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Published work

37 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

DepthPilot: From Controllability to Interpretability in Colonoscopy Video Generation

Controllable medical video generation has achieved remarkable progress, but it still lacks interpretability, which requires the alignment of generated contents with physical priors and faithful clinical manifestations. To push the boundaries from mere controllability to interpretability, we propose DepthPilot, the first interpretable framework for colonoscopy video generation. This work takes a step toward trustworthy generation through two synergistic paradigms. To achieve explicit geometric grounding, DepthPilot devises a prior distribution alignment strategy, injecting depth constraints into the diffusion backbone via parameter-efficient fine-tuning to ensure anatomical fidelity. To enhance intrinsic nonlinear modeling under these geometric constraints, DepthPilot employs an adaptive spline denoising module, replacing fixed linear weights with learnable spline functions to capture complex spatio-temporal dynamics. Extensive evaluations across three public datasets and in-house clinical data confirm DepthPilot's robust ability to produce physically consistent videos. It achieves FID scores below 15 across all benchmarks and ranks first in clinician assessments, bridging the gap between "visually realistic" and "clinically interpretable". Moreover, DepthPilot-generated videos are expected to enable reliable 3D reconstruction, facilitating surgical navigation and blind region identification, and serve as a foundation toward the colorectal world model.

preprint2024arXiv

Optically Helicity-Dependent Orbital and Spin Dynamics in Two-Dimensional Ferromagnets

Disentangling orbital (OAM) and spin (SAM) angular momenta in the ultrafast spin dynamics of two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnets on subfemtoseconds is a challenge in the field of ultrafast magnetism. Herein, we employed non-collinear spin version of real-time time-dependent density functional theory to investigate the orbital and spin dynamics of 2D ferromagnets Fe3GeTe2 (FGT) induced by circularly polarized light. Our results show the demagnetization of Fe sublattice in FGT is accompanied by helicity-dependent precession of OAM and SAM excited by circularly polarized lasers. We further identify that precession of OAM and SAM in FGT is faster than the demagnetization within a few femtoseconds. Remarkably, circularly polarized lasers can significantly induce a periodically transverse response of OAM and SAM on very ultrafast timescales of ~250 attoseconds. Our finding suggests a powerful new route for attosecond regimes of the angular momentum manipulation to coherently control helicity-dependent orbital and spin dynamics in 2D limits.

preprint2023arXiv

The state-of-the-art 3D anisotropic intracranial hemorrhage segmentation on non-contrast head CT: The INSTANCE challenge

Automatic intracranial hemorrhage segmentation in 3D non-contrast head CT (NCCT) scans is significant in clinical practice. Existing hemorrhage segmentation methods usually ignores the anisotropic nature of the NCCT, and are evaluated on different in-house datasets with distinct metrics, making it highly challenging to improve segmentation performance and perform objective comparisons among different methods. The INSTANCE 2022 was a grand challenge held in conjunction with the 2022 International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI). It is intended to resolve the above-mentioned problems and promote the development of both intracranial hemorrhage segmentation and anisotropic data processing. The INSTANCE released a training set of 100 cases with ground-truth and a validation set with 30 cases without ground-truth labels that were available to the participants. A held-out testing set with 70 cases is utilized for the final evaluation and ranking. The methods from different participants are ranked based on four metrics, including Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff Distance (HD), Relative Volume Difference (RVD) and Normalized Surface Dice (NSD). A total of 13 teams submitted distinct solutions to resolve the challenges, making several baseline models, pre-processing strategies and anisotropic data processing techniques available to future researchers. The winner method achieved an average DSC of 0.6925, demonstrating a significant growth over our proposed baseline method. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed INSTANCE challenge releases the first intracranial hemorrhage segmentation benchmark, and is also the first challenge that intended to resolve the anisotropic problem in 3D medical image segmentation, which provides new alternatives in these research fields.

preprint2022arXiv

A note on the Lie complexity and beyond

In a recent paper, Jason P. Bell and Jeffrey Shallit introduced the notion of {\em Lie complexity} and proved that the Lie complexity function of an automatic sequence is automatic. In this note, we give more facts concerning Lie complexity and define the extended Lie complexity and the prefix Lie complexity. Further, we prove that some proprieties of Lie complexity also hold for the extended Lie complexity. Particularly, we prove that the extended Lie complexity function and the first-order difference sequence of the prefix Lie complexity function of an automatic sequence are both automatic.

preprint2022arXiv

A note on the maximum number of $k$-powers in a finite word

A \emph{power} is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer; the power is also called a {\em $k$-power} and $k$ is its {\em exponent}. We prove that for any $k \ge 2$, the maximum number of different non-empty $k$-power factors in a word of length $n$ is between $\frac{n}{k-1}-Θ(\sqrt{n})$ and $\frac{n-1}{k-1}$. We also show that the maximum number of different non-empty power factors of exponent at least 2 in a length-$n$ word is at most $n-1$. Both upper bounds generalize the recent upper bound of $n-1$ on the maximum number of different square factors in a length-$n$ word by Brlek and Li (2022).

preprint2022arXiv

An upper bound of the number of distinct powers in binary words

A power is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer and a square is a word of the form $uu$. Fraenkel and Simpson conjectured in 1998 that the number of distinct squares in a word is bounded by the length of the word. This conjecture was proven recently by Brlek and Li. Besides, there exists a stronger upper bound for binary words conjectured by Jonoska, Manea and Seki stating that for a word of length $n$ over the alphabet $\left\{a, b\right\}$, if we let $k$ be the least of the number of a's and the number of b's and $k \geq 2$, then the number of distinct squares is upper bounded by $\frac{2k-1}{2k+2}n$. In this article, we prove this conjecture by giving a stronger statement on the number of distinct powers in a binary word.

preprint2022arXiv

Extreme Continuous Treatment Effects: Measures, Estimation and Inference

This paper concerns estimation and inference for treatment effects in deep tails of the counterfactual distribution of unobservable potential outcomes corresponding to a continuously valued treatment. We consider two measures for the deep tail characteristics: the extreme quantile function and the tail mean function defined as the conditional mean beyond a quantile level. Then we define the extreme quantile treatment effect (EQTE) and the extreme average treatment effect (EATE), which can be identified through the commonly adopted unconfoundedness condition and estimated with the aid of extreme value theory. Our limiting theory is for the EQTE and EATE processes indexed by a set of quantile levels and hence facilitates uniform inference. Simulations suggest that our method works well in finite samples and an empirical application illustrates its practical merit.

preprint2022arXiv

FFCNet: Fourier Transform-Based Frequency Learning and Complex Convolutional Network for Colon Disease Classification

Reliable automatic classification of colonoscopy images is of great significance in assessing the stage of colonic lesions and formulating appropriate treatment plans. However, it is challenging due to uneven brightness, location variability, inter-class similarity, and intra-class dissimilarity, affecting the classification accuracy. To address the above issues, we propose a Fourier-based Frequency Complex Network (FFCNet) for colon disease classification in this study. Specifically, FFCNet is a novel complex network that enables the combination of complex convolutional networks with frequency learning to overcome the loss of phase information caused by real convolution operations. Also, our Fourier transform transfers the average brightness of an image to a point in the spectrum (the DC component), alleviating the effects of uneven brightness by decoupling image content and brightness. Moreover, the image patch scrambling module in FFCNet generates random local spectral blocks, empowering the network to learn long-range and local diseasespecific features and improving the discriminative ability of hard samples. We evaluated the proposed FFCNet on an in-house dataset with 2568 colonoscopy images, showing our method achieves high performance outperforming previous state-of-the art methods with an accuracy of 86:35% and an accuracy of 4.46% higher than the backbone. The project page with code is available at https://github.com/soleilssss/FFCNet.

preprint2022arXiv

MNet: Rethinking 2D/3D Networks for Anisotropic Medical Image Segmentation

The nature of thick-slice scanning causes severe inter-slice discontinuities of 3D medical images, and the vanilla 2D/3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) fail to represent sparse inter-slice information and dense intra-slice information in a balanced way, leading to severe underfitting to inter-slice features (for vanilla 2D CNNs) and overfitting to noise from long-range slices (for vanilla 3D CNNs). In this work, a novel mesh network (MNet) is proposed to balance the spatial representation inter axes via learning. 1) Our MNet latently fuses plenty of representation processes by embedding multi-dimensional convolutions deeply into basic modules, making the selections of representation processes flexible, thus balancing representation for sparse inter-slice information and dense intra-slice information adaptively. 2) Our MNet latently fuses multi-dimensional features inside each basic module, simultaneously taking the advantages of 2D (high segmentation accuracy of the easily recognized regions in 2D view) and 3D (high smoothness of 3D organ contour) representations, thus obtaining more accurate modeling for target regions. Comprehensive experiments are performed on four public datasets (CT\&MR), the results consistently demonstrate the proposed MNet outperforms the other methods. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/zfdong-code/MNet

preprint2022arXiv

Nanodiamond grain boundaries and lattice expansion drive Silicon vacancy emission heterogeneity

Silicon-vacancy (SiV$^-$) centers in diamond are promising candidates as sources of single-photons in quantum networks due to their minimal phonon coupling and narrow optical linewidths. Correlating SiV$^-$ emission with the defect's atomic-scale structure is important for controlling and optimizing quantum emission, but remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we use cathodoluminescence imaging in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) to elucidate the structural sources of non-ideality in the SiV$^-$ emission from nanodiamonds with sub-nanometer-scale resolution. We show that different crystalline domains of a nanodiamond exhibit distinct zero-phonon line (ZPL) energies and differences in brightness, while near-surface SiV$^-$ emitters remain bright. We correlate these changes with local lattice expansion using 4D STEM and diffraction, and show that associated blue shifts from the ZPL are due to defect density heterogeneity, while red shifts are due to lattice distortions.

preprint2022arXiv

PAC-Wrap: Semi-Supervised PAC Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is essential for preventing hazardous outcomes for safety-critical applications like autonomous driving. Given their safety-criticality, these applications benefit from provable bounds on various errors in anomaly detection. To achieve this goal in the semi-supervised setting, we propose to provide Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) guarantees on the false negative and false positive detection rates for anomaly detection algorithms. Our method (PAC-Wrap) can wrap around virtually any existing semi-supervised and unsupervised anomaly detection method, endowing it with rigorous guarantees. Our experiments with various anomaly detectors and datasets indicate that PAC-Wrap is broadly effective.

preprint2022arXiv

Position-prior Clustering-based Self-attention Module for Knee Cartilage Segmentation

The morphological changes in knee cartilage (especially femoral and tibial cartilages) are closely related to the progression of knee osteoarthritis, which is expressed by magnetic resonance (MR) images and assessed on the cartilage segmentation results. Thus, it is necessary to propose an effective automatic cartilage segmentation model for longitudinal research on osteoarthritis. In this research, to relieve the problem of inaccurate discontinuous segmentation caused by the limited receptive field in convolutional neural networks, we proposed a novel position-prior clustering-based self-attention module (PCAM). In PCAM, long-range dependency between each class center and feature point is captured by self-attention allowing contextual information re-allocated to strengthen the relative features and ensure the continuity of segmentation result. The clutsering-based method is used to estimate class centers, which fosters intra-class consistency and further improves the accuracy of segmentation results. The position-prior excludes the false positives from side-output and makes center estimation more precise. Sufficient experiments are conducted on OAI-ZIB dataset. The experimental results show that the segmentation performance of combination of segmentation network and PCAM obtains an evident improvement compared to original model, which proves the potential application of PCAM in medical segmentation tasks. The source code is publicly available from link: https://github.com/LeongDong/PCAMNet

preprint2022arXiv

Pressure-induced superconductivity in flat-band Kagome compounds Pd$_3$P$_2$(S$_{1-x}$Se$_x$)$_8$

We performed high-pressure transport studies on the flat-band Kagome compounds, Pd$_3$P$_2$(S$_{1-x}$Se$_x$)$_8$ ($x$ = 0, 0.25), with a diamond anvil cell. For both compounds, the resistivity exhibits an insulating behavior with pressure up to 17 GPa. With pressure above 20 GPa, a metallic behavior is observed at high temperatures in Pd$_3$P$_2$S$_8$, and superconductivity emerges at low temperatures. The onset temperature of superconducting transition $T_{\rm C}$ rises monotonically from 2 K to 4.8 K and does not saturate with pressure up to 43 GPa. For the Se-doped compound Pd$_3$P$_2$(S$_{0.75}$Se$_{0.25}$)$_8$, the $T_{\rm C}$ is about 1.5 K higher than that of the undoped one over the whole pressure range, and reaches 6.4 K at 43 GPa. The upper critical field with field applied along the $c$ axis at typical pressures is about 50$\%$ of the Pauli limit, suggesting a 3D superconductivity. The Hall coefficient in the metallic phase is low and exhibits a peaked behavior at about 30 K, which suggests either a multi-band electronic structure or an electron correlation effect in the system.

preprint2022arXiv

Revisit the rate of tidal disruption events: the role of the partial tidal disruption event

Tidal disruption of stars in dense nuclear star clusters containing supermassive central black holes (SMBH) is modeled by high-accuracy direct N-body simulation. Stars getting too close to the SMBH are tidally disrupted and a tidal disruption event (TDE) happens. TDEs probe properties of SMBH, their accretion disks, and the surrounding nuclear stellar cluster. In this paper we compare rates of full tidal disruption events (FTDE) with partial tidal disruption events (PTDE). Since a PTDE does not destroy the star, a leftover object emerges; we use the term 'leftover star' for it; two novel effects occur in the simulation: (1) variation of the leftover star's mass and radius, (2) variation of the leftover star's orbital energy. After switching on these two effects in our simulation, the number of FTDEs is reduced by roughly 28%, and the reduction is mostly due to the ejection of the leftover stars from PTDEs coming originally from relatively large distance. The number of PTDEs is about 75% higher than the simple estimation given by Stone et al. (2020), and the enhancement is mainly due to the multiple PTDEs produced by the leftover stars residing in the diffusive regime. We compute the peak mass fallback rate for the PTDEs and FTDEs recorded in the simulation, and find 58% of the PTDEs have peak mass fallback rate exceeding the Eddington limit, and the number of super-Eddington PTDEs is 2.3 times the number of super-Eddington FTDEs.

preprint2022arXiv

S-type stars discovered in Medium-Resolution Spectra of LAMOST DR9

In this paper, we report on 606 S-type stars identified from Data Release 9 of the LAMOST medium-resolution spectroscopic (MRS) survey, and 539 of them are reported for the first time. The discovery of these stars is a three-step process, i.e., selecting with the ZrO band indices greater than 0.25, excluding non-S-type stars with the iterative Support Vector Machine method, and finally retaining stars with absolute bolometric magnitude larger than -7.1. The 606 stars are consistent with the distribution of known S-type stars in the color-magnitude diagram. We estimated the C/Os using the [C/Fe] and [O/Fe] provided by APOGEE and the MARCS model for S-type stars, respectively, and the results of the two methods show that C/Os of all stars are larger than 0.5. Both the locations on the color-magnitude diagram and C/Os further verify the nature of our S-type sample. Investigating the effect of TiO and atmospheric parameters on ZrO with the sample, we found that log g has a more significant impact on ZrO than Teff and [Fe/H], and both TiO and log g may negatively correlate with ZrO. According to the criterion of Tian et al. (2020), a total of 238 binary candidates were found by the zero-point-calibrated radial velocities from the officially released catalog of LAMOST MRS and the catalog of Zhang et al. (2021). A catalog of these 606 S-type stars is available from the following link https://doi.org/10.12149/101097.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards PAC Multi-Object Detection and Tracking

Accurately detecting and tracking multi-objects is important for safety-critical applications such as autonomous navigation. However, it remains challenging to provide guarantees on the performance of state-of-the-art techniques based on deep learning. We consider a strategy known as conformal prediction, which predicts sets of labels instead of a single label; in the classification and regression settings, these algorithms can guarantee that the true label lies within the prediction set with high probability. Building on these ideas, we propose multi-object detection and tracking algorithms that come with probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantees. They do so by constructing both a prediction set around each object detection as well as around the set of edge transitions; given an object, the detection prediction set contains its true bounding box with high probability, and the edge prediction set contains its true transition across frames with high probability. We empirically demonstrate that our method can detect and track objects with PAC guarantees on the COCO and MOT-17 datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Ultrafast optically induced magnetic state transition in 2D antiferromagnets

Manipulating spin in antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials has great potential in AFM opto-spintronics. Laser pulses can induce a transient ferromagnetic (FM) state in AFM metallic systems, but have never been proven in two-dimensional (2D) AFM semiconductors and related van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures. Here, using 2D vdW heterostructures of FM MnS2 and AFM MXenes as prototypes, we investigated optically induced interlayer spin transfer dynamics based on the real-time time-dependent density functional theory (rt-TDDFT). We observed that laser pulses induce significant spin injection and the interfacial atom-mediated spin transfer from MnS2 to Cr2CCl2. In particular, we first demonstrated the transient FM state in semiconducting AFM/FM heterostructures during photoexcited processes. Because the proximity magnetism breaks the magnetic symmetry of Cr2CCl2 in heterostructures. Our results provide the microscopic understanding for optically controlled interlayer spin dynamics in 2D magnetic heterostructures and open a new way to manipulate magnetic orders in ultrafast opto-spintronics.

preprint2022arXiv

United adversarial learning for liver tumor segmentation and detection of multi-modality non-contrast MRI

Simultaneous segmentation and detection of liver tumors (hemangioma and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)) by using multi-modality non-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (NCMRI) are crucial for the clinical diagnosis. However, it is still a challenging task due to: (1) the HCC information on NCMRI is invisible or insufficient makes extraction of liver tumors feature difficult; (2) diverse imaging characteristics in multi-modality NCMRI causes feature fusion and selection difficult; (3) no specific information between hemangioma and HCC on NCMRI cause liver tumors detection difficult. In this study, we propose a united adversarial learning framework (UAL) for simultaneous liver tumors segmentation and detection using multi-modality NCMRI. The UAL first utilizes a multi-view aware encoder to extract multi-modality NCMRI information for liver tumor segmentation and detection. In this encoder, a novel edge dissimilarity feature pyramid module is designed to facilitate the complementary multi-modality feature extraction. Second, the newly designed fusion and selection channel is used to fuse the multi-modality feature and make the decision of the feature selection. Then, the proposed mechanism of coordinate sharing with padding integrates the multi-task of segmentation and detection so that it enables multi-task to perform united adversarial learning in one discriminator. Lastly, an innovative multi-phase radiomics guided discriminator exploits the clear and specific tumor information to improve the multi-task performance via the adversarial learning strategy. The UAL is validated in corresponding multi-modality NCMRI (i.e. T1FS pre-contrast MRI, T2FS MRI, and DWI) and three phases contrast-enhanced MRI of 255 clinical subjects. The experiments show that UAL has great potential in the clinical diagnosis of liver tumors.

preprint2022arXiv

XMorpher: Full Transformer for Deformable Medical Image Registration via Cross Attention

An effective backbone network is important to deep learning-based Deformable Medical Image Registration (DMIR), because it extracts and matches the features between two images to discover the mutual correspondence for fine registration. However, the existing deep networks focus on single image situation and are limited in registration task which is performed on paired images. Therefore, we advance a novel backbone network, XMorpher, for the effective corresponding feature representation in DMIR. 1) It proposes a novel full transformer architecture including dual parallel feature extraction networks which exchange information through cross attention, thus discovering multi-level semantic correspondence while extracting respective features gradually for final effective registration. 2) It advances the Cross Attention Transformer (CAT) blocks to establish the attention mechanism between images which is able to find the correspondence automatically and prompts the features to fuse efficiently in the network. 3) It constrains the attention computation between base windows and searching windows with different sizes, and thus focuses on the local transformation of deformable registration and enhances the computing efficiency at the same time. Without any bells and whistles, our XMorpher gives Voxelmorph 2.8% improvement on DSC , demonstrating its effective representation of the features from the paired images in DMIR. We believe that our XMorpher has great application potential in more paired medical images. Our XMorpher is open on https://github.com/Solemoon/XMorpher

preprint2021arXiv

A catalog of early-type Hα emission line stars and 58 newly confirmed Herbig Ae/Bes from LAMOST DR7

We derive a catalog of early-type emission-line stars including 30,048 spectra of 25,886 stars from LAMOST DR7, in which 3,922 have Simbad records. The sample is obtained using K-Nearest Neighbor and Random Forest methods and visually inspected. The spectra are classified into 3 morphological types (10 subtypes) based on H$α$ emission line profiles. Some spectra contaminated by nebula emission lines such as from HII regions are flagged in the catalog. We also provide a specific sub-catalog of 101 stars with the stellar wind by calculating stellar wind or accretion flow velocities based on P Cygni or inverse P Cygni profiles, in which 74\% of them having velocities below 400km/s. More important, with two color-color diagrams (H-K, K- W1) and (H-K, J-H) of a collection of known Herbig Ae/Be stars (HAeBes) and classical Ae/Be stars (CAeBes), we propose an updated criterion to separate HAeBes from CAeBes. By the criterion, we select 201 HAeBes candidates and 5,547 CAeBes candidates from the sample. We confirmed 66 of the 201 HAeBes by using both WISE images and LAMOST spectra and present a specific HAeBe sub-catalog, in which 58 are newly identified. In addition, the WISE colors (W1-W2, W1- W3, and W1-W4) show the distribution consistency between our confirmed HAeBes and that of the known HAeBes. Most of the 66 confirmed HAeBes locate in the lower edge of the main sequence of hot end in the HR diagram, while the distances of about 77\% exceed 1Kpc, which enlarges the number of far distant known HAeBes.

preprint2021arXiv

Doping isolated one-dimensional antiferro-magnetic semiconductor Vanadium tetrasulfide ($VS_4$) nanowires with carriers induces half-metallicity

Quasi one-dimensional (1D) vanadium tetrasulfide ($VS_4$) nanowires (NWs) are synthetic semiconductors which combine with each other through Van der Waals interactions to form bulk phases. However, the properties of these individual nanowires remain unknown. Nevertheless, our calculations of their stability indicate that $VS_4$) NWs can be separated from their bulk structures. Accordingly, we theoretically investigated the geometrical, electronic, and magnetic properties of bulk phase and isolated $VS_4$ NWs. Our results indicate that both bulk phase and isolated $VS_4$ NWs are semiconductors with band gaps of 2.24 and 2.64 eV, respectively, and that they prefer the antiferromagnetic (AFM) ground state based on DFT calculations. These calculations also suggested that isolated $VS_4$ NWs show half-metallic antiferromagnetism upon electron and hole doping because carrier doping splits the spin degeneracy to induce local spin polarisation. As a result, spin polarisation currents in isolated $VS_4$ NWs can be manipulated with locally applied gate voltage. Therefore, these 1D AFM materials have a high potential for advancing both fundamental research and spintronic applications because they are more resistant to magnetic perturbation than their 1D ferromagnetic counterparts.

preprint2021arXiv

En route to nanoscopic quantum optical imaging: counting emitters with photon-number-resolving detectors

Fundamental understanding of biological pathways requires minimally invasive nanoscopic optical resolution imaging. Many approaches to high-resolution imaging rely on localization of single emitters, such as fluorescent molecule or quantum dot. Exact determination of the number of such emitters in an imaging volume is essential for a number of applications; however, in a commonly employed intensity-based microscopy it is not possible to distinguish individual emitters without initial knowledge of system parameters. Here we explore how quantum measurements of the emitted photons using photon number resolving detectors can be used to address this challenging task. In the proposed new approach, the problem of counting emitters reduces to the task of determining differences between the emitted photons and the Poisson limit. We show that quantum measurements of the number of photons emitted from an ensemble of emitters enable the determination of both the number of emitters and the probability of emission. This method can be applied for any type of emitters, including Raman and infrared emitters, which makes it a truly universal way to achieve super-resolution optical imaging. The scaling laws of this new approach are presented by the Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds and define the extent this technique can be used for quantum optical imaging with nanoscopic resolution.

preprint2021arXiv

Milli-Hertz Gravitational Wave Background Produced by Quasi-Periodic Eruptions

Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are important targets for future space-borne gravitational-wave (GW) detectors, such as the Laser Interferometer Sapce Antenna (LISA). Recent works suggest that EMRI may reside in a population of newly discovered X-ray transients called "quasi-periodic eruptions" (QPEs). Here we follow this scenario and investigate the detectability of the five recently discovered QPEs by LISA. We consider two specific models in which the QPEs are made of either stellar-mass objects moving on circular orbits around massive black holes (MBHs) or white dwarfs (WDs) on eccentric orbits around MBHs. We find that in either case each QPE is too weak to be resolvable by LISA. However, if QPEs are made of eccentric WD-MBH binaries, they radiate GWs in a wide range of frequencies. The broad spectra overlap to form a background which, between $0.003-0.02$ Hz, exceeds the background known to exist due to other types of sources. Presence of this GW background in the LISA band could impact the future search for the seed black holes at high redshift as well as the stellar-mass binary black holes in the local universe.

preprint2020arXiv

$ϕ$-Thue-Morse sequences and infinite products

In this article we introduce a new approach to compute infinite products defined by automatic sequences involving the Thue-Morse sequence. As examples, for any positive integers $q$ and $r$ such that $0 \leq r \leq q-1$, we find infinitely many couples of rational functions $R(x)$ and $S(n)$ such that $$\prod_{n=0}^{\infty}R(n)^{\frac{1+a_n}{2}}S(n)^{\frac{1-a_n}{2}}=2cos(\frac{2r+1}{2q}π),$$ where $(a_n)_{n \in \mathbf{N}}$ is the Thue-Morse sequence beginning with $a_0=1,a_1= -1$.

preprint2020arXiv

Coupling loss at the end connections of REBCO stacks: 2D modelling and measurement

In high power density superconducting motors, superconducting tapes are usually stacked and connected together at terminals to improve the current capacity. When a parallel sinusoidal magnetic field is applied on this partially coupled stack, the coupling current is induced and causes additional coupling loss. Usually 3D modeling is needed to calculate the coupling loss but it takes too much computing resource and time. In this paper, a numerical 2D modeling by minimum electromagnetic entropy production (MEMEP) method is developed to speed up the calculation. The presented MEMEP model shows good accuracy and the capability to take the realistic resistance between tapes into account for coupling loss calculation with a high number of mesh element, which agrees to measurements.Thanks to the model, a systemic study of coupling loss on amplitude-dependence, frequency-dependence, resistance-dependence, and length-dependence, is presented and discussed. The results reveal the features of coupling loss which is very helpful devices with multi-tape conductors, such as the stator or rotor windings of motors.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Complementary Joint Model for Complex Scene Registration and Few-shot Segmentation on Medical Images

Deep learning-based medical image registration and segmentation joint models utilize the complementarity (augmentation data or weakly supervised data from registration, region constraints from segmentation) to bring mutual improvement in complex scene and few-shot situation. However, further adoption of the joint models are hindered: 1) the diversity of augmentation data is reduced limiting the further enhancement of segmentation, 2) misaligned regions in weakly supervised data disturb the training process, 3) lack of label-based region constraints in few-shot situation limits the registration performance. We propose a novel Deep Complementary Joint Model (DeepRS) for complex scene registration and few-shot segmentation. We embed a perturbation factor in the registration to increase the activity of deformation thus maintaining the augmentation data diversity. We take a pixel-wise discriminator to extract alignment confidence maps which highlight aligned regions in weakly supervised data so the misaligned regions' disturbance will be suppressed via weighting. The outputs from segmentation model are utilized to implement deep-based region constraints thus relieving the label requirements and bringing fine registration. Extensive experiments on the CT dataset of MM-WHS 2017 Challenge show great advantages of our DeepRS that outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models.

preprint2020arXiv

Direct Quantification for Coronary Artery Stenosis Using Multiview Learning

The quantification of the coronary artery stenosis is of significant clinical importance in coronary artery disease diagnosis and intervention treatment. It aims to quantify the morphological indices of the coronary artery lesions such as minimum lumen diameter, reference vessel diameter, lesion length, and these indices are the reference of the interventional stent placement. In this study, we propose a direct multiview quantitative coronary angiography (DMQCA) model as an automatic clinical tool to quantify the coronary artery stenosis from X-ray coronary angiography images. The proposed DMQCA model consists of a multiview module with two attention mechanisms, a key-frame module, and a regression module, to achieve direct accurate multiple-index estimation. The multi-view module comprehensively learns the Spatio-temporal features of coronary arteries through a three-dimensional convolution. The attention mechanisms of each view focus on the subtle feature of the lesion region and capture the important context information. The key-frame module learns the subtle features of the stenosis through successive dilated residual blocks. The regression module finally generates the indices estimation from multiple features.

preprint2020arXiv

Measuring black hole masses from tidal disruption events and testing the $M_{\rm BH}-σ_*$ relation

Liu and collaborators recently proposed an elliptical accretion disk model for tidal disruption events (TDEs). They showed that the accretion disks of optical/UV TDEs are large and highly eccentric and suggested that the broad optical emission lines with complex and diverse profiles originate in the cool eccentric accretion disk of random inclination and orientation. In this paper, we calculate the radiation efficiency of the elliptical accretion disk and investigate the implications for the observations of TDEs. We compile observational data for the peak bolometric luminosity and total radiation energy after peak brightness of 18 TDE sources and compare these data to the predictions from the elliptical accretion disk model. Our results show that the observations are consistent with the theoretical predictions and that the majority of the orbital energy of the stellar debris is advected into the black hole (BH) without being converted into radiation. Furthermore, we derive the masses of the disrupted stars and the masses of the BHs of the TDEs. The BH masses obtained in this paper are also consistent with those calculated with the $M_{\rm BH} - σ_*$ relation. Our results provide an effective method for measuring the masses of BHs in large numbers of TDEs to be discovered in ongoing and next-generation sky surveys, regardless of whether the BHs are located at the centers of galactic nuclei or wander in disks and halos.

preprint2020arXiv

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning based Mobile Manipulation Control for Dynamic Object Tracking and Grasping

Agile control of mobile manipulator is challenging because of the high complexity coupled by the robotic system and the unstructured working environment. Tracking and grasping a dynamic object with a random trajectory is even harder. In this paper, a multi-task reinforcement learning-based mobile manipulation control framework is proposed to achieve general dynamic object tracking and grasping. Several basic types of dynamic trajectories are chosen as the task training set. To improve the policy generalization in practice, random noise and dynamics randomization are introduced during the training process. Extensive experiments show that our policy trained can adapt to unseen random dynamic trajectories with about 0.1m tracking error and 75\% grasping success rate of dynamic objects. The trained policy can also be successfully deployed on a real mobile manipulator.

preprint2020arXiv

Robust Model Predictive Shielding for Safe Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Dynamics

This paper proposes a framework for safe reinforcement learning that can handle stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems. We focus on the setting where the nominal dynamics are known, and are subject to additive stochastic disturbances with known distribution. Our goal is to ensure the safety of a control policy trained using reinforcement learning, e.g., in a simulated environment. We build on the idea of model predictive shielding (MPS), where a backup controller is used to override the learned policy as needed to ensure safety. The key challenge is how to compute a backup policy in the context of stochastic dynamics. We propose to use a tube-based robust NMPC controller as the backup controller. We estimate the tubes using sampled trajectories, leveraging ideas from statistical learning theory to obtain high-probability guarantees. We empirically demonstrate that our approach can ensure safety in stochastic systems, including cart-pole and a non-holonomic particle with random obstacles.

preprint2020arXiv

Simultaneous Left Atrium Anatomy and Scar Segmentations via Deep Learning in Multiview Information with Attention

Three-dimensional late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) cardiac MR (CMR) of left atrial scar in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) has recently emerged as a promising technique to stratify patients, to guide ablation therapy and to predict treatment success. This requires a segmentation of the high intensity scar tissue and also a segmentation of the left atrium (LA) anatomy, the latter usually being derived from a separate bright-blood acquisition. Performing both segmentations automatically from a single 3D LGE CMR acquisition would eliminate the need for an additional acquisition and avoid subsequent registration issues. In this paper, we propose a joint segmentation method based on multiview two-task (MVTT) recursive attention model working directly on 3D LGE CMR images to segment the LA (and proximal pulmonary veins) and to delineate the scar on the same dataset. Using our MVTT recursive attention model, both the LA anatomy and scar can be segmented accurately (mean Dice score of 93% for the LA anatomy and 87% for the scar segmentations) and efficiently (~0.27 seconds to simultaneously segment the LA anatomy and scars directly from the 3D LGE CMR dataset with 60-68 2D slices). Compared to conventional unsupervised learning and other state-of-the-art deep learning based methods, the proposed MVTT model achieved excellent results, leading to an automatic generation of a patient-specific anatomical model combined with scar segmentation for patients in AF.

preprint2020arXiv

Unifying Neural Learning and Symbolic Reasoning for Spinal Medical Report Generation

Automated medical report generation in spine radiology, i.e., given spinal medical images and directly create radiologist-level diagnosis reports to support clinical decision making, is a novel yet fundamental study in the domain of artificial intelligence in healthcare. However, it is incredibly challenging because it is an extremely complicated task that involves visual perception and high-level reasoning processes. In this paper, we propose the neural-symbolic learning (NSL) framework that performs human-like learning by unifying deep neural learning and symbolic logical reasoning for the spinal medical report generation. Generally speaking, the NSL framework firstly employs deep neural learning to imitate human visual perception for detecting abnormalities of target spinal structures. Concretely, we design an adversarial graph network that interpolates a symbolic graph reasoning module into a generative adversarial network through embedding prior domain knowledge, achieving semantic segmentation of spinal structures with high complexity and variability. NSL secondly conducts human-like symbolic logical reasoning that realizes unsupervised causal effect analysis of detected entities of abnormalities through meta-interpretive learning. NSL finally fills these discoveries of target diseases into a unified template, successfully achieving a comprehensive medical report generation. When it employed in a real-world clinical dataset, a series of empirical studies demonstrate its capacity on spinal medical report generation as well as show that our algorithm remarkably exceeds existing methods in the detection of spinal structures. These indicate its potential as a clinical tool that contributes to computer-aided diagnosis.

preprint2019arXiv

Control of spintronic and electronic properties of bimetallic and vacancy-ordered vanadium carbide MXenes via surface functionalization

MXenes are 2D transition metal carbides with high potential for overcoming limitations of conventional two-dimensional electronics. In this context, various MXenes have shown magnetic properties suitable for applications in spintronics, yet the number of MXenes reported so far is far smaller than their parental MAX phases. Therefore, we have studied the structural, electronic and magnetic properties of bimetallic and vacancy-ordered MXenes derived from a new $(V_{2/3}Zr_{1/3})_2AlC $ MAX phase to assess whether MXene exfoliation would return stable magnetic materials. In particular, we have investigated the properties of pristine and surface-functionalized $(V_{2/3}Zr_{1/3})_2CX_2$ bimetallic and $(V_{2/3} \square_{1/3})_2CX2$ vacancy-ordered MXenes with X = O, F and OH. Our density functional theory (DFT) calculations showed that modifying the MXene stoichiometry and/or MXene surface functionalization changes MXene properties. After testing all possible combinations of metallic motifs and functionalization, we identified $V_{2/3}Zr_{1/3})_2CX_2$, $(V_{2/3}\square_{1/3})_2CF_2$ and $(V_{2/3}\square_{1/3})_2C(OH)_2$ as stable structures. Among them, $(V_{2/3}Zr_{1/3})_2CO_2$ MXene is predicted to be an FM intrinsic half-semiconductor with a remarkably high Curie temperature ($T_C$)) of 270 K. The $(V_{2/3}Zr_{1/3})_2C(OH)_2$ MXene exhibits a rather low work function (WF) (1.37 eV) and is thus a promising candidate for ultra-low work function electron emitters. Conversely, the $(V_{2/3}\square_{1/3})_2CF_2$ MXene has a rather high WF and hence can be used as a hole injector for Schottky-barrier-free contact applications. Overall, our proof-of-concept study shows that theoretical predictions of MXene exfoliation and properties support further experimental research towards developing spintronics devices.

preprint2019arXiv

Visual Model-predictive Localization for Computationally Efficient Autonomous Racing of a 72-gram Drone

Drone racing is becoming a popular e-sport all over the world, and beating the best human drone race pilots has quickly become a new major challenge for artificial intelligence and robotics. In this paper, we propose a strategy for autonomous drone racing which is computationally more efficient than navigation methods like visual inertial odometry and simultaneous localization and mapping. This fast light-weight vision-based navigation algorithm estimates the position of the drone by fusing race gate detections with model dynamics predictions. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show the clear advantage compared to Kalman filtering when dealing with the relatively low frequency visual updates and occasional large outliers that occur in fast drone racing. Flight tests are performed on a tiny racing quadrotor named "Trashcan", which was equipped with a Jevois smart-camera for a total of 72g. The test track consists of 3 laps around a 4-gate racing track. The gates spaced 4 meters apart and can be displaced from their supposed position. An average speed of 2m/s is achieved while the maximum speed is 2.6m/s. To the best of our knowledge, this flying platform is the smallest autonomous racing drone in the world and is 6 times lighter than the existing lightest autonomous racing drone setup (420g), while still being one of the fastest autonomous racing drones in the world.