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Published work

59 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A$^2$TGPO: Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping

Reinforcement learning for agentic large language models (LLMs) typically relies on a sparse, trajectory-level outcome reward, making it difficult to evaluate the contribution of individual tool-calls within multi-turn interactions. Existing approaches to such process credit assignment either depend on separate external process reward models that introduce additional consumption, or tree-based structural rollout that merely redistributes the outcome signal while constraining trajectory diversity. A promising alternative leverages the per-turn change in the policy's predicted probability of the ground-truth, termed Information Gain (IG), as an intrinsic process signal without an external evaluator. However, prior work on leveraging IG signals within the RL training loop faces three systematic challenges: normalizing across turns that face heterogeneous positional contexts can distort the relative standing of individual turns, accumulating a variable number of terms causes advantage magnitudes to drift with trajectory depth, and a fixed clipping range governs policy updates identically for turns with vastly different IG signals. In this paper, we propose A$^2$TGPO (Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping), which retains IG as the intrinsic signal but re-designs how it is normalized, accumulated, and consumed: (i) turn-group normalization: normalizes IG within each (prompt, turn-index) group so that each turn is compared only against peers at the same interaction depth; (ii) variance-rescaled discounted accumulation: divides cumulative normalized IG by square root of accumulated terms to keep advantage magnitudes comparable across turn positions; and (iii) adaptive turn-level clipping: modulates each turn's clipping range based on its normalized IG, widening the update region for informative turns and narrowing it for uninformative ones.

preprint2026arXiv

AT$^2$PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search

LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT$^2$PO (Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT$^2$PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzfoutofspace/ATPO.

preprint2026arXiv

CombatVLA: An Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model for Combat Tasks in 3D Action Role-Playing Games

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have expanded the capabilities of embodied intelligence. However, significant challenges remain in real-time decision-making in complex 3D environments, which demand second-level responses, high-resolution perception, and tactical reasoning under dynamic conditions. To advance the field, we introduce CombatVLA, an efficient VLA model optimized for combat tasks in 3D action role-playing games(ARPGs). Specifically, our CombatVLA is a 3B model trained on video-action pairs collected by an action tracker, where the data is formatted as action-of-thought (AoT) sequences. Thereafter, CombatVLA seamlessly integrates into an action execution framework, allowing efficient inference through our truncated AoT strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that CombatVLA not only outperforms all existing models on the combat understanding benchmark but also achieves a 50-fold acceleration in game combat. Moreover, it has a higher task success rate than human players. We will open-source all resources, including the action tracker, dataset, benchmark, model weights, training code, and the implementation of the framework at https://combatvla.github.io/.

preprint2026arXiv

KOS-TL (Knowledge Operation System Type Logic)

This paper introduces KOS-TL (Knowledge Operation System Type Logic), a novel constructive framework designed to provide a rigorous logical foundation for autonomous and executable knowledge systems. Traditional knowledge representation models often suffer from a gap between static symbolic logic and dynamic system execution. To bridge this divide, KOS-TL leverages Dependent Type Theory to unify data, logic, and proof into a singular computational substrate.The architecture of KOS-TL is organized into three hierarchical layers: the Core Layer, which defines the static type universe and constructive primitives; the Kernel Layer, which governs state evolution through an event-driven mechanism characterized by the triple $\langle Σ, \textsf{Ev}, Δ\rangle$; and the Runtime Layer, responsible for the bidirectional refinement of physical signals into logical evidence. We formally define the operational semantics of the system and prove key meta-theoretical properties, including Progress and Evolutionary Consistency, ensuring that the system remains logically self-consistent and free from stuck states during continuous state transitions.By integrating Davidsonian event semantics with Martin-Löf type theory, KOS-TL enables the construction of "proof-carrying knowledge," where every state change in the knowledge base is accompanied by a formal witness of its validity. We demonstrate the practical utility of this logic through application examples in industrial traceability and cross-border financial compliance. Our results suggest that KOS-TL provides a robust, formally verifiable basis for the next generation of intelligent, autonomous operating systems.

preprint2026arXiv

Magnetic exchange coupled nonreciprocal devices for cryogenic memory

As computing power demands continue to grow, superconducting electronics present an opportunity to reduce power consumption by increasing the energy efficiency of digital logic and memory. A key milestone for scaling this technology is the development of efficient superconducting memories. Such devices should be nonvolatile, scalable to high integration density and memory capacity, enable fast and low-power reading and writing operations, and be compatible with the digital logic. We present a versatile device platform to develop such nonvolatile memory devices consisting of an exchange-coupled ultra-thin superconductor encapsulated between two ferromagnetic insulators (FIs). The superconducting exchange coupling, which is tuneable by the relative alignment between the FI magnetizations, enables the switching of superconductivity on and off. We exploit this mechanism to create a superconducting nonvolatile memory where single-cell writing is realized using heat-assisted magnetic recording, and explain how it can become a contender for state-of-the-art superconducting memories. Furthermore, below their critical temperatures, the memory elements show a marked nonreciprocity, with zero magnetic field superconducting diode efficiencies exceeding $\pm$60%, showing the versatility of the proposed devices for superconducting computing.

preprint2026arXiv

Rotate Your Character: Revisiting Video Diffusion Models for High-Quality 3D Character Generation

Generating high-quality 3D characters from single images remains a significant challenge in digital content creation, particularly due to complex body poses and self-occlusion. In this paper, we present RCM (Rotate your Character Model), an advanced image-to-video diffusion framework tailored for high-quality novel view synthesis (NVS) and 3D character generation. Compared to existing diffusion-based approaches, RCM offers several key advantages: (1) transferring characters with any complex poses into a canonical pose, enabling consistent novel view synthesis across the entire viewing orbit, (2) high-resolution orbital video generation at 1024x1024 resolution, (3) controllable observation positions given different initial camera poses, and (4) multi-view conditioning supporting up to 4 input images, accommodating diverse user scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RCM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both novel view synthesis and 3D generation quality.

preprint2026arXiv

RSATalker: Realistic Socially-Aware Talking Head Generation for Multi-Turn Conversation

Talking head generation is increasingly important in virtual reality (VR), especially for social scenarios involving multi-turn conversation. Existing approaches face notable limitations: mesh-based 3D methods can model dual-person dialogue but lack realistic textures, while large-model-based 2D methods produce natural appearances but incur prohibitive computational costs. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based methods achieve efficient and realistic rendering but remain speaker-only and ignore social relationships. We introduce RSATalker, the first framework that leverages 3DGS for realistic and socially-aware talking head generation with support for multi-turn conversation. Our method first drives mesh-based 3D facial motion from speech, then binds 3D Gaussians to mesh facets to render high-fidelity 2D avatar videos. To capture interpersonal dynamics, we propose a socially-aware module that encodes social relationships, including blood and non-blood as well as equal and unequal, into high-level embeddings through a learnable query mechanism. We design a three-stage training paradigm and construct the RSATalker dataset with speech-mesh-image triplets annotated with social relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSATalker achieves state-of-the-art performance in both realism and social awareness. The code and dataset will be released.

preprint2026arXiv

Sequential Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design in Infinite Dimensions via Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning

Sequential Bayesian optimal experimental design (SBOED) for PDE-governed inverse problems is computationally challenging, especially for infinite-dimensional random field parameters. High-fidelity approaches require repeated forward and adjoint PDE solves inside nested Bayesian inversion and design loops. We formulate SBOED as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and learn an amortized design policy via policy-gradient reinforcement learning (PGRL), enabling online design selection from the experiment history without repeatedly solving an SBOED optimization problem. To make policy training and reward evaluation scalable, we combine dual dimension reduction -- active subspace projection for the parameter and principal component analysis for the state -- with an adjusted derivative-informed latent attention neural operator (LANO) surrogate that predicts both the parameter-to-solution map and its Jacobian. We use a Laplace-based D-optimality reward while noting that, in general, other expected-information-gain utilities such as KL divergence can also be used within the same framework. We further introduce an eigenvalue-based evaluation strategy that uses prior samples as proxies for maximum a posteriori (MAP) points, avoiding repeated MAP solves while retaining accurate information-gain estimates. Numerical experiments on sequential multi-sensor placement for contaminant source tracking demonstrate approximately $100\times$ speedup over high-fidelity finite element methods, improved performance over random sensor placements, and physically interpretable policies that discover an ``upstream'' tracking strategy.

preprint2026arXiv

SiriusHelper: An LLM Agent-Based Operations Assistant for Big Data Platforms

Big data platforms are widely used in modern enterprises, and an in-production intelligent assistant is increasingly important to help users quickly find actionable guidance and reduce operational burden. While recent LLM+RAG assistants provide a natural interface, they face practical challenges in real deployments: limited scenario coverage across both general consultation and domain-specific troubleshooting workflows, inefficient knowledge access due to inadequate multi-hop retrieval and flat knowledge organization, and high maintenance cost because escalated tickets are unstructured and hard to convert into assistant improvements and reusable SOPs. In this paper, we present SiriusHelper, a deployed intelligent assistant for big data platforms. SiriusHelper serves as a unified online assistant that automatically identifies user intent and routes queries to the right handling path, including dedicated expert workflows for specialized scenarios (e.g., SQL execution diagnosis). To support complex troubleshooting, SiriusHelper combines a DeepSearch-driven mechanism with a priority-based hierarchical knowledge base to enable multi-hop retrieval without context overload, thus improving answer reliability and latency. To reduce expert overhead, SiriusHelper further introduces automated ticket understanding and SOP distillation: it diagnoses the assistant failure reason (e.g., missing knowledge or wrong routing) and extracts domain-specific SOPs to continuously enrich the knowledge base. Experiments and online deployment on Tencent Big Data platform show that SiriusHelper outperforms representative alternatives and reduces online ticket volume by 20.8\%.

preprint2026arXiv

TAGRPO: Boosting GRPO on Image-to-Video Generation with Direct Trajectory Alignment

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of integrating Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into flow matching models, particularly for text-to-image and text-to-video generation. However, we find that directly applying these techniques to image-to-video (I2V) models often fails to yield consistent reward improvements. To address this limitation, we present TAGRPO, a robust post-training framework for I2V models inspired by contrastive learning. Our approach is grounded in the observation that rollout videos generated from identical initial noise provide superior guidance for optimization. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel GRPO loss applied to intermediate latents, encouraging direct alignment with high-reward trajectories while maximizing distance from low-reward counterparts. Furthermore, we introduce a memory bank for rollout videos to enhance diversity and reduce computational overhead. Despite its simplicity, TAGRPO achieves significant improvements over DanceGRPO in I2V generation.

preprint2026arXiv

Time to REFLECT: Can We Trust LLM Judges for Evidence-based Research Agents?

Deep research agents increasingly automate complex information-seeking tasks, producing evidence-grounded reports via multi-step reasoning, tool use, and synthesis. Their growing role demands scalable, reliable evaluation, positioning LLM-as-judge as a supervision paradigm for assessing factual accuracy, evidence use, and reasoning quality. Yet the reliability of these judges for deep research agents remains poorly understood, posing a critical meta-evaluation problem: before deploying LLM judges to supervise research agents, we must first evaluate the judges themselves. Existing meta-evaluations fall short in two ways: (1) reliance on coarse, subjective human-preference agreement; (2) focus on instruction-following or verifiable tasks, leaving open-ended agent executions unexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce REFLECT (REliable Fine-grained LLM judge Evaluation via Controlled inTervention), a meta-evaluation benchmark targeting fine-grained failure detection in agentic environments. REFLECT defines a detailed taxonomy of process- and outcome-level failure modes, instantiated by performing controlled and localized interventions on quality-screened agent execution traces. This yields verifiable, comprehensive, and fine-grained instances for validating the judge models. Our experiments show that current LLM judges remain unreliable: even the best-performing models achieve overall accuracies below 55% across reasoning, tool-use, and report-quality failures, with especially poor performance on evidence verification. Together, our taxonomy and findings expose systematic judge limitations, reveal tradeoffs in cost and reliability, and offer actionable guidance for building more reliable evaluation pipelines for deep research agents.

preprint2026arXiv

Toward AI-Driven Digital Twins for Metropolitan Floods: A Conditional Latent Dynamics Network Surrogate of the Shallow Water Equations

AI-driven flood digital twins demand fast hydrodynamic surrogates for ensemble forecasting and observation assimilation. Yet even GPU-accelerated two-dimensional shallow water equation (SWE) solvers still require $\sim 55$ minutes per $96$-hour run on a $\sim 4.2$-million-active-cell metropolitan basin (the Des~Plaines River basin at $30\,\mathrm{m}$ resolution), making such workloads prohibitive at native resolution. We present the Conditional Latent Dynamics Network (CLDNet): a low-dimensional latent neural ODE driven by rainfall, paired with a coordinate-based decoder conditioned on static terrain (elevation, slope, Manning roughness) that reconstructs depth and discharge at arbitrary query points. Pointwise decoding decouples memory from grid size and handles irregular watersheds natively, enabling metropolitan-scale training on a single compute node and direct queries at exact gauge coordinates without raster snapping. We evaluate CLDNet on a synthetic $250{,}000$-cell Texas benchmark and on a new Des~Plaines case study of $114$ real-rainfall Stage~IV storms whose reference simulator we validate against United States Geological Survey (USGS) gauges at the April~2013 flood-of-record (Nash--Sutcliffe efficiency $0.57$--$0.94$ on mean-recentered water-surface elevation). CLDNet roughly halves the relative root-mean-squared error of an unconditional baseline, outperforms regular-grid VAE--ConvLSTM and FNO baselines on the Texas benchmark (both presuppose a Cartesian grid and do not apply to the irregular Des~Plaines watershed), reaches a critical success index of $\approx 86\%$ at the $0.5\,\mathrm{m}$ inundation threshold, and produces a full $96$-hour basin-wide forecast in $\sim 29$ seconds -- a $\sim 115\times$ speedup.

preprint2026arXiv

TRACE: Temporal Routing with Autoregressive Cross-channel Experts for EEG Representation Learning

Learning transferable representations for electroencephalography (EEG) remains challenging because EEG signals are inherently multi-channel and non-stationary. Channels observed at the same time provide coupled measurements of neural activity, while the relevant temporal dynamics vary across contexts. This structure is poorly matched by architectures that apply uniform computation across time or route each channel patch independently. To this end, we propose TRACE, an autoregressive EEG pre-training framework that predicts future EEG patches from causal context while performing temporally adaptive and cross-channel coherent computation. At each temporal step, TRACE derives an expert routing decision from the causal cross-channel history and applies it jointly to all channels at that step. This preserves instantaneous cross-channel coherence while allowing different temporal regimes to activate different computation. Since routing is defined over the available channel set and causal temporal context, TRACE is compatible with heterogeneous pre-training across corpora with different channel counts, montages, sequence lengths, and recording domains. Across eight downstream EEG benchmarks, TRACE is evaluated in both settings: when downstream domains are seen only as unlabeled pre-training data and when downstream datasets are completely unseen during pre-training. It obtains the best results on several benchmarks while remaining competitive on motor imagery and clinical event classification tasks, with ablations supporting the importance of cross-channel temporal routing.

preprint2025arXiv

BIOME-Bench: A Benchmark for Biomolecular Interaction Inference and Multi-Omics Pathway Mechanism Elucidation from Scientific Literature

Multi-omics studies often rely on pathway enrichment to interpret heterogeneous molecular changes, but pathway enrichment (PE)-based workflows inherit structural limitations of pathway resources, including curation lag, functional redundancy, and limited sensitivity to molecular states and interventions. Although recent work has explored using large language models (LLMs) to improve PE-based interpretation, the lack of a standardized benchmark for end-to-end multi-omics pathway mechanism elucidation has largely confined evaluation to small, manually curated datasets or ad hoc case studies, hindering reproducible progress. To address this issue, we introduce BIOME-Bench, constructed via a rigorous four-stage workflow, to evaluate two core capabilities of LLMs in multi-omics analysis: Biomolecular Interaction Inference and end-to-end Multi-Omics Pathway Mechanism Elucidation. We develop evaluation protocols for both tasks and conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple strong contemporary models. Experimental results demonstrate that existing models still exhibit substantial deficiencies in multi-omics analysis, struggling to reliably distinguish fine-grained biomolecular relation types and to generate faithful, robust pathway-level mechanistic explanations.

preprint2025arXiv

Towards a deeper fundamental understanding of (Al,Sc)N ferroelectric nitrides

Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations, within the virtual crystal alloy approximation, are performed, along with the development of a Landau-type model employing a symmetry-allowed analytical expression of the internal energy and having parameters being determined from first principles, to investigate properties and energetics of Al1-xScxN ferroelectric nitrides in their hexagonal forms. These DFT computations and this model predict the existence of two different types of minima, namely the 4-fold-coordinated wurtzite (WZ) polar structure and a 5-times paraelectric hexagonal phase (to be denoted as H5), for any Sc composition up to 40%. The H5 minimum progressively becomes the lowest energy state within hexagonal symmetry as the Sc concentration increases from 0 to 40%. Furthermore, the model points out to several key findings. Examples include the crucial role of the coupling between polarization and strains to create the WZ minimum, in addition to polar and elastic energies, and that the origin of the H5 state overcoming the WZ phase as the global minimum within hexagonal symmetry when increasing the Sc composition mostly lies in the compositional dependency of only two parameters, one linked to the polarization and another one being purely elastic in nature. Other examples are that forcing Al1-xScxN systems to have no or a weak change in lattice parameters when heating them allows to reproduce well their finite-temperature polar properties, and that a value of the axial ratio close to that of the ideal WZ structure does imply a large polarization at low temperatures but not necessarily at high temperatures because of the ordered-disordered character of the temperature-induced formation of the WZ state. Such findings should allow for a better fundamental understanding of (Al,Sc)N ferroelectric nitrides, which may be used to design efficient devices operating at low voltages.

preprint2023arXiv

Voltage-Controlled Magnon Transistor via Tunning Interfacial Exchange Coupling

Magnon transistors that can effectively regulate magnon transport by an electric field are desired for magnonics which aims to provide a Joule-heating free alternative to the conventional electronics owing to the electric neutrality of magnons (the key carriers of spin-angular momenta in the magnonics). However, also due to their electric neutrality, magnons have no access to directly interact with an electric field and it is thus difficult to manipulate magnon transport by voltages straightforwardly. Here, we demonstrated a gate voltage ($V_{\rm g}$) applied on a nonmagnetic metal/magnetic insulator (NM/MI) interface that bended the energy band of the MI and then modulated the possibility for conduction electrons in the NM to tunnel into the MI can consequently enhance or weaken the spin-magnon conversion efficiency at the interface. A voltage-controlled magnon transistor based on the magnon-mediated electric current drag (MECD) effect in a Pt/Y$_{\rm 3}$Fe$_{\rm 5}$O$_{\rm 12}$ (YIG)/Pt sandwich was then experimentally realized with $V_{\rm g}$ modulating the magnitude of the MECD signal. The obtained efficiency (the change ratio between the MECD voltage at $\pm V_{\rm g}$) reached 10%/(MV/cm) at 300 K. This prototype of magnon transistor offers an effective scheme to control magnon transport by a gate voltage.

preprint2022arXiv

A Lateral AlGaN/GaN Schottky Barrier Diode with 0.36 V Turn-on Voltage and 10 kV Breakdown Voltage by Using Double Barrier Anode Structure

In this letter, we demonstrate a lateral AlGaN/GaN Schottky barrier diode (SBD) on sapphire substrate with low turn-on voltage (Von) and high breakdown voltage (VBK). By using a double barrier anode (DBA) structure formed by the mixture of Platinum (Pt) and Tantalum (Ta), the Von of the SBD can be as low as 0.36 V with a leakage current of 2.5E-6 A/mm. Supported by the high-quality carbon-doped GaN buffer on sapphire, the VBK can reach more than 10 kV with the anode-to-cathode spacing of 85 μm. Combining the VBK and the specific on-resistance (Ron,sp) of 25.1 mΩ.cm^2, the power figure of merit of the SBD can reach 4.0 GW/cm^2, demonstrating a great potential for the application in ultra-high-voltage electronics.

preprint2022arXiv

A New Atomic Norm for DOA Estimation With Gain-Phase Errors

The problem of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation has been studied for decades as an essential technology in enabling radar, wireless communications, and array signal processing related applications. In this paper, the DOA estimation problem in the scenario with gain-phase errors is considered, and a sparse model is formulated by exploiting the signal sparsity in the spatial domain. By proposing a new atomic norm, named as GP-ANM, an optimization method is formulated via deriving a dual norm of GP-ANM. Then, the corresponding semidefinite program (SDP) is given to estimate the DOA efficiently, where the SDP is obtained based on the Schur complement. Moreover, a regularization parameter is obtained theoretically in the convex optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods, including the subspace-based and sparse-based methods in the scenario with gain-phase errors.

preprint2022arXiv

An efficient method for goal-oriented linear Bayesian optimal experimental design: Application to optimal sensor placemen

Optimal experimental design (OED) plays an important role in the problem of identifying uncertainty with limited experimental data. In many applications, we seek to minimize the uncertainty of a predicted quantity of interest (QoI) based on the solution of the inverse problem, rather than the inversion model parameter itself. In these scenarios, we develop an efficient method for goal-oriented optimal experimental design (GOOED) for large-scale Bayesian linear inverse problem that finds sensor locations to maximize the expected information gain (EIG) for a predicted QoI. By deriving a new formula to compute the EIG, exploiting low-rank structures of two appropriate operators, we are able to employ an online-offline decomposition scheme and a swapping greedy algorithm to maximize the EIG at a cost measured in model solutions that is independent of the problem dimensions. We provide detailed error analysis of the approximated EIG, and demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy, and both data- and parameter-dimension independence of the proposed algorithm for a contaminant transport inverse problem with infinite-dimensional parameter field.

preprint2022arXiv

Broadband Cross-Circular Polarization Carpet Cloaking based on a Phase Change Material Metasurface in the Mid-infrared Region

In view of the fact that most invisibility devices focus on linear polarization cloaking and that the characteristics of mid infrared cloaking are rarely studied, we propose a cross circularly polarized invisibility carpet cloaking device in the mid infrared band. Based on the Pancharatnam Berry phase principle, the unit cells with the cross circular polarization gradient phase were carefully designed and constructed into a metasurface. In order to achieve tunable cross circular polarization carpet cloaks, a phase change material is introduced into the design of the unit structure. When the phase change material is in amorphous and crystalline states, the proposed metasurface unit cells can achieve high efficiency cross polarization conversion and reflection intensity can be tuned. According to the phase compensation principle of carpet cloaking, we construct a metasurface cloaking device with a phase gradient using the designed unit structure. From the near and far field distributions, the cross circular polarization cloaking property is confirmed in the broadband wavelength range. The proposed cloaking device can effectively resist detection of cross-circular polarization.

preprint2022arXiv

Efficient DOA Estimation Method for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Aided UAV Swarm

The conventional direction of arrival (DOA) estimation methods are performed with multiple receiving channels. In this paper, a changeling DOA estimation problem is addressed in a different scenario with only one full-functional receiving channel. A new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm system using multiple lifted reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is proposed for the DOA estimation. The UAV movement degrades the DOA estimation performance significantly, and the existing atomic norm minimization (ANM) methods cannot be used in the scenario with array perturbation. Specifically, considering the position perturbation of UAVs, a new atomic norm-based DOA estimation method is proposed, where an atomic norm is defined with the parameter of the position perturbation. Then, a customized semi-definite programming (SDP) method is derived to solve the atomic norm-based method, where different from the traditional SDP method, an additional transforming matrix is formulated. Moreover, a gradient descent method is applied to refine the estimated DOA and the position perturbation further. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves much better DOA estimation performance in the RIS-aided UAV swarm system with only one receiving channel than various benchmark schemes.

preprint2022arXiv

J-PLUS: A catalogue of globular cluster candidates around the M81/M82/NGC3077 triplet of galaxies

Globular clusters (GCs) are proxies of the formation assemblies of their host galaxies. However, few studies exist targeting GC systems of spiral galaxies up to several effective radii. Through 12-band Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS) imaging, we study the point sources around the M81/M82/NGC3077 triplet in search of new GC candidates. We develop a tailored classification scheme to search for GC candidates based on their similarity to known GCs via a principal components analysis (PCA) projection. Our method accounts for missing data and photometric errors. We report 642 new GC candidates in a region of 3.5 deg$^2$ around the triplet, ranked according to their Gaia astrometric proper motions when available. We find tantalising evidence for an overdensity of GC candidate sources forming a bridge connecting M81 and M82. Finally, the spatial distribution of the GC candidates $(g-i)$ colours is consistent with halo/intra-cluster GCs, i.e. it gets bluer as they get further from the closest galaxy in the field. We further employ a regression-tree based model to estimate the metallicity distribution of the GC candidates based on their J-PLUS bands. The metallicity distribution of the sample candidates is broad and displays a bump towards the metal-rich end. Our list increases the population of GC candidates around the triplet by 3-fold, stresses the usefulness of multi-band surveys in finding these objects, and provides a testbed for further studies analysing their spatial distribution around nearby (spirals) galaxies.

preprint2022arXiv

Large-scale Bayesian optimal experimental design with derivative-informed projected neural network

We address the solution of large-scale Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) with infinite-dimensional parameter fields. The OED problem seeks to find sensor locations that maximize the expected information gain (EIG) in the solution of the underlying Bayesian inverse problem. Computation of the EIG is usually prohibitive for PDE-based OED problems. To make the evaluation of the EIG tractable, we approximate the (PDE-based) parameter-to-observable map with a derivative-informed projected neural network (DIPNet) surrogate, which exploits the geometry, smoothness, and intrinsic low-dimensionality of the map using a small and dimension-independent number of PDE solves. The surrogate is then deployed within a greedy algorithm-based solution of the OED problem such that no further PDE solves are required. We analyze the EIG approximation error in terms of the generalization error of the DIPNet and show they are of the same order. Finally, the efficiency and accuracy of the method are demonstrated via numerical experiments on OED problems governed by inverse scattering and inverse reactive transport with up to 16,641 uncertain parameters and 100 experimental design variables, where we observe up to three orders of magnitude speedup relative to a reference double loop Monte Carlo method.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Video Salient Object Detection Progressively from Unlabeled Videos

Recent deep learning-based video salient object detection (VSOD) has achieved some breakthrough, but these methods rely on expensive annotated videos with pixel-wise annotations, weak annotations, or part of the pixel-wise annotations. In this paper, based on the similarities and the differences between VSOD and image salient object detection (SOD), we propose a novel VSOD method via a progressive framework that locates and segments salient objects in sequence without utilizing any video annotation. To use the knowledge learned in the SOD dataset for VSOD efficiently, we introduce dynamic saliency to compensate for the lack of motion information of SOD during the locating process but retain the same fine segmenting process. Specifically, an algorithm for generating spatiotemporal location labels, which consists of generating high-saliency location labels and tracking salient objects in adjacent frames, is proposed. Based on these location labels, a two-stream locating network that introduces an optical flow branch for video salient object locating is presented. Although our method does not require labeled video at all, the experimental results on five public benchmarks of DAVIS, FBMS, ViSal, VOS, and DAVSOD demonstrate that our proposed method is competitive with fully supervised methods and outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly and unsupervised methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Looper: An end-to-end ML platform for product decisions

Modern software systems and products increasingly rely on machine learning models to make data-driven decisions based on interactions with users, infrastructure and other systems. For broader adoption, this practice must (i) accommodate product engineers without ML backgrounds, (ii) support finegrain product-metric evaluation and (iii) optimize for product goals. To address shortcomings of prior platforms, we introduce general principles for and the architecture of an ML platform, Looper, with simple APIs for decision-making and feedback collection. Looper covers the end-to-end ML lifecycle from collecting training data and model training to deployment and inference, and extends support to personalization, causal evaluation with heterogenous treatment effects, and Bayesian tuning for product goals. During the 2021 production deployment Looper simultaneously hosted 440-1,000 ML models that made 4-6 million real-time decisions per second. We sum up experiences of platform adopters and describe their learning curve.

preprint2022arXiv

Manifold Optimization Based Multi-user Rate Maximization Aided by Intelligent Reflecting Surface

In this work, two problems associated with a downlink multi-user system are considered with the aid of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS): weighted sum-rate maximization and weighted minimal-rate maximization. For the first problem, a novel DOuble Manifold ALternating Optimization (DOMALO) algorithm is proposed by exploiting the matrix manifold theory and introducing the beamforming matrix and reflection vector using complex sphere manifold and complex oblique manifold, respectively, which incorporate the inherent geometrical structure and the required constraint. A smooth double manifold alternating optimization (S-DOMALO) algorithm is then developed based on the Dinkelbach-type algorithm and smooth exponential penalty function for the second problem. Finally, possible cooperative beamforming gain between IRSs and the IRS phase shift with limited resolution is studied, providing a reference for practical implementation. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithms can significantly outperform the benchmark schemes.

preprint2022arXiv

Mesa: A Memory-saving Training Framework for Transformers

There has been an explosion of interest in designing high-performance Transformers. While Transformers have delivered significant performance improvements, training such networks is extremely memory intensive owing to storing all intermediate activations that are needed for gradient computation during backpropagation, especially for long sequences. To this end, we present Mesa, a memory-saving training framework for Transformers. Specifically, Mesa uses exact activations during forward pass while storing a low-precision version of activations to reduce memory consumption during training. The low-precision activations are then dequantized during back-propagation to compute gradients. Besides, to address the heterogeneous activation distributions in the multi-head self-attention layers, we propose a head-wise activation quantization strategy, which quantizes activations based on the statistics of each head to minimize the approximation error. To further boost training efficiency, we learn quantization parameters by running estimates. More importantly, by re-investing the saved memory in employing a larger batch size or scaling up model size, we may further improve the performance under constrained computational resources. Extensive experiments on ImageNet, CIFAR-100 and ADE20K demonstrate that Mesa can achieve flexible memory-savings (up to 50%) during training while achieving comparable or even better performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/Mesa.

preprint2022arXiv

Off-Grid DOA Estimation Using Sparse Bayesian Learning in MIMO Radar With Unknown Mutual Coupling

In the practical radar with multiple antennas, the antenna imperfections degrade the system performance. In this paper, the problem of estimating the direction of arrival (DOA) in multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) radar system with unknown mutual coupling effect between antennas is investigated. To exploit the target sparsity in the spatial domain, the compressed sensing (CS)-based methods have been proposed by discretizing the detection area and formulating the dictionary matrix, so an \emph{off-grid} gap is caused by the discretization processes. In this paper, different from the present DOA estimation methods, both the off-grid gap due to the sparse sampling and the unknown mutual coupling effect between antennas are considered at the same time, and a novel sparse system model for DOA estimation is formulated. Then, a novel sparse Bayesian learning (SBL)-based method named sparse Bayesian learning with the mutual coupling (SBLMC) is proposed, where an expectation-maximum (EM)-based method is established to estimate all the unknown parameters including the noise variance, the mutual coupling vectors, the off-grid vector and the variance vector of scattering coefficients. Additionally, the prior distributions for all the unknown parameters are theoretically derived. With regard to the DOA estimation performance, the proposed SBLMC method can outperform state-of-the-art methods in the MIMO radar with unknown mutual coupling effect, while keeping the acceptable computational complexity.

preprint2022arXiv

Optimal Neural Network Approximation of Wasserstein Gradient Direction via Convex Optimization

The computation of Wasserstein gradient direction is essential for posterior sampling problems and scientific computing. The approximation of the Wasserstein gradient with finite samples requires solving a variational problem. We study the variational problem in the family of two-layer networks with squared-ReLU activations, towards which we derive a semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxation. This SDP can be viewed as an approximation of the Wasserstein gradient in a broader function family including two-layer networks. By solving the convex SDP, we obtain the optimal approximation of the Wasserstein gradient direction in this class of functions. Numerical experiments including PDE-constrained Bayesian inference and parameter estimation in COVID-19 modeling demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

preprint2022arXiv

Performance Bounds for PDE-Constrained Optimization under Uncertainty

Computational approaches to PDE-constrained optimization under uncertainty may involve finite-dimensional approximations of control and state spaces, sample average approximations of measures of risk and reliability, smooth approximations of nonsmooth functions, penalty approximations of constraints as well as many other kinds of inaccuracies. In this paper, we analyze the performance of controls obtained by an approximation-based algorithm and in the process develop estimates of optimality gaps for general optimization problems defined on metric spaces. Under mild assumptions, we establish that limiting controls have arbitrarily small optimality gaps provided that the inaccuracies in the various approximations vanish. We carry out the analysis for a broad class of problems with multiple expectation, risk, and reliability functions involving PDE solutions and appearing in objective as well as constraint expressions. In particular, we address problems with buffered failure probability constraints approximated via an augmented Lagrangian. We demonstrate the framework on an elliptic PDE with a random coefficient field and a distributed control function.

preprint2022arXiv

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Sparse DOA Estimation Method With Non-ULA

The direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem is addressed in this letter. A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided system for the DOA estimation is proposed. Unlike traditional DOA estimation systems, a low-cost system with only one complete functional receiver is given by changing the phases of the reflected signals at the RIS elements to realize the multiple measurements. Moreover, an atomic norm-based method is proposed for the DOA estimation by exploiting the target sparsity in the spatial domain and solved by a semi-definite programming (SDP) method. Furthermore, the RIS elements can be any geometry array for practical consideration, so a transformation matrix is formulated and different from the conventional SDP method. Simulation results show that the proposed method can estimate the DOA more accurately than the existing methods in the non-uniform linear RIS array.

preprint2022arXiv

Scalable Multi-view Clustering with Graph Filtering

With the explosive growth of multi-source data, multi-view clustering has attracted great attention in recent years. Most existing multi-view methods operate in raw feature space and heavily depend on the quality of original feature representation. Moreover, they are often designed for feature data and ignore the rich topology structure information. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a generic framework to cluster both attribute and graph data with heterogeneous features. It is capable of exploring the interplay between feature and structure. Specifically, we first adopt graph filtering technique to eliminate high-frequency noise to achieve a clustering-friendly smooth representation. To handle the scalability challenge, we develop a novel sampling strategy to improve the quality of anchors. Extensive experiments on attribute and graph benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach with respect to state-of-the-art approaches.

preprint2022arXiv

Structured Binary Neural Networks for Image Recognition

We propose methods to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with both binarized weights and activations, leading to quantized models that are specifically friendly to mobile devices with limited power capacity and computation resources. Previous works on quantizing CNNs often seek to approximate the floating-point information using a set of discrete values, which we call value approximation, typically assuming the same architecture as the full-precision networks. Here we take a novel "structure approximation" view of quantization -- it is very likely that different architectures designed for low-bit networks may be better for achieving good performance. In particular, we propose a "network decomposition" strategy, termed Group-Net, in which we divide the network into groups. Thus, each full-precision group can be effectively reconstructed by aggregating a set of homogeneous binary branches. In addition, we learn effective connections among groups to improve the representation capability. Moreover, the proposed Group-Net shows strong generalization to other tasks. For instance, we extend Group-Net for accurate semantic segmentation by embedding rich context into the binary structure. Furthermore, for the first time, we apply binary neural networks to object detection. Experiments on both classification, semantic segmentation and object detection tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods over various quantized networks in the literature. Our methods outperform the previous best binary neural networks in terms of accuracy and computation efficiency.

preprint2022arXiv

The Schrödinger equation in $L^p$ spaces for operators with heat kernel satisfying Poisson type bounds

Let $L$ be a non-negative self-adjoint operator acting on $L^2(X)$ where $X$ is a space of homogeneous type with a dimension $n$. In this paper, we study sharp endpoint $L^p$-Sobolev estimates for the solution of the initial value problem for the Schrödinger equation, $i \partial_t u + L u=0 $ and show that for all $f\in L^p(X), 1<p<\infty,$ \begin{eqnarray*} \left\| e^{itL} (I+L)^{-{σn}} f\right\|_{p} \leq C(1+|t|)^{σn} \|f\|_{p}, \ \ \ t\in{\mathbb R}, \ \ \ σ\geq \big|{1\over 2}-{1\over p}\big|, \end{eqnarray*} where the semigroup $e^{-tL}$ generated by $L$ satisfies a Poisson type upper bound. This extends the previous result in \cite{CDLY1} in which the semigroup $e^{-tL}$ generated by $L$ satisfies the exponential decay.

preprint2022arXiv

yonder: A python package for data denoising and reconstruction

We present a standalone implementation of a data-deconvolution method based on singular value decomposition. The tool is written in python and packaged in the open-source yonder package. yonder receives as input two matrices, one for the data and another for the errors, and outputs a denoised version of the original dataset. In this Research Note, we briefly describe the methodology and show a demonstration of the yonder on a simulated dataset.

preprint2021arXiv

Matrix Engines for High Performance Computing:A Paragon of Performance or Grasping at Straws?

Matrix engines or units, in different forms and affinities, are becoming a reality in modern processors; CPUs and otherwise. The current and dominant algorithmic approach to Deep Learning merits the commercial investments in these units, and deduced from the No.1 benchmark in supercomputing, namely High Performance Linpack, one would expect an awakened enthusiasm by the HPC community, too. Hence, our goal is to identify the practical added benefits for HPC and machine learning applications by having access to matrix engines. For this purpose, we perform an in-depth survey of software stacks, proxy applications and benchmarks, and historical batch job records. We provide a cost-benefit analysis of matrix engines, both asymptotically and in conjunction with state-of-the-art processors. While our empirical data will temper the enthusiasm, we also outline opportunities to misuse these dense matrix-multiplication engines if they come for free.

preprint2021arXiv

Physics-Based Iterative Reconstruction for Dual Source and Flying Focal Spot Computed Tomography

For single source helical Computed Tomography (CT), both Filtered-Back Projection (FBP) and statistical iterative reconstruction have been investigated. However for dual source CT with flying focal spot (DS-FFS CT), statistical iterative reconstruction that accurately models the scanner geometry and physics remains unknown to researchers. Therefore, this paper presents a novel physics-based iterative reconstruction method for DS-FFS CT and assess its image quality. Our algorithm uses precise physics models to reconstruct from the native cone-beam geometry and interleaved dual source helical trajectory of a DS-FFS CT. To do so, we construct a noise physics model to represent data acquisition noise and a prior image model to represent image noise and texture. In addition, we design forward system models to compute the locations of deflected focal spots, the dimension and sensitivity of voxels and detector units, as well as the length of intersection between X-rays and voxels. The forward system models further represent the coordinated movement between the dual sources by computing their X-ray coverage gaps and overlaps at an arbitrary helical pitch. With the above models, we reconstruct images by using an advanced Consensus Equilibrium (CE) numerical method to compute the maximum a posteriori estimate to a joint optimization problem that simultaneously fits all models. We compared our reconstruction with Siemens ADMIRE, which is the clinical standard hybrid iterative reconstruction (IR) method for DS-FFS CT, in terms of spatial resolution, noise profile and image artifacts through both phantoms and clinical datasets. Experiments show that our reconstruction has a consistently higher spatial resolution than the clinical standard hybrid IR. In addition, our reconstruction shows a reduced magnitude of image undersampling artifacts than the clinical standard.

preprint2021arXiv

Projected Wasserstein gradient descent for high-dimensional Bayesian inference

We propose a projected Wasserstein gradient descent method (pWGD) for high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems. The underlying density function of a particle system of WGD is approximated by kernel density estimation (KDE), which faces the long-standing curse of dimensionality. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the intrinsic low-rank structure in the difference between the posterior and prior distributions. The parameters are projected into a low-dimensional subspace to alleviate the approximation error of KDE in high dimensions. We formulate a projected Wasserstein gradient flow and analyze its convergence property under mild assumptions. Several numerical experiments illustrate the accuracy, convergence, and complexity scalability of pWGD with respect to parameter dimension, sample size, and processor cores.

preprint2021arXiv

Quantum teleportation mediated by surface plasmon polariton

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are collective excitations of free electrons propagating along a metal-dielectric interface. Although some basic quantum properties of SPPs, such as the preservation of entanglement, the wave-particle duality of a single plasmon, the quantum interference of two plasmons, and the verification of entanglement generation, have been shown, more advanced quantum information protocols have yet to be demonstrated with SPPs. Here, we experimentally realize quantum state teleportation between single photons and SPPs. To achieve this, we use polarization-entangled photon pairs, coherent photon-plasmon-photon conversion on a metallic subwavelength hole array, complete Bell-state measurements and an active feed-forward technique. The results of both quantum state and quantum process tomography confirm the quantum nature of the SPP mediated teleportation. An average state fidelity of 0.889$\pm$0.004 and a process fidelity of 0.820$\pm$0.005, which are well above the classical limit, are achieved. Our work shows that SPPs may be useful for realizing complex quantum protocols in a photonic-plasmonic hybrid quantum network.

preprint2021arXiv

Towards Enhancing Database Education: Natural Language Generation Meets Query Execution Plans

The database systems course is offered as part of an undergraduate computer science degree program in many major universities. A key learning goal of learners taking such a course is to understand how SQL queries are processed in a RDBMS in practice. Since a query execution plan (QEP) describes the execution steps of a query, learners can acquire the understanding by perusing the QEPs generated by a RDBMS. Unfortunately, in practice, it is often daunting for a learner to comprehend these QEPs containing vendor-specific implementation details, hindering her learning process. In this paper, we present a novel, end-to-end, generic system called lantern that generates a natural language description of a qep to facilitate understanding of the query execution steps. It takes as input an SQL query and its QEP, and generates a natural language description of the execution strategy deployed by the underlying RDBMS. Specifically, it deploys a declarative framework called pool that enables subject matter experts to efficiently create and maintain natural language descriptions of physical operators used in QEPs. A rule-based framework called RULE-LANTERN is proposed that exploits pool to generate natural language descriptions of QEPs. Despite the high accuracy of RULE-LANTERN, our engagement with learners reveal that, consistent with existing psychology theories, perusing such rule-based descriptions lead to boredom due to repetitive statements across different QEPs. To address this issue, we present a novel deep learning-based language generation framework called NEURAL-LANTERN that infuses language variability in the generated description by exploiting a set of paraphrasing tools and word embedding. Our experimental study with real learners shows the effectiveness of lantern in facilitating comprehension of QEPs.

preprint2020arXiv

2.5-kV AlGaN/GaN Schottky Barrier Diode on Silicon Substrate with Recessed-anode Structure

In this letter, we demonstrate high-performance lateral AlGaN/GaN Schottky barrier diodes (SBD) on Si substrate with a recessed-anode structure. The optimized rapid etch process provides results in improving etching quality with a 0.26-nm roughness of the anode recessed surface. By using the high work function metal Pt as the Schottky electrode, a low Von of 0.71 V is obtained with a high uniformity of 0.023 V for 40 devices. Supported by the flat anode recess surface and related field plate design, the SBD device with the anode-cathode spacing of 15 um show the Ron,sp of 1.53 mOhm.cm2 only, the breakdown voltage can reach 1592 V with a high power FOM (Figure-of-Merit) of 1656 MW/cm2. For the SBD device with the anode-cathode spacing of 30 um, the breakdown voltage can be as high as 2521 V and the power FOM is 1244 MW/cm2.

preprint2020arXiv

Almost everywhere convergence of Bochner-Riesz means for the Hermite operators

Let $H = -Δ+ |x|^2$ be the Hermite operator in ${\mathbb R}^n$. In this paper we study almost everywhere convergence of the Bochner-Riesz means associated with $H$ which is defined by $S_R^λ(H)f(x) = \sum\limits_{k=0}^{\infty} \big(1-{2k+n\over R^2}\big)_+^λ P_k f(x).$ Here $P_k f$ is the $k$-th Hermite spectral projection operator. For $2\le p<\infty$, we prove that $$ \lim\limits_{R\to \infty} S_R^λ(H) f=f \ \ \ \text{a.e.} $$ for all $f\in L^p(\mathbb R^n)$ provided that $λ> λ(p)/2$ and $λ(p)=\max\big\{ n\big({1/2}-{1/p}\big)-{1/ 2}, \, 0\big\}.$ Conversely, we also show the convergence generally fails if $λ< λ(p)/2$ in the sense that there is an $f\in L^p(\mathbb R^n)$ for $2n/(n-1)\le p$ such that the convergence fails. This is in surprising contrast with a.e. convergence of the classical Bochner-Riesz means for the Laplacian. For $n\geq 2$ and $p\ge 2$ our result tells that the critical summability index for a.e. convergence for $S_R^λ(H)$ is as small as only the \emph{half} of the critical index for a.e. convergence of the classical Bochner-Riesz means. When $n = 1$, we show a.e. convergence holds for $f\in L^p({\mathbb R})$ with $ p\geq 2$ whenever $λ>0$. Compared with the classical result due to Askey and Wainger who showed the optimal $L^p$ convergence for $S_R^λ(H)$ on ${\mathbb R}$ we only need smaller summability index for a.e. convergence.

preprint2020arXiv

An Efficient Secure Dynamic Skyline Query Model

It is now cost-effective to outsource large dataset and perform query over the cloud. However, in this scenario, there exist serious security and privacy issues that sensitive information contained in the dataset can be leaked. The most effective way to address that is to encrypt the data before outsourcing. Nevertheless, it remains a grand challenge to process queries in ciphertext efficiently. In this work, we shall focus on solving one representative query task, namely dynamic skyline query, in a secure manner over the cloud. However, it is difficult to be performed on encrypted data as its dynamic domination criteria require both subtraction and comparison, which cannot be directly supported by a single encryption scheme efficiently. To this end, we present a novel framework called SCALE. It works by transforming traditional dynamic skyline domination into pure comparisons. The whole process can be completed in single-round interaction between user and the cloud. We theoretically prove that the outsourced database, query requests, and returned results are all kept secret under our model. Moreover, we also present an efficient strategy for dynamic insertion and deletion of stored records. Empirical study over a series of datasets demonstrates that our framework improves the efficiency of query processing by nearly three orders of magnitude compared to the state-of-the-art.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Neural Network-Based Quantized Signal Reconstruction for DOA Estimation

For a massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system using intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) equipped with radio frequency (RF) chains, the multi-channel RF chains are expensive compared to passive IRS, especially, when the high-resolution and high-speed analog to digital converters (ADC) are used in each RF channel. In this letter, a direction of angle (DOA) estimation problem is investigated with low-cost ADC in IRS, and we propose a deep neural network (DNN) as a recovery method for the low-resolution sampled signal. Different from the existing denoising convolutional neural network (DnCNN) for Gaussian noise, the proposed DNN with fully connected (FC) layers estimates the quantization noise caused by the ADC. Then, the denoised signal is subjected to the DOA estimation, and the recovery performance for the quantized signal is evaluated by DOA estimation. Simulation results show that under the same training conditions, the better reconstruction performance is achieved by the proposed network than state-of-the-art methods. The performance of the DOA estimation using 1-bit ADC is improved to exceed that using 2-bit ADC.

preprint2020arXiv

Efficient production of a narrow-line erbium magneto-optical trap with two-stage slowing

We describe an experimental setup for producing a large cold erbium (Er) sample in a narrow-line magneto-optical trap (MOT) in a simple and efficient way. We implement a pair of angled slowing beams with respect to the Zeeman slower axis, and further slow down atoms exiting from the Zeeman slower. The second-stage slowing beams enable the narrow-line MOT to trap atoms exiting from the Zeeman slower with higher velocity. This scheme is particularly useful when the Zeeman slower is at low optical power without the conventional transverse cooling between an oven and a Zeeman slower, in which case we significantly improve the loading efficiency into the MOT and are able to trap more than $10^8$ atoms in the narrow-line MOT of $^{166}$Er. This work highlights our implementation, which greatly simplifies laser cooling and trapping of Er atoms and also should benefit other similar elements.

preprint2020arXiv

Ferroelectric 180 degree walls are mechanically softer than the domains they separate

Domain walls are functionally different from the domains they separate, but little is known about their mechanical properties. Using scanning probe microscopy, we have measured the mechanical response of ferroelectric 180o domain walls and observed that, despite separating domains that are mechanically identical (non-ferroelastic), the walls are mechanically distinct -- softer -- compared to the domains. This effect has been observed in different ferroelectric materials (LiNbO3, BaTiO3, PbTiO3) and with different morphologies (from single crystals to thin films) so it appears to be universal. We propose a theoretical framework that explains the domain wall softening and justifies that the effect should be common to all ferroelectrics.

preprint2020arXiv

High-order minibands and interband Landau level reconstruction in graphene moire superlattice

The propagation of Dirac fermions in graphene through a long-period periodic potential would result in a band folding together with the emergence of a series of cloned Dirac points (DPs). In highly aligned graphene/hexagonal boron nitride (G/hBN) heterostructures, the lattice mismatch between the two atomic crystals generates a unique kind of periodic structure known as a moiré superlattice. Of particular interests is the emergent phenomena related to the reconstructed band-structure of graphene, such as the Hofstadter butterfly, topological currents, gate dependent pseudospin mixing, and ballistic miniband conduction. However, most studies so far have been limited to the lower-order minibands, e.g. the 1st and 2nd minibands counted from charge neutrality, and consequently the fundamental nature of the reconstructed higher-order miniband spectra still remains largely unknown. Here we report on probing the higher-order minibands of precisely aligned graphene moiré superlattices by transport spectroscopy. Using dual electrostatic gating, the edges of these high-order minibands, i.e. the 3rd and 4th minibands, can be reached. Interestingly, we have observed interband Landau level (LL) crossinginducing gap closures in a multiband magneto-transport regime, which originates from band overlap between the 2nd and 3rd minibands. As observed high-order minibands and LL reconstruction qualitatively match our simulated results. Our findings highlight the synergistic effect of minibands in transport, thus presenting a new opportunity for graphene electronic devices.

preprint2020arXiv

Liberation of slave modes inside domain walls in multiferroic Cu-Cl boracite

Domain walls (DWs), the two-dimensional boundaries between symmetry equivalent ferroic domains, are actively investigated due to their promise for novel logic and memory devices. Moreover, they can be easily created, erased and reshaped at a low energy cost due to their high mobility and large electrical conductivity. Most work so far has been focused on DWs in proper ferroelectrics, where the primary order parameter, ferroelectric polarization, interpolates between the values in the domains by either reducing to zero (in Ising-type DW) or rotating (Bloch type DW). Here we present a new member of DW family with a complex inner texture of slave order parameters inside the wall where the primary order parameter reduces to zero. Our first-principles-derived model predicts the existence of monopolar and toroidal polarization patterns. The results enable large-scale phase field simulations of complex domain patterns in boracites and could inspire novel devices based on domain walls in improper ferroelectrics.

preprint2020arXiv

Massive suppression of proximity pairing in topological (Bi$_{1-x}$Sb$_{x})_2$Te$_3$ films on niobium

Interfacing bulk conducting topological Bi$_2$Se$_3$ films with s-wave superconductors initiates strong superconducting order in the nontrivial surface states. However, bulk insulating topological (Bi$_{1-x}$Sb$_{x})_2$Te$_3$ films on bulk Nb instead exhibit a giant attenuation of surface superconductivity, even for films only two-layers thick. This massive suppression of proximity pairing is evidenced by ultrahigh-resolution band mappings and by contrasting quantified superconducting gaps with those of heavily n-doped topological Bi$_2$Se$_3$/Nb. The results underscore the limitations of using superconducting proximity effects to realize topological superconductivity in nearly intrinsic systems.

preprint2020arXiv

Projected Stein Variational Gradient Descent

The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the fundamental property of intrinsic low dimensionality of the data informed subspace stemming from ill-posedness of such problems. We adaptively construct the subspace using a gradient information matrix of the log-likelihood, and apply pSVGD to the much lower-dimensional coefficients of the parameter projection. The method is demonstrated to be more accurate and efficient than SVGD. It is also shown to be more scalable with respect to the number of parameters, samples, data points, and processor cores via experiments with parameters dimensions ranging from the hundreds to the tens of thousands.

preprint2020arXiv

Projected Stein Variational Newton: A Fast and Scalable Bayesian Inference Method in High Dimensions

We propose a fast and scalable variational method for Bayesian inference in high-dimensional parameter space, which we call projected Stein variational Newton (pSVN) method. We exploit the intrinsic low-dimensional geometric structure of the posterior distribution in the high-dimensional parameter space via its Hessian (of the log posterior) operator and perform a parallel update of the parameter samples projected into a low-dimensional subspace by an SVN method. The subspace is adaptively constructed using the eigenvectors of the averaged Hessian at the current samples. We demonstrate fast convergence of the proposed method and its scalability with respect to the number of parameters, samples, and processor cores.

preprint2020arXiv

Sharp endpoint $L^p$ estimates for Schrödinger groups

Let $L$ be a non-negative self-adjoint operator acting on $L^2(X)$ where $X$ is a space of homogeneous type with a dimension $n$. Suppose that the heat operator $e^{-tL}$ satisfies the generalized Gaussian $(p_0, p&#39;_0)$-estimates of order $m$ for some $1\leq p_0 < 2$. In this paper we prove {\it sharp} endpoint $L^p$-Sobolev bound for the Schrödinger group $e^{itL}$, that is for every $p\in (p_0, p&#39;_0)$ there exists a constant $C=C(n,p)>0$ independent of $t$ such that \begin{eqnarray*} \left\| (I+L)^{-{s}}e^{itL} f\right\|_{p} \leq C(1+|t|)^{s}\|f\|_{p}, \ \ \ t\in{\mathbb R}, \ \ \ s\geq n\big|{1\over 2}-{1\over p}\big|. \end{eqnarray*} As a consequence, the above estimate holds for all $1<p<\infty$ when the heat kernel of $L$ satisfies a Gaussian upper bound. This extends classical results due to Feffermann and Stein, and Miyachi for the Laplacian on the Euclidean spaces ${\mathbb R}^n$. We also give an application to obtain an endpoint estimate for $L^p$-boundedness of the Riesz means of the solutions of the Schrödinger equations.

preprint2020arXiv

Stein variational reduced basis Bayesian inversion

We propose and analyze a Stein variational reduced basis method (SVRB) to solve large-scale PDE-constrained Bayesian inverse problems. To address the computational challenge of drawing numerous samples requiring expensive PDE solves from the posterior distribution, we integrate an adaptive and goal-oriented model reduction technique with an optimization-based Stein variational gradient descent method (SVGD). The samples are drawn from the prior distribution and iteratively pushed to the posterior by a sequence of transport maps, which are constructed by SVGD, requiring the evaluation of the potential---the negative log of the likelihood function---and its gradient with respect to the random parameters, which depend on the solution of the PDE. To reduce the computational cost, we develop an adaptive and goal-oriented model reduction technique based on reduced basis approximations for the evaluation of the potential and its gradient. We present a detailed analysis for the reduced basis approximation errors of the potential and its gradient, the induced errors of the posterior distribution measured by Kullback--Leibler divergence, as well as the errors of the samples. To demonstrate the computational accuracy and efficiency of SVRB, we report results of numerical experiments on a Bayesian inverse problem governed by a diffusion PDE with random parameters with both uniform and Gaussian prior distributions. Over 100X speedups can be achieved while the accuracy of the approximation of the potential and its gradient is preserved.

preprint2020arXiv

Tag and Correct: Question aware Open Information Extraction with Two-stage Decoding

Question Aware Open Information Extraction (Question aware Open IE) takes question and passage as inputs, outputting an answer tuple which contains a subject, a predicate, and one or more arguments. Each field of answer is a natural language word sequence and is extracted from the passage. The semi-structured answer has two advantages which are more readable and falsifiable compared to span answer. There are two approaches to solve this problem. One is an extractive method which extracts candidate answers from the passage with the Open IE model, and ranks them by matching with questions. It fully uses the passage information at the extraction step, but the extraction is independent to the question. The other one is the generative method which uses a sequence to sequence model to generate answers directly. It combines the question and passage as input at the same time, but it generates the answer from scratch, which does not use the facts that most of the answer words come from in the passage. To guide the generation by passage, we present a two-stage decoding model which contains a tagging decoder and a correction decoder. At the first stage, the tagging decoder will tag keywords from the passage. At the second stage, the correction decoder will generate answers based on tagged keywords. Our model could be trained end-to-end although it has two stages. Compared to previous generative models, we generate better answers by generating coarse to fine. We evaluate our model on WebAssertions (Yan et al., 2018) which is a Question aware Open IE dataset. Our model achieves a BLEU score of 59.32, which is better than previous generative methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Tensor train construction from tensor actions, with application to compression of large high order derivative tensors

We present a method for converting tensors into tensor train format based on actions of the tensor as a vector-valued multilinear function. Existing methods for constructing tensor trains require access to &#34;array entries&#34; of the tensor and are therefore inefficient or computationally prohibitive if the tensor is accessible only through its action, especially for high order tensors. Our method permits efficient tensor train compression of large high order derivative tensors for nonlinear mappings that are implicitly defined through the solution of a system of equations. Array entries of these derivative tensors are not directly accessible, but actions of these tensors can be computed efficiently via a procedure that we discuss. Such tensors are often amenable to tensor train compression in theory, but until now no efficient algorithm existed to convert them into tensor train format. We demonstrate our method by compressing a Hilbert tensor of size $41 \times 42 \times 43 \times 44 \times 45$, and by forming high order (up to $5^\text{th}$ order derivatives/$6^\text{th}$ order tensors) Taylor series surrogates of the noise-whitened parameter-to-output map for a stochastic partial differential equation with boundary output.

preprint2020arXiv

Topological Insulators-Based Magnetic Heterostructure

The combination of magnetism and topology in magnetic topological insulators (MTIs) has led to unprecedented advancements of time reversal symmetry-breaking topological quantum physics in the past decade. Compared with the uniform films, the MTI heterostructures provide a better framework to manipulate the spin-orbit coupling and spin properties. In this review, we summarize the fundamental mechanisms related to the physical orders host in (Bi,Sb)2(Te,Se)3-based hybrid systems. Besides, we provide an assessment on the general strategies to enhance the magnetic coupling and spin-orbit torque strength through different structural engineering approaches and effective interfacial interactions. Finally, we offer an outlook of MTI heterostructures-based spintronics applications, particularly in view of their feasibility to achieve room-temperature operation.

preprint2020arXiv

Training-free Monocular 3D Event Detection System for Traffic Surveillance

We focus on the problem of detecting traffic events in a surveillance scenario, including the detection of both vehicle actions and traffic collisions. Existing event detection systems are mostly learning-based and have achieved convincing performance when a large amount of training data is available. However, in real-world scenarios, collecting sufficient labeled training data is expensive and sometimes impossible (e.g. for traffic collision detection). Moreover, the conventional 2D representation of surveillance views is easily affected by occlusions and different camera views in nature. To deal with the aforementioned problems, in this paper, we propose a training-free monocular 3D event detection system for traffic surveillance. Our system firstly projects the vehicles into the 3D Euclidean space and estimates their kinematic states. Then we develop multiple simple yet effective ways to identify the events based on the kinematic patterns, which need no further training. Consequently, our system is robust to the occlusions and the viewpoint changes. Exclusive experiments report the superior result of our method on large-scale real-world surveillance datasets, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed system.

preprint2020arXiv

Unexpected Giant Microwave Conductivity in a Nominally Silent BiFeO3 Domain Wall

Nanoelectronic devices based on ferroelectric domain walls (DWs), such as memories, transistors, and rectifiers, have been demonstrated in recent years. Practical high-speed electronics, on the other hand, usually demand operation frequencies in the giga-Hertz (GHz) regime, where the effect of dipolar oscillation is important. In this work, an unexpected giant GHz conductivity on the order of 103 S/m is observed in certain BiFeO3 DWs, which is about 100,000 times greater than the carrier-induced dc conductivity of the same walls. Surprisingly, the nominal configuration of the DWs precludes the ac conduction under an excitation electric field perpendicular to the surface. Theoretical analysis shows that the inclined DWs are stressed asymmetrically near the film surface, whereas the vertical walls in a control sample are not. The resultant imbalanced polarization profile can then couple to the out-of-plane microwave fields and induce power dissipation, which is confirmed by the phase-field modeling. Since the contributions from mobile-carrier conduction and bound-charge oscillation to the ac conductivity are equivalent in a microwave circuit, the research on local structural dynamics may open a new avenue to implement DW nano-devices for RF applications.

preprint2019arXiv

Tailoring Hybrid Anomalous Hall Response in Engineered Magnetic Topological Insulator Heterostructures

Engineering the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in the emerging magnetic topological insulators (MTIs) has great potentials for quantum information processing and spintronics applications. In this letter, we synthesize the epitaxial Bi2Te3/MnTe magnetic heterostructures and observe pronounced AHE signals from both layers combined together. The evolution of the resulting hybrid AHE intensity with the top Bi2Te3 layer thickness manifests the presence of an intrinsic ferromagnetic phase induced by the topological surface states at the heterolayer-interface. More importantly, by doping the Bi2Te3 layer with Sb, we are able to manipulate the sign of the Berry phase-associated AHE component. Our results demonstrate the un-paralleled advantages of MTI heterostructures over magnetically doped TI counterparts, in which the tunability of the AHE response can be greatly enhanced. This in turn unveils a new avenue for MTI heterostructure-based multifunctional applications.