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Published work

175 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

See Tomorrow, Act Today: Foresight-Driven Autonomous Driving

Current end-to-end autonomous driving planners are fundamentally reactive: they condition on historical and present observations to predict future actions. We argue that autonomous agents should instead imagine future scenes before deciding, just as human drivers mentally simulate ``what will happen next" before acting. We introduce ForeSight, a foundation world model centric planning framework that reframes autonomous driving as anticipatory decision-making. Rather than treating world models as auxiliary components, ForeSight makes future scene imagination the primary driver of action prediction. Our approach operates in two stages: (1) generating plausible future visual worlds via a pretrained world model, and (2) planning actions conditioned on these imagined futures. This paradigm shift from ``what should I do now?" to ``what will happen, and how should I respond?" enables genuinely anticipatory rather than reactive planning. By grounding decisions in anticipated contexts rather than present observations alone, ForeSight navigates dynamic, interactive scenarios more effectively. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM and nuScenes demonstrate that explicit future imagination significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art alternatives, validating our foresight-driven approach.

preprint2025arXiv

Observation of the $γ$-ray Emission from W43 with LHAASO

In this paper, we report the detection of the very-high-energy (VHE, $ 100{\rm\ GeV} < E < 100{\rm\ TeV} $) and ultra-high-energy (UHE, $E > 100\rm\ TeV$) $γ$-ray emissions from the direction of the young star-forming region W43, observed by the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observation (LHAASO). The extended $γ$-ray source was detected with a significance of ${\sim}16\,σ$ by KM2A and ${\sim}17\,σ$ by WCDA, respectively. The angular extension of this $γ$-ray source is about 0.5 degrees, corresponding to a physical size of about 50 pc. We discuss the origin of the $γ$-ray emission and possible cosmic ray acceleration in the W43 region using multi-wavelength data. Our findings suggest that W43 is likely another young star cluster capable of accelerating cosmic rays (CRs) to at least several hundred TeV.

preprint2025arXiv

Study of Ultra-High-Energy Gamma-Ray Source 1LHAASO J0056+6346u and Its Possible Origins

We report a dedicated study of the newly discovered extended UHE $γ$-ray source 1LHAASO J0056+6346u. Analyzing 979 days of LHAASO-WCDA data and 1389 days of LHAASO-KM2A data, we observed a significant excess of $γ$-ray events with both WCDA and KM2A. Assuming a point power-law source with a fixed spectral index, the significance maps reveal excesses of ${\sim}12.65\,σ$, ${\sim}22.18\,σ$, and ${\sim}10.24\,σ$ in the energy ranges of 1--25 TeV, 25--100 TeV, and $> 100$ TeV, respectively. We use a 3D likelihood algorithm to derive the morphological and spectral parameters, and the source is detected with significances of $12.65\,σ$ by WCDA and $25.27\,σ$ by KM2A. The best-fit positions derived from WCDA and KM2A data are (R.A. = $13.96^\circ\pm0.09^\circ$, Decl. = $63.92^\circ\pm0.05^\circ$) and (R.A. = $14.00^\circ\pm0.05^\circ$, Decl. = $63.79^\circ\pm0.02^\circ$), respectively. The angular size ($r_{39}$) of 1LHAASO J0056+6346u is $0.34^\circ\pm0.04^\circ$ at 1--25 TeV and $0.24^\circ\pm0.02^\circ$ at $> 25$ TeV. The differential flux of this UHE $γ$-ray source can be described by an exponential cutoff power-law function: $(2.67\pm0.25) \times 10^{-15} (E/20\,\text{TeV})^{-1.97\pm0.10} e^{-E/(55.1\pm7.2)\,\text{TeV}} \,\text{TeV}^{-1}\,\text{cm}^{-2}\,\text{s}^{-1}$. To explore potential sources of $γ$-ray emission, we investigated the gas distribution around 1LHAASO J0056+6346u. 1LHAASO J0056+6346u is likely to be a TeV PWN powered by an unknown pulsar, which would naturally explain both its spatial and spectral properties. Another explanation is that this UHE $γ$-ray source might be associated with gas content illuminated by a nearby CR accelerator, possibly the SNR candidate G124.0+1.4.

preprint2025arXiv

Ultrahigh-Energy Gamma-ray Emission Associated with Black Hole-Jet Systems

Black holes (BH), one of the most intriguing objects in the universe, can manifest themselves through electromagnetic radiation initiated by the accretion flow. Some stellar-mass BHs drive relativistic jets when accreting matter from their companion stars, forming microquasars. Non-thermal emission from the radio to tera-electronvolt (TeV) gamma-ray band has been observed from microquasars, indicating the acceleration of relativistic particles. Here we report detection of four microquasars (SS 433, V4641 Sgr, GRS 1915+105, MAXI J1820+070) of spectrum extending to the ultrahigh-energy (UHE; photon energy $E>100$ TeV) band and one microquasar (Cygnus X-1) of spectrum approaching 100 TeV, using the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). Notably, the total emission associated with SS 433 cannot be interpreted with a single leptonic component. In the UHE band, its emission is in spatial coincidence with a giant atomic cloud, which is consistent with a hadronic origin. An elongated source is discovered from V4641 Sgr with the spectrum continuing up to 800 TeV. The detection of UHE gamma rays demonstrates that accreting BHs and their environments can operate as extremely efficient accelerators of particles out of 1 peta-electronvolt (PeV), suggesting microquasars to be important contributors to Galactic cosmic rays especially around the `knee' region.

preprint2024arXiv

Fast KV-Switching and Dual-Layer Flat-Panel Detector Enabled Cone-Beam CT Joint Spectral Imaging

Purpose: Fast kV-switching (FKS) and dual-layer flat-panel detector (DL-FPD) technologies have been actively studied as promising dual-energy solutions for FPD-based cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). However, CBCT spectral imaging is known to face challenges in obtaining accurate and robust material discrimination performance due to the limited energy separation. To further improve CBCT spectral imaging capability, this work aims to promote a source-detector joint spectral imaging solution which takes advantages of both FKS and DL-FPD, and to conduct a feasibility study on the first tabletop CBCT system with the joint spectral imaging capability developed. Methods: In this work, the first FKS and DL-FPD jointly enabled multi-energy tabletop CBCT system has been developed in our laboratory. To evaluate its spectral imaging performance, a set of physics experiments are conducted, where the multi-energy and head phantoms are scanned using the 80/105/130kVp switching pairs and projection data are collected using a prototype DL-FPD. To compensate for the slightly angular mismatch between the low- and high-energy projections in FKS, a dual-domain projection completion scheme is implemented. Afterwards material decomposition is carried out by using the maximum-likelihood method, followed by reconstruction of basis material and virtual monochromatic images. Results: The physics experiments confirmed the feasibility and superiority of the joint spectral imaging, whose CNR of the multi-energy phantom were boosted by an average improvement of 21.9%, 20.4% for water and 32.8%, 62.8% for iodine when compared with that of the FKS and DL-FPD in fan-beam and cone-beam experiments, respectively. Conclusions: A feasibility study of the joint spectral imaging for CBCT by utilizing both the FKS and DL-FPD was conducted, with the first tabletop CBCT system having such a capability being developed.

preprint2024arXiv

FGENet: Fine-Grained Extraction Network for Congested Crowd Counting

Crowd counting has gained significant popularity due to its practical applications. However, mainstream counting methods ignore precise individual localization and suffer from annotation noise because of counting from estimating density maps. Additionally, they also struggle with high-density images.To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end model called Fine-Grained Extraction Network (FGENet). Different from methods estimating density maps, FGENet directly learns the original coordinate points that represent the precise localization of individuals.This study designs a fusion module, named Fine-Grained Feature Pyramid(FGFP), that is used to fuse feature maps extracted by the backbone of FGENet. The fused features are then passed to both regression and classification heads, where the former provides predicted point coordinates for a given image, and the latter determines the confidence level for each predicted point being an individual. At the end, FGENet establishes correspondences between prediction points and ground truth points by employing the Hungarian algorithm. For training FGENet, we design a robust loss function, named Three-Task Combination (TTC), to mitigate the impact of annotation noise. Extensive experiments are conducted on four widely used crowd counting datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FGENet. Notably, our method achieves a remarkable improvement of 3.14 points in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) on the ShanghaiTech Part A dataset, showcasing its superiority over the existing state-of-the-art methods. Even more impressively, FGENet surpasses previous benchmarks on the UCF\_CC\_50 dataset with an astounding enhancement of 30.16 points in MAE.

preprint2023arXiv

Language Models are Drummers: Drum Composition with Natural Language Pre-Training

Automatic music generation with artificial intelligence typically requires a large amount of data which is hard to obtain for many less common genres and musical instruments. To tackle this issue, we present ongoing work and preliminary findings on the possibility for deep models to transfer knowledge from language to music, by finetuning large language models pre-trained on a massive text corpus on only hundreds of MIDI files of drum performances. We show that by doing so, one of the largest, state-of-the-art models (GPT3) is capable of generating reasonable drum grooves, while models that are not pre-trained (Transformer) shows no such ability beyond naive repetition. Evaluating generated music is a challenging task, more so is evaluating drum grooves with little precedence in literature. Hence, we propose a tailored structural evaluation method and analyze drum grooves produced by GPT3 compared to those played by human professionals, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of such generation by language-to-music transfer. Our findings suggest that language-to-music transfer learning with large language models is viable and promising.

preprint2023arXiv

PMP: Privacy-Aware Matrix Profile against Sensitive Pattern Inference for Time Series

Recent rapid development of sensor technology has allowed massive fine-grained time series (TS) data to be collected and set the foundation for the development of data-driven services and applications. During the process, data sharing is often involved to allow the third-party modelers to perform specific time series data mining (TSDM) tasks based on the need of data owner. The high resolution of TS brings new challenges in protecting privacy. While meaningful information in high-resolution TS shifts from concrete point values to local shape-based segments, numerous research have found that long shape-based patterns could contain more sensitive information and may potentially be extracted and misused by a malicious third party. However, the privacy issue for TS patterns is surprisingly seldom explored in privacy-preserving literature. In this work, we consider a new privacy-preserving problem: preventing malicious inference on long shape-based patterns while preserving short segment information for the utility task performance. To mitigate the challenge, we investigate an alternative approach by sharing Matrix Profile (MP), which is a non-linear transformation of original data and a versatile data structure that supports many data mining tasks. We found that while MP can prevent concrete shape leakage, the canonical correlation in MP index can still reveal the location of sensitive long pattern. Based on this observation, we design two attacks named Location Attack and Entropy Attack to extract the pattern location from MP. To further protect MP from these two attacks, we propose a Privacy-Aware Matrix Profile (PMP) via perturbing the local correlation and breaking the canonical correlation in MP index vector. We evaluate our proposed PMP against baseline noise-adding methods through quantitative analysis and real-world case studies to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

preprint2023arXiv

PolarFormer: Multi-camera 3D Object Detection with Polar Transformer

3D object detection in autonomous driving aims to reason "what" and "where" the objects of interest present in a 3D world. Following the conventional wisdom of previous 2D object detection, existing methods often adopt the canonical Cartesian coordinate system with perpendicular axis. However, we conjugate that this does not fit the nature of the ego car's perspective, as each onboard camera perceives the world in shape of wedge intrinsic to the imaging geometry with radical (non-perpendicular) axis. Hence, in this paper we advocate the exploitation of the Polar coordinate system and propose a new Polar Transformer (PolarFormer) for more accurate 3D object detection in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) taking as input only multi-camera 2D images. Specifically, we design a cross attention based Polar detection head without restriction to the shape of input structure to deal with irregular Polar grids. For tackling the unconstrained object scale variations along Polar's distance dimension, we further introduce a multi-scalePolar representation learning strategy. As a result, our model can make best use of the Polar representation rasterized via attending to the corresponding image observation in a sequence-to-sequence fashion subject to the geometric constraints. Thorough experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our PolarFormer outperforms significantly state-of-the-art 3D object detection alternatives.

preprint2022arXiv

A general framework for adaptive two-index fusion attribute weighted naive Bayes

Naive Bayes(NB) is one of the essential algorithms in data mining. However, it is rarely used in reality because of the attribute independent assumption. Researchers have proposed many improved NB methods to alleviate this assumption. Among these methods, due to high efficiency and easy implementation, the filter attribute weighted NB methods receive great attentions. However, there still exists several challenges, such as the poor representation ability for single index and the fusion problem of two indexes. To overcome above challenges, we propose a general framework for Adaptive Two-index Fusion attribute weighted NB(ATFNB). Two types of data description category are used to represent the correlation between classes and attributes, intercorrelation between attributes and attributes, respectively. ATFNB can select any one index from each category. Then, we introduce a switching factor \{beta} to fuse two indexes, which can adaptively adjust the optimal ratio of the two index on various datasets. And a quick algorithm is proposed to infer the optimal interval of switching factor \{beta}. Finally, the weight of each attribute is calculated using the optimal value \{beta} and is integrated into NB classifier to improve the accuracy. The experimental results on 50 benchmark datasets and a Flavia dataset show that ATFNB outperforms the basic NB and state-of-the-art filter weighted NB models. In addition, the ATFNB framework can improve the existing two-index NB model by introducing the adaptive switching factor \{beta}. Auxiliary experimental results demonstrate the improved model significantly increases the accuracy compared to the original model without the adaptive switching factor \{beta}.

preprint2022arXiv

A Preliminary Study on the Potential Usefulness of Open Domain Model for Missing Software Requirements Recommendation

Completeness is one of the most important attributes of software requirement specifications. Unfortunately, incompleteness is meanwhile one of the most difficult problems to detect. Some approaches have been proposed to detect missing requirements based on the requirement-oriented domain model. However, this kind of models are lacking for lots of domains. Fortunately, the domain models constructed for different purposes can usually be found online. This raises a question: whether or not these domain models are helpful in finding the missing functional information in requirement specification? To explore this question, we design and conduct a preliminary study by computing the overlapping rate between the entities in domain models and the concepts of natural language software requirements and then digging into four regularities of the occurrence of these entities(concepts) based on two example domains. The usefulness of these regularities, especially the one based on our proposed metric AHME (with F2 gains of 146% and 223% on the two domains than without any regularity), has been shown in experiments.

preprint2022arXiv

Accelerating Score-based Generative Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis

Score-based generative models (SGMs) have recently emerged as a promising class of generative models. The key idea is to produce high-quality images by recurrently adding Gaussian noises and gradients to a Gaussian sample until converging to the target distribution, a.k.a. the diffusion sampling. To ensure stability of convergence in sampling and generation quality, however, this sequential sampling process has to take a small step size and many sampling iterations (e.g., 2000). Several acceleration methods have been proposed with focus on low-resolution generation. In this work, we consider the acceleration of high-resolution generation with SGMs, a more challenging yet more important problem. We prove theoretically that this slow convergence drawback is primarily due to the ignorance of the target distribution. Further, we introduce a novel Target Distribution Aware Sampling (TDAS) method by leveraging the structural priors in space and frequency domains. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CelebA, LSUN, and FFHQ datasets validate that TDAS can consistently accelerate state-of-the-art SGMs, particularly on more challenging high resolution (1024x1024) image generation tasks by up to 18.4x, whilst largely maintaining the synthesis quality. With fewer sampling iterations, TDAS can still generate good quality images. In contrast, the existing methods degrade drastically or even fails completely

preprint2022arXiv

ALX: Large Scale Matrix Factorization on TPUs

We present ALX, an open-source library for distributed matrix factorization using Alternating Least Squares, written in JAX. Our design allows for efficient use of the TPU architecture and scales well to matrix factorization problems of O(B) rows/columns by scaling the number of available TPU cores. In order to spur future research on large scale matrix factorization methods and to illustrate the scalability properties of our own implementation, we also built a real world web link prediction dataset called WebGraph. This dataset can be easily modeled as a matrix factorization problem. We created several variants of this dataset based on locality and sparsity properties of sub-graphs. The largest variant of WebGraph has around 365M nodes and training a single epoch finishes in about 20 minutes with 256 TPU cores. We include speed and performance numbers of ALX on all variants of WebGraph. Both the framework code and the dataset is open-sourced.

preprint2022arXiv

Bidirectional Self-Training with Multiple Anisotropic Prototypes for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

A thriving trend for domain adaptive segmentation endeavors to generate the high-quality pseudo labels for target domain and retrain the segmentor on them. Under this self-training paradigm, some competitive methods have sought to the latent-space information, which establishes the feature centroids (a.k.a prototypes) of the semantic classes and determines the pseudo label candidates by their distances from these centroids. In this paper, we argue that the latent space contains more information to be exploited thus taking one step further to capitalize on it. Firstly, instead of merely using the source-domain prototypes to determine the target pseudo labels as most of the traditional methods do, we bidirectionally produce the target-domain prototypes to degrade those source features which might be too hard or disturbed for the adaptation. Secondly, existing attempts simply model each category as a single and isotropic prototype while ignoring the variance of the feature distribution, which could lead to the confusion of similar categories. To cope with this issue, we propose to represent each category with multiple and anisotropic prototypes via Gaussian Mixture Model, in order to fit the de facto distribution of source domain and estimate the likelihood of target samples based on the probability density. We apply our method on GTA5->Cityscapes and Synthia->Cityscapes tasks and achieve 61.2 and 62.8 respectively in terms of mean IoU, substantially outperforming other competitive self-training methods. Noticeably, in some categories which severely suffer from the categorical confusion such as "truck" and "bus", our method achieves 56.4 and 68.8 respectively, which further demonstrates the effectiveness of our design.

preprint2022arXiv

BigDetection: A Large-scale Benchmark for Improved Object Detector Pre-training

Multiple datasets and open challenges for object detection have been introduced in recent years. To build more general and powerful object detection systems, in this paper, we construct a new large-scale benchmark termed BigDetection. Our goal is to simply leverage the training data from existing datasets (LVIS, OpenImages and Object365) with carefully designed principles, and curate a larger dataset for improved detector pre-training. Specifically, we generate a new taxonomy which unifies the heterogeneous label spaces from different sources. Our BigDetection dataset has 600 object categories and contains over 3.4M training images with 36M bounding boxes. It is much larger in multiple dimensions than previous benchmarks, which offers both opportunities and challenges. Extensive experiments demonstrate its validity as a new benchmark for evaluating different object detection methods, and its effectiveness as a pre-training dataset.

preprint2022arXiv

CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset

Large-scale datasets have played indispensable roles in the recent success of face generation/editing and significantly facilitated the advances of emerging research fields. However, the academic community still lacks a video dataset with diverse facial attribute annotations, which is crucial for the research on face-related videos. In this work, we propose a large-scale, high-quality, and diverse video dataset with rich facial attribute annotations, named the High-Quality Celebrity Video Dataset (CelebV-HQ). CelebV-HQ contains 35,666 video clips with the resolution of 512x512 at least, involving 15,653 identities. All clips are labeled manually with 83 facial attributes, covering appearance, action, and emotion. We conduct a comprehensive analysis in terms of age, ethnicity, brightness stability, motion smoothness, head pose diversity, and data quality to demonstrate the diversity and temporal coherence of CelebV-HQ. Besides, its versatility and potential are validated on two representative tasks, i.e., unconditional video generation and video facial attribute editing. Furthermore, we envision the future potential of CelebV-HQ, as well as the new opportunities and challenges it would bring to related research directions. Data, code, and models are publicly available. Project page: https://celebv-hq.github.io.

preprint2022arXiv

Characterizing the $γ$-Ray Variability of Active Galactic Nuclei with Stochastic Process Method

The $γ$-ray astronomy in time domain has been by now progressed further as the variabilities of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) on different timescales have been reported a lot. We study the $γ$-ray variabilities of 23 jetted AGNs through applying a stochastic process method to the ~12.7 yr long-term light curve (LC) obtained by Fermi-Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT). In this method, the stochastically driven damped simple harmonic oscillator (SHO) and the damped random walk (DRW) models are used to model the long-term LCs. Our results show that the long-term variabilities of 23 AGNs can be characterized well by both SHO and DRW models. However, the SHO model is restricted in the over-damped mode and the parameters are poorly constrained. The SHO power spectral densities (PSDs) are same as the typical DRW PSD. In the plot of the rest-frame timescale that corresponds to the broken frequency in the PSD versus black hole mass, the intrinsic $γ$-ray characteristic timescales of 23 AGNs occupy almost the same space with the optical variability timescales obtained from the accretion disk emission. This suggests a connection between the jet and the accretion disk. Same as the optical variability of AGN accretion disk, the $γ$-ray timescale is also consistent with the thermal timescale caused by the thermal instability in the standard accretion disk of AGN.

preprint2022arXiv

Correlated topological pumping of interacting bosons assisted by Bloch oscillations

Thouless pumping, not only achieving quantized transport but also immune to moderate disorder, has attracted growing attention in both experiments and theories. Here, we explore how particle-particle interactions affect topological transport in a periodically-modulated and tilted optical lattice. Not limited to wannier states, our scheme ensures a dispersionless quantized transport even for initial Gaussian-like wave packets of interacting bosons which do not uniformly occupy a given band. This is because the tilting potential leads to Bloch oscillations uniformly sampling the Berry curvatures over the entire Brillouin zone. The interplay among on-site potential difference, tunneling rate and interactions contributes to the topological transport of bound and scattering states and the topologically resonant tunnelings. Our study deepens the understanding of correlation effects on topological states, and provides a feasible way for detecting topological properties in interacting systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Demonstration of broadband topological slow light

Slow-light devices are able to significantly enhance light-matter interaction due to the reduced group velocity of light, but a very low group velocity is usually achieved in a narrow bandwidth, accompanied by extreme sensitivity to imperfections that causes increased disorder-induced attenuation. Recent theories have suggested an ideal solution to this problem - unidirectional chiral photonic states, previously discovered in structures known as photonic topological insulators, not only resist backscattering from imperfections but can also be slowed down in the entire topological bandgap with multiple windings in the Brillouin zone. Here, we report on the experimental demonstration of broadband topological slow light in a photonic topological insulator. When coupled with periodic resonators that form flat bands, the chiral photonic states can wind many times around the Brillouin zone, achieving an ultra-low group velocity in the entire topological bandgap. This demonstration extends the scope of topological photonics into slow light engineering and opens a unique avenue in the dispersion manipulation of chiral photonic states.

preprint2022arXiv

Device-centric Federated Analytics At Ease

Nowadays, high-volume and privacy-sensitive data are generated by mobile devices, which are better to be preserved on devices and queried on demand. However, data analysts still lack a uniform way to harness such distributed on-device data. In this paper, we propose a data querying system, Deck, that enables flexible device-centric federated analytics. The key idea of Deck is to bypass the app developers but allow the data analysts to directly submit their analytics code to run on devices, through a centralized query coordinator service. Deck provides a list of standard APIs to data analysts and handles most of the device-specific tasks underneath. Deck further incorporates two key techniques: (i) a hybrid permission checking mechanism and mandatory cross-device aggregation to ensure data privacy; (ii) a zero-knowledge statistical model that judiciously trades off query delay and query resource expenditure on devices. We fully implement Deck and plug it into 20 popular Android apps. An in-the-wild deployment on 1,642 volunteers shows that Deck significantly reduces the query delay by up to 30x compared to baselines. Our microbenchmarks also demonstrate that the standalone overhead of Deck is negligible.

preprint2022arXiv

Direct observation of moiré flat-band breakdown at the edge of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene

Low-energy moiré flat bands in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (tBG) have demonstrated incredible potentials to exhibit rich exotic quantum phenomena. Theoretically, the moiré flat bands of tBG are based on the extended structures, i.e., the moiré patterns with periodic boundary conditions. However, a fundamental question of whether the flat bands can exist in the graphene moiré patterns with a reduced structure symmetry, such as sample edges, remains unanswered. Here, via scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy, we study the local electronic properties of a magic-angle tBG near the sample terminated edge and report a direct observation of breakdown of the moiré flat bands. We show that the moiré electronic structures, including the low-energy flat bands, can sufficiently exist in a complete moiré spot, i.e., a moiré supercell, right at the edge even the translational symmetry of the moiré patterns is broken in one direction. However, the flat-band characteristic is obviously absent in the incomplete moiré spots that are partly terminated by the edge. Our results indicate that a whole moiré spot is sufficient and indispensable for the generation of the effective moiré flat bands in tBG.

preprint2022arXiv

Dynamic Graph Message Passing Networks

Modelling long-range dependencies is critical for scene understanding tasks in computer vision. Although CNNs have excelled in many vision tasks, they are still limited in capturing long-range structured relationships as they typically consist of layers of local kernels. A fully-connected graph is beneficial for such modelling, however, its computational overhead is prohibitive. We propose a dynamic graph message passing network, that significantly reduces the computational complexity compared to related works modelling a fully-connected graph. This is achieved by adaptively sampling nodes in the graph, conditioned on the input, for message passing. Based on the sampled nodes, we dynamically predict node-dependent filter weights and the affinity matrix for propagating information between them. Using this model, we show significant improvements with respect to strong, state-of-the-art baselines on three different tasks and backbone architectures. Our approach also outperforms fully-connected graphs while using substantially fewer floating-point operations and parameters. The project website is http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~lz/dgmn/

preprint2022arXiv

Elastic and inelastic $J/ψ$ photoproduction in $p$-$p$ collisions at LHC energies: the feature of Weizsäcker-Williams approximation

The $J/ψ$ production originating from elastic and inelastic photoproduction processes in p-p collisions at LHC energies is investigated, where the fragmentation processes are involved. An exact treatment is performed, which adopts the Martin-Ryskin method to weight the contribution from different channels, and can return to Weizsäcker-Williams approximation (WWA) when $Q^{2}\rightarrow0$. The relevant kinematical relations are also achieved. We present a comprehensive analysis for the feature of WWA by comparing with the exact treatment. The results are expressed in $Q^{2}$, $y$, $z$, $p_{T}$, and $y_{r}$ (rapidity) distributions, and the total cross sections are also estimated. The numerical results indicate that, the incoherent-photon emission can provide the meaningful contribution to elastic photoproduction, and starts to play a very important role in the inelastic processes. The photoproduction and fragmentation processes can improve the contribution of $J/ψ$ production in $p$-$p$ collisions at LHC energies. Moreover, the WWA is only effective in very restricted domains, and the exact treatment is needed to deal accurately with the $J/ψ$ photoproduction, which can naturally avoid double counting and WWA errors.

preprint2022arXiv

Fabrication and characterization of InSb nanosheet/hBN/graphite heterostructure devices

Semiconductor InSb nanosheet/hexagonal boron nitride (hBN)/graphite trilayers are fabricated, and single- and double-gate devices made from the trilayers are realized and characterized. The InSb nanosheets employed in the trilayer devices are epitaxially grown, free-standing, zincblende crystals and are in micrometer lateral sizes. The hBN and graphite flakes are obtained by exfoliation. Each trilayer is made by successively stacking an InSb nanosheet on an hBN flake and on a graphite flake using a home-made alignment stacking/transfer setup. The fabricated single- and double-gate devices are characterized by electrical and/or magnetotransport measurements. In all these devices, the graphite and hBN flakes are employed as the bottom gates and the gate dielectrics. The measurements of a fabricated single bottom-gate field-effect device show that the InSb nanosheet in the device has an electron field-effect mobility of ~7300 cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ and a low gate hysteresis of ~0.05 V at 1.9 K. The measurements of a double-gate Hall-bar device show that both the top and the bottom gate exhibit strong capacitive couplings to the InSb nanosheet channel and can thus tune the nanosheet channel conduction effectively. The electron Hall mobility in the InSb nanosheet of the Hall-bar device is extracted to be larger than 1.1$\times$10$^4$ cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ at a sheet electron density of ~6.1$\times$10$^{11}$ cm$^{-2}$ and 1.9 K and, thus, the device exhibits well-defined Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations.

preprint2022arXiv

FashionViL: Fashion-Focused Vision-and-Language Representation Learning

Large-scale Vision-and-Language (V+L) pre-training for representation learning has proven to be effective in boosting various downstream V+L tasks. However, when it comes to the fashion domain, existing V+L methods are inadequate as they overlook the unique characteristics of both the fashion V+L data and downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a novel fashion-focused V+L representation learning framework, dubbed as FashionViL. It contains two novel fashion-specific pre-training tasks designed particularly to exploit two intrinsic attributes with fashion V+L data. First, in contrast to other domains where a V+L data point contains only a single image-text pair, there could be multiple images in the fashion domain. We thus propose a Multi-View Contrastive Learning task for pulling closer the visual representation of one image to the compositional multimodal representation of another image+text. Second, fashion text (e.g., product description) often contains rich fine-grained concepts (attributes/noun phrases). To exploit this, a Pseudo-Attributes Classification task is introduced to encourage the learned unimodal (visual/textual) representations of the same concept to be adjacent. Further, fashion V+L tasks uniquely include ones that do not conform to the common one-stream or two-stream architectures (e.g., text-guided image retrieval). We thus propose a flexible, versatile V+L model architecture consisting of a modality-agnostic Transformer so that it can be flexibly adapted to any downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that our FashionViL achieves a new state of the art across five downstream tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/BrandonHanx/mmf.

preprint2022arXiv

GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code

Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

preprint2022arXiv

Graph Node-Feature Convolution for Representation Learning

Graph convolutional network (GCN) is an emerging neural network approach. It learns new representation of a node by aggregating feature vectors of all neighbors in the aggregation process without considering whether the neighbors or features are useful or not. Recent methods have improved solutions by sampling a fixed size set of neighbors, or assigning different weights to different neighbors in the aggregation process, but features within a feature vector are still treated equally in the aggregation process. In this paper, we introduce a new convolution operation on regular size feature maps constructed from features of a fixed node bandwidth via sampling to get the first-level node representation, which is then passed to a standard GCN to learn the second-level node representation. Experiments show that our method outperforms competing methods in semi-supervised node classification tasks. Furthermore, our method opens new doors for exploring new GCN architectures, particularly deeper GCN models.

preprint2022arXiv

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Based Video Semantic Coding for Segmentation

The rapid development of intelligent tasks, e.g., segmentation, detection, classification, etc, has brought an urgent need for semantic compression, which aims to reduce the compression cost while maintaining the original semantic information. However, it is impractical to directly integrate the semantic metric into the traditional codecs since they cannot be optimized in an end-to-end manner. To solve this problem, some pioneering works have applied reinforcement learning to implement image-wise semantic compression. Nevertheless, video semantic compression has not been explored since its complex reference architectures and compression modes. In this paper, we take a step forward to video semantic compression and propose the Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning based task-driven Video Semantic Coding, named as HRLVSC. Specifically, to simplify the complex mode decision of video semantic coding, we divided the action space into frame-level and CTU-level spaces in a hierarchical manner, and then explore the best mode selection for them progressively with the cooperation of frame-level and CTU-level agents. Moreover, since the modes of video semantic coding will exponentially increase with the number of frames in a Group of Pictures (GOP), we carefully investigate the effects of different mode selections for video semantic coding and design a simple but effective mode simplification strategy for it. We have validated our HRLVSC on the video segmentation task with HEVC reference software HM16.19. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that our HRLVSC can achieve over 39% BD-rate saving for video semantic coding under the Low Delay P configuration.

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

In Defense of Subspace Tracker: Orthogonal Embedding for Visual Tracking

The paper focuses on a classical tracking model, subspace learning, grounded on the fact that the targets in successive frames are considered to reside in a low-dimensional subspace or manifold due to the similarity in their appearances. In recent years, a number of subspace trackers have been proposed and obtained impressive results. Inspired by the most recent results that the tracking performance is boosted by the subspace with discrimination capability learned over the recently localized targets and their immediately surrounding background, this work aims at solving such a problem: how to learn a robust low-dimensional subspace to accurately and discriminatively represent these target and background samples. To this end, a discriminative approach, which reliably separates the target from its surrounding background, is injected into the subspace learning by means of joint learning, achieving a dimension-adaptive subspace with superior discrimination capability. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art trackers on four popular tracking benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs competitively against its counterparts. In particular, it achieves more than 9% performance increase compared with the state-of-the-art subspace trackers.

preprint2022arXiv

Is "My Favorite New Movie" My Favorite Movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases

Recursive noun phrases (NPs) have interesting semantic properties. For example, "my favorite new movie" is not necessarily my favorite movie, whereas "my new favorite movie" is. This is common sense to humans, yet it is unknown whether language models have such knowledge. We introduce the Recursive Noun Phrase Challenge (RNPC), a dataset of three textual inference tasks involving textual entailment and event plausibility comparison, precisely targeting the understanding of recursive NPs. When evaluated on RNPC, state-of-the-art Transformer models only perform around chance. Still, we show that such knowledge is learnable with appropriate data. We further probe the models for relevant linguistic features that can be learned from our tasks, including modifier semantic category and modifier scope. Finally, models trained on RNPC achieve strong zero-shot performance on an extrinsic Harm Detection evaluation task, showing the usefulness of the understanding of recursive NPs in downstream applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Knowledge-aware Neural Collective Matrix Factorization for Cross-domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) can help customers find more satisfying items in different domains. Existing CDR models mainly use common users or mapping functions as bridges between domains but have very limited exploration in fully utilizing extra knowledge across domains. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the knowledge graph (KG) for CDR, which enables items in different domains to share knowledge. To this end, we first construct a new dataset AmazonKG4CDR from the Freebase KG and a subset (two domain pairs: movies-music, movie-book) of Amazon Review Data. This new dataset facilitates linking knowledge to bridge within- and cross-domain items for CDR. Then we propose a new framework, KG-aware Neural Collective Matrix Factorization (KG-NeuCMF), leveraging KG to enrich item representations. It first learns item embeddings by graph convolutional autoencoder to capture both domain-specific and domain-general knowledge from adjacent and higher-order neighbours in the KG. Then, we maximize the mutual information between item embeddings learned from the KG and user-item matrix to establish cross-domain relationships for better CDR. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on the newly constructed dataset and demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms the best-performing baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

LAGOS-AND: A Large Gold Standard Dataset for Scholarly Author Name Disambiguation

In this paper, we present a method to automatically build large labeled datasets for the author ambiguity problem in the academic world by leveraging the authoritative academic resources, ORCID and DOI. Using the method, we built LAGOS-AND, two large, gold-standard datasets for author name disambiguation (AND), of which LAGOS-AND-BLOCK is created for clustering-based AND research and LAGOS-AND-PAIRWISE is created for classification-based AND research. Our LAGOS-AND datasets are substantially different from the existing ones. The initial versions of the datasets (v1.0, released in February 2021) include 7.5M citations authored by 798K unique authors (LAGOS-AND-BLOCK) and close to 1M instances (LAGOS-AND-PAIRWISE). And both datasets show close similarities to the whole Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) across validations of six facets. In building the datasets, we reveal the variation degrees of last names in three literature databases, PubMed, MAG, and Semantic Scholar, by comparing author names hosted to the authors' official last names shown on the ORCID pages. Furthermore, we evaluate several baseline disambiguation methods as well as the MAG's author IDs system on our datasets, and the evaluation helps identify several interesting findings. We hope the datasets and findings will bring new insights for future studies. The code and datasets are publicly available.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Ego 3D Representation as Ray Tracing

A self-driving perception model aims to extract 3D semantic representations from multiple cameras collectively into the bird's-eye-view (BEV) coordinate frame of the ego car in order to ground downstream planner. Existing perception methods often rely on error-prone depth estimation of the whole scene or learning sparse virtual 3D representations without the target geometry structure, both of which remain limited in performance and/or capability. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end architecture for ego 3D representation learning from an arbitrary number of unconstrained camera views. Inspired by the ray tracing principle, we design a polarized grid of "imaginary eyes" as the learnable ego 3D representation and formulate the learning process with the adaptive attention mechanism in conjunction with the 3D-to-2D projection. Critically, this formulation allows extracting rich 3D representation from 2D images without any depth supervision, and with the built-in geometry structure consistent w.r.t. BEV. Despite its simplicity and versatility, extensive experiments on standard BEV visual tasks (e.g., camera-based 3D object detection and BEV segmentation) show that our model outperforms all state-of-the-art alternatives significantly, with an extra advantage in computational efficiency from multi-task learning.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning from Mistakes -- A Framework for Neural Architecture Search

Learning from one's mistakes is an effective human learning technique where the learners focus more on the topics where mistakes were made, so as to deepen their understanding. In this paper, we investigate if this human learning strategy can be applied in machine learning. We propose a novel machine learning method called Learning From Mistakes (LFM), wherein the learner improves its ability to learn by focusing more on the mistakes during revision. We formulate LFM as a three-stage optimization problem: 1) learner learns; 2) learner re-learns focusing on the mistakes, and; 3) learner validates its learning. We develop an efficient algorithm to solve the LFM problem. We apply the LFM framework to neural architecture search on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Imagenet. Experimental results strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-Scale Context-Guided Lumbar Spine Disease Identification with Coarse-to-fine Localization and Classification

Accurate and efficient lumbar spine disease identification is crucial for clinical diagnosis. However, existing deep learning models with millions of parameters often fail to learn with only hundreds or dozens of medical images. These models also ignore the contextual relationship between adjacent objects, such as between vertebras and intervertebral discs. This work introduces a multi-scale context-guided network with coarse-to-fine localization and classification, named CCF-Net, for lumbar spine disease identification. Specifically, in learning, we divide the localization objective into two parallel tasks, coarse and fine, which are more straightforward and effectively reduce the number of parameters and computational cost. The experimental results show that the coarse-to-fine design presents the potential to achieve high performance with fewer parameters and data requirements. Moreover, the multi-scale context-guided module can significantly improve the performance by 6.45% and 5.51% with ResNet18 and ResNet50, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/czifan/CCFNet.pytorch.

preprint2022arXiv

ONCE-3DLanes: Building Monocular 3D Lane Detection

We present ONCE-3DLanes, a real-world autonomous driving dataset with lane layout annotation in 3D space. Conventional 2D lane detection from a monocular image yields poor performance of following planning and control tasks in autonomous driving due to the case of uneven road. Predicting the 3D lane layout is thus necessary and enables effective and safe driving. However, existing 3D lane detection datasets are either unpublished or synthesized from a simulated environment, severely hampering the development of this field. In this paper, we take steps towards addressing these issues. By exploiting the explicit relationship between point clouds and image pixels, a dataset annotation pipeline is designed to automatically generate high-quality 3D lane locations from 2D lane annotations in 211K road scenes. In addition, we present an extrinsic-free, anchor-free method, called SALAD, regressing the 3D coordinates of lanes in image view without converting the feature map into the bird's-eye view (BEV). To facilitate future research on 3D lane detection, we benchmark the dataset and provide a novel evaluation metric, performing extensive experiments of both existing approaches and our proposed method. The aim of our work is to revive the interest of 3D lane detection in a real-world scenario. We believe our work can lead to the expected and unexpected innovations in both academia and industry.

preprint2022arXiv

Origami-controlled strain engineering of tunable flat bands and correlated states in folded graphene

Flat electronic bands with tunable structures offer opportunities for the exploitation and manipulation of exotic interacting quantum states. Here, we present a controllable route to construct easily tunable flat bands in folded graphene, by nano origami-controlled strain engineering, and discover correlated states in this system. Via tearing and folding graphene monolayer at arbitrary step edges with scanning tunneling microscope manipulation, we create strain-induced pseudo-magnetic fields as well as resulting flat electronic bands in the curved edges of folded graphene. We show that the intensity of the pseudo-magnetic field can be readily tuned by changing the width of the folding edge due to the edge-width-dependent lattice deformation, leading to the well adjustability of the geometry of flat bands in folded graphene. Furthermore, by creating expected dispersionless flat bands using this technique, the correlation-induced splits of flat bands are successfully observed in the density of states when these bands are partially filled. Our experiment provides a feasible and effective pathway to engineer the system with tunable flat band structures, and establishes a new platform that can be used to realize devisable strain and interaction induced quantum phases.

preprint2022arXiv

PR-PL: A Novel Transfer Learning Framework with Prototypical Representation based Pairwise Learning for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

Affective brain-computer interfaces based on electroencephalography (EEG) is an important branch in the field of affective computing. However, individual differences and noisy labels seriously limit the effectiveness and generalizability of EEG-based emotion recognition models. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning framework with Prototypical Representation based Pairwise Learning (PR-PL) to learn discriminative and generalized prototypical representations for emotion revealing across individuals and formulate emotion recognition as pairwise learning for alleviating the reliance on precise label information. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark databases under four cross-validation evaluation protocols (cross-subject cross-session, cross-subject within-session, within-subject cross-session, and within-subject within-session). The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PR-PL against the state-of-the-arts under all four evaluation protocols, which shows the effectiveness and generalizability of PR-PL in dealing with the ambiguity of EEG responses in affective studies. The source code is available at https://github.com/KAZABANA/PR-PL.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantum oscillations in a hexagonal boron nitride-supported single crystalline InSb nanosheet

A gated Hall-bar device is made from an epitaxially grown, free-standing InSb nanosheet on a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) dielectric/graphite gate structure and the electron transport properties in the InSb nanosheet are studied by gate-transfer characteristic and magnetotransport measurements at low temperatures. The measurements show that the carriers in the InSb nanosheet are of electrons and the carrier density in the nanosheet can be highly efficiently tuned by the graphite gate. The mobility of the electrons in the InSb nanosheet is extracted from low-field magneotransport measurements and a value of the mobility exceeding ~18000 cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ is found. High-field magentotransport measurements show well-defined Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations in the longitudinal resistance of the InSb nanosheet. Temperature-dependent measurements of the SdH oscillations are carried out and key transport parameters, including the electron effective mass m$^*$$\sim$0.028 m$_0$ and the quantum lifetime $τ$$\sim$0.046 ps, in the InSb nanosheet are extracted. It is for the first time that such experimental measurements have been reported for a free-standing InSb nanosheet and the results obtained indicate that InSb nanosheet/hBN/graphite gate structures can be used to develop advanced quantum devices for novel physics studies and for quantum technology applications.

preprint2022arXiv

RCLane: Relay Chain Prediction for Lane Detection

Lane detection is an important component of many real-world autonomous systems. Despite a wide variety of lane detection approaches have been proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time, lane detection remains a largely unsolved problem. This is because most of the existing lane detection methods either treat the lane detection as a dense prediction or a detection task, few of them consider the unique topologies (Y-shape, Fork-shape, nearly horizontal lane) of the lane markers, which leads to sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we present a new method for lane detection based on relay chain prediction. Specifically, our model predicts a segmentation map to classify the foreground and background region. For each pixel point in the foreground region, we go through the forward branch and backward branch to recover the whole lane. Each branch decodes a transfer map and a distance map to produce the direction moving to the next point, and how many steps to progressively predict a relay station (next point). As such, our model is able to capture the keypoints along the lanes. Despite its simplicity, our strategy allows us to establish new state-of-the-art on four major benchmarks including TuSimple, CULane, CurveLanes and LLAMAS.

preprint2022arXiv

Reasoning about Procedures with Natural Language Processing: A Tutorial

This tutorial provides a comprehensive and in-depth view of the research on procedures, primarily in Natural Language Processing. A procedure is a sequence of steps intended to achieve some goal. Understanding procedures in natural language has a long history, with recent breakthroughs made possible by advances in technology. First, we discuss established approaches to collect procedures, by human annotation or extraction from web resources. Then, we examine different angles from which procedures can be reasoned about, as well as ways to represent them. Finally, we enumerate scenarios where procedural knowledge can be applied to the real world.

preprint2022arXiv

Region-Aware Metric Learning for Open World Semantic Segmentation via Meta-Channel Aggregation

As one of the most challenging and practical segmentation tasks, open-world semantic segmentation requires the model to segment the anomaly regions in the images and incrementally learn to segment out-of-distribution (OOD) objects, especially under a few-shot condition. The current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, Deep Metric Learning Network (DMLNet), relies on pixel-level metric learning, with which the identification of similar regions having different semantics is difficult. Therefore, we propose a method called region-aware metric learning (RAML), which first separates the regions of the images and generates region-aware features for further metric learning. RAML improves the integrity of the segmented anomaly regions. Moreover, we propose a novel meta-channel aggregation (MCA) module to further separate anomaly regions, forming high-quality sub-region candidates and thereby improving the model performance for OOD objects. To evaluate the proposed RAML, we have conducted extensive experiments and ablation studies on Lost And Found and Road Anomaly datasets for anomaly segmentation and the CityScapes dataset for incremental few-shot learning. The results show that the proposed RAML achieves SOTA performance in both stages of open world segmentation. Our code and appendix are available at https://github.com/czifan/RAML.

preprint2022arXiv

Scalable Nanophotonic-Electronic Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking neural networks (SNN) provide a new computational paradigm capable of highly parallelized, real-time processing. Photonic devices are ideal for the design of high-bandwidth, parallel architectures matching the SNN computational paradigm. Co-integration of CMOS and photonic elements allow low-loss photonic devices to be combined with analog electronics for greater flexibility of nonlinear computational elements. As such, we designed and simulated an optoelectronic spiking neuron circuit on a monolithic silicon photonics (SiPh) process that replicates useful spiking behaviors beyond the leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF). Additionally, we explored two learning algorithms with the potential for on-chip learning using Mach-Zehnder Interferometric (MZI) meshes as synaptic interconnects. A variation of Random Backpropagation (RPB) was experimentally demonstrated on-chip and matched the performance of a standard linear regression on a simple classification task. Meanwhile, the Contrastive Hebbian Learning (CHL) rule was applied to a simulated neural network composed of MZI meshes for a random input-output mapping task. The CHL-trained MZI network performed better than random guessing but does not match the performance of the ideal neural network (without the constraints imposed by the MZI meshes). Through these efforts, we demonstrate that co-integrated CMOS and SiPh technologies are well-suited to the design of scalable SNN computing architectures.

preprint2022arXiv

Show Me More Details: Discovering Hierarchies of Procedures from Semi-structured Web Data

Procedures are inherently hierarchical. To "make videos", one may need to "purchase a camera", which in turn may require one to "set a budget". While such hierarchical knowledge is critical for reasoning about complex procedures, most existing work has treated procedures as shallow structures without modeling the parent-child relation. In this work, we attempt to construct an open-domain hierarchical knowledge-base (KB) of procedures based on wikiHow, a website containing more than 110k instructional articles, each documenting the steps to carry out a complex procedure. To this end, we develop a simple and efficient method that links steps (e.g., "purchase a camera") in an article to other articles with similar goals (e.g., "how to choose a camera"), recursively constructing the KB. Our method significantly outperforms several strong baselines according to automatic evaluation, human judgment, and application to downstream tasks such as instructional video retrieval. A demo with partial data can be found at https://wikihow-hierarchy.github.io. The code and the data are at https://github.com/shuyanzhou/wikihow_hierarchy.

preprint2022arXiv

SiamMask: A Framework for Fast Online Object Tracking and Segmentation

In this paper we introduce SiamMask, a framework to perform both visual object tracking and video object segmentation, in real-time, with the same simple method. We improve the offline training procedure of popular fully-convolutional Siamese approaches by augmenting their losses with a binary segmentation task. Once the offline training is completed, SiamMask only requires a single bounding box for initialization and can simultaneously carry out visual object tracking and segmentation at high frame-rates. Moreover, we show that it is possible to extend the framework to handle multiple object tracking and segmentation by simply re-using the multi-task model in a cascaded fashion. Experimental results show that our approach has high processing efficiency, at around 55 frames per second. It yields real-time state-of-the-art results on visual-object tracking benchmarks, while at the same time demonstrating competitive performance at a high speed for video object segmentation benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

SOFT: Softmax-free Transformer with Linear Complexity

Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic complexity in both computation and memory usage. Various attempts on approximating the self-attention computation with linear complexity have been made in Natural Language Processing. However, an in-depth analysis in this work shows that they are either theoretically flawed or empirically ineffective for visual recognition. We further identify that their limitations are rooted in keeping the softmax self-attention during approximations. Specifically, conventional self-attention is computed by normalizing the scaled dot-product between token feature vectors. Keeping this softmax operation challenges any subsequent linearization efforts. Based on this insight, for the first time, a softmax-free transformer or SOFT is proposed. To remove softmax in self-attention, Gaussian kernel function is used to replace the dot-product similarity without further normalization. This enables a full self-attention matrix to be approximated via a low-rank matrix decomposition. The robustness of the approximation is achieved by calculating its Moore-Penrose inverse using a Newton-Raphson method. Extensive experiments on ImageNet show that our SOFT significantly improves the computational efficiency of existing ViT variants. Crucially, with a linear complexity, much longer token sequences are permitted in SOFT, resulting in superior trade-off between accuracy and complexity.

preprint2022arXiv

Trajectories and Radiation of Charged Particles in the Pulsar Magnetosphere

Trajectories and radiation of the accelerating electrons are studied in the pulsar magnetosphere approximated as the electromagnetic field of the Deutsch's solutions. Because the electrons are accelerated rapidly to ultra-relativistic velocity near the neutron star surface, the electron velocity vector (and then its trajectory) is derived from the balance between Lorentz force and radiation reaction force, which makes the pitch angle between electron trajectories and magnetic field lines nonzero in most part of the magnetosphere. In such a case, the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of synchro-curvature radiation for the accelerating electrons with a mono-energetic form are calculated. Our results indicate that: (i) the pitch angle is the function of electron position ($r, θ, ϕ$) in the open field line regions, and increases with increasing $r$ and $θ$ as well as increasing the inclination angle; (ii) the radius of curvature becomes large along the particle trajectory, and (iii) the SED appears a double peak structure depending on the emission position, where the synchrotron radiation plays an important role in X-ray band and curvature radiation mainly works in GeV band, which is only determined by parameters $α$ and $ζ$

preprint2022arXiv

UIGR: Unified Interactive Garment Retrieval

Interactive garment retrieval (IGR) aims to retrieve a target garment image based on a reference garment image along with user feedback on what to change on the reference garment. Two IGR tasks have been studied extensively: text-guided garment retrieval (TGR) and visually compatible garment retrieval (VCR). The user feedback for the former indicates what semantic attributes to change with the garment category preserved, while the category is the only thing to be changed explicitly for the latter, with an implicit requirement on style preservation. Despite the similarity between these two tasks and the practical need for an efficient system tackling both, they have never been unified and modeled jointly. In this paper, we propose a Unified Interactive Garment Retrieval (UIGR) framework to unify TGR and VCR. To this end, we first contribute a large-scale benchmark suited for both problems. We further propose a strong baseline architecture to integrate TGR and VCR in one model. Extensive experiments suggest that unifying two tasks in one framework is not only more efficient by requiring a single model only, it also leads to better performance. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/BrandonHanx/CompFashion.

preprint2022arXiv

What Makes for Automatic Reconstruction of Pulmonary Segments

3D reconstruction of pulmonary segments plays an important role in surgical treatment planning of lung cancer, which facilitates preservation of pulmonary function and helps ensure low recurrence rates. However, automatic reconstruction of pulmonary segments remains unexplored in the era of deep learning. In this paper, we investigate what makes for automatic reconstruction of pulmonary segments. First and foremost, we formulate, clinically and geometrically, the anatomical definitions of pulmonary segments, and propose evaluation metrics adhering to these definitions. Second, we propose ImPulSe (Implicit Pulmonary Segment), a deep implicit surface model designed for pulmonary segment reconstruction. The automatic reconstruction of pulmonary segments by ImPulSe is accurate in metrics and visually appealing. Compared with canonical segmentation methods, ImPulSe outputs continuous predictions of arbitrary resolutions with higher training efficiency and fewer parameters. Lastly, we experiment with different network inputs to analyze what matters in the task of pulmonary segment reconstruction. Our code is available at https://github.com/M3DV/ImPulSe.

preprint2021arXiv

A Possible Hadronic Origin of TeV Photon Emission from SNR G106.3+2.7

In our model, the acceleration and propagation of particles from the Bohm-like diffusion region inside the SNR to the Galactic diffusion region outside the SNR are described through nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration (NLDSA). The main content of our NLDSA model is to solve the hydrodynamic equations numerically for gas density, gas velocity, gas pressure as well as the equation for the quasi-isotropic particle momentum distribution. The consequent multi-band non-thermal emission is from two different regions, namely the acceleration region and the escaping region. Our model is capable of explaining the multi-band photon emission via the dominant synchrotron radiation of the electrons accelerated inside the SNR; and the photons with energy of $\gtrsim$ GeV are naturally produced by the protons inside and outside the SNR. Moreover, the photons in the energy range of $\sim 1 - \sim 100$ TeV are due to the interaction of escaped protons with dense molecular clouds. For the photons with energy of $E_γ\gtrsim $ 1 GeV from SNR G106.3+2.7, our results here favor a hadronic origin, where the photons in the energy range of $\sim 1$ GeV to $\sim 1$ TeV are produced inside the SNR through proton-proton interaction, while the photons with $E_γ\gtrsim 1$ TeV originate from the interaction of escaped protons with a dense molecular cloud.

preprint2021arXiv

A Survey on Concept Factorization: From Shallow to Deep Representation Learning

The quality of learned features by representation learning determines the performance of learning algorithms and the related application tasks (such as high-dimensional data clustering). As a relatively new paradigm for representation learning, Concept Factorization (CF) has attracted a great deal of interests in the areas of machine learning and data mining for over a decade. Lots of effective CF based methods have been proposed based on different perspectives and properties, but note that it still remains not easy to grasp the essential connections and figure out the underlying explanatory factors from exiting studies. In this paper, we therefore survey the recent advances on CF methodologies and the potential benchmarks by categorizing and summarizing the current methods. Specifically, we first re-view the root CF method, and then explore the advancement of CF-based representation learning ranging from shallow to deep/multilayer cases. We also introduce the potential application areas of CF-based methods. Finally, we point out some future directions for studying the CF-based representation learning. Overall, this survey provides an insightful overview of both theoretical basis and current developments in the field of CF, which can also help the interested researchers to understand the current trends of CF and find the most appropriate CF techniques to deal with particular applications.

preprint2021arXiv

Automatically detecting the conflicts between software requirements based on finer semantic analysis

Context: Conflicts between software requirements bring uncertainties to product development. Some great approaches have been proposed to identify these conflicts. However, they usually require the software requirements represented with specific templates and/or depend on other external source which is often uneasy to build for lots of projects in practice. Objective: We aim to propose an approach Finer Semantic Analysis-based Requirements Conflict Detector (FSARC) to automatically detecting the conflicts between the given natural language functional requirements by analyzing their finer semantic compositions. Method: We build a harmonized semantic meta-model of functional requirements with the form of eight-tuple. Then we propose algorithms to automatically analyze the linguistic features of requirements and to annotate the semantic elements for their semantic model construction. And we define seven types of conflicts as long as their heuristic detecting rules on the ground of their text pattern and semantical dependency. Finally, we design and implement the algorithm for conflicts detection. Results: The experiment with four requirement datasets illustrates that the recall of FSARC is nearly 100% and the average precision is 83.88% on conflicts detection. Conclusion: We provide a useful tool for detecting the conflicts between natural language functional requirements to improve the quality of the final requirements set. Besides, our approach is capable of transforming the natural language functional requirements into eight semantic tuples, which is useful not only the detection of the conflicts between requirements but also some other tasks such as constructing the association between requirements and so on.

preprint2021arXiv

Failure Prediction in Production Line Based on Federated Learning: An Empirical Study

Data protection across organizations is limiting the application of centralized learning (CL) techniques. Federated learning (FL) enables multiple participants to build a learning model without sharing data. Nevertheless, there are very few research works on FL in intelligent manufacturing. This paper presents the results of an empirical study on failure prediction in the production line based on FL. This paper (1) designs Federated Support Vector Machine (FedSVM) and Federated Random Forest (FedRF) algorithms for the horizontal FL and vertical FL scenarios, respectively; (2) proposes an experiment process for evaluating the effectiveness between the FL and CL algorithms; (3) finds that the performance of FL and CL are not significantly different on the global testing data, on the random partial testing data, and on the estimated unknown Bosch data, respectively. The fact that the testing data is heterogeneous enhances our findings. Our study reveals that FL can replace CL for failure prediction.

preprint2021arXiv

Fluence Adaptation for Task-based Dose Optimization in X-ray Phase-Contrast Imaging

Purpose: Grating-based imaging (GBI) and edge-illumination (EI) are two promising types of XPCI as the conventional x-ray sources can be directly utilized. For GBI and EI systems, the phase-stepping acquisition with multiple exposures at a constant fluence is usually adopted in the literature. This work, however, attempts to challenge such a constant fluence concept during the phase-stepping process and proposes a fluence adaptation mechanism for dose reduction. Method: Recently, analytic multi-order moment analysis has been proposed to improve the computing efficiency. In these algorithms, multiple contrasts can be calculated by summing together the weighted phase-stepping curves (PSCs) with some kernel functions, which suggests us that the raw data at different steps have different contributions for the noise in retrieved contrasts. Based on analytic retrieval formulas and the Gaussian noise model for detected signals, we derived an optimal adaptive fluence distribution, which is proportional to the absolute weighting kernel functions and the root of original sample PSCs acquired under the constant fluence. Results: To validate our analyses, simulations and experiments are conducted for GBI and EI systems. Simulated results demonstrate that the dose reduction ratio between our proposed fluence distributions and the typical constant one can be about 20% for the phase contrast, which is consistent with our theoretical predictions. Although the experimental noise reduction ratios are a little smaller than the theoretical ones, synthetic and real experiments both observe better noise performance by our proposed method. Our simulated results also give out the effective ranges of the parameters of the PSCs, such as the visibility in GBI, the standard deviation and the mean value in EI, providing a guidance for the use of our proposed approach in practice.

preprint2021arXiv

Large evanescently-induced Brillouin scattering at the surrounding of a nanofibre

Brillouin scattering has been widely exploited for advanced photonics functionalities such as microwave photonics, signal processing, sensing, lasing, and more recently in micro- and nano-photonic waveguides. So far, all the works have focused on the opto-acoustic interaction driven from the core region of micro- and nano-waveguides. Here we observe, for the first time, an efficient Brillouin scattering generated by an evanescent field nearby a sub-wavelength waveguide embedded in a pressurised gas cell, with a maximum gain coefficient of $18.90 \pm 0.17$ m$^{-1}$W$^{-1}$. This gain is 11 times larger than the highest Brillouin gain obtained in a hollow-core fibre and 79 times larger than in a standard single-mode fibre. The realisation of strong free-space Brillouin scattering from a waveguide benefits from the flexibility of confined light while providing a direct access to the opto-acoustic interaction, as required in free-space optoacoustics such as Brillouin spectroscopy and microscopy. Therefore, our work creates an important bridge between Brillouin scattering in waveguides, Brillouin spectroscopy and microscopy, and opens new avenues in light-sound interactions, optomechanics, sensing, lasing and imaging.

preprint2021arXiv

Multi-band Emission up to PeV Energy from the Crab Nebula in a Spatially Dependent Lepto-hadronic Model

Multi-band emission from radio to ultra-high energy gamma-rays in the Crab Nebula has been detected. To explain the observed results, non-thermal photon production \textbf{in} the Crab Nebula is carefully studied in a spatially dependent lepto-hadronic model. In our model, the dynamical evolution of the PWN is simulated in a spherically symmetric system. Both electrons and protons are accelerated at the termination shock. The relevant particle propagation equations as well as the photon evolving equation are simultaneously solved. For the Crab Nebula, our results reveal that the observed multi-band photon spectra can be well reproduced with reasonable model parameters. In particular, the photons with energy $\gtrsim 200$ TeV are mainly contributed by the hadronic component via proton-proton interaction. The contribution of the hadronic component depends on both proton spectral index $α_{\rm p}$ and number density $n_{\rm H}$ of medium within the PWN. Besides, high energy neutrino fluxes are predicted with variable proton spectral indices. The predicted fluxes are not only far below the sensitivities of current neutrino observatories, but also beneath the atmospheric neutrino background with energy less than $\sim 40$ TeV. Moreover, the calculated radial profiles of surface brightness and spectral index are presented.

preprint2021arXiv

Surface-acoustic-wave-controlled optomechanically induced transparency in a hybrid piezo-optomechanical planar distributed Bragg-reflector-cavity system

We propose a scheme that can generate tunable optomechanically induced transparency in a hybrid piezooptomechanical cavity system. The system is composed of a high-quality planar distributed Bragg reflector cavity modified with an embedded Gaussian-shaped defect. Moreover, interdigitated transducers are fabricated on the surface of the cavity to generate surface acoustic waves. Under the actuation of the surface acoustic wave, the upper Bragg mirrors can be vibrated as a bulk acoustic resonator, and the distributed Bragg reflector cavity becomes a standard three-level optomechanical system. In this situation, we show that when a strong pump optical field and a weak probe optical field are simultaneously applied to the hybrid optomechanical cavity system, optomechanically induced transparency occurs under the quantum interference between different energy-level pathways. Our scheme can be applied in the fields of optical switches and quantum information processing in solid-state quantum systems.

preprint2021arXiv

The NPU System for the 2020 Personalized Voice Trigger Challenge

This paper describes the system developed by the NPU team for the 2020 personalized voice trigger challenge. Our submitted system consists of two independently trained subsystems: a small footprint keyword spotting (KWS) system and a speaker verification (SV) system. For the KWS system, a multi-scale dilated temporal convolutional (MDTC) network is proposed to detect wake-up word (WuW). For SV system, Write something here. The KWS predicts posterior probabilities of whether an audio utterance contains WuW and estimates the location of WuW at the same time. When the posterior probability ofWuW reaches a predefined threshold, the identity information of triggered segment is determined by the SV system. On evaluation dataset, our submitted system obtains detection costs of 0.081and 0.091 in close talking and far-field tasks, respectively.

preprint2021arXiv

Unlocking the Origin of Compositional Fluctuations in InGaN Light Emitting Diodes

The accurate determination of the compositional fluctuations is pivotal in understanding their role in the reduction of efficiency in high indium content $In_{x}Ga_{1-x}N$ light-emitting diodes, the origin of which is still poorly understood. Here we have combined electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) imaging at sub-nanometer resolution with multiscale computational models to obtain a statistical distribution of the compositional fluctuations in $In_{x}Ga_{1-x}N$ quantum wells (QWs). Employing a multiscale computational model, we show the tendency of intrinsic compositional fluctuation in $In_{x}Ga_{1-x}N$ QWs at different Indium concentration and in the presence of strain. We have developed a systematic formalism based on the autonomous detection of compositional fluctuation in observed and simulated EELS maps. We have shown a direct comparison between the computationally predicted and experimentally observed compositional fluctuations. We have found that although a random alloy model captures the distribution of compositional fluctuations in relatively low In ($\sim$ 18%) content $In_{x}Ga_{1-x}N$ QWs, there exists a striking deviation from the model in higher In content ($\geq$ 24%) QWs. Our results highlight a distinct behavior in carrier localization driven by compositional fluctuations in the low and high In-content InGaN QWs, which would ultimately affect the performance of LEDs. Furthermore, our robust computational and atomic characterization method can be widely applied to study materials in which nanoscale compositional fluctuations play a significant role on the material performance.

preprint2021arXiv

Validity of equivalent photon spectra and the photoproduction processes in p-p collisions

Through a consistent analysis of the terms neglected in going from the accurate expression to the one of Weizsäcker-Williams approximation (WWA), the validity of equivalent photon spectra is studied, and a modified photon flux of proton is also derived. We take the photoproductions of photons and dileptons as examples, to provide the comparison between the exact results and the ones based on various photon fluxes. We present the results for the distributions in $Q^{2}$ (virtuality of photons), $y$ and $p_{T}$, the total cross sections are also estimated. The numerical results show that the modified equivalent photon spectrum reproduces the exact result within less than one percent. And the corrections of photoproduction processes to the dileptons and photons productions are about $20\%$.

preprint2020arXiv

3D Printed Brain-Controlled Robot-Arm Prosthetic via Embedded Deep Learning from sEMG Sensors

In this paper, we present our work on developing robot arm prosthetic via deep learning. Our work proposes to use transfer learning techniques applied to the Google Inception model to retrain the final layer for surface electromyography (sEMG) classification. Data have been collected using the Thalmic Labs Myo Armband and used to generate graph images comprised of 8 subplots per image containing sEMG data captured from 40 data points per sensor, corresponding to the array of 8 sEMG sensors in the armband. Data captured were then classified into four categories (Fist, Thumbs Up, Open Hand, Rest) via using a deep learning model, Inception-v3, with transfer learning to train the model for accurate prediction of each on real-time input of new data. This trained model was then downloaded to the ARM processor based embedding system to enable the brain-controlled robot-arm prosthetic manufactured from our 3D printer. Testing of the functionality of the method, a robotic arm was produced using a 3D printer and off-the-shelf hardware to control it. SSH communication protocols are employed to execute python files hosted on an embedded Raspberry Pi with ARM processors to trigger movement on the robot arm of the predicted gesture.

preprint2020arXiv

A novel deep learning-based method for monochromatic image synthesis from spectral CT using photon-counting detectors

With the growing technology of photon-counting detectors (PCD), spectral CT is a widely concerned topic which has the potential of material differentiation. However, due to some non-ideal factors such as cross talk and pulse pile-up of the detectors, direct reconstruction from detected spectrum without any corrections will get a wrong result. Conventional methods try to model these factors using calibration and make corrections accordingly, but depend on the preciseness of the model. To solve this problem, in this paper, we proposed a novel deep learning-based monochromatic image synthesis method working in sinogram domain. Different from previous deep learning-based methods aimed at this problem, we designed a novel network architecture according to the physical model of cross talk, and it can solve this problem better in an ingenious way. Our method was tested on a cone-beam CT (CBCT) system equipped with a PCD. After using FDK algorithm on the corrected projection, we got quite more accurate results with less noise, which showed the feasibility of monochromatic image synthesis by our method.

preprint2020arXiv

A Survey on Deep Learning for Neuroimaging-based Brain Disorder Analysis

Deep learning has been recently used for the analysis of neuroimages, such as structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI, and positron emission tomography (PET), and has achieved significant performance improvements over traditional machine learning in computer-aided diagnosis of brain disorders. This paper reviews the applications of deep learning methods for neuroimaging-based brain disorder analysis. We first provide a comprehensive overview of deep learning techniques and popular network architectures, by introducing various types of deep neural networks and recent developments. We then review deep learning methods for computer-aided analysis of four typical brain disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Autism spectrum disorder, and Schizophrenia, where the first two diseases are neurodegenerative disorders and the last two are neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, respectively. More importantly, we discuss the limitations of existing studies and present possible future directions.

preprint2020arXiv

Automatic marker-free registration of tree point-cloud data based on rotating projection

Point-cloud data acquired using a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) play an important role in digital forestry research. Multiple scans are generally used to overcome occlusion effects and obtain complete tree structural information. However, it is time-consuming and difficult to place artificial reflectors in a forest with complex terrain for marker-based registration, a process that reduces registration automation and efficiency. In this study, we propose an automatic coarse-to-fine method for the registration of point-cloud data from multiple scans of a single tree. In coarse registration, point clouds produced by each scan are projected onto a spherical surface to generate a series of two-dimensional (2D) images, which are used to estimate the initial positions of multiple scans. Corresponding feature-point pairs are then extracted from these series of 2D images. In fine registration, point-cloud data slicing and fitting methods are used to extract corresponding central stem and branch centers for use as tie points to calculate fine transformation parameters. To evaluate the accuracy of registration results, we propose a model of error evaluation via calculating the distances between center points from corresponding branches in adjacent scans. For accurate evaluation, we conducted experiments on two simulated trees and a real-world tree. Average registration errors of the proposed method were 0.26m around on simulated tree point clouds, and 0.05m around on real-world tree point cloud.

preprint2020arXiv

Depth creates no more spurious local minima

We show that for any convex differentiable loss, a deep linear network has no spurious local minima as long as it is true for the two layer case. This reduction greatly simplifies the study on the existence of spurious local minima in deep linear networks. When applied to the quadratic loss, our result immediately implies the powerful result in [Kawaguchi 2016]. Further, with the work in [Zhou and Liang 2018], we can remove all the assumptions in [Kawaguchi 2016]. This property holds for more general "multi-tower" linear networks too. Our proof builds on [Laurent and von Brecht 2018] and develops a new perturbation argument to show that any spurious local minimum must have full rank, a structural property which can be useful more generally.

preprint2020arXiv

Direct Speech-to-image Translation

Direct speech-to-image translation without text is an interesting and useful topic due to the potential applications in human-computer interaction, art creation, computer-aided design. etc. Not to mention that many languages have no writing form. However, as far as we know, it has not been well-studied how to translate the speech signals into images directly and how well they can be translated. In this paper, we attempt to translate the speech signals into the image signals without the transcription stage. Specifically, a speech encoder is designed to represent the input speech signals as an embedding feature, and it is trained with a pretrained image encoder using teacher-student learning to obtain better generalization ability on new classes. Subsequently, a stacked generative adversarial network is used to synthesize high-quality images conditioned on the embedding feature. Experimental results on both synthesized and real data show that our proposed method is effective to translate the raw speech signals into images without the middle text representation. Ablation study gives more insights about our method.

preprint2020arXiv

Dual Graph Convolutional Network for Semantic Segmentation

Exploiting long-range contextual information is key for pixel-wise prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. In contrast to previous work that uses multi-scale feature fusion or dilated convolutions, we propose a novel graph-convolutional network (GCN) to address this problem. Our Dual Graph Convolutional Network (DGCNet) models the global context of the input feature by modelling two orthogonal graphs in a single framework. The first component models spatial relationships between pixels in the image, whilst the second models interdependencies along the channel dimensions of the network's feature map. This is done efficiently by projecting the feature into a new, lower-dimensional space where all pairwise interactions can be modelled, before reprojecting into the original space. Our simple method provides substantial benefits over a strong baseline and achieves state-of-the-art results on both Cityscapes (82.0% mean IoU) and Pascal Context (53.7% mean IoU) datasets. Code and models are made available to foster any further research (\url{https://github.com/lxtGH/GALD-DGCNet}).

preprint2020arXiv

Egocentric Action Recognition by Video Attention and Temporal Context

We present the submission of Samsung AI Centre Cambridge to the CVPR2020 EPIC-Kitchens Action Recognition Challenge. In this challenge, action recognition is posed as the problem of simultaneously predicting a single `verb' and `noun' class label given an input trimmed video clip. That is, a `verb' and a `noun' together define a compositional `action' class. The challenging aspects of this real-life action recognition task include small fast moving objects, complex hand-object interactions, and occlusions. At the core of our submission is a recently-proposed spatial-temporal video attention model, called `W3' (`What-Where-When') attention~\cite{perez2020knowing}. We further introduce a simple yet effective contextual learning mechanism to model `action' class scores directly from long-term temporal behaviour based on the `verb' and `noun' prediction scores. Our solution achieves strong performance on the challenge metrics without using object-specific reasoning nor extra training data. In particular, our best solution with multimodal ensemble achieves the 2$^{nd}$ best position for `verb', and 3$^{rd}$ best for `noun' and `action' on the Seen Kitchens test set.

preprint2020arXiv

Enhanced Valley Zeeman Splitting in Fe-Doped Monolayer MoS2

The Zeeman effect offers unique opportunities for magnetic manipulation of the spin degree of freedom (DOF). Recently, valley Zeeman splitting, referring to the lifting of valley degeneracy, has been demonstrated in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) at liquid helium temperature. However, to realize the practical applications of valley pseudospins, the valley DOF must be controllable by a magnetic field at room temperature, which remains a significant challenge. Magnetic doping in TMDs can enhance the Zeeman splitting, however, to achieve this experimentally is not easy. Here, we report unambiguous magnetic manipulation of valley Zeeman splitting at 300 K (g = -6.4) and 10 K (g = -11) in a CVD-grown Fe-doped MoS2 monolayer; the effective g factor can be tuned to -20.7 by increasing the Fe dopant concentration, which represents an approximately fivefold enhancement as compared to undoped MoS2. Our measurements and calculations reveal that the enhanced splitting and geff factors are due to the Heisenberg exchange interaction of the localized magnetic moments (Fe 3d electrons) with MoS2 through the d-orbital hybridization.

preprint2020arXiv

Estimating the Unruh effect via entangled many-body probes

We study the estimation of parameters in a quantum metrology scheme based on entangled many-body Unruh-DeWitt detectors. It is found that the precision for the estimation of Unruh effect can be enhanced via initial state preparations and parameter selections. It is shown that the precision in the estimation of the Unruh temperature in terms of a many-body-probe metrology is always better than the precision in two probe strategies. The proper acceleration for Bob's detector and the interaction between the accelerated detector and the external field have significant influences on the precision for the Unruh effect's estimation. In addition, the probe state prepared with more excited atoms in the initial state is found to perform better than less excited initial states. However, different from the estimation of the Unruh temperature, the estimation of the effective coupling parameter for the accelerated detector requires more total atoms but less excited atoms in the estimations.

preprint2020arXiv

FeCAM: A Universal Compact Digital and Analog Content Addressable Memory Using Ferroelectric

Ferroelectric field effect transistors (FeFETs) are being actively investigated with the potential for in-memory computing (IMC) over other non-volatile memories (NVMs). Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) are a form of IMC that performs parallel searches for matched entries over a memory array for a given input query. CAMs are widely used for data-centric applications that involve pattern matching and search functionality. To accommodate the ever expanding data, it is attractive to resort to analog CAM for memory density improvement. However, the digital CAM design nowadays based on standard CMOS or emerging nonvolatile memories (e.g., resistive storage devices) is already challenging due to area, power, and cost penalties. Thus, it can be extremely expensive to achieve analog CAM with those technologies due to added cell components. As such, we propose, for the first time, a universal compact FeFET based CAM design, FeCAM, with search and storage functionality enabled in digital and analog domain simultaneously. By exploiting the multi-level-cell (MLC) states of FeFET, FeCAM can store and search inputs in either digital or analog domain. We perform a device-circuit co-design of the proposed FeCAM and validate its functionality and performance using an experimentally calibrated FeFET model. Circuit level simulation results demonstrate that FeCAM can either store continuous matching ranges or encode 3-bit data in a single CAM cell. When compared with the existing digital CMOS based CAM approaches, FeCAM is found to improve both memory density by 22.4X and energy saving by 8.6/3.2X for analog/digital modes, respectively. In the CAM-related application, our evaluations show that FeCAM can achieve 60.5X/23.1X saving in area/search energy compared with conventional CMOS based CAMs.

preprint2020arXiv

Feedback Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has attracted considerable attention in computer vision since skeleton data is more robust to the dynamic circumstance and complicated background than other modalities. Recently, many researchers have used the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to model spatial-temporal features of skeleton sequences by an end-to-end optimization. However, conventional GCNs are feedforward networks which are impossible for low-level layers to access semantic information in the high-level layers. In this paper, we propose a novel network, named Feedback Graph Convolutional Network (FGCN). This is the first work that introduces the feedback mechanism into GCNs and action recognition. Compared with conventional GCNs, FGCN has the following advantages: (1) a multi-stage temporal sampling strategy is designed to extract spatial-temporal features for action recognition in a coarse-to-fine progressive process; (2) A dense connections based Feedback Graph Convolutional Block (FGCB) is proposed to introduce feedback connections into the GCNs. It transmits the high-level semantic features to the low-level layers and flows temporal information stage by stage to progressively model global spatial-temporal features for action recognition; (3) The FGCN model provides early predictions. In the early stages, the model receives partial information about actions. Naturally, its predictions are relatively coarse. The coarse predictions are treated as the prior to guide the feature learning of later stages for a accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on the datasets, NTU-RGB+D, NTU-RGB+D120 and Northwestern-UCLA, demonstrate that the proposed FGCN is effective for action recognition. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the three datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Few-shot Action Recognition with Permutation-invariant Attention

Many few-shot learning models focus on recognising images. In contrast, we tackle a challenging task of few-shot action recognition from videos. We build on a C3D encoder for spatio-temporal video blocks to capture short-range action patterns. Such encoded blocks are aggregated by permutation-invariant pooling to make our approach robust to varying action lengths and long-range temporal dependencies whose patterns are unlikely to repeat even in clips of the same class. Subsequently, the pooled representations are combined into simple relation descriptors which encode so-called query and support clips. Finally, relation descriptors are fed to the comparator with the goal of similarity learning between query and support clips. Importantly, to re-weight block contributions during pooling, we exploit spatial and temporal attention modules and self-supervision. In naturalistic clips (of the same class) there exists a temporal distribution shift--the locations of discriminative temporal action hotspots vary. Thus, we permute blocks of a clip and align the resulting attention regions with similarly permuted attention regions of non-permuted clip to train the attention mechanism invariant to block (and thus long-term hotspot) permutations. Our method outperforms the state of the art on the HMDB51, UCF101, miniMIT datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Gaussian Process Modeling $\it{Fermi}$-LAT $γ$-ray Blazar Variability: A Sample of Blazars with $γ$-ray Quasi-periodicities

Blazar variability may be driven by stochastic processes. On the other hand, quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) behaviors are recently reported to be detected in $\it{Fermi}$-LAT data of blazars. However, the significances of these QPO signals given by traditional Fourier-like methods are still questioned. We analyze $γ$-ray light curves of the QPO blazars with two Gaussian process methods, CARMA and $\it{celerite}$, to examine the appropriateness of Gaussian processes for characterizing $γ$-ray light curves of blazars and the existence of the reported QPOs. We collect a sample of 27 blazars with possible $γ$-ray periodicity and generate their $\sim11$ years $\it{Fermi}$-LAT light curves. We apply the Gaussian process models to the $γ$-ray light curves, and build their intrinsic power spectral densities (PSDs). The results show that in general the $γ$-ray light curves can be characterized by CARMA and $\textit{celerite}$ models, indicating that $γ$-ray variabilities of blazars are essentially Gaussian processes. The resulting PSDs are generally the red noise shapes with slopes between $-0.6$ and $-1.7$. Possible evidence for the $γ$-ray QPOs in PKS 0537$-$441 and PG 1553$+$113 are found in the Gaussian process modelings.

preprint2020arXiv

Improving Semantic Segmentation via Decoupled Body and Edge Supervision

Existing semantic segmentation approaches either aim to improve the object's inner consistency by modeling the global context, or refine objects detail along their boundaries by multi-scale feature fusion. In this paper, a new paradigm for semantic segmentation is proposed. Our insight is that appealing performance of semantic segmentation requires \textit{explicitly} modeling the object \textit{body} and \textit{edge}, which correspond to the high and low frequency of the image. To do so, we first warp the image feature by learning a flow field to make the object part more consistent. The resulting body feature and the residual edge feature are further optimized under decoupled supervision by explicitly sampling different parts (body or edge) pixels. We show that the proposed framework with various baselines or backbone networks leads to better object inner consistency and object boundaries. Extensive experiments on four major road scene semantic segmentation benchmarks including \textit{Cityscapes}, \textit{CamVid}, \textit{KIITI} and \textit{BDD} show that our proposed approach establishes new state of the art while retaining high efficiency in inference. In particular, we achieve 83.7 mIoU \% on Cityscape with only fine-annotated data. Code and models are made available to foster any further research (\url{https://github.com/lxtGH/DecoupleSegNets}).

preprint2020arXiv

In-Vehicle Object Detection in the Wild for Driverless Vehicles

In-vehicle human object identification plays an important role in vision-based automated vehicle driving systems while objects such as pedestrians and vehicles on roads or streets are the primary targets to protect from driverless vehicles. A challenge is the difficulty to detect objects in moving under the wild conditions, while illumination and image quality could drastically vary. In this work, to address this challenge, we exploit Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGANs) with Single Shot Detector (SSD) to handle with the wild conditions. In our work, a GAN was trained with low-quality images to handle with the challenges arising from the wild conditions in smart cities, while a cascaded SSD is employed as the object detector to perform with the GAN. We used tested our approach under wild conditions using taxi driver videos on London street in both daylight and night times, and the tests from in-vehicle videos demonstrate that this strategy can drastically achieve a better detection rate under the wild conditions.

preprint2020arXiv

Instance Credibility Inference for Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize new objects with extremely limited training data for each category. Previous efforts are made by either leveraging meta-learning paradigm or novel principles in data augmentation to alleviate this extremely data-scarce problem. In contrast, this paper presents a simple statistical approach, dubbed Instance Credibility Inference (ICI) to exploit the distribution support of unlabeled instances for few-shot learning. Specifically, we first train a linear classifier with the labeled few-shot examples and use it to infer the pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data. To measure the credibility of each pseudo-labeled instance, we then propose to solve another linear regression hypothesis by increasing the sparsity of the incidental parameters and rank the pseudo-labeled instances with their sparsity degree. We select the most trustworthy pseudo-labeled instances alongside the labeled examples to re-train the linear classifier. This process is iterated until all the unlabeled samples are included in the expanded training set, i.e. the pseudo-label is converged for unlabeled data pool. Extensive experiments under two few-shot settings show that our simple approach can establish new state-of-the-arts on four widely used few-shot learning benchmark datasets including miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS, and CUB. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yikai-Wang/ICI-FSL

preprint2020arXiv

Large-scale Gastric Cancer Screening and Localization Using Multi-task Deep Neural Network

Gastric cancer is one of the most common cancers, which ranks third among the leading causes of cancer death. Biopsy of gastric mucosa is a standard procedure in gastric cancer screening test. However, manual pathological inspection is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Besides, it is challenging for an automated algorithm to locate the small lesion regions in the gigapixel whole-slide image and make the decision correctly.To tackle these issues, we collected large-scale whole-slide image dataset with detailed lesion region annotation and designed a whole-slide image analyzing framework consisting of 3 networks which could not only determine the screening result but also present the suspicious areas to the pathologist for reference. Experiments demonstrated that our proposed framework achieves sensitivity of 97.05% and specificity of 92.72% in screening task and Dice coefficient of 0.8331 in segmentation task. Furthermore, we tested our best model in real-world scenario on 10,315 whole-slide images collected from 4 medical centers.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning to fool the speaker recognition

Due to the widespread deployment of fingerprint/face/speaker recognition systems, attacking deep learning based biometric systems has drawn more and more attention. Previous research mainly studied the attack to the vision-based system, such as fingerprint and face recognition. While the attack for speaker recognition has not been investigated yet, although it has been widely used in our daily life. In this paper, we attempt to fool the state-of-the-art speaker recognition model and present \textit{speaker recognition attacker}, a lightweight model to fool the deep speaker recognition model by adding imperceptible perturbations onto the raw speech waveform. We find that the speaker recognition system is also vulnerable to the attack, and we achieve a high success rate on the non-targeted attack. Besides, we also present an effective method to optimize the speaker recognition attacker to obtain a trade-off between the attack success rate with the perceptual quality. Experiments on the TIMIT dataset show that we can achieve a sentence error rate of $99.2\%$ with an average SNR $57.2\text{dB}$ and PESQ 4.2 with speed rather faster than real-time.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning-based Computer-aided Prescription Model for Parkinson's Disease: A Data-driven Perspective

In this paper, we study a novel problem: "automatic prescription recommendation for PD patients." To realize this goal, we first build a dataset by collecting 1) symptoms of PD patients, and 2) their prescription drug provided by neurologists. Then, we build a novel computer-aided prescription model by learning the relation between observed symptoms and prescription drug. Finally, for the new coming patients, we could recommend (predict) suitable prescription drug on their observed symptoms by our prescription model. From the methodology part, our proposed model, namely Prescription viA Learning lAtent Symptoms (PALAS), could recommend prescription using the multi-modality representation of the data. In PALAS, a latent symptom space is learned to better model the relationship between symptoms and prescription drug, as there is a large semantic gap between them. Moreover, we present an efficient alternating optimization method for PALAS. We evaluated our method using the data collected from 136 PD patients at Nanjing Brain Hospital, which can be regarded as a large dataset in PD research community. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and clinical potential of our method in this recommendation task, if compared with other competing methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Low Complexity Trellis-Coded Quantization in Versatile Video Coding

The forthcoming Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard adopts the trellis-coded quantization, which leverages the delicate trellis graph to map the quantization candidates within one block into the optimal path. Despite the high compression efficiency, the complex trellis search with soft decision quantization may hinder the applications due to high complexity and low throughput capacity. To reduce the complexity, in this paper, we propose a low complexity trellis-coded quantization scheme in a scientifically sound way with theoretical modeling of the rate and distortion. As such, the trellis departure point can be adaptively adjusted, and unnecessarily visited branches are accordingly pruned, leading to the shrink of total trellis stages and simplification of transition branches. Extensive experimental results on the VVC test model show that the proposed scheme is effective in reducing the encoding complexity by 11% and 5% with all intra and random access configurations, respectively, at the cost of only 0.11% and 0.05% BD-Rate increase. Meanwhile, on average 24% and 27% quantization time savings can be achieved under all intra and random access configurations. Due to the excellent performance, the VVC test model has adopted one implementation of the proposed scheme.

preprint2020arXiv

Mobility edge of Stark many-body localization

We investigate many-body localization of interacting spinless fermions in a one-dimensional disordered and tilted lattice. The fermions undergo energy-dependent transitions from ergodic to Stark many-body localization driven by the tilted potential, which are manifested by the appearance of mobility edges between delocalized states and Stark many-body localized states even when the disorder is weak. We can concretely diagnose these transitions rather than crossovers by finite-size scaling of energy-level statistics. Moreover, in the Stark many-body localization, the entanglement entropy obeys the area law scaling, in analogy to that in the conventional many-body localization.

preprint2020arXiv

Negative refraction of ultra-squeezed in-plane hyperbolic designer polaritons

The in-plane negative refraction of high-momentum (i.e., high-k) photonic modes could enable many applications such as imaging and hyperlensing in a planar platform at deep-subwavelength scales. However, its practical implementation in experiments remains elusive so far. Here we propose a class of hyperbolic metasurfaces, which is characterized by an anisotropic magnetic sheet conductivity and can support the in-plane ultrahigh-k magnetic designer polaritons. Based on such metasurfaces, we report the first experimental observation of the all-angle negative refraction of designer polaritons at extremely deep-subwavelength scales. Moreover, we directly visualize the designer polaritons with hyperbolic dispersions. Importantly, for these hyperbolic polaritons, we find that their squeezing factor is ultra-large and, to be specific, it can be up to 129 in the experiments, a record-breaking value exceeding those in naturally hyperbolic materials. The present scheme for the achievement of negative refraction is also applicable to other natural materials and may enable intriguing applications in nanophotonics. Besides, the proposed metasurfaces are readily tailorable in space and frequency, which could serve as a versatile platform to explore the extremely high confinement and unusual propagation of hyperbolic polaritons.

preprint2020arXiv

Neural Collaborative Filtering vs. Matrix Factorization Revisited

Embedding based models have been the state of the art in collaborative filtering for over a decade. Traditionally, the dot product or higher order equivalents have been used to combine two or more embeddings, e.g., most notably in matrix factorization. In recent years, it was suggested to replace the dot product with a learned similarity e.g. using a multilayer perceptron (MLP). This approach is often referred to as neural collaborative filtering (NCF). In this work, we revisit the experiments of the NCF paper that popularized learned similarities using MLPs. First, we show that with a proper hyperparameter selection, a simple dot product substantially outperforms the proposed learned similarities. Second, while a MLP can in theory approximate any function, we show that it is non-trivial to learn a dot product with an MLP. Finally, we discuss practical issues that arise when applying MLP based similarities and show that MLPs are too costly to use for item recommendation in production environments while dot products allow to apply very efficient retrieval algorithms. We conclude that MLPs should be used with care as embedding combiner and that dot products might be a better default choice.

preprint2020arXiv

NPU Speaker Verification System for INTERSPEECH 2020 Far-Field Speaker Verification Challenge

This paper describes the NPU system submitted to Interspeech 2020 Far-Field Speaker Verification Challenge (FFSVC). We particularly focus on far-field text-dependent SV from single (task1) and multiple microphone arrays (task3). The major challenges in such scenarios are short utterance and cross-channel and distance mismatch for enrollment and test. With the belief that better speaker embedding can alleviate the effects from short utterance, we introduce a new speaker embedding architecture - ResNet-BAM, which integrates a bottleneck attention module with ResNet as a simple and efficient way to further improve the representation power of ResNet. This contribution brings up to 1% EER reduction. We further address the mismatch problem in three directions. First, domain adversarial training, which aims to learn domain-invariant features, can yield to 0.8% EER reduction. Second, front-end signal processing, including WPE and beamforming, has no obvious contribution, but together with data selection and domain adversarial training, can further contribute to 0.5% EER reduction. Finally, data augmentation, which works with a specifically-designed data selection strategy, can lead to 2% EER reduction. Together with the above contributions, in the middle challenge results, our single submission system (without multi-system fusion) achieves the first and second place on task 1 and task 3, respectively.

preprint2020arXiv

PriceAggregator: An Intelligent System for Hotel Price Fetching

This paper describes the hotel price aggregation system - PriceAggregator, deployed at Agoda, a global online travel agency for hotels, vacation rentals, flights and airport transfer. Agoda aggregates non-direct suppliers' hotel rooms to ensure that Agoda's customers always have the widest selection of hotels, room types and packages. As of today, Agoda aggregates millions of hotels. The major challenge is that each supplier only allows Agoda to fetch for the hotel price with a limited amount of Queries Per Second (QPS). Due to the sheer volume of Agoda's user search traffic, this limited amount of QPS is never enough to cover all user searches. Inevitably, many user searches have to be ignored. Hence, booking lost. To overcome the challenge, we built PriceAggregator. PriceAggregator intelligently determines when, how and what to send to the suppliers to fetch for price. In this paper, we not only prove PriceAggregator is optimal theoretically but also demonstrate that PriceAggregator performs well in practice. PriceAggregator has been deployed in Agoda. Extensive online A/B experimentation have shown that PriceAggregator increases Agoda's bookings significantly.

preprint2020arXiv

Reversing the cycle: self-supervised deep stereo through enhanced monocular distillation

In many fields, self-supervised learning solutions are rapidly evolving and filling the gap with supervised approaches. This fact occurs for depth estimation based on either monocular or stereo, with the latter often providing a valid source of self-supervision for the former. In contrast, to soften typical stereo artefacts, we propose a novel self-supervised paradigm reversing the link between the two. Purposely, in order to train deep stereo networks, we distill knowledge through a monocular completion network. This architecture exploits single-image clues and few sparse points, sourced by traditional stereo algorithms, to estimate dense yet accurate disparity maps by means of a consensus mechanism over multiple estimations. We thoroughly evaluate with popular stereo datasets the impact of different supervisory signals showing how stereo networks trained with our paradigm outperform existing self-supervised frameworks. Finally, our proposal achieves notable generalization capabilities dealing with domain shift issues. Code available at https://github.com/FilippoAleotti/Reversing

preprint2020arXiv

Searching for Quasi-Periodic Modulations in $γ$-ray Active Galactic Nuclei

We perform a systematic search of quasi-periodic variabilities in $γ$-ray active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the third \emph{Fermi} Large Area Telescope source catalog (3FGL). We employe two techniques, Lomb-Scargle Periodogram (LSP) and Weighted Wavelet Z-transform (WWZ), to obtain power spectra of $γ$-ray light curves covering from 2008 August to 2016 December. The results show that besides several objects that have been reported in previous works, an additional source, the FSRQ PKS 0601-70 has a possible quasi-periodic variability of 450 days in its $γ$-ray light curves with the significance of $>3σ$. The physical implications of our findings are discussed.

preprint2020arXiv

Selective Convolutional Network: An Efficient Object Detector with Ignoring Background

It is well known that attention mechanisms can effectively improve the performance of many CNNs including object detectors. Instead of refining feature maps prevalently, we reduce the prohibitive computational complexity by a novel attempt at attention. Therefore, we introduce an efficient object detector called Selective Convolutional Network (SCN), which selectively calculates only on the locations that contain meaningful and conducive information. The basic idea is to exclude the insignificant background areas, which effectively reduces the computational cost especially during the feature extraction. To solve it, we design an elaborate structure with negligible overheads to guide the network where to look next. It's end-to-end trainable and easy-embedding. Without additional segmentation datasets, we explores two different train strategies including direct supervision and indirect supervision. Extensive experiments assess the performance on PASCAL VOC2007 and MS COCO detection datasets. Results show that SSD and Pelee integrated with our method averagely reduce the calculations in a range of 1/5 and 1/3 with slight loss of accuracy, demonstrating the feasibility of SCN.

preprint2020arXiv

Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation

The objective of this paper is self-supervised representation learning, with the goal of solving semi-supervised video object segmentation (a.k.a. dense tracking). We make the following contributions: (i) we propose to improve the existing self-supervised approach, with a simple, yet more effective memory mechanism for long-term correspondence matching, which resolves the challenge caused by the dis-appearance and reappearance of objects; (ii) by augmenting the self-supervised approach with an online adaptation module, our method successfully alleviates tracker drifts caused by spatial-temporal discontinuity, e.g. occlusions or dis-occlusions, fast motions; (iii) we explore the efficiency of self-supervised representation learning for dense tracking, surprisingly, we show that a powerful tracking model can be trained with as few as 100 raw video clips (equivalent to a duration of 11mins), indicating that low-level statistics have already been effective for tracking tasks; (iv) we demonstrate state-of-the-art results among the self-supervised approaches on DAVIS-2017 and YouTube-VOS, as well as surpassing most of methods trained with millions of manual segmentation annotations, further bridging the gap between self-supervised and supervised learning. Codes are released to foster any further research (https://github.com/fangruizhu/self_sup_semiVOS).

preprint2020arXiv

Semantic Discord: Finding Unusual Local Patterns for Time Series

Finding anomalous subsequence in a long time series is a very important but difficult problem. Existing state-of-the-art methods have been focusing on searching for the subsequence that is the most dissimilar to the rest of the subsequences; however, they do not take into account the background patterns that contain the anomalous candidates. As a result, such approaches are likely to miss local anomalies. We introduce a new definition named \textit{semantic discord}, which incorporates the context information from larger subsequences containing the anomaly candidates. We propose an efficient algorithm with a derived lower bound that is up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than the brute force algorithm in real world data. We demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in locating anomalies by extensive experiments. We further explain the interpretability of semantic discord.

preprint2020arXiv

SentPWNet: A Unified Sentence Pair Weighting Network for Task-specific Sentence Embedding

Pair-based metric learning has been widely adopted to learn sentence embedding in many NLP tasks such as semantic text similarity due to its efficiency in computation. Most existing works employed a sequence encoder model and utilized limited sentence pairs with a pair-based loss to learn discriminating sentence representation. However, it is known that the sentence representation can be biased when the sampled sentence pairs deviate from the true distribution of all sentence pairs. In this paper, our theoretical analysis shows that existing works severely suffered from a good pair sampling and instance weighting strategy. Instead of one time pair selection and learning on equal weighted pairs, we propose a unified locality weighting and learning framework to learn task-specific sentence embedding. Our model, SentPWNet, exploits the neighboring spatial distribution of each sentence as locality weight to indicate the informative level of sentence pair. Such weight is updated along with pair-loss optimization in each round, ensuring the model keep learning the most informative sentence pairs. Extensive experiments on four public available datasets and a self-collected place search benchmark with 1.4 million places clearly demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms existing sentence embedding methods with comparable efficiency.

preprint2020arXiv

Spatial Language Representation with Multi-Level Geocoding

We present a multi-level geocoding model (MLG) that learns to associate texts to geographic locations. The Earth's surface is represented using space-filling curves that decompose the sphere into a hierarchy of similarly sized, non-overlapping cells. MLG balances generalization and accuracy by combining losses across multiple levels and predicting cells at each level simultaneously. Without using any dataset-specific tuning, we show that MLG obtains state-of-the-art results for toponym resolution on three English datasets. Furthermore, it obtains large gains without any knowledge base metadata, demonstrating that it can effectively learn the connection between text spans and coordinates - and thus can be extended to toponymns not present in knowledge bases.

preprint2020arXiv

Spin-Valley Locking Effect in Defect States of Monolayer MoS$_2$

Valley pseudospin in two-dimensional (2D) transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) allows optical control of spin-valley polarization and intervalley quantum coherence. Defect states in TMDs give rise to new exciton features and theoretically exhibit spin-valley polarization; however, experimental achievement of this phenomenon remains challenges. Here, we report unambiguous valley pseudospin of defect-bound localized excitons in CVD-grown monolayer MoS2; enhanced valley Zeeman splitting with an effective g-factor of -6.2 is observed. Our results reveal that all five d-orbitals and the increased effective electron mass contribute to the band shift of defect states, demonstrating a new physics of the magnetic responses of defect-bound localized excitons, strikingly different from that of A excitons. Our work paves the way for the manipulation of the spin-valley degrees of freedom through defects toward valleytronic devices.

preprint2020arXiv

Strip Pooling: Rethinking Spatial Pooling for Scene Parsing

Spatial pooling has been proven highly effective in capturing long-range contextual information for pixel-wise prediction tasks, such as scene parsing. In this paper, beyond conventional spatial pooling that usually has a regular shape of NxN, we rethink the formulation of spatial pooling by introducing a new pooling strategy, called strip pooling, which considers a long but narrow kernel, i.e., 1xN or Nx1. Based on strip pooling, we further investigate spatial pooling architecture design by 1) introducing a new strip pooling module that enables backbone networks to efficiently model long-range dependencies, 2) presenting a novel building block with diverse spatial pooling as a core, and 3) systematically comparing the performance of the proposed strip pooling and conventional spatial pooling techniques. Both novel pooling-based designs are lightweight and can serve as an efficient plug-and-play module in existing scene parsing networks. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks (e.g., ADE20K and Cityscapes) demonstrate that our simple approach establishes new state-of-the-art results. Code is made available at https://github.com/Andrew-Qibin/SPNet.

preprint2020arXiv

Strong and tunable spin-orbit interaction in a single crystalline InSb nanosheet

A dual-gate InSb nanosheet field-effect device is realized and is used to investigate the physical origin and the controllability of the spin-orbit interaction in a narrow bandgap semiconductor InSb nanosheet. We demonstrate that by applying a voltage over the dual gate, efficiently tuning of the spin-orbit interaction in the InSb nanosheet can be achieved. We also find the presence of an intrinsic spin-orbit interaction in the InSb nanosheet at zero dual-gate voltage and identify its physical origin as a build-in asymmetry in the device layer structure. Having a strong and controllable spin-orbit interaction in an InSb nanosheet could simplify the design and realization of spintronic deceives, spin-based quantum devices and topological quantum devices.

preprint2020arXiv

Style Normalization and Restitution for Generalizable Person Re-identification

Existing fully-supervised person re-identification (ReID) methods usually suffer from poor generalization capability caused by domain gaps. The key to solving this problem lies in filtering out identity-irrelevant interference and learning domain-invariant person representations. In this paper, we aim to design a generalizable person ReID framework which trains a model on source domains yet is able to generalize/perform well on target domains. To achieve this goal, we propose a simple yet effective Style Normalization and Restitution (SNR) module. Specifically, we filter out style variations (e.g., illumination, color contrast) by Instance Normalization (IN). However, such a process inevitably removes discriminative information. We propose to distill identity-relevant feature from the removed information and restitute it to the network to ensure high discrimination. For better disentanglement, we enforce a dual causal loss constraint in SNR to encourage the separation of identity-relevant features and identity-irrelevant features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong generalization capability of our framework. Our models empowered by the SNR modules significantly outperform the state-of-the-art domain generalization approaches on multiple widely-used person ReID benchmarks, and also show superiority on unsupervised domain adaptation.

preprint2020arXiv

Superbloom: Bloom filter meets Transformer

We extend the idea of word pieces in natural language models to machine learning tasks on opaque ids. This is achieved by applying hash functions to map each id to multiple hash tokens in a much smaller space, similarly to a Bloom filter. We show that by applying a multi-layer Transformer to these Bloom filter digests, we are able to obtain models with high accuracy. They outperform models of a similar size without hashing and, to a large degree, models of a much larger size trained using sampled softmax with the same computational budget. Our key observation is that it is important to use a multi-layer Transformer for Bloom filter digests to remove ambiguity in the hashed input. We believe this provides an alternative method to solving problems with large vocabulary size.

preprint2020arXiv

The Analog Front-end for the LGAD Based Precision Timing Application in CMS ETL

The analog front-end for the Low Gain Avalanche Detector (LGAD) based precision timing application in the CMS Endcap Timing Layer (ETL) has been prototyped in a 65 nm CMOS mini-ASIC named ETROC0. Serving as the very first prototype of ETL readout chip (ETROC), ETROC0 aims to study and demonstrate the performance of the analog frontend, with the goal to achieve 40 to 50 ps time resolution per hit with LGAD (therefore reach about 30ps per track with two detector-layer hits per track). ETROC0 consists of preamplifier and discriminator stages, which amplifies the LGAD signal and generates digital pulses containing time of arrival and time over threshold information. This paper will focus on the design considerations that lead to the ETROC front-end architecture choice, the key design features of the building blocks, the methodology of using the LGAD simulation data to evaluate and optimize the front-end design. The ETROC0 prototype chips have been extensively tested using charge injection and the measured performance agrees well with simulation. The initial beam test results are also presented, with time resolution of around 33 ps observed from the preamplifier waveform analysis and around 41 ps from the discriminator pulses analysis. A subset of ETROC0 chips have also been tested to a total ionizing dose of 100 MRad with X-ray and no performance degradation been observed.

preprint2020arXiv

Universal Adversarial Perturbations Generative Network for Speaker Recognition

Attacking deep learning based biometric systems has drawn more and more attention with the wide deployment of fingerprint/face/speaker recognition systems, given the fact that the neural networks are vulnerable to the adversarial examples, which have been intentionally perturbed to remain almost imperceptible for human. In this paper, we demonstrated the existence of the universal adversarial perturbations~(UAPs) for the speaker recognition systems. We proposed a generative network to learn the mapping from the low-dimensional normal distribution to the UAPs subspace, then synthesize the UAPs to perturbe any input signals to spoof the well-trained speaker recognition model with high probability. Experimental results on TIMIT and LibriSpeech datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

preprint2020arXiv

What Deep CNNs Benefit from Global Covariance Pooling: An Optimization Perspective

Recent works have demonstrated that global covariance pooling (GCP) has the ability to improve performance of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on visual classification task. Despite considerable advance, the reasons on effectiveness of GCP on deep CNNs have not been well studied. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand what deep CNNs benefit from GCP in a viewpoint of optimization. Specifically, we explore the effect of GCP on deep CNNs in terms of the Lipschitzness of optimization loss and the predictiveness of gradients, and show that GCP can make the optimization landscape more smooth and the gradients more predictive. Furthermore, we discuss the connection between GCP and second-order optimization for deep CNNs. More importantly, above findings can account for several merits of covariance pooling for training deep CNNs that have not been recognized previously or fully explored, including significant acceleration of network convergence (i.e., the networks trained with GCP can support rapid decay of learning rates, achieving favorable performance while significantly reducing number of training epochs), stronger robustness to distorted examples generated by image corruptions and perturbations, and good generalization ability to different vision tasks, e.g., object detection and instance segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments using various deep CNN models on diversified tasks, and the results provide strong support to our findings.

preprint2020arXiv

XingGAN for Person Image Generation

We propose a novel Generative Adversarial Network (XingGAN or CrossingGAN) for person image generation tasks, i.e., translating the pose of a given person to a desired one. The proposed Xing generator consists of two generation branches that model the person's appearance and shape information, respectively. Moreover, we propose two novel blocks to effectively transfer and update the person's shape and appearance embeddings in a crossing way to mutually improve each other, which has not been considered by any other existing GAN-based image generation work. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets, i.e., Market-1501 and DeepFashion, demonstrate that the proposed XingGAN advances the state-of-the-art performance both in terms of objective quantitative scores and subjective visual realness. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/XingGAN.

preprint2020arXiv

Zero-Shot Heterogeneous Transfer Learning from Recommender Systems to Cold-Start Search Retrieval

Many recent advances in neural information retrieval models, which predict top-K items given a query, learn directly from a large training set of (query, item) pairs. However, they are often insufficient when there are many previously unseen (query, item) combinations, often referred to as the cold start problem. Furthermore, the search system can be biased towards items that are frequently shown to a query previously, also known as the 'rich get richer' (a.k.a. feedback loop) problem. In light of these problems, we observed that most online content platforms have both a search and a recommender system that, while having heterogeneous input spaces, can be connected through their common output item space and a shared semantic representation. In this paper, we propose a new Zero-Shot Heterogeneous Transfer Learning framework that transfers learned knowledge from the recommender system component to improve the search component of a content platform. First, it learns representations of items and their natural-language features by predicting (item, item) correlation graphs derived from the recommender system as an auxiliary task. Then, the learned representations are transferred to solve the target search retrieval task, performing query-to-item prediction without having seen any (query, item) pairs in training. We conduct online and offline experiments on one of the world's largest search and recommender systems from Google, and present the results and lessons learned. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve high performance on offline search retrieval tasks, and more importantly, achieved significant improvements on relevance and user interactions over the highly-optimized production system in online experiments.

preprint2019arXiv

Deep Self-representative Concept Factorization Network for Representation Learning

In this paper, we investigate the unsupervised deep representation learning issue and technically propose a novel framework called Deep Self-representative Concept Factorization Network (DSCF-Net), for clustering deep features. To improve the representation and clustering abilities, DSCF-Net explicitly considers discovering hidden deep semantic features, enhancing the robustness proper-ties of the deep factorization to noise and preserving the local man-ifold structures of deep features. Specifically, DSCF-Net seamlessly integrates the robust deep concept factorization, deep self-expressive representation and adaptive locality preserving feature learning into a unified framework. To discover hidden deep repre-sentations, DSCF-Net designs a hierarchical factorization architec-ture using multiple layers of linear transformations, where the hierarchical representation is performed by formulating the prob-lem as optimizing the basis concepts in each layer to improve the representation indirectly. DSCF-Net also improves the robustness by subspace recovery for sparse error correction firstly and then performs the deep factorization in the recovered visual subspace. To obtain locality-preserving representations, we also present an adaptive deep self-representative weighting strategy by using the coefficient matrix as the adaptive reconstruction weights to keep the locality of representations. Extensive comparison results with several other related models show that DSCF-Net delivers state-of-the-art performance on several public databases.

preprint2019arXiv

Magnetic phase transitions of insulating spin-orbit coupled Bose atoms in one-dimensional optical lattices

We consider the insulating spin-orbit coupled Bose atoms confined within one-dimensional optical lattices and explore their ground-state magnetic phase transitions. Under strong interactions, the charge degrees of atoms are frozen and the system can be described by an anisotropic XXZ Heisenberg chain with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and transverse field. We apply the matrix product state method to obtain low-energy states and analyze the lowest energy gaps and the ground-state magnetization and correlations. We find when the transverse field is absent, the ground state is a gapped ferromagnetic phase with long-range correlation in the z direction if the interspin s-wave interacting strength is stronger than that of the intraspin one, otherwise it is a gapless Luttinger liquid (LL) phase with algebraic decaying correlation. When the transverse field is turned on, the gapless LL phase is broken, there emerges a long-range correlated phase with ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic or spiral order, which depends on the DM interaction strength. We believe our study provides a complete understanding of the interplay between SOC and quantum magnetism of spinor atoms in optical lattices.

preprint2019arXiv

Multi-Label Transfer Learning for Multi-Relational Semantic Similarity

Multi-relational semantic similarity datasets define the semantic relations between two short texts in multiple ways, e.g., similarity, relatedness, and so on. Yet, all the systems to date designed to capture such relations target one relation at a time. We propose a multi-label transfer learning approach based on LSTM to make predictions for several relations simultaneously and aggregate the losses to update the parameters. This multi-label regression approach jointly learns the information provided by the multiple relations, rather than treating them as separate tasks. Not only does this approach outperform the single-task approach and the traditional multi-task learning approach, but it also achieves state-of-the-art performance on all but one relation of the Human Activity Phrase dataset.

preprint2019arXiv

Soliton dynamics in a fractional complex Ginzburg-Landau model

The general objective of the work is to study dynamics of dissipative solitons in the framework of a one-dimensional complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE) of a fractional order. To estimate the shape of solitons in fractional models, we first develop the variational approximation for solitons of the fractional nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLSE), and an analytical approximation for exponentially decaying tails of the solitons. Proceeding to numerical consideration of solitons in fractional CGLE, we study, in necessary detail, effects of the respective Levy index (LI) on the solitons' dynamics. In particular, dependence of stability domains in the model's parameter space on the LI is identified. Pairs of in-phase dissipative solitons merge into single pulses, with the respective merger distance also determined by LI.

preprint2019arXiv

Truncated analytic moment analysis and its hybrid-field contrast in grating-based x-ray phase contrast imaging

For grating-based x-ray phase contrast imaging (GPCI), a multi-order moment analysis (MMA) has been recently developed to obtain multiple contrasts from the ultra-small-angle x-ray scattering distribution, as a novel information retrieval approach that is totally different from the conventional Fourier components analysis (FCA). In this paper, we present an analytic form of MMA in theory that can retrieve multiple contrasts directly from raw phase-stepping images, with no scattering distribution involved. For practical implementation, a truncated analytic analysis (called as TA-MMA) is adopted and it is hundreds of times faster in computation than the original deconvolution-based MMA (called as DB-MMA). More importantly, TA-MMA is proved to establish a quantitative connection between FCA and MMA, i.e., the first-order moment computed by TA-MMA is essentially the product of the phase contrast and the dark-field contrast retrieved by FCA, providing a new physical parameter for GPCI. The new physical parameter, in fact, can be treated as a ``hybrid-field'' contrast as it fuses the original phase contrast and dark-field contrast in a straightforward manner, which may be the first physical fusion contrast in GPCI to our knowledge and may have a potential to be directly used in practical applications.

preprint2018arXiv

Improving Text-to-SQL Evaluation Methodology

To be informative, an evaluation must measure how well systems generalize to realistic unseen data. We identify limitations of and propose improvements to current evaluations of text-to-SQL systems. First, we compare human-generated and automatically generated questions, characterizing properties of queries necessary for real-world applications. To facilitate evaluation on multiple datasets, we release standardized and improved versions of seven existing datasets and one new text-to-SQL dataset. Second, we show that the current division of data into training and test sets measures robustness to variations in the way questions are asked, but only partially tests how well systems generalize to new queries; therefore, we propose a complementary dataset split for evaluation of future work. Finally, we demonstrate how the common practice of anonymizing variables during evaluation removes an important challenge of the task. Our observations highlight key difficulties, and our methodology enables effective measurement of future development.

preprint2016arXiv

An oblique pulsar magnetosphere with a plasma conductivity

An oblique pulsar magnetosphere with a plasma conductivity is studied by using a pseudo-spectral method. In the pseudo-spectral method, the time-dependent Maxwell equations are solved, both electric and magnetic fields are expanded in terms of the vector spherical harmonic (VSH) functions in spherical geometry and the divergencelessness of magnetic field is analytically enforced by a projection method. The pulsar magnetospheres in infinite (i. e., force-free approximation) and finite conductivities are simulated and a family of solutions that smoothly transition from the Deutsch vacuum solution to the force-free solution are obtained. The $\sin^2α$ dependence of the spin-down luminosity on the magnetic inclination angle $α$ in which the full electric current density are taken into account is retrieved in the force-free regime.

preprint2016arXiv

Cluster Mean-Field Signature of Entanglement Entropy in Bosonic Superfluid-Insulator Transitions

Entanglement entropy (EE), a fundamental conception in quantum information for characterizing entanglement, has been extensively employed to explore quantum phase transitions (QPTs). Although the conventional single-site mean-field (MF) approach successfully predicts the emergence of QPTs, it fails to include any entanglement. Here, for the first time, in the framework of a cluster MF treatment, we extract the signature of EE in the bosonic superfluid-insulator transitions. We consider a trimerized Kagome lattice of interacting bosons, in which each trimer is treated as a cluster, and implement the cluster MF treatment by decoupling all inter-trimer hopping. In addition to superfluid and integer insulator phases, we find that fractional insulator phases appear when the tunneling is dominated by the intra-trimer part. To quantify the residual bipartite entanglement in a cluster, we calculate the second-order Renyi entropy, which can be experimentally measured by quantum interference of many-body twins. The second-order Renyi entropy itself is continuous everywhere, however, the continuousness of its first-order derivative breaks down at the phase boundary. This means that the bosonic superfluid-insulator transitions can still be efficiently captured by the residual entanglement in our cluster MF treatment. Besides to the bosonic superfluid-insulator transitions, our cluster MF treatment may also be used to capture the signature of EE for other QPTs in quantum superlattice models.

preprint2016arXiv

Cosmological Tests with the FSRQ Gamma-ray Luminosity Function

The extensive catalog of $γ$-ray selected flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) produced by \emph{Fermi} during a four-year survey has generated considerable interest in determining their $γ$-ray luminosity function (GLF) and its evolution with cosmic time. In this paper, we introduce the novel idea of using this extensive database to test the differential volume expansion rate predicted by two specific models, the concordance $Λ$CDM and $R_{\rm h}=ct$ cosmologies. For this purpose, we use two well-studied formulations of the GLF, one based on pure luminosity evolution (PLE) and the other on a luminosity-dependent density evolution (LDDE). Using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test on one-parameter cumulative distributions (in luminosity, redshift, photon index and source count), we confirm the results of earlier works showing that these data somewhat favour LDDE over PLE; we show that this is the case for both $Λ$CDM and $R_{\rm h}=ct$. Regardless of which GLF one chooses, however, we also show that model selection tools very strongly favour $R_{\rm h}=ct$ over $Λ$CDM. We suggest that such population studies, though featuring a strong evolution in redshift, may nonetheless be used as a valuable independent check of other model comparisons based solely on geometric considerations.

preprint2016arXiv

Formation of very hard electron and gamma-ray spectra of flat spectrum radio quasar in fast-cooling regime

In external Compton scenario, we investigate the formation of the very hard electron spectrum in the fast-cooling regime, using a time-dependent emission model. It is shown that a very hard electron distribution $N'_{\rm e}(\gp)\propto\gp^{-p}$ with the spectral index $p\sim1.3$ is formed below the minimum energy of injection electron when inverse Compton scattering takes place in the Klein-Nishina regime, i.e., inverse Compton scattering of relativistic electrons on broad-line region radiation in flat spectrum radio quasars. This produces a very hard gamma-ray spectrum, and can reasonably explain the very hard \emph{Fermi}-LAT spectrum of the flat spectrum radio quasar 3C 279 during the extreme gamma-ray flare in 2013 December.

preprint2016arXiv

Learning a Discriminative Null Space for Person Re-identification

Most existing person re-identification (re-id) methods focus on learning the optimal distance metrics across camera views. Typically a person's appearance is represented using features of thousands of dimensions, whilst only hundreds of training samples are available due to the difficulties in collecting matched training images. With the number of training samples much smaller than the feature dimension, the existing methods thus face the classic small sample size (SSS) problem and have to resort to dimensionality reduction techniques and/or matrix regularisation, which lead to loss of discriminative power. In this work, we propose to overcome the SSS problem in re-id distance metric learning by matching people in a discriminative null space of the training data. In this null space, images of the same person are collapsed into a single point thus minimising the within-class scatter to the extreme and maximising the relative between-class separation simultaneously. Importantly, it has a fixed dimension, a closed-form solution and is very efficient to compute. Extensive experiments carried out on five person re-identification benchmarks including VIPeR, PRID2011, CUHK01, CUHK03 and Market1501 show that such a simple approach beats the state-of-the-art alternatives, often by a big margin.

preprint2016arXiv

Private Empirical Risk Minimization Beyond the Worst Case: The Effect of the Constraint Set Geometry

Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) is a standard technique in machine learning, where a model is selected by minimizing a loss function over constraint set. When the training dataset consists of private information, it is natural to use a differentially private ERM algorithm, and this problem has been the subject of a long line of work started with Chaudhuri and Monteleoni 2008. A private ERM algorithm outputs an approximate minimizer of the loss function and its error can be measured as the difference from the optimal value of the loss function. When the constraint set is arbitrary, the required error bounds are fairly well understood \cite{BassilyST14}. In this work, we show that the geometric properties of the constraint set can be used to derive significantly better results. Specifically, we show that a differentially private version of Mirror Descent leads to error bounds of the form $\tilde{O}(G_{\mathcal{C}}/n)$ for a lipschitz loss function, improving on the $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{p}/n)$ bounds in Bassily, Smith and Thakurta 2014. Here $p$ is the dimensionality of the problem, $n$ is the number of data points in the training set, and $G_{\mathcal{C}}$ denotes the Gaussian width of the constraint set that we optimize over. We show similar improvements for strongly convex functions, and for smooth functions. In addition, we show that when the loss function is Lipschitz with respect to the $\ell_1$ norm and $\mathcal{C}$ is $\ell_1$-bounded, a differentially private version of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm gives error bounds of the form $\tilde{O}(n^{-2/3})$. This captures the important and common case of sparse linear regression (LASSO), when the data $x_i$ satisfies $|x_i|_{\infty} \leq 1$ and we optimize over the $\ell_1$ ball. We show new lower bounds for this setting, that together with known bounds, imply that all our upper bounds are tight.

preprint2016arXiv

Real-Time Visual Tracking: Promoting the Robustness of Correlation Filter Learning

Correlation filtering based tracking model has received lots of attention and achieved great success in real-time tracking, however, the lost function in current correlation filtering paradigm could not reliably response to the appearance changes caused by occlusion and illumination variations. This study intends to promote the robustness of the correlation filter learning. By exploiting the anisotropy of the filter response, three sparsity related loss functions are proposed to alleviate the overfitting issue of previous methods and improve the overall tracking performance. As a result, three real-time trackers are implemented. Extensive experiments in various challenging situations demonstrate that the robustness of the learned correlation filter has been greatly improved via the designed loss functions. In addition, the study reveals, from an experimental perspective, how different loss functions essentially influence the tracking performance. An important conclusion is that the sensitivity of the peak values of the filter in successive frames is consistent with the tracking performance. This is a useful reference criterion in designing a robust correlation filter for visual tracking.

preprint2016arXiv

Study of linearity of LYSO crystal for HERD calorimeter

The High Energy cosmic Radiation Detection (HERD) facility is a space mission designed for detecting cosmic ray (CR) electrons, $γ$-rays up to tens of TeV and CR nuclei from proton to iron up to several PeV. The main instrument of HERD is a 3-D imaging calorimeter (CALO) composed of nearly ten thousand cubic LYSO crystals. A large dynamic range of single HERD CALO Cell (HCC) is necessary to achieve HERD's PeV observation objectives, which means that the response of HCC should maintain a good linearity from minimum ionizing particle (MIP) calibration to PeV shower maximum. In order to study the linearity of HCC over such a large energy range, a beam test has been implemented at the E2 and E3 beam lines of BEPC. High intensity pulsed electron beam provided by E2 line are used for producing high energy density within HCC; $π^{+}$/proton provided by E3 line are used for HCC calibration. The results show that no saturation effect occurs and the linearity of HCC is better than 10% from 30 MeV (1 MIP) to 1.1$\times$10$^{3}$ TeV (energy density is 93 TeV/cm$^{3}$), which can meet the requirement mentioned above.

preprint2016arXiv

Superconductivity and abnormal pressure effect in Sr0.5La0.5FBiSe2 superconductor

Through the solid state reaction method, we synthesized a new BiSe2-based superconductor Sr0:5La0:5FBiSe2 with superconducting transition temperature Tc?3.8 K. A strong diamagnetic signal below Tc in susceptibility ?(T) is observed indicating the bulk nature of superconductivity. Different to most BiS2-based compounds where superconductivity develops from a semiconducting-like normal state, the present compound exhibits a metallic behavior down to Tc. Under weak magnetic field or pressure, however, a remarkable crossover from metallic to insulating behaviors takes place around Tmin where the resistivity picks up a local minimum. With increasing pressure, Tc decreases monotonously and Tmin shifts to high temperatures, while the absolute value of the normal state resistivity at low temperatures first decreases and then increases with pressure up to 2.5 GPa. These results imply that the electronic structure of Sr0:5La0:5FBiSe2 may be different to those in the other BiS2-based systems.

preprint2016arXiv

Testing one-zone synchrotron-self-Compton models with spectral energy distributions of Mrk 421

We test one-zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) models with high-quality multiwavelength spectral energy distribution (SED) data of Mrk 421. We use Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique to fit twelve day-scale SEDs of Mrk 421 with one-zone SSC models. Three types of electron energy distribution (EED), a log-parabola (LP) EED, a power-law log-parabola (PLLP) EED and a broken power-law (BPL) EED, are assumed in fits. We find that the one-zone SSC model with the PLLP EED provides successful fits to all the twelve SEDs. However, the one-zone SSC model with the LP and BPL EEDs fail to provide acceptable fits to the highest energy X-ray data or GeV data in several states. We therefore conclude that the one-zone SSC model works well in explaining the SEDs of Mrk 421, and the PLLP EED is preferred over the LP and BPL EEDs for Mrk 421 during the flare in March 2010. We derive magnetic field $B'\sim0.01$\ G, Doppler factor $δ_{\rm D}\sim$30--50, and the curvature parameter of EED $r\sim1$--$10$ in the model with the PLLP EED. The evolutions of model parameters are explored. The physical implications of our results are discussed.

preprint2016arXiv

Tracking Completion

A fundamental component of modern trackers is an online learned tracking model, which is typically modeled either globally or locally. The two kinds of models perform differently in terms of effectiveness and robustness under different challenging situations. This work exploits the advantages of both models. A subspace model, from a global perspective, is learned from previously obtained targets via rank-minimization to address the tracking, and a pixel-level local observation is leveraged si- multaneously, from a local point of view, to augment the subspace model. A matrix completion method is employed to integrate the two models. Unlike previous tracking methods, which locate the target among all fully observed target candidates, the proposed approach first estimates an expected target via the matrix completion through partially observed target candidates, and then, identifies the target according to the estimation accuracy with respect to the target candidates. Specifically, the tracking is formulated as a problem of target appearance estimation. Extensive experiments on various challenging video sequences verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms other popular state-of-the-art trackers.

preprint2015arXiv

A self-consistent interpretation of the GeV-TeV emission from a distant blazar PKS 1424+240

We propose a scenario for self-consistent interpretation of GeV - TeV spectrum of a distant blazar PKS 1424+240. In this scenario, ultra-high energy (UHE) protons are assumed to exist in the blazar jet and produce gamma rays through synchrotron emission emitted by relativistic protons and pair cascades (resulted from $pγ$ interaction); meanwhile, some of these UHE protons may escape from the jet and are injected into intergalactic space. Therefore, we assume that UHE cosmic rays (CR) originate from relativistic protons in the jet and use energy-independent escape timescale to obtain UHECR injection spectrum. Both contributions of gamma rays injected by the source and secondary gamma rays produced in interactions of UHECRs emitted by the blazar with photon background during their propagation through intergalactic space are calculated. Our results show that this scenario is able to reproduce the GeV-TeV spectrum of PKS 1424+240 self-consistently in a broad range of redshifts $0.6<z<1.3$. The required relativistic jet power $L_p\simeq3\times10^{46}\ \rm erg\ s^{-1}$ only moderately depends on the assumed source redshift, while the proton escape timescale (and the injected UHECR luminosity) strongly depends on $z$. We compare the integral TeV fluxes predicted in our scenario with the sensitivity of the planned Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), and discuss the implications to future observations.

preprint2015arXiv

Coexistence of superconductivity and ferromagnetism in Sr0.5Ce0.5FBiS2

Through the combination of X-ray diffraction, electrical transport, magnetic susceptibility, and the heat capacity measurements, we studied the effect of Ce doping in the newly discovered SrFBiS${2}$ system. It is found that Sr${0.5}$Ce${0.5}$FBiS${2}$ undergoes a second-order transition below $7.5 K, followed by a superconducting transition with the critical temperature Tc=2.8 K. Our transport, specific heat and DC-magnetization results suggest the presence of bulk ferromagneticcorrelation of Ce ion below 7.5 K that coexist with superconductivity when the temperature is further lowered below 2.8 K.

preprint2015arXiv

Complex molecules in W51 North region

We present Submillimeter Array (SMA) molecular line observations in two 2 GHz-wide bands centered at 217.5 and 227.5 GHz, toward the massive star forming region W51 North. We identified 84 molecular line transitions from 17 species and their isotopologues. The molecular gas distribution of these lines mainly peaks in the continuum position of W51 North, and has a small tail extending to the west, probably associated with W51 d2. In addition to the commonly detected nitrogen and oxygen-bearing species, we detected a large amount of transitions of the Acetone (CH$_3$COCH$_3$) and Methyl Formate (CH$_3$OCHO), which may suggest that these molecules are present in an early evolutionary stage of the massive stars. We also found that W51 North is an ethanol-rich source. There is no obvious difference in the molecular gas distributions between the oxygen-bearing and nitrogen-bearing molecules. Under the assumption of Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE), with the XCLASS tool, the molecular column densities, and rotation temperatures are estimated. We found that the oxygen-bearing molecules have considerable higher column densities and fractional abundances than the nitrogen-bearing molecules. The rotation temperatures range from 100 to 200 K, suggesting that the molecular emission could be originated from a warm environment. Finally, based on the gas distributions, fractional abundances and the rotation temperatures, we conclude that CH$_3$OH, C$_2$H$_5$OH, CH$_3$COCH$_3$ and CH$_3$CH$_2$CN might be synthesized on the grain surface, while gas phase chemistry is responsible for the production of CH$_3$OCH$_3$, CH$_3$OCHO and CH$_2$CHCN.

preprint2015arXiv

Dynamic changes of emitting electron distribution in the jet of 3C 279: signatures of acceleration and cooling

We study the dynamic changes of electron energy distribution (EED) through systematically analysing the quasi-simultaneous spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the flat spectrum radio quasar 3C 279 in different states. With Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique we model fourteen SEDs of 3C 279 using a leptonic model with a three-parameter log-parabola electron energy distribution (EED). The 14 SEDs can be satisfactorily fitted with the one-zone leptonic model. The observed $γ$ rays in 13 states are attributed to Compton scattering of external infrared photons from a surrounding dusty torus. The curved $γ$-ray spectrum observed during 2-8 April 2014 is well explained by the external Compton of dust radiation. It is found that there is a clear positive correlation between the curvature parameter $b$ of the EED and the electron peak energy $γ'_{\rm pk}$. No clear correlation between $b$ and the synchrotron peak frequency $ν_{\rm s}$ is found, due to the varied product of Doppler factor and fluid magnetic field from state to state. We interpret the correlation of $b-γ'_{\rm pk}$ in a stochastic acceleration scenario. This positive correlation is in agreement with the prediction in the stage when the balance between acceleration and radiative cooling of the electrons is nearly established in the case of the turbulence spectral index $q=2$.

preprint2015arXiv

Multicolor Photometry of the Merging Galaxy Cluster A2319: Dynamics and Star Formation Properties

Asymmetric X-ray emission and powerful cluster-scale radio halo indicate that A2319 is a merging cluster of galaxies. This paper presents our multicolor photometry for A2319 with 15 optical intermediate filters in the Beijing-Arizona-Taiwan-Connecticut (BATC) system. There are 142 galaxies with known spectroscopic redshifts within the viewing field, including 128 member galaxies (called sample I).A large velocity dispersion in the rest frame suggests a merger dynamics in A2319. The contour map of projected density and localized velocity structure confirm the so-called A2319B substructure, at ~ 10' NW to the main concentration A2319A. The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of more than 30,000 sources are obtained in our BATC photometry down to V ~ 20 mag. With color-color diagrams and photometric redshift technique, 233 galaxies brighter than h=19.0 are newly selected as member candidates. The early-type galaxies are found to follow a tight color-magnitude correlation. Based on sample I and the enlarged sample of member galaxies (called sample II), subcluster A2319B is confirmed. A strong environmental effect on star formation histories is found in the manner that galaxies in the sparse regions have various star formation histories, while galaxies in the dense regions are found to have shorter SFR time scales, older stellar ages, and higher ISM metallicities. For the merging cluster A2319, local surface density is a better environmental indicator rather than the clustercentric distance. Compared with the well-relaxed cluster A2589, a higher fraction of star-forming galaxies is found in A2319, indicating that the galaxy-scale turbulence stimulated by the subcluster merger might have played a role in triggering the star formation activity.

preprint2015arXiv

Near-Equipartition Jets with Log-Parabola Electron Energy Distribution and the Blazar Spectral-Index Diagrams

Fermi-LAT analyses show that the gamma-ray photon spectral indices Gamma_gamma of a large sample of blazars correlate with the vFv peak synchrotron frequency v_s according to the relation Gamma_gamma = d - k log v_s. The same function, with different constants d and k, also describes the relationship between Gamma_gamma and peak Compton frequency v_C. This behavior is derived analytically using an equipartition blazar model with a log-parabola description of the electron energy distribution (EED). In the Thomson regime, k = k_EC = 3b/4 for external Compton processes and k = k_SSC = 9b/16 for synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) processes, where b is the log-parabola width parameter of the EED. The BL Lac object Mrk 501 is fit with a synchrotron/SSC model given by the log-parabola EED, and is best fit away from equipartition. Corrections are made to the spectral-index diagrams for a low-energy power-law EED and departures from equipartition, as constrained by absolute jet power. Analytic expressions are compared with numerical values derived from self-Compton and external Compton scattered gamma-ray spectra from Ly alpha broad-line region and IR target photons. The Gamma_gamma vs. v_s behavior in the model depends strongly on b, with progressively and predictably weaker dependences on gamma-ray detection range, variability time, and isotropic gamma-ray luminosity. Implications for blazar unification and blazars as ultra-high energy cosmic-ray sources are presented. Arguments by Ghisellini et al. (2014) that the jet power exceeds the accretion luminosity depend on the doubtful assumption that we are viewing at the Doppler angle.

preprint2015arXiv

On focal submanifolds of isoparametric hypersurfaces and Simons formula

The focal submanifolds of isoparametric hypersurfaces in spheres are all minimal Willmore submanifolds, mostly being $\mathcal{A}$-manifolds in the sense of A.Gray but rarely Ricci-parallel (\cite{QTY},\cite{LY},\cite{TY3}). In this paper we study the geometry of the focal submanifolds via Simons formula. We show that all the focal submanifolds with $g\geq3$ are not normally flat by estimating the normal scalar curvatures. Moreover, we give a complete classification of the semiparallel submanifolds among the focal submanifolds.

preprint2015arXiv

Parameter constraints in a near-equipartition model with multi-frequency \emph{NuSTAR}, \emph{Swift} and \emph{Fermi-LAT} data from 3C 279

Precise spectra of 3C 279 in the 0.5-70 keV range, obtained during two epochs of \emph{Swift} and \emph{NuSTAR} observations, are analyzed using a near-equipartition model. We apply a one-zone leptonic model with a three-parameter log-parabola electron energy distribution (EED) to fit the \emph{Swift} and \emph{NuSTAR} X-ray data, as well as simultaneous optical and \emph{Fermi}-LAT $γ$-ray data. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique is used to search the high-dimensional parameter space and evaluate the uncertainties on model parameters. We show that the two spectra can be successfully fit in near-equipartition conditions, defined by the ratio of the energy density of relativistic electrons to magnetic field $ζ_{\rm e}$ being close to unity. In both spectra, the observed X-rays are dominated by synchrotron-self Compton photons, and the observed $γ$ rays are dominated by Compton scattering of external infrared photons from a surrounding dusty torus. Model parameters are well constrained. From the low state to the high state, both the curvature of the log-parabola width parameter and the synchrotron peak frequency significantly increase. The derived magnetic fields in the two states are nearly identical ($\sim1$\ G), but the Doppler factor in the high state is larger than that in the low state ($\sim$28 versus $\sim$18). We derive that the gamma-ray emission site takes place outside the broad-line region, at $\gtrsim$ 0.1 pc from the black hole, but within the dusty torus. Implications for 3C 279 as a source of high-energy cosmic-rays are discussed.

preprint2015arXiv

Private False Discovery Rate Control

We provide the first differentially private algorithms for controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) in multiple hypothesis testing, with essentially no loss in power under certain conditions. Our general approach is to adapt a well-known variant of the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure (BHq), making each step differentially private. This destroys the classical proof of FDR control. To prove FDR control of our method, (a) we develop a new proof of the original (non-private) BHq algorithm and its robust variants -- a proof requiring only the assumption that the true null test statistics are independent, allowing for arbitrary correlations between the true nulls and false nulls. This assumption is fairly weak compared to those previously shown in the vast literature on this topic, and explains in part the empirical robustness of BHq. Then (b) we relate the FDR control properties of the differentially private version to the control properties of the non-private version. \end{enumerate} We also present a low-distortion "one-shot" differentially private primitive for "top $k$" problems, e.g., "Which are the $k$ most popular hobbies?" (which we apply to: "Which hypotheses have the $k$ most significant $p$-values?"), and use it to get a faster privacy-preserving instantiation of our general approach at little cost in accuracy. The proof of privacy for the one-shot top~$k$ algorithm introduces a new technique of independent interest.

preprint2015arXiv

Ramanujan-type Congruences for $\ell$-Regular Partitions Modulo $3, 5, 11$ and $13$

Let $b_\ell(n)$ be the number of $\ell$-regular partitions of $n$. Recently, Hou et al established several infinite families of congruences for $b_\ell(n)$ modulo $m$, where $(\ell,m)=(3,3),(6,3),(5,5),(10,5)$ and $(7,7)$. In this paper, by the vanishing property given by Hou et al, we show an infinite family of congruence for $b_{11}(n)$ modulo $11$. Moreover, for $\ell= 3, 13$ and $25$, we obtain three infinite families of congruences for $b_{\ell}(n)$ modulo $3, 5$ and $13$ by the theory of Hecke eigenforms.

preprint2015arXiv

Strong Gravitational Lensing in the Einstein-Proca Theory

Adopting the strong field limit approach, we investigate the strong gravitational lensing of a spherically symmetric spacetime in the Einstein-Proca theory. With the strong field limit coefficient, three observable quantities are obtained, which are the innermost relativistic image, the deflection angle and the ratio of the flux. Comparing the observable value and the theoretical value of the strong gravitational lensing, we can verify the effectiveness of the strong gravitational lensing model.

preprint2015arXiv

The spectral simulations of axisymmetric force-free pulsar magnetosphere

A pseudo-spectral method with an absorbing outer boundary is used to solve a set of the time-dependent force-free equations. In the method, both electric and magnetic fields are expanded in terms of the vector spherical harmonic (VSH) functions in spherical geometry and the divergencelessness of magnetic field is analytically enforced by a projection method. Our simulations show that the Deutsch vacuum solution and the Michel monopole solution can be well reproduced by our pseudo-spectral code. Further the method is used to present the time-dependent simulation of the force-free pulsar magnetosphere for an aligned rotator. The simulations show that the current sheet in the equatorial plane can be resolved well, and the obtained spin-down luminosity in the steady state is in good agreement with the value given by Spitkovsky (2006).

preprint2014arXiv

Compact Model of Nanowire Tunneling FETs Including Phonon-Assisted Tunneling and Quantum Capacitance

A physics-based compact model for silicon gate-all-around (GAA) nanowire tunneling FETs (NW-tFETs) with good accuracy has been developed by considering Phonon-Assisted Tunneling (PAT) and transition from Quantum Capacitance Limit (QCL) to Classical Limit (CL) during the device-size scaling. The impact of PAT results in the broadening of a single electron-energy level to an energy band with density-of-states (DOS) distribution of Lorentzian shape. As a consequence, the tunneling probability at the edge of tunneling window no longer changes abruptly from zero to having a finite value. By adjusting the parameters in the Lorentzian function, an accurate fitting to the measured transfer characteristics in the subthreshold region is made possible. Besides, with an analytical formula to calculate the channel potential, the model is able to cover naturally the transition from QCL to CL regime when the device size is scaled. Furthermore, on-voltage is defined to facilitate the modeling and fitting processes. Comparisons with the experimental data demonstrate the model accuracy across all device operation regions and the flexibility in model parameter extraction is also shown.

preprint2014arXiv

Detecting Differential Expression from RNA-seq Data with Expression Measurement Uncertainty

High-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has emerged as a revolutionary and powerful technology for expression profiling. Most proposed methods for detecting differentially expressed (DE) genes from RNA-seq are based on statistics that compare normalized read counts between conditions. However, there are few methods considering the expression measurement uncertainty into DE detection. Moreover, most methods are only capable of detecting DE genes, and few methods are available for detecting DE isoforms. In this paper, a Bayesian framework (BDSeq) is proposed to detect DE genes and isoforms with consideration of expression measurement uncertainty. This expression measurement uncertainty provides useful information which can help to improve the performance of DE detection. Three real RAN-seq data sets are used to evaluate the performance of BDSeq and results show that the inclusion of expression measurement uncertainty improves accuracy in detection of DE genes and isoforms. Finally, we develop a GamSeq-BDSeq RNA-seq analysis pipeline to facilitate users, which is freely available at the website http://parnec.nuaa.edu.cn/liux/GSBD/GamSeq-BDSeq.html.

preprint2014arXiv

Electronic phase diagram in the new BiS2-based Sr1-xLaxFBiS2 system

In this paper, we systematically study the electron doping effect in a new BiS2-based system Sr1-xLaxFBiS2(0<x<0.7) through multiple techniques of X-ray diffraction, electrical transport, magnetic susceptibility, and Hall effect measurements. The parent compound SrFBiS2 is found to possess a semiconducting-like ground state, with thermally activation energy Eg=38 meV. By the partial substitution of La for Sr, superconductivity emerges when x > 0.3, reaching its maximal superconducting transition temperature Tc=3.5 K at x=0.55. In the normal state of superconducting samples, it is clearly seen that there exists a crossover from metallic to semiconducting state below a temperature Tmin, which shifts to lower temperatures with increasing La content. Based on these measurements, the associated electronic phase diagram of Sr1-xLaxFBiS2 system has thus been established.

preprint2014arXiv

Laser-sub-cycle two-dimensional electron momentum mapping using orthogonal two-color fields

The two-dimensional sub-cycle-time to electron momentum mapping provided by orthogonal two-color laser fields is applied to photoelectron spectroscopy. Using neon as the example we gain experimental access to the dynamics of emitted electron wave packets in electron momenta spectra measured by coincidence momentum imaging. We demonstrate the opportunities provided by this time-to-momentum mapping by investigating the influence of the parent ion on the emitted electrons on laser-sub-cycle times. It is found that depending on their sub-cycle birth time the trajectories of photoelectrons are affected differently by the ion's Coulomb field.

preprint2014arXiv

Pulsed Laser Deposition of High-Quality Thin Films of the Insulating Ferromagnet EuS

High-quality thin films of the ferromagnetic-insulator europium(II) sulfide (EuS) were fabricated by pulsed laser deposition on Al2O3 (0001) and Si (100) substrates. A single orientation was obtained with the [100] planes parallel to the substrates, with atomic-scale smoothness indicates a near-ideal surface topography. The films exhibit uniform ferromagnetism below 15.9 K, with a substantial component of the magnetization perpendicular to the plane of the films. Optimization of the growth condition also yielded truly insulating films with immeasurably large resistance. This combination of magnetic and electric properties open the gate for novel devices that require a true ferromagnetic insulator.

preprint2014arXiv

Ramanujan-type Congruences for Overpartitions Modulo 16

Let $\overline{p}(n)$ denote the number of overpartitions of $n$. Recently, Fortin-Jacob-Mathieu and Hirschhorn-Sellers independently obtained 2-, 3- and 4-dissections of the generating function for $\overline{p}(n)$ and derived a number of congruences for $\overline{p}(n)$ modulo $4$, $8$ and $64$ including $\overline{p}(5n+2)\equiv 0 \pmod{4}$, $\overline{p}(4n+3)\equiv 0 \pmod{8}$ and $\overline{p}(8n+7)\equiv 0 \pmod{64}$. By employing dissection techniques, Yao and Xia obtained congruences for $\overline{p}(n)$ modulo $8, 16$ and $32$, such as $\overline{p}(48n+26) \equiv 0 \pmod{8}$, $\overline{p}(24n+17)\equiv 0 \pmod{16}$ and $\overline{p}(72n+69)\equiv 0 \pmod{32}$. In this paper, we give a 16-dissection of the generating function for $\overline{p}(n)$ modulo 16 and we show that $\overline{p}(16n+14)\equiv0\pmod{16}$ for $n\ge 0$. Moreover, by using the $2$-adic expansion of the generating function of $\overline{p}(n)$ due to Mahlburg, we obtain that $\overline{p}(\ell^2n+r\ell)\equiv0\pmod{16}$, where $n\ge 0$, $\ell \equiv -1\pmod{8}$ is an odd prime and $r$ is a positive integer with $\ell \nmid r$. In particular, for $\ell=7$, we get $\overline{p}(49n+7)\equiv0\pmod{16}$ and $\overline{p}(49n+14)\equiv0\pmod{16}$ for $n\geq 0$. We also find four congruence relations: $\overline{p}(4n)\equiv(-1)^n\overline{p}(n) \pmod{16}$ for $n\ge 0$, $\overline{p}(4n)\equiv(-1)^n\overline{p}(n)\pmod{32}$ for $n$ being not a square of an odd positive integer, $\overline{p}(4n)\equiv(-1)^n\overline{p}(n)\pmod{64}$ for $n\not\equiv 1,2,5\pmod{8}$ and $\overline{p}(4n)\equiv(-1)^n\overline{p}(n)\pmod{128}$ for $n\equiv 0\pmod{4}$.

preprint2014arXiv

Ramanujan-type Congruences for Overpartitions Modulo 5

Let $\overline{p}(n)$ denote the number of overpartitions of $n$. Hirschhorn and Sellers showed that $\overline{p}(4n+3)\equiv 0 \pmod{8}$ for $n\geq 0$. They also conjectured that $\overline{p}(40n+35)\equiv 0 \pmod{40}$ for $n\geq 0$. Chen and Xia proved this conjecture by using the $(p,k)$-parametrization of theta functions given by Alaca, Alaca and Williams. In this paper, we show that $\overline{p}(5n)\equiv (-1)^{n}\overline{p}(4\cdot 5n) \pmod{5}$ for $n \geq 0$ and $\overline{p}(n)\equiv (-1)^{n}\overline{p}(4n)\pmod{8}$ for $n \geq 0$ by using the relation of the generating function of $\overline{p}(5n)$ modulo $5$ found by Treneer and the $2$-adic expansion of the generating function of $\overline{p}(n)$ due to Mahlburg. As a consequence, we deduce that $\overline{p}(4^k(40n+35))\equiv 0 \pmod{40}$ for $n,k\geq 0$. Furthermore, applying the Hecke operator on $ϕ(q)^3$ and the fact that $ϕ(q)^3$ is a Hecke eigenform, we obtain an infinite family of congrences $\overline{p}(4^k \cdot5\ell^2n)\equiv 0 \pmod{5}$, where $k\ge 0$ and $\ell$ is a prime such that $\ell\equiv3 \pmod{5}$ and $\left(\frac{-n}{\ell}\right)=-1$. Moreover, we show that $\overline{p}(5^{2}n)\equiv \overline{p}(5^{4}n) \pmod{5}$ for $n \ge 0$. So we are led to the congruences $\overline{p}\big(4^k5^{2i+3}(5n\pm1)\big)\equiv 0 \pmod{5}$ for $n, k, i\ge 0$. In this way, we obtain various Ramanujan-type congruences for $\overline{p}(n)$ modulo $5$ such as $\overline{p}(45(3n+1))\equiv 0 \pmod{5}$ and $\overline{p}(125(5n\pm 1))\equiv 0 \pmod{5}$ for $n\geq 0$.

preprint2014arXiv

Skewless Network Clock Synchronization Without Discontinuity: Convergence and Performance

This paper examines synchronization of computer clocks connected via a data network and proposes a skewless algorithm to synchronize them. Unlike existing solutions, which either estimate and compensate the frequency difference (skew) among clocks or introduce offset corrections that can generate jitter and possibly even backward jumps, our solution achieves synchronization without these problems. We first analyze the convergence property of the algorithm and provide explicit necessary and sufficient conditions on the parameters to guarantee synchronization. We then study the effect of noisy measurements (jitter) and frequency drift (wander) on the offsets and synchronization frequency, and further optimize the parameter values to minimize their variance. Our study reveals a few insights, for example, we show that our algorithm can converge even in the presence of timing loops and noise, provided that there is a well defined leader. This marks a clear contrast with current standards such as NTP and PTP, where timing loops are specifically avoided. Furthermore, timing loops can even be beneficial in our scheme as it is demonstrated that highly connected subnetworks can collectively outperform individual clients when the time source has large jitter. The results are supported by experiments running on a cluster of IBM BladeCenter servers with Linux.

preprint2014arXiv

The physical properties of Fermi BL Lac objects jets

We investigate the physical properties of BL Lac objects (BL Lacs) jets by modeling the quasi-simultaneous spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of 22 {\it Fermi} BL Lac objects in the frame of a simple one-zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model. We obtained the best-fit model parameters and their uncertainties for each BL Lac object through the $χ^2$-minimization procedure and discussed their implications on the physical processes. The modeling results show that the one-zone SSC model can successfully fit the SEDs of high-synchrotron-peaked BL Lacs (HBLs) and intermediate-synchrotron-peaked BL Lacs (IBLs), but fails to explain the SEDs of low-synchrotron-peaked BL Lacs (LBLs). The statistical analysis results for model parameters are summarized as follows. (1) No correlation is found between magnetic field ($B$) and the broken energy of relativistic electrons distribution ($γ^{\prime}_{\rm b}$) for HBLs and IBLs, but there are inverse correlations between $γ^{\prime}_{\rm b}$ and the radius of emitting blob ($R^{\prime}_{\rm b}$) as well as the electrons number $K^{\prime}_{\rm e}$ for HBLs and IBLs. It's therefore concluded that the variation of $γ^{\prime}_{\rm b}$ is mainly caused by that of $R^{\prime}_{\rm b}$ rather than $B$ for HBLs and IBLs. (2) The Poynting flux in jets can not account for the observed radiations since the power in Poynting flux is smaller than the radiative power, and the cold protons could be the primary energy carrier in the jets.

preprint2014arXiv

Understanding the TeV emission from a distant blazar PKS 1424+240 in a lepto-hadronic jet model

We investigate the formation of TeV spectrum of a distant blazar PKS 1424+240 residing at a redshift $z\geq0.6$ in two scenarios in the frame of a lepto-hadronic jet model taking both the uncertainties of the extragalactic background light (EBL) and its redshift into account. In the first scenario, TeV emission is attributed to the synchrotron emission of pair cascades resulting from $pγ$ interaction; in the second scenario, TeV emission is attributed to the proton-synchrotron emission, and an internal absorption due to interaction with the photons around the jet is included. The results show that in the first scenario the 68\% upper limit of its redshift within which this scenario can explain the VERITAS TeV spectrum in 2009 well is $\sim0.75$; in the second scenario, this upper limit of the redshift becomes $\sim1.03$. However, the second scenario can be excluded because it requires an unreasonable photon field around the jet with a luminosity of $\sim10^{43}\rm \ erg\ s^{-1}$. In conclusion, the jet model can explain its TeV spectrum with a low EBL density if $0.6<z<0.75$.

preprint2014arXiv

Weak Localization Effects as Evidence for Bulk Quantization in Thin Films Bi2Se3

Strong spin-orbit coupling in topological insulators results in the ubiquitously observed weak antilocalization feature in their magnetoresistance. Here we present magnetoresistance measurements in ultra thin films of the topological insulator Bi_2Se_3, and show that in the 2D quantum limit, in which the topological insulator bulk becomes quantized, an additional negative magnetoresistance feature appears. Detailed analysis associates this feature with weak localization of the quantized bulk channels, providing thus evidence for this quantization. Examination of the dephasing fields at different temperatures indicates different scattering mechanism in the bulk vs the surface states.

preprint2013arXiv

Emerging Weak Localization Effects on Topological Insulator-Insulating Ferromagnet (Bi_2Se_3-EuS) Interface

Thin films of topological insulator Bi_2Se_3 were deposited directly on insulating ferromagnetic EuS. Unusual negative magnetoresistance was observed near the zero field below the Curie temperature (T_C), resembling the weak localization effect; whereas the usual positive magnetoresistance was recovered above T_C. Such negative magnetoresistance was only observed for Bi_2Se_3 layers thinner than t~4nm, when its top and bottom surfaces are coupled. These results provide evidence for a proximity effect between a topological insulator and an insulating ferromagnet, laying the foundation for future realization of the half-integer quantized anomalous Hall effect in three-dimensional topological insulators.

preprint2013arXiv

Emitting Electron Spectra and Acceleration Processes in the Jet of PKS 0447-439

We investigate the electron energy distributions (EEDs) and the corresponding acceleration processes in the jet of PKS 0447$-$439 and estimate its redshift through modeling its observed spectral energy distribution (SED) in the frame of a one-zone synchrotron-self Compton (SSC) model. Three EEDs formed in different acceleration scenarios are assumed: the power-law with exponential cut-off (PLC) EED (shock-acceleration scenario or the case of the EED approaching equilibrium in the stochastic-acceleration scenario), the log-parabolic (LP) EED (stochastic-acceleration scenario and the acceleration dominating) and the broken power law (BPL) EED (no acceleration scenario), and then the corresponding fluxes of both synchrotron and SSC are calculated. The model is applied to PKS 0447-439 and modeling SEDs are compared to the observed SED of this object by using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. Calculating results show that PLC model fails to fit the observed SED well, while the LP and BPL models give comparably good fits for the observed SED. The results indicate that it is possible that stochastic acceleration process acts in the emitting region of PKS 0447-439 and the EED is far from equilibrium (acceleration dominating) or no acceleration process works (in the emitting region). The redshift of PKS 0447-439 is also estimated in our fitting, and $z=0.16\pm0.05$ for LP case and $z=0.17\pm0.04$ for BPL case.

preprint2013arXiv

Emitting electrons spectra and acceleration processes in the jet of Mrk 421: from low state to giant flare state

We investigate the electron energy distributions (EEDs) and the acceleration processes in the jet of Mrk 421 through fitting the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) in different active states in the frame of a one-zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model. After assuming two possible EEDs formed in different acceleration models: the shock accelerated power-law with exponential cut-off (PLC) EED and the stochastic turbulence accelerated log-parabolic (LP) EED, we fit the observed SEDs of Mrk 421 in both low and giant flare states by using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method which constrains the model parameters in a more efficient way. Our calculating results indicate that (1) the PLC and LP models give comparably good fits for the SED in low state, but the variations of model parameters from low state to flaring can be reasonably explained only in the case of the PLC in low state; and (2) the LP model gives better fits compared to the PLC model for the SED in flare state, and the intra-day/night variability observed at GeV-TeV bands can be accommodated only in the LP model. The giant flare may be attributed to the stochastic turbulence re-acceleration of the shock accelerated electrons in low state. Therefore, we may conclude that shock acceleration is dominant in low state, while stochastic turbulence acceleration is dominant in flare state. Moreover, our result shows that the extrapolated TeV spectra from the best-fit SEDs from optical through GeV with the two EEDs are different. It should be considered in caution when such extrapolated TeV spectra are used to constrain extragalactic background light (EBL) models.

preprint2013arXiv

Nearly optimal minimax estimator for high-dimensional sparse linear regression

We present estimators for a well studied statistical estimation problem: the estimation for the linear regression model with soft sparsity constraints ($\ell_q$ constraint with $0<q\leq1$) in the high-dimensional setting. We first present a family of estimators, called the projected nearest neighbor estimator and show, by using results from Convex Geometry, that such estimator is within a logarithmic factor of the optimal for any design matrix. Then by utilizing a semi-definite programming relaxation technique developed in [SIAM J. Comput. 36 (2007) 1764-1776], we obtain an approximation algorithm for computing the minimax risk for any such estimation task and also a polynomial time nearly optimal estimator for the important case of $\ell_1$ sparsity constraint. Such results were only known before for special cases, despite decades of studies on this problem. We also extend the method to the adaptive case when the parameter radius is unknown.

preprint2013arXiv

Skewless Network Clock Synchronization

This paper examines synchronization of computer clocks connected via a data network and proposes a skewless algorithm to synchronize them. Unlike existing solutions, which either estimate and compensate the frequency difference (skew) among clocks or introduce offset corrections that can generate jitter and possibly even backward jumps, our algorithm achieves synchronization without these problems. We first analyze the convergence property of the algorithm and provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the parameters to guarantee synchronization. We then implement our solution on a cluster of IBM BladeCenter servers running Linux and study its performance. In particular, both analytically and experimentally, we show that our algorithm can converge in the presence of timing loops. This marks a clear contrast with current standards such as NTP and PTP, where timing loops are specifically avoided. Furthermore, timing loops can even be beneficial in our scheme. For example, it is demonstrated that highly connected subnetworks can collectively outperform individual clients when the time source has large jitter. It is also experimentally demonstrated that our algorithm outperforms other well-established software-based solutions such as the NTPv4 and IBM Coordinated Cluster Time (IBM CCT).

preprint2013arXiv

Sybil-proof Mechanisms in Query Incentive Networks

In this paper, we study incentive mechanisms for retrieving information from networked agents. Following the model in [Kleinberg and Raghavan 2005], the agents are represented as nodes in an infinite tree, which is generated by a random branching process. A query is issued by the root, and each node possesses an answer with an independent probability $p=1/n$. Further, each node in the tree acts strategically to maximize its own payoff. In order to encourage the agents to participate in the information acquisition process, an incentive mechanism is needed to reward agents who provide the information as well as agents who help to facilitate such acquisition. We focus on designing efficient sybil-proof incentive mechanisms, i.e., which are robust to fake identity attacks. %We consider incentive mechanisms which are sybil-proof, i.e., robust to fake identity attacks. We propose a family of mechanisms, called the direct referral (DR) mechanisms, which allocate most reward to the information holder as well as its direct parent (or direct referral). We show that, when designed properly, the direct referral mechanism is sybil-proof and efficient. In particular, we show that we may achieve an expected cost of $O(h^2)$ for propagating the query down $h$ levels for any branching factor $b>1$. This result exponentially improves on previous work when requiring to find an answer with high probability. When the underlying network is a deterministic chain, our mechanism is optimal under some mild assumptions. In addition, due to its simple reward structure, the DR mechanism might have good chance to be adopted in practice.

preprint2012arXiv

High Quality Ultrathin Bi2Se3 Films on CaF2 and CaF2/Si by Molecular Beam Epitaxy with a Radio Frequency Cracker Cell

Here we report a method to fabricate high quality Bi2Se3 thin films using molecular beam epitaxy with a radio frequency cracker cell as an atomic selenium source. With rates close to exact stoichiometry, optimal layer-by-layer growth of high quality Bi2Se3 thin films with smooth surfaces, has been achieved on CaF2(111) substrates and Si(111) substrates with a thin CaF2 buffer layer(CaF2/Si). Transport measurements show a characteristic weak antilocalization mangnetoresistance, with emergence of weak localization in the ultrathin film limit. Quantum Oscillations attributed to the topological surface states have been observed, including in films on CaF2/Si.

preprint2012arXiv

Multi-track Map Matching

We study algorithms for matching user tracks, consisting of time-ordered location points, to paths in the road network. Previous work has focused on the scenario where the location data is linearly ordered and consists of fairly dense and regular samples. In this work, we consider the \emph{multi-track map matching}, where the location data comes from different trips on the same route, each with very sparse samples. This captures the realistic scenario where users repeatedly travel on regular routes and samples are sparsely collected, either due to energy consumption constraints or because samples are only collected when the user actively uses a service. In the multi-track problem, the total set of combined locations is only partially ordered, rather than globally ordered as required by previous map-matching algorithms. We propose two methods, the iterative projection scheme and the graph Laplacian scheme, to solve the multi-track problem by using a single-track map-matching subroutine. We also propose a boosting technique which may be applied to either approach to improve the accuracy of the estimated paths. In addition, in order to deal with variable sampling rates in single-track map matching, we propose a method based on a particular regularized cost function that can be adapted for different sampling rates and measurement errors. We evaluate the effectiveness of our techniques for reconstructing tracks under several different configurations of sampling error and sampling rate.

preprint2012arXiv

Non-variable TeV emission from the extended jet of a blazar in the stochastic acceleration scenario: the case of the hard TeV emission of 1ES 1101-232

The detections of X-ray emission from the kiloparsec-scale jets of blazars and radio galaxies may imply the existence of high energy electrons in these extended jets, and these electrons could produce high energy emission through inverse Compton (IC) process. In this paper we study the non-variable hard TeV emission from a blazar. The multi-band emission consists of two components: one is the traditional synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission from the inner jet, and the other is the emission produced via SSC and IC scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons (IC/CMB) and extragalactic background light (EBL) photons (IC/EBL) by relativistic electrons in the extended jet under the stochastic acceleration scenario. Such a model is applied to 1ES 1101-232. The results indicate that (1) the non-variable hard TeV emission of 1ES 1101-232 can be reproduced well, which is dominated by IC/CMB emission from the extended jet, using three characteristic values of Doppler factor ($δ_{\rm D}=5,10,15$) for the TeV emitting region in the extended jet; and (2) in the cases of $δ_{\rm D}=15$ and 10, the physical parameters can achieve the equipartition (or quasi-equipartition) between the relativistic electrons and the magnetic field; In contrast, the physical parameters largely deviate from the equipartition for the case of $δ_{\rm D}=5$. It is therefore concluded that the TeV emission region of 1ES 1101-232 in the extended jet should be moderately or highly beamed.

preprint2012arXiv

Segmentation of ultrasound images of thyroid nodule for assisting fine needle aspiration cytology

The incidence of thyroid nodule is very high and generally increases with the age. Thyroid nodule may presage the emergence of thyroid cancer. The thyroid nodule can be completely cured if detected early. Fine needle aspiration cytology is a recognized early diagnosis method of thyroid nodule. There are still some limitations in the fine needle aspiration cytology, and the ultrasound diagnosis of thyroid nodule has become the first choice for auxiliary examination of thyroid nodular disease. If we could combine medical imaging technology and fine needle aspiration cytology, the diagnostic rate of thyroid nodule would be improved significantly. The properties of ultrasound will degrade the image quality, which makes it difficult to recognize the edges for physicians. Image segmentation technique based on graph theory has become a research hotspot at present. Normalized cut (Ncut) is a representative one, which is suitable for segmentation of feature parts of medical image. However, how to solve the normalized cut has become a problem, which needs large memory capacity and heavy calculation of weight matrix. It always generates over segmentation or less segmentation which leads to inaccurate in the segmentation. The speckle noise in B ultrasound image of thyroid tumor makes the quality of the image deteriorate. In the light of this characteristic, we combine the anisotropic diffusion model with the normalized cut in this paper. After the enhancement of anisotropic diffusion model, it removes the noise in the B ultrasound image while preserves the important edges and local details. This reduces the amount of computation in constructing the weight matrix of the improved normalized cut and improves the accuracy of the final segmentation results. The feasibility of the method is proved by the experimental results.

preprint2012arXiv

Spectral variability of FIRST bright QSOs with SDSS observations

For some samples, it has been shown that spectra of QSOs with low redshift are bluer during their brighter phases. For the FIRST bright QSO sample, we assemble their spectra from SDSS DR7 to investigate variability between the spectra from White et al. (2000) and from the SDSS for a long rest-frame time-lag, up to 10 years. There are 312 radio loud QSOs and 232 radio quiet QSOs in this sample, up to $z \sim 3.5$. With two-epoch variation, it is found that spectra of half of the QSOs appear redder during their brighter phases. There is no obvious difference in slope variability between sub-samples of radio quiet and radio loud QSOs. This result implies that the presence of a radio jet does not affect the slope variability on 10-year timescales. The arithmetic composite difference spectrum for variable QSOs is steep at blueward of $\sim$ 2500Å. The variability for the region blueward of 2500 Å is different to that for the region redward of 2500 Å.

preprint2012arXiv

The contribution from blazar cascade emission to the extragalactic gamma-ray background: What a role does the extragalactic magnetic field play?

We estimate the contribution to the extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGRB) from both intrinsic and cascade emissions produced by blazars using a simple semi- analysis method for two models of the blazar gamma-ray luminosity function (GLF). For the cascade emission, we consider two possible contributions: one is due to that the flux of the cascade emission is lower than the Fermi LAT sensitivity (case I), which is independent on the extragalactic magnetic field (EGMF), another is due to the fact that the flux of the cascade emission is larger than the Fermi LAT sensitivity but the emission angle is larger than LAT point-spread-function (PSF) angle (case II), which depends on the EGMF. Our results indicate that (1) blazar contribution to the EGRB is dominant although it depends on the GLF model and the EGMF; (2) the EGMF plays an important role in estimating the contribution from the cascade emission produced by blazars, the contribution from the cascade emission will significantly alter the EGRB spectrum when the strength of the EGMF is large enough (say BEGMF > 10-12 G); and (3) since the cascade emission in case II reaches a saturation when the strength of the EGMF is ? 10-11 G, it is very possible that the contribution from the cascade emission produced by blazars can be considered as another method to probe the upper limit of the strength of the EGMF.

preprint2012arXiv

The estimate of emission region locations of {\it Fermi} FSRQs

We study the locations of emission regions through modelling the quasi-simultaneous multi-frequency spectral energy distributions of 21 {\it Fermi} flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) in the frame of a multi-component one-zone leptonic model. In our calculations, we take the detailed broad line region (BLR) structure into account and discuss the effect of the uncertainty of the BLR structure on constraining the location of the emission regions for each FSQR, meanwhile we also include both the internal and external absorptions. Our results indicate that (1) the contribution of external Compton-BLR component is important to $γ$-ray emission, and the energy density of external target photon fields depends on the location of the emission region, which can be derived through reproducing the observed $γ$-ray emission, and (2) the emission regions of FSRQs with relative low accretion disk luminosity lie in the region of $7.9\times10^{16}$\ --\ $1.3\times10^{18}$\ cm (300 -- 4300 Schwarzschild radii) from central black hole, and for FSRQs with high accretion disk luminosity, the emission regions locate in the larger region of $2.6\times10^{17}$\ --\ $4.2\times10^{18}$\ cm (300 -- 5600 Schwarzschild radii).

preprint2012arXiv

The Geometry of Differential Privacy: the Sparse and Approximate Cases

In this work, we study trade-offs between accuracy and privacy in the context of linear queries over histograms. This is a rich class of queries that includes contingency tables and range queries, and has been a focus of a long line of work. For a set of $d$ linear queries over a database $x \in \R^N$, we seek to find the differentially private mechanism that has the minimum mean squared error. For pure differential privacy, an $O(\log^2 d)$ approximation to the optimal mechanism is known. Our first contribution is to give an $O(\log^2 d)$ approximation guarantee for the case of $(\eps,δ)$-differential privacy. Our mechanism is simple, efficient and adds correlated Gaussian noise to the answers. We prove its approximation guarantee relative to the hereditary discrepancy lower bound of Muthukrishnan and Nikolov, using tools from convex geometry. We next consider this question in the case when the number of queries exceeds the number of individuals in the database, i.e. when $d > n \triangleq \|x\|_1$. It is known that better mechanisms exist in this setting. Our second main contribution is to give an $(\eps,δ)$-differentially private mechanism which is optimal up to a $\polylog(d,N)$ factor for any given query set $A$ and any given upper bound $n$ on $\|x\|_1$. This approximation is achieved by coupling the Gaussian noise addition approach with a linear regression step. We give an analogous result for the $\eps$-differential privacy setting. We also improve on the mean squared error upper bound for answering counting queries on a database of size $n$ by Blum, Ligett, and Roth, and match the lower bound implied by the work of Dinur and Nissim up to logarithmic factors. The connection between hereditary discrepancy and the privacy mechanism enables us to derive the first polylogarithmic approximation to the hereditary discrepancy of a matrix $A$.

preprint2012arXiv

The Mind Grows Circuits

There is a vast supply of prior art that study models for mental processes. Some studies in psychology and philosophy approach it from an inner perspective in terms of experiences and percepts. Others such as neurobiology or connectionist-machines approach it externally by viewing the mind as complex circuit of neurons where each neuron is a primitive binary circuit. In this paper, we also model the mind as a place where a circuit grows, starting as a collection of primitive components at birth and then builds up incrementally in a bottom up fashion. A new node is formed by a simple composition of prior nodes when we undergo a repeated experience that can be described by that composition. Unlike neural networks, however, these circuits take "concepts" or "percepts" as inputs and outputs. Thus the growing circuits can be likened to a growing collection of lambda expressions that are built on top of one another in an attempt to compress the sensory input as a heuristic to bound its Kolmogorov Complexity.

preprint2012arXiv

The minimax risk of truncated series estimators for symmetric convex polytopes

We study the optimality of the minimax risk of truncated series estimators for symmetric convex polytopes. We show that the optimal truncated series estimator is within $O(\log m)$ factor of the optimal if the polytope is defined by $m$ hyperplanes. This represents the first such bounds towards general convex bodies. In proving our result, we first define a geometric quantity, called the \emph{approximation radius}, for lower bounding the minimax risk. We then derive our bounds by establishing a connection between the approximation radius and the Kolmogorov width, the quantity that provides upper bounds for the truncated series estimator. Besides, our proof contains several ingredients which might be of independent interest: 1. The notion of approximation radius depends on the volume of the body. It is an intuitive notion and is flexible to yield strong minimax lower bounds; 2. The connection between the approximation radius and the Kolmogorov width is a consequence of a novel duality relationship on the Kolmogorov width, developed by utilizing some deep results from convex geometry.

preprint2011arXiv

A series of trees with the first $\lfloor\frac{n-7}{2}\rfloor$ largest energies

The energy of a graph is defined as the sum of the absolute values of the eigenvalues of the graph. In this paper, we present a new method to compare the energies of two $k$-subdivision bipartite graphs on some cut edges. As the applications of this new method, we determine the first $\lfloor\frac{n-7}{2}\rfloor$ largest energy trees of order $n$ for $n\ge 31$, and we also give a simplified proof of the conjecture on the fourth maximal energy tree.

preprint2011arXiv

Emission Patterns and Light Curves of Gamma-Rays in the Pulsar Magnetosphere with a Current-Induced Magnetic Field

We study the emission patterns and light curves of gamma-rays in the pulsar magnetosphere with a current-induced magnetic field perturbation. Based on the solution of a static dipole with the magnetic field induced by some currents (perturbation field), we derive the solutions of a static as well as a retarded dipole with the perturbation field in the Cartesian coordinates. The static (retarded) magnetic field can be expressed as the sum of pure static (retarded) dipolar magnetic field and the static (retarded) perturbation field. We use the solution of the retarded magnetic field to investigate the influence of the perturbation field on the emission patterns and light curves, and we apply the perturbed solutions to calculate the gamma-ray light curves for the case of the Vela pulsar. We find out that the perturbation field induced by the currents will change the emission patterns and then light curves of gamma-rays, especially for a larger perturbation field. Our results indicate that the perturbation field created by the outward-flowing (inward-flowing) electrons (positrons) can decrease the rotation effect on the magnetosphere and makes emission pattern appear to be more smooth relative to that of the pure retarded dipole, but the perturbation field created by the outward-flowing (inward-flowing) positrons (electrons) can make the emission pattern less smooth.

preprint2011arXiv

High temperature charge and thermal transport properties of the n-type thermoelectric material PbSe

We present a detailed study of the charge transport, optical reflectivity, and thermal transport properties of n-type PbSe crystals. A strong scattering, mobility-limiting mechanism was revealed to be at play at temperatures above 500 K. The mechanism is indicative of complex electron-phonon interactions that cannot be explained by conventional acoustical phonon scattering alone. We applied the first order non-parabolicity approximation to extract the density of states effective mass as a function of doping both at room temperature and at 700 K. The results are compared to those of a parabolic band model and in the light of doping dependent studies of the infrared optical reflectivity. The thermal conductivity behavior as a function of temperature shows strong deviation from the expected Debye-Peierls high temperature behavior (umklapp dominated) indicating an additional heat carrying channel, which we associate with optical phonon excitations. The correlation of the thermal conductivity observations to the high temperature carrier mobility behavior is discussed. The thermoelectric figure of merit exhibits a promising value of ~0.8 at 700K at 1.5 x 10^{19}$ cm^-3.

preprint2011arXiv

Multicolor Photometry of the Galaxies in Abell 1775: Substructures, Luminosity Functions, and Star-Formation Properties

An optical photometric observation in 15 bands was carried out for nearby galaxy cluster Abell 1775 by the Beijing-Arizona-Taiwan-Connecticut (BATC) multi-color system. Over 5000 sources' spectral energy distributions (SEDs) were obtained. Since this cluster has also been observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the BATC SEDs were combined with the SDSS five-band photometric data. Using the combined SEDs, 146 faint galaxies were selected as new member galaxies by the photometric redshift technique. Based on the positions, redshifts and 20-band SEDs of member galaxies, dynamical substructures and luminosity functions (LFs) of A1775 were investigated. The previous reported bimodal structure of A1775 has been confirmed: a poor subcluster with lower redshift, A1775A, is located ~14' southeast to the main concentration A1775B. After taking into account the new supplemented member galaxies, a new subcluster A1775C was found along the aligned direction of A1775A and A1775B. The different LF faint ends of the two subclusters indicate that A1775B is a more dynamically evolved system, while A1775A is still dynamically young. By the STARLIGHT spectral synthesis code, the star- formation histories of the member galaxies were studied. The dependence of the mean stellar ages upon the Hubble type was confirmed, and the environmental effect on star-formation activities for galaxies in A1775B has been explored.

preprint2010arXiv

Aligned Graphene Nanoribbons and Crossbars from Unzipped Carbon Nanotubes

Aligned graphene nanoribbon (GNR) arrays were made by unzipping of aligned single-walled and few-walled carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays. Nanotube unzipping was achieved by a polymer-protected Ar plasma etching method, and the resulting nanoribbon array was transferred onto any substrates. Atomic force microscope (AFM) imaging and Raman mapping on the same CNTs before and after unzipping confirmed that ~80% of CNTs were opened up to form single layer sub-10 nm GNRs. Electrical devices made from the GNRs (after annealing in H2 at high temperature) showed on/off current (Ion/Ioff) ratios up to 103 at room temperature, suggesting semiconducting nature of the narrow GNRs. Novel GNR-GNR and GNR-CNT crossbars were fabricated by transferring GNR arrays across GNR and CNT arrays, respectively. The production of ordered graphene nanoribbon architectures may allow for large scale integration of GNRs into nanoelectronics or optoelectronics.

preprint2010arXiv

Circulant Arrays on Cyclic Subgroups of Finite Fields: Rank Analysis and Construction of Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes

This paper consists of three parts. The first part presents a large class of new binary quasi-cyclic (QC)-LDPC codes with girth of at least 6 whose parity-check matrices are constructed based on cyclic subgroups of finite fields. Experimental results show that the codes constructed perform well over the binary-input AWGN channel with iterative decoding using the sum-product algorithm (SPA). The second part analyzes the ranks of the parity-check matrices of codes constructed based on finite fields with characteristic of 2 and gives combinatorial expressions for these ranks. The third part identifies a subclass of constructed QC-LDPC codes that have large minimum distances. Decoding of codes in this subclass with the SPA converges very fast.

preprint2010arXiv

Interacting model of new agegraphic dark energy: Cosmological evolution and statefinder diagnostic

The statefinder diagnosic is a useful method for distinguishing different dark energy models. In this paper, we investigate the new agegraphic dark energy model with interaction between dark energy and matter component by using statefinder parameter pair $\{r, s\}$ and study its cosmological evolution. We plot the trajectories of the new agegraphic dark energy model for different interaction cases in the statefinder plane. As a result, the influence of the interaction on the evolution of the universe is shown in the statefinder diagrams.

preprint2010arXiv

Lepto-Hadronic Origin of gamma-rays from the G54.1+0.3 Pulsar Wind Nebula

G54.1+0.3 is a Crab-like pulsar wind nebula (PWN) with the highest $γ$-ray to X-ray luminosity ratio among all the nebulae driven by young rotation-powered pulsars. We model the spectral evolution of the PWN and find it difficult to match the observed multi-band data with leptons alone using reasonable model parameters. In lepton-hadron hybrid model instead, TeV photons come mainly from $π^0$ decay in proton-proton interaction and the observed photon spectrum can be well reproduced. The newly discovered infrared loop and molecular cloud in or closely around the PWN can work as the target for the bombardment of the PWN protons.

preprint2010arXiv

Multiband Nonthermal Radiative Properties of HESS J1813-178

The source HESS J1813-178 was detected in the survey of the inner Galaxy in TeV gamma-rays, and a SNR G12.8-0.0 was identified in the radio band to be associated with it. The PWN embedded in the SNR is powered by an energetic pulsar PSR J1813-1749, which was recently discovered. Whether the TeV gamma-rays originate from the SNR shell or the PWN is uncertain now. We investigate theoretically the multiwavelength nonthermal radiation from the composite SNR G12.8-0.0. The emission from the particles accelerated in the SNR shell is calculated based on a semianalytical method to the nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration mechanism. In the model, the magnetic field is self-generated via resonant streaming instability, and the dynamical reaction of the field on the shock is taken into account. Based on a model which couples the dynamical and radiative evolution of a PWN in a non-radiative SNR, the dynamics and the multi-band emission of the PWN are investigated. The particles are injected with a spectrum of a relativistic Maxwellian plus a power law high-energy tail with an index of -2.5. Our results indicate that the radio emission from the shell can be well reproduced as synchrotron radiation of the electrons accelerated by the SNR shock; with an ISM number density of 1.4 cm^{-3} for the remnant, the gamma-ray emission from the SNR shell is insignificant, and the observed X-rays and VHE gamma-rays from the source are consistent with the emission produced by electrons/positrons injected in the PWN via synchrotron radiation and IC scattering, respectively; the resulting gamma-ray flux for the shell is comparable to the detected one only with a relatively larger density of about 2.8 cm^{-3}. The VHE gamma-rays of HESS J1813-178 can be naturally explained to mainly originate from the nebula although the contribution of the SNR shell becomes significant with a denser ambient medium.

preprint2010arXiv

On the Nonthermal Emission from the Supernova Remnant W51C

The middle-aged supernova remnant (SNR) W51C is an interesting source for the interaction of the shell with a molecular cloud. The shell emits intense radio synchrotron photons, and high-energy gamma-rays from the remnant have been detected using the {\it Fermi} Large Area Telescope (LAT), the H.E.S.S. telescope, and the Milagro gamma-ray observatory. Based on a semi-analytical approach to the nonlinear shock acceleration process, we investigate the multiband nonthermal emission from W51C. The result shows that the radio emission from the remnant can be explained as synchrotron radiation of the electrons accelerated by a part of the shock flowing into the ambient medium. On the other hand, the high-energy gamma-rays detected by the {\it Fermi} LAT are mainly produced via proton-proton collisions of the high-energy protons with the ambient matter in the molecular cloud overtaken by the other part of the shock. We propose a possible explanation of the multiband nonthermal emission from W51C, and it can be concluded that a molecular cloud overtaken by a shock wave can be an important emitter in GeV $γ$-rays.

preprint2010arXiv

Sandage-Loeb test for the new agegraphic and Ricci dark energy models

The Sandage-Loeb (SL) test is a unique method to explore dark energy at the ``redshift desert'' ($2\lesssim z\lesssim 5$), an era not covered by any other dark energy probes, by directly measuring the temporal variation of the redshift of quasar (QSO) Lyman-$α$ absorption lines. In this paper, we study the prospects for constraining the new agegraphic dark energy (NADE) model and the Ricci dark energy (RDE) model with the SL test. We show that, assuming only a ten-year survey, the SL test can constrain these two models with high significance.

preprint2010arXiv

The Correlated Multi-color Optical Variations of BL Lac Object S5 0716+714

S5 0716+714 is a well-studied BL Lac object in the sky. Verifying the existence of correlations among the flux variations in different bands serves as an important tool to investigate the emission processes. To examine the possible existence of a lag between variations in different optical bands on this source, we employ a discrete correlation function (DCF) analysis on the light curves. In order to obtain statistically meaningful values for the cross-correlation time lags and their related uncertainties, we perform Monte Carlo simulations called "flux redistribution/random subset selection" (FR/RSS). Our analysis confirms that the variations in different optical light curves are strongly correlated. The time lags show a hint of the variations in high frequency band leading those in low frequency band of the order of a few minutes.

preprint2010arXiv

Understanding Fashion Cycles as a Social Choice

We present a formal model for studying fashion trends, in terms of three parameters of fashionable items: (1) their innate utility; (2) individual boredom associated with repeated usage of an item; and (3) social influences associated with the preferences from other people. While there are several works that emphasize the effect of social influence in understanding fashion trends, in this paper we show how boredom plays a strong role in both individual and social choices. We show how boredom can be used to explain the cyclic choices in several scenarios such as an individual who has to pick a restaurant to visit every day, or a society that has to repeatedly `vote' on a single fashion style from a collection. We formally show that a society that votes for a single fashion style can be viewed as a single individual cycling through different choices. In our model, the utility of an item gets discounted by the amount of boredom that has accumulated over the past; this boredom increases with every use of the item and decays exponentially when not used. We address the problem of optimally choosing items for usage, so as to maximize over-all satisfaction, i.e., composite utility, over a period of time. First we show that the simple greedy heuristic of always choosing the item with the maximum current composite utility can be arbitrarily worse than the optimal. Second, we prove that even with just a single individual, determining the optimal strategy for choosing items is NP-hard. Third, we show that a simple modification to the greedy algorithm that simply doubles the boredom of each item is a provably close approximation to the optimal strategy. Finally, we present an experimental study over real-world data collected from query logs to compare our algorithms.

preprint2009arXiv

New agegraphic dark energy as a rolling tachyon

Combining the general relativity and the uncertainty relation in quantum mechanics, the energy density of quantum fluctuations of space-time can be viewed as dark energy. The so-called agegraphic dark energy model is just based on this viewpoint, in which the age of the universe is introduced as the length measure. Recently, the new agegraphic dark energy model was proposed, where the dynamical dark energy is measured by the conformal age of the universe. On the other hand, scalar-field dark energy models like tachyon are often regarded as an effective description of some underlying theory of dark energy. In this paper, we show that the new agegraphic dark energy can be described completely by a tachyon scalar-field. We thus reconstruct the potential and the dynamics of the tachyon scalar-field, according to the evolution of the new agegraphic dark energy.