Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 21 - EmergingVerification L1Unclaimed author
33works
0followers
21topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Identity and collaboration

How to connect with this researcher

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Log in to claim

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

33 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration

Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.

preprint2026arXiv

Hypergraph Pattern Machine: Compositional Tokenization for Higher-Order Interactions

Hypergraphs model higher-order relations that drive real-world decisions, from drug prescriptions to recommendations. A central structural signal in such data, beyond what pairwise relations can express, is interaction compositionality: whether a higher-order relation is compositional, emergent, or inhibitory with respect to its observed or unobserved sets. In polypharmacy, the regime decides whether a drug should be dropped, kept, or excluded: a compositional drug triple can be safely simplified, an emergent triple requires all drugs jointly, and an inhibitory triple flags a drug that disrupts an existing interaction. However, existing hypergraph learning methods, which merely propagate messages over observed hyperedges, leave this compositional signal unmodeled, allowing dangerous drug combinations to slip through and be misclassified. To this end, we propose the Hypergraph Pattern Machine (HGPM), shifting the paradigm from message passing to learning the compositional pattern of subsets. It tokenizes compositional subsets, organizes them in an inclusion DAG, and trains an inclusion-aware Transformer under masked reconstruction. On ten hypergraph benchmarks, HGPM matches or exceeds state-of-the-art methods. Notably, in a real adverse-event prediction case, HGPM correctly identifies the drug addition that inhibits the side effect among feature-identical candidates, a discrimination existing methods cannot make. The code and data are in https://github.com/KryieZhao/HGPM.git.

preprint2026arXiv

MicroDiffuse3D: A Foundation Model for 3D Microscopy Imaging Restoration

Chemical imaging enables label-free visualization of cells, tissues and living systems while providing direct biochemical information that is difficult to obtain with conventional fluorescence microscopy. Despite its promise in applications ranging from intraoperative diagnosis to drug-response analysis, its broader use remains limited by slow data acquisition, particularly for three-dimensional imaging. Here we present MicroDiffuse3D, a pretrained foundation model for 3D microscopy image restoration that recovers high-quality volumetric structure from degraded low-resolution measurements acquired at substantially higher throughput. We evaluated MicroDiffuse3D across three challenging restoration settings, including 3D super-resolution under 16-fold volumetric sparsity, joint degradation in resolution and noise, and 3D denoising in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, where the model delivered clear gains over strong baselines. Under the sparse 3D super-resolution setting, MicroDiffuse3D produced clearer continuity across depth with fewer artifacts and improved segmentation quality by 10.58% and line-profile concordance by 15.59%. Together, our results establish pretrained 3D restoration as a broadly applicable strategy for overcoming the throughput and SNR limitations in volumetric chemical imaging, enabling high-resolution analysis at scales and speeds that were previously difficult to achieve.

preprint2026arXiv

PRISM: Fast Online LLM Serving via Scheduling-Memory Co-design

Modern online large language model (LLM) services, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent systems, increasingly expose two prominent characteristics: prompt segmentation (e.g., system instructions, retrieved passages, tool outputs) and hotspot skew, where a small set of these segments recurs frequently across user requests. Failing to jointly exploit these patterns could lead to repeated prefill of hot segments and prolonged TTFT, undermining both throughput and user-perceived responsiveness. However, existing work tackles these patterns independently: KV-cache management mainly exploits segment reuse while scheduling reorders requests to improve cache locality, yet neither aligns request admission with KV-cache retention. To address this gap, we first analyze how scheduling and KV-cache management jointly affect TTFT. Guided by this, we present PRISM (Prefix Reuse Optimization Integrated Scheduling and Memory), which co-designs a query-aware scheduler (QAS) with a demand-aware radix tree (DART) to align request admission with exact-prefix KV retention. Our evaluation results show that, versus the strongest baseline, PRISM reduces average per-QPS P99 TTFT by 23.3\% and 37.1\% while increasing exact-prefix KV-cache hit rate by 5.9 and 12.2 percentage points on 4B and 13B models, respectively.

preprint2026arXiv

Relay Buffer Independent Communication over Pooled HBM for Efficient MoE Inference on Ascend

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference requires large-scale token exchange across devices, making dispatch and combine major bottlenecks in both prefill and decode. Beyond network transfer, routing-driven layout transformation, temporary relay, and output restoration can add substantial overhead. Existing MoE communication paths are often buffer-centric, using explicit inter-process relay and reordering buffers around collective transfer. This report presents a relay-buffer-free communication design for MoE inference acceleration on Ascend systems. The design reorganizes dispatch and combine around direct placement into destination expert windows and direct reading from remote expert windows. Built on globally pooled high-bandwidth memory and symmetric-memory allocation, it removes most intermediate relay and reordering buffers while retaining only lightweight control state, including counts, offsets, and synchronization metadata. We instantiate the design as two schedules for the main phases of MoE inference: a prefill schedule with richer planning state for throughput-oriented execution, and a compact decode schedule for latency-sensitive execution. Experiments on Ascend-based MoE workloads show reduced dispatch and combine latency in both settings. At the serving level, the implementation improves time to first token (TTFT), preserves competitive time per output token (TPOT), and enlarges the feasible scheduling space under practical latency constraints. These results indicate that, on platforms with globally addressable device memory, reducing intermediate buffering and output restoration around expert execution is an effective direction for accelerating MoE inference.

preprint2024arXiv

Long time behaviors for the inhomogeneous NLS with a potential in $\mathbb{R}^3$

In this article, we aim to study the scattering of the solution to the focusing inhomogeneous nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a potential of form \begin{align*} i\partial_t u+Δu- Vu=-|x|^{-b}|u|^{p-1}u \end{align*} in the energy space $H^1(\R^3)$. We prove a scattering criterion, and then we use it together with Morawetz estimate to show the scattering theory, which generalizes the results of Dinh \cite{DD} to the non-radial symmetric case.

preprint2022arXiv

Adaptive Transfer Learning for Plant Phenotyping

Plant phenotyping (Guo et al. 2021; Pieruschka et al. 2019) focuses on studying the diverse traits of plants related to the plants' growth. To be more specific, by accurately measuring the plant's anatomical, ontogenetical, physiological and biochemical properties, it allows identifying the crucial factors of plants' growth in different environments. One commonly used approach is to predict the plant's traits using hyperspectral reflectance (Yendrek et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2021). However, the data distributions of the hyperspectral reflectance data in plant phenotyping might vary in different environments for different plants. That is, it would be computationally expansive to learn the machine learning models separately for one plant in different environments. To solve this problem, we focus on studying the knowledge transferability of modern machine learning models in plant phenotyping. More specifically, this work aims to answer the following questions. (1) How is the performance of conventional machine learning models, e.g., partial least squares regression (PLSR), Gaussian process regression (GPR) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP), affected by the number of annotated samples for plant phenotyping? (2) Whether could the neural network based transfer learning models improve the performance of plant phenotyping? (3) Could the neural network based transfer learning be improved by using infinite-width hidden layers for plant phenotyping?

preprint2022arXiv

Brain-Aware Replacements for Supervised Contrastive Learning in Detection of Alzheimer's Disease

We propose a novel framework for Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection using brain MRIs. The framework starts with a data augmentation method called Brain-Aware Replacements (BAR), which leverages a standard brain parcellation to replace medically-relevant 3D brain regions in an anchor MRI from a randomly picked MRI to create synthetic samples. Ground truth "hard" labels are also linearly mixed depending on the replacement ratio in order to create "soft" labels. BAR produces a great variety of realistic-looking synthetic MRIs with higher local variability compared to other mix-based methods, such as CutMix. On top of BAR, we propose using a soft-label-capable supervised contrastive loss, aiming to learn the relative similarity of representations that reflect how mixed are the synthetic MRIs using our soft labels. This way, we do not fully exhaust the entropic capacity of our hard labels, since we only use them to create soft labels and synthetic MRIs through BAR. We show that a model pre-trained using our framework can be further fine-tuned with a cross-entropy loss using the hard labels that were used to create the synthetic samples. We validated the performance of our framework in a binary AD detection task against both from-scratch supervised training and state-of-the-art self-supervised training plus fine-tuning approaches. Then we evaluated BAR's individual performance compared to another mix-based method CutMix by integrating it within our framework. We show that our framework yields superior results in both precision and recall for the AD detection task.

preprint2022arXiv

Estimating risks of option books using neural-SDE market models

In this paper, we examine the capacity of an arbitrage-free neural-SDE market model to produce realistic scenarios for the joint dynamics of multiple European options on a single underlying. We subsequently demonstrate its use as a risk simulation engine for option portfolios. Through backtesting analysis, we show that our models are more computationally efficient and accurate for evaluating the Value-at-Risk (VaR) of option portfolios, with better coverage performance and less procyclicality than standard filtered historical simulation approaches.

preprint2022arXiv

Eye-gaze-guided Vision Transformer for Rectifying Shortcut Learning

Learning harmful shortcuts such as spurious correlations and biases prevents deep neural networks from learning the meaningful and useful representations, thus jeopardizing the generalizability and interpretability of the learned representation. The situation becomes even more serious in medical imaging, where the clinical data (e.g., MR images with pathology) are limited and scarce while the reliability, generalizability and transparency of the learned model are highly required. To address this problem, we propose to infuse human experts' intelligence and domain knowledge into the training of deep neural networks. The core idea is that we infuse the visual attention information from expert radiologists to proactively guide the deep model to focus on regions with potential pathology and avoid being trapped in learning harmful shortcuts. To do so, we propose a novel eye-gaze-guided vision transformer (EG-ViT) for diagnosis with limited medical image data. We mask the input image patches that are out of the radiologists' interest and add an additional residual connection in the last encoder layer of EG-ViT to maintain the correlations of all patches. The experiments on two public datasets of INbreast and SIIM-ACR demonstrate our EG-ViT model can effectively learn/transfer experts' domain knowledge and achieve much better performance than baselines. Meanwhile, it successfully rectifies the harmful shortcut learning and significantly improves the EG-ViT model's interpretability. In general, EG-ViT takes the advantages of both human expert's prior knowledge and the power of deep neural networks. This work opens new avenues for advancing current artificial intelligence paradigms by infusing human intelligence.

preprint2022arXiv

Follow My Eye: Using Gaze to Supervise Computer-Aided Diagnosis

When deep neural network (DNN) was first introduced to the medical image analysis community, researchers were impressed by its performance. However, it is evident now that a large number of manually labeled data is often a must to train a properly functioning DNN. This demand for supervision data and labels is a major bottleneck in current medical image analysis, since collecting a large number of annotations from experienced experts can be time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we demonstrate that the eye movement of radiologists reading medical images can be a new form of supervision to train the DNN-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. Particularly, we record the tracks of the radiologists' gaze when they are reading images. The gaze information is processed and then used to supervise the DNN's attention via an Attention Consistency module. To the best of our knowledge, the above pipeline is among the earliest efforts to leverage expert eye movement for deep-learning-based CAD. We have conducted extensive experiments on knee X-ray images for osteoarthritis assessment. The results show that our method can achieve considerable improvement in diagnosis performance, with the help of gaze supervision.

preprint2022arXiv

Graph-in-Graph Network for Automatic Gene Ontology Description Generation

Gene Ontology (GO) is the primary gene function knowledge base that enables computational tasks in biomedicine. The basic element of GO is a term, which includes a set of genes with the same function. Existing research efforts of GO mainly focus on predicting gene term associations. Other tasks, such as generating descriptions of new terms, are rarely pursued. In this paper, we propose a novel task: GO term description generation. This task aims to automatically generate a sentence that describes the function of a GO term belonging to one of the three categories, i.e., molecular function, biological process, and cellular component. To address this task, we propose a Graph-in-Graph network that can efficiently leverage the structural information of GO. The proposed network introduces a two-layer graph: the first layer is a graph of GO terms where each node is also a graph (gene graph). Such a Graph-in-Graph network can derive the biological functions of GO terms and generate proper descriptions. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed network, we build three large-scale benchmark datasets. By incorporating the proposed Graph-in-Graph network, the performances of seven different sequence-to-sequence models can be substantially boosted across all evaluation metrics, with up to 34.7%, 14.5%, and 39.1% relative improvements in BLEU, ROUGE-L, and METEOR, respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

Hedging option books using neural-SDE market models

We study the capability of arbitrage-free neural-SDE market models to yield effective strategies for hedging options. In particular, we derive sensitivity-based and minimum-variance-based hedging strategies using these models and examine their performance when applied to various option portfolios using real-world data. Through backtesting analysis over typical and stressed market periods, we show that neural-SDE market models achieve lower hedging errors than Black--Scholes delta and delta-vega hedging consistently over time, and are less sensitive to the tenor choice of hedging instruments. In addition, hedging using market models leads to similar performance to hedging using Heston models, while the former tends to be more robust during stressed market periods.

preprint2022arXiv

Joint Progressive and Coarse-to-fine Registration of Brain MRI via Deformation Field Integration and Non-Rigid Feature Fusion

Registration of brain MRI images requires to solve a deformation field, which is extremely difficult in aligning intricate brain tissues, e.g., subcortical nuclei, etc. Existing efforts resort to decomposing the target deformation field into intermediate sub-fields with either tiny motions, i.e., progressive registration stage by stage, or lower resolutions, i.e., coarse-to-fine estimation of the full-size deformation field. In this paper, we argue that those efforts are not mutually exclusive, and propose a unified framework for robust brain MRI registration in both progressive and coarse-to-fine manners simultaneously. Specifically, building on a dual-encoder U-Net, the fixed-moving MRI pair is encoded and decoded into multi-scale deformation sub-fields from coarse to fine. Each decoding block contains two proposed novel modules: i) in Deformation Field Integration (DFI), a single integrated sub-field is calculated, warping by which is equivalent to warping progressively by sub-fields from all previous decoding blocks, and ii) in Non-rigid Feature Fusion (NFF), features of the fixed-moving pair are aligned by DFI-integrated sub-field, and then fused to predict a finer sub-field. Leveraging both DFI and NFF, the target deformation field is factorized into multi-scale sub-fields, where the coarser fields alleviate the estimate of a finer one and the finer field learns to make up those misalignments insolvable by previous coarser ones. The extensive and comprehensive experimental results on both private and public datasets demonstrate a superior registration performance of brain MRI images over progressive registration only and coarse-to-fine estimation only, with an increase by at most 8% in the average Dice.

preprint2022arXiv

Knee Cartilage Defect Assessment by Graph Representation and Surface Convolution

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common osteoarthritis and a leading cause of disability. Cartilage defects are regarded as major manifestations of knee OA, which are visible by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Thus early detection and assessment for knee cartilage defects are important for protecting patients from knee OA. In this way, many attempts have been made on knee cartilage defect assessment by applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to knee MRI. However, the physiologic characteristics of the cartilage may hinder such efforts: the cartilage is a thin curved layer, implying that only a small portion of voxels in knee MRI can contribute to the cartilage defect assessment; heterogeneous scanning protocols further challenge the feasibility of the CNNs in clinical practice; the CNN-based knee cartilage evaluation results lack interpretability. To address these challenges, we model the cartilages structure and appearance from knee MRI into a graph representation, which is capable of handling highly diverse clinical data. Then, guided by the cartilage graph representation, we design a non-Euclidean deep learning network with the self-attention mechanism, to extract cartilage features in the local and global, and to derive the final assessment with a visualized result. Our comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method yields superior performance in knee cartilage defect assessment, plus its convenient 3D visualization for interpretability.

preprint2022arXiv

ProTranslator: zero-shot protein function prediction using textual description

Accurately finding proteins and genes that have a certain function is the prerequisite for a broad range of biomedical applications. Despite the encouraging progress of existing computational approaches in protein function prediction, it remains challenging to annotate proteins to a novel function that is not collected in the Gene Ontology and does not have any annotated proteins. This limitation, a side effect from the widely-used multi-label classification problem setting of protein function prediction, hampers the progress of studying new pathways and biological processes, and further slows down research in various biomedical areas. Here, we tackle this problem by annotating proteins to a function only based on its textual description so that we do not need to know any associated proteins for this function. The key idea of our method ProTranslator is to redefine protein function prediction as a machine translation problem, which translates the description word sequence of a function to the amino acid sequence of a protein. We can then transfer annotations from functions that have similar textual description to annotate a novel function. We observed substantial improvement in annotating novel functions and sparsely annotated functions on CAFA3, SwissProt and GOA datasets. We further demonstrated how our method accurately predicted gene members for a given pathway in Reactome, KEGG and MSigDB only based on the pathway description. Finally, we showed how ProTranslator enabled us to generate the textual description instead of the function label for a set of proteins, providing a new scheme for protein function prediction. We envision ProTranslator will give rise to a protein function "search engine" that returns a list of proteins based on the free text queried by the user.

preprint2022arXiv

Scattering For three waves Nonlinear Schrödinger System with mass-resonance in 5D

In this paper, we study the dynamics behavior of the NLS system with three waves interaction in the energy space $H^1(\mathbb{R}^5) \times H^1(\mathbb{R}^5)\times H^1(\mathbb{R}^5) $. Inspired by B. Dodson and J. Murphy in \cite{Dodson2018}, we establish an interaction Morawetz estimate for the NLS system, together with the criterion which proved by Tao-Dodson--Murphy we can get the scattering under the ground state in energy space with mass-resonance. Under the radial assumption, we can remove the mass-resonance condition.

preprint2022arXiv

Spin-charge separation in a 1D Fermi gas with tunable interactions

Ultracold atoms confined to periodic potentials have proven to be a powerful tool for quantum simulation of complex many-body systems. We confine fermions to one-dimension to realize the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid model describing the highly collective nature of their low-energy excitations. We use Bragg spectroscopy to directly excite either the spin or charge wave for various strength of repulsive interaction. We observe that the velocity of the spin and charge excitations shift in opposite directions with increasing interaction, a hallmark of spin-charge separation. The excitation spectra are in quantitative agreement with the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory, and furthermore, we find that the spin excitations become dispersive at large interaction, signaling the onset of the nonlinear Luttinger liquid regime.

preprint2022arXiv

TBI-GAN: An Adversarial Learning Approach for Data Synthesis on Traumatic Brain Segmentation

Brain network analysis for traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients is critical for its consciousness level assessment and prognosis evaluation, which requires the segmentation of certain consciousness-related brain regions. However, it is difficult to construct a TBI segmentation model as manually annotated MR scans of TBI patients are hard to collect. Data augmentation techniques can be applied to alleviate the issue of data scarcity. However, conventional data augmentation strategies such as spatial and intensity transformation are unable to mimic the deformation and lesions in traumatic brains, which limits the performance of the subsequent segmentation task. To address these issues, we propose a novel medical image inpainting model named TBI-GAN to synthesize TBI MR scans with paired brain label maps. The main strength of our TBI-GAN method is that it can generate TBI images and corresponding label maps simultaneously, which has not been achieved in the previous inpainting methods for medical images. We first generate the inpainted image under the guidance of edge information following a coarse-to-fine manner, and then the synthesized intensity image is used as the prior for label inpainting. Furthermore, we introduce a registration-based template augmentation pipeline to increase the diversity of the synthesized image pairs and enhance the capacity of data augmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed TBI-GAN method can produce sufficient synthesized TBI images with high quality and valid label maps, which can greatly improve the 2D and 3D traumatic brain segmentation performance compared with the alternatives.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Accurate Active Camera Localization

In this work, we tackle the problem of active camera localization, which controls the camera movements actively to achieve an accurate camera pose. The past solutions are mostly based on Markov Localization, which reduces the position-wise camera uncertainty for localization. These approaches localize the camera in the discrete pose space and are agnostic to the localization-driven scene property, which restricts the camera pose accuracy in the coarse scale. We propose to overcome these limitations via a novel active camera localization algorithm, composed of a passive and an active localization module. The former optimizes the camera pose in the continuous pose space by establishing point-wise camera-world correspondences. The latter explicitly models the scene and camera uncertainty components to plan the right path for accurate camera pose estimation. We validate our algorithm on the challenging localization scenarios from both synthetic and scanned real-world indoor scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms both the state-of-the-art Markov Localization based approach and other compared approaches on the fine-scale camera pose accuracy. Code and data are released at https://github.com/qhFang/AccurateACL.

preprint2021arXiv

Combined Trojan Y Chromosome Strategy and Sterile Insect Technique to Eliminate Mosquitoes: Modelling and Analysis

Sterile insect technique has been successfully applied in the control of agricultural pests, however, it has a limited ability to control mosquitoes. A promising alternative approach is Trojan Y Chromosome strategy, which works by manipulating the sex ratio of a population through the introduction of feminized Y Y supermales that guarantee male offspring. A combined Trojan Y chromosome strategy and sterile insect technique (TYC-SIT) strategy is modeled with ordinary differential equations that allow the kinetics of the female population decline of mosquitoes to be evaluated under identical modeling conditions. The dynamical analysis leads to results on both local and global stabilities of this combined model. Optimal control analysis is also implemented to investigate the optimal mechanisms for extinction of mosquitoes. In particular, the numerical results affirm that the combined TYC-SIT enables near elimination of mosquitoes. The conclusion has great significance for pest controls.

preprint2021arXiv

Field-effect at electrical contacts to two-dimensional materials

The inferior electrical contact to two-dimensional (2D) materials is a critical challenge for their application in post-silicon very large-scale integrated circuits. Electrical contacts were generally related to their resistive effect, quantified as contact resistance. With a systematic investigation, this work demonstrates a capacitive metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) field-effect at the electrical contacts to 2D materials: the field-effect depletes or accumulates charge carriers, redistributes the voltage potential, and give rise to abnormal current saturation and nonlinearity. On the one hand, the current saturation hinders the devices' driving ability, which can be eliminated with carefully engineered contact configurations. On the other hand, by introducing the nonlinearity to monolithic analog artificial neural network circuits, the circuits' perception ability can be significantly enhanced, as evidenced using a COVID-19 critical illness prediction model. This work provides a comprehension of the field-effect at the electrical contacts to 2D materials, which is fundamental to the design, simulation, and fabrication of electronics based on 2D material.

preprint2021arXiv

Radiation-tolerant high-entropy alloys via interstitial-solute-induced chemical heterogeneities

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) composed of multiple principal elements have been shown to offer improved radiation resistance over their elemental or dilute-solution counterparts. Using NiCoFeCrMn HEA as a model, here we introduce carbon and nitrogen interstitial alloying elements to impart chemical heterogeneities in the form of the local chemical order (LCO) and associated compositional variations. Density functional theory simulations predict chemical short-range order (CSRO) (nearest neighbors and the next couple of atomic shells) surrounding C and N, due to the chemical affinity of C with (Co, Fe) and N with (Cr, Mn). Atomic-resolution chemical mapping of the elemental distribution confirms marked compositional variations well beyond statistical fluctuations. Ni+ irradiation experiments at elevated temperatures demonstrate a remarkable reduction in void swelling by at least one order of magnitude compared to the base HEA without C and N alloying. The underlying mechanism is that the interstitial-solute-induced chemical heterogeneities roughen the lattice as well as the energy landscape, impeding the movements of, and constraining the path lanes for, the normally fast-moving self-interstitials and their clusters. The irradiation-produced interstitials and vacancies therefore recombine more readily, delaying void formation. Our findings thus open a promising avenue towards highly radiation-tolerant alloys.

preprint2020arXiv

Analysis of Indexing Structures for Immutable Data

In emerging applications such as blockchains and collaborative data analytics, there are strong demands for data immutability, multi-version accesses, and tamper-evident controls. This leads to three new index structures for immutable data, namely Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), Merkle Bucket Tree (MBT), and Pattern-Oriented-Split Tree (POS-Tree). Although these structures have been adopted in real applications, there is no systematic evaluation of their pros and cons in the literature. This makes it difficult for practitioners to choose the right index structure for their applications, as there is only a limited understanding of the characteristics of each index. To alleviate the above deficiency, we present a comprehensive analysis of the existing index structures for immutable data, evaluating both their asymptotic and empirical performance. Specifically, we show that MPT, MBT, and POS-Tree are all instances of a recently proposed framework, dubbed \my{Structurally Invariant and Reusable Indexes (SIRI)}. We propose to evaluate the SIRI instances based on five essential metrics: their efficiency for four index operations (i.e., lookup, update, comparison, and merge), as well as their \my{deduplication ratios} (i.e., the size of the index with deduplication over the size without deduplication). We establish the worst-case guarantees of each index in terms of these five metrics, and we experimentally evaluate all indexes in a large variety of settings. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we conclude that POS-Tree is a favorable choice for indexing immutable data.

preprint2020arXiv

ForkBase: Immutable, Tamper-evident Storage Substrate for Branchable Applications

Data collaboration activities typically require systematic or protocol-based coordination to be scalable. Git, an effective enabler for collaborative coding, has been attested for its success in countless projects around the world. Hence, applying the Git philosophy to general data collaboration beyond coding is motivating. We call it Git for data. However, the original Git design handles data at the file granule, which is considered too coarse-grained for many database applications. We argue that Git for data should be co-designed with database systems. To this end, we developed ForkBase to make Git for data practical. ForkBase is a distributed, immutable storage system designed for data version management and data collaborative operation. In this demonstration, we show how ForkBase can greatly facilitate collaborative data management and how its novel data deduplication technique can improve storage efficiency for archiving massive data versions.

preprint2020arXiv

Label-Driven Reconstruction for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation enables to alleviate the need for pixel-wise annotation in the semantic segmentation. One of the most common strategies is to translate images from the source domain to the target domain and then align their marginal distributions in the feature space using adversarial learning. However, source-to-target translation enlarges the bias in translated images and introduces extra computations, owing to the dominant data size of the source domain. Furthermore, consistency of the joint distribution in source and target domains cannot be guaranteed through global feature alignment. Here, we present an innovative framework, designed to mitigate the image translation bias and align cross-domain features with the same category. This is achieved by 1) performing the target-to-source translation and 2) reconstructing both source and target images from their predicted labels. Extensive experiments on adapting from synthetic to real urban scene understanding demonstrate that our framework competes favorably against existing state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

mr2NST: Multi-Resolution and Multi-Reference Neural Style Transfer for Mammography

Computer-aided diagnosis with deep learning techniques has been shown to be helpful for the diagnosis of the mammography in many clinical studies. However, the image styles of different vendors are very distinctive, and there may exist domain gap among different vendors that could potentially compromise the universal applicability of one deep learning model. In this study, we explicitly address style variety issue with the proposed multi-resolution and multi-reference neural style transfer (mr2NST) network. The mr2NST can normalize the styles from different vendors to the same style baseline with very high resolution. We illustrate that the image quality of the transferred images is comparable to the quality of original images of the target domain (vendor) in terms of NIMA scores. Meanwhile, the mr2NST results are also shown to be helpful for the lesion detection in mammograms.

preprint2020arXiv

Peer Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing with Worst-Case Response Time Guarantees

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a new paradigm that provides cloud computing services at the edge of networks. To achieve better performance with limited computing resources, peer offloading between cooperative edge servers (e.g. MEC- enabled base stations) has been proposed as an effective technique to handle bursty and spatially imbalanced arrival of computation tasks. While various performance metrics of peer offloading policies have been considered in the literatures, the worst-case response time, a common Quality of Service(QoS) requirement in real-time applications, yet receives much less attention. To fill the gap, we formulate the peer offloading problem based on a stochastic arrival model and propose two online algorithms for cases with and without prior knowledge of task arrival rate. Our goal is to maximize the utility function of time-average throughput under constraints of energy consumption and worst-case response time. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results show that our algorithms are able to produce close to optimal performance.

preprint2020arXiv

PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing using Nonlocal Neural Networks with Adaptive Sampling

Raw point clouds data inevitably contains outliers or noise through acquisition from 3D sensors or reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end network for robust point clouds processing, named PointASNL, which can deal with point clouds with noise effectively. The key component in our approach is the adaptive sampling (AS) module. It first re-weights the neighbors around the initial sampled points from farthest point sampling (FPS), and then adaptively adjusts the sampled points beyond the entire point cloud. Our AS module can not only benefit the feature learning of point clouds, but also ease the biased effect of outliers. To further capture the neighbor and long-range dependencies of the sampled point, we proposed a local-nonlocal (L-NL) module inspired by the nonlocal operation. Such L-NL module enables the learning process insensitive to noise. Extensive experiments verify the robustness and superiority of our approach in point clouds processing tasks regardless of synthesis data, indoor data, and outdoor data with or without noise. Specifically, PointASNL achieves state-of-the-art robust performance for classification and segmentation tasks on all datasets, and significantly outperforms previous methods on real-world outdoor SemanticKITTI dataset with considerate noise. Our code is released through https://github.com/yanx27/PointASNL.

preprint2020arXiv

Re-balancing Variational Autoencoder Loss for Molecule Sequence Generation

Molecule generation is to design new molecules with specific chemical properties and further to optimize the desired chemical properties. Following previous work, we encode molecules into continuous vectors in the latent space and then decode the vectors into molecules under the variational autoencoder (VAE) framework. We investigate the posterior collapse problem of current RNN-based VAEs for molecule sequence generation. For the first time, we find that underestimated reconstruction loss leads to posterior collapse, and provide both theoretical and experimental evidence. We propose an effective and efficient solution to fix the problem and avoid posterior collapse. Without bells and whistles, our method achieves SOTA reconstruction accuracy and competitive validity on the ZINC 250K dataset. When generating 10,000 unique valid SMILES from random prior sampling, it costs JT-VAE1450s while our method only needs 9s. Our implementation is at https://github.com/chaoyan1037/Re-balanced-VAE.

preprint2020arXiv

Task-agnostic Temporally Consistent Facial Video Editing

Recent research has witnessed the advances in facial image editing tasks. For video editing, however, previous methods either simply apply transformations frame by frame or utilize multiple frames in a concatenated or iterative fashion, which leads to noticeable visual flickers. In addition, these methods are confined to dealing with one specific task at a time without any extensibility. In this paper, we propose a task-agnostic temporally consistent facial video editing framework. Based on a 3D reconstruction model, our framework is designed to handle several editing tasks in a more unified and disentangled manner. The core design includes a dynamic training sample selection mechanism and a novel 3D temporal loss constraint that fully exploits both image and video datasets and enforces temporal consistency. Compared with the state-of-the-art facial image editing methods, our framework generates video portraits that are more photo-realistic and temporally smooth.

preprint2020arXiv

Theoretical Analysis of Double Differential Cross Section of Proton, Deuteron and Triton for $p+^7$Li Reaction at 14 MeV

Based on the statistical theory of light nucleus reactions (STLN), the description of the complicated emission processes of proton and light composite charged particles are further improved through considering the effects of Coulomb barriers both in incident and different outgoing reaction channels. And the analysis of the reaction channels including the sequential and simultaneous emission processes for $p + ^7$Li reaction is performed in detail. So the partial spectra of all of outgoing particles are also obtained for different reaction processes. The calculated double differential cross sections of total outgoing proton, deuteron and triton at $E_p = 14$ MeV agree well with the available experimental data for different outgoing angles. The ENDF-6 formatted data, which includes all of the reaction cross sections, elastic angular distributions, double differential cross sections of nucleon and light composite charged particles for $p + ^7$Li reaction, are also obtained by PUNF code.