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Published work

55 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Motion-Aware Caching for Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation

Autoregressive video generation paradigms offer theoretical promise for long video synthesis, yet their practical deployment is hindered by the computational burden of sequential iterative denoising. While cache reuse strategies can accelerate generation by skipping redundant denoising steps, existing methods rely on coarse-grained chunk-level skipping that fails to capture fine-grained pixel dynamics. This oversight is critical: pixels with high motion require more denoising steps to prevent error accumulation, while static pixels tolerate aggressive skipping. We formalize this insight theoretically by linking cache errors to residual instability, and propose MotionCache, a motion-aware cache framework that exploits inter-frame differences as a lightweight proxy for pixel-level motion characteristics. MotionCache employs a coarse-to-fine strategy: an initial warm-up phase establishes semantic coherence, followed by motion-weighted cache reuse that dynamically adjusts update frequencies per token. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models like SkyReels-V2 and MAGI-1 demonstrate that MotionCache achieves significant speedups of $\textbf{6.28}\times$ and $\textbf{1.64}\times$ respectively, while effectively preserving generation quality (VBench: $1\%\downarrow$ and $0.01\%\downarrow$ respectively). The code is available at https://github.com/ywlq/MotionCache.

preprint2023arXiv

Close the Optical Sensing Domain Gap by Physics-Grounded Active Stereo Sensor Simulation

In this paper, we focus on the simulation of active stereovision depth sensors, which are popular in both academic and industry communities. Inspired by the underlying mechanism of the sensors, we designed a fully physics-grounded simulation pipeline that includes material acquisition, ray-tracing-based infrared (IR) image rendering, IR noise simulation, and depth estimation. The pipeline is able to generate depth maps with material-dependent error patterns similar to a real depth sensor in real time. We conduct real experiments to show that perception algorithms and reinforcement learning policies trained in our simulation platform could transfer well to the real-world test cases without any fine-tuning. Furthermore, due to the high degree of realism of this simulation, our depth sensor simulator can be used as a convenient testbed to evaluate the algorithm performance in the real world, which will largely reduce the human effort in developing robotic algorithms. The entire pipeline has been integrated into the SAPIEN simulator and is open-sourced to promote the research of vision and robotics communities.

preprint2022arXiv

BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engage

We present BlenderBot 3, a 175B parameter dialogue model capable of open-domain conversation with access to the internet and a long-term memory, and having been trained on a large number of user defined tasks. We release both the model weights and code, and have also deployed the model on a public web page to interact with organic users. This technical report describes how the model was built (architecture, model and training scheme), and details of its deployment, including safety mechanisms. Human evaluations show its superiority to existing open-domain dialogue agents, including its predecessors (Roller et al., 2021; Komeili et al., 2022). Finally, we detail our plan for continual learning using the data collected from deployment, which will also be publicly released. The goal of this research program is thus to enable the community to study ever-improving responsible agents that learn through interaction.

preprint2022arXiv

Channel Importance Matters in Few-Shot Image Classification

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) requires vision models to quickly adapt to brand-new classification tasks with a shift in task distribution. Understanding the difficulties posed by this task distribution shift is central to FSL. In this paper, we show that a simple channel-wise feature transformation may be the key to unraveling this secret from a channel perspective. When facing novel few-shot tasks in the test-time datasets, this transformation can greatly improve the generalization ability of learned image representations, while being agnostic to the choice of training algorithms and datasets. Through an in-depth analysis of this transformation, we find that the difficulty of representation transfer in FSL stems from the severe channel bias problem of image representations: channels may have different importance in different tasks, while convolutional neural networks are likely to be insensitive, or respond incorrectly to such a shift. This points out a core problem of the generalization ability of modern vision systems and needs further attention in the future. Our code is available at https://github.com/Frankluox/Channel_Importance_FSL.

preprint2022arXiv

Design optimization of band-pass filter based on parity-time symmetry coupled-resonant

Integrated optical filter based on microring resonators plays a critical role in many applications, ranging from wavelength division multiplexing and switching to channel routing. Bandwidth tunable filters are capable of meeting the on-demand flexible operations in complex situations, due to their advantages of scalability, multi-function, and energy-saving. It has been investigated recently that parity-time (PT) symmetry coupled-resonant systems can be applied to the bandwidth-tunable filters. However, due to the trade-off between the bandwidth-tunable contrast ratio and insertion loss of system, the bandwidth-tunable contrast ratio of this method is severely limited. Here, the bandwidth-tunable contrast ratio is defined as the maximum bandwidth divided by the minimum bandwidth. In this work, we show that high bandwidth-tunable contrast ratio and low insertion loss of system can be achieved simultaneously by increasing the coupling strength between the input port and the resonant. System characterizations under different coupling states reveal that the low insertion loss can be obtained when the system initially operates at the over-coupling condition. A high bandwidth-tunable contrast ratio PT-symmetry band-pass filter with moderate insertion loss is shown on the Silicon platform. Our scheme provides an effective method to reduce the insertion loss of on-chip tunable filters, which is also applicable to the high-order cascaded microring systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Efficient Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement without Private Setups

Efficient asynchronous Byzantine agreement (BA) protocols were mostly studied with private setups, e.g., pre-setup threshold cryptosystem. Challenges remain to reduce the large communication in the absence of such setups. Recently, Abraham et al. (PODC'21) presented the first asynchronous validated BA (VBA) with expected $O(n^3)$ messages and $O(1)$ rounds, relying on only public key infrastructure (PKI) setup, but the design still costs $O(λn^3 \log n)$ bits. Here $n$ is the number of parties, and $λ$ is a cryptographic security parameter. In this paper, we reduce the communication of private-setup free asynchronous BA to expected $O(λn^3)$ bits. At the core of our design, we give a systematic treatment of common randomness protocols in the asynchronous network, and proceed as: - We give an efficient reasonably fair common coin protocol in the asynchronous setting with only PKI setup. It costs only $O(λn^3)$ bits and $O(1)$ rounds, and ensures that with at least 1/3 probability, all honest parties can output a common bit that is as if randomly flipped. This directly renders more efficient private-setup free asynchronous binary agreement (ABA) with expected $O(λn^3)$ bits and $O(1)$ rounds. - Then, we lift our common coin to attain perfect agreement by using a single ABA. This gives us a reasonably fair random leader election protocol with expected $O(λn^3)$ communication and expected constant rounds. It is pluggable in all existing VBA protocols (e.g., Cachin et al., CRYPTO'01; Abraham et al., PODC'19; Lu et al., PODC'20) to remove the needed private setup or distributed key generation (DKG). As such, the communication of private-setup free VBA is reduced to expected $O(λn^3)$ bits while preserving fast termination in expected $O(1)$ rounds.

preprint2022arXiv

Forward-backward asymmetries in $Λ_b \rightarrow Λl^+ l^-$ in Bethe-Salpeter equation approach

Using the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) we investigate the forward-backward asymmetries $( A_{FB}) $ in $Λ_b \rightarrow Λl^+ l^-(l=e,μ,τ)$ in the quark-diquark model. This approach provides precise form factors that are different from those of QCD sum rules. We calculate the rare decay form factors for $Λ_b \rightarrow Λl^+ l^-$ and investigate the (integrated) forward-backward asymmetries in these decay channels. We find that the integrated $A^l_{FB}$, $\bar{A}^l_{FB}(Λ_b \rightarrow Λe^+ e^-) \simeq -0.1371 $, $\bar{A}^l_{FB}(Λ_b \rightarrow Λμ^+ μ^- ) \simeq -0.1376 $, $\bar{A}^l_{FB}(Λ_b \rightarrow Λτ^+ τ^-) \simeq -0.1053 $, the hadron side asymmetries $\bar{A}^h_{FB}(Λ_b \rightarrow Λμ^+ μ^-)\simeq -0.2315$, the lepton-hadron side asymmetries $\bar{A}^{lh}_{FB}(Λ_b \rightarrow Λμ^+ μ^-)\simeq 0.0827$, the longitudinal polarization fractions $\bar{F}_L(Λ_b \rightarrow Λμ^+ μ^-)\simeq 0.5681$.

preprint2022arXiv

Freeform Body Motion Generation from Speech

People naturally conduct spontaneous body motions to enhance their speeches while giving talks. Body motion generation from speech is inherently difficult due to the non-deterministic mapping from speech to body motions. Most existing works map speech to motion in a deterministic way by conditioning on certain styles, leading to sub-optimal results. Motivated by studies in linguistics, we decompose the co-speech motion into two complementary parts: pose modes and rhythmic dynamics. Accordingly, we introduce a novel freeform motion generation model (FreeMo) by equipping a two-stream architecture, i.e., a pose mode branch for primary posture generation, and a rhythmic motion branch for rhythmic dynamics synthesis. On one hand, diverse pose modes are generated by conditional sampling in a latent space, guided by speech semantics. On the other hand, rhythmic dynamics are synced with the speech prosody. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance against several baselines, in terms of motion diversity, quality and syncing with speech. Code and pre-trained models will be publicly available through https://github.com/TheTempAccount/Co-Speech-Motion-Generation.

preprint2022arXiv

Label-Only Membership Inference Attack against Node-Level Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), inspired by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), aggregate the message of nodes' neighbors and structure information to acquire expressive representations of nodes for node classification, graph classification, and link prediction. Previous studies have indicated that GNNs are vulnerable to Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs), which infer whether a node is in the training data of GNNs and leak the node's private information, like the patient's disease history. The implementation of previous MIAs takes advantage of the models' probability output, which is infeasible if GNNs only provide the prediction label (label-only) for the input. In this paper, we propose a label-only MIA against GNNs for node classification with the help of GNNs' flexible prediction mechanism, e.g., obtaining the prediction label of one node even when neighbors' information is unavailable. Our attacking method achieves around 60\% accuracy, precision, and Area Under the Curve (AUC) for most datasets and GNN models, some of which are competitive or even better than state-of-the-art probability-based MIAs implemented under our environment and settings. Additionally, we analyze the influence of the sampling method, model selection approach, and overfitting level on the attack performance of our label-only MIA. Both of those factors have an impact on the attack performance. Then, we consider scenarios where assumptions about the adversary's additional dataset (shadow dataset) and extra information about the target model are relaxed. Even in those scenarios, our label-only MIA achieves a better attack performance in most cases. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of possible defenses, including Dropout, Regularization, Normalization, and Jumping knowledge. None of those four defenses prevent our attack completely.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning from data in the mixed adversarial non-adversarial case: Finding the helpers and ignoring the trolls

The promise of interaction between intelligent conversational agents and humans is that models can learn from such feedback in order to improve. Unfortunately, such exchanges in the wild will not always involve human utterances that are benign or of high quality, and will include a mixture of engaged (helpers) and unengaged or even malicious users (trolls). In this work we study how to perform robust learning in such an environment. We introduce a benchmark evaluation, SafetyMix, which can evaluate methods that learn safe vs. toxic language in a variety of adversarial settings to test their robustness. We propose and analyze several mitigating learning algorithms that identify trolls either at the example or at the user level. Our main finding is that user-based methods, that take into account that troll users will exhibit adversarial behavior across multiple examples, work best in a variety of settings on our benchmark. We then test these methods in a further real-life setting of conversations collected during deployment, with similar results.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning New Skills after Deployment: Improving open-domain internet-driven dialogue with human feedback

Frozen models trained to mimic static datasets can never improve their performance. Models that can employ internet-retrieval for up-to-date information and obtain feedback from humans during deployment provide the promise of both adapting to new information, and improving their performance. In this work we study how to improve internet-driven conversational skills in such a learning framework. We collect deployment data, which we make publicly available, of human interactions, and collect various types of human feedback -- including binary quality measurements, free-form text feedback, and fine-grained reasons for failure. We then study various algorithms for improving from such feedback, including standard supervised learning, rejection sampling, model-guiding and reward-based learning, in order to make recommendations on which type of feedback and algorithms work best. We find the recently introduced Director model (Arora et al., '22) shows significant improvements over other existing approaches.

preprint2022arXiv

Mass Testing and Characterization of 20-inch PMTs for JUNO

Main goal of the JUNO experiment is to determine the neutrino mass ordering using a 20kt liquid-scintillator detector. Its key feature is an excellent energy resolution of at least 3 % at 1 MeV, for which its instruments need to meet a certain quality and thus have to be fully characterized. More than 20,000 20-inch PMTs have been received and assessed by JUNO after a detailed testing program which began in 2017 and elapsed for about four years. Based on this mass characterization and a set of specific requirements, a good quality of all accepted PMTs could be ascertained. This paper presents the performed testing procedure with the designed testing systems as well as the statistical characteristics of all 20-inch PMTs intended to be used in the JUNO experiment, covering more than fifteen performance parameters including the photocathode uniformity. This constitutes the largest sample of 20-inch PMTs ever produced and studied in detail to date, i.e. 15,000 of the newly developed 20-inch MCP-PMTs from Northern Night Vision Technology Co. (NNVT) and 5,000 of dynode PMTs from Hamamatsu Photonics K. K.(HPK).

preprint2022arXiv

On Anytime Learning at Macroscale

In many practical applications of machine learning data arrives sequentially over time in large chunks. Practitioners have then to decide how to allocate their computational budget in order to obtain the best performance at any point in time. Online learning theory for convex optimization suggests that the best strategy is to use data as soon as it arrives. However, this might not be the best strategy when using deep non-linear networks, particularly when these perform multiple passes over each chunk of data rendering the overall distribution non i.i.d.. In this paper, we formalize this learning setting in the simplest scenario in which each data chunk is drawn from the same underlying distribution, and make a first attempt at empirically answering the following questions: How long should the learner wait before training on the newly arrived chunks? What architecture should the learner adopt? Should the learner increase capacity over time as more data is observed? We probe this learning setting using convolutional neural networks trained on classic computer vision benchmarks as well as a large transformer model trained on a large-scale language modeling task. Code is available at \url{www.github.com/facebookresearch/ALMA}.

preprint2022arXiv

On the $N$-hypercontractions and similarity of multivariable weighted shifts

In \cite{SH}, A. L. Shields proved a well-known theorem for the similarity of unilateral weighted shift operators. By using the generalization of this theorem for multivariable weighted shifts and the curvature of holomorphic bundles, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the similarity of $m$-tuples in Cowen-Douglas class. We also present a necessary condition for commuting $m$-tuples of backward weighted shift operators to be $n$-hypercontractive in terms of the weight sequences.

preprint2022arXiv

Polarization multiplexed dissipative Kerr solitons in on-chip micro-resonator

We demonstrate polarization multiplexed dissipative Kerr solitons in an on-chip silicon nitride micro-resonator. In our experiment, TE- and TM-polarized soliton can be individually generated and controlled, thanks to their weak mutual interaction as the result of sufficiently different repetition rates and orthogonal polarization states. Furthermore, we find that TE- and TM-polarized solitons usually exhibit uncorrelated time jitters, therefore the frequency and phase coherence between the polarization multiplexed soliton microcombs change dramatically as a function of pump laser parameters, by optimizing which we achieve narrow dual-microcomb beat note linewidth as small as 4.4 kHz. Potential applications of on-chip polarization multiplexed soliton microcombs include Kerr comb spectral expansion, dual-comb metrology, and measurement of quantum entanglements.

preprint2022arXiv

SaFeRDialogues: Taking Feedback Gracefully after Conversational Safety Failures

Current open-domain conversational models can easily be made to talk in inadequate ways. Online learning from conversational feedback given by the conversation partner is a promising avenue for a model to improve and adapt, so as to generate fewer of these safety failures. However, current state-of-the-art models tend to react to feedback with defensive or oblivious responses. This makes for an unpleasant experience and may discourage conversation partners from giving feedback in the future. This work proposes SaFeRDialogues, a task and dataset of graceful responses to conversational feedback about safety failures. We collect a dataset of 10k dialogues demonstrating safety failures, feedback signaling them, and a response acknowledging the feedback. We show how fine-tuning on this dataset results in conversations that human raters deem considerably more likely to lead to a civil conversation, without sacrificing engagingness or general conversational ability.

preprint2022arXiv

Semantically Proportional Patchmix for Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot learning aims to classify unseen classes with only a limited number of labeled data. Recent works have demonstrated that training models with a simple transfer learning strategy can achieve competitive results in few-shot classification. Although excelling at distinguishing training data, these models are not well generalized to unseen data, probably due to insufficient feature representations on evaluation. To tackle this issue, we propose Semantically Proportional Patchmix (SePPMix), in which patches are cut and pasted among training images and the ground truth labels are mixed proportionally to the semantic information of the patches. In this way, we can improve the generalization ability of the model by regional dropout effect without introducing severe label noise. To learn more robust representations of data, we further take rotate transformation on the mixed images and predict rotations as a rule-based regularizer. Extensive experiments on prevalent few-shot benchmarks have shown the effectiveness of our proposed method.

preprint2022arXiv

SSformer: A Lightweight Transformer for Semantic Segmentation

It is well believed that Transformer performs better in semantic segmentation compared to convolutional neural networks. Nevertheless, the original Vision Transformer may lack of inductive biases of local neighborhoods and possess a high time complexity. Recently, Swin Transformer sets a new record in various vision tasks by using hierarchical architecture and shifted windows while being more efficient. However, as Swin Transformer is specifically designed for image classification, it may achieve suboptimal performance on dense prediction-based segmentation task. Further, simply combing Swin Transformer with existing methods would lead to the boost of model size and parameters for the final segmentation model. In this paper, we rethink the Swin Transformer for semantic segmentation, and design a lightweight yet effective transformer model, called SSformer. In this model, considering the inherent hierarchical design of Swin Transformer, we propose a decoder to aggregate information from different layers, thus obtaining both local and global attentions. Experimental results show the proposed SSformer yields comparable mIoU performance with state-of-the-art models, while maintaining a smaller model size and lower compute.

preprint2022arXiv

ToM2C: Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation with Theory of Mind

Being able to predict the mental states of others is a key factor to effective social interaction. It is also crucial for distributed multi-agent systems, where agents are required to communicate and cooperate. In this paper, we introduce such an important social-cognitive skill, i.e. Theory of Mind (ToM), to build socially intelligent agents who are able to communicate and cooperate effectively to accomplish challenging tasks. With ToM, each agent is capable of inferring the mental states and intentions of others according to its (local) observation. Based on the inferred states, the agents decide "when" and with "whom" to share their intentions. With the information observed, inferred, and received, the agents decide their sub-goals and reach a consensus among the team. In the end, the low-level executors independently take primitive actions to accomplish the sub-goals. We demonstrate the idea in two typical target-oriented multi-agent tasks: cooperative navigation and multi-sensor target coverage. The experiments show that the proposed model not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on reward and communication efficiency, but also shows good generalization across different scales of the environment.

preprint2022arXiv

Unreliability of two-band model analysis of magnetoresistivities in unveiling temperature-driven Lifshitz transition

Recently, anomalies in the temperature dependences of the carrier density and/or mobility derived from analysis of the magnetoresistivities using the conventional two-band model have been used to unveil intriguing temperature-induced Lifshitz transitions in various materials. For instance, two temperature-driven Lifshitz transitions were inferred to exist in the Dirac nodal-line semimetal ZrSiSe, based on two-band model analysis of the Hall magnetoconductivities where the second band exhibits a change in the carrier type from holes to electrons when the temperature decreases below T = 106 K and a dip is observed in the mobility versus temperature curve at T = 80 K. Here, we revisit the experiments and two-band model analysis on ZrSiSe. We show that the anomalies in the second band may be spurious, because the first band dominates the Hall magnetoconductivities at T > 80 K, making the carrier type and mobility obtained for the second band from the two-band model analysis unreliable. That is, care must be taken in interpreting these anomalies as evidences for temperature-driven Lifshitz transitions. Our skepticism on the existence of such phase transitions in ZrSiSe is further supported by the validation of the Kohler's rule for magnetoresistances at temperatures below 180 K. This work showcases potential issues in interpreting anomalies in the temperature dependence of the carrier density and mobility derived from the analysis of magnetoconductivities or magnetoresistivities using the conventional two-band model.

preprint2021arXiv

JUNO Physics and Detector

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a 20 kton LS detector at 700-m underground. An excellent energy resolution and a large fiducial volume offer exciting opportunities for addressing many important topics in neutrino and astro-particle physics. With 6 years of data, the neutrino mass ordering can be determined at 3-4 sigma and three oscillation parameters can be measured to a precision of 0.6% or better by detecting reactor antineutrinos. With 10 years of data, DSNB could be observed at 3-sigma; a lower limit of the proton lifetime of 8.34e33 years (90% C.L.) can be set by searching for p->nu_bar K^+; detection of solar neutrinos would shed new light on the solar metallicity problem and examine the vacuum-matter transition region. A core-collapse supernova at 10 kpc would lead to ~5000 IBD and ~2000 (300) all-flavor neutrino-proton (electron) scattering events. Geo-neutrinos can be detected with a rate of ~400 events/year. We also summarize the final design of the JUNO detector and the key R&D achievements. All 20-inch PMTs have been tested. The average photon detection efficiency is 28.9% for the 15,000 MCP PMTs and 28.1% for the 5,000 dynode PMTs, higher than the JUNO requirement of 27%. Together with the >20 m attenuation length of LS, we expect a yield of 1345 p.e. per MeV and an effective energy resolution of 3.02%/\sqrt{E (MeV)}$ in simulations. The underwater electronics is designed to have a loss rate <0.5% in 6 years. With degassing membranes and a micro-bubble system, the radon concentration in the 35-kton water pool could be lowered to <10 mBq/m^3. Acrylic panels of radiopurity <0.5 ppt U/Th are produced. The 20-kton LS will be purified onsite. Singles in the fiducial volume can be controlled to ~10 Hz. The JUNO experiment also features a double calorimeter system with 25,600 3-inch PMTs, a LS testing facility OSIRIS, and a near detector TAO.

preprint2021arXiv

Non-Ohmic negative longitudinal magnetoresistance in two-dimensional electron gas

Negative longitudinal magnetoresistance (NLMR) has been reported in a variety of materials and has attracted extensive attention as an electrotransport hallmark of topological Weyl semimetals. However, its origin is still under debate. Here, we demonstrate that the NLMR in a two dimensional electron gas can be influenced by the measurement current. While the NLMR persists up to 130 K, its magnitude and magnetic field response become dependent on the applied current below 60 K. The tunable NLMR at low and high currents can be best attributed to quantum interference and disorder scattering effects, respectively. This work uncovers non-Ohmic NLMR in a non-Weyl material and highlights potential effects of the measurement current in elucidating electrotransport phenomena. We also demonstrate that NLMRs can be a valuable phenomenon in revealing the origins of other properties, such as negative MRs in perpendicular magnetic fields.

preprint2021arXiv

RegNet: Self-Regulated Network for Image Classification

The ResNet and its variants have achieved remarkable successes in various computer vision tasks. Despite its success in making gradient flow through building blocks, the simple shortcut connection mechanism limits the ability of re-exploring new potentially complementary features due to the additive function. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose to introduce a regulator module as a memory mechanism to extract complementary features, which are further fed to the ResNet. In particular, the regulator module is composed of convolutional RNNs (e.g., Convolutional LSTMs or Convolutional GRUs), which are shown to be good at extracting Spatio-temporal information. We named the new regulated networks as RegNet. The regulator module can be easily implemented and appended to any ResNet architecture. We also apply the regulator module for improving the Squeeze-and-Excitation ResNet to show the generalization ability of our method. Experimental results on three image classification datasets have demonstrated the promising performance of the proposed architecture compared with the standard ResNet, SE-ResNet, and other state-of-the-art architectures.

preprint2020arXiv

A Novel Alternative Optimization Method for Joint Power and Trajectory Design in UAV-Enabled Wireless Network

This letter aims to maximize the average throughput via the joint design of the transmit power and trajectory for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled network. The conventional way to tackle this problem is based on the alternating optimization (AO) method by iteratively updating power and trajectory until convergence, resulting in a non-convex trajectory subproblem which is difficult to deal with. To develop more efficient methods, we propose a novel AO method by incorporating both power and trajectory into an intermediate variable, and then iteratively updating power and the newly introduced variable. This novel variable transformation makes it easier to decompose the original problem into two convex subproblems, namely a throughput maximization subproblem and a feasibility subproblem. Consequently, both of these subproblems can be solved in a globally optimal fashion. We further propose a low-complexity algorithm for the feasibility subproblem by exploiting the alternating directional method of multipliers (ADMM), whose updating step is performed in closed-form solutions. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method reduces the computation time by orders of magnitude, while achieving higher performance than the conventional methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Capitalizing Backscatter-Aided Hybrid Relay Communications with Wireless Energy Harvesting

In this work, we employ multiple energy harvesting relays to assist information transmission from a multi-antenna hybrid access point (HAP) to a receiver. All the relays are wirelessly powered by the HAP in the power-splitting (PS) protocol. We introduce the novel concept of hybrid relay communications, which allows each relay to switch between two radio modes, i.e., the active RF communications and the passive backscatter communications, according to its channel and energy conditions. We envision that the complement transmissions in two radio modes can be exploited to improve the overall relay performance. As such, we aim to jointly optimize the HAP's beamforming, individual relays' radio mode, the PS ratio, and the relays' collaborative beamforming to enhance the throughput performance at the receiver. The resulting formulation becomes a combinatorial and non-convex problem. Thus, we firstly propose a convex approximation to the original problem, which serves as a lower bound of the relay performance. Then, we design an iterative algorithm that decomposes the binary relay mode optimization from the other operating parameters. In the inner loop of the algorithm, we exploit the structural properties to optimize the relay performance with the fixed relay mode in the alternating optimization framework. In the outer loop, different performance metrics are derived to guide the search for a set of passive relays to further improve the relay performance. Simulation results verify that the hybrid relaying communications can achieve 20% performance improvement compared to the conventional relay communications with all active relays.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Backscatter-Aided Data Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Wireless network optimization has been becoming very challenging as the problem size and complexity increase tremendously, due to close couplings among network entities with heterogeneous service and resource requirements. By continuously interacting with the environment, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a mechanism for different network entities to build knowledge and make autonomous decisions to improve network performance. In this article, we first review typical DRL approaches and recent enhancements. We then discuss the applications of DRL for mobile edge computing (MEC), which can be used for the low-power IoT devices, e.g., wireless sensors in healthcare monitoring, to offload computation workload to nearby MEC servers. To balance power consumption in offloading and computation, we propose a novel hybrid offloading model that exploits the complement operations of RF communications and low-power backscatter communications. The DRL framework is then customized to optimize the transmission scheduling and workload allocation in two communications technologies, which is shown to enhance the offloading performance significantly compared with existing schemes.

preprint2020arXiv

Feasibility and physics potential of detecting $^8$B solar neutrinos at JUNO

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory~(JUNO) features a 20~kt multi-purpose underground liquid scintillator sphere as its main detector. Some of JUNO's features make it an excellent experiment for $^8$B solar neutrino measurements, such as its low-energy threshold, its high energy resolution compared to water Cherenkov detectors, and its much large target mass compared to previous liquid scintillator detectors. In this paper we present a comprehensive assessment of JUNO's potential for detecting $^8$B solar neutrinos via the neutrino-electron elastic scattering process. A reduced 2~MeV threshold on the recoil electron energy is found to be achievable assuming the intrinsic radioactive background $^{238}$U and $^{232}$Th in the liquid scintillator can be controlled to 10$^{-17}$~g/g. With ten years of data taking, about 60,000 signal and 30,000 background events are expected. This large sample will enable an examination of the distortion of the recoil electron spectrum that is dominated by the neutrino flavor transformation in the dense solar matter, which will shed new light on the tension between the measured electron spectra and the predictions of the standard three-flavor neutrino oscillation framework. If $Δm^{2}_{21}=4.8\times10^{-5}~(7.5\times10^{-5})$~eV$^{2}$, JUNO can provide evidence of neutrino oscillation in the Earth at the about 3$σ$~(2$σ$) level by measuring the non-zero signal rate variation with respect to the solar zenith angle. Moveover, JUNO can simultaneously measure $Δm^2_{21}$ using $^8$B solar neutrinos to a precision of 20\% or better depending on the central value and to sub-percent precision using reactor antineutrinos. A comparison of these two measurements from the same detector will help elucidate the current tension between the value of $Δm^2_{21}$ reported by solar neutrino experiments and the KamLAND experiment.

preprint2020arXiv

Multi-Level Micro-Randomized Trial: Detecting the Proximal Effect of Messages on Physical Activity

Technological advancements in mobile devices have made it possible to deliver mobile health interventions to individuals. A novel intervention framework that emerges from such advancements is the just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI), where it aims to suggest the right support to the individual "just in time", when their needs arise, thus having proximal, near future effects. The micro-randomized trial (MRT) design was proposed recently to test the proximal effects of these JITAIs. In an MRT, participants are repeatedly randomized to one of the intervention options of various in the intervention components, at a scale of hundreds or thousands of decision time points over the course of the study. However, the extant MRT framework only tests the proximal effect of two-level intervention components (e.g. control vs intervention). In this paper, we propose a novel version of MRT design with multiple levels per intervention component, which we call "multi-level micro-randomized trial" (MLMRT) design. The MLMRT extends the existing MRT design by allowing multi-level intervention components, and the addition of more levels to the components during the study period. We apply generalized estimating equation type methodology on the longitudinal data arising from an MLMRT to develop the novel test statistics for assessing the proximal effects and deriving the associated sample size calculators. We conduct simulation studies to evaluate the sample size calculators based on both power and precision. We have developed an R shiny application of the sample size calculators. This proposed design is motivated by our involvement in the Diabetes and Mental Health Adaptive Notification Tracking and Evaluation (DIAMANTE) study. This study uses a novel mobile application, also called "DIAMANTE", which delivers adaptive text messages to encourage physical activity.

preprint2020arXiv

Nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation with optimal control on superconducting circuits

Quantum gates, which are the essential building blocks of quantum computers, are very fragile. Thus, to realize robust quantum gates with high fidelity is the ultimate goal of quantum manipulation. Here, we propose a nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation scheme on superconducting circuits to engineer arbitrary quantum gates, which share both the robust merit of geometric phases and the capacity to combine with optimal control technique to further enhance the gate robustness. Specifically, in our proposal, arbitrary geometric single-qubit gates can be realized on a transmon qubit, by a resonant microwave field driving, with both the amplitude and phase of the driving being time-dependent. Meanwhile, nontrivial two-qubit geometric gates can be implemented by two capacitively coupled transmon qubits, with one of the transmon qubits' frequency being modulated to obtain effective resonant coupling between them. Therefore, our scheme provides a promising step towards fault-tolerant solid-state quantum computation.

preprint2020arXiv

Optimization-driven Hierarchical Learning Framework for Wireless Powered Backscatter-aided Relay Communications

In this paper, we employ multiple wireless-powered relays to assist information transmission from a multi-antenna access point to a single-antenna receiver. The wireless relays can operate in either the passive mode via backscatter communications or the active mode via RF communications, depending on their channel conditions and energy states. We aim to maximize the overall throughput by jointly optimizing the access point's beamforming and the relays' radio modes and operating parameters. Due to the non-convex and combinatorial structure, we develop a novel optimization-driven hierarchical deep deterministic policy gradient (H-DDPG) approach to adapt the beamforming and relay strategies dynamically. The optimization-driven H-DDPG algorithm firstly decomposes the binary relay mode selection into the outer-loop deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm and then optimizes the continuous beamforming and relaying parameters by using the inner-loop DDPG algorithm. Secondly, to improve the learning efficiency, we integrate the model-based optimization into the DDPG framework by providing a better-informed target estimation for DNN training. Simulation results reveal that these two special designs ensure a more stable learning and achieve a higher reward performance, up to nearly 20%, compared to the conventional DDPG approach.

preprint2020arXiv

Pose-Assisted Multi-Camera Collaboration for Active Object Tracking

Active Object Tracking (AOT) is crucial to many visionbased applications, e.g., mobile robot, intelligent surveillance. However, there are a number of challenges when deploying active tracking in complex scenarios, e.g., target is frequently occluded by obstacles. In this paper, we extend the single-camera AOT to a multi-camera setting, where cameras tracking a target in a collaborative fashion. To achieve effective collaboration among cameras, we propose a novel Pose-Assisted Multi-Camera Collaboration System, which enables a camera to cooperate with the others by sharing camera poses for active object tracking. In the system, each camera is equipped with two controllers and a switcher: The vision-based controller tracks targets based on observed images. The pose-based controller moves the camera in accordance to the poses of the other cameras. At each step, the switcher decides which action to take from the two controllers according to the visibility of the target. The experimental results demonstrate that our system outperforms all the baselines and is capable of generalizing to unseen environments. The code and demo videos are available on our website https://sites.google.com/view/pose-assistedcollaboration.

preprint2020arXiv

Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot

Building open-domain chatbots is a challenging area for machine learning research. While prior work has shown that scaling neural models in the number of parameters and the size of the data they are trained on gives improved results, we show that other ingredients are important for a high-performing chatbot. Good conversation requires a number of skills that an expert conversationalist blends in a seamless way: providing engaging talking points and listening to their partners, and displaying knowledge, empathy and personality appropriately, while maintaining a consistent persona. We show that large scale models can learn these skills when given appropriate training data and choice of generation strategy. We build variants of these recipes with 90M, 2.7B and 9.4B parameter models, and make our models and code publicly available. Human evaluations show our best models are superior to existing approaches in multi-turn dialogue in terms of engagingness and humanness measurements. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.

preprint2020arXiv

Site testing campaign for the Large Optical/infrared Telescope of China: Overview

The Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT) is a ground-based 12m diameter optical/infrared telescope which is proposed to be built in the western part of China in the next decade. Based on satellite remote sensing data, along with geographical, logistical and political considerations, three candidate sites were chosen for ground-based astronomical performance monitoring. These sites include: Ali in Tibet, Daocheng in Sichuan, and Muztagh Ata in Xinjiang. Up until now, all three sites have continuously collected data for two years. In this paper, we will introduce this site testing campaign, and present its monitoring results obtained during the period between March 2017 and March 2019.

preprint2020arXiv

Site-testing at Muztagh-ata site I: Ground Meteorology and Sky Brightness

Site-testing is crucial for achieving the goal of scientific research and analysis of meteorological and optical observing conditions is one of the basic tasks of it. As one of three potential sites to host 12-meter Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT), Muztagh-ata site which is located on the Pamirs Plateau in west China's Xinjiang began its site-testing task in the spring of 2017. In this paper, we firstly start with an introduction to the site and then present a statistical analysis of the ground-level meteorological properties such as air temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, recorded by automatic weather station with standard meteorological sensors for two-year long. We also show the monitoring results of sky brightness during this period.

preprint2020arXiv

Site-testing at Muztagh-ata site II: Seeing statistics

In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the statistical properties of seeing for the Muztagh-ata site which is the candidate site for hosting future Chinese Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT) project. The measurement was obtained with Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM) from April 2017 to November 2018 at different heights during different periods. The median seeing at 11 meters and 6 meters are very close but different significantly from that on the ground. We mainly analyzed the seeing at 11 meters monthly and hourly, having found that the best season for observing was from late autumn to early winter and seeing tended to improve during the night only in autumn. The analysis of the dependence on temperature inversion, wind speed, direction also was made and the best meteorological conditions for seeing is given.

preprint2020arXiv

Studying the $D_1D$ molecule in the Bethe-Salpeter equation approach

We study the possible bound states of the $D_1D$ system in the Bethe-Salpeter (BS) formalism in the ladder and instantaneous approximations. By solving the BS equation numerically with the kernel containing one-particle exchange diagrams and introducing three different form factors (monopole, dipole, and exponential form factors) at the vertices, we investigate whether the isoscalar and isovector $D_1D$ bound states may exist, respectively. We find that $Y(4260)$ could be accommodated as a $D_1D$ molecule, whereas the interpretation of $Z_2^+(4250)$ as a $D_1D$ molecule is disfavored. The bottom analog of $Y(4260)$ may exist but that of $Z_2^+(4250)$ does not.

preprint2020arXiv

TAO Conceptual Design Report: A Precision Measurement of the Reactor Antineutrino Spectrum with Sub-percent Energy Resolution

The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO, also known as JUNO-TAO) is a satellite experiment of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO). A ton-level liquid scintillator detector will be placed at about 30 m from a core of the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant. The reactor antineutrino spectrum will be measured with sub-percent energy resolution, to provide a reference spectrum for future reactor neutrino experiments, and to provide a benchmark measurement to test nuclear databases. A spherical acrylic vessel containing 2.8 ton gadolinium-doped liquid scintillator will be viewed by 10 m^2 Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) of >50% photon detection efficiency with almost full coverage. The photoelectron yield is about 4500 per MeV, an order higher than any existing large-scale liquid scintillator detectors. The detector operates at -50 degree C to lower the dark noise of SiPMs to an acceptable level. The detector will measure about 2000 reactor antineutrinos per day, and is designed to be well shielded from cosmogenic backgrounds and ambient radioactivities to have about 10% background-to-signal ratio. The experiment is expected to start operation in 2022.

preprint2016arXiv

A Simple Experimental Model to Investigate Force Range for Membrane Nanotube Formation

The presence of membrane tubules in living cells is essential to many biological processes. In cells, one mechanism to form nanosized lipid tubules is via molecular motor induced bilayer extraction. In this paper, we describe a simple experimental model to investigate the forces required for lipid tube formation using kinesin motors anchored to DOPC vesicles. Previous related studies have used molecular motors actively pulling on the membrane to extract a nanotube. Here, we invert the system geometry; molecular motors are used as static anchors linking DOPC vesicles to a two-dimensional microtubule network and an external flow is introduced to generate nanotubes facilitated by the drag force. We found that a drag force of ~7 pN was sufficient for tubule extraction for vesicles ranging from 1 to 2 um in radius. By our method, we found that the force generated by a single molecular motor was sufficient for membrane tubule extraction from a spherical lipid vesicle.

preprint2016arXiv

Cooperative Protofilament Switching Emerges from Inter-Motor Interference in Multiple-Motor Transport

Within living cells, the transport of cargo is accomplished by groups of molecular motors. Such collective transport could utilize mechanisms which emerge from inter-motor interactions in ways that are yet to be fully understood. Here we combined experimental measurements of two-kinesin transport with a theoretical framework to investigate the functional ramifications of inter-motor interactions on individual motor function and collective cargo transport. In contrast to kinesin's low sidestepping frequency when present as a single motor, with exactly two kinesins per cargo, we observed substantial motion perpendicular to the microtubule. Our model captures a surface-associated mode of kinesin, which is only accessible via inter-motor interference in groups, in which kinesin diffuses along the microtubule surface and rapidly "hops" between protofilaments without dissociating from the microtubule. Critically, each kinesin transitions dynamically between the active stepping mode and this weak surface-associated mode enhancing local exploration of the microtubule surface, possibly enabling cellular cargos to overcome macromolecular crowding and to navigate obstacles along microtubule tracks without sacrificing overall travel distance.

preprint2016arXiv

Image segmentation based on the hybrid total variation model and the K-means clustering strategy

The performance of image segmentation highly relies on the original inputting image. When the image is contaminated by some noises or blurs, we can not obtain the efficient segmentation result by using direct segmentation methods. In order to efficiently segment the contaminated image, this paper proposes a two step method based on the hybrid total variation model with a box constraint and the K-means clustering method. In the first step, the hybrid model is based on the weighted convex combination between the total variation functional and the high-order total variation as the regularization term to obtain the original clustering data. In order to deal with non-smooth regularization term, we solve this model by employing the alternating split Bregman method. Then, in the second step, the segmentation can be obtained by thresholding this clustering data into different phases, where the thresholds can be given by using the K-means clustering method. Numerical comparisons show that our proposed model can provide more efficient segmentation results dealing with the noise image and blurring image.

preprint2016arXiv

Rewritable Artificial Magnetic Charge Ice

Artificial ices enable the study of geometrical frustration by design and through direct observation. However, it has proven difficult to achieve tailored long-range ordering of their diverse configurations, limiting both fundamental and applied research directions. We designed an artificial spin structure that produces a magnetic charge ice with tunable long-range ordering of eight different configurations. We also developed a technique to precisely manipulate the local magnetic charge states and demonstrate write-read-erase multifunctionality at room temperature. This globally reconfigurable and locally writable magnetic charge ice could provide a setting for designing magnetic monopole defects, tailoring magnonics, and controlling the properties of other two-dimensional materials.

preprint2016arXiv

Wireless Fractal Cellular Networks

With the seamless coverage of wireless cellular networks in modern society, it is interesting to consider the shape of wireless cellular coverage. Is the shape a regular hexagon, an irregular polygon, or another complex geometrical shape? Based on fractal theory, the statistical characteristic of the wireless cellular coverage boundary is determined by the measured wireless cellular data collected from Shanghai, China. The measured results indicate that the wireless cellular coverage boundary presents an extremely irregular geometrical shape, which is also called a statistical fractal shape. Moreover, the statistical fractal characteristics of the wireless cellular coverage boundary have been validated by values of the Hurst parameter estimated in angular scales. The statistical fractal characteristics of the wireless cellular coverage boundary can be used to evaluate and design the handoff scheme of mobile user terminals in wireless cellular networks.

preprint2015arXiv

Deep Boosting: Layered Feature Mining for General Image Classification

Constructing effective representations is a critical but challenging problem in multimedia understanding. The traditional handcraft features often rely on domain knowledge, limiting the performances of exiting methods. This paper discusses a novel computational architecture for general image feature mining, which assembles the primitive filters (i.e. Gabor wavelets) into compositional features in a layer-wise manner. In each layer, we produce a number of base classifiers (i.e. regression stumps) associated with the generated features, and discover informative compositions by using the boosting algorithm. The output compositional features of each layer are treated as the base components to build up the next layer. Our framework is able to generate expressive image representations while inducing very discriminate functions for image classification. The experiments are conducted on several public datasets, and we demonstrate superior performances over state-of-the-art approaches.

preprint2015arXiv

Elimination of polarization degeneracy in circularly symmetric bianisotropic waveguides: a decoupled case

Mode properties of circularly symmetric waveguides with one special type of bianisotropy are studied using finite element approach. We find that the polarization degeneracy in circularly symmetric waveguides can be eliminated, by introducing intrinsic crossing coupling between electric and magnetic moments in the constituent units of the waveguide media. Breaking the polarization degeneracy in high order mode groups is also confirmed numerically. With the bianisotropic parameters chosen in this work, the x and y-polarized modes remain decoupled. Typically, the y-polarized modes remain completely unchanged, while the x-polarized modes are turned into leaky modes that are lossy along propagation direction. A perturbation model from coupled mode theory is developed to explain the results and shows excellent agreement. Such asymmetric behavior between different polarizations might be feasible and useful for developing compact polarizers in terahertz or mid-infrared regime.

preprint2015arXiv

General coupled mode theory in non-Hermitian waveguides

In the presence of loss and gain, the coupled mode equation on describing the mode hybridization of various waveguides or cavities, or cavities coupled to waveguides becomes intrinsically non-Hermitian. In such non-Hermitian waveguides, the standard coupled coupled mode theory fails. We generalize the coupled mode theory with a properly defined inner product based on reaction conservation. We apply our theory to the non-Hermitian parity-time symmetric waveguides, and obtain excellent agreement with results obtained by finite element fullwave simulations. The theory presented here is typically formulated in space to study coupling between waveguides, which can be transformed into time domain by proper reformulation to study coupling between non-Hermitian resonators. Our theory has the strength of studying non-Hermitian optical systems with inclusion of the full vector fields, thus is useful to study and design non-Hermitian devices that support asymmetric and even nonreciprocal light propagations

preprint2015arXiv

Time traces of individual kinesin motors suggest functional heterogeneity

Conventional analysis of in vitro assays of motor proteins rests on the assumption that all proteins with the same chemical composition function identically; however molecule-to-molecule variation is often seen even in well-controlled experiments. In an effort to obtain a statistically meaningful set of time traces that simultaneously avoid any experimental artifacts, we performed quantum-dot labeled kinesin experiments on both surface and levitated microtubules. Similar to glassy systems, we found that mean velocities of individual kinesin motors vary widely from one motor to another, the variation of which is greater than that expected from the stochastic variation of stepping times. In the presence of heterogeneity, an ensemble-averaged quantity such as diffusion constant or randomness parameter is ill-defined. We propose to analyze heterogeneous data from single molecule measurements by decomposing them into homogeneous subensembles.

preprint2014arXiv

Effects of Shock Waves on Neutrino Oscillations in Three Supernova Models

It has been realized that the shock wave effects play an important role in neutrino oscillations during the supernova explosion. In recent years, with the development of simulations about supernova explosion, we have a better understanding about the density profiles and the shock waves in supernovae than before. It has been shown that the appearance of shock waves not only varies with time, but is also affected by the mass of the supernova. When the mass of the supernova happens to be in a certain range (e.g. it equals 10.8 times the mass of the sun), there might be a reverse shock wave, another sudden change of density except the forward shock wave, emerging in the supernova. In addition, there are some other time-dependent changes of density profiles in different supernova models. Because of these complex density profiles, the expression of the crossing probability at the high resonance, $P_H$, which we used previously would be no longer applicable. In order to get more accurate and reasonable results, we use the data of density profiles in three different supernova models obtained from simulations to study the variations of $P_s$ (the survival probability of $ν_e\rightarrowν_e$), as well as $P_c$ (the conversion probability of $ν_x\rightarrowν_e$). It is found that the mass of the supernova does make a difference on the behavior of $P_s$, and affects $P_c$ at the same time. With the results of $P_s$ and $P_c$, we can estimate the number of $ν_e$ remained after they go through the matter in the supernova.

preprint2014arXiv

Intrusion Detection using Continuous Time Bayesian Networks

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) fall into two high-level categories: network-based systems (NIDS) that monitor network behaviors, and host-based systems (HIDS) that monitor system calls. In this work, we present a general technique for both systems. We use anomaly detection, which identifies patterns not conforming to a historic norm. In both types of systems, the rates of change vary dramatically over time (due to burstiness) and over components (due to service difference). To efficiently model such systems, we use continuous time Bayesian networks (CTBNs) and avoid specifying a fixed update interval common to discrete-time models. We build generative models from the normal training data, and abnormal behaviors are flagged based on their likelihood under this norm. For NIDS, we construct a hierarchical CTBN model for the network packet traces and use Rao-Blackwellized particle filtering to learn the parameters. We illustrate the power of our method through experiments on detecting real worms and identifying hosts on two publicly available network traces, the MAWI dataset and the LBNL dataset. For HIDS, we develop a novel learning method to deal with the finite resolution of system log file time stamps, without losing the benefits of our continuous time model. We demonstrate the method by detecting intrusions in the DARPA 1998 BSM dataset.

preprint2014arXiv

Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer with Co-Channel Interference

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is an appealing solution to balance the energy distribution in wireless networks and improve the energy-efficiency of the entire network. In this paper, we study the optimal policies for SWIPT over the flat-fading channel subject to the co-channel interference. The SWIPT receiver using dynamic power splitting (DPS) is expected to achieve the maximum information rate given an average harvested energy constraint. In the case that channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is not available, the optimal power splitting is derived. For the case with CSIT, the joint optimal policy of the transmit power and the power splitting are also provided. Through simulations, we show the optimal rate-energy (R-E) trade-offs of our proposed policies. The case with CSIT achieves better R-E trade-off than the case with no CSIT.

preprint2013arXiv

Detection of supernova neutrinos on the Earth for large theta13

Supernova (SN) neutrinos detected on the Earth are subject to the shock wave effects, the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) effects, the neutrino collective effects and the Earth matter effects. Considering the recent experimental result about the large mixing angle $θ_{13}$ ($\backsimeq8.8^{\circ}$) provided by the Daya Bay Collaboration and applying the available knowledge for the neutrino conversion probability in the high resonance of SN, $P_{H}$, which is in the form of hypergeometric function in the case of large $θ_{13}$, we deduce the expression of $P_{H}$ taking into account the shock wave effects. It is found that $P_{H}$ is not zero in a certain range of time due to the shock wave effects. After considering all the four physical effects and scanning relevant parameters, we calculate the event numbers of SN neutrinos detected at the Daya Bay experiment. From the numerical results, it is found that the behaviors of neutrino event numbers detected on the Earth depend on the neutrino mass hierarchy and neutrino spectrum parameters including the temperature $T_α$, the dimensionless pinching parameter $η_α$ or $β_α$ (where $α$ refers to neutrino flavor), the average energy $< E_α>$, and the SN neutrino luminosities $L_α$. We also compare the results of two parametrization methods for the neutrino energy distributions and give the ranges of SN neutrino event numbers that will be detected at the Daya Bay experiment.

preprint2012arXiv

Optimal Portfolio Selection under Concave Price Impact

In this paper we study an optimal portfolio selection problem under instantaneous price impact. Based on some empirical analysis in the literature, we model such impact as a concave function of the trading size when the trading size is small. The price impact can be thought of as either a liquidity cost or a transaction cost, but the concavity nature of the cost leads to some fundamental difference from those in the existing literature. We show that the problem can be reduced to an impulse control problem, but without fixed cost, and that the value function is a viscosity solution to a special type of Quasi-Variational Inequality (QVI). We also prove directly (without using the solution to the QVI) that the optimal strategy exists and more importantly, despite the absence of a fixed cost, it is still in a "piecewise constant" form, reflecting a more practical perspective.

preprint2012arXiv

Performance of MIMO Relay DCSK-CD Systems over Nakagami Fading Channels

A multi-access multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay differential chaos shift keying cooperative diversity (DCSK-CD) system is proposed in this paper as a comprehensive cooperation scheme, in which the relay and destination both employ multiple antennas to strengthen the robustness against signal fading in a wireless network. It is shown that, with spatial diversity gains, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed system is remarkably better than the conventional DCSK non-cooperation (DCSK-NC) and DCSK cooperative communication (DCSK-CC) systems. Moreover, the exact BER and close-form expressions of the proposed system are derived over Nakagami fading channels through the moment generating function (MGF), which is shown to be highly consistent with the simulation results. Meanwhile, this paper illustrates a trade-off between the performance and the complexity, and provides a threshold for the number of relay antennas keeping the user consumed energy constant. Due to the above-mentioned advantages, the proposed system stands out as a good candidate or alternative for energy-constrained wireless communications based on chaotic modulation, especially for low-power and low-cost wireless personal area networks (WPANs).

preprint2012arXiv

Self-Assembly of Glycine on Cu (001): the Tales of Polarity and Temperature

Glycine on Cu(001) is used as an example to illustrate the critical role of molecular polarity and finite temperature effect in self-assembly of biomolecules at a metal surface. A unified picture for glycine self-assembly on Cu(001) is derived based on full polarity compensation considerations, implemented as a generic rule. Temperature plays a non-trivial role: the ground-state structure at 0 K is absent at room temperature, where intermolecular hydrogen bonding overweighs competing molecule-substrate interactions. The unique p(2X4) structure from the rule is proved as the most stable one by ab initio molecular dynamics at room temperature, and its STM images and anisotropic free-electron-like dispersion are in excellent agreement with experiments. Moreover, the rich self-assembling patterns including the heterochiral and homochiral phases, and their interrelationships are entirely governed by the same mechanism.

preprint2011arXiv

Hedging strategies with a put option and their failure rates

The problem of stock hedging is reconsidered in this paper, where a put option is chosen from a set of available put options to hedge the market risk of a stock. A formula is proposed to determine the probability that the potential loss exceeds a predetermined level of Value-at-Risk, which is used to find the optimal strike price and optimal hedge ratio. The assumptions that the chosen put option finishes in-the-money and the constraint of hedging budget is binding are relaxed in this paper. A hypothesis test is proposed to determine whether the failure rate of hedging strategy is greater than the predetermined level of risk. The performances of the proposed method and the method with those two assumptions are compared through simulations. The results of simulated investigations indicate that the proposed method is much more prudent than the method with those two assumptions.