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Published work

30 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

TVRN: Invertible Neural Networks for Compression-Aware Temporal Video Rescaling

To fit diverse display and bandwidth constraints, high-frame-rate videos are temporally downscaled to low-frame-rate (LFR) and later upscaled, requiring joint optimization for effective frame-rate rescaling. However, existing methods typically link the two operations via training objectives, without fully exploiting their reciprocal nature, which may cause high-frequency information loss. Moreover, they overlook the impact of lossy codecs on LFR videos, limiting real-world applicability. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for compression-aware frame-rate rescaling, named TVRN. To regularize high-frequency information lost during frame-rate downscaling, TVRN adopts an invertible architecture that combines a Multi-Input Multi-Output Temporal Wavelet Transform with a high-frequency reconstruction module. To enable end-to-end training through non-differentiable lossy codecs, we design a surrogate network that approximates their gradients. Finally, to improve robustness under various compression levels, we extend TVRN to an asymmetric architecture by incorporating compression-aware features learned via a learning-to-rank strategy. Extensive experiments show that TVRN outperforms existing methods in reconstruction quality under industrial video compression settings. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/fengxinmin/TVRN_public.

preprint2024arXiv

Learning Multimodal Volumetric Features for Large-Scale Neuron Tracing

The current neuron reconstruction pipeline for electron microscopy (EM) data usually includes automatic image segmentation followed by extensive human expert proofreading. In this work, we aim to reduce human workload by predicting connectivity between over-segmented neuron pieces, taking both microscopy image and 3D morphology features into account, similar to human proofreading workflow. To this end, we first construct a dataset, named FlyTracing, that contains millions of pairwise connections of segments expanding the whole fly brain, which is three orders of magnitude larger than existing datasets for neuron segment connection. To learn sophisticated biological imaging features from the connectivity annotations, we propose a novel connectivity-aware contrastive learning method to generate dense volumetric EM image embedding. The learned embeddings can be easily incorporated with any point or voxel-based morphological representations for automatic neuron tracing. Extensive comparisons of different combination schemes of image and morphological representation in identifying split errors across the whole fly brain demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach, especially for the locations that contain severe imaging artifacts, such as section missing and misalignment. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Levishery/Flywire-Neuron-Tracing.

preprint2022arXiv

A filtering technique for the matrix power series being near-sparse

This work presents a new algorithm for matrix power series which is near-sparse, that is, there are a large number of near-zero elements in it. The proposed algorithm uses a filtering technique to improve the sparsity of the matrices involved in the calculation process of the Paterson-Stockmeyer (PS) scheme. Based on the error analysis considering the transaction error and the error introduced by filtering, the proposed algorithm can obtain similar accuracy as the original PS scheme but is more efficient than it. For the near-sparse matrix power series, the proposed method is also more efficient than the MATLAB built-in codes.

preprint2022arXiv

A new stable and avoiding inversion iteration for computing matrix square root

The objective of this research was to compute the principal matrix square root with sparse approximation. A new stable iterative scheme avoiding fully matrix inversion (SIAI) is provided. The analysis on the sparsity and error of the matrices involved during the iterative process is given. Based on the bandwidth and error analysis, a more efficient algorithm combining the SIAI with the filtering technique is proposed. The high computational efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are demonstrated by computing the principal square roots of different matrices to reveal its applicability over the existing methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Automatic Reward Design via Learning Motivation-Consistent Intrinsic Rewards

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching that goal. In many cases, the extrinsic rewards provided by the environment (e.g., win or loss of a game) are very sparse and make it difficult to train agents directly. Researchers usually assist the learning of agents by adding some auxiliary rewards in practice. However, designing auxiliary rewards is often turned to a trial-and-error search for reward settings that produces acceptable results. In this paper, we propose to automatically generate goal-consistent intrinsic rewards for the agent to learn, by maximizing which the expected accumulative extrinsic rewards can be maximized. To this end, we introduce the concept of motivation which captures the underlying goal of maximizing certain rewards and propose the motivation based reward design method. The basic idea is to shape the intrinsic rewards by minimizing the distance between the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. We conduct extensive experiments and show that our method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in handling problems of delayed reward, exploration, and credit assignment.

preprint2022arXiv

Compressing Deep Graph Neural Networks via Adversarial Knowledge Distillation

Deep graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown to be expressive for modeling graph-structured data. Nevertheless, the over-stacked architecture of deep graph models makes it difficult to deploy and rapidly test on mobile or embedded systems. To compress over-stacked GNNs, knowledge distillation via a teacher-student architecture turns out to be an effective technique, where the key step is to measure the discrepancy between teacher and student networks with predefined distance functions. However, using the same distance for graphs of various structures may be unfit, and the optimal distance formulation is hard to determine. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Adversarial Knowledge Distillation framework for graph models named GraphAKD, which adversarially trains a discriminator and a generator to adaptively detect and decrease the discrepancy. Specifically, noticing that the well-captured inter-node and inter-class correlations favor the success of deep GNNs, we propose to criticize the inherited knowledge from node-level and class-level views with a trainable discriminator. The discriminator distinguishes between teacher knowledge and what the student inherits, while the student GNN works as a generator and aims to fool the discriminator. To our best knowledge, GraphAKD is the first to introduce adversarial training to knowledge distillation in graph domains. Experiments on node-level and graph-level classification benchmarks demonstrate that GraphAKD improves the student performance by a large margin. The results imply that GraphAKD can precisely transfer knowledge from a complicated teacher GNN to a compact student GNN.

preprint2022arXiv

Development and Commissioning of a Compact Cosmic Ray Muon Imaging Prototype

Due to the muon tomography's capability of imaging high Z materials, some potential applications have been reported on inspecting smuggled nuclear materials in customs. A compact Cosmic Ray Muons (CRM) imaging prototype, Lanzhou University Muon Imaging System (LUMIS), is comprehensively introduced in this paper including the structure design, assembly, data acquisition and analysis, detector performance test, and material imaging commissioning etc. Casted triangular prism plastic scintillators (PS) were coupled with Si-PMs for sensitive detector components in system. LUMIS's experimental results show that the detection efficiency of an individual detector layer is about 98%, the position resolution for vertical incident muons is 2.5 mm and the angle resolution is 8.73 mrad given a separation distance of 40.5 cm. Moreover, the image reconstruction software was developed based on the Point of Closest Approach (PoCA) to detect lead bricks as our target. The reconstructed images indicate that the profile of the lead bricks in the image is highly consistent with the target. Subsequently, the capability of LUMIS to distinguish different materials, such as Pb, Cu, Fe, and Al, was investigated as well. The lower limit of response time for rapidly alarming high-Z materials is also given and discussed. The successful development and commissioning of the LUMIS prototype have provided a new solution option in technology and craftsmanship for developing compact CRM imaging systems that can be used in many applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Duality-Induced Regularizer for Semantic Matching Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Semantic matching models -- which assume that entities with similar semantics have similar embeddings -- have shown great power in knowledge graph embeddings (KGE). Many existing semantic matching models use inner products in embedding spaces to measure the plausibility of triples and quadruples in static and temporal knowledge graphs. However, vectors that have the same inner products with another vector can still be orthogonal to each other, which implies that entities with similar semantics may have dissimilar embeddings. This property of inner products significantly limits the performance of semantic matching models. To address this challenge, we propose a novel regularizer -- namely, DUality-induced RegulArizer (DURA) -- which effectively encourages the entities with similar semantics to have similar embeddings. The major novelty of DURA is based on the observation that, for an existing semantic matching KGE model (primal), there is often another distance based KGE model (dual) closely associated with it, which can be used as effective constraints for entity embeddings. Experiments demonstrate that DURA consistently and significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art semantic matching models on both static and temporal knowledge graph benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

Evaluating Pest Management Strategies: A Robust Method and its Application to Strawberry Disease Management

Farmers use pesticides to reduce yield losses. The efficacies of pesticide treatments are often evaluated by analyzing the average treatment effects and risks. The stochastic efficiency with respect to a function is often employed in such evaluations through ranking the certainty equivalents of each treatment. The main challenge of using this method is gathering an adequate number of observations to produce results with statistical power. However, in many cases, only a limited number of trials are replicated in field experiments, leaving an inadequate number of observations. In addition, this method focuses only on the farmer's profit without incorporating the impact of disease pressure on yield and profit. The objective of our study is to propose a methodology to address the issue of an insufficient number of observations using simulations and take into account the effect of disease pressure on yield through a quantile regression model. We apply this method to the case of strawberry disease management in Florida.

preprint2022arXiv

Exploiting Global Semantic Similarities in Knowledge Graphs by Relational Prototype Entities

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding aims at learning the latent representations for entities and relations of a KG in continuous vector spaces. An empirical observation is that the head (tail) entities connected by the same relation often share similar semantic attributes -- specifically, they often belong to the same category -- no matter how far away they are from each other in the KG; that is, they share global semantic similarities. However, many existing methods derive KG embeddings based on the local information, which fail to effectively capture such global semantic similarities among entities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, which introduces a set of virtual nodes called \textit{\textbf{relational prototype entities}} to represent the prototypes of the head and tail entities connected by the same relations. By enforcing the entities' embeddings close to their associated prototypes' embeddings, our approach can effectively encourage the global semantic similarities of entities -- that can be far away in the KG -- connected by the same relation. Experiments on the entity alignment and KG completion tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-arts.

preprint2022arXiv

Feudal Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Network Partition for Traffic Signal Control

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been applied and shown great potential in multi-intersections traffic signal control, where multiple agents, one for each intersection, must cooperate together to optimize traffic flow. To encourage global cooperation, previous work partitions the traffic network into several regions and learns policies for agents in a feudal structure. However, static network partition fails to adapt to dynamic traffic flow, which will changes frequently over time. To address this, we propose a novel feudal MARL approach with adaptive network partition. Specifically, we first partition the network into several regions according to the traffic flow. To do this, we propose two approaches: one is directly to use graph neural network (GNN) to generate the network partition, and the other is to use Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) to find the best partition with criteria computed by GNN. Then, we design a variant of Qmix using GNN to handle various dimensions of input, given by the dynamic network partition. Finally, we use a feudal hierarchy to manage agents in each partition and promote global cooperation. By doing so, agents are able to adapt to the traffic flow as required in practice. We empirically evaluate our method both in a synthetic traffic grid and real-world traffic networks of three cities, widely used in the literature. Our experimental results confirm that our method can achieve better performance, in terms of average travel time and queue length, than several leading methods for traffic signal control.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Task-relevant Representations for Generalization via Characteristic Functions of Reward Sequence Distributions

Generalization across different environments with the same tasks is critical for successful applications of visual reinforcement learning (RL) in real scenarios. However, visual distractions -- which are common in real scenes -- from high-dimensional observations can be hurtful to the learned representations in visual RL, thus degrading the performance of generalization. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach, namely Characteristic Reward Sequence Prediction (CRESP), to extract the task-relevant information by learning reward sequence distributions (RSDs), as the reward signals are task-relevant in RL and invariant to visual distractions. Specifically, to effectively capture the task-relevant information via RSDs, CRESP introduces an auxiliary task -- that is, predicting the characteristic functions of RSDs -- to learn task-relevant representations, because we can well approximate the high-dimensional distributions by leveraging the corresponding characteristic functions. Experiments demonstrate that CRESP significantly improves the performance of generalization on unseen environments, outperforming several state-of-the-arts on DeepMind Control tasks with different visual distractions.

preprint2022arXiv

Meta Reinforcement Learning with Successor Feature Based Context

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods only focus on learning a single task from scratch and are not able to use prior knowledge to learn other tasks more effectively. Context-based meta RL techniques are recently proposed as a possible solution to tackle this. However, they are usually less efficient than conventional RL and may require many trial-and-errors during training. To address this, we propose a novel meta-RL approach that achieves competitive performance comparing to existing meta-RL algorithms, while requires significantly fewer environmental interactions. By combining context variables with the idea of decomposing reward in successor feature framework, our method does not only learn high-quality policies for multiple tasks simultaneously but also can quickly adapt to new tasks with a small amount of training. Compared with state-of-the-art meta-RL baselines, we empirically show the effectiveness and data efficiency of our method on several continuous control tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

MFGNet: Dynamic Modality-Aware Filter Generation for RGB-T Tracking

Many RGB-T trackers attempt to attain robust feature representation by utilizing an adaptive weighting scheme (or attention mechanism). Different from these works, we propose a new dynamic modality-aware filter generation module (named MFGNet) to boost the message communication between visible and thermal data by adaptively adjusting the convolutional kernels for various input images in practical tracking. Given the image pairs as input, we first encode their features with the backbone network. Then, we concatenate these feature maps and generate dynamic modality-aware filters with two independent networks. The visible and thermal filters will be used to conduct a dynamic convolutional operation on their corresponding input feature maps respectively. Inspired by residual connection, both the generated visible and thermal feature maps will be summarized with input feature maps. The augmented feature maps will be fed into the RoI align module to generate instance-level features for subsequent classification. To address issues caused by heavy occlusion, fast motion and out-of-view, we propose to conduct a joint local and global search by exploiting a new direction-aware target driven attention mechanism. The spatial and temporal recurrent neural network is used to capture the direction-aware context for accurate global attention prediction. Extensive experiments on three large-scale RGB-T tracking benchmark datasets validated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The source code of this paper is available at \textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/wangxiao5791509/MFG_RGBT_Tracking_PyTorch}}.

preprint2022arXiv

MNL-Bandits under Inventory and Limited Switches Constraints

Optimizing the assortment of products to display to customers is a key to increasing revenue for both offline and online retailers. To trade-off between exploring customers' preference and exploiting customers' choices learned from data, in this paper, by adopting the Multi-Nomial Logit (MNL) choice model to capture customers' choices over products, we study the problem of optimizing assortments over a planning horizon $T$ for maximizing the profit of the retailer. To make the problem setting more practical, we consider both the inventory constraint and the limited switches constraint, where the retailer cannot use up the resource inventory before time $T$ and is forbidden to switch the assortment shown to customers too many times. Such a setting suits the case when an online retailer wants to dynamically optimize the assortment selection for a population of customers. We develop an efficient UCB-like algorithm to optimize the assortments while learning customers' choices from data. We prove that our algorithm can achieve a sub-linear regret bound $\tilde{O}\left(T^{1-α/2}\right)$ if $O(T^α)$ switches are allowed. %, and our regret bound is optimal with respect to $T$. Extensive numerical experiments show that our algorithm outperforms baselines and the gap between our algorithm's performance and the theoretical upper bound is small.

preprint2022arXiv

Modeling Diverse Chemical Reactions for Single-step Retrosynthesis via Discrete Latent Variables

Single-step retrosynthesis is the cornerstone of retrosynthesis planning, which is a crucial task for computer-aided drug discovery. The goal of single-step retrosynthesis is to identify the possible reactants that lead to the synthesis of the target product in one reaction. By representing organic molecules as canonical strings, existing sequence-based retrosynthetic methods treat the product-to-reactant retrosynthesis as a sequence-to-sequence translation problem. However, most of them struggle to identify diverse chemical reactions for a desired product due to the deterministic inference, which contradicts the fact that many compounds can be synthesized through various reaction types with different sets of reactants. In this work, we aim to increase reaction diversity and generate various reactants using discrete latent variables. We propose a novel sequence-based approach, namely RetroDVCAE, which incorporates conditional variational autoencoders into single-step retrosynthesis and associates discrete latent variables with the generation process. Specifically, RetroDVCAE uses the Gumbel-Softmax distribution to approximate the categorical distribution over potential reactions and generates multiple sets of reactants with the variational decoder. Experiments demonstrate that RetroDVCAE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both benchmark dataset and homemade dataset. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that RetroDVCAE can model the multi-modal distribution over reaction types and produce diverse reactant candidates.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-Agent Path Finding Based on Subdimensional Expansion with Bypass

Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is an active area in artificial intelligence, which has many real-world applications such as warehouse management, traffic control, robotics, etc. Recently, M* and its variants have greatly improved the ability to solve the MAPF problem. Although subdimensional expansion used in those approaches significantly decreases the dimensionality of the joint search space and reduces the branching factor, they do not make full use of the possible non-uniqueness of the optimal path of each agent. As a result, the updating of the collision sets may bring a large number of redundant computation. In this paper, the idea of bypass is introduced into subdimensional expansion to reduce the redundant computation. Specifically, we propose the BPM* algorithm, which is an implementation of subdimensional expansion with bypass in M*. In the experiments, we show that BPM* outperforms the state-of-the-art in solving several MAPF benchmark problems.

preprint2022arXiv

Polarization-controlled dynamically switchable high-harmonic generation from all-dielectric metasurfaces governed by dual bound states in the continuum

Tailoring optical nonlinear effects (e.g. harmonic generation, sum-frequency mixing, etc.) in the recently emerging all-dielectric platform is important for both the fundamental science and industrial development of high-efficiency, ultrafast, and miniaturized photonic devices. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for dynamically switchable high-harmonic generation in Silicon nanodimer metasurfaces by exploiting polarization-controlled dual bound states in the continuum (BIC). Owing to the high-quality factor of BIC resonances, efficient harmonic signals including the third-harmonic generation and fifth-harmonic generation from a direct process as well as a cascaded process by degenerate four-wave mixing are obtained. Moreover, the BICs and their resonantly enhanced harmonics can be switched on or off with high selectivity respect to the fundamental pump polarization. Compared with previous reports, our work provide a simple but effective tuning strategy by fully exploring the structural symmetry and polarization degree of freedom rather than resorting to additional external stimuli, which would have great advantages in smart designing tunable and switchable nonlinear light source for chip-scale applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Rethinking Graph Convolutional Networks in Knowledge Graph Completion

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) -- which are effective in modeling graph structures -- have been increasingly popular in knowledge graph completion (KGC). GCN-based KGC models first use GCNs to generate expressive entity representations and then use knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models to capture the interactions among entities and relations. However, many GCN-based KGC models fail to outperform state-of-the-art KGE models though introducing additional computational complexity. This phenomenon motivates us to explore the real effect of GCNs in KGC. Therefore, in this paper, we build upon representative GCN-based KGC models and introduce variants to find which factor of GCNs is critical in KGC. Surprisingly, we observe from experiments that the graph structure modeling in GCNs does not have a significant impact on the performance of KGC models, which is in contrast to the common belief. Instead, the transformations for entity representations are responsible for the performance improvements. Based on the observation, we propose a simple yet effective framework named LTE-KGE, which equips existing KGE models with linearly transformed entity embeddings. Experiments demonstrate that LTE-KGE models lead to similar performance improvements with GCN-based KGC methods, while being more computationally efficient. These results suggest that existing GCNs are unnecessary for KGC, and novel GCN-based KGC models should count on more ablation studies to validate their effectiveness. The code of all the experiments is available on GitHub at https://github.com/MIRALab-USTC/GCN4KGC.

preprint2022arXiv

Self-Adaptive Label Augmentation for Semi-supervised Few-shot Classification

Few-shot classification aims to learn a model that can generalize well to new tasks when only a few labeled samples are available. To make use of unlabeled data that are more abundantly available in real applications, Ren et al. \shortcite{ren2018meta} propose a semi-supervised few-shot classification method that assigns an appropriate label to each unlabeled sample by a manually defined metric. However, the manually defined metric fails to capture the intrinsic property in data. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{A}daptive \textbf{L}abel \textbf{A}ugmentation approach, called \textbf{SALA}, for semi-supervised few-shot classification. A major novelty of SALA is the task-adaptive metric, which can learn the metric adaptively for different tasks in an end-to-end fashion. Another appealing feature of SALA is a progressive neighbor selection strategy, which selects unlabeled data with high confidence progressively through the training phase. Experiments demonstrate that SALA outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for semi-supervised few-shot classification on benchmark datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Titanium Nitride Film on Sapphire Substrate with Low Dielectric Loss for Superconducting Qubits

Dielectric loss is one of the major decoherence sources of superconducting qubits. Contemporary high-coherence superconducting qubits are formed by material systems mostly consisting of superconducting films on substrate with low dielectric loss, where the loss mainly originates from the surfaces and interfaces. Among the multiple candidates for material systems, a combination of titanium nitride (TiN) film and sapphire substrate has good potential because of its chemical stability against oxidization, and high quality at interfaces. In this work, we report a TiN film deposited onto sapphire substrate achieving low dielectric loss at the material interface. Through the systematic characterizations of a series of transmon qubits fabricated with identical batches of TiN base layers, but different geometries of qubit shunting capacitors with various participation ratios of the material interface, we quantitatively extract the loss tangent value at the substrate-metal interface smaller than $8.9 \times 10^{-4}$ in 1-nm disordered layer. By optimizing the interface participation ratio of the transmon qubit, we reproducibly achieve qubit lifetimes of up to 300 $μ$s and quality factors approaching 8 million. We demonstrate that TiN film on sapphire substrate is an ideal material system for high-coherence superconducting qubits. Our analyses further suggest that the interface dielectric loss around the Josephson junction part of the circuit could be the dominant limitation of lifetimes for state-of-the-art transmon qubits.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Hybrid-Optimization Video Coding

Video coding is a mathematical optimization problem of rate and distortion essentially. To solve this complex optimization problem, two popular video coding frameworks have been developed: block-based hybrid video coding and end-to-end learned video coding. If we rethink video coding from the perspective of optimization, we find that the existing two frameworks represent two directions of optimization solutions. Block-based hybrid coding represents the discrete optimization solution because those irrelevant coding modes are discrete in mathematics. It searches for the best one among multiple starting points (i.e. modes). However, the search is not efficient enough. On the other hand, end-to-end learned coding represents the continuous optimization solution because the gradient descent is based on a continuous function. It optimizes a group of model parameters efficiently by the numerical algorithm. However, limited by only one starting point, it is easy to fall into the local optimum. To better solve the optimization problem, we propose to regard video coding as a hybrid of the discrete and continuous optimization problem, and use both search and numerical algorithm to solve it. Our idea is to provide multiple discrete starting points in the global space and optimize the local optimum around each point by numerical algorithm efficiently. Finally, we search for the global optimum among those local optimums. Guided by the hybrid optimization idea, we design a hybrid optimization video coding framework, which is built on continuous deep networks entirely and also contains some discrete modes. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments. Compared to the continuous optimization framework, our method outperforms pure learned video coding methods. Meanwhile, compared to the discrete optimization framework, our method achieves comparable performance to HEVC reference software HM16.10 in PSNR.

preprint2021arXiv

Fluxonium: an alternative qubit platform for high-fidelity operations

Superconducting qubits provide a promising path toward building large-scale quantum computers. The simple and robust transmon qubit has been the leading platform, achieving multiple milestones. However, fault-tolerant quantum computing calls for qubit operations at error rates significantly lower than those exhibited in the state of the art. Consequently, alternative superconducting qubits with better error protection have attracted increasing interest. Among them, fluxonium is a particularly promising candidate, featuring large anharmonicity and long coherence times. Here, we engineer a fluxonium-based quantum processor that integrates high qubit-coherence, fast frequency-tunability, and individual-qubit addressability for reset, readout, and gates. With simple and fast gate schemes, we achieve an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.97% and a two-qubit gate fidelity of up to 99.72%. This performance is comparable to the highest values reported in the literature of superconducting circuits. Thus our work, for the first time within the realm of superconducting qubits, reveals an approach toward fault-tolerant quantum computing that is alternative and competitive to the transmon system.

preprint2021arXiv

Topology-Aware Correlations Between Relations for Inductive Link Prediction in Knowledge Graphs

Inductive link prediction -- where entities during training and inference stages can be different -- has been shown to be promising for completing continuously evolving knowledge graphs. Existing models of inductive reasoning mainly focus on predicting missing links by learning logical rules. However, many existing approaches do not take into account semantic correlations between relations, which are commonly seen in real-world knowledge graphs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel inductive reasoning approach, namely TACT, which can effectively exploit Topology-Aware CorrelaTions between relations in an entity-independent manner. TACT is inspired by the observation that the semantic correlation between two relations is highly correlated to their topological structure in knowledge graphs. Specifically, we categorize all relation pairs into several topological patterns, and then propose a Relational Correlation Network (RCN) to learn the importance of the different patterns for inductive link prediction. Experiments demonstrate that TACT can effectively model semantic correlations between relations, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the inductive link prediction task.

preprint2020arXiv

Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Platform: Surface Code Simulations with Crosstalk

We report, in a sequence of notes, our work on the Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Platform (AC-QDP). AC-QDP provides a set of tools for aiding the development of both quantum computing algorithms and quantum processors, and is powered by a large-scale classical simulator deployed on Alibaba Cloud. In this note, we simulate a distance-3 logical qubit encoded in the 17-qubit surface code using experimental noise parameters for transmon qubits in a planar circuit QED architecture. Our simulation features crosstalk induced by ZZ-interactions. We show that at the current-stage noise levels, crosstalk contributes significantly to the dephasing of the logical qubit. This results in a total phase-flip probability of $\sim 0.6\%$, about $60\%$ higher than expected without considering crosstalk. This indicates that for the code considered, the current noise parameters approach, but do not yet meet, the break-even fault-tolerance regime.

preprint2020arXiv

Camera Trace Erasing

Camera trace is a unique noise produced in digital imaging process. Most existing forensic methods analyze camera trace to identify image origins. In this paper, we address a new low-level vision problem, camera trace erasing, to reveal the weakness of trace-based forensic methods. A comprehensive investigation on existing anti-forensic methods reveals that it is non-trivial to effectively erase camera trace while avoiding the destruction of content signal. To reconcile these two demands, we propose Siamese Trace Erasing (SiamTE), in which a novel hybrid loss is designed on the basis of Siamese architecture for network training. Specifically, we propose embedded similarity, truncated fidelity, and cross identity to form the hybrid loss. Compared with existing anti-forensic methods, SiamTE has a clear advantage for camera trace erasing, which is demonstrated in three representative tasks. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ngchc/CameraTE.

preprint2020arXiv

Quasibound states in the continuum in terahertz free-standing metal complementary periodic cross-shaped resonators

We numerically and experimentally achieve quasi-bound states in the continuums (BICs) with high-Q factors in the free-standing metal complementary periodic cross-shaped resonators (CPCRs) at terahertz (THz) frequencies. Such induced quasi-BICs arises from the breaking of the mirror symmetry of CPCRs. By properly tuning the asymmetric factor, the measured Q factor of quasi-BIC can reach 102, which is lower than the simulated Q factor of 166 due to the limited system resolutions. We also simulate the electric field magnitude and vector distributions at the quasi-BICs, where the out-phase alignment between the electric dipoles is found. The sharp quasi-BICs realized in this thin free-standing metal structure may immediately boost the performance of filters and sensors in terahertz wave manipulation or biomolecular sensing.

preprint2020arXiv

SKEP: Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis

Recently, sentiment analysis has seen remarkable advance with the help of pre-training approaches. However, sentiment knowledge, such as sentiment words and aspect-sentiment pairs, is ignored in the process of pre-training, despite the fact that they are widely used in traditional sentiment analysis approaches. In this paper, we introduce Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training (SKEP) in order to learn a unified sentiment representation for multiple sentiment analysis tasks. With the help of automatically-mined knowledge, SKEP conducts sentiment masking and constructs three sentiment knowledge prediction objectives, so as to embed sentiment information at the word, polarity and aspect level into pre-trained sentiment representation. In particular, the prediction of aspect-sentiment pairs is converted into multi-label classification, aiming to capture the dependency between words in a pair. Experiments on three kinds of sentiment tasks show that SKEP significantly outperforms strong pre-training baseline, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on most of the test datasets. We release our code at https://github.com/baidu/Senta.

preprint2020arXiv

Spin-phonon relaxation from a universal \emph{ab initio} density-matrix approach

Designing new quantum materials with long-lived electron spin states urgently requires a general theoretical formalism and computational technique to reliably predict intrinsic spin relaxation times. We present a new, accurate and universal first-principles methodology based on Lindbladian dynamics of density matrices to calculate spin-phonon relaxation time ($τ_s$) of solids with arbitrary spin mixing and crystal symmetry. This method describes contributions of Elliott-Yafet (EY) and D'yakonov-Perel' (DP) mechanisms to spin relaxation for systems with and without inversion symmetry on an equal footing. We show that intrinsic spin and momentum relaxation times both decrease with increasing temperature; however, for the DP mechanism, spin relaxation time varies inversely with extrinsic scattering time. We predict large anisotropy of spin lifetime in transition metal dichalcogenides. The excellent agreement with experiments for a broad range of materials underscores the predictive capability of our method for properties critical to quantum information science.

preprint2019arXiv

Deep Learning-Based Video Coding: A Review and A Case Study

The past decade has witnessed great success of deep learning technology in many disciplines, especially in computer vision and image processing. However, deep learning-based video coding remains in its infancy. This paper reviews the representative works about using deep learning for image/video coding, which has been an actively developing research area since the year of 2015. We divide the related works into two categories: new coding schemes that are built primarily upon deep networks (deep schemes), and deep network-based coding tools (deep tools) that shall be used within traditional coding schemes or together with traditional coding tools. For deep schemes, pixel probability modeling and auto-encoder are the two approaches, that can be viewed as predictive coding scheme and transform coding scheme, respectively. For deep tools, there have been several proposed techniques using deep learning to perform intra-picture prediction, inter-picture prediction, cross-channel prediction, probability distribution prediction, transform, post- or in-loop filtering, down- and up-sampling, as well as encoding optimizations. In the hope of advocating the research of deep learning-based video coding, we present a case study of our developed prototype video codec, namely Deep Learning Video Coding (DLVC). DLVC features two deep tools that are both based on convolutional neural network (CNN), namely CNN-based in-loop filter (CNN-ILF) and CNN-based block adaptive resolution coding (CNN-BARC). Both tools help improve the compression efficiency by a significant margin. With the two deep tools as well as other non-deep coding tools, DLVC is able to achieve on average 39.6\% and 33.0\% bits saving than HEVC, under random-access and low-delay configurations, respectively. The source code of DLVC has been released for future researches.