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Published work

43 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents

LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to handle streaming tasks, yet they often remain one-off problem solvers that fail to learn from past interactions. Reusable skills distilled from experience provide a natural substrate for self-evolution, where high-quality skill curation serves as the key bottleneck. Existing approaches either rely on manual skill curation, prescribe heuristic skill operations, or train for short-horizon skill operations. However, they still struggle to learn complex long-term curation policies from indirect and delayed feedback. To tackle this challenge, we propose SkillOS, an experience-driven RL training recipe for learning skill curation in self-evolving agents. SkillOS pairs a frozen agent executor that retrieves and applies skills with a trainable skill curator that updates an external SkillRepo from accumulated experience. To provide learning signals for curation, we design composite rewards and train on grouped task streams based on skill-relevant task dependencies, where earlier trajectories update the SkillRepo, and later related tasks evaluate these updates. Across multi-turn agentic tasks and single-turn reasoning tasks, SkillOS consistently outperforms memory-free and strong memory-based baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, with the learned skill curator generalizing across different executor backbones and task domains. Further analyses show that the learned curator produces more targeted skill use, while the skills in SkillRepo evolve into more richly structured Markdown files that encode higher-level meta-skills over time.

preprint2024arXiv

Exception-aware Lifecycle Model Construction for Framework APIs

The implementation of complex software systems usually depends on low-level frameworks or third-party libraries. During their evolution, the APIs adding and removing behaviors may cause unexpected compatibility problems. So, precisely analyzing and constructing the framework/ library's API lifecycle model is of great importance. Existing works have proposed the API existence-changing model for defect detection, while not considering the influence of semantic changes in APIs. In some cases, developers will not remove or deprecate APIs but modify their semantics by adding, removing, or modifying their exception-thrown code, which may bring potential defects to upper-level code. Therefore, besides the API existence model, it is also necessary for developers to be concerned with the exception-related code evolution in APIs, which requires the construction of exception-aware API lifecycle models for framework/library projects. To achieve automatic exception-aware API lifecycle model construction, this paper adopts a static analysis technique to extract exception summary information in the framework API code and adopts a multi-step matching strategy to obtain the changing process of exceptions. Then, it generates exception-aware API lifecycle models for the given framework/library project. With this approach, the API lifecycle extraction tool, JavaExP, is implemented, which is based on Java bytecode analysis. Compared to the state-of-the-art tool, JavaExP achieves both a higher F1 score (+60%) and efficiency (+7x), whose precision of exception matching and changing results is 98%. Compared to the exception-unaware API lifecycle modeling on 60 versions, JavaExp can identify 18% times more API changes. Among the 75,433 APIs under analysis, 20% of APIs have changed their exception-throwing behavior at least once after API introduction, which may bring many hidden compatibility issues.

preprint2024arXiv

Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Lane Changing of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic

Autonomous driving has attracted significant research interests in the past two decades as it offers many potential benefits, including releasing drivers from exhausting driving and mitigating traffic congestion, among others. Despite promising progress, lane-changing remains a great challenge for autonomous vehicles (AV), especially in mixed and dynamic traffic scenarios. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL), a powerful data-driven control method, has been widely explored for lane-changing decision makings in AVs with encouraging results demonstrated. However, the majority of those studies are focused on a single-vehicle setting, and lane-changing in the context of multiple AVs coexisting with human-driven vehicles (HDVs) have received scarce attention. In this paper, we formulate the lane-changing decision making of multiple AVs in a mixed-traffic highway environment as a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problem, where each AV makes lane-changing decisions based on the motions of both neighboring AVs and HDVs. Specifically, a multi-agent advantage actor-critic network (MA2C) is developed with a novel local reward design and a parameter sharing scheme. In particular, a multi-objective reward function is proposed to incorporate fuel efficiency, driving comfort, and safety of autonomous driving. Comprehensive experimental results, conducted under three different traffic densities and various levels of human driver aggressiveness, show that our proposed MARL framework consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art benchmarks in terms of efficiency, safety and driver comfort.

preprint2022arXiv

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Android ICC Resolution Techniques

Inter-component communication (ICC) is a widely used mechanism in mobile apps, which enables message-based control flow transferring and data passing between Android components. Effective ICC resolution requires precisely identifying entry points, analyzing data values of ICC fields, modeling related framework APIs, etc. Due to various control-flow- and data-flow-related characteristics involved and the lack of oracles for real-world apps, the comprehensive evaluation of ICC resolution techniques is challenging. To fill this gap, we collect multiple-type benchmark suites with 4,104 apps, covering hand-made apps, open-source, and commercial ones. Considering their differences, various evaluation metrics, e.g., number count, graph structure, and reliable oracle based metrics, are adopted on-demand. As the oracle for real-world apps is unavailable, we design a dynamic analysis approach to extract the real ICC links triggered during GUI exploration. By auditing the code implementations, we carefully check the extracted ICCs and confirm 1,680 ones to form a reliable oracle set, in which each ICC is labeled with 25 code characteristic tags. The evaluation performed on six state-of-the-art ICC resolution tools shows that 1) the completeness of static ICC resolution results on real-world apps is not satisfactory, as up to 38%-85% ICCs are missed by tools; 2) many wrongly reported ICCs are sent from or received by only a few components and the graph structure information can help the identification; 3) the efficiency of fundamental tools, like ICC resolution ones, should be optimized in both engineering and research aspects. By investigating both the missed and wrongly reported ICCs, we discuss the strengths of different tools for users and summarize eight common FN/FP patterns in ICC resolution for tool developers.

preprint2022arXiv

An Efficient Algorithm for Generating Directed Networks with Predetermined Assortativity Measures

Assortativity coefficients are important metrics to analyze both directed and undirected networks. In general, it is not guaranteed that the fitted model will always agree with the assortativity coefficients in the given network, and the structure of directed networks is more complicated than the undirected ones. Therefore, we provide a remedy by proposing a degree-preserving rewiring algorithm, called DiDPR, for generating directed networks with given directed assortativity coefficients. We construct the joint edge distribution of the target network by accounting for the four directed assortativity coefficients simultaneously, provided that they are attainable, and obtain the desired network by solving a convex optimization problem.Our algorithm also helps check the attainability of the given assortativity coefficients. We assess the performance of the proposed algorithm by simulation studies with focus on two different network models, namely Erdös--Rényi and preferential attachment random networks. We then apply the algorithm to a Facebook wall post network as a real data example. The codes for implementing our algorithm are publicly available in R package wdnet.

preprint2022arXiv

AUGER: Automatically Generating Review Comments with Pre-training Models

Code review is one of the best practices as a powerful safeguard for software quality. In practice, senior or highly skilled reviewers inspect source code and provide constructive comments, considering what authors may ignore, for example, some special cases. The collaborative validation between contributors results in code being highly qualified and less chance of bugs. However, since personal knowledge is limited and varies, the efficiency and effectiveness of code review practice are worthy of further improvement. In fact, it still takes a colossal and time-consuming effort to deliver useful review comments. This paper explores a synergy of multiple practical review comments to enhance code review and proposes AUGER (AUtomatically GEnerating Review comments): a review comments generator with pre-training models. We first collect empirical review data from 11 notable Java projects and construct a dataset of 10,882 code changes. By leveraging Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) models, the framework synthesizes valuable knowledge in the training stage and effectively outperforms baselines by 37.38% in ROUGE-L. 29% of our automatic review comments are considered useful according to prior studies. The inference generates just in 20 seconds and is also open to training further. Moreover, the performance also gets improved when thoroughly analyzed in case study.

preprint2022arXiv

Density-Aware Hyper-Graph Neural Networks for Graph-based Semi-supervised Node Classification

Graph-based semi-supervised learning, which can exploit the connectivity relationship between labeled and unlabeled data, has been shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in many artificial intelligence applications. One of the most challenging problems for graph-based semi-supervised node classification is how to use the implicit information among various data to improve the performance of classifying. Traditional studies on graph-based semi-supervised learning have focused on the pairwise connections among data. However, the data correlation in real applications could be beyond pairwise and more complicated. The density information has been demonstrated to be an important clue, but it is rarely explored in depth among existing graph-based semi-supervised node classification methods. To develop a flexible and effective model for graph-based semi-supervised node classification, we propose a novel Density-Aware Hyper-Graph Neural Networks (DA-HGNN). In our proposed approach, hyper-graph is provided to explore the high-order semantic correlation among data, and a density-aware hyper-graph attention network is presented to explore the high-order connection relationship. Extensive experiments are conducted in various benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

preprint2022arXiv

Ergodic problems for contact Hamilton-Jacobi equations

This paper deals with the generalized ergodic problem \[ H(x,u(x),Du(x))=c, \quad x\in M, \] where the unknown is a pair $(c,u)$ of a constant $c \in \mathbb{R}$ and a function $u$ on $M$ for which $u$ is a viscosity solution. We assume $H=H(x,u,p)$ satisfies Tonelli conditions in the argument $p\in T^*_xM$ and the Lipschitz condition in the argument $u\in\R$. For a given $c\in \R$, we first discuss necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of viscosity solutions. Let $\mathfrak{C}$ denote the set of all real numbers $c$'s for which the above equation admits viscosity solutions. Then we show $\mathfrak{C}$ is an interval, whose endpoints $\x$, $\y$ with $\x\leqslant\y$ can be characterized by a min-max formula and a max-min formula, respectively. The most significant finding is that we figure out the structure of $\mathfrak{C}$ without monotonicity assumptions on $u$.

preprint2022arXiv

FedSSO: A Federated Server-Side Second-Order Optimization Algorithm

In this work, we propose FedSSO, a server-side second-order optimization method for federated learning (FL). In contrast to previous works in this direction, we employ a server-side approximation for the Quasi-Newton method without requiring any training data from the clients. In this way, we not only shift the computation burden from clients to server, but also eliminate the additional communication for second-order updates between clients and server entirely. We provide theoretical guarantee for convergence of our novel method, and empirically demonstrate our fast convergence and communication savings in both convex and non-convex settings.

preprint2022arXiv

Identifying structure-absorption relationships and predicting absorption strength of non-fullerene acceptors for organic photovoltaics

Non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs) are excellent light harvesters, yet the origin of such high optical extinction is not well understood. In this work, we investigate the absorption strength of NFAs by building a database of time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) calculations of ~500 pi-conjugated molecules. The calculations are first validated by comparison with experimental measurements on liquid and solid state using common fullerene and non-fullerene acceptors. We find that the molar extinction coefficient (ε_(d,max)) shows reasonable agreement between calculation in vacuum and experiment for molecules in solution, highlighting the effectiveness of TDDFT for predicting optical properties of organic pi-conjugated molecules. We then perform a statistical analysis based on molecular descriptors to identify which features are important in defining the absorption strength. This allows us to identify structural features that are correlated with high absorption strength in NFAs and could be used to guide molecular design: highly absorbing NFAs should possess a planar, linear, and fully conjugated molecular backbone with highly polarisable heteroatoms. We then exploit a random decision forest to draw predictions for ε_(d,max) using a computational framework based on extended tight-binding Hamiltonians, which shows reasonable predicting accuracy with lower computational cost than TDDFT. This work provides a general understanding of the relationship between molecular structure and absorption strength in pi-conjugated organic molecules, including NFAs, while introducing predictive machine-learning models of low computational cost.

preprint2022arXiv

Improving Tese Case Generation for Python Native Libraries Through Constraints on Input Data Structures

Modern Python projects execute computational functions using native libraries and give Python interfaces to boost execution speed; hence, testing these libraries becomes critical to the project's robustness. One challenge is that existing approaches use coverage to guide generation, but native libraries run as black boxes to Python code with no execution information. Another is that dynamic binary instrumentation reduces testing performance as it needs to monitor both native libraries and the Python virtual machine. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an automated test case generation approach that works at the Python code layer. Our insight is that many path conditions in native libraries are for processing input data structures through interacting with the VM. In our approach, we instrument the Python Interpreter to monitor the interactions between native libraries and VM, derive constraints on the structures, and then use the constraints to guide test case generation. We implement our approach in a tool named PyCing and apply it to six widely-used Python projects. The experimental results reveal that with the structure constraint guidance, PyCing can cover more execution paths than existing test cases and state-of-the-art tools. Also, with the checkers in the testing framework Pytest, PyCing can identify segmentation faults in 10 Python interfaces and memory leaks in 9. Our instrumentation strategy also has an acceptable influence on testing efficiency.

preprint2022arXiv

Knowledge Management for Cloud Computing Field

Migration legacy systems to cloud platforms is a knowledge intensive process. There is an ever increasing body of knowledge reporting empirical scenarios of successful and problematic cloud migration. Reusing this body of knowledge, dispersed and fragmented over the academic/multi-vocal literature, has practical values to mitigate costly risks and pitfalls in further projects of legacy to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud migration. In line with this, knowledge management systems/platforms pertinent to cloud migration are a prime prerequisite and a strategic imperative for an organization. We have conducted a qualitative exploratory study to understand the benefits and challenges of developing Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) for cloud migration in real trials. Whilst our prototype system demonstration supported the importance and bene-fits of developing Cloud Migration KMS (CM-KMS), our semi-structured industry interview study with 11 participants highlighted challenging impediments against developing this class of KMS. As a result, this study proposes nine significant challenges that cause the abandon of the design and maintenance of CM-KMS, including continuous changes and updates, integration of knowledge, knowledge granularity, preservation of context, automation, deconstruction of traditional knowledge, dependency on experts, hybrid knowledge of both vendor-specific and vendor-neutral cloud platforms, and parsimony. Our results inform cloud architects to pay attention to adopt CM-KMS for the legacy-to-cloud migration in their organizations.

preprint2022arXiv

Nonlinear semigroup approach to Hamilton-Jacobi equations -- A toy model

In this paper, we discuss the existence and multiplicity problem of viscosity solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation $$h(x,d_x u)+λ(x)u=c,\quad x\in M,$$ where $M$ is a closed manifold and $λ:M\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ changes signs on $M$, via nonlinear semigroup method. It turns out that a bifurcation phenomenon occurs when parameter $c$ strides over the critical value. As an application of the main result, we analyse the structure of the set of viscosity solutions of an one-dimensional example in detail.

preprint2022arXiv

On the Minimax Spherical Designs

Distributing points on a (possibly high-dimensional) sphere with minimal energy is a long-standing problem in and outside the field of mathematics. This paper considers a novel energy function that arises naturally from statistics and combinatorial optimization, and studies its theoretical properties. Our result solves both the exact optimal spherical point configurations in certain cases and the minimal energy asymptotics under general assumptions. Connections between our results and the L1-Principal Component analysis and Quasi-Monte Carlo methods are also discussed.

preprint2022arXiv

On the Robustness of Reading Comprehension Models to Entity Renaming

We study the robustness of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models to entity renaming -- do models make more wrong predictions when the same questions are asked about an entity whose name has been changed? Such failures imply that models overly rely on entity information to answer questions, and thus may generalize poorly when facts about the world change or questions are asked about novel entities. To systematically audit this issue, we present a pipeline to automatically generate test examples at scale, by replacing entity names in the original test sample with names from a variety of sources, ranging from names in the same test set, to common names in life, to arbitrary strings. Across five datasets and three pretrained model architectures, MRC models consistently perform worse when entities are renamed, with particularly large accuracy drops on datasets constructed via distant supervision. We also find large differences between models: SpanBERT, which is pretrained with span-level masking, is more robust than RoBERTa, despite having similar accuracy on unperturbed test data. We further experiment with different masking strategies as the continual pretraining objective and find that entity-based masking can improve the robustness of MRC models.

preprint2022arXiv

Regression Modeling for Recurrent Events Using R Package reReg

Recurrent event analyses have found a wide range of applications in biomedicine, public health, and engineering, among others, where study subjects may experience a sequence of event of interest during follow-up. The R package reReg (Chiou and Huang 2021) offers a comprehensive collection of practical and easy-to-use tools for regression analysis of recurrent events, possibly with the presence of an informative terminal event. The regression framework is a general scale-change model which encompasses the popular Cox-type model, the accelerated rate model, and the accelerated mean model as special cases. Informative censoring is accommodated through a subject-specific frailty without no need for parametric specification. Different regression models are allowed for the recurrent event process and the terminal event. Also included are visualization and simulation tools.

preprint2022arXiv

Wavelet Regularization Benefits Adversarial Training

Adversarial training methods are state-of-the-art (SOTA) empirical defense methods against adversarial examples. Many regularization methods have been proven to be effective with the combination of adversarial training. Nevertheless, such regularization methods are implemented in the time domain. Since adversarial vulnerability can be regarded as a high-frequency phenomenon, it is essential to regulate the adversarially-trained neural network models in the frequency domain. Faced with these challenges, we make a theoretical analysis on the regularization property of wavelets which can enhance adversarial training. We propose a wavelet regularization method based on the Haar wavelet decomposition which is named Wavelet Average Pooling. This wavelet regularization module is integrated into the wide residual neural network so that a new WideWaveletResNet model is formed. On the datasets of CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, our proposed Adversarial Wavelet Training method realizes considerable robustness under different types of attacks. It verifies the assumption that our wavelet regularization method can enhance adversarial robustness especially in the deep wide neural networks. The visualization experiments of the Frequency Principle (F-Principle) and interpretability are implemented to show the effectiveness of our method. A detailed comparison based on different wavelet base functions is presented. The code is available at the repository: \url{https://github.com/momo1986/AdversarialWaveletTraining}.

preprint2021arXiv

Assortativity measures for weighted and directed networks

Assortativity measures the tendency of a vertex in a network being connected by other vertexes with respect to some vertex-specific features. Classical assortativity coefficients are defined for unweighted and undirected networks with respect to vertex degree. We propose a class of assortativity coefficients that capture the assortative characteristics and structure of weighted and directed networks more precisely. The vertex-to-vertex strength correlation is used as an example, but the proposed measure can be applied to any pair of vertex-specific features. The effectiveness of the proposed measure is assessed through extensive simulations based on prevalent random network models in comparison with existing assortativity measures. In application World Input-Ouput Networks,the new measures reveal interesting insights that would not be obtained by using existing ones. An implementation is publicly available in a R package "wdnet".

preprint2021arXiv

Atomic Norm Based Localization of Far-Field and Near-Field Signals with Generalized Symmetric Arrays

Most localization methods for mixed far-field (FF) and near-field (NF) sources are based on uniform linear array (ULA) rather than sparse linear array (SLA). In this paper, we propose a localization method for mixed FF and NF sources based on the generalized symmetric linear arrays, which include ULAs, Cantor array, Fractal array and many other SLAs. Our method consists of two steps. In the first step, the high-order statistics of the array output is exploited to increase the degree of freedom. Then the direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) of the FF and NF sources are jointly estimated by using the recently proposed atomic norm minimization (ANM), which belongs to the gridless super-resolution method since the discretization of the parameter space is not required. In the second step, the ranges are given by MUSIC-like one-dimensional searching. Simulations results are provided to demonstrate the advantages of our method.

preprint2021arXiv

Axial Higgs Mode Detected by Quantum Pathway Interference in RTe3

The observation of the Higgs boson solidified the standard model of particle physics. However, explanations of anomalies (e.g. dark matter) rely on further symmetry breaking calling for an undiscovered axial Higgs mode. In condensed matter the Higgs was seen in magnetic, superconducting and charge density wave(CDW) systems. Uncovering a low energy mode's vector properties is challenging, requiring going beyond typical spectroscopic or scattering techniques. Here, we discover an axial Higgs mode in the CDW system RTe3 using the interference of quantum pathways. In RTe3 (R=La,Gd), the electronic ordering couples bands of equal or different angular momenta. As such, the Raman scattering tensor associated to the Higgs mode contains both symmetric and antisymmetric components, which can be excited via two distinct, but degenerate pathways. This leads to constructive or destructive interference of these pathways, depending on the choice of the incident and Raman scattered light polarization. The qualitative behavior of the Raman spectra is well-captured by an appropriate tight-binding model including an axial Higgs mode. The elucidation of the antisymmetric component provides direct evidence that the Higgs mode contains an axial vector representation (i.e. a pseudo-angular momentum) and hints the CDW in RTe3 is unconventional. Thus we provide a means for measuring collective modes quantum properties without resorting to extreme experimental conditions.

preprint2021arXiv

Clustering US States by Time Series of COVID-19 New Case Counts with Non-negative Matrix Factorization

The spreading pattern of COVID-19 differ a lot across the US states under different quarantine measures and reopening policies. We proposed to cluster the US states into distinct communities based on the daily new confirmed case counts via a nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) followed by a k-means clustering procedure on the coefficients of the NMF basis. A cross-validation method was employed to select the rank of the NMF. Applying the method to the entire study period from March 22 to July 25, we clustered the 49 continental states (including District of Columbia) into 7 groups, two of which contained a single state. To investigate the dynamics of the clustering results over time, the same method was successively applied to the time periods with increment of one week, starting from the period of March 22 to March 28. The results suggested a change point in the clustering in the week starting on May 30, which might be explained by a combined impact of both quarantine measures and reopening policies.

preprint2021arXiv

Extended calculations of energy levels, radiative properties, and lifetimes for P-like Ge XVIII

Using the multiconfiguration Dirac-Hartree-Fock (MCDHF) and the relativistic configuration interaction (RCI) methods, a consistent set of transition energies and radiative transition data for the lowest 150 states of the $3s^2 3p^3$, $3s 3p^4$, $3s^2 3p^2 3d$, $3s 3p^3 3d$, $3p^5$, and $3s^2 3p 3d^2$ configurations in P-like Ge XVIII is provided. To assess the accuracy of the MCDHF transition energies, we have also performed calculations using the many-body perturbation theory (MBPT). Comparisons are made between the present MCDHF and MBPT data sets, as well as with other available experimental and theoretical values. The resulting accurate and consistent MCDHF data set will be useful for line identification and modeling purposes. These data can be considered as a benchmark for other calculations.

preprint2021arXiv

Time-periodic solutions of contact Hamilton-Jacobi equations on the circle

We are concerned with the existence and multiplicity of nontrivial time-periodic viscosity solutions to \[ \partial_t w(x,t) + H( x,\partial_x w(x,t),w(x,t) )=0,\quad (x,t)\in \mathbb{S} \times [0,+\infty). \] We find that there are infinitely many nontrivial time-periodic viscosity solutions with different periods when $\frac{\partial H}{\partial u}(x,p,u)\leqslant-δ<0$ by analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the dynamical system $(C(\mathbb{S} ,\mathbb{R}),\{T_t\}_{t\geqslant 0})$, where $\{T_t\}_{t\geqslant 0}$ was introduced in \cite{WWY1}. Moreover, in view of the convergence of $T_{t_n}φ$, we get the existence of nontrivial periodic points of $T_t$, where $φ$ are initial data satisfying certain properties. This is a long-time behavior result for the solution to the above equation with initial data $φ$. At last, as an application, we describe to readers a bifurcation phenomenon for \[ \partial_t w(x,t) + H( x,\partial_x w(x,t),λw(x,t) )=0,\quad (x,t)\in \mathbb{S} \times [0,+\infty), \] when the sign of the parameter $λ$ varies. The structure of the unit circle $\mathbb{S}$ plays an essential role here. The most important novelty is the discovery of the nontrivial recurrence of $(C(\mathbb{S} ,\mathbb{R}),\{T_t\}_{t\geqslant 0})$.

preprint2020arXiv

A Fast Radio Burst discovered in FAST drift scan survey

We report the discovery of a highly dispersed fast radio burst, FRB~181123, from an analysis of $\sim$1500~hr of drift-scan survey data taken using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). The pulse has three distinct emission components, which vary with frequency across our 1.0--1.5~GHz observing band. We measure the peak flux density to be $>0.065$~Jy and the corresponding fluence $>0.2$~Jy~ms. Based on the observed dispersion measure of 1812~cm$^{-3}$~pc, we infer a redshift of $\sim 1.9$. From this, we estimate the peak luminosity and isotropic energy to be $\lesssim 2\times10^{43}$~erg~s$^{-1}$ and $\lesssim 2\times10^{40}$~erg, respectively. With only one FRB from the survey detected so far, our constraints on the event rate are limited. We derive a 95\% confidence lower limit for the event rate of 900 FRBs per day for FRBs with fluences $>0.025$~Jy~ms. We performed follow-up observations of the source with FAST for four hours and have not found a repeated burst. We discuss the implications of this discovery for our understanding of the physical mechanisms of FRBs.

preprint2020arXiv

Computational Performance of a Germline Variant Calling Pipeline for Next Generation Sequencing

With the booming of next generation sequencing technology and its implementation in clinical practice and life science research, the need for faster and more efficient data analysis methods becomes pressing in the field of sequencing. Here we report on the evaluation of an optimized germline mutation calling pipeline, HummingBird, by assessing its performance against the widely accepted BWA-GATK pipeline. We found that the HummingBird pipeline can significantly reduce the running time of the primary data analysis for whole genome sequencing and whole exome sequencing while without significantly sacrificing the variant calling accuracy. Thus, we conclude that expansion of such software usage will help to improve the primary data analysis efficiency for next generation sequencing.

preprint2020arXiv

Discovery and timing of pulsars in the globular cluster M13 with FAST

We report the discovery of a binary millisecond pulsar (namely PSR J1641+3627F or M13F) in the globular cluster M13 (NGC 6205) and timing solutions of M13A to F using observations made with the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). PSR J1641+3627F has a spin period of 3.00 ms and an orbital period of 1.4 days. The most likely companion mass is 0.16 M$_{\odot}$. M13A to E all have short spin periods and small period derivatives. We also confirm that the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J1641$+$3627E (also M13E) is a black widow with a companion mass around 0.02 M$_{\odot}$. We find that all the binary systems have low eccentricities compared to those typical for globular cluster pulsars and that they decrease with distance from the cluster core. This is consistent with what is expected as this cluster has a very low encounter rate per binary.

preprint2020arXiv

Enabling Cyberattack-Resilient Load Forecasting through Adversarial Machine Learning

In the face of an increasingly broad cyberattack surface, cyberattack-resilient load forecasting for electric utilities is both more necessary and more challenging than ever. In this paper, we propose an adversarial machine learning (AML) approach, which can respond to a wide range of attack behaviors without detecting outliers. It strikes a balance between enhancing a system&#39;s robustness against cyberattacks and maintaining a reasonable degree of forecasting accuracy when there is no attack. Attack models and configurations for the adversarial training were selected and evaluated to achieve the desired level of performance in a simulation study. The results validate the effectiveness and excellent performance of the proposed method.

preprint2020arXiv

Ground and Excited Exciton Polarons in Monolayer MoSe2

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors, with versatile experimentally accessible exciton species, offer an interesting platform for investigating the interaction between excitons and a Fermi sea of charges. Using hexagonal boron nitride encapsulated monolayer MoSe2, we study the impact of charge density tuning on the ground and excited Rydberg states in the atomic layer. Consistent excitonpolaron behavior is revealed in both photoluminescence and reflection spectra of the A exciton 1s (A:1s) Rydberg state, in contrast to previous studies. The A:2s Rydberg state provides an opportunity to understand such interactions with greatly reduced exciton binding energy. We found that the impact of the Fermi sea becomes much more dramatic. With a photoluminescence upconversion technique, we further verify the 2s polaron-like behavior for the repulsive branch of B:2s exciton whose energy is well above the bare bandgap. Our studies show that the polaron-like interaction features are quite generic and highly robust, offering key insights into the dressed manybody state in a Fermi sea.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning from Explanations with Neural Execution Tree

While deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, these data-hungry models heavily rely on labeled data, which restricts their applications in scenarios where data annotation is expensive. Natural language (NL) explanations have been demonstrated very useful additional supervision, which can provide sufficient domain knowledge for generating more labeled data over new instances, while the annotation time only doubles. However, directly applying them for augmenting model learning encounters two challenges: (1) NL explanations are unstructured and inherently compositional, which asks for a modularized model to represent their semantics, (2) NL explanations often have large numbers of linguistic variants, resulting in low recall and limited generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural Execution Tree (NExT) framework to augment training data for text classification using NL explanations. After transforming NL explanations into executable logical forms by semantic parsing, NExT generalizes different types of actions specified by the logical forms for labeling data instances, which substantially increases the coverage of each NL explanation. Experiments on two NLP tasks (relation extraction and sentiment analysis) demonstrate its superiority over baseline methods. Its extension to multi-hop question answering achieves performance gain with light annotation effort.

preprint2020arXiv

Long-lived populations of momentum- and spin-indirect excitons in monolayer WSe$_2$

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides are a promising platform to investigate many-body interactions of excitonic complexes. In monolayer tungsten diselenide, the ground-state exciton is dark (spin-indirect), and the valley degeneracy allows low-energy dark momentum-indirect excitons to form. Interactions between the dark exciton species and the optically accessible bright exciton (X) are likely to play significant roles in determining the optical properties of X at high power, as well as limiting the ultimate exciton densities that can be achieved, yet so far little is known about these interactions. Here, we demonstrate long-lived dense populations of momentum-indirect intervalley ($X_K$) and spin-indirect intravalley (D) dark excitons by time-resolved photoluminescence measurements (Tr-PL). Our results uncover an efficient inter-state conversion between X to D excitons through the spin-flip process and the one between D and $X_K$ excitons mediated by the exchange interaction (D + D to $X_K$ + $X_K$). Moreover, we observe a persistent redshift of the X exciton due to strong excitonic screening by $X_K$ exciton with a response time in the timescale of sub-ns, revealing a non-trivial inter-state exciton-exciton interaction. Our results provide a new insight into the interaction between bright and dark excitons, and point to a possibility to employ dark excitons for investigating exciton condensation and the valleytronics.

preprint2020arXiv

Multivariate Distributionally Robust Convex Regression under Absolute Error Loss

This paper proposes a novel non-parametric multidimensional convex regression estimator which is designed to be robust to adversarial perturbations in the empirical measure. We minimize over convex functions the maximum (over Wasserstein perturbations of the empirical measure) of the absolute regression errors. The inner maximization is solved in closed form resulting in a regularization penalty involves the norm of the gradient. We show consistency of our estimator and a rate of convergence of order $ \widetilde{O}\left( n^{-1/d}\right) $, matching the bounds of alternative estimators based on square-loss minimization. Contrary to all of the existing results, our convergence rates hold without imposing compactness on the underlying domain and with no a priori bounds on the underlying convex function or its gradient norm.

preprint2020arXiv

Orbital angular momentum beam generation using a free-electron laser oscillator

With wavelength tunability, free-electron lasers (FELs) are well-suited for generating orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams in a wide photon energy range. We report the first experimental demonstration of OAM beam generation using an oscillator FEL. Lasing around 458 nm, we have produced the four lowest orders of coherently mixed OAM beams with good beam quality, excellent stability, and substantial intracavity power. We have also developed a pulsed mode operation of the OAM beam with a highly reproducible temporal structure for a range of modulation frequencies from 1 to 30 Hz. This development can be extended to short wavelengths, for example to x-rays using a future x-ray FEL oscillator. The operation of such an OAM FEL also paves the way for the generation of OAM gamma-ray beams via Compton scattering.

preprint2020arXiv

Probing new physics with multi-vacua quantum tunnelings beyond standard model through gravitational waves

We report on a novel phenomenon of particle cosmology, which features specific cosmological phase transitions via quantum tunnelings through multiple vacua. The latter is inspired by the axiverse ideas and enables us to probe the associated new physics models through a potential observation of specific patterns in the stochastic gravitational waves background. Multiple vacua may induce the nucleation of co-existing bubbles over the phase transition epoch, hence enhancing the overall process of bubbles&#39; nucleation. Our detailed analysis of semi-analytical and numerical solutions to the bounce equations of the path integral in three vacua case has enabled us to determine the existence of three instanton solutions. This new mechanism of cosmological phase transitions clearly predicts a possibly sizeable new source of gravitational waves, with its energy spectrum being featured with particular patterns, which could be probed by the future gravitational wave interferometers.

preprint2020arXiv

Radial distribution of charm quarks in jets in high-energy heavy-ion collisions

Heavy flavor physics in high-energy heavy-ion collisions is a promising and active area to study the mass dependence of the &#34;jet quenching&#34; effects both at the RHIC and the LHC. In this talk, we present the first theoretical study on the $D^0$ meson radial distributions relative to the jet axis both in p+p and Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV, where a nice agreement of our results with experimental data is observed. The in-medium parton propagations are described by a Monte Carlo transport model which uses the next-to-leading order (NLO) plus parton shower (PS) event generator SHERPA as input and includes elastic (collisional) and inelastic (radiative) in-medium interaction of heavy flavor jet. We find that, at low $D^0$ meson $p_T$, the radial distribution significantly shifts to larger radius indicating a strong diffusion effect, and the diffusion effects decrease quickly with $p_T$ ,which is consistent with the recent CMS measurements. We demonstrate that the angular deviation of charm quarks is sensitive to $D_s$ but not $\hat{q}$, which may provide new constrains on the collisional and radiative heavy quark energy loss.

preprint2020arXiv

Remarks on the distribution of colors in Gallai colorings

A Gallai coloring of a complete graph $K_n$ is an edge coloring without triangles colored with three different colors. A sequence $e_1\ge \dots \ge e_k$ of positive integers is an $(n,k)$-sequence if $\sum_{i=1}^k e_i=\binom{n}{2}$. An $(n,k)$-sequence is a G-sequence if there is a Gallai coloring of $K_n$ with $k$ colors such that there are $e_i$ edges of color $i$ for all $i,1\le i \le k$. Gyárfás, Pálvölgyi, Patkós and Wales proved that for any integer $k\ge 3$ there exists an integer $g(k)$ such that every $(n,k)$-sequence is a G-sequence if and only if $n\ge g(k)$. They showed that $g(3)=5, g(4)=8$ and $2k-2\le g(k)\le 8k^2+1$. We show that $g(5)=10$ and give almost matching lower and upper bounds for $g(k)$ by showing that with suitable constants $α,β>0$, $\frac{αk^{1.5}}{\ln k}\le g(k) \le βk^{1.5}$ for all sufficiently large $k$.

preprint2020arXiv

Scalable Multi-Hop Relational Reasoning for Knowledge-Aware Question Answering

Existing work on augmenting question answering (QA) models with external knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs) either struggle to model multi-hop relations efficiently, or lack transparency into the model&#39;s prediction rationale. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware approach that equips pre-trained language models (PTLMs) with a multi-hop relational reasoning module, named multi-hop graph relation network (MHGRN). It performs multi-hop, multi-relational reasoning over subgraphs extracted from external knowledge graphs. The proposed reasoning module unifies path-based reasoning methods and graph neural networks to achieve better interpretability and scalability. We also empirically show its effectiveness and scalability on CommonsenseQA and OpenbookQA datasets, and interpret its behaviors with case studies.

preprint2020arXiv

The Fundamental Performance of FAST with 19-beam Receiver at L Band

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) passed national acceptance and is taking pilot cycle of &#39;Shared-Risk&#39; observations. The 19-beam receiver covering 1.05-1.45 GHz was used for most of these observations. The electronics gain fluctuation of the system is better than 1\% over 3.5 hours, enabling enough stability for observations. Pointing accuracy, aperture efficiency and system temperature are three key parameters of FAST. The measured standard deviation of pointing accuracy is 7.9$&#39;&#39;$, which satisfies the initial design of FAST. When zenith angle is less than 26.4$^\circ$, the aperture efficiency and system temperature around 1.4 GHz are $\sim$ 0.63 and less than 24 K for central beam, respectively. The measured value of these two parameters are better than designed value of 0.6 and 25 K, respectively. The sensitivity and stability of the 19-beam backend are confirmed to satisfy expectation by spectral HI observations toward N672 and polarization observations toward 3C286. The performance allows FAST to take sensitive observations in various scientific goals, from studies of pulsar to galaxy evolution.

preprint2020arXiv

The range of non-Kitaev terms and fractional particles in RuCl$_3$

Significant efforts have focused on the magnetic excitations of relativistic Mott insulators, predicted to realize the Kitaev quantum spin liquid (QSL). This exactly solvable model involves a highly entangled state resulting from bond-dependent Ising interactions that produce excitations which are non-local in terms of spin flips. A key challenge in real materials is identifying the relative size of the non-Kitaev terms and their role in the emergence or suppression of fractional excitations. Here, we identify the energy and temperature boundaries of non-Kitaev interactions by direct comparison of the Raman susceptibility of RuCl3 with quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) results for the Kitaev QSLs. Moreover, we further confirm the fractional nature of the magnetic excitations, which is given by creating a pair of fermionic quasiparticles. Interestingly, this fermionic response remains valid in the non-Kitaev range. Our results and focus on the use of the Raman susceptibility provide a stringent new test for future theoretical and experimental studies of QSLs.

preprint2020arXiv

Up- and Down-Conversion between Intra- and Inter-Valley Excitons in Waveguide Coupled Monolayer WSe2

The presence of two spin-split valleys in monolayer (1L) transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors supports versatile exciton species classified by their spin and valley quantum numbers. While the spin-0 intravalley exciton, known as the &#34;bright&#34; exciton, is readily observable, other types of excitons, such as the spin-1 intravalley (spin-dark) and spin-0 intervalley (momentum-dark) excitons, are more difficult to access. Here we develop a waveguide coupled 1L tungsten diselenide (WSe2) device to probe these exciton species. In particular, TM coupling to the atomic layer&#39;s out-of-plane dipole moments enabled us to not only efficiently collect, but also resonantly populate the spin-1 dark excitons, promising for developing devices with long valley lifetimes. Our work reveals several upconversion processes that bring out an intricate coupling network linking spin-0 and spin-1 intra- and inter-valley excitons, demonstrating that intervalley scattering and spin-flip are very common processes in the atomic layer. These experimental results deepen our understanding of tungsten diselenide exciton physics and illustrate that planar photonic devices are capable of harnessing versatile exciton species in TMD semiconductors.

preprint2020arXiv

Weak KAM solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi equations with decreasing dependence on unknown functions

We consider the Hamilton-Jacobi equation \[{H}(x,u,Du)=0,\quad x\in M, \] where $M$ is a connected, closed and smooth Riemannian manifold, ${H}(x,u,p)$ satisfies Tonelli conditions with respect to $p$ and certain decreasing condition with respect to $u$. Based on a dynamical approach developed in \cite{WWY,WWY1,WWY2}, we obtain a series of properties for weak KAM solutions (equivalently, viscosity solutions) of the stationary equation and the long time behavior of viscosity solutions of the evolutionary equation on the Cauchy problem \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} w_t+{H}(x,w,w_x)=0,\quad (x,t)\in M\times (0,+\infty),\\ w(x,0)=φ(x), \quad x\in M. \end{cases} \end{equation*}

preprint2018arXiv

On estimation for Brownian motion governed by telegraph process with multiple off states

Brownian motion whose infinitesimal variance changes according to a three-state continuous time Markov Chain is studied. This Markov Chain can be viewed as a telegraph process with one on state and two off states. We first derive the distribution of occupation time of the on state. Then the result is used to develop a likelihood estimation procedure when the stochastic process at hand is observed at discrete, possibly irregularly spaced time points. The likelihood function is evaluated with the forward algorithm in the general framework of hidden Markov models. The analytic results are confirmed with simulation studies. The estimation procedure is applied to analyze the position data from a mountain lion.