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Published work

132 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

ResRL: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Negative Sample Projection Residual Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) but usually exhibits limited generation diversity due to the over-incentivization of positive rewards. Although methods like Negative Sample Reinforcement (NSR) mitigate this issue by upweighting penalty from negative samples, they may suppress the semantic distributions shared between positive and negative responses. To boost reasoning ability without losing diversity, this paper proposes negative sample projection Residual Reinforcement Learning (ResRL) that decouples similar semantic distributions among positive and negative responses. We theoretically link Lazy Likelihood Displacement (LLD) to negative-positive head-gradient interference and derive a single-forward proxy that upper-bounds representation alignment to guide conservative advantage reweighting. ResRL then projects negative-token hidden representations onto an SVD-based low-rank positive subspace and uses projection residuals to modulate negative gradients, improving reasoning while preserving diversity and outperforming strong baselines on average across twelve benchmarks spanning Mathematics, Code, Agent Tasks, and Function Calling. Notably, ResRL surpasses NSR on mathematical reasoning by 9.4\% in Avg@16 and 7.0\% in Pass@128. Code is available at https://github.com/1229095296/ResRL.git.

preprint2026arXiv

Rethinking the State Update Gate for Long-Sequence Recurrent 3D Reconstruction

Streaming 3D reconstruction under a strict constant-memory budget hinges on how the recurrent state is updated as the stream evolves. We profile TTT3R-style per-token gates across five benchmarks and discover a structural bottleneck: the gate is intrinsically bounded in magnitude (median $0.31$; never exceeding $0.6$) and nearly frame-invariant, yielding an effective memory horizon of only $\sim$3 frames per state token, which serves as the structural origin of long-sequence drift. We trace this to a missing axis: existing inference-time methods modulate updates only at the per-token, intra-frame level, while the orthogonal frame-level question of \emph{how strongly each frame should contribute to the state} has been treated as content-independent. We close this gap with a scalar frame-level gate $α_t \in (0, 1]$ derived in closed form from frame-to-frame changes of internal features -- a continuous relaxation of classical Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) keyframe selection that requires no parameters, no training, and no extra forward pass. Across six benchmarks spanning camera pose, video depth, and 3D reconstruction at sequence lengths up to $4,541$ frames, our gate cuts ATE by $51\%$ on long TUM-RGBD pose sequences, reduces AbsRel by $12.8\%$ on Bonn video depth, and on KITTI long-sequence pose estimation surpasses both LongStream and Keyframe-VO, while retaining strictly constant memory at zero training cost.

preprint2025arXiv

Dynamical feedback control with operator learning for the Vlasov-Poisson system

To meet the demands of instantaneous control of instabilities over long time horizons in plasma fusion, we design a dynamic feedback control strategy for the Vlasov-Poisson system by constructing an operator that maps state perturbations to an external control field. In the first part of the paper, we propose learning such an operator using a neural network. Inspired by optimal control theory for linearized dynamics, we introduce a low-rank neural operator architecture and train it via adjoint state method. The resulting controller is effective at suppressing instabilities well beyond the training time horizon. To generalize control across varying initial data, we further introduce a novel cancellation-based control strategy that removes the destabilizing component of the electric field. This approach naturally defines an operator without requiring any training, ensures perturbation decay over infinite time, and demonstrates strong robustness under noisy feedback. Numerical experiments confirm the effectiveness of the method in both one- and multidimensional settings.

preprint2024arXiv

An Initial Investigation of Neural Replay Simulator for Over-the-Air Adversarial Perturbations to Automatic Speaker Verification

Deep Learning has advanced Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) in the past few years. Although it is known that deep learning-based ASV systems are vulnerable to adversarial examples in digital access, there are few studies on adversarial attacks in the context of physical access, where a replay process (i.e., over the air) is involved. An over-the-air attack involves a loudspeaker, a microphone, and a replaying environment that impacts the movement of the sound wave. Our initial experiment confirms that the replay process impacts the effectiveness of the over-the-air attack performance. This study performs an initial investigation towards utilizing a neural replay simulator to improve over-the-air adversarial attack robustness. This is achieved by using a neural waveform synthesizer to simulate the replay process when estimating the adversarial perturbations. Experiments conducted on the ASVspoof2019 dataset confirm that the neural replay simulator can considerably increase the success rates of over-the-air adversarial attacks. This raises the concern for adversarial attacks on speaker verification in physical access applications.

preprint2023arXiv

BERT-ERC: Fine-tuning BERT is Enough for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Previous works on emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) follow a two-step paradigm, which can be summarized as first producing context-independent features via fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) and then analyzing contextual information and dialogue structure information among the extracted features. However, we discover that this paradigm has several limitations. Accordingly, we propose a novel paradigm, i.e., exploring contextual information and dialogue structure information in the fine-tuning step, and adapting the PLM to the ERC task in terms of input text, classification structure, and training strategy. Furthermore, we develop our model BERT-ERC according to the proposed paradigm, which improves ERC performance in three aspects, namely suggestive text, fine-grained classification module, and two-stage training. Compared to existing methods, BERT-ERC achieves substantial improvement on four datasets, indicating its effectiveness and generalization capability. Besides, we also set up the limited resources scenario and the online prediction scenario to approximate real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed paradigm significantly outperforms the previous one and can be adapted to various scenes.

preprint2023arXiv

Enhanced pair production in multi-pulse trains electric fields with oscillation

For different alternating-sign multi-pulse trains electric fields with oscillation, the effects of the electric field pulse number and the relative phase of the combined electric field on pair production are investigated by solving quantum Vlasov equation. It is found that the number density of created particles in the combined electric fields is increased by more than one order of magnitude compared to the results without oscillating structure for both zero transverse momentum and full momentum space. In the case of zero transverse momentum, the created particles longitudinal momentum spectrum are monochromatic for large pulse numbers and some suitable relative phases. The number density depends nonlinearly on the relative phase that enables the optimal relative phase parameters for the number density. Moreover, for the full momentum space, the created particles number density and momentum spectrum under different multi-pulse trains electric fields are given and discussed. We also find that the number density as a function of pulse number satisfies the power law with index 5.342 for the strong but slowly varying electric field with large pulse numbers.

preprint2023arXiv

Enrollment Forecast for Clinical Trials at the Portfolio Planning Phase Based on Site-Level Historical Data

Accurate forecast of a clinical trial enrollment timeline at the planning phase is of great importance to both corporate strategic planning and trial operational excellence. While predictions of key milestones such as last subject first dose date can inform strategic decision-making, detailed predictive insights (e.g., median number of enrolled subjects by month for a country) can facilitate the planning of clinical trial operation activities and promote execution excellence. The naive approach often calculates an average enrollment rate from historical data and generates an inaccurate prediction based on a linear trend with the average rate. The traditional statistical approach utilizes the simple Poisson-Gamma model that assumes time-invariant site activation rates and it can fail to capture the underlying nonlinear patterns (e.g., up and down site activation pattern). We present a novel statistical approach based on generalized linear mixed-effects models and the use of non-homogeneous Poisson processes through Bayesian framework to model the country initiation, site activation and subject enrollment sequentially in a systematic fashion. We validate the performance of our proposed enrollment modeling framework based on a set of preselected 25 studies from four therapeutic areas. Our modeling framework shows a substantial improvement in prediction accuracy in comparison to the traditional statistical approach. Furthermore, we show that our modeling and simulation approach calibrates the data variability appropriately and gives correct coverage rates for prediction intervals of various nominal levels. Finally, we demonstrate the use of our approach to generate the predicted enrollment curves through time with confidence bands overlaid.

preprint2022arXiv

Backdoor Defense with Machine Unlearning

Backdoor injection attack is an emerging threat to the security of neural networks, however, there still exist limited effective defense methods against the attack. In this paper, we propose BAERASE, a novel method that can erase the backdoor injected into the victim model through machine unlearning. Specifically, BAERASE mainly implements backdoor defense in two key steps. First, trigger pattern recovery is conducted to extract the trigger patterns infected by the victim model. Here, the trigger pattern recovery problem is equivalent to the one of extracting an unknown noise distribution from the victim model, which can be easily resolved by the entropy maximization based generative model. Subsequently, BAERASE leverages these recovered trigger patterns to reverse the backdoor injection procedure and induce the victim model to erase the polluted memories through a newly designed gradient ascent based machine unlearning method. Compared with the previous machine unlearning solutions, the proposed approach gets rid of the reliance on the full access to training data for retraining and shows higher effectiveness on backdoor erasing than existing fine-tuning or pruning methods. Moreover, experiments show that BAERASE can averagely lower the attack success rates of three kinds of state-of-the-art backdoor attacks by 99\% on four benchmark datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

CAMO-MOT: Combined Appearance-Motion Optimization for 3D Multi-Object Tracking with Camera-LiDAR Fusion

3D Multi-object tracking (MOT) ensures consistency during continuous dynamic detection, conducive to subsequent motion planning and navigation tasks in autonomous driving. However, camera-based methods suffer in the case of occlusions and it can be challenging to accurately track the irregular motion of objects for LiDAR-based methods. Some fusion methods work well but do not consider the untrustworthy issue of appearance features under occlusion. At the same time, the false detection problem also significantly affects tracking. As such, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion 3D MOT framework based on the Combined Appearance-Motion Optimization (CAMO-MOT), which uses both camera and LiDAR data and significantly reduces tracking failures caused by occlusion and false detection. For occlusion problems, we are the first to propose an occlusion head to select the best object appearance features multiple times effectively, reducing the influence of occlusions. To decrease the impact of false detection in tracking, we design a motion cost matrix based on confidence scores which improve the positioning and object prediction accuracy in 3D space. As existing multi-object tracking methods only consider a single category, we also propose to build a multi-category loss to implement multi-object tracking in multi-category scenes. A series of validation experiments are conducted on the KITTI and nuScenes tracking benchmarks. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and the lowest identity switches (IDS) value (23 for Car and 137 for Pedestrian) among all multi-modal MOT methods on the KITTI test dataset. And our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance among all algorithms on the nuScenes test dataset with 75.3% AMOTA.

preprint2022arXiv

Computer-Aided Road Inspection: Systems and Algorithms

Road damage is an inconvenience and a safety hazard, severely affecting vehicle condition, driving comfort, and traffic safety. The traditional manual visual road inspection process is pricey, dangerous, exhausting, and cumbersome. Also, manual road inspection results are qualitative and subjective, as they depend entirely on the inspector's personal experience. Therefore, there is an ever-increasing need for automated road inspection systems. This chapter first compares the five most common road damage types. Then, 2-D/3-D road imaging systems are discussed. Finally, state-of-the-art machine vision and intelligence-based road damage detection algorithms are introduced.

preprint2022arXiv

Convolutional Embedding Makes Hierarchical Vision Transformer Stronger

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently dominated a range of computer vision tasks, yet it suffers from low training data efficiency and inferior local semantic representation capability without appropriate inductive bias. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) inherently capture regional-aware semantics, inspiring researchers to introduce CNNs back into the architecture of the ViTs to provide desirable inductive bias for ViTs. However, is the locality achieved by the micro-level CNNs embedded in ViTs good enough? In this paper, we investigate the problem by profoundly exploring how the macro architecture of the hybrid CNNs/ViTs enhances the performances of hierarchical ViTs. Particularly, we study the role of token embedding layers, alias convolutional embedding (CE), and systemically reveal how CE injects desirable inductive bias in ViTs. Besides, we apply the optimal CE configuration to 4 recently released state-of-the-art ViTs, effectively boosting the corresponding performances. Finally, a family of efficient hybrid CNNs/ViTs, dubbed CETNets, are released, which may serve as generic vision backbones. Specifically, CETNets achieve 84.9% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K (training from scratch), 48.6% box mAP on the COCO benchmark, and 51.6% mIoU on the ADE20K, substantially improving the performances of the corresponding state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep Historical Borrowing Framework to Prospectively and Simultaneously Synthesize Control Information in Confirmatory Clinical Trials with Multiple Endpoints

In current clinical trial development, historical information is receiving more attention as it provides utility beyond sample size calculation. Meta-analytic-predictive (MAP) priors and robust MAP priors have been proposed for prospectively borrowing historical data on a single endpoint. To simultaneously synthesize control information from multiple endpoints in confirmatory clinical trials, we propose to approximate posterior probabilities from a Bayesian hierarchical model and estimate critical values by deep learning to construct pre-specified strategies for hypothesis testing. This feature is important to ensure study integrity by establishing prospective decision functions before the trial conduct. Simulations are performed to show that our method properly controls family-wise error rate (FWER) and preserves power as compared with a typical practice of choosing constant critical values given a subset of null space. Satisfactory performance under prior-data conflict is also demonstrated. We further illustrate our method using a case study in Immunology.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo via Inter-Intra Image Feature Fusion

Uncalibrated photometric stereo is proposed to estimate the detailed surface normal from images under varying and unknown lightings. Recently, deep learning brings powerful data priors to this underdetermined problem. This paper presents a new method for deep uncalibrated photometric stereo, which efficiently utilizes the inter-image representation to guide the normal estimation. Previous methods use optimization-based neural inverse rendering or a single size-independent pooling layer to deal with multiple inputs, which are inefficient for utilizing information among input images. Given multi-images under different lighting, we consider the intra-image and inter-image variations highly correlated. Motivated by the correlated variations, we designed an inter-intra image feature fusion module to introduce the inter-image representation into the per-image feature extraction. The extra representation is used to guide the per-image feature extraction and eliminate the ambiguity in normal estimation. We demonstrate the effect of our design on a wide range of samples, especially on dark materials. Our method produces significantly better results than the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real data.

preprint2022arXiv

Detecting fake news by enhanced text representation with multi-EDU-structure awareness

Since fake news poses a serious threat to society and individuals, numerous studies have been brought by considering text, propagation and user profiles. Due to the data collection problem, these methods based on propagation and user profiles are less applicable in the early stages. A good alternative method is to detect news based on text as soon as they are released, and a lot of text-based methods were proposed, which usually utilized words, sentences or paragraphs as basic units. But, word is a too fine-grained unit to express coherent information well, sentence or paragraph is too coarse to show specific information. Which granularity is better and how to utilize it to enhance text representation for fake news detection are two key problems. In this paper, we introduce Elementary Discourse Unit (EDU) whose granularity is between word and sentence, and propose a multi-EDU-structure awareness model to improve text representation for fake news detection, namely EDU4FD. For the multi-EDU-structure awareness, we build the sequence-based EDU representations and the graph-based EDU representations. The former is gotten by modeling the coherence between consecutive EDUs with TextCNN that reflect the semantic coherence. For the latter, we first extract rhetorical relations to build the EDU dependency graph, which can show the global narrative logic and help deliver the main idea truthfully. Then a Relation Graph Attention Network (RGAT) is set to get the graph-based EDU representation. Finally, the two EDU representations are incorporated as the enhanced text representation for fake news detection, using a gated recursive unit combined with a global attention mechanism. Experiments on four cross-source fake news datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art text-based methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Determining anomalies in a semilinear elliptic equation by a minimal number of measurements

We are concerned with the inverse boundary problem of determining anomalies associated with a semilinear elliptic equation of the form $-Δu+a(\mathbf x, u)=0$, where $a(\mathbf x, u)$ is a general nonlinear term that belongs to a Hölder class. It is assumed that the inhomogeneity of $f(\mathbf x, u)$ is contained in a bounded domain $D$ in the sense that outside $D$, $a(\mathbf x, u)=λu$ with $λ\in\mathbb{C}$. We establish novel unique identifiability results in several general scenarios of practical interest. These include determining the support of the inclusion (i.e. $D$) independent of its content (i.e. $a(\mathbf{x}, u)$ in $D$) by a single boundary measurement; and determining both $D$ and $a(\mathbf{x}, u)|_D$ by $M$ boundary measurements, where $M\in\mathbb{N}$ signifies the number of unknown coefficients in $a(\mathbf x, u)$. The mathematical argument is based on microlocally characterising the singularities in the solution $u$ induced by the geometric singularities of $D$, and does not rely on any linearisation technique.

preprint2022arXiv

Differential Private Knowledge Transfer for Privacy-Preserving Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been popularly studied to alleviate the cold-start and data sparsity problem commonly existed in recommender systems. CDR models can improve the recommendation performance of a target domain by leveraging the data of other source domains. However, most existing CDR models assume information can directly 'transfer across the bridge', ignoring the privacy issues. To solve the privacy concern in CDR, in this paper, we propose a novel two stage based privacy-preserving CDR framework (PriCDR). In the first stage, we propose two methods, i.e., Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform (JLT) based and Sparse-awareJLT (SJLT) based, to publish the rating matrix of the source domain using differential privacy. We theoretically analyze the privacy and utility of our proposed differential privacy based rating publishing methods. In the second stage, we propose a novel heterogeneous CDR model (HeteroCDR), which uses deep auto-encoder and deep neural network to model the published source rating matrix and target rating matrix respectively. To this end, PriCDR can not only protect the data privacy of the source domain, but also alleviate the data sparsity of the source domain. We conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PriCDR and HeteroCDR.

preprint2022arXiv

Exploiting Data Sparsity in Secure Cross-Platform Social Recommendation

Social recommendation has shown promising improvements over traditional systems since it leverages social correlation data as an additional input. Most existing work assumes that all data are available to the recommendation platform. However, in practice, user-item interaction data (e.g.,rating) and user-user social data are usually generated by different platforms, and both of which contain sensitive information. Therefore, "How to perform secure and efficient social recommendation across different platforms, where the data are highly-sparse in nature" remains an important challenge. In this work, we bring secure computation techniques into social recommendation, and propose S3Rec, a sparsity-aware secure cross-platform social recommendation framework. As a result, our model can not only improve the recommendation performance of the rating platform by incorporating the sparse social data on the social platform, but also protect data privacy of both platforms. Moreover, to further improve model training efficiency, we propose two secure sparse matrix multiplication protocols based on homomorphic encryption and private information retrieval. Our experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of S3Rec.

preprint2022arXiv

Higher Order Correlation Analysis for Multi-View Learning

Multi-view learning is frequently used in data science. The pairwise correlation maximization is a classical approach for exploring the consensus of multiple views. Since the pairwise correlation is inherent for two views, the extensions to more views can be diversified and the intrinsic interconnections among views are generally lost. To address this issue, we propose to maximize higher order correlations. This can be formulated as a low rank approximation problem with the higher order correlation tensor of multi-view data. We use the generating polynomial method to solve the low rank approximation problem. Numerical results on real multi-view data demonstrate that this method consistently outperforms prior existing methods.

preprint2022arXiv

HyAR: Addressing Discrete-Continuous Action Reinforcement Learning via Hybrid Action Representation

Discrete-continuous hybrid action space is a natural setting in many practical problems, such as robot control and game AI. However, most previous Reinforcement Learning (RL) works only demonstrate the success in controlling with either discrete or continuous action space, while seldom take into account the hybrid action space. One naive way to address hybrid action RL is to convert the hybrid action space into a unified homogeneous action space by discretization or continualization, so that conventional RL algorithms can be applied. However, this ignores the underlying structure of hybrid action space and also induces the scalability issue and additional approximation difficulties, thus leading to degenerated results. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Action Representation (HyAR) to learn a compact and decodable latent representation space for the original hybrid action space. HyAR constructs the latent space and embeds the dependence between discrete action and continuous parameter via an embedding table and conditional Variantional Auto-Encoder (VAE). To further improve the effectiveness, the action representation is trained to be semantically smooth through unsupervised environmental dynamics prediction. Finally, the agent then learns its policy with conventional DRL algorithms in the learned representation space and interacts with the environment by decoding the hybrid action embeddings to the original action space. We evaluate HyAR in a variety of environments with discrete-continuous action space. The results demonstrate the superiority of HyAR when compared with previous baselines, especially for high-dimensional action spaces.

preprint2022arXiv

ImpDet: Exploring Implicit Fields for 3D Object Detection

Conventional 3D object detection approaches concentrate on bounding boxes representation learning with several parameters, i.e., localization, dimension, and orientation. Despite its popularity and universality, such a straightforward paradigm is sensitive to slight numerical deviations, especially in localization. By exploiting the property that point clouds are naturally captured on the surface of objects along with accurate location and intensity information, we introduce a new perspective that views bounding box regression as an implicit function. This leads to our proposed framework, termed Implicit Detection or ImpDet, which leverages implicit field learning for 3D object detection. Our ImpDet assigns specific values to points in different local 3D spaces, thereby high-quality boundaries can be generated by classifying points inside or outside the boundary. To solve the problem of sparsity on the object surface, we further present a simple yet efficient virtual sampling strategy to not only fill the empty region, but also learn rich semantic features to help refine the boundaries. Extensive experimental results on KITTI and Waymo benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of unifying implicit fields into object detection.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Decoupling Features Through Orthogonality Regularization

Keyword spotting (KWS) and speaker verification (SV) are two important tasks in speech applications. Research shows that the state-of-art KWS and SV models are trained independently using different datasets since they expect to learn distinctive acoustic features. However, humans can distinguish language content and the speaker identity simultaneously. Motivated by this, we believe it is important to explore a method that can effectively extract common features while decoupling task-specific features. Bearing this in mind, a two-branch deep network (KWS branch and SV branch) with the same network structure is developed and a novel decoupling feature learning method is proposed to push up the performance of KWS and SV simultaneously where speaker-invariant keyword representations and keyword-invariant speaker representations are expected respectively. Experiments are conducted on Google Speech Commands Dataset (GSCD). The results demonstrate that the orthogonality regularization helps the network to achieve SOTA EER of 1.31% and 1.87% on KWS and SV, respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

Longitudinal Prediction of Postnatal Brain Magnetic Resonance Images via a Metamorphic Generative Adversarial Network

Missing scans are inevitable in longitudinal studies due to either subject dropouts or failed scans. In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework to predict missing scans from acquired scans, catering to longitudinal infant studies. Prediction of infant brain MRI is challenging owing to the rapid contrast and structural changes particularly during the first year of life. We introduce a trustworthy metamorphic generative adversarial network (MGAN) for translating infant brain MRI from one time-point to another. MGAN has three key features: (i) Image translation leveraging spatial and frequency information for detail-preserving mapping; (ii) Quality-guided learning strategy that focuses attention on challenging regions. (iii) Multi-scale hybrid loss function that improves translation of tissue contrast and structural details. Experimental results indicate that MGAN outperforms existing GANs by accurately predicting both contrast and anatomical details.

preprint2022arXiv

Low Rank Tensor Decompositions and Approximations

There exist linear relations among tensor entries of low rank tensors. These linear relations can be expressed by multi-linear polynomials, which are called generating polynomials. We use generating polynomials to compute tensor rank decompositions and low rank tensor approximations. We prove that this gives a quasi-optimal low rank tensor approximation if the given tensor is sufficiently close to a low rank one.

preprint2022arXiv

Mix-Teaching: A Simple, Unified and Effective Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection is an essential perception task for autonomous driving. However, the high reliance on large-scale labeled data make it costly and time-consuming during model optimization. To reduce such over-reliance on human annotations, we propose Mix-Teaching, an effective semi-supervised learning framework applicable to employ both labeled and unlabeled images in training stage. Mix-Teaching first generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled images by self-training. The student model is then trained on the mixed images possessing much more intensive and precise labeling by merging instance-level image patches into empty backgrounds or labeled images. This is the first to break the image-level limitation and put high-quality pseudo labels from multi frames into one image for semi-supervised training. Besides, as a result of the misalignment between confidence score and localization quality, it's hard to discriminate high-quality pseudo-labels from noisy predictions using only confidence-based criterion. To that end, we further introduce an uncertainty-based filter to help select reliable pseudo boxes for the above mixing operation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first unified SSL framework for monocular 3D object detection. Mix-Teaching consistently improves MonoFlex and GUPNet by significant margins under various labeling ratios on KITTI dataset. For example, our method achieves around +6.34% AP@0.7 improvement against the GUPNet baseline on validation set when using only 10% labeled data. Besides, by leveraging full training set and the additional 48K raw images of KITTI, it can further improve the MonoFlex by +4.65% improvement on AP@0.7 for car detection, reaching 18.54% AP@0.7, which ranks the 1st place among all monocular based methods on KITTI test leaderboard. The code and pretrained models will be released at https://github.com/yanglei18/Mix-Teaching.

preprint2022arXiv

NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Efficient Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2022 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The task of the challenge was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of $\times$4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high resolution images. The aim was to design a network for single image super-resolution that achieved improvement of efficiency measured according to several metrics including runtime, parameters, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining the PSNR of 29.00dB on DIV2K validation set. IMDN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 3 tracks including the main track (runtime), sub-track one (model complexity), and sub-track two (overall performance). In the main track, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated. The rank of the teams were determined directly by the absolute value of the average runtime on the validation set and test set. In sub-track one, the number of parameters and FLOPs were considered. And the individual rankings of the two metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking in this track. In sub-track two, all of the five metrics mentioned in the description of the challenge including runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption were considered. Similar to sub-track one, the rankings of five metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking. The challenge had 303 registered participants, and 43 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution.

preprint2022arXiv

Phase effect and symmetry on pair production in spatially inhomogeneous frequency chirping electric fields

Effect of the carrier envelop phase on the electron-positron pair production is studied in spatially inhomogeneous electric field with symmetrical frequency chirping. In high or low original frequency field without chirping as well as one with chirping, we find that the strength of interference effect of the momentum spectrum and the reduced particle number are all changeable periodically with phase, in particular, these periodical changes are more sensitive to the applied parameters in case of low frequency field. At the small spatial scale, the reduced particle number change is over one order magnitude by phase in small chirping. For the reduced particle number, the different optimal phases are obtained at different spatial scales, however, the larger the chirping is applied, the higher the created pair number is got. Interestingly, some different types of symmetries, i.e., the mutual symmetry of mirror/coincidence for two correlated phases and the individual self symmetry for single phase, are unfolded on the momentum spectrum. The physical reason of the mutual symmetry between two correlated phases and also the individual symmetry for two fixed specific phases are examined and discussed analytically in detail. The combined roles by phase and chirping on the periodic and symmetrical behaviors of the momentum spectrum and the reduced particle number are expected to have the potential extension to more fields such as that with multidimensional spatial coordinate.

preprint2022arXiv

Private, Efficient, and Accurate: Protecting Models Trained by Multi-party Learning with Differential Privacy

Secure multi-party computation-based machine learning, referred to as MPL, has become an important technology to utilize data from multiple parties with privacy preservation. While MPL provides rigorous security guarantees for the computation process, the models trained by MPL are still vulnerable to attacks that solely depend on access to the models. Differential privacy could help to defend against such attacks. However, the accuracy loss brought by differential privacy and the huge communication overhead of secure multi-party computation protocols make it highly challenging to balance the 3-way trade-off between privacy, efficiency, and accuracy. In this paper, we are motivated to resolve the above issue by proposing a solution, referred to as PEA (Private, Efficient, Accurate), which consists of a secure DPSGD protocol and two optimization methods. First, we propose a secure DPSGD protocol to enforce DPSGD in secret sharing-based MPL frameworks. Second, to reduce the accuracy loss led by differential privacy noise and the huge communication overhead of MPL, we propose two optimization methods for the training process of MPL: (1) the data-independent feature extraction method, which aims to simplify the trained model structure; (2) the local data-based global model initialization method, which aims to speed up the convergence of the model training. We implement PEA in two open-source MPL frameworks: TF-Encrypted and Queqiao. The experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of PEA. E.g. when $ε$ = 2, we can train a differentially private classification model with an accuracy of 88% for CIFAR-10 within 7 minutes under the LAN setting. This result significantly outperforms the one from CryptGPU, one SOTA MPL framework: it costs more than 16 hours to train a non-private deep neural network model on CIFAR-10 with the same accuracy.

preprint2022arXiv

Propagation Path Loss Models in Forest Scenario at 605 MHz

When signals propagate through forest areas, they will be affected by environmental factors such as vegetation. Different types of environments have different influences on signal attenuation. This paper analyzes the existing classical propagation path loss models and the model with excess loss caused by forest areas and then proposes a new short-range wireless channel propagation model, which can be applied to different types of forest environments. We conducted continuous-wave measurements at a center frequency of 605 MHz on predetermined routes in distinct types of forest areas and recorded the reference signal received power. Then, we use various path loss models to fit the measured data based on different vegetation types and distributions. Simulation results show that the proposed model has substantially smaller fitting errors with reasonable computational complexity, as compared with representative traditional counterparts.

preprint2022arXiv

Representing Brain Anatomical Regularity and Variability by Few-Shot Embedding

Effective representation of brain anatomical architecture is fundamental in understanding brain regularity and variability. Despite numerous efforts, it is still difficult to infer reliable anatomical correspondence at finer scale, given the tremendous individual variability in cortical folding patterns. It is even more challenging to disentangle common and individual patterns when comparing brains at different neuro-developmental stages. In this work, we developed a novel learning-based few-shot embedding framework to encode the cortical folding patterns into a latent space represented by a group of anatomically meaningful embedding vectors. Specifically, we adopted 3-hinge (3HG) network as the substrate and designed an autoencoder-based embedding framework to learn a common embedding vector for each 3HG's multi-hop feature: each 3HG can be represented as a combination of these feature embeddings via a set of individual specific coefficients to characterize individualized anatomical information. That is, the regularity of folding patterns is encoded into the embeddings, while the individual variations are preserved by the multi=hop combination coefficients. To effectively learn the embeddings for the population with very limited samples, few-shot learning was adopted. We applied our method on adult HCP and pediatric datasets with 1,000+ brains (from 34 gestational weeks to young adult). Our experimental results show that: 1) the learned embedding vectors can quantitatively encode the commonality and individuality of cortical folding patterns; 2) with the embeddings we can robustly infer the complicated many-to-many anatomical correspondences among different brains and 3) our model can be successfully transferred to new populations with very limited training samples.

preprint2022arXiv

Scalable and Sparsity-Aware Privacy-Preserving K-means Clustering with Application to Fraud Detection

K-means is one of the most widely used clustering models in practice. Due to the problem of data isolation and the requirement for high model performance, how to jointly build practical and secure K-means for multiple parties has become an important topic for many applications in the industry. Existing work on this is mainly of two types. The first type has efficiency advantages, but information leakage raises potential privacy risks. The second type is provable secure but is inefficient and even helpless for the large-scale data sparsity scenario. In this paper, we propose a new framework for efficient sparsity-aware K-means with three characteristics. First, our framework is divided into a data-independent offline phase and a much faster online phase, and the offline phase allows to pre-compute almost all cryptographic operations. Second, we take advantage of the vectorization techniques in both online and offline phases. Third, we adopt a sparse matrix multiplication for the data sparsity scenario to improve efficiency further. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three synthetic datasets and deploy our model in a real-world fraud detection task. Our experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art solution, our model achieves competitive performance in terms of both running time and communication size, especially on sparse datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Semibricks, torsion-free classes and the Jordan-Hölder property

Let $\mathscr{C}$ be an extriangulated category and $\mathcal{X}$ be a semibrick in $\mathscr{C}$. Let $\mathcal{T}$ be the filtration subcategory generated by $\mathcal{X}$. We introduce the weak Jordan-Hölder property (WJHP) and Jordan-Hölder property (JHP) in $\mathscr{C}$ and show that $\mathcal{T}$ satisfies (WJHP). Furthermore, $\mathcal{T}$ satisfies (JHP) if and only if $\mathcal{X}$ is proper. Using reflection functors and $c$-sortable elements, we give a combinatorial criterion for the torsion-free class satisfying (JHP) in the representation category of a quiver of type $A$.

preprint2022arXiv

Structure-Enhanced Pop Music Generation via Harmony-Aware Learning

Pop music generation has always been an attractive topic for both musicians and scientists for a long time. However, automatically composing pop music with a satisfactory structure is still a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose to leverage harmony-aware learning for structure-enhanced pop music generation. On the one hand, one of the participants of harmony, chord, represents the harmonic set of multiple notes, which is integrated closely with the spatial structure of music, the texture. On the other hand, the other participant of harmony, chord progression, usually accompanies the development of the music, which promotes the temporal structure of music, the form. Moreover, when chords evolve into chord progression, the texture and form can be bridged by the harmony naturally, which contributes to the joint learning of the two structures. Furthermore, we propose the Harmony-Aware Hierarchical Music Transformer (HAT), which can exploit the structure adaptively from the music, and make the musical tokens interact hierarchically to enhance the structure in multi-level musical elements. Experimental results reveal that compared to the existing methods, HAT owns a much better understanding of the structure and it can also improve the quality of generated music, especially in the form and texture.

preprint2022arXiv

The Implicit Regularization of Momentum Gradient Descent with Early Stopping

The study on the implicit regularization induced by gradient-based optimization is a longstanding pursuit. In the present paper, we characterize the implicit regularization of momentum gradient descent (MGD) with early stopping by comparing with the explicit $\ell_2$-regularization (ridge). In details, we study MGD in the continuous-time view, so-called momentum gradient flow (MGF), and show that its tendency is closer to ridge than the gradient descent (GD) [Ali et al., 2019] for least squares regression. Moreover, we prove that, under the calibration $t=\sqrt{2/λ}$, where $t$ is the time parameter in MGF and $λ$ is the tuning parameter in ridge regression, the risk of MGF is no more than 1.54 times that of ridge. In particular, the relative Bayes risk of MGF to ridge is between 1 and 1.035 under the optimal tuning. The numerical experiments support our theoretical results strongly.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Deep Neural Network via Algorithmic-Cryptographic Co-design

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable progress in various real-world applications, especially when abundant training data are provided. However, data isolation has become a serious problem currently. Existing works build privacy preserving DNN models from either algorithmic perspective or cryptographic perspective. The former mainly splits the DNN computation graph between data holders or between data holders and server, which demonstrates good scalability but suffers from accuracy loss and potential privacy risks. In contrast, the latter leverages time-consuming cryptographic techniques, which has strong privacy guarantee but poor scalability. In this paper, we propose SPNN - a Scalable and Privacy-preserving deep Neural Network learning framework, from algorithmic-cryptographic co-perspective. From algorithmic perspective, we split the computation graph of DNN models into two parts, i.e., the private data related computations that are performed by data holders and the rest heavy computations that are delegated to a server with high computation ability. From cryptographic perspective, we propose using two types of cryptographic techniques, i.e., secret sharing and homomorphic encryption, for the isolated data holders to conduct private data related computations privately and cooperatively. Furthermore, we implement SPNN in a decentralized setting and introduce user-friendly APIs. Experimental results conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of SPNN.

preprint2022arXiv

Two-Stage Mesh Deep Learning for Automated Tooth Segmentation and Landmark Localization on 3D Intraoral Scans

Accurately segmenting teeth and identifying the corresponding anatomical landmarks on dental mesh models are essential in computer-aided orthodontic treatment. Manually performing these two tasks is time-consuming, tedious, and, more importantly, highly dependent on orthodontists' experiences due to the abnormality and large-scale variance of patients' teeth. Some machine learning-based methods have been designed and applied in the orthodontic field to automatically segment dental meshes (e.g., intraoral scans). In contrast, the number of studies on tooth landmark localization is still limited. This paper proposes a two-stage framework based on mesh deep learning (called TS-MDL) for joint tooth labeling and landmark identification on raw intraoral scans. Our TS-MDL first adopts an end-to-end \emph{i}MeshSegNet method (i.e., a variant of the existing MeshSegNet with both improved accuracy and efficiency) to label each tooth on the downsampled scan. Guided by the segmentation outputs, our TS-MDL further selects each tooth's region of interest (ROI) on the original mesh to construct a light-weight variant of the pioneering PointNet (i.e., PointNet-Reg) for regressing the corresponding landmark heatmaps. Our TS-MDL was evaluated on a real-clinical dataset, showing promising segmentation and localization performance. Specifically, \emph{i}MeshSegNet in the first stage of TS-MDL reached an averaged Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) at \textcolor[rgb]{0,0,0}{$0.964\pm0.054$}, significantly outperforming the original MeshSegNet. In the second stage, PointNet-Reg achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of $0.597\pm0.761 \, mm$ in distances between the prediction and ground truth for $66$ landmarks, which is superior compared with other networks for landmark detection. All these results suggest the potential usage of our TS-MDL in orthodontics.

preprint2022arXiv

Vertically Federated Graph Neural Network for Privacy-Preserving Node Classification

Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN) has achieved remarkable progresses in various real-world tasks on graph data, consisting of node features and the adjacent information between different nodes. High-performance GNN models always depend on both rich features and complete edge information in graph. However, such information could possibly be isolated by different data holders in practice, which is the so-called data isolation problem. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose VFGNN, a federated GNN learning paradigm for privacy-preserving node classification task under data vertically partitioned setting, which can be generalized to existing GNN models. Specifically, we split the computation graph into two parts. We leave the private data (i.e., features, edges, and labels) related computations on data holders, and delegate the rest of computations to a semi-honest server. We also propose to apply differential privacy to prevent potential information leakage from the server. We conduct experiments on three benchmarks and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of VFGNN.

preprint2022arXiv

Wav2vec-S: Semi-Supervised Pre-Training for Low-Resource ASR

Self-supervised pre-training could effectively improve the performance of low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, existing self-supervised pre-training are task-agnostic, i.e., could be applied to various downstream tasks. Although it enlarges the scope of its application, the capacity of the pre-trained model is not fully utilized for the ASR task, and the learned representations may not be optimal for ASR. In this work, in order to build a better pre-trained model for low-resource ASR, we propose a pre-training approach called wav2vec-S, where we use task-specific semi-supervised pre-training to refine the self-supervised pre-trained model for the ASR task thus more effectively utilize the capacity of the pre-trained model to generate task-specific representations for ASR. Experiments show that compared to wav2vec 2.0, wav2vec-S only requires a marginal increment of pre-training time but could significantly improve ASR performance on in-domain, cross-domain and cross-lingual datasets. Average relative WER reductions are 24.5% and 6.6% for 1h and 10h fine-tuning, respectively. Furthermore, we show that semi-supervised pre-training could close the representation gap between the self-supervised pre-trained model and the corresponding fine-tuned model through canonical correlation analysis.

preprint2021arXiv

Further results on generalized Holmgren's principle to the Lamé operator and applications

In our earlier paper [9], it is proved that a homogeneous rigid, traction or impedance condition on one or two intersecting line segments together with a certain zero point-value condition implies that the solution to the Lamé system must be identically zero, which is referred to as the generalized Holmgren principle (GHP). The GHP enables us to solve a longstanding inverse scattering problem of determining a polygonal elastic obstacle of general impedance type by at most a few far-field measurements. In this paper, we include all the possible physical boundary conditions from linear elasticity into the GHP study with additionally the soft-clamped, simply-supported as well as the associated impedance-type conditions. We derive a comprehensive and complete characterisation of the GHP associated with all of the aforementioned physical conditions. As significant applications, we establish novel unique identifiability results by at most a few scattering measurements not only for the inverse elastic obstacle problem but also for the inverse elastic diffraction grating problem within polygonal geometry in the most general physical scenario. We follow the general strategy from [9] in establishing the results. However, we develop technically new ingredients to tackle the more general and challenging physical and mathematical setups. It is particularly worth noting that in [9], the impedance parameters were assumed to be constant whereas in this work they can be variable functions.

preprint2021arXiv

Primal dual methods for Wasserstein gradient flows

Combining the classical theory of optimal transport with modern operator splitting techniques, we develop a new numerical method for nonlinear, nonlocal partial differential equations, arising in models of porous media, materials science, and biological swarming. Our method proceeds as follows: First, we discretize in time, either via the classical JKO scheme or via a novel Crank-Nicolson type method we introduce. Next, we use the Benamou-Brenier dynamical characterization of the Wasserstein distance to reduce computing the solution of the discrete time equations to solving fully discrete minimization problems, with strictly convex objective functions and linear constraints. Third, we compute the minimizers by applying a recently introduced, provably convergent primal dual splitting scheme for three operators [Yan 2018]. By leveraging the PDEs' underlying variational structure, our method overcomes stability issues present in previous numerical work built on explicit time discretizations, which suffer due to the equations' strong nonlinearities and degeneracies. Our method is also naturally positivity and mass preserving and, in the case of the JKO scheme, energy decreasing. We prove that minimizers of the fully discrete problem converge to minimizers of the spatially continuous, discrete time problem as the spatial discretization is refined. We conclude with simulations of nonlinear PDEs and Wasserstein geodesics in one and two dimensions that illustrate the key properties of our approach, including higher order convergence our novel Crank-Nicolson type method, when compared to the classical JKO method.

preprint2021arXiv

Spectrum Sharing for 6G Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks Based on NOMA and Cognitive Radio

The explosive growth of bandwidth hungry Internet applications has led to the rapid development of new generation mobile network technologies that are expected to provide broadband access to the Internet in a pervasive manner. For example, 6G networks are capable of providing high-speed network access by exploiting higher frequency spectrum; high-throughout satellite communication services are also adopted to achieve pervasive coverage in remote and isolated areas. In order to enable seamless access, Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks (ISTCN) has emerged as an important research area. ISTCN aims to provide high speed and pervasive network services by integrating broadband terrestrial mobile networks with satellite communication networks. As terrestrial mobile networks began to use higher frequency spectrum (between 3GHz to 40GHz) which overlaps with that of satellite communication (4GHz to 8GHz for C band and 26GHz to 40GHz for Ka band), there are opportunities and challenges. On one hand, satellite terminals can potentially access terrestrial networks in an integrated manner; on the other hand, there will be more congestion and interference in this spectrum, hence more efficient spectrum management techniques are required. In this paper, we propose a new technique to improve spectrum sharing performance by introducing Non-orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (NOMA) and Cognitive Radio (CR) in the spectrum sharing of ISTCN. In essence, NOMA technology improves spectrum efficiency by allowing different users to transmit on the same carrier and distinguishing users by user power levels while CR technology improves spectrum efficiency through dynamic spectrum sharing. Furthermore, some open researches and challenges in ISTCN will be discussed.

preprint2021arXiv

Trace Ratio Optimization with an Application to Multi-view Learning

A trace ratio optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold is investigated from the perspectives of both theory and numerical computations. At least three special cases of the problem have arisen from Fisher linear discriminant analysis, canonical correlation analysis, and unbalanced Procrustes problem, respectively. Necessary conditions in the form of nonlinear eigenvalue problem with eigenvector dependency are established and a numerical method based on the self-consistent field (SCF) iteration is designed and proved to be always convergent. As an application to multi-view subspace learning, a new framework and its instantiated concrete models are proposed and demonstrated on real world data sets. Numerical results show that the efficiency of the proposed numerical methods and effectiveness of the new multi-view subspace learning models.

preprint2020arXiv

A Comprehensive Analysis of Information Leakage in Deep Transfer Learning

Transfer learning is widely used for transferring knowledge from a source domain to the target domain where the labeled data is scarce. Recently, deep transfer learning has achieved remarkable progress in various applications. However, the source and target datasets usually belong to two different organizations in many real-world scenarios, potential privacy issues in deep transfer learning are posed. In this study, to thoroughly analyze the potential privacy leakage in deep transfer learning, we first divide previous methods into three categories. Based on that, we demonstrate specific threats that lead to unintentional privacy leakage in each category. Additionally, we also provide some solutions to prevent these threats. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to provide a thorough analysis of the information leakage issues in deep transfer learning methods and provide potential solutions to the issue. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and an industry dataset are conducted to show the privacy leakage under different deep transfer learning settings and defense solution effectiveness.

preprint2020arXiv

A particle method for the homogeneous Landau equation

We propose a novel deterministic particle method to numerically approximate the Landau equation for plasmas. Based on a new variational formulation in terms of gradient flows of the Landau equation, we regularize the collision operator to make sense of the particle solutions. These particle solutions solve a large coupled ODE system that retains all the important properties of the Landau operator, namely the conservation of mass, momentum and energy, and the decay of entropy. We illustrate our new method by showing its performance in several test cases including the physically relevant case of the Coulomb interaction. The comparison to the exact solution and the spectral method is strikingly good maintaining 2nd order accuracy. Moreover, an efficient implementation of the method via the treecode is explored. This gives a proof of concept for the practical use of our method when coupled with the classical PIC method for the Vlasov equation.

preprint2020arXiv

A Proximal-Gradient Algorithm for Crystal Surface Evolution

As a counterpoint to recent numerical methods for crystal surface evolution, which agree well with microscopic dynamics but suffer from significant stiffness that prevents simulation on fine spatial grids, we develop a new numerical method based on the macroscopic partial differential equation, leveraging its formal structure as the gradient flow of the total variation energy, with respect to a weighted $H^{-1}$ norm. This gradient flow structure relates to several metric space gradient flows of recent interest, including 2-Wasserstein flows and their generalizations to nonlinear mobilities. We develop a novel semi-implicit time discretization of the gradient flow, inspired by the classical minimizing movements scheme (known as the JKO scheme in the 2-Wasserstein case). We then use a primal dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method to compute each element of the semi-implicit scheme. In one dimension, we prove convergence of the PDHG method to the semi-implicit scheme, under general integrability assumptions on the mobility and its reciprocal. Finally, by taking finite difference approximations of our PDHG method, we arrive at a fully discrete numerical algorithm, with iterations that converge at a rate independent of the spatial discretization: in particular, the convergence properties do not deteriorate as we refine our spatial grid. We close with several numerical examples illustrating the properties of our method, including facet formation at local maxima, pinning at local minima, and convergence as the spatial and temporal discretizations are refined.

preprint2020arXiv

A Reinforced Topic-Aware Convolutional Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Abstractive Text Summarization

In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to tackle the automatic summarization tasks by incorporating topic information into the convolutional sequence-to-sequence (ConvS2S) model and using self-critical sequence training (SCST) for optimization. Through jointly attending to topics and word-level alignment, our approach can improve coherence, diversity, and informativeness of generated summaries via a biased probability generation mechanism. On the other hand, reinforcement training, like SCST, directly optimizes the proposed model with respect to the non-differentiable metric ROUGE, which also avoids the exposure bias during inference. We carry out the experimental evaluation with state-of-the-art methods over the Gigaword, DUC-2004, and LCSTS datasets. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in the abstractive summarization.

preprint2020arXiv

Adapted tree boosting for Transfer Learning

Secure online transaction is an essential task for e-commerce platforms. Alipay, one of the world's leading cashless payment platform, provides the payment service to both merchants and individual customers. The fraud detection models are built to protect the customers, but stronger demands are raised by the new scenes, which are lacking in training data and labels. The proposed model makes a difference by utilizing the data under similar old scenes and the data under a new scene is treated as the target domain to be promoted. Inspired by this real case in Alipay, we view the problem as a transfer learning problem and design a set of revise strategies to transfer the source domain models to the target domain under the framework of gradient boosting tree models. This work provides an option for the cold-starting and data-sharing problems.

preprint2020arXiv

An Auto-Context Deformable Registration Network for Infant Brain MRI

Deformable image registration is fundamental to longitudinal and population analysis. Geometric alignment of the infant brain MR images is challenging, owing to rapid changes in image appearance in association with brain development. In this paper, we propose an infant-dedicated deep registration network that uses the auto-context strategy to gradually refine the deformation fields to obtain highly accurate correspondences. Instead of training multiple registration networks, our method estimates the deformation fields by invoking a single network multiple times for iterative deformation refinement. The final deformation field is obtained by the incremental composition of the deformation fields. Experimental results in comparison with state-of-the-art registration methods indicate that our method achieves higher accuracy while at the same time preserves the smoothness of the deformation fields. Our implementation is available online.

preprint2020arXiv

Artificial Multiferroics and Enhanced Magnetoelectric Effect in van der Waals Heterostructures

Multiferroic materials with coupled ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties are important for multifunctional devices due to their potential ability of controlling magnetism via electric field, and vice versa. The recent discoveries of two-dimensional ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials have ignited tremendous research interest and aroused hope to search for two-dimensional multiferroics. However, intrinsic two-dimensional multiferroic materials and, particularly, those with strong magnetoelectric couplings are still rare to date. In this paper, using first-principles simulations, we propose artificial two-dimensional multiferroics via a van der Waals heterostructure formed by ferromagnetic bilayer chromium triiodide (CrI3) and ferroelectric monolayer Sc2CO2. In addition to the coexistence of ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity, our calculations show that, by switching the electric polarization of Sc2CO2, we can tune the interlayer magnetic couplings of bilayer CrI3 between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic states. We further reveal that such a strong magnetoelectric effect is from a dramatic change of the band alignment induced by the strong build-in electric polarization in Sc2CO2 and the subsequent change of the interlayer magnetic coupling of bilayer CrI3. These artificial multiferroics and enhanced magnetoelectric effect give rise to realizing multifunctional nanoelectronics by van der Waals heterostructures.

preprint2020arXiv

Co-rotational chiral magnetic skyrmions near harmonic maps

Chiral magnetic skyrmions are topological solitons, of significant physical interest, arising in ferromagnets described by a micromagnetic energy including a chiral (Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya) interaction term. We show that for small chiral interaction, the skyrmions on $\mathbb{R}^2$ with co-rotational symmetry are close to harmonic maps, and prove precise bounds on the differences. One application of these bounds is precise energy asymptotics. Another (pursued in a separate work) is an alternate, quantitative proof of the recent skyrmion stability result of Li-Melcher.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Tensor CCA for Multi-view Learning

We present Deep Tensor Canonical Correlation Analysis (DTCCA), a method to learn complex nonlinear transformations of multiple views (more than two) of data such that the resulting representations are linearly correlated in high order. The high-order correlation of given multiple views is modeled by covariance tensor, which is different from most CCA formulations relying solely on the pairwise correlations. Parameters of transformations of each view are jointly learned by maximizing the high-order canonical correlation. To solve the resulting problem, we reformulate it as the best sum of rank-1 approximation, which can be efficiently solved by existing tensor decomposition method. DTCCA is a nonlinear extension of tensor CCA (TCCA) via deep networks. The transformations of DTCCA are parametric functions, which are very different from implicit mapping in the form of kernel function. Comparing with kernel TCCA, DTCCA not only can deal with arbitrary dimensions of the input data, but also does not need to maintain the training data for computing representations of any given data point. Hence, DTCCA as a unified model can efficiently overcome the scalable issue of TCCA for either high-dimensional multi-view data or a large amount of views, and it also naturally extends TCCA for learning nonlinear representation. Extensive experiments on three multi-view data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

preprint2020arXiv

Direct Observation of One-Dimensional Peierls-Type Charge Density Wave in Twin Boundaries of Monolayer MoTe$_2$

One-dimensional (1D) metallic mirror-twin boundaries (MTBs) in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) exhibit a periodic charge modulation and provide an ideal platform for exploring collective electron behavior in the confined system. The underlying mechanism of the charge modulation and how the electrons travel in 1D structures remain controversial. Here, for the first time, we observed atomic-scale structures of the charge distribution within one period in MTB of monolayer MoTe2 by using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS). The coexisting apparent periodic lattice distortions and U-shaped energy gap clearly demonstrate a Peierls-type charge density wave (CDW). Equidistant quantized energy levels with varied periodicity are further discovered outside the CDW gap along the metallic MTB. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations are in good agreement with the gapped electronic structures and reveal they originate mainly from Mo 4d orbital. Our work presents hallmark evidence of the 1D Peierls-type CDW on the metallic MTBs and offers opportunities to study the underlying physics of 1D charge modulation.

preprint2020arXiv

Drosophila-Inspired 3D Moving Object Detection Based on Point Clouds

3D moving object detection is one of the most critical tasks in dynamic scene analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel Drosophila-inspired 3D moving object detection method using Lidar sensors. According to the theory of elementary motion detector, we have developed a motion detector based on the shallow visual neural pathway of Drosophila. This detector is sensitive to the movement of objects and can well suppress background noise. Designing neural circuits with different connection modes, the approach searches for motion areas in a coarse-to-fine fashion and extracts point clouds of each motion area to form moving object proposals. An improved 3D object detection network is then used to estimate the point clouds of each proposal and efficiently generates the 3D bounding boxes and the object categories. We evaluate the proposed approach on the widely-used KITTI benchmark, and state-of-the-art performance was obtained by using the proposed approach on the task of motion detection.

preprint2020arXiv

Enhanced pair production in frequency modulated Sauter potential wells

Electron-positron pair production in frequency modulated Sauter potential wells is investigated in the framework of the computational quantum field theory. In combined potential wells with a static Sauter potential well and a frequency modulated oscillating one, the modulated amplitude has a large effect on the number of created pairs. The optimal modulation amplitude of frequency at different center frequencies is obtained, which increases the number of electrons at about two times. However, for a single oscillating potential well with frequency modulation, chirp effect is sensitive to the center frequency, and the number of electrons can be enhanced even to four orders of magnitude at a regime of low center frequency. It implies that for a slowly oscillating Sauter potential well, the chirp effect through the frequency modulation is better than adding a static potential well to improve the pair production.

preprint2020arXiv

Fusion-supervised Deep Cross-modal Hashing

Deep hashing has recently received attention in cross-modal retrieval for its impressive advantages. However, existing hashing methods for cross-modal retrieval cannot fully capture the heterogeneous multi-modal correlation and exploit the semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel \emph{Fusion-supervised Deep Cross-modal Hashing} (FDCH) approach. Firstly, FDCH learns unified binary codes through a fusion hash network with paired samples as input, which effectively enhances the modeling of the correlation of heterogeneous multi-modal data. Then, these high-quality unified hash codes further supervise the training of the modality-specific hash networks for encoding out-of-sample queries. Meanwhile, both pair-wise similarity information and classification information are embedded in the hash networks under one stream framework, which simultaneously preserves cross-modal similarity and keeps semantic consistency. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of FDCH.

preprint2020arXiv

Generation and manipulation of chiral terahertz waves emitted from the three-dimensional topological insulator Bi2Te3

Arbitrary manipulation of broadband terahertz waves with flexible polarization shaping at the source has great potential in expanding real applications such as imaging, information encryption, and all-optically coherent control of terahertz nonlinear phenomena. Topological insulators featuring unique spin-momentum locked surface state have already exhibited very promising prospects in terahertz emission, detection and modulation, which may lay a foundation for future on-chip topological insulator-based terahertz systems. However, polarization shaped terahertz emission with prescribed manners of arbitrarily manipulated temporal evolution of the amplitude and electric-field vector direction based on topological insulators have not yet been explored. Here we systematically investigated the terahertz radiation from topological insulator Bi2Te3 nanofilms driven by femtosecond laser pulses, and successfully realized the generation of efficient chiral terahertz waves with controllable chirality, ellipticity, and principle axis. The convenient engineering of the chiral terahertz waves was interpreted by photogalvanic effect induced photocurrent, while the linearly polarized terahertz waves originated from linear photogalvanic effect induced shift currents. We believe our works not only help further understanding femtosecond coherent control of ultrafast spin currents in light-matter interaction but also provide an effective way to generate spin-polarized terahertz waves and accelerate the proliferation of twisting the terahertz waves at the source.

preprint2020arXiv

Glioma Grade Prediction Using Wavelet Scattering-Based Radiomics

Glioma grading before surgery is very critical for the prognosis prediction and treatment plan making. We present a novel wavelet scattering-based radiomic method to predict noninvasively and accurately the glioma grades. The method consists of wavelet scattering feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and glioma grade prediction. The dimensionality reduction was achieved using partial least squares (PLS) regression and the glioma grade prediction using support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF). The prediction obtained on multimodal magnetic resonance images of 285 patients with well-labeled intratumoral and peritumoral regions showed that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of glioma grade prediction was increased up to 0.99 when considering both intratumoral and peritumoral features in multimodal images, which represents an increase of about 13% compared to traditional radiomics. In addition, the features extracted from peritumoral regions further increase the accuracy of glioma grading.

preprint2020arXiv

Highway freight transportation diversity of cities based on radiation models

Using a unique data set containing about 15.06 million truck transportation records in five months, we investigate the highway freight transportation diversity of 338 Chinese cities based on the truck transportation probability $p_{ij}$ from one city to the other. The transportation probabilities are calculated from the radiation model based on the geographic distance and its cost-based version based on the driving distance as the proxy of cost. For each model, we consider both the population and the gross domestic product, and find quantitatively very similar results. We find that the transportation probabilities have nice power-law tails with the tail exponents close to 0.5 for all the models. The two transportation probabilities in each model fall around the diagonal $p_{ij}=p_{ji}$ but are often not the same. In addition, the corresponding transportation probabilities calculated from the raw radiation model and the cost-based radiation model also fluctuate around the diagonal $p_{ij}^{\rm{geo}}=p_{ij}^{\rm{cost}}$. We calculate four sets of highway truck transportation diversity according to the four sets of transportation probabilities that are found to be close to each other for each city pair. Further, it is found that the population, the gross domestic product, the in-flux, and the out-flux scale as power laws with respect to the transportation diversity in the raw and cost-based radiation models. It implies that a more developed city usually has higher diversity in highway truck transportation, which reflects the fact that a more developed city usually has a more diverse economic structure.

preprint2020arXiv

Idempotent completion of extriangulated categories

Extriangulated categories were introduced by Nakaoka and Palu as a simultaneous generalization of exact categories and triangulated categories. In this paper, we show that the idempotent completion of an extriangulated category admits a natural extriangulated structure. As applications, we prove that cotorsion pairs in an extriangulated category induce cotorsion pairs in its idempotent completion under certain condition, and the idempotent completion of a recollement of extriangulated categories is still a recollement.

preprint2020arXiv

Industrial Scale Privacy Preserving Deep Neural Network

Deep Neural Network (DNN) has been showing great potential in kinds of real-world applications such as fraud detection and distress prediction. Meanwhile, data isolation has become a serious problem currently, i.e., different parties cannot share data with each other. To solve this issue, most research leverages cryptographic techniques to train secure DNN models for multi-parties without compromising their private data. Although such methods have strong security guarantee, they are difficult to scale to deep networks and large datasets due to its high communication and computation complexities. To solve the scalability of the existing secure Deep Neural Network (DNN) in data isolation scenarios, in this paper, we propose an industrial scale privacy preserving neural network learning paradigm, which is secure against semi-honest adversaries. Our main idea is to split the computation graph of DNN into two parts, i.e., the computations related to private data are performed by each party using cryptographic techniques, and the rest computations are done by a neutral server with high computation ability. We also present a defender mechanism for further privacy protection. We conduct experiments on real-world fraud detection dataset and financial distress prediction dataset, the encouraging results demonstrate the practicalness of our proposal.

preprint2020arXiv

InfDetect: a Large Scale Graph-based Fraud Detection System for E-Commerce Insurance

The insurance industry has been creating innovative products around the emerging online shopping activities. Such e-commerce insurance is designed to protect buyers from potential risks such as impulse purchases and counterfeits. Fraudulent claims towards online insurance typically involve multiple parties such as buyers, sellers, and express companies, and they could lead to heavy financial losses. In order to uncover the relations behind organized fraudsters and detect fraudulent claims, we developed a large-scale insurance fraud detection system, i.e., InfDetect, which provides interfaces for commonly used graphs, standard data processing procedures, and a uniform graph learning platform. InfDetect is able to process big graphs containing up to 100 millions of nodes and billions of edges. In this paper, we investigate different graphs to facilitate fraudster mining, such as a device-sharing graph, a transaction graph, a friendship graph, and a buyer-seller graph. These graphs are fed to a uniform graph learning platform containing supervised and unsupervised graph learning algorithms. Cases on widely applied e-commerce insurance are described to demonstrate the usage and capability of our system. InfDetect has successfully detected thousands of fraudulent claims and saved over tens of thousands of dollars daily.

preprint2020arXiv

InGaAs/InP single-photon detectors with 60% detection efficiency at 1550 nm

InGaAs/InP single-photon detectors (SPDs) are widely used for near-infrared photon counting in practical applications. Photon detection efficiency (PDE) is one of the most important parameters for SPD characterization, and therefore increasing PDE consistently plays a central role in both industrial development and academic research. Here we present the implementation of high-frequency gating InGaAs/InP SPD with a PDE as high as 60% at 1550 nm. On one hand, we optimize the structure design and device fabrication of InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diode with an additional dielectric-metal reflection layer to relatively increase the absorption efficiency of incident photons by ~ 20%. On the other hand, we develop a monolithic readout circuit of weak avalanche extraction to minimize the parasitic capacitance for the suppression of the afterpulsing effect. With 1.25 GHz sine wave gating and optimized gate amplitude and operation temperature, the SPD is characterized to reach a PDE of 60% with a dark count rate (DCR) of 340 kcps. For practical use, given 3 kcps DCR as a reference the PDE reaches ~ 40% PDE with an afterpulse probability of 5.5%, which can significantly improve the performance for the near-infrared SPD based applications.

preprint2020arXiv

Multi-view Orthonormalized Partial Least Squares: Regularizations and Deep Extensions

We establish a family of subspace-based learning method for multi-view learning using the least squares as the fundamental basis. Specifically, we investigate orthonormalized partial least squares (OPLS) and study its important properties for both multivariate regression and classification. Building on the least squares reformulation of OPLS, we propose a unified multi-view learning framework to learn a classifier over a common latent space shared by all views. The regularization technique is further leveraged to unleash the power of the proposed framework by providing three generic types of regularizers on its inherent ingredients including model parameters, decision values and latent projected points. We instantiate a set of regularizers in terms of various priors. The proposed framework with proper choices of regularizers not only can recast existing methods, but also inspire new models. To further improve the performance of the proposed framework on complex real problems, we propose to learn nonlinear transformations parameterized by deep networks. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare various methods on nine data sets with different numbers of views in terms of both feature extraction and cross-modal retrieval.

preprint2020arXiv

On generalized Holmgren's principle to the Lamé operator with applications to inverse elastic problems

Consider the Lamé operator $\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{ u} ) :=μΔ\mathbf{u}+(λ+μ) \nabla(\nabla \cdot \mathbf{ u} )$ that arises in the theory of linear elasticity. This paper studies the geometric properties of the (generalized) Lamé eigenfunction $\mathbf{u}$, namely $-\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{ u} )=κ\mathbf{ u}$ with $κ\in\mathbb{R}_+$ and $\mathbf{ u}\in L^2(Ω)^2$, $Ω\subset\mathbb{R}^2$. We introduce the so-called homogeneous line segments of $\mathbf{u}$ in $Ω$, on which $\mathbf{u}$, its traction or their combination via an impedance parameter is vanishing. We give a comprehensive study on characterizing the presence of one or two such line segments and its implication to the uniqueness of $\mathbf{u}$. The results can be regarded as generalizing the classical Holmgren's uniqueness principle for the Lamé operator in two aspects. We establish the results by analyzing the development of analytic microlocal singularities of $\mathbf{u}$ with the presence of the aforesaid line segments. Finally, we apply the results to the inverse elastic problems in establishing two novel unique identifiability results. It is shown that a generalized impedance obstacle as well as its boundary impedance can be determined by using at most four far-field patterns. Unique determination by a minimal number of far-field patterns is a longstanding problem in inverse elastic scattering theory.

preprint2020arXiv

Practical Privacy Preserving POI Recommendation

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has been extensively studied and successfully applied in industry recently. However, most existing approaches build centralized models on the basis of collecting users' data. Both private data and models are held by the recommender, which causes serious privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel Privacy preserving POI Recommendation (PriRec) framework. First, to protect data privacy, users' private data (features and actions) are kept on their own side, e.g., Cellphone or Pad. Meanwhile, the public data need to be accessed by all the users are kept by the recommender to reduce the storage costs of users' devices. Those public data include: (1) static data only related to the status of POI, such as POI categories, and (2) dynamic data depend on user-POI actions such as visited counts. The dynamic data could be sensitive, and we develop local differential privacy techniques to release such data to public with privacy guarantees. Second, PriRec follows the representations of Factorization Machine (FM) that consists of linear model and the feature interaction model. To protect the model privacy, the linear models are saved on users' side, and we propose a secure decentralized gradient descent protocol for users to learn it collaboratively. The feature interaction model is kept by the recommender since there is no privacy risk, and we adopt secure aggregation strategy in federated learning paradigm to learn it. To this end, PriRec keeps users' private raw data and models in users' own hands, and protects user privacy to a large extent. We apply PriRec in real-world datasets, and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that, compared with FM, PriRec achieves comparable or even better recommendation accuracy.

preprint2020arXiv

Privacy Preserving PCA for Multiparty Modeling

In this paper, we present a general multiparty modeling paradigm with Privacy Preserving Principal Component Analysis (PPPCA) for horizontally partitioned data. PPPCA can accomplish multiparty cooperative execution of PCA under the premise of keeping plaintext data locally. We also propose implementations using two techniques, i.e., homomorphic encryption and secret sharing. The output of PPPCA can be sent directly to data consumer to build any machine learning models. We conduct experiments on three UCI benchmark datasets and a real-world fraud detection dataset. Results show that the accuracy of the model built upon PPPCA is the same as the model with PCA that is built based on centralized plaintext data.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantitative estimates for homogenization of nonlinear elliptic operators in perforated domains

This paper was devoted to study the quantitative homogenization problems for nonlinear elliptic operators in perforated domains. We obtained a sharp error estimate $O(\varepsilon)$ when the problem was anchored in the reference domain $\varepsilonω$. If concerning a bounded perforated domain, one will see a bad influence from the boundary layers, which leads to the loss of the convergence rate by $O(\varepsilon^{1/2})$. Equipped with the error estimates, we developed both interior and boundary Lipschitz estimates at large-scales. As an application, we received the so-called quenched Calderón-Zygumund estimates by Shen's real arguments. To overcome some difficulties, we improved the extension theory from (\cite[Theorem 4.3]{OSY}) to $L^p$-versions with $\frac{2d}{d+1}-ε<p<\frac{2d}{d-1}+ε$ and $0<ε\ll1$. Appealing to this, we established Poincaré-Sobolev inequalities of local type on perforated domains. Some of results in the present literature are new even for related linear elliptic models.

preprint2020arXiv

Secret Sharing based Secure Regressions with Applications

Nowadays, the utilization of the ever expanding amount of data has made a huge impact on web technologies while also causing various types of security concerns. On one hand, potential gains are highly anticipated if different organizations could somehow collaboratively share their data for technological improvements. On the other hand, data security concerns may arise for both data holders and data providers due to commercial or sociological concerns. To make a balance between technical improvements and security limitations, we implement secure and scalable protocols for multiple data holders to train linear regression and logistic regression models. We build our protocols based on the secret sharing scheme, which is scalable and efficient in applications. Moreover, our proposed paradigm can be generalized to any secure multiparty training scenarios where only matrix summation and matrix multiplications are used. We demonstrate our approach by experiments which shows the scalability and efficiency of our proposed protocols, and finally present its real-world applications.

preprint2020arXiv

Secure Social Recommendation based on Secret Sharing

Nowadays, privacy preserving machine learning has been drawing much attention in both industry and academy. Meanwhile, recommender systems have been extensively adopted by many commercial platforms (e.g. Amazon) and they are mainly built based on user-item interactions. Besides, social platforms (e.g. Facebook) have rich resources of user social information. It is well known that social information, which is rich on social platforms such as Facebook, are useful to recommender systems. It is anticipated to combine the social information with the user-item ratings to improve the overall recommendation performance. Most existing recommendation models are built based on the assumptions that the social information are available. However, different platforms are usually reluctant to (or cannot) share their data due to certain concerns. In this paper, we first propose a SEcure SOcial RECommendation (SeSoRec) framework which can (1) collaboratively mine knowledge from social platform to improve the recommendation performance of the rating platform, and (2) securely keep the raw data of both platforms. We then propose a Secret Sharing based Matrix Multiplication (SSMM) protocol to optimize SeSoRec and prove its correctness and security theoretically. By applying minibatch gradient descent, SeSoRec has linear time complexities in terms of both computation and communication. The comprehensive experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SeSoRec and SSMM.

preprint2020arXiv

Spectral norm of a symmetric tensor and its computation

We show that the spectral norm of a $d$-mode real or complex symmetric tensor in $n$ variables can be computed by finding the fixed points of the corresponding polynomial map. For a generic complex symmetric tensor the number of fixed points is finite, and we give upper and lower bounds for the number of fixed points. For $n=2$ we show that these fixed points are the roots of a corresponding univariate polynomial of degree at most $(d-1)^2+1$, except certain cases, which are completely analyzed. In particular, for $n=2$ the spectral norm of $d$-symmetric tensor is polynomially computable in $d$ with a given relative precision. For a fixed $n>2$ we show that the spectral norm of a $d$-mode symmetric tensor is polynomially computable in $d$ with a given relative precision with respect to the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the tensor. These results show that the geometric measure of entanglement of $d$-mode symmetric qunits on $\mathbb{C}^n$ are polynomially computable for a fixed $n$.

preprint2020arXiv

suboptimal error estimates for homogenization of linear elasticity systems on perforated domains

In the present work, we established almost-sharp error estimates for linear elasticity systems in periodically perforated domains. The first result was $L^{\frac{2d}{d-1-τ}}$-error estimates $O\big(\varepsilon^{1-\fracτ{2}}\big)$ with $0<τ<1$ for a bounded smooth domain. It followed from weighted Hardy-Sobolev's inequalities and a suboptimal error estimate for the square function of the first-order approximating corrector (which was earliest investigated by C. Kenig, F. Lin, Z. Shen \cite{KLS} under additional regularity assumption on coefficients). The new approach relied on the weighted quenched Calderón-Zygmund estimate (initially appeared in A. Gloria, S. Neukamm, F. Otto's work \cite{Gloria_Neukamm_Otto_2015} for a quantitative stochastic homogenization theory). The second effort was $L^2$-error estimates $O\big(\varepsilon^{\frac{5}{6}}\ln^{\frac{2}{3}}(1/\varepsilon)\big)$ for a Lipschitz domain, followed from a new duality scheme coupled with interpolation inequalities. Also, we developed a new weighted extension theorem for perforated domains, and a real method imposed by Z. Shen \cite{S3} played a fundamental role in the whole project.

preprint2019arXiv

An immersed boundary method for fluid--structure--acoustics interactions involving large deformations and complex geometries

This paper presents an immersed boundary (IB) method for fluid--structure--acoustics interactions involving large deformations and complex geometries. In this method, the fluid dynamics is solved by a finite difference method where the temporal, viscous and convective terms are respectively discretized by the third-order Runge-Kutta scheme, the fourth-order central difference scheme and a fifth-order W/TENO (Weighted/Targeted Essentially Non-oscillation) scheme. Without loss of generality, a nonlinear flexible plate is considered here, and is solved by a finite element method based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation. The no-slip boundary condition at the fluid--structure interface is achieved by using a diffusion-interface penalty IB method. With the above proposed method, the aeroacoustics field generated by the moving boundaries and the associated flows are inherently solved. In order to validate and verify the current method, several benchmark cases are conducted: acoustic waves scattered from a stationary cylinder in a quiescent flow, sound generation by a stationary and a rotating cylinder in a uniform flow, sound generation by an insect in hovering flight, deformation of a red blood cell induced by acoustic waves and acoustic waves scattered by a stationary sphere. The comparison of the sound scattered by a cylinder shows that the present IB--WENO scheme, a simple approach, has an excellent performance which is even better than the implicit IB--lattice Boltzmann method. For the sound scattered by a sphere, the IB--TENO scheme has a lower dissipation compared with the IB--WENO scheme. Applications of this technique to model fluid-structure-acoustics interactions of flapping foils mimicking an insect wing section during forward flight and flapping foil energy harvester are also presented, considering the effects of foil shape and flexibility.

preprint2019arXiv

CDEX dark matter experiment: Status and prospects

The China Dark Matter Experiment (CDEX) aims at direct searches of light Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL) with an overburden of about 2400m rock. Results from a prototype CDEX-1 994 g p-type Point Contact Germanium(pPCGe) detector are reported. Research programs are pursued to further reduce the physics threshold by improving hardware and data analysis. The CDEX-10 experiment with a pPCGe array of 10 kg target mass range is being tested. The evolution of CDEX program into "CDEX-1T Experiment" with ton-scale germanium detector arrays will also be introduced in this study.

preprint2019arXiv

Fisher information regularization schemes for Wasserstein gradient flows

We propose a variational scheme for computing Wasserstein gradient flows. The scheme builds upon the Jordan--Kinderlehrer--Otto framework with the Benamou-Brenier's dynamic formulation of the quadratic Wasserstein metric and adds a regularization by the Fisher information. This regularization can be derived in terms of energy splitting and is closely related to the Schr{ö}dinger bridge problem. It improves the convexity of the variational problem and automatically preserves the non-negativity of the solution. As a result, it allows us to apply sequential quadratic programming to solve the sub-optimization problem. We further save the computational cost by showing that no additional time interpolation is needed in the underlying dynamic formulation of the Wasserstein-2 metric, and therefore, the dimension of the problem is vastly reduced. Several numerical examples, including porous media equation, nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation, aggregation diffusion equation, and Derrida-Lebowitz-Speer-Spohn equation, are provided. These examples demonstrate the simplicity and stableness of the proposed scheme.

preprint2016arXiv

A distribution-function-valued SPDE and its applications

In this paper we further study the stochastic partial differential equation first proposed by Xiong (2013). Under localized conditions on the coefficients we show that the solution is in fact distribution-function-valued and we establish the pathwise uniqueness of the solution. As applications we obtain the well-posedness of the martingale problems for two classes of measure-valued diffusions: interacting super-Brownian motions and interacting Fleming-Viot processes. Properties of the two superprocesses such as the existence of density fields and the extinction behaviors are also studied.

preprint2016arXiv

A Novel Regularized Principal Graph Learning Framework on Explicit Graph Representation

Many scientific datasets are of high dimension, and the analysis usually requires visual manipulation by retaining the most important structures of data. Principal curve is a widely used approach for this purpose. However, many existing methods work only for data with structures that are not self-intersected, which is quite restrictive for real applications. A few methods can overcome the above problem, but they either require complicated human-made rules for a specific task with lack of convergence guarantee and adaption flexibility to different tasks, or cannot obtain explicit structures of data. To address these issues, we develop a new regularized principal graph learning framework that captures the local information of the underlying graph structure based on reversed graph embedding. As showcases, models that can learn a spanning tree or a weighted undirected $\ell_1$ graph are proposed, and a new learning algorithm is developed that learns a set of principal points and a graph structure from data, simultaneously. The new algorithm is simple with guaranteed convergence. We then extend the proposed framework to deal with large-scale data. Experimental results on various synthetic and six real world datasets show that the proposed method compares favorably with baselines and can uncover the underlying structure correctly.

preprint2016arXiv

Assessing Material Qualities and Efficiency Limits of III-V on Silicon Solar Cells Using External Radiative Efficiency

The paper presents a quantitative approach to the investigation and comparison of the material qualities of III-V on silicon (III-V/Si) solar cells by using external radiative efficiencies. We use this analysis to predict the limiting efficiencies and evaluate the criteria of material quality in order to achieve high efficiency III-V/Si solar cells. This result yields several implications for the design of high efficiency III-V/Si solar cells.

preprint2016arXiv

Bilevel Polynomial Programs and Semidefinite Relaxation Methods

A bilevel program is an optimization problem whose constraints involve another optimization problem. This paper studies bilevel polynomial programs (BPPs), i.e., all the functions are polynomials. We reformulate BPPs equivalently as semi-infinite polynomial programs (SIPPs), using Fritz John conditions and Jacobian representations. Combining the exchange technique and Lasserre type semidefinite relaxations, we propose numerical methods for solving both simple and general BPPs. For simple BPPs, we prove the convergence to global optimal solutions. Numerical experiments are presented to show the efficiency of proposed algorithms.

preprint2016arXiv

Central limit theorems for supercritical superprocesses with immigration

In this paper, we establish a central limit theorem for a large class of general supercritical superprocesses with immigration with spatially dependent branching mechanisms satisfying a second moment condition. This central limit theorem extends and generalizes the results obtained by Ren, Song and Zhang[2015]. We first give law of large numbers for supercritical superprocesses with immigration since there is few convergence result on immigration superprocesses, then based on these results, we establish the central limit theorem.

preprint2016arXiv

Cross-model convolutional neural network for multiple modality data representation

A novel data representation method of convolutional neural net- work (CNN) is proposed in this paper to represent data of different modalities. We learn a CNN model for the data of each modality to map the data of differ- ent modalities to a common space, and regularize the new representations in the common space by a cross-model relevance matrix. We further impose that the class label of data points can also be predicted from the CNN representa- tions in the common space. The learning problem is modeled as a minimiza- tion problem, which is solved by an augmented Lagrange method (ALM) with updating rules of Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The experiments over benchmark of sequence data of multiple modalities show its advantage.

preprint2016arXiv

Detection of Single Nanoparticles Using the Dissipative Interaction in a High-Q Microcavity

Ultrasensitive optical detection of nanometer-scaled particles is highly desirable for applications in early-stage diagnosis of human diseases, environmental monitoring, and homeland security, but remains extremely difficult due to ultralow polarizabilities of small-sized, low-index particles. Optical whispering-gallery-mode microcavities, which can enhance significantly the light-matter interaction, have emerged as promising platforms for label-free detection of nanoscale objects. Different from the conventional whispering-gallery-mode sensing relying on the reactive (i.e., dispersive) interaction, here we propose and demonstrate to detect single lossy nanoparticles using the dissipative interaction in a high-$Q$ toroidal microcavity. In the experiment, detection of single gold nanorods in an aqueous environment is realized by monitoring simultaneously the linewidth change and shift of the cavity mode. The experimental result falls within the theoretical prediction. Remarkably, the reactive and dissipative sensing methods are evaluated by setting the probe wavelength on and off the surface plasmon resonance to tune the absorption of nanorods, which demonstrates clearly the great potential of the dissipative sensing method to detect lossy nanoparticles. Future applications could also combine the dissipative and reactive sensing methods, which may provide better characterizations of nanoparticles.

preprint2016arXiv

Discrimination of neutrons and γ-rays in liquid scintillator based on Elman neural network

In this work, a new neutron and γ(n/γ) discrimination method based on an Elman Neural Network (ENN) is proposed to improve the discrimination performance of liquid scintillator (LS) detectors. Neutron and γ data were acquired from an EJ-335 LS detector, which was exposed in a 241Am-9Be radiation field. Neutron and γ events were discriminated using two methods of artificial neural network including the ENN and a typical Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) as a control. The results show that the two methods have different n/γ discrimination performances. Compared to the BPNN, the ENN provides an improved of Figure of Merit (FOM) in n/γ discrimination. The FOM increases from 0.907 {\pm} 0.034 to 0.953 {\pm} 0.037 by using the new method of the ENN. The proposed n/γ discrimination method based on ENN provides a new choice of pulse shape discrimination in neutron detection.

preprint2016arXiv

Forward Reachable Sets: Analytically derived properties of connected components for dynamic networks

Formal analysis of the emergent structural properties of dynamic networks is largely uncharted territory. We focus here on the properties of forward reachable sets (FRS) as a function of the underlying degree distribution and edge duration. FRS are defined as the set of nodes that can be reached from an initial seed via a path of temporally ordered edges; a natural extension of connected component measures to dynamic networks. Working in a stochastic framework, we derive closed-form expressions for the mean and variance of the exponential growth rate of the FRS for temporal networks with both edge and node dynamics. For networks with node dynamics, we calculate thresholds for the growth of the FRS. The effects of finite population size are explored via simulation and approximation. We examine how these properties vary by edge duration and different cross-sectional degree distributions that characterize a range of scientifically interesting normative outcomes (Poisson and Bernoulli). The size of the forward reachable set gives an upper bound for the epidemic size in disease transmission network models, relating this work to epidemic modeling (Ferguson 2000, Eames 2004).

preprint2016arXiv

Joint Learning of Siamese CNNs and Temporally Constrained Metrics for Tracklet Association

In this paper, we study the challenging problem of multi-object tracking in a complex scene captured by a single camera. Different from the existing tracklet association-based tracking methods, we propose a novel and efficient way to obtain discriminative appearance-based tracklet affinity models. Our proposed method jointly learns the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and temporally constrained metrics. In our method, a Siamese convolutional neural network (CNN) is first pre-trained on the auxiliary data. Then the Siamese CNN and temporally constrained metrics are jointly learned online to construct the appearance-based tracklet affinity models. The proposed method can jointly learn the hierarchical deep features and temporally constrained segment-wise metrics under a unified framework. For reliable association between tracklets, a novel loss function incorporating temporally constrained multi-task learning mechanism is proposed. By employing the proposed method, tracklet association can be accomplished even in challenging situations. Moreover, a new dataset with 40 fully annotated sequences is created to facilitate the tracking evaluation. Experimental results on five public datasets and the new large-scale dataset show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in multi-object tracking.

preprint2016arXiv

Multi-objective Compositions for Collision-Free Connectivity Maintenance in Teams of Mobile Robots

Compositional barrier functions are proposed in this paper to systematically compose multiple objectives for teams of mobile robots. The objectives are first encoded as barrier functions, and then composed using AND and OR logical operators. The advantage of this approach is that compositional barrier functions can provably guarantee the simultaneous satisfaction of all composed objectives. The compositional barrier functions are applied to the example of ensuring collision avoidance and static/dynamical graph connectivity of teams of mobile robots. The resulting composite safety and connectivity barrier certificates are verified experimentally on a team of four mobile robots.

preprint2016arXiv

Positivity-preserving and asymptotic preserving method for 2D Keller-Segal equations

We propose a semi-discrete scheme for 2D Keller-Segel equations based on a symmetrization reformation, which is equivalent to the convex splitting method and is free of any nonlinear solver. We show that, this new scheme is unconditionally stable as long as the initial condition does not exceed certain threshold, and it asymptotically preserves the quasi-static limit in the transient regime. Furthermore, we prove that the fully discrete scheme is conservative and positivity preserving, which makes it ideal for simulations. The analogical schemes for the radial symmetric cases and the subcritical degenerate cases are also presented and analyzed. With extensive numerical tests, we verify the claimed properties of the methods and demonstrate their superiority in various challenging applications.

preprint2016arXiv

Probabilistic Dimensionality Reduction via Structure Learning

We propose a novel probabilistic dimensionality reduction framework that can naturally integrate the generative model and the locality information of data. Based on this framework, we present a new model, which is able to learn a smooth skeleton of embedding points in a low-dimensional space from high-dimensional noisy data. The formulation of the new model can be equivalently interpreted as two coupled learning problem, i.e., structure learning and the learning of projection matrix. This interpretation motivates the learning of the embedding points that can directly form an explicit graph structure. We develop a new method to learn the embedding points that form a spanning tree, which is further extended to obtain a discriminative and compact feature representation for clustering problems. Unlike traditional clustering methods, we assume that centers of clusters should be close to each other if they are connected in a learned graph, and other cluster centers should be distant. This can greatly facilitate data visualization and scientific discovery in downstream analysis. Extensive experiments are performed that demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to obtain discriminative feature representations, and correctly recover the intrinsic structures of various real-world datasets.

preprint2016arXiv

Quantum walks accompanied by spin flipping in one-dimensional optical lattices

We investigate continuous-time quantum walks of two fermionic atoms loaded in one-dimensional optical lattices with on-site interaction and subjected to a Zeeman field. The quantum walks are accompanied by spin-flipping processes. We calculate the time-dependent density distributions of the two fermions with opposite spins which are initially positioned on the center site by means of exact numerical method. Besides the usual fast linear expansion behavior, we find an interesting spin-flipping induced localization in the time-evolution of density distributions. We show that the fast linear expansion behavior could be restored by simply ramping on the Zeeman field or further increasing the spin-flipping strength. The intrinsic origin of this exotic phenomenon is attributed to the emergence of a flat band in the single particle spectrum of the system. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of on-site interaction on the dynamics of the quantum walkers. The two-particle correlations are calculated and signal of localization is also shown therein. A simple potential experimental application of this interesting phenomenon is proposed.

preprint2016arXiv

Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.

preprint2016arXiv

Safety Barrier Certificates for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

This paper presents a formal framework for collision avoidance in multi-robot systems, wherein an existing controller is modified in a minimally invasive fashion to ensure safety. We build this framework through the use of control barrier functions (CBFs) which guarantee forward invariance of a safe set; these yield safety barrier certificates in the context of heterogeneous robot dynamics subject to acceleration bounds. Moreover, safety barrier certificates are extended to a distributed control framework, wherein neighboring agent dynamics are unknown, through local parameter identification. The end result is an optimization-based controller that formally guarantees collision free behavior in heterogeneous multi-agent systems by minimally modifying the desired controller via safety barrier constraints. This formal result is verified in simulation on a multi-robot system consisting of both cumbersome and agile robots, is demonstrated experimentally on a system with a Magellan Pro robot and three Khepera III robots.

preprint2016arXiv

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions.

preprint2016arXiv

Statistics of Chaotic Resonances in an Optical Microcavity

Distributions of eigenmodes are widely concerned in both bounded and open systems. In the realm of chaos, counting resonances can characterize the underlying dynamics (regular vs. chaotic), and is often instrumental to identify classical-to-quantum correspondence. Here, we study, both theoretically and experimentally, the statistics of chaotic resonances in an optical microcavity with a mixed phase space of both regular and chaotic dynamics. Information on the number of chaotic modes is extracted by counting regular modes, which couple to the former via dynamical tunneling. The experimental data are in agreement with a known semiclassical prediction for the dependence of the number of chaotic resonances on the number of open channels, while they deviate significantly from a purely random-matrix-theory-based treatment, in general. We ascribe this result to the ballistic decay of the rays, which occurs within Ehrenfest time, and importantly, within the timescale of transient chaos. The present approach may provide a general tool for the statistical analysis of chaotic resonances in open systems.

preprint2016arXiv

Strongly Modulated Ambipolar Characteristics of Few-layer Black Phosphorus in Oxygen

Two-dimensional black phosphorus has been configured as field-effect transistors, showing an intrinsic symmetric ambipolar transport characteristic. Here, we demonstrate the strongly modulated ambipolar characteristics of few-layer black phosphorus in oxygen. Pure oxygen exposure can dramatically decrease the electron mobility of black phosphorus without degrading the hole transport. The transport characteristics can be nearly recovered upon annealing in Argon. This reveals that oxygen molecules are physisorbed on black phosphorus. In contrast, oxygen exposure upon light illumination exhibits a significant attenuation for both electron and hole transport, originating from the photoactivated oxidation of black phosphorus, which is corroborated by in situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy characterization. Our findings clarify the predominant role of oxygen in modulating ambipolar characteristics of black phosphorus, thereby providing deeper insight to the design of black phosphorus based complementary electronics.

preprint2016arXiv

The Existence of Topological Edge States in Honeycomb Plasmonic Lattices

In this paper, we investigate the band properties of 2D honeycomb plasmonic lattices consisting of metallic nanoparticles. By means of the coupled dipole method and quasi-static approximation, we theoretically analyze the band structures stemming from near-field interaction of localized surface plasmon polaritons for both the infinite lattice and ribbons. Naturally, the interaction of point dipoles decouples into independent out-of-plane and in-plane polarizations. For the out-of-plane modes, both the bulk spectrum and the range of the momentum $k_{\parallel}$ where edge states exist in ribbons are similar to the electronic bands in graphene. Nevertheless, the in-plane polarized modes show significant differences, which do not only possess additional non-flat edge states in ribbons, but also have different distributions of the flat edge states in reciprocal space. For in-plane polarized modes, we derived the bulk-edge correspondence, namely, the relation between the number of flat edge states at a fixed $k_\parallel$, Zak phases of the bulk bands and the winding number associated with the bulk hamiltonian, and verified it through four typical ribbon boundaries, i.e. zigzag, bearded zigzag, armchair, and bearded armchair. Our approach gives a new topological understanding of edge states in such plasmonic systems, and may also apply to other 2D "vector wave" systems.

preprint2016arXiv

The Robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed

This paper describes the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-robot research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium and discusses the considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built into the system already at the design phase without overly constraining what coordinated control programs users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.

preprint2016arXiv

Tracklet Association by Online Target-Specific Metric Learning and Coherent Dynamics Estimation

In this paper, we present a novel method based on online target-specific metric learning and coherent dynamics estimation for tracklet (track fragment) association by network flow optimization in long-term multi-person tracking. Our proposed framework aims to exploit appearance and motion cues to prevent identity switches during tracking and to recover missed detections. Furthermore, target-specific metrics (appearance cue) and motion dynamics (motion cue) are proposed to be learned and estimated online, i.e. during the tracking process. Our approach is effective even when such cues fail to identify or follow the target due to occlusions or object-to-object interactions. We also propose to learn the weights of these two tracking cues to handle the difficult situations, such as severe occlusions and object-to-object interactions effectively. Our method has been validated on several public datasets and the experimental results show that it outperforms several state-of-the-art tracking methods.

preprint2015arXiv

Deep Learning Algorithms with Applications to Video Analytics for A Smart City: A Survey

Deep learning has recently achieved very promising results in a wide range of areas such as computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing. It aims to learn hierarchical representations of data by using deep architecture models. In a smart city, a lot of data (e.g. videos captured from many distributed sensors) need to be automatically processed and analyzed. In this paper, we review the deep learning algorithms applied to video analytics of smart city in terms of different research topics: object detection, object tracking, face recognition, image classification and scene labeling.

preprint2015arXiv

Efficient Spectrum Management Exploiting D2D Communication in 5G Systems

In the future standardization of the 5G networks, in Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release 13 and beyond, Device-to-Device communications (D2D) is recognized as one of the key technologies that will support the 5G architecture. In fact, D2D can be exploited for different proximity-based services (ProSe) where the users discover their neighbors and benefit form different services like social applications, advertisement, public safety, and warning messages. In such a scenario, the aim is to manage in a proper way the radio spectrum and the energy consumption to provide high Quality of Experience (QoE) and better Quality of Services (QoS). To reach this goal, in this paper we propose a novel D2D-based uploading scheme in order to decrease the amount of radio resources needed to upload to the eNodeB a certain multimedia content. As a further improvement, the proposed scheme enhances the energy consumption of the users in the network, without affects the content uploading time. The obtained results show that our scheme achieves a gain of about 35\% in term of mean radio resources used with respect to the standard LTE cellular approach. In addition, it is also 40 times more efficient in terms of energy consumption needed to upload the multimedia content.

preprint2015arXiv

Mechanism and modulation of terahertz generation from a semimetal - graphite

Semi-metals might offer a stronger interaction and a better confinement for terahertz wave than semiconductors, while preserve tunability. Particularly, graphene-based materials are envisioned as terahertz modulators, filters and ultra-broadband sources. However, the understanding of terahertz generation from those materials is still not clear, thus limits us recognizing the potential and improving device performances. Graphite, the mother material of graphene and a typical bulk semi-metal, is a good system to study semi-metals and graphene-based materials. Here we experimentally modulate and maximize the terahertz signal from graphite surface, thus reveal the mechanism - surface field driving photon induced carriers into transient current to radiate terahertz wave. We also discuss the differences between graphite and semiconductors; particularly graphite shows no temperature dependency from room temperature to 80C. Above knowledge will help us understand terahertz generations, achieve maximum output and electric modulation, in semi-metal or graphene based devices.

preprint2015arXiv

Metal-Silicene Interaction Studied by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Ag atoms have been deposited on 3x3 silicene and R3xR3 silicene films by molecular beam epitaxy method in ultrahigh vacuum. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, we found that Ag atoms do not form chemical bonds with both 3x3 silicene and R3xR3 silicene films,which is due to chemically inert surface of silicene. On 3x3 silicene films, Ag atoms mostly form into stable flat top Ag islands. In contrast, Ag atoms form nanoclusters and glide on silicene films, suggesting more inert nature. Raman spectroscopy suggests that there is more sp2 hybridization in R3xR3 than in R7xR7/3x3silicene films

preprint2015arXiv

Observation of van Hove Singularities in Twisted Silicene Multilayers

Interlayer interactions perturb the electronic structure of two-dimensional materials and lead to new physical phenomena, such as van Hove singularities and Hofstadter's butterfly pattern. Silicene, the recently discovered two-dimensional form of silicon, is quite unique, in that silicon atoms adopt competing <i>sp</i><sup>2</sup> and <i>sp</i><sup>3</sup> hybridization states leading to a low-buckled structure promising relatively strong interlayer interaction. In multilayer silicene, the stacking order provides an important yet rarely explored degree of freedom for tuning its electronic structures through manipulating interlayer coupling. Here, we report the emergence of van Hove singularities in the multilayer silicene created by an interlayer rotation. We demonstrate that even a large-angle rotation (> 20<sup>o</sup>) between stacked silicene layers can generate a Moire pattern and van Hove singularities due to the strong interlayer coupling in multilayer silicene. Our study suggests an intriguing method for expanding the tunability of the electronic structure for electronic applications in this two-dimensional material.

preprint2015arXiv

Video Tracking Using Learned Hierarchical Features

In this paper, we propose an approach to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking. First, we offline learn features robust to diverse motion patterns from auxiliary video sequences. The hierarchical features are learned via a two-layer convolutional neural network. Embedding the temporal slowness constraint in the stacked architecture makes the learned features robust to complicated motion transformations, which is important for visual object tracking. Then, given a target video sequence, we propose a domain adaptation module to online adapt the pre-learned features according to the specific target object. The adaptation is conducted in both layers of the deep feature learning module so as to include appearance information of the specific target object. As a result, the learned hierarchical features can be robust to both complicated motion transformations and appearance changes of target objects. We integrate our feature learning algorithm into three tracking methods. Experimental results demonstrate that significant improvement can be achieved using our learned hierarchical features, especially on video sequences with complicated motion transformations.

preprint2014arXiv

Estimation and model selection in generalized additive partial linear models for correlated data with diverging number of covariates

We propose generalized additive partial linear models for complex data which allow one to capture nonlinear patterns of some covariates, in the presence of linear components. The proposed method improves estimation efficiency and increases statistical power for correlated data through incorporating the correlation information. A unique feature of the proposed method is its capability of handling model selection in cases where it is difficult to specify the likelihood function. We derive the quadratic inference function-based estimators for the linear coefficients and the nonparametric functions when the dimension of covariates diverges, and establish asymptotic normality for the linear coefficient estimators and the rates of convergence for the nonparametric functions estimators for both finite and high-dimensional cases. The proposed method and theoretical development are quite challenging since the numbers of linear covariates and nonlinear components both increase as the sample size increases. We also propose a doubly penalized procedure for variable selection which can simultaneously identify nonzero linear and nonparametric components, and which has an asymptotic oracle property. Extensive Monte Carlo studies have been conducted and show that the proposed procedure works effectively even with moderate sample sizes. A pharmacokinetics study on renal cancer data is illustrated using the proposed method.

preprint2014arXiv

Graphene, a material for high temperature devices; intrinsic carrier density, carrier drift velocity, and lattice energy

Heat has always been a killing matter for traditional semiconductor machines. The underlining physical reason is that the intrinsic carrier density of a device made from a traditional semiconductor material increases very fast with a rising temperature. Once reaching a temperature, the density surpasses the chemical doping or gating effect, any p-n junction or transistor made from the semiconductor will fail to function. Here, we measure the intrinsic Fermi level (|E_F|=2.93k_B*T) or intrinsic carrier density (n_in=3.87*10^6 cm^-2 K^-2*T^2), carrier drift velocity, and G mode phonon energy of graphene devices and their temperature dependencies up to 2400 K. Our results show intrinsic carrier density of graphene is an order of magnitude less sensitive to temperature than those of Si or Ge, and reveal the great potentials of graphene as a material for high temperature devices. We also observe a linear decline of saturation drift velocity with increasing temperature, and identify the temperature coefficients of the intrinsic G mode phonon energy. Above knowledge is vital in understanding the physical phenomena of graphene under high power or high temperature.

preprint2014arXiv

Matching Pursuit LASSO Part II: Applications and Sparse Recovery over Batch Signals

Matching Pursuit LASSIn Part I \cite{TanPMLPart1}, a Matching Pursuit LASSO ({MPL}) algorithm has been presented for solving large-scale sparse recovery (SR) problems. In this paper, we present a subspace search to further improve the performance of MPL, and then continue to address another major challenge of SR -- batch SR with many signals, a consideration which is absent from most of previous $\ell_1$-norm methods. As a result, a batch-mode {MPL} is developed to vastly speed up sparse recovery of many signals simultaneously. Comprehensive numerical experiments on compressive sensing and face recognition tasks demonstrate the superior performance of MPL and BMPL over other methods considered in this paper, in terms of sparse recovery ability and efficiency. In particular, BMPL is up to 400 times faster than existing $\ell_1$-norm methods considered to be state-of-the-art.O Part II: Applications and Sparse Recovery over Batch Signals

preprint2014arXiv

Metamaterial Broadband Angular Selectivity

We demonstrate how broadband angular selectivity can be achieved with stacks of one-dimensionally periodic photonic crystals, each consisting of alternating isotropic layers and effective anisotropic layers, where each effective anisotropic layer is constructed from a multilayered metamaterial. We show that by simply changing the structure of the metamaterials, the selective angle can be tuned to a broad range of angles; and, by increasing the number of stacks, the angular transmission window can be made as narrow as desired. As a proof of principle, we realize the idea experimentally in the microwave regime. The angular selectivity and tunability we report here can have various applications such as in directional control of electromagnetic emitters and detectors.

preprint2014arXiv

On Optimizing Energy Efficiency in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

Multi-radio multi-channel (MR-MC) networks contribute significant enhancement in the network throughput by exploiting multiple radio interfaces and non-overlapping channels. While throughput optimization is one of the main targets in allocating resource in MR-MC networks, recently, the network energy efficiency is becoming a more and more important concern. Although turning on more radios and exploiting more channels for communication is always beneficial to network capacity, they may not be necessarily desirable from an energy efficiency perspective. The relationship between these two often conflicting objectives has not been well-studied in many existing works. In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimizing energy efficiency under full capacity operation in MR-MC networks and analyze the optimal choices of numbers of radios and channels. We provide detailed problem formulation and solution procedures. In particular, for homogeneous commodity networks, we derive a theoretical upper bound of the optimal energy efficiency and analyze the conditions under which such optimality can be achieved. Numerical results demonstrate that the achieved optimal energy efficiency is close to the theoretical upper bound.

preprint2014arXiv

Semidefinite Relaxations for Best Rank-1 Tensor Approximations

This paper studies the problem of finding best rank-1 approximations for both symmetric and nonsymmetric tensors. For symmetric tensors, this is equivalent to optimizing homogeneous polynomials over unit spheres; for nonsymmetric tensors, this is equivalent to optimizing multi-quadratic forms over multi-spheres. We propose semidefinite relaxations, based on sum of squares representations, to solve these polynomial optimization problems. Their properties and structures are studied. In applications, the resulting semidefinite programs are often large scale. The recent Newton-CG augmented Lagrangian method by Zhao, Sun and Toh is suitable for solving these semidefinite relaxations. Extensive numerical experiments are presented to show that this approach is practical in getting best rank-1 approximations.

preprint2014arXiv

Study of the material photon and electron background and the liquid argon detector veto efficiency of the CDEX-10 experiment

The China Dark Matter Experiment (CDEX) is located at the China Jinping underground laboratory (CJPL) and aims to directly detect the WIMP flux with high sensitivity in the low mass region. Here we present a study of the predicted photon and electron backgrounds including the background contribution of the structure materials of the germanium detector, the passive shielding materials, and the intrinsic radioactivity of the liquid argon that serves as an anti-Compton active shielding detector. A detailed geometry is modeled and the background contribution has been simulated based on the measured radioactivities of all possible components within the GEANT4 program. Then the photon and electron background level in the energy region of interest (<10^-2 events kg-1 day-1 keV-1 (cpkkd)) is predicted based on Monte Carlo simulations. The simulated result is consistent with the design goal of CDEX-10 experiment, 0.1 cpkkd, which shows that the active and passive shield design of CDEX-10 is effective and feasible.

preprint2013arXiv

An asymptotic-preserving scheme for the semiconductor Boltzmann equation toward the energy-transport limit

We design an asymptotic-preserving scheme for the semiconductor Boltzmann equation which leads to an energy-transport system for electron mass and internal energy as mean free path goes to zero. To overcome the stiffness induced by the convection terms, we adopt an even-odd decomposition to formulate the equation into a diffusive relaxation system. New difficulty arises in the two-scale stiff collision terms, whereas the simple BGK penalization does not work well to drive the solution to the correct limit. We propose a clever variant of it by introducing a threshold on the stiffer collision term such that the evolution of the solution resembles a Hilbert expansion at the continuous level. Formal asymptotic analysis and numerical results are presented to illustrate the efficiency and accuracy of the new scheme.

preprint2013arXiv

Approximate Bayesian Probabilistic-Data-Association-Aided Iterative Detection for MIMO Systems Using Arbitrary M-ary Modulation

In this paper, the issue of designing an iterative-detection-and-decoding (IDD)-aided receiver, relying on the low-complexity probabilistic data association (PDA) method, is addressed for turbo-coded multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems using general M-ary modulations. We demonstrate that the classic candidate-search-aided bit-based extrinsic log-likelihood ratio (LLR) calculation method is not applicable to the family of PDA-based detectors. Additionally, we reveal that, in contrast to the interpretation in the existing literature, the output symbol probabilities of existing PDA algorithms are not the true a posteriori probabilities (APPs) but, rather, the normalized symbol likelihoods. Therefore, the classic relationship, where the extrinsic LLRs are given by subtracting the a priori LLRs from the a posteriori LLRs, does not hold for the existing PDA-based detectors. Motivated by these revelations, we conceive a new approximate Bayesian-theorem-based logarithmic-domain PDA (AB-Log-PDA) method and unveil the technique of calculating bit-based extrinsic LLRs for the AB-Log-PDA, which facilitates the employment of the AB-Log-PDA in a simplified IDD receiver structure. Additionally, we demonstrate that we may dispense with inner iterations within the AB-Log-PDA in the context of IDD receivers. Our complexity analysis and numerical results recorded for Nakagami-m fading channels demonstrate that the proposed AB-Log-PDA-based IDD scheme is capable of achieving a performance comparable with that of the optimal maximum a posteriori (MAP)-detector-based IDD receiver, while imposing significantly lower computational complexity in the scenarios considered.

preprint2013arXiv

Gate-tunable nearly total terahertz absorption in graphene with resonant metal back reflector

The gate-tunable terahertz (THz) absorption of graphene layers with a resonant metal back reflector (RMBF) is theoretically investigated. We demonstrate that the THz absorption of graphene with RMBF can vary from nearly negligible to nearly total by tuning the external gate voltage. This peculiar nearly total THz absorption can be attributed to the Fabry-Perot cavity effect, which enhances the absorption and reduces the reflection of graphene. The absorption spectra of the graphene-RMBF structure can also be tailored in bandwidth and center frequency by changing the thickness and dielectric constant of the spacer layer.

preprint2013arXiv

Imaging Hydrogen Bond in Real Space

Hydrogen bond is often assumed to be a purely electrostatic interaction between a electron-deficient hydrogen atom and a region of high electron density. Here, for the first time, we directly image hydrogen bond in real space by room-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) with the assistance of resonant tunneling effect in double barrier mode. STM observations demonstrate that the C=O:HO hydrogen bonds lifted several angstrom meters above metal surfaces appear shuttle-like features with a significant contrast along the direction connected the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of a single hydrogen bond. The off-center location of the summit and the variance of the appearance height for the hydrogen bond with scanning bias reveal that there are certain hybridizations between the electron orbitals of the involved oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the C=O:HO hydrogen bond.

preprint2013arXiv

Modeling Based on Elman Wavelet Neural Network for Class-D Power Amplifiers

In Class-D Power Amplifiers (CDPAs), the power supply noise can intermodulate with the input signal, manifesting into power-supply induced intermodulation distortion (PS-IMD) and due to the memory effects of the system, there exist asymmetries in the PS-IMDs. In this paper, a new behavioral modeling based on the Elman Wavelet Neural Network (EWNN) is proposed to study the nonlinear distortion of the CDPAs. In EWNN model, the Morlet wavelet functions are employed as the activation function and there is a normalized operation in the hidden layer, the modification of the scale factor and translation factor in the wavelet functions are ignored to avoid the fluctuations of the error curves. When there are 30 neurons in the hidden layer, to achieve the same square sum error (SSE) $ε_{min}=10^{-3}$, EWNN needs 31 iteration steps, while the basic Elman neural network (BENN) model needs 86 steps. The Volterra-Laguerre model has 605 parameters to be estimated but still can't achieve the same magnitude accuracy of EWNN. Simulation results show that the proposed approach of EWNN model has fewer parameters and higher accuracy than the Volterra-Laguerre model and its convergence rate is much faster than the BENN model.

preprint2013arXiv

Quantum simulation of Kibble-Zurek mechanism with a semiconductor electron charge qubit

The Kibble-Zurek mechanism provides a description of the topological structure occurring in the symmetry breaking phase transitions, which may manifest as the cosmological strings in the early universe or vortex lines in the superfulid. A particularly intriguing analogy between Kibble-Zurek mechanism and a text book quantum phenomenon, Landau-Zener transition has been discovered, but is difficult to observe up to now. In recent years, there has been broad interest in quantum simulations using different well-controlled physical setups, in which full tunability allows access to unexplored parameter regimes. Here we demonstrate a proof-of-principle quantum simulation of Kibble-Zurek mechanism using a single electron charge qubit in double quantum dot, set to behave as Landau-Zener dynamics. We measure the qubit states as a function of driven pulse velocity and successfully reproduce Kibble-Zurek like dependence of topological defect density on the quench rate. The high-level controllability of semiconductor two-level system make it a platform to test the key elements of topological defect formation process and shed a new insight on the aspect of non-equilibrium phase transitions.

preprint2013arXiv

Semidefinite relaxations for semi-infinite polynomial programming

This paper studies how to solve semi-infinite polynomial programming (SIPP) problems by semidefinite relaxation method. We first introduce two SDP relaxation methods for solving polynomial optimization problems with finitely many constraints. Then we propose an exchange algorithm with SDP relaxations to solve SIPP problems with compact index set. At last, we extend the proposed method to SIPP problems with noncompact index set via homogenization. Numerical results show that the algorithm is efficient in practice.

preprint2013arXiv

Simultaneous variable selection and estimation in semiparametric modeling of longitudinal/clustered data

We consider the problem of simultaneous variable selection and estimation in additive, partially linear models for longitudinal/clustered data. We propose an estimation procedure via polynomial splines to estimate the nonparametric components and apply proper penalty functions to achieve sparsity in the linear part. Under reasonable conditions, we obtain the asymptotic normality of the estimators for the linear components and the consistency of the estimators for the nonparametric components. We further demonstrate that, with proper choice of the regularization parameter, the penalized estimators of the non-zero coefficients achieve the asymptotic oracle property. The finite sample behavior of the penalized estimators is evaluated with simulation studies and illustrated by a longitudinal CD4 cell count data set.

preprint2013arXiv

The CDEX-1 1 kg Point-Contact Germanium Detector for Low Mass Dark Matter Searches

The CDEX Collaboration has been established for direct detection of light dark matter particles, using ultra-low energy threshold p-type point-contact germanium detectors, in China JinPing underground Laboratory (CJPL). The first 1 kg point-contact germanium detector with a sub-keV energy threshold has been tested in a passive shielding system located in CJPL. The outputs from both the point-contact p+ electrode and the outside n+ electrode make it possible to scan the lower energy range of less than 1 keV and at the same time to detect the higher energy range up to 3 MeV. The outputs from both p+ and n+ electrode may also provide a more powerful method for signal discrimination for dark matter experiment. Some key parameters, including energy resolution, dead time, decay times of internal X-rays, and system stability, have been tested and measured. The results show that the 1 kg point-contact germanium detector, together with its shielding system and electronics, can run smoothly with good performances. This detector system will be deployed for dark matter search experiments.

preprint2012arXiv

Chaos-induced transparency in an ultrahigh-Q optical microcavity

We demonstrate experimentally a new form of induced transparency, i.e., chaos-induced transparency, in a slightly deformed microcavity which support both continuous chaotic modes and discrete regular modes with Q factors exceeding 3X?10^7. When excited by a focused laser beam, the induced transparency in the transmission spectrum originates from the destructive interference of two parallel optical pathways: (i) directly refractive excitation of the chaotic modes, and (ii) excitation of the ultra-high-Q regular mode via chaos-assisted dynamical tunneling mechanism coupling back to the chaotic modes. By controlling the focal position of the laser beam, the induced transparency experiences a highly tunable Fano-like asymmetric lineshape. The experimental results are modeled by a quantum scattering theory and show excellent agreement. This chaos-induced transparency is accompanied by extremely steep normal dispersion, and may open up new possibilities a dramatic slow light behavior and a significant enhancement of nonlinear interactions.

preprint2012arXiv

Fermi super-Tonks-Girardeau state for attractive Fermi gases in an optical lattice

We demonstrate that a kind of highly excited state of strongly attractive Hubbard model, named of Fermi super-Tonks-Girardeau state, can be realized in the spin-1/2 Fermi optical lattice system by a sudden switch of interaction from the strongly repulsive regime to the strongly attractive regime. In contrast to the ground state of the attractive Hubbard model, such a state is the lowest scattering state with no pairing between attractive fermions. With the aid of Bethe-ansatz method, we calculate energies of both the Fermi Tonks-Girardeau gas and the Fermi super-Tonks-Girardeau state of spin-1/2 ultracold fermions and show that both energies approach to the same limit as the strength of the interaction goes to infinity. By exactly solving the quench dynamics of the Hubbard model, we demonstrate that the Fermi super-Tonks-Girardeau state can be transferred from the initial repulsive ground state very efficiently. This allows the experimental study of properties of Fermi super-Tonks-Girardeau gas in optical lattices.

preprint2012arXiv

Interaction induced mergence of Dirac points in Non-Abelian optical lattices

We study the properties of an ultracold Fermi gas loaded in a square optical lattice and subjected to an external and classical non-Abelian gauge field. We calculate the energy spectrum of the system and show that the Dirac points in the energy spectrum will remain quite stable under onsite interaction of certain strength. Once the on-site interaction grows stronger than a critical value, the Dirac points will no longer be stable and merge into a single hybrid point. This mergence implies a quantum phase transition from a semimetallic phase to a band insulator. The on-site interaction between ultracold fermions could be conveniently controlled by Feshbach resonances in current experiments. We proposed that this remarkable interaction induced mergence of Dirac points may be observed in the ultracold fermi gas experiments.

preprint2012arXiv

Minimizing Rational Functions by Exact Jacobian SDP Relaxation Applicable to Finite Singularities

This paper considers the optimization problem of minimizing a rational function. We reformulate this problem as polynomial optimization by the technique of homogenization. These two problems are shown to be equivalent under some generic conditions. The exact Jacobian SDP relaxation method proposed by Nie is used to solve the resulting polynomial optimization. We also prove that the assumption of nonsingularity in Nie's method can be weakened as the finiteness of singularities. Some numerical examples are given to illustrate the efficiency of our method.

preprint2011arXiv

Downtrack response of differential reader for high density magnetic recording

The downtrack responses of a differential reader to various magnetic patterns have been investigated micromagnetically. The differential signals can well discriminate the "0" and "1" readback bits and the waveforms obtained resemble the counterparts for longitudinal media or for perpendicular media after differentiation. Pulse shapes are found Gaussian. With decreasing head media spacing, free layer thickness, and gap length, PW50 roughly linearly decreases and the maximum signal exponentially increases. These properties, together with small inter-symbol interference, are essential for future high density magnetic recording.

preprint2011arXiv

Estimation and variable selection for generalized additive partial linear models

We study generalized additive partial linear models, proposing the use of polynomial spline smoothing for estimation of nonparametric functions, and deriving quasi-likelihood based estimators for the linear parameters. We establish asymptotic normality for the estimators of the parametric components. The procedure avoids solving large systems of equations as in kernel-based procedures and thus results in gains in computational simplicity. We further develop a class of variable selection procedures for the linear parameters by employing a nonconcave penalized quasi-likelihood, which is shown to have an asymptotic oracle property. Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical example are presented for illustration.

preprint2011arXiv

Regularization Methods for SDP Relaxations in Large Scale Polynomial Optimization

We study how to solve semidefinite programming relaxations for large scale polynomial optimization. When interior-point methods are used, typically only small or moderately large problems could be solved. This paper studies regularization methods for solving polynomial optimization problems. We describe these methods for semidefinite optimization with block structures, and then apply them to solve large scale polynomial optimization problems. The performance is tested on various numerical examples. By regularization methods, significantly bigger problems could be solved on a regular computer, which is almost impossible by interior point methods.

preprint2011arXiv

Uniformly stable rectangular elements for fourth order elliptic singular perturbation problems

This paper analyzes rectangular finite element methods for fourth order elliptic singular perturbation problems. We show that the non-$C^0$ rectangular Morley element is uniformly convergent in the energy norm with respect to the perturbation parameter. We also propose a $C^0$ extended high order rectangular Morley element and prove the uniform convergence. Finally, we do some numerical experiments to confirm the theoretical results.

preprint2010arXiv

Graphite Nanoeraser

We present here a method for cleaning intermediate-size (5~50nm) contamination from highly oriented pyrolytic graphite. Electron beam deposition causes a continuous increase of carbonaceous material on graphene and graphite surfaces, which is difficult to remove by conventional techniques. Direct mechanical wiping using a graphite nanoeraser is observed to drastically reduce the amount of contamination. After the mechanical removal of contamination, the graphite surfaces were able to self-retract after shearing, indicating that van der Waals contact bonding is restored. Since contact bonding provides an indication of a level of cleanliness normally only attainable in a high-quality clean-room, we discuss potential applications in preparation of ultraclean surfaces.

preprint2010arXiv

Preparation of stable excited states in an optical lattice via sudden quantum quench

We study how stable excited many-body states of the Bose-Hubbard model, including both the gas-like state for strongly attractive bosons and bound cluster state for repulsive bosons, can be produced with cold bosonic atoms in an one-dimensional optical lattice. Starting from the initial ground states of strongly interacting bosonic systems, we can achieve stable excited states of the systems with opposite interaction strength by suddenly switching the interaction to the opposite limit. By exactly solving dynamics of the Bose-Hubbard model, we demonstrate that the produced excited state can be a very stable dynamic state. This allows the experimental study of excited state properties of ultracold atoms system in optical lattices.

preprint2010arXiv

Spectroscopy of nickel monosulfide in 450 - 560 nm by laser-induced fluorescence and dispersed fluorescence techniques

Laser-induced fluorescence excitation spectrum of NiS in the wavelength range of 450 - 560 nm has been recorded and analyzed. Thirty-five vibronic transition bands have been observed, 29 of which are reported for the first time. Rotational analyses indicated that all the observed bands can be attributable to the [Omega = 0] - X^3 Sigma^- transitions of ^58 NiS (and ^60 NiS). Twenty-five bands have been suggested to be grouped into four vibrational progressions. Furthermore, through dispersed fluorescence measurements we directly obtained the energies for the ground-state vibrational levels up to v" = 6 as well as the vibrational frequency and the anharmonicity constant for the ground state of ^58 NiS.

preprint2010arXiv

The B-X and C-X band systems of CuCl revisited: A laser-induced fluorescence study in 465-490 nm

We have reinvestigated the B-X and C-X band systems of CuCl by recording the laser-induced fluorescence excitation spectra in 20400-21800 cm^{-1}. The rotational analyses in Hund's case (a) revealed unambiguously a singlet-to-singlet transition nature. The measured lifetimes of a few microseconds seem too long for singlets and too short for triplets, which we think is actually in favor of a picture of singlet ({1}^Pi and {1}^Sigma^{+})-triplet ({3}^Pi_{0,1,2}) mixed states in the B and C band systems of CuCl. The two excited states we observed in our spectra may be the singlets that have been strongly "contaminated" by their triplet neighbors.