensate of $\sim 10^4$ $^{87}$Rb atoms, the balanced three-mode Dicke state exhibiting an improved number squeezing of $13.02\pm0.20$ dB is observed within 766 ms, highlighting the potential of DRL for quantum dynamics control and quantum state preparation in interacting MB systems.

preprint2021arXiv

Short-term origin-destination demand prediction in urban rail transit systems: A channel-wise attentive split-convolutional neural network method

Short-term origin-destination (OD) flow prediction in urban rail transit (URT) plays a crucial role in smart and real-time URT operation and management. Different from other short-term traffic forecasting methods, the short-term OD flow prediction possesses three unique characteristics: (1) data availability: real-time OD flow is not available during the prediction; (2) data dimensionality: the dimension of the OD flow is much higher than the cardinality of transportation networks; (3) data sparsity: URT OD flow is spatiotemporally sparse. There is a great need to develop novel OD flow forecasting method that explicitly considers the unique characteristics of the URT system. To this end, a channel-wise attentive split-convolutional neural network (CAS-CNN) is proposed. The proposed model consists of many novel components such as the channel-wise attention mechanism and split CNN. In particular, an inflow/outflow-gated mechanism is innovatively introduced to address the data availability issue. We further originally propose a masked loss function to solve the data dimensionality and data sparsity issues. The model interpretability is also discussed in detail. The CAS-CNN model is tested on two large-scale real-world datasets from Beijing Subway, and it outperforms the rest of benchmarking methods. The proposed model contributes to the development of short-term OD flow prediction, and it also lays the foundations of real-time URT operation and management.

preprint2020arXiv

Morphological and non-equilibrium analysis of coupled Rayleigh-Taylor-Kelvin-Helmholtz instability

In this paper, the coupled Rayleigh-Taylor-Kelvin-Helmholtz instability(RTI, KHI and RTKHI, respectively) system is investigated using a multiple-relaxation-time discrete Boltzmann model. Both the morphological boundary length and thermodynamic nonequilibrium (TNE) strength are introduced to probe the complex configurations and kinetic processes. In the simulations, RTI always plays a major role in the later stage, while the main mechanism in the early stage depends on the comparison of buoyancy and shear strength. It is found that, both the total boundary length $L$ of the condensed temperature field and the mean heat flux strength $D_{3,1}$ can be used to measure the ratio of buoyancy to shear strength, and to quantitatively judge the main mechanism in the early stage of the RTKHI system. Specifically, when KHI (RTI) dominates, $L^{KHI} > L^{RTI}$ ($L^{KHI} < L^{RTI}$), $D_{3,1}^{KHI} > D_{3,1}^{RTI}$ ($D_{3,1}^{KHI} < D_{3,1}^{RTI}$); when KHI and RTI are balanced, $L^{KHI} = L^{RTI}$, $D_{3,1}^{KHI} = D_{3,1}^{RTI}$. A second sets of findings are as below: For the case where the KHI dominates at earlier time and the RTI dominates at later time, the evolution process can be roughly divided into two stages. Before the transition point of the two stages, $L^{RTKHI}$ initially increases exponentially, and then increases linearly. Hence, the ending point of linear increasing $L^{RTKHI}$ can work as a geometric criterion for discriminating the two stages. The TNE quantity, heat flux strength $D_{3,1}^{RTKHI}$, shows similar behavior. Therefore, the ending point of linear increasing $D_{3,1}^{RTKHI}$ can work as a physical criterion for discriminating the two stages.

preprint2020arXiv

Multi-graph convolutional network for short-term passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit

Short-term passenger flow forecasting is a crucial task for urban rail transit operations. Emerging deep-learning technologies have become effective methods used to overcome this problem. In this study, the authors propose a deep-learning architecture called Conv-GCN that combines a graph convolutional network (GCN) and a three-dimensional (3D) convolutional neural network (3D CNN). First, they introduce a multi-graph GCN to deal with three inflow and outflow patterns (recent, daily, and weekly) separately. Multi-graph GCN networks can capture spatiotemporal correlations and topological information within the entire network. A 3D CNN is then applied to deeply integrate the inflow and outflow information. High-level spatiotemporal features between different inflow and outflow patterns and between stations that are nearby and far away can be extracted by 3D CNN. Finally, a fully connected layer is used to output results. The Conv-GCN model is evaluated on smart card data of the Beijing subway under the time interval of 10, 15, and 30 min. Results show that this model yields the best performance compared with seven other models. In terms of the root-mean-square errors, the performances under three time intervals have been improved by 9.402, 7.756, and 9.256%, respectively. This study can provide critical insights for subway operators to optimise urban rail transit operations.

preprint2020arXiv

Nonequilibrium dual-boson approach

We develop nonequilibrium auxiliary quantum master equation dual boson method (aux-DB), and argue that it presents a convenient way to describe steady states of correlated impurity models (such as single molecule optoelectronic devices) where electron and energy transport should be taken into account. The aux-DB is shown to provide high accuracy with relatively low numerical cost. Theoretical analysis is followed by illustrative simulations within generic two-level junction model, where the new scheme is benchmarked against numerically exact results.

preprint2020arXiv

Revealing Fine Structures of the Retinal Receptive Field by Deep Learning Networks

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance on many visual tasks. Recently, they became useful models for the visual system in neuroscience. However, it is still not clear what are learned by CNNs in terms of neuronal circuits. When a deep CNN with many layers is used for the visual system, it is not easy to compare the structure components of CNNs with possible neuroscience underpinnings due to highly complex circuits from the retina to higher visual cortex. Here we address this issue by focusing on single retinal ganglion cells with biophysical models and recording data from animals. By training CNNs with white noise images to predict neuronal responses, we found that fine structures of the retinal receptive field can be revealed. Specifically, convolutional filters learned are resembling biological components of the retinal circuit. This suggests that a CNN learning from one single retinal cell reveals a minimal neural network carried out in this cell. Furthermore, when CNNs learned from different cells are transferred between cells, there is a diversity of transfer learning performance, which indicates that CNNs are cell-specific. Moreover, when CNNs are transferred between different types of input images, here white noise v.s. natural images, transfer learning shows a good performance, which implies that CNNs indeed capture the full computational ability of a single retinal cell for different inputs. Taken together, these results suggest that CNNs could be used to reveal structure components of neuronal circuits, and provide a powerful model for neural system identification.

preprint2020arXiv

TLFW: A Three-layer Framework in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Network with a Mobile Base Station

Wireless sensor networks as the base support for the Internet of things has been a large number of popularity and application. Such as intelligent agriculture, we have to use the sensor network to obtain the growth environmental data of crops, etc.. However, the difficulty of power supply of wireless nodes has seriously hindered the application and development of Internet of things. In order to solve this problem, people use low-power, sleep scheduling and other energy-saving methods on the nodes. Although these methods can prolong the working time of nodes, they will eventually become invalid because of the exhaustion of energy. The use of solar energy, wind energy, and wireless signals in the environment to obtain energy is another way to solve the energy problem of nodes. However, these methods are affected by weather, environment and other factors, and are unstable. Thus, the discontinuity work of the node is caused. In recent years, the development of wireless power transfer (WPT) has brought another solution to this problem. In this paper, a three-layer framework is proposed for mobile station data collection in rechargeable wireless sensor networks to keep the node running forever, named TLFW which includes the sensor layer, cluster head layer, and mobile station layer. And the framework can minimize the total energy consumption of the system. The simulation results show that the scheme can reduce the energy consumption of the entire system, compared with a Mobile Station in a Rechargeable Sensor Network(MSiRSN).

preprint2018arXiv

Rational Neural Networks for Approximating Jump Discontinuities of Graph Convolution Operator

For node level graph encoding, a recent important state-of-art method is the graph convolutional networks (GCN), which nicely integrate local vertex features and graph topology in the spectral domain. However, current studies suffer from several drawbacks: (1) graph CNNs relies on Chebyshev polynomial approximation which results in oscillatory approximation at jump discontinuities; (2) Increasing the order of Chebyshev polynomial can reduce the oscillations issue, but also incurs unaffordable computational cost; (3) Chebyshev polynomials require degree $Ω$(poly(1/$ε$)) to approximate a jump signal such as $|x|$, while rational function only needs $\mathcal{O}$(poly log(1/$ε$))\cite{liang2016deep,telgarsky2017neural}. However, it's non-trivial to apply rational approximation without increasing computational complexity due to the denominator. In this paper, the superiority of rational approximation is exploited for graph signal recovering. RatioanlNet is proposed to integrate rational function and neural networks. We show that rational function of eigenvalues can be rewritten as a function of graph Laplacian, which can avoid multiplication by the eigenvector matrix. Focusing on the analysis of approximation on graph convolution operation, a graph signal regression task is formulated. Under graph signal regression task, its time complexity can be significantly reduced by graph Fourier transform. To overcome the local minimum problem of neural networks model, a relaxed Remez algorithm is utilized to initialize the weight parameters. Convergence rate of RatioanlNet and polynomial based methods on jump signal is analyzed for a theoretical guarantee. The extensive experimental results demonstrated that our approach could effectively characterize the jump discontinuities, outperforming competing methods by a substantial margin on both synthetic and real-world graphs.

preprint2016arXiv

Bidirectional outflows as evidence of magnetic reconnection leading to a solar microflare

Magnetic reconnection is a rapid energy release process that is believed to be responsible for flares on the Sun and stars. Nevertheless, such flare-related reconnection is mostly detected to occur in the corona, while there have been few studies concerning the reconnection in the chromosphere or photosphere. Here we present both spectroscopic and imaging observations of magnetic reconnection in the chromosphere leading to a microflare. During the flare peak time, chromospheric line profiles show significant blueshifted/redshifted components on the two sides of the flaring site, corresponding to upflows and downflows with velocities of $\pm$(70--80) km s$^{-1}$, comparable with the local Alfvén speed as expected by the reconnection in the chromosphere. The three-dimensional nonlinear force-free field configuration further discloses twisted field lines (a flux rope) at a low altitude, cospatial with the dark threads in He I 10830 Å images. The instability of the flux rope may initiate the flare-related reconnection. These observations provide clear evidence of magnetic reconnection in the chromosphere and show the similar mechanisms of a microflare to those of major flares.

preprint2016arXiv

Efficient single pixel imaging in Fourier space

Single pixel imaging (SPI) is a novel technique being able to capture 2D images using a bucket detector with high signal-to-noise ratio, wide spectrum range and low cost. Conventional SPI projects random illumination patterns to randomly and uniformly sample the entire scene's information. Determined by the Nyquist sampling theory, SPI needs either numerous projections or high computation cost to reconstruct the target scene, especially for high-resolution cases. To address this issue, we propose an efficient single pixel imaging technique (eSPI), which instead projects sinusoidal patterns for importance sampling of the target scene's spatial spectrum in Fourier space. Specifically, utilizing the centrosymmetric conjugation and sparsity priors of natural images' spatial spectra, eSPI sequentially projects two $\fracπ{2}$-phase-shifted sinusoidal patterns to obtain each Fourier coefficient in the most informative spatial frequency bands. eSPI can reduce requisite patterns by two orders of magnitude compared to conventional SPI, which helps a lot for fast and high-resolution SPI.

preprint2016arXiv

Fourier ptychographic reconstruction using Poisson maximum likelihood and truncated Wirtinger gradient

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is a novel computational coherent imaging technique for high space-bandwidth product imaging. Mathematically, Fourier ptychographic (FP) reconstruction can be implemented as a phase retrieval optimization process, in which we only obtain low resolution intensity images corresponding to the sub-bands of the sample's high resolution (HR) spatial spectrum, and aim to retrieve the complex HR spectrum. In real setups, the measurements always suffer from various degenerations such as Gaussian noise, Poisson noise, speckle noise and pupil location error, which would largely degrade the reconstruction. To efficiently address these degenerations, we propose a novel FP reconstruction method under a gradient descent optimization framework in this paper. The technique utilizes Poisson maximum likelihood for better signal modeling, and truncated Wirtinger gradient for error removal. Results on both simulated data and real data captured using our laser FPM setup show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms. Also, we have released our source code for non-commercial use.

preprint2016arXiv

Layer compression and enhanced optical properties of few-layer graphene nanosheets induced by ion irradiation

Graphene has been recognized as an attractive two-dimensional material for fundamental research and wide applications in electronic and photonic devices owing to its unique properties. The technologies to modulate the properties of graphene are of continuous interest to researchers in multidisciplinary areas. Herein, we report on the first experimental observation of the layer-to-layer compression and enhanced optical properties of few-layer graphene nanosheets by applying the irradiation of energetic ion beams. After the irradiation, the space between the graphene layers was reduced, resulting in a tighter contact between the few-layer graphene nanosheet and the surface of the substrate. This processing also enhanced the interaction between the graphene nanosheets and the evanescent-field wave near the surface, thus reinforcing the polarization-dependent light absorption of the graphene layers (with 3-fold polarization extinction ratio increment). Utilizing the ion-irradiated graphene nanosheets as saturable absorbers, the passively Q-switched waveguide lasing with considerably improved performances was achieved, owing to the enhanced interactions between the graphene nanosheets and evanescent field of light. The obtained repetition rate of waveguide laser was up to 2.3 MHz with a pulse duration of 101 ns.

preprint2016arXiv

Magnetic helicity estimations in models and observations of the solar magnetic field. Part I: Finite volume methods

Magnetic helicity is a conserved quantity of ideal magneto-hydrodynamics characterized by an inverse turbulent cascade. Accordingly, it is often invoked as one of the basic physical quantities driving the generation and structuring of magnetic fields in a variety of astrophysical and laboratory plasmas. We provide here the first systematic comparison of six existing methods for the estimation of the helicity of magnetic fields known in a finite volume. All such methods are reviewed, benchmarked, and compared with each other, and specifically tested for accuracy and sensitivity to errors. To that purpose, we consider four groups of numerical tests, ranging from solutions of the three-dimensional, force-free equilibrium, to magneto-hydrodynamical numerical simulations. Almost all methods are found to produce the same value of magnetic helicity within few percent in all tests. In the more solar-relevant and realistic of the tests employed here, the simulation of an eruptive flux rope, the spread in the computed values obtained by all but one method is only 3%, indicating the reliability and mutual consistency of such methods in appropriate parameter ranges. However, methods show differences in the sensitivity to numerical resolution and to errors in the solenoidal property of the input fields. In addition to finite volume methods, we also briefly discuss a method that estimates helicity from the field lines' twist, and one that exploits the field's value at one boundary and a coronal minimal connectivity instead of a pre-defined three-dimensional magnetic-field solution.

preprint2016arXiv

Magnetic reconnection between a solar filament and nearby coronal loops

Magnetic reconnection, the rearrangement of magnetic field topology, is a fundamental physical process in magnetized plasma systems all over the universe1,2. Its process is difficult to be directly observed. Coronal structures, such as coronal loops and filament spines, often sketch the magnetic field geometry and its changes in the solar corona3. Here we show a highly suggestive observation of magnetic reconnection between an erupting solar filament and its nearby coronal loops, resulting in changes in connection of the filament. X-type structures form when the erupting filament encounters the loops. The filament becomes straight, and bright current sheets form at the interfaces with the loops. Many plasmoids appear in these current sheets and propagate bi-directionally. The filament disconnects from the current sheets, which gradually disperse and disappear, reconnects to the loops, and becomes redirected to the loop footpoints. This evolution of the filament and the loops suggests successive magnetic reconnection predicted by theories1 but rarely detected with such clarity in observations. Our results on the formation, evolution, and disappearance of current sheets, confirm three-dimensional magnetic reconnection theory and have implications for the evolution of dissipation regions and the release of magnetic energy for reconnection in many magnetized plasma systems.

preprint2016arXiv

Motion-corrected Fourier ptychography

Fourier ptychography (FP) is a recently proposed computational imaging technique for high space-bandwidth product imaging. In real setups such as endoscope and transmission electron microscope, the common sample motion largely degrades the FP reconstruction and limits its practicability. In this paper, we propose a novel FP reconstruction method to efficiently correct for unknown sample motion. Specifically, we adaptively update the sample's Fourier spectrum from low spatial-frequency regions towards high spatial-frequency ones, with an additional motion recovery and phase-offset compensation procedure for each sub-spectrum. Benefiting from the phase retrieval redundancy theory, the required large overlap between adjacent sub-spectra offers an accurate guide for successful motion recovery. Experimental results on both simulated data and real captured data show that the proposed method can correct for unknown sample motion with its standard deviation being up to 10% of the field-of-view scale. We have released our source code for non-commercial use, and it may find wide applications in related FP platforms such as endoscopy and transmission electron microscopy.

preprint2016arXiv

Nonequilibrium diagrammatic technique for Hubbard Green functions

We introduce diagrammatic technique for Hubbard nonequilibrium Green functions (NEGF). The formulation is an extension of equilibrium considerations for strongly correlated lattice models to description of current carrying molecular junctions. Within the technique intra-system interactions are taken into account exactly, while molecular coupling to contacts is used as a small parameter in perturbative expansion. We demonstrate the viability of the approach with numerical simulations for a generic junction model of quantum dot coupled to two electron reservoirs.

preprint2016arXiv

Re-enabling high-speed caching for LSM-trees

LSM-tree has been widely used in cloud computing systems by Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to achieve high performance for write-intensive workloads. However, in LSM-tree, random key-value queries can experience long latency and low throughput due to the interference from the compaction, a basic operation in the algorithm, to caching. LSM-tree relies on frequent compaction operations to merge data into a sorted structure. After a compaction, the original data are reorganized and written to other locations on the disk. As a result, the cached data are invalidated since their referencing addresses are changed, causing serious performance degradations. We propose dLSM in order to re-enable high-speed caching during intensive writes. dLSM is an LSM-tree with a compaction buffer on the disk, working as a cushion to minimize the cache invalidation caused by compactions. The compaction buffer maintains a series of snapshots of the frequently compacted data, which represent a consistent view of the corresponding data in the underlying LSM-tree. Being updated in a much lower rate than that of compactions, data in the compaction buffer are almost stationary. In dLSM, an object is referenced by the disk address of the corresponding block either in the compaction buffer for frequently compacted data, or in the underlying LSM-tree for infrequently compacted data. Thus, hot objects can be effectively kept in the cache without harmful invalidations. With the help of a small on-disk compaction buffer, dLSM achieves a high query performance by enabling effective caching, while retaining all merits of LSM-tree for write-intensive data processing. We have implemented dLSM based on LevelDB. Our evaluations show that with a standard DRAM cache, dLSM can achieve 5--8x performance improvement over LSM with the same cache on HDD storage.

preprint2016arXiv

Technical Report: A Generalized Matching Pursuit Approach for Graph-Structured Sparsity

Sparsity-constrained optimization is an important and challenging problem that has wide applicability in data mining, machine learning, and statistics. In this paper, we focus on sparsity-constrained optimization in cases where the cost function is a general nonlinear function and, in particular, the sparsity constraint is defined by a graph-structured sparsity model. Existing methods explore this problem in the context of sparse estimation in linear models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to present an efficient approximation algorithm, namely, Graph-structured Matching Pursuit (Graph-Mp), to optimize a general nonlinear function subject to graph-structured constraints. We prove that our algorithm enjoys the strong guarantees analogous to those designed for linear models in terms of convergence rate and approximation accuracy. As a case study, we specialize Graph-Mp to optimize a number of well-known graph scan statistic models for the connected subgraph detection task, and empirical evidence demonstrates that our general algorithm performs superior over state-of-the-art methods that are designed specifically for the task of connected subgraph detection.

preprint2016arXiv

Technical Report: Graph-Structured Sparse Optimization for Connected Subgraph Detection

Structured sparse optimization is an important and challenging problem for analyzing high-dimensional data in a variety of applications such as bioinformatics, medical imaging, social networks, and astronomy. Although a number of structured sparsity models have been explored, such as trees, groups, clusters, and paths, connected subgraphs have been rarely explored in the current literature. One of the main technical challenges is that there is no structured sparsity-inducing norm that can directly model the space of connected subgraphs, and there is no exact implementation of a projection oracle for connected subgraphs due to its NP-hardness. In this paper, we explore efficient approximate projection oracles for connected subgraphs, and propose two new efficient algorithms, namely, Graph-IHT and Graph-GHTP, to optimize a generic nonlinear objective function subject to connectivity constraint on the support of the variables. Our proposed algorithms enjoy strong guarantees analogous to several current methods for sparsity-constrained optimization, such as Projected Gradient Descent (PGD), Approximate Model Iterative Hard Thresholding (AM-IHT), and Gradient Hard Thresholding Pursuit (GHTP) with respect to convergence rate and approximation accuracy. We apply our proposed algorithms to optimize several well-known graph scan statistics in several applications of connected subgraph detection as a case study, and the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2015arXiv

Heating and cooling of coronal loops observed by SDO

Context: One of the most prominent processes suggested to heat the corona to well above 10^6 K builds on nanoflares, short bursts of energy dissipation. Aims: We compare observations to model predictions to test the validity of the nanoflare process. Methods: Using extreme UV data from AIA/SDO and HMI/SDO line-of-sight magnetograms we study the spatial and temporal evolution of a set of loops in active region AR 11850. Results: We find a transient brightening of loops in emission from Fe xviii forming at about 7.2 MK while at the same time these loops dim in emission from lower temperatures. This points to a fast heating of the loop that goes along with evaporation of material that we observe as apparent upward motions in the image sequence. After this initial phases lasting for some 10 min, the loops brighten in a sequence of AIA channels showing cooler and cooler plasma, indicating the cooling of the loops over a time scale of about one hour. A comparison to the predictions from a 1D loop model shows that this observation supports the nanoflare process in (almost) all aspects. In addition, our observations show that the loops get broader while getting brighter, which cannot be understood in a 1D model.

preprint2015arXiv

Multispectral imaging using a single bucket detector

Current multispectral imagers suffer from low photon efficiency and limited spectrum range. These limitations are partially due to the technological limitations from array sensors (CCD or CMOS), and also caused by separative measurement of the entries/slices of a spatial-spectral data cube. Besides, they are mostly expensive and bulky. To address above issues, this paper proposes to image the 3D multispectral data with a single bucket detector in a multiplexing way. Under the single pixel imaging scheme, we project spatial-spectral modulated illumination onto the target scene to encode the scene's 3D information into a 1D measurement sequence. Conventional spatial modulation is used to resolve the scene's spatial information. To avoid increasing requisite acquisition time for 2D to 3D extension of the latent data, we conduct spectral modulation in a frequency-division multiplexing manner in the speed gap between slow spatial light modulation and fast detector response. Then the sequential reconstruction falls into a simple Fourier decomposition and standard compressive sensing problem. A proof-of-concept setup is built to capture the multispectral data (64 pixels $\times$ 64 pixels $\times$ 10 wavelength bands) in the visible wavelength range (450nm-650nm) with acquisition time being 1 minute. The imaging scheme is of high flexibility for different spectrum ranges and resolutions. It holds great potentials for various low light and airborne applications, and can be easily manufactured production-volume portable multispectral imagers.

preprint2015arXiv

Sampling-based Causal Inference in Cue Combination and its Neural Implementation

Causal inference in cue combination is to decide whether the cues have a single cause or multiple causes. Although the Bayesian causal inference model explains the problem of causal inference in cue combination successfully, how causal inference in cue combination could be implemented by neural circuits, is unclear. The existing method based on calculating log posterior ratio with variable elimination has the problem of being unrealistic and task-specific. In this paper, we take advantages of the special structure of the Bayesian causal inference model and propose a hierarchical inference algorithm based on importance sampling. A simple neural circuit is designed to implement the proposed inference algorithm. Theoretical analyses and experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm converges to the accurate value as the sample size goes to infinite. Moreover, the neural circuit we design can be easily generalized to implement inference for other problems, such as the multi-stimuli cause inference and the same-different judgment.

preprint2015arXiv

Self-absorption in the solar transition region

Transient brightenings in the transition region of the Sun have been studied for decades and are usually related to magnetic reconnection. Recently, absorption features due to chromospheric lines have been identified in transition region emission lines raising the question of the thermal stratification during such reconnection events. We analyse data from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) in an emerging active region. Here the spectral profiles show clear self-absorption features in the transition region lines of Si\,{\sc{iv}}. While some indications existed that opacity effects might play some role in strong transition region lines, self-absorption has not been observed before. We show why previous instruments could not observe such self-absorption features, and discuss some implications of this observation for the corresponding structure of reconnection events in the atmosphere. Based on this we speculate that a range of phenomena, such as explosive events, blinkers or Ellerman bombs, are just different aspects of the same reconnection event occurring at different heights in the atmosphere.

preprint2015arXiv

The dichotomy structure of Y chromosome Haplogroup N

Haplogroup N-M231 of human Y chromosome is a common clade from Eastern Asia to Northern Europe, being one of the most frequent haplogroups in Altaic and Uralic-speaking populations. Using newly discovered bi-allelic markers from high-throughput DNA sequencing, we largely improved the phylogeny of Haplogroup N, in which 16 subclades could be identified by 33 SNPs. More than 400 males belonging to Haplogroup N in 34 populations in China were successfully genotyped, and populations in Northern Asia and Eastern Europe were also compared together. We found that all the N samples were typed as inside either clade N1-F1206 (including former N1a-M128, N1b-P43 and N1c-M46 clades), most of which were found in Altaic, Uralic, Russian and Chinese-speaking populations, or N2-F2930, common in Tibeto-Burman and Chinese-speaking populations. Our detailed results suggest that Haplogroup N developed in the region of China since the final stage of late Paleolithic Era.

preprint2015arXiv

Using coronal seismology to estimate the magnetic field strength in a realistic coronal model

Coronal seismology is extensively used to estimate properties of the corona, e.g. the coronal magnetic field strength are derived from oscillations observed in coronal loops. We present a three-dimensional coronal simulation including a realistic energy balance in which we observe oscillations of a loop in synthesised coronal emission. We use these results to test the inversions based on coronal seismology. From the simulation of the corona above an active region we synthesise extreme ultraviolet (EUV) emission from the model corona. From this we derive maps of line intensity and Doppler shift providing synthetic data in the same format as obtained from observations. We fit the (Doppler) oscillation of the loop in the same fashion as done for observations to derive the oscillation period and damping time. The loop oscillation seen in our model is similar to imaging and spectroscopic observations of the Sun. The velocity disturbance of the kink oscillation shows an oscillation period of 52.5s and a damping time of 125s, both being consistent with the ranges of periods and damping times found in observation. Using standard coronal seismology techniques, we find an average magnetic field strength of $B_{\rm kink}=79$G for our loop in the simulation, while in the loop the field strength drops from some 300G at the coronal base to 50G at the apex. Using the data from our simulation we can infer what the average magnetic field derived from coronal seismology actually means. It is close to the magnetic field strength in a constant cross-section flux tube that would give the same wave travel time through the loop. Our model produced not only a realistic looking loop-dominated corona, but also provides realistic information on the oscillation properties that can be used to calibrate and better understand the result from coronal seismology.

preprint2014arXiv

'Beating the news' with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest using Open Source Indicators

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24x7 continuous system for forecasting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Unlike retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the uptick and downtick of incidents during the June 2013 protests in Brazil. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off specific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for forecasting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings.

preprint2014arXiv

An Extended Stable Marriage Problem Algorithm for Clone Detection

Code cloning negatively affects industrial software and threatens intellectual property. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting cloned software by using a bijective matching technique. The proposed approach focuses on increasing the range of similarity measures and thus enhancing the precision of the detection. This is achieved by extending a well-known stable-marriage problem (SMP) and demonstrating how matches between code fragments of different files can be expressed. A prototype of the proposed approach is provided using a proper scenario, which shows a noticeable improvement in several features of clone detection such as scalability and accuracy.

preprint2014arXiv

Content adaptive sparse illumination for Fourier ptychography

Fourier Ptychography (FP) is a recently proposed technique for large field of view and high resolution imaging. Specifically, FP captures a set of low resolution images under angularly varying illuminations and stitches them together in Fourier domain. One of FP's main disadvantages is its long capturing process due to the requisite large number of incident illumination angles. In this letter, utilizing the sparsity of natural images in Fourier domain, we propose a highly efficient method termed as AFP, which applies content adaptive sparse illumination for Fourier ptychography by capturing the most informative parts of the scene's spatial spectrum. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the reported framework with both simulations and real experiments. Results show that the proposed AFP could shorten the acquisition time of conventional FP by around 30%-60%.

preprint2014arXiv

Conversion from mutual helicity to self-helicity observed with IRIS

Context. In the upper atmosphere of the Sun observations show convincing evidence for crossing and twisted structures, which are interpreted as mutual helicity and self-helicity. Aims. We use observations with the new Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) to show the conversion of mutual helicity into self-helicity in coronal structures on the Sun. Methods. Using far UV spectra and slit-jaw images from IRIS and coronal images and magnetograms from SDO, we investigated the evolution of two crossing loops in an active region, in particular, the properties of the Si IV line profile in cool loops. Results. In the early stage two cool loops cross each other and accordingly have mutual helicity. The Doppler shifts in the loops indicate that they wind around each other. As a consequence, near the crossing point of the loops (interchange) reconnection sets in, which heats the plasma. This is consistent with the observed increase of the line width and of the appearance of the loops at higher temperatures. After this interaction, the two new loops run in parallel, and in one of them shows a clear spectral tilt of the Si IV line profile. This is indicative of a helical (twisting) motion, which is the same as to say that the loop has self-helicity. Conclusions. The high spatial and spectral resolution of IRIS allowed us to see the conversion of mutual helicity to self-helicity in the (interchange) reconnection of two loops. This is observational evidence for earlier theoretical speculations.

preprint2014arXiv

Electric-Field-Modulated Nonvolatile Resistance Switching in VO2/PMN-PT(111) Heterostructures

The electric-field-modulated resistance switching in VO2 thin films grown on piezoelectric (111)-0.68Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-0.32PbTiO3 (PMN-PT) substrates has been investigated. Large relative change in resistance (10.7%) was observed in VO2/PMN-PT(111) hererostructures at room temperature. For a substrate with a given polarization direction, stable resistive states of VO2 films can be realized even when the applied electric fields are removed from the heterostructures. By sweeping electric fields across the heterostructure appropriately, multiple resistive states can be achieved. These stable resistive states result from the different stable remnant strain states of substrate, which is related to the rearrangements of ferroelectric domain structures in PMN-PT(111) substrate. The resistance switching tuned by electric field in our work may have potential applications for novel electronic devices.

preprint2014arXiv

Multi-frame denoising of high speed optical coherence tomography data using inter-frame and intra-frame priors

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an important interferometric diagnostic technique which provides cross-sectional views of the subsurface microstructure of biological tissues. However, the imaging quality of high-speed OCT is limited due to the large speckle noise. To address this problem, this paper proposes a multi-frame algorithmic method to denoise OCT volume. Mathematically, we build an optimization model which forces the temporally registered frames to be low rank, and the gradient in each frame to be sparse, under logarithmic image formation and noise variance constraints. Besides, a convex optimization algorithm based on the augmented Lagrangian method is derived to solve the above model. The results reveal that our approach outperforms the other methods in terms of both speckle noise suppression and crucial detail preservation.

preprint2013arXiv

Two dimensional MRT LB model for compressible and incompressible flows

In the paper we extend the Multiple-Relaxation-Time (MRT) Lattice Boltzmann (LB) model proposed in [Europhys. Lett. \textbf{90}, 54003 (2010)] so that it is suitable also for incompressible flows. To decrease the artificial oscillations, the convection term is discretized by the flux limiter scheme with splitting technique. New model is validated by some well-known benchmark tests, including Riemann problem and Couette flow, and satisfying agreements are obtained between the simulation results and analytical ones. In order to show the merit of LB model over traditional methods, the non-equilibrium characteristics of system are solved. The simulation results are consistent with physical analysis.

preprint2012arXiv

hStorage-DB: Heterogeneity-aware Data Management to Exploit the Full Capability of Hybrid Storage Systems

As storage systems become increasingly heterogeneous and complex, it adds burdens on DBAs, causing suboptimal performance even after a lot of human efforts have been made. In addition, existing monitoring-based storage management by access pattern detections has difficulties to handle workloads that are highly dynamic and concurrent. To achieve high performance by best utilizing heterogeneous storage devices, we have designed and implemented a heterogeneity-aware software framework for DBMS storage management called hStorage-DB, where semantic information that is critical for storage I/O is identified and passed to the storage manager. According to the collected semantic information, requests are classified into different types. Each type is assigned a proper QoS policy supported by the underlying storage system, so that every request will be served with a suitable storage device. With hStorage-DB, we can well utilize semantic information that cannot be detected through data access monitoring but is particularly important for a hybrid storage system. To show the effectiveness of hStorage-DB, we have implemented a system prototype that consists of an I/O request classification enabled DBMS, and a hybrid storage system that is organized into a two-level caching hierarchy. Our performance evaluation shows that hStorage-DB can automatically make proper decisions for data allocation in different storage devices and make substantial performance improvements in a cost-efficient way.

preprint2012arXiv

Lattice Boltzmann modeling and simulation of compressible flows

In this mini-review we summarize the progress of Lattice Boltzmann(LB) modeling and simulating compressible flows in our group in recent years. Main contents include (i) Single-Relaxation-Time(SRT) LB model supplemented by additional viscosity, (ii) Multiple-Relaxation-Time(MRT) LB model, and (iii) LB study on hydrodynamic instabilities. The former two belong to improvements of physical modeling and the third belongs to simulation or application. The SRT-LB model supplemented by additional viscosity keeps the original framework of Lattice Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (LBGK). So, it is easier and more convenient for previous SRT-LB users. The MRT-LB is a completely new framework for physical modeling. It significantly extends the range of LB applications. The cost is longer computational time. The developed SRT-LB and MRT-LB are complementary from the sides of convenience and applicability.

preprint2012arXiv

Semantics and Algorithms for Parametric Monitoring

Analysis of execution traces plays a fundamental role in many program analysis approaches, such as runtime verification, testing, monitoring, and specification mining. Execution traces are frequently parametric, i.e., they contain events with parameter bindings. Each parametric trace usually consists of many meaningful trace slices merged together, each slice corresponding to one parameter binding. This gives a semantics-based solution to parametric trace analysis. A general-purpose parametric trace slicing technique is introduced, which takes each event in the parametric trace and dispatches it to its corresponding trace slices. This parametric trace slicing technique can be used in combination with any conventional, non-parametric trace analysis technique, by applying the later on each trace slice. As an instance, a parametric property monitoring technique is then presented. The presented parametric trace slicing and monitoring techniques have been implemented and extensively evaluated. Measurements of runtime overhead confirm that the generality of the discussed techniques does not come at a performance expense when compared with existing parametric trace monitoring systems.

preprint2011arXiv

Prandtl number effects in MRT Lattice Boltzmann models for shocked and unshocked compressible fluids

For compressible fluids under shock wave reaction, we have proposed two Multiple-Relaxation-Time (MRT) Lattice Boltzmann (LB) models [F. Chen, et al, EPL \textbf{90} (2010) 54003; Phys. Lett. A \textbf{375} (2011) 2129.]. In this paper, we construct a new MRT Lattice Boltzmann model which is not only for the shocked compressible fluids, but also for the unshocked compressible fluids. To make the model work for unshocked compressible fluids, a key step is to modify the collision operators of energy flux so that the viscous coefficient in momentum equation is consistent with that in energy equation even in the unshocked system. The unnecessity of the modification for systems under strong shock is analyzed. The model is validated by some well-known benchmark tests, including (i) thermal Couette flow, (ii) Riemann problem, (iii) Richtmyer-Meshkov instability. The first system is unshocked and the latter two are shocked. In all the three systems, the Prandtl numbers effects are checked. Satisfying agreements are obtained between new model results and analytical ones or other numerical results.

preprint2010arXiv

Indecomposable and Noncrossed Product Division Algebras over Curves over Complete Discrete Valuation Rings

Let T be a complete discrete valuation ring and $\hat{X}$ a smooth projective curve over $S=\spec(T)$ with closed fibre $X$. Denote by $F$ the function field of $\hat{X}$ and by $\hat{F}$ the completion of $F$ with respect to the discrete valuation defined by $X$, the closed fibre. In this paper, we construct indecomposable and noncrossed product division algebras over $F$. This is done by defining an index preserving group homomorphism $s:\br(\hat{F})'\to\br(F)'$, and using it to lift indecomposable and noncrossed product division algebras over $\hat{F}$.

preprint2010arXiv

Multiple-Relaxation-Time Lattice Boltzmann Approach to Compressible Flows with Flexible Specific-Heat Ratio and Prandtl Number

A new multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann scheme for compressible flows with arbitrary specific heat ratio and Prandtl number is presented. In the new scheme, which is based on a two-dimensional 16-discrete-velocity model, the moment space and the corresponding transformation matrix are constructed according to the seven-moment relations associated with the local equilibrium distribution function. In the continuum limit, the model recovers the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with flexible specific-heat ratio and Prandtl number. Numerical experiments show that compressible flows with strong shocks can be simulated by the present model up to Mach numbers $Ma \sim 5$.

preprint2010arXiv

Multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model for compressible fluids

We present an energy-conserving multiple-relaxation-time finite difference lattice Boltzmann model for compressible flows. This model is based on a 16-discrete-velocity model. The collision step is first calculated in the moment space and then mapped back to the velocity space. The moment space and corresponding transformation matrix are constructed according to the group representation theory. Equilibria of the nonconserved moments are chosen according to the need of recovering compressible Navier-Stokes equations through the Chapman-Enskog expansion. Numerical experiments showed that compressible flows with strong shocks can be well simulated by the present model. The used benchmark tests include (i) shock tubes, such as the Sod, Lax, Sjogreen, Colella explosion wave and collision of two strong shocks, (ii) regular and Mach shock reflections, and (iii) shock wave reaction on cylindrical bubble problems. The new model works for both low and high speeds compressible flows. It contains more physical information and has better numerical stability and accuracy than its single-relaxation-time version.

preprint2010arXiv

Three-Dimensional Lattice Boltzmann Model for High-Speed Compressible Flows

A highly efficient three-dimensional (3D) Lattice Boltzmann (LB) model for high speed compressible flows is proposed. This model is developed from the original one by Kataoka and Tsutahara[Phys. Rev. E 69, 056702 (2004)]. The convection term is discretized by the Non-oscillatory, containing No free parameters and Dissipative (NND) scheme, which effectively damps oscillations at discontinuities. To be more consistent with the kinetic theory of viscosity and to further improve the numerical stability, an additional dissipation term is introduced. Model parameters are chosen in such a way that the von Neumann stability criterion is satisfied. The new model is validated by well-known benchmarks, (i) Riemann problems, including the problem with Lax shock tube and a newly designed shock tube problem with high Mach number; (ii) reaction of shock wave on droplet or bubble. Good agreements are obtained between LB results and exact ones or previously reported solutions. The model is capable of simulating flows from subsonic to supersonic and capturing jumps resulted from shock waves.