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Published work

222 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

AMAP Agentic Planning Technical Report

We present STAgent, an agentic large language model tailored for spatio-temporal understanding, designed to solve complex tasks such as constrained point-of-interest discovery and itinerary planning. STAgent is a specialized model capable of interacting with ten distinct tools within spatio-temporal scenarios, enabling it to explore, verify, and refine intermediate steps during complex reasoning. Notably, STAgent effectively preserves its general capabilities. We empower STAgent with these capabilities through three key contributions: (1) a stable tool environment that supports over ten domain-specific tools, enabling asynchronous rollout and training; (2) a hierarchical data curation framework that identifies high-quality data like a needle in a haystack, curating high-quality queries by retaining less than 1\% of the raw data, emphasizing both diversity and difficulty; and (3) a cascaded training recipe that starts with a seed SFT stage acting as a guardian to measure query difficulty, followed by a second SFT stage fine-tuned on queries with high certainty, and an ultimate RL stage that leverages data of low certainty. Initialized with Qwen3-30B-A3B to establish a strong SFT foundation and leverage insights into sample difficulty, STAgent yields promising performance on TravelBench while maintaining its general capabilities across a wide range of general benchmarks, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed agentic model.

preprint2026arXiv

Explainability of Complex AI Models with Correlation Impact Ratio

Complex AI systems make better predictions but often lack transparency, limiting trustworthiness, interpretability, and safe deployment. Common post hoc AI explainers, such as LIME, SHAP, HSIC, and SAGE, are model agnostic but are too restricted in one significant regard: they tend to misrank correlated features and require costly perturbations, which do not scale to high dimensional data. We introduce ExCIR (Explainability through Correlation Impact Ratio), a theoretically grounded, simple, and reliable metric for explaining the contribution of input features to model outputs, which remains stable and consistent under noise and sampling variations. We demonstrate that ExCIR captures dependencies arising from correlated features through a lightweight single pass formulation. Experimental evaluations on diverse datasets, including EEG, synthetic vehicular data, Digits, and Cats-Dogs, validate the effectiveness and stability of ExCIR across domains, achieving more interpretable feature explanations than existing methods while remaining computationally efficient. To this end, we further extend ExCIR with an information theoretic foundation that unifies the correlation ratio with Canonical Correlation Analysis under mutual information bounds, enabling multi output and class conditioned explainability at scale.

preprint2026arXiv

Learn where to Click from Yourself: On-Policy Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding maps natural language instructions to the visual coordinates of target elements and serves as a core capability for autonomous GUI agents. Recent reinforcement learning methods (e.g., GRPO) have achieved strong performance, but they rely on expensive multiple rollouts and suffer from sparse signals on hard samples. These limitations make on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), which provides dense token-level supervision from a single rollout, a promising alternative. However, its applicability to GUI grounding remains unexplored. In this paper, we present GUI-SD, the first OPSD framework tailored for GUI grounding. First, it constructs a visually enriched privileged context for the teacher using a target bounding box and a Gaussian soft mask, providing informative guidance without leaking exact coordinates. Second, it employs entropy-guided distillation, which adaptively weights tokens based on digit significance and teacher confidence, concentrating optimization on the most impactful and reliable positions. Extensive experiments on six representative GUI grounding benchmarks show that GUI-SD consistently outperforms GRPO-based methods and naive OPSD in both accuracy and training efficiency. Code and training data are available at https://zhangyan-ucas.github.io/GUI-SD/.

preprint2026arXiv

M^4olGen: Multi-Agent, Multi-Stage Molecular Generation under Precise Multi-Property Constraints

Generating molecules that satisfy precise numeric constraints over multiple physicochemical properties is critical and challenging. Although large language models (LLMs) are expressive, they struggle with precise multi-objective control and numeric reasoning without external structure and feedback. We introduce \textbf{M olGen}, a fragment-level, retrieval-augmented, two-stage framework for molecule generation under multi-property constraints. Stage I : Prototype generation: a multi-agent reasoner performs retrieval-anchored, fragment-level edits to produce a candidate near the feasible region. Stage II : RL-based fine-grained optimization: a fragment-level optimizer trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) applies one- or multi-hop refinements to explicitly minimize the property errors toward our target while regulating edit complexity and deviation from the prototype. A large, automatically curated dataset with reasoning chains of fragment edits and measured property deltas underpins both stages, enabling deterministic, reproducible supervision and controllable multi-hop reasoning. Unlike prior work, our framework better reasons about molecules by leveraging fragments and supports controllable refinement toward numeric targets. Experiments on generation under two sets of property constraints (QED, LogP, Molecular Weight and HOMO, LUMO) show consistent gains in validity and precise satisfaction of multi-property targets, outperforming strong LLMs and graph-based algorithms.

preprint2026arXiv

Memory in the Age of AI Agents

Memory has emerged, and will continue to remain, a core capability of foundation model-based agents. As research on agent memory rapidly expands and attracts unprecedented attention, the field has also become increasingly fragmented. Existing works that fall under the umbrella of agent memory often differ substantially in their motivations, implementations, and evaluation protocols, while the proliferation of loosely defined memory terminologies has further obscured conceptual clarity. Traditional taxonomies such as long/short-term memory have proven insufficient to capture the diversity of contemporary agent memory systems. This work aims to provide an up-to-date landscape of current agent memory research. We begin by clearly delineating the scope of agent memory and distinguishing it from related concepts such as LLM memory, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and context engineering. We then examine agent memory through the unified lenses of forms, functions, and dynamics. From the perspective of forms, we identify three dominant realizations of agent memory, namely token-level, parametric, and latent memory. From the perspective of functions, we propose a finer-grained taxonomy that distinguishes factual, experiential, and working memory. From the perspective of dynamics, we analyze how memory is formed, evolved, and retrieved over time. To support practical development, we compile a comprehensive summary of memory benchmarks and open-source frameworks. Beyond consolidation, we articulate a forward-looking perspective on emerging research frontiers, including memory automation, reinforcement learning integration, multimodal memory, multi-agent memory, and trustworthiness issues. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a conceptual foundation for rethinking memory as a first-class primitive in the design of future agentic intelligence.

preprint2026arXiv

Modality-Aware Identity Construction and Counterfactual Structure Learning for ID-Free Multimodal Recommendation

Multimodal recommendation has attracted extensive attention by leveraging heterogeneous modality information to alleviate data sparsity and improve recommendation accuracy. Existing methods have attempted to replace ID embeddings with multimodal features and have achieved promising preliminary results. However, these methods still exhibit the following two limitations: (1) the reconstructed ID representations remain relatively static and fail to fully exploit multimodal semantics; and (2) the graph learning process is insufficient in mining latent long-tail semantic relations and is easily affected by popularity bias. To address these issues, we propose a novel method named Modality-Aware Identity Construction and Counterfactual Structure Learning for ID-free Multimodal Recommendation (MAIL). Specifically, we design a modality-aware identity construction module that dynamically modulates positional encodings with multimodal semantics to construct content-aware ID-free identity representations. Then, we propose a counterfactual structure learning paradigm that mines low-exposure semantic neighbors via popularity penalization and alleviates popularity bias. Extensive experiments are conducted on five public Amazon datasets. Experimental results show that MAIL achieves average improvements of 7.81% in Recall@10 and 12.81% in NDCG@10 compared with the baseline models. Our code is available at https://github.com/HubuKG/MAIL.

preprint2026arXiv

Multigap nodeless superconductivity in Dirac semimetal PdTe

PdTe has recently been reported to be a type-II Dirac semimetal while a bulk nodal and surface nodeless superconductivity (SC) has been claimed to coexist. In this work, we applied point-contact spectroscopy (PCS) method to systematically study the superconducting gap in PdTe single crystals with a SC transition temperature $T_{c}=4.3$ K. The obtained differential conductance curves show a common deviation from a single-gap superconducting behavior and can be better fitted by a two-gap Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk model, suggesting the larger gap $Δ_{L}$ with $2Δ_{L}$=3.7 $k_{B}T_{c}$ and the smaller gap $Δ_S$ yielding $2Δ_{S}$=1.1-2.2 $k_{B}T_{c}$ with a weak interband scattering. The variations of conductance spectra among different contacts are proposed to be caused by the anisotropy of Fermi surface topology associated with different gaps.

preprint2026arXiv

Multiple nodal superconducting phases and order-parameter evolution in pressurized UTe$_2$

Spin-triplet superconductivity (SC) offers a unique avenue for realizing non-Abelian Majorana zero modes and thus the fault-tolerant topological quantum computation, and has attracted a broad audience for both fundamental research and potential applications. The recently discovered heavy-fermion spin-triplet superconductor candidate UTe$_2$ has sparked great interest for its ultrahigh upper critical field and reentrant SC phases in the proximity to a field-polarized magnetic state. Despite extensive studies on the phase diagrams and competing orders induced by pressure and magnetic field, limited has been known about its SC order parameters and their evolution with these control parameters, largely due to the lack of appropriate symmetry-sensitive detections. Here, we report comprehensive point-contact spectroscopy measurements of pressurized UTe$_2$ on the (0~0~1) surface. The observation of Andreev bound state strongly suggests the presence of a $p_z$ component in the SC order parameters. Quantitative analysis based on an extended Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk model unveils $B_{2u}$ or $B_{3u}$ as the most likely representation for both ambient and pressurized UTe$_2$, and remarkably, the multiple SC phases can be distinguished by a single parameter $\langle Δ_{z}\rangle/\langleΔ_{x(y)}\rangle$, the relative weight between the $p_z$-wave and $p_{x(y)}$-wave pairings. These findings not only impose stringent constraints on the superconducting order parameter in UTe$_2$, but also provide key spectroscopic evidence for the existence of multiple SC phases tuned through pressure.

preprint2026arXiv

VoxScene: Anchor-Conditioned Voxel Diffusion for Indoor Scene Arrangement

We present VoxScene, a novel anchor-conditioned voxel diffusion framework tailored for 3D scene synthesis. Current data-driven layout generation techniques typically rely on bounding proxies or implicit representations, which overlook volumetric structures. This geometric blindness inevitably leads to severe physical collisions and structural entanglement, particularly in densely populated environments. To overcome these limitations, we shift the paradigm to an explicit, object-centric voxel representation. Our pipeline sequentially synthesizes discrete volumetric occupancies conditioned on prior anchors and local context. By exploiting the mutually exclusive nature of discrete voxels, our approach eliminates spatial ambiguities and guarantees collision-free arrangements, even in highly complex environments. Furthermore, the synthesized high-fidelity voxel grids serve as discriminative geometric queries for downstream asset retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate the universality of our method, achieving state-of-the-art physical plausibility and unlocking shape diversity compared to existing layout planners.

preprint2025arXiv

Dynamic Bayesian Optimization Framework for Instruction Tuning in Partial Differential Equation Discovery

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for equation discovery, yet their outputs are highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, a phenomenon we term instruction brittleness. Static prompts cannot adapt to the evolving state of a multi-step generation process, causing models to plateau at suboptimal solutions. To address this, we propose NeuroSymBO, which reframes prompt engineering as a sequential decision problem. Our method maintains a discrete library of reasoning strategies and uses Bayesian Optimization to select the optimal instruction at each step based on numerical feedback. Experiments on PDE discovery benchmarks show that adaptive instruction selection significantly outperforms fixed prompts, achieving higher recovery rates with more parsimonious solutions.

preprint2025arXiv

Measurement of branching fractions of $Λ_{c}^{+}$ decays to $Σ^{+} η$ and $Σ^{+} η'$

By analyzing $e^+e^-$ collision data taken at center-of-mass energies $\sqrt{s}$ between 4.600 and 4.699 GeV with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $\rm 4.5~fb^{-1}$, we study the hadronic decays $Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η$ and $Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η^{\prime}$ using the single-tag method. The branching fraction ratio of $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ η$ relative to $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ π^0$ is determined to be $0.305 \pm 0.046_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.007_{\rm syst.}$, and that of $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ η'$ relative to $Λ_{c}^+ \rightarrow Σ^+ ω$ is $0.336 \pm 0.094_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.037_{\rm syst.}$. The ratio of $\frac{\mathcal{B}\left(Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η'\right)}{\mathcal{B}\left(Λ_{c}^{+} \rightarrow Σ^{+} η\right)} $ is determined to be $1.73 \pm 0.22_{\rm stat.} \pm 0.16_{\rm syst.}$. These results enrich our knowledge of charmed baryon decays.

preprint2024arXiv

Investigation of the $ΔI = 1/2$ rule and test of CP violation through the measurement of decay asymmetry parameters in $Ξ^-$ decays

Using $(10087\pm44)\times 10^{6}$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector, numerous $Ξ^-$ and $Λ$ decay asymmetry parameters are simultaneously determined from the process $J/ψ\to Ξ^- \barΞ^+ \to Λ(pπ^-) π^- \barΛ(\bar{n} π^0) π^+$ and its charge-conjugate channel. The precisions of $α_0$ for $Λ\to nπ^0$ and $\barα_0$ for $\barΛ \to \bar{n}π^0$ compared to world averages are improved by factors of 4 and 1.7, respectively. The ratio of decay asymmetry parameters of $Λ\to nπ^0$ to that of $Λ\to pπ^-$, $\langle α_0 \rangle/ \langle α_{Λ-} \rangle $, is determined to be $ 0.873 \pm 0.012^{+0.011}_{-0.010}$, where the first and the second uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively. The ratio is smaller than unity more than $5σ$, which signifies the existence of the $ΔI = 3/2$ transition in $Λ$ for the first time. Beside, we test for CP violation in $Ξ^- \to Λπ^-$ and in $Λ\to n π^{0}$ with the best precision to date.

preprint2024arXiv

Prompt Decoupling for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification

Text-to-image person re-identification (TIReID) aims to retrieve the target person from an image gallery via a textual description query. Recently, pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have attracted significant attention and have been widely utilized for this task due to their robust capacity for semantic concept learning and rich multi-modal knowledge. However, recent CLIP-based TIReID methods commonly rely on direct fine-tuning of the entire network to adapt the CLIP model for the TIReID task. Although these methods show competitive performance on this topic, they are suboptimal as they necessitate simultaneous domain adaptation and task adaptation. To address this issue, we attempt to decouple these two processes during the training stage. Specifically, we introduce the prompt tuning strategy to enable domain adaptation and propose a two-stage training approach to disentangle domain adaptation from task adaptation. In the first stage, we freeze the two encoders from CLIP and solely focus on optimizing the prompts to alleviate domain gap between the original training data of CLIP and downstream tasks. In the second stage, we maintain the fixed prompts and fine-tune the CLIP model to prioritize capturing fine-grained information, which is more suitable for TIReID task. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our method on three widely used datasets. Compared to the directly fine-tuned approach, our method achieves significant improvements.

preprint2023arXiv

Chiral phase modulation and tunable broadband perfect absorber using the coherent cold atomic ensemble

We investigate the two-channel nonreciprocal scattering of a coherent atomic ensemble under the linear spatial Kramers-Kronig modulation, which has potential applications in chiral phase modulation and broadband coherent perfect/asymmetric absorber that yet is typically unavailable in conventional continuous atomic media. In the regime of electromagnetically induced transparency, we observe the direction-dependent (chiral) phase modulation, which may enrich the burgeoning chiral quantum optics and can be used for implementing photonic filters, unidirectional amplifiers, and coherent asymmetric absorbers. By simplifying the stringent generation condition of coherent perfect absorption (CPA), we demonstrate the possibility of realizing two-channel CPA with broadband and sharp edges. Our proposal may be used to design and integrate some all-optical functional devices at extremely low power levels for quantum information processing and optical communication networks.

preprint2023arXiv

Fluid Tunnel Research for Challenges of Urban Climate

Experimental investigations using wind and water tunnels have long been a staple of fluid mechanics research for a large number of applications. These experiments often single out a specific physical process to be investigated, while studies involving multiscale and multi-physics processes are rare due to the difficulty and complexity in the experimental setup. In the era of climate change, there is an increasing interest in innovative experimental studies in which fluid (wind and water) tunnels are employed for modelling multiscale, multi-physics phenomena of the urban climate. High-quality fluid tunnel measurements of urban-physics related phenomena are also much needed to facilitate the development and validation of advanced multi-physics numerical models. As a repository of knowledge in modelling these urban processes, we cover fundamentals, recommendations and guidelines for experimental design, recent advances and outlook on eight selected research areas, including (i) thermal buoyancy effects of urban airflows, (ii) aerodynamic and thermal effects of vegetation, (iii) radiative and convective heat fluxes over urban materials, (iv) influence of thermal stratification on land-atmosphere interactions, (v) pollutant dispersion, (vi) indoor and outdoor natural ventilation, (vii) wind thermal comfort, and (viii) urban winds over complex urban sites. Further, three main challenges, i.e., modelling of multi-physics, modelling of anthropogenic processes, and combined use of fluid tunnels, scaled outdoor and field measurements for urban climate studies, are discussed.

preprint2023arXiv

Search for hidden-charm tetraquark with strangeness in $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow K^+ D_{s}^{*-} D^{*0}+c.c.$

We report a search for a heavier partner of the recently observed $Z_{cs}(3985)^{-}$ state, denoted as $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$, in the process $e^{+} e^{-}\rightarrow K^{+}D_{s}^{*-}D^{* 0}+c.c.$, based on $e^+e^-$ collision data collected at the center-of-mass energies of $\sqrt{s}=4.661$, 4.682 and 4.699 GeV with the BESIII detector. The $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$ is of interest as it is expected to be a candidate for a hidden-charm and open-strange tetraquark. A partial-reconstruction technique is used to isolate $K^+$ recoil-mass spectra, which are probed for a potential contribution from $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}\to D_{s}^{*-}D^{* 0}$ ($c.c.$). We find an excess of $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}\rightarrow D_{s}^{*-}D^{*0}$ ($c.c.$) candidates with a significance of $2.1σ$, after considering systematic uncertainties, at a mass of $(4123.5\pm0.7_\mathrm{stat.}\pm4.7_\mathrm{syst.})\ \mathrm{MeV}/c^{2}$. As the data set is limited in size, the upper limits are evaluated at the 90\% confidence level on the product of the Born cross sections ($σ^{\mathrm{Born}}$) and the branching fraction ($\mathcal{B}$) of $Z_{cs}^{\prime-}\rightarrow D_{s}^{*-}D^{* 0}$, under different assumptions of the $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$ mass from 4.120 to 4.140 MeV and of the width from 10 to 50 MeV at the three center-of-mass energies. The upper limits of $σ^{\rm Born}\cdot\mathcal{B}$ are found to be at the level of $\mathcal{O}(1)$ pb at each energy. Larger data samples are needed to confirm the $Z_{cs}^{\prime -}$ state and clarify its nature in the coming years.

preprint2023arXiv

USER: Unified Semantic Enhancement with Momentum Contrast for Image-Text Retrieval

As a fundamental and challenging task in bridging language and vision domains, Image-Text Retrieval (ITR) aims at searching for the target instances that are semantically relevant to the given query from the other modality, and its key challenge is to measure the semantic similarity across different modalities. Although significant progress has been achieved, existing approaches typically suffer from two major limitations: (1) It hurts the accuracy of the representation by directly exploiting the bottom-up attention based region-level features where each region is equally treated. (2) It limits the scale of negative sample pairs by employing the mini-batch based end-to-end training mechanism. To address these limitations, we propose a Unified Semantic Enhancement Momentum Contrastive Learning (USER) method for ITR. Specifically, we delicately design two simple but effective Global representation based Semantic Enhancement (GSE) modules. One learns the global representation via the self-attention algorithm, noted as Self-Guided Enhancement (SGE) module. The other module benefits from the pre-trained CLIP module, which provides a novel scheme to exploit and transfer the knowledge from an off-the-shelf model, noted as CLIP-Guided Enhancement (CGE) module. Moreover, we incorporate the training mechanism of MoCo into ITR, in which two dynamic queues are employed to enrich and enlarge the scale of negative sample pairs. Meanwhile, a Unified Training Objective (UTO) is developed to learn from mini-batch based and dynamic queue based samples. Extensive experiments on the benchmark MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets demonstrate the superiority of both retrieval accuracy and inference efficiency. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/zhangy0822/USER.

preprint2022arXiv

A Formal Specification of Operating System based on ARINC 653

In this paper, by using the formal language \emph{Circus}, we give a formal specification of an operating system based on ARINC 653 standard. Our specification includes interrupt handling, time and memory management, partition and process scheduling, system call response and related APEX services. Especially, the concurrent behaviours of partitions and processes are also specified.

preprint2022arXiv

A Universal Framework for Reconstructing Complex Networks and Node Dynamics from Discrete or Continuous Dynamics Data

Many dynamical processes of complex systems can be understood as the dynamics of a group of nodes interacting on a given network structure. However, finding such interaction structure and node dynamics from time series of node behaviours is tough. Conventional methods focus on either network structure inference task or dynamics reconstruction problem, very few of them can work well on both. This paper proposes a universal framework for reconstructing network structure and node dynamics at the same time from observed time-series data of nodes. We use a differentiable Bernoulli sampling process to generate a candidate network structure, and use neural networks to simulate the node dynamics based on the candidate network. We then adjust all the parameters with a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to maximize the likelihood function defined on the data. The experiments show that our model can recover various network structures and node dynamics at the same time with high accuracy. It can also work well on binary, discrete and continuous time-series data, and the reconstruction results are robust against noise and missing information.

preprint2022arXiv

AMCAD: Adaptive Mixed-Curvature Representation based Advertisement Retrieval System

Graph embedding based retrieval has become one of the most popular techniques in the information retrieval community and search engine industry. The classical paradigm mainly relies on the flat Euclidean geometry. In recent years, hyperbolic (negative curvature) and spherical (positive curvature) representation methods have shown their superiority to capture hierarchical and cyclic data structures respectively. However, in industrial scenarios such as e-commerce sponsored search platforms, the large-scale heterogeneous query-item-advertisement interaction graphs often have multiple structures coexisting. Existing methods either only consider a single geometry space, or combine several spaces manually, which are incapable and inflexible to model the complexity and heterogeneity in the real scenario. To tackle this challenge, we present a web-scale Adaptive Mixed-Curvature ADvertisement retrieval system (AMCAD) to automatically capture the complex and heterogeneous graph structures in non-Euclidean spaces. Specifically, entities are represented in adaptive mixed-curvature spaces, where the types and curvatures of the subspaces are trained to be optimal combinations. Besides, an attentive edge-wise space projector is designed to model the similarities between heterogeneous nodes according to local graph structures and the relation types. Moreover, to deploy AMCAD in Taobao, one of the largest ecommerce platforms with hundreds of million users, we design an efficient two-layer online retrieval framework for the task of graph based advertisement retrieval. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets and A/B tests on online traffic are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

preprint2022arXiv

Amplitude analysis and branching fraction measurement of the decay $D_{s}^{+} \to K^+π^+π^-$

Using $6.32$ fb$^{-1}$ of $e^{+}e^{-}$ collision data collected at the center-of-mass energies between 4.178 and 4.226 GeV with the BESIII detector, we perform an amplitude analysis of the decay $D^+_s \to K^+π^+π^-$ and determine the amplitudes of the various intermediate states. The absolute branching fraction of $D^+_s\to K^+π^+π^-$ is measured to be ($6.11\pm0.18_{\rm stat.}\pm0.11_{\rm syst.})\times 10^{-3}$. The branching fractions of the dominant intermediate processes $D_{s}^{+} \to K^+ρ^0, ρ^0 \to π^+π^-$ and $D_{s}^{+} \to K^*(892)^0π^+, K^*(892)^0 \to K^+π^-$ are determined to be $(1.96\pm0.19_{\rm stat.}\pm0.23_{\rm syst.})\times 10^{-3}$ and $(1.85\pm0.12_{\rm stat.}\pm0.13_{\rm syst.})\times 10^{-3}$, respectively. The intermediate resonances $f_0(500)$, $f_0(980)$, and $f_0(1370)$ are observed for the first time in this channel.

preprint2022arXiv

Amplitude analysis and branching-fraction measurement of $D_{s}^{+} \to π^{+}π^{0}η^{\prime}$

Using data collected with the BESIII detector in $e^+e^-$ collisions at center-of-mass energies between 4.178 and 4.226 GeV and corresponding to 6.32~fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, we report the amplitude analysis and branching-fraction measurement of the $D^+_s \to π^+ π^0 η^{\prime}$ decay. We find that the dominant intermediate process is $D^+_s \toρ^+ η^{\prime}$ and the significances of other resonant and nonresonant processes are all less than $3σ$. The upper limits on the branching fractions of $S$-wave and $P$-wave nonresonant components are set to $0.10\%$ and $0.74\%$ at the $90\%$ confidence level, respectively. In addition, the branching fraction of the $D^+_s \to π^+ π^0 η^{\prime}$ decay is measured to be $(6.15\pm0.25(\rm stat.)\pm0.18(\rm syst.))\%$, which receives significant contribution only from $D_s^+\to ρ^+η^{\prime}$ according to the amplitude analysis.

preprint2022arXiv

Compositional Human-Scene Interaction Synthesis with Semantic Control

Synthesizing natural interactions between virtual humans and their 3D environments is critical for numerous applications, such as computer games and AR/VR experiences. Our goal is to synthesize humans interacting with a given 3D scene controlled by high-level semantic specifications as pairs of action categories and object instances, e.g., "sit on the chair". The key challenge of incorporating interaction semantics into the generation framework is to learn a joint representation that effectively captures heterogeneous information, including human body articulation, 3D object geometry, and the intent of the interaction. To address this challenge, we design a novel transformer-based generative model, in which the articulated 3D human body surface points and 3D objects are jointly encoded in a unified latent space, and the semantics of the interaction between the human and objects are embedded via positional encoding. Furthermore, inspired by the compositional nature of interactions that humans can simultaneously interact with multiple objects, we define interaction semantics as the composition of varying numbers of atomic action-object pairs. Our proposed generative model can naturally incorporate varying numbers of atomic interactions, which enables synthesizing compositional human-scene interactions without requiring composite interaction data. We extend the PROX dataset with interaction semantic labels and scene instance segmentation to evaluate our method and demonstrate that our method can generate realistic human-scene interactions with semantic control. Our perceptual study shows that our synthesized virtual humans can naturally interact with 3D scenes, considerably outperforming existing methods. We name our method COINS, for COmpositional INteraction Synthesis with Semantic Control. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zkf1997/COINS.

preprint2022arXiv

Cross section measurements of the processes $e^+e^- \rightarrow ωπ^{0}$ and $ωη$ at center-of-mass energies between 3.773 and 4.701 GeV

The Born cross sections of the processes $e^+e^- \rightarrow ωπ^{0}$ and $e^+e^- \rightarrow ωη$ are measured at center-of-mass energies between 3.773 and 4.701 GeV using a total integrated luminosity of 22.7 fb$^{-1}$ collected with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII collider. A simple $s^{-n}$ dependence for the continuum process can describe the measured Born cross sections. No significant contributions from the $ψ(4160)$, $Y(4230)$, $Y(4360)$, $ψ(4415)$, $Y(4660)$ resonances are found, which indicates relative small branching fractions for these resonances into the $ωπ^{0}$ and $ωη$ final states.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep Graph Learning for Spatially-Varying Indoor Lighting Prediction

Lighting prediction from a single image is becoming increasingly important in many vision and augmented reality (AR) applications in which shading and shadow consistency between virtual and real objects should be guaranteed. However, this is a notoriously ill-posed problem, especially for indoor scenarios, because of the complexity of indoor luminaires and the limited information involved in 2D images. In this paper, we propose a graph learning-based framework for indoor lighting estimation. At its core is a new lighting model (dubbed DSGLight) based on depth-augmented Spherical Gaussians (SG) and a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) that infers the new lighting representation from a single LDR image of limited field-of-view. Our lighting model builds 128 evenly distributed SGs over the indoor panorama, where each SG encoding the lighting and the depth around that node. The proposed GCN then learns the mapping from the input image to DSGLight. Compared with existing lighting models, our DSGLight encodes both direct lighting and indirect environmental lighting more faithfully and compactly. It also makes network training and inference more stable. The estimated depth distribution enables temporally stable shading and shadows under spatially-varying lighting. Through thorough experiments, we show that our method obviously outperforms existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

preprint2022arXiv

Digital Twin Assisted Task Offloading for Aerial Edge Computing and Networks

Considering the user mobility and unpredictable mobile edge computing (MEC) environments, this paper studies the intelligent task offloading problem in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled MEC with the assistance of digital twin (DT). We aim at minimizing the energy consumption of the entire MEC system by jointly optimizing mobile terminal users (MTUs) association, UAV trajectory, transmission power distribution and computation capacity allocation while respecting the constraints of mission maximum processing delays. Specifically, double deep Q-network (DDQN) algorithm stemming from deep reinforcement learning is first proposed to effectively solve the problem of MTUs association and UAV trajectory. Then, the closed-form expression is employed to handle the problem of transmission power distribution and the computation capacity allocation problem is further addressed via an iterative algorithm. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme is able to converge and significantly reduce the total energy consumption of the MEC system compared to the benchmark schemes.

preprint2022arXiv

Diverse Preference Augmentation with Multiple Domains for Cold-start Recommendations

Cold-start issues have been more and more challenging for providing accurate recommendations with the fast increase of users and items. Most existing approaches attempt to solve the intractable problems via content-aware recommendations based on auxiliary information and/or cross-domain recommendations with transfer learning. Their performances are often constrained by the extremely sparse user-item interactions, unavailable side information, or very limited domain-shared users. Recently, meta-learners with meta-augmentation by adding noises to labels have been proven to be effective to avoid overfitting and shown good performance on new tasks. Motivated by the idea of meta-augmentation, in this paper, by treating a user's preference over items as a task, we propose a so-called Diverse Preference Augmentation framework with multiple source domains based on meta-learning (referred to as MetaDPA) to i) generate diverse ratings in a new domain of interest (known as target domain) to handle overfitting on the case of sparse interactions, and to ii) learn a preference model in the target domain via a meta-learning scheme to alleviate cold-start issues. Specifically, we first conduct multi-source domain adaptation by dual conditional variational autoencoders and impose a Multi-domain InfoMax (MDI) constraint on the latent representations to learn domain-shared and domain-specific preference properties. To avoid overfitting, we add a Mutually-Exclusive (ME) constraint on the output of decoders to generate diverse ratings given content data. Finally, these generated diverse ratings and the original ratings are introduced into the meta-training procedure to learn a preference meta-learner, which produces good generalization ability on cold-start recommendation tasks. Experiments on real-world datasets show our proposed MetaDPA clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devices

Understanding social interactions from egocentric views is crucial for many applications, ranging from assistive robotics to AR/VR. Key to reasoning about interactions is to understand the body pose and motion of the interaction partner from the egocentric view. However, research in this area is severely hindered by the lack of datasets. Existing datasets are limited in terms of either size, capture/annotation modalities, ground-truth quality, or interaction diversity. We fill this gap by proposing EgoBody, a novel large-scale dataset for human pose, shape and motion estimation from egocentric views, during interactions in complex 3D scenes. We employ Microsoft HoloLens2 headsets to record rich egocentric data streams (including RGB, depth, eye gaze, head and hand tracking). To obtain accurate 3D ground truth, we calibrate the headset with a multi-Kinect rig and fit expressive SMPL-X body meshes to multi-view RGB-D frames, reconstructing 3D human shapes and poses relative to the scene, over time. We collect 125 sequences, spanning diverse interaction scenarios, and propose the first benchmark for 3D full-body pose and shape estimation of the social partner from egocentric views. We extensively evaluate state-of-the-art methods, highlight their limitations in the egocentric scenario, and address such limitations leveraging our high-quality annotations. Data and code are available at https://sanweiliti.github.io/egobody/egobody.html.

preprint2022arXiv

ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify causal relations between event pairs in a document. It poses a great challenge of across-sentence reasoning without clear causal indicators. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework for DECI, which improves existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods upon two aspects. First, we formulate DECI as a node classification problem by constructing an event relational graph, without the needs of prior knowledge or tools. Second, ERGO seamlessly integrates event-pair relation classification and global inference, which leverages a Relational Graph Transformer (RGT) to capture the potential causal chain. Besides, we introduce edge-building strategies and adaptive focal loss to deal with the massive false positives caused by common spurious correlation. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that ERGO significantly outperforms previous SOTA methods (13.1% F1 gains on average). We have conducted extensive quantitative analysis and case studies to provide insights for future research directions (Section 4.8).

preprint2022arXiv

Evolutionary Preference Learning via Graph Nested GRU ODE for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict the user next action based on the ongoing sessions. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in modeling the user preference evolution to capture the fine-grained user interests. While latent user preferences behind the sessions drift continuously over time, most existing approaches still model the temporal session data in discrete state spaces, which are incapable of capturing the fine-grained preference evolution and result in sub-optimal solutions. To this end, we propose Graph Nested GRU ordinary differential equation (ODE), namely GNG-ODE, a novel continuum model that extends the idea of neural ODEs to continuous-time temporal session graphs. The proposed model preserves the continuous nature of dynamic user preferences, encoding both temporal and structural patterns of item transitions into continuous-time dynamic embeddings. As the existing ODE solvers do not consider graph structure change and thus cannot be directly applied to the dynamic graph, we propose a time alignment technique, called t-Alignment, to align the updating time steps of the temporal session graphs within a batch. Empirical results on three benchmark datasets show that GNG-ODE significantly outperforms other baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

First Observation of the Semileptonic Decay $Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^- e^+ν_e$

Using $4.5~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ annihilation data samples collected at the center-of-mass energies ranging from 4.600~GeV to 4.699~GeV with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider, a first study of the semileptonic decays $Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^-e^+ν_e$, $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1520) e^+ν_e$ and $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1405) e^+ν_e$ is performed. The $Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^-e^+ν_e$ decay is observed with a significance of $8.2σ$ and the branching fraction is measured to be $\mathcal{B}(Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^- e^+ν_e)=(0.88\pm0.17_{\rm stat.}\pm0.07_{\rm syst.})\times 10^{-3}$. We also report evidence of $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1520)e^+ν_e$ and $Λ_c^+\rightarrow Λ(1405)e^+ν_e$ with significances of $3.3σ$ and $3.2σ$, respectively, and measure $\mathcal B(Λ^+_c\rightarrow Λ(1520)e^+ν_e)=(1.02\pm0.52_{\rm stat.}\pm0.11_{\rm syst.})\times10^{-3}$ and $\mathcal B(Λ^+_c\rightarrow Λ(1405)[\rightarrow pK^-]e^+ν_e)=(0.42\pm0.19_{\rm stat.}\pm0.04_{\rm syst.})\times10^{-3}$. Combining these with the inclusive semileptonic $Λ_c^+$ branching fraction measured by BESIII, the relative fraction is determined to be $[\mathcal{B}(Λ_c^+\rightarrow pK^-e^+ν_e)/\mathcal{B}(Λ_c^+\rightarrow X e^+ν_e)]=(2.1\pm0.4_{\rm stat.}\pm0.2_{\rm syst.})\%$, which provides a clear confirmation that semileptonic $Λ_c^+$ decays are not saturated by the $Λ\ell^+ν_{\ell}$ final state.

preprint2022arXiv

Giant Atoms in a Synthetic Frequency Dimension

Giant atoms that interact with real-space waveguides at multiple spatial points have attracted extensive attention due to their unique interference effects. Here we propose a feasible scheme for constructing giant atoms in a synthetic frequency dimension with, e.g., a dynamically modulated superconducting resonator and a tailored three-level artificial atom. Both analytical and numerical calculations show good agreement between our scheme and real-space two-level giant atoms. In particular, the symmetry of the model in momentum space can be broken by tuning the phase of the external field applied on the atom, enabling chiral interactions between the atom and the frequency lattice. We further demonstrate the possibility of simulating cascaded interaction and directional excitation transfer in the frequency dimension by directly extending our model to involve more such effective giant atoms.

preprint2022arXiv

Giant atoms with time-dependent couplings

We study the decay dynamics of a two-level giant atom that is coupled to a waveguide with time-dependent coupling strengths. In the non-Markovian regime where the retardation effect cannot be ignored, we show that the dynamics of the atom depends on the atom-waveguide coupling strengths at an earlier time. This allows one to tailor the decay dynamics of the giant atom and even realize a stationary population revival with appropriate coupling modulations. Moreover, we demonstrate the possibility of simulating the quantum Zeno and quantum anti-Zeno effects in the giant-atom model with periodic coupling quenches. These results have potential applications in quantum information processing and quantum network engineering.

preprint2022arXiv

IAM: A Comprehensive and Large-Scale Dataset for Integrated Argument Mining Tasks

Traditionally, a debate usually requires a manual preparation process, including reading plenty of articles, selecting the claims, identifying the stances of the claims, seeking the evidence for the claims, etc. As the AI debate attracts more attention these years, it is worth exploring the methods to automate the tedious process involved in the debating system. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive and large dataset named IAM, which can be applied to a series of argument mining tasks, including claim extraction, stance classification, evidence extraction, etc. Our dataset is collected from over 1k articles related to 123 topics. Near 70k sentences in the dataset are fully annotated based on their argument properties (e.g., claims, stances, evidence, etc.). We further propose two new integrated argument mining tasks associated with the debate preparation process: (1) claim extraction with stance classification (CESC) and (2) claim-evidence pair extraction (CEPE). We adopt a pipeline approach and an end-to-end method for each integrated task separately. Promising experimental results are reported to show the values and challenges of our proposed tasks, and motivate future research on argument mining.

preprint2022arXiv

Incentivizing Proof-of-Stake Blockchain for Secured Data Collection in UAV-Assisted IoT: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. In this paper, we propose to employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assist the clustered IoT data collection with blockchain-based security provisioning. In particular, the UAVs generate candidate blocks based on the collected data, which are then audited through a lightweight proof-of-stake consensus mechanism within the UAV-based blockchain network. To motivate efficient blockchain while reducing the operational cost, a stake pool is constructed at the active UAV while encouraging stake investment from other UAVs with profit sharing. The problem is formulated to maximize the overall profit through the blockchain system in unit time by jointly investigating the IoT transmission, incentives through investment and profit sharing, and UAV deployment strategies. Then, the problem is solved in a distributed manner while being decoupled into two layers. The inner layer incorporates IoT transmission and incentive design, which are tackled with large-system approximation and one-leader-multi-follower Stackelberg game analysis, respectively. The outer layer for UAV deployment is undertaken with a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient approach. Results show the convergence of the proposed learning process and the UAV deployment, and also demonstrated is the performance superiority of our proposal as compared with the baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Multi-granularity User Intent Unit for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation aims to predict a user's next action based on previous actions in the current session. The major challenge is to capture authentic and complete user preferences in the entire session. Recent work utilizes graph structure to represent the entire session and adopts Graph Neural Network to encode session information. This modeling choice has been proved to be effective and achieved remarkable results. However, most of the existing studies only consider each item within the session independently and do not capture session semantics from a high-level perspective. Such limitation often leads to severe information loss and increases the difficulty of capturing long-range dependencies within a session. Intuitively, compared with individual items, a session snippet, i.e., a group of locally consecutive items, is able to provide supplemental user intents which are hardly captured by existing methods. In this work, we propose to learn multi-granularity consecutive user intent unit to improve the recommendation performance. Specifically, we creatively propose Multi-granularity Intent Heterogeneous Session Graph which captures the interactions between different granularity intent units and relieves the burden of long-dependency. Moreover, we propose the Intent Fusion Ranking module to compose the recommendation results from various granularity user intents. Compared with current methods that only leverage intents from individual items, IFR benefits from different granularity user intents to generate more accurate and comprehensive session representation, thus eventually boosting recommendation performance. We conduct extensive experiments on five session-based recommendation datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Robust Representation through Graph Adversarial Contrastive Learning

Existing studies show that node representations generated by graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, such as unnoticeable perturbations of adjacent matrix and node features. Thus, it is requisite to learn robust representations in graph neural networks. To improve the robustness of graph representation learning, we propose a novel Graph Adversarial Contrastive Learning framework (GraphACL) by introducing adversarial augmentations into graph self-supervised learning. In this framework, we maximize the mutual information between local and global representations of a perturbed graph and its adversarial augmentations, where the adversarial graphs can be generated in either supervised or unsupervised approaches. Based on the Information Bottleneck Principle, we theoretically prove that our method could obtain a much tighter bound, thus improving the robustness of graph representation learning. Empirically, we evaluate several methods on a range of node classification benchmarks and the results demonstrate GraphACL could achieve comparable accuracy over previous supervised methods.

preprint2022arXiv

LFGCF: Light Folksonomy Graph Collaborative Filtering for Tag-Aware Recommendation

Tag-aware recommendation is a task of predicting a personalized list of items for a user by their tagging behaviors. It is crucial for many applications with tagging capabilities like last.fm or movielens. Recently, many efforts have been devoted to improving Tag-aware recommendation systems (TRS) with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), which has become new state-of-the-art for the general recommendation. However, some solutions are directly inherited from GCN without justifications, which is difficult to alleviate the sparsity, ambiguity, and redundancy issues introduced by tags, thus adding to difficulties of training and degrading recommendation performance. In this work, we aim to simplify the design of GCN to make it more concise for TRS. We propose a novel tag-aware recommendation model named Light Folksonomy Graph Collaborative Filtering (LFGCF), which only includes the essential GCN components. Specifically, LFGCF first constructs Folksonomy Graphs from the records of user assigning tags and item getting tagged. Then we leverage the simple design of aggregation to learn the high-order representations on Folksonomy Graphs and use the weighted sum of the embeddings learned at several layers for information updating. We share tags embeddings to bridge the information gap between users and items. Besides, a regularization function named TransRT is proposed to better depict user preferences and item features. Extensive hyperparameters experiments and ablation studies on three real-world datasets show that LFGCF uses fewer parameters and significantly outperforms most baselines for the tag-aware top-N recommendations.

preprint2022arXiv

Light transfer transitions beyond higher-order exceptional points in parity-time and anti-parity-time symmetric waveguide arrays

We propose two non-Hermitian arrays consisting of $N=2l+1$ waveguides and exhibiting parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) or anti-$\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry for investigating light transfer dynamics based on $N$th-order exceptional points (EPs). The $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric array supports two $N$th-order EPs separating an unbroken and a broken phase with real and imaginary eignvalues, respectively. Light transfer dynamics in this array exhibits radically different behaviors, i.e. a unidirectional oscillation behavior in the unbroken phase, an edge-towards localization behavior in the broken phase, and a center-towards localization behavior just at $N$th-order EPs. The anti-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric array supports also two $N$th-order EPs separating an unbroken and a broken phase, which refer however to imaginary and real eigenvalues, respectively. Accordingly, light transfer dynamics in this array exhibits a center-towards localization behavior in the unbroken phase and an origin-centered oscillation behavior in the broken phase. These nontrivial light transfer behaviors and their controlled transitions are not viable for otherwise split lower-order EPs and depend on the underlying $SU(2)$ symmetry of spin-$l$ matrices.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$ cross section and observation of a resonant structure

Based on $e^{+}e^{-}$ collision data collected by the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider at center-of-mass energies from 2.000 to 3.080 GeV, a partial-wave analysis is performed for the process $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$. The Born cross section of the process $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$ and its subprocesses $e^{+}e^{-} \to ϕπ^{0}$, $K^{*}(892)K$ and $K^{*}_{2}(1430)K$ are measured. The results for $e^{+}e^{-} \to K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$ and $ϕπ^{0}$ are consistent with the BaBar measurements and with improved precision. By analyzing the cross section, of the subprocesses $e^{+}e^{-} \to$ $K^{*}(892)K$ and $K^{*}_{2}(1430)K$, a structure with mass $M_R$ = (2208 $\pm$ 19 $\pm$ 24) MeV/$c^{2}$ and width $Γ_R$ = (168 $\pm$ 24 $\pm$ 39) MeV is observed with a combined statistical significance of 7.6$σ$. The measured resonance parameters suggest it can be identified as the $ϕ(2170)$, thus the results provide valuable input to understand the internal nature of this state.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of $Λ$ baryon polarization in $e^+e^-\rightarrowΛ\barΛ$ at $\sqrt{s} = 3.773$ GeV

Using a data sample of $ψ(3770)$ events collected with the BESIII detector at BEPCII corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.9 fb$^{-1}$, we report a measurement of $Λ$ spin polarization in $e^+e^-\rightarrowΛ\barΛ$ at $\sqrt{s} = 3.773$ GeV. The significance of polarization is found to be 2$σ$ including the systematic uncertainty, which implies a zero phase between the transition amplitudes of the $Λ\barΛ$ helicity states. This phase can be interpreted in terms of psionic form factors, and is determined to be $ΔΦ^Ψ$ = $Φ^Ψ_{E} - Φ^Ψ_{M}$ = $(71^{+66}_{-46}$ $\pm$ 5)$^{\circ}$. Similarly, the ratio between the form factors is found to be $R^ψ$ = $|G^Ψ_{E}/G^Ψ_{M}|$ = $0.48^{+0.12}_{-0.07}$ $\pm$ 0.04. The first uncertainties are statistical and the second systematic.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the $D \to K^-π^+π^+π^-$ and $D \to K^-π^+π^0$ coherence factors and average strong-phase differences in quantum-correlated ${D\bar{D}}$ decays

The decays $D\to K^-π^+π^+π^-$ and $D \to K^-π^+π^0$ are studied in a sample of quantum-correlated $D\bar{D}$ pairs produced through the process $e^+e^- \to ψ(3770) \to D\bar{D}$, exploiting a data set collected by the BESIII experiment that corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 2.93 fb$^{-1}$. Here $D$ indicates a quantum superposition of a $D^0$ and a $\bar{D}^0$ meson. By reconstructing one neutral charm meson in a signal decay, and the other in the same or a different final state, observables are measured that contain information on the coherence factors and average strong-phase differences of each of the signal modes. These parameters are critical inputs in the measurement of the angle $γ$ of the Unitarity Triangle in $B^- \to DK^-$ decays at the LHCb and Belle II experiments. The coherence factors are determined to be $R_{K3π}=0.52^{+0.12}_{-0.10}$ and $R_{Kππ^0}=0.78 \pm 0.04$, with values for the average strong-phase differences that are $δ_D^{K3π}=\left(167^{+31}_{-19}\right)^\circ$ and $δ_D^{Kππ^0}=\left(196^{+14}_{-15}\right)^\circ$, where the uncertainties include both statistical and systematic contributions. The analysis is re-performed in four bins of the phase-space of the $D \to K^-π^+π^+π^-$ to yield results that will allow for a more sensitive measurement of $γ$ with this mode, to which the BESIII inputs will contribute an uncertainty of around 6$^\circ$.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the branching fraction and decay asymmetry of $Λ\to nγ$

The radiative hyperon decay $Λ\to nγ$ is studied using $(10087\pm44)\times 10^6$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector operating at BEPCII. The absolute branching fraction of the decay $Λ\to nγ$ is determined with a significance of 5.6$σ$ to be $[0.832\pm0.038(\rm stat.)\pm0.054(\rm syst.)]\times10^{-3}$, which lies significantly below the current PDG value. By analyzing the joint angular distribution of the decay products, the first determination of the decay asymmetry $α_γ$ is reported with a value of $-0.16\pm0.10(\rm stat.)\pm0.05(\rm syst.)$.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the branching fraction for $ψ(3686)\to ωK^0_SK^0_S$

Analyzing $(448.1\pm2.9)\times10^6$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider, the $ψ(3686)\to ωK_{S}^{0}K_{S}^{0}$ decay is observed for the first time. The branching fraction for this decay is determined to be $\mathcal{B}_{ψ(3686)\to ωK_{S}^{0}K^{0}_{S}}$=$(7.04\pm0.39\pm0.36)$$\times10^{-5}$, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the branching fraction of the doubly Cabibbo-suppressed decay $D^0\to K^+π^-π^0$ and search for $D^0\to K^+π^-π^0π^0$

Using $2.93\,\rm fb^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ collision data collected at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773\,GeV with the BESIII detector, we present a measurement of the branching fraction of the doubly Cabibbo-suppressed (DCS) decay $D^0\to K^+π^-π^0$ and a search for the DCS decay $D^0\to K^+π^-π^0π^0$. The branching fraction of $D^0\to K^+π^-π^0$ is determined to be $[3.13^{+0.60}_{-0.56}({\rm stat}) \pm 0.09({\rm syst})] \times 10^{-4}$. No signal is observed for $D^0\to K^+π^-π^0π^0$ and an upper limit of $3.6 \times 10^{-4}$ is set on the branching fraction at the 90\% C.L. We combine these results with the world-average branching fractions of their counterpart Cabibbo-favored decays to determine the ratios of the doubly Cabibbo-suppressed over the Cabibbo-favored branching fractions, ${\mathcal B}(D^0\to K^+π^-π^0)/{\mathcal B}(D^0\to K^-π^+π^0)=(0.22\pm 0.04)\%$~and ${\mathcal B}(D^0\to K^+π^-π^0π^0)/{\mathcal B}(D^0\to K^-π^+π^0π^0)<0.40\%$ at the 90\% C.L., which correspond to $(0.75\pm 0.14)\tan^{4} θ_C$~and $1.37\times \tan^{4} θ_C$, respectively, where $θ_C$ is the Cabibbo angle.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the Cross Section for $e^{+}e^{-}\to$ hadrons at Energies from 2.2324 to 3.6710 GeV

Based on electron-positron collision data collected with the BESIII detector operating at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II storage rings, the value of $R\equivσ(e^{+}e^{-}\to$hadrons)/$σ(e^{+}e^{-}\toμ^{+}μ^{-})$ is measured at 14 center-of-mass energies from 2.2324 to 3.6710 GeV. The resulting uncertainties are less than $3.0\%$, and are dominated by systematic uncertainties.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the cross section of $e^{+}e^{-}\toηπ^{+}π^{-}$ at center-of-mass energies from 3.872 GeV to 4.700 GeV

Using data samples with an integrated luminosity of 19 fb$^{-1}$ at twenty-eight center-of-mass energies from 3.872 GeV to 4.700 GeV collected with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII electron--positron collider, the process $e^{+}e^{-}\toηπ^{+}π^{-}$ and the intermediate process $e^{+}e^{-}\toηρ^{0}$ are studied for the first time. The Born cross sections are measured. No significant resonance structure is observed in the cross section lineshape.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurement of the total and leptonic decay widths of the $J/ψ$ resonance with an energy scan method at BESIII

Using $e^+e^-$ annihilation data sets collected with the BESIII detector, we measure the cross sections of the processes $e^+e^- \to e^+e^-$ and $e^+e^- \to μ^+μ^-$ at fifteen center-of-mass energy points in the vicinity of the $J/ψ$ resonance. By a simultaneous fit to the measured, center-of-mass energy dependent cross sections of the two processes, the combined quantities $Γ_{ee} Γ_{ee} / Γ_{\rm tot}$ and $Γ_{ee} Γ_{μμ} / Γ_{\rm tot}$ are determined to be ($0.346 \pm 0.009$) and ($0.335 \pm 0.006$) keV, respectively, where $Γ_{ee}$, $Γ_{μμ}$, and $Γ_{\rm tot}$ are the electronic, muonic, and total decay widths of the $J/ψ$ resonance, respectively. Using the resultant $Γ_{ee} Γ_{μμ} / Γ_{\rm tot}$ and $Γ_{ee} Γ_{ee} / Γ_{\rm tot}$, the ratio $Γ_{ee} / Γ_{μμ}$ is calculated to be $1.031 \pm 0.015$, which is consistent with the expectation of lepton universality within about two standard deviations. Assuming lepton universality and using the branching fraction of the $J/ψ$ leptonic decay measured by BESIII in 2013, $Γ_{\rm tot}$ and $Γ_{ll}$ are determined to be ($93.0 \pm 2.1$) and ($5.56 \pm 0.11$) keV, respectively, where $Γ_{ll}$ is the average leptonic decay width of the $J/ψ$ resonance.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurements of Absolute Branching Fractions of $D^0\to K_L^0ϕ$, $K_L^0η$, $K_L^0ω$, and $K_L^0η^{\prime}$

We report the first measurements of the absolute branching fractions of $D^0\to K_L^0ϕ$, $D^0\to K_L^0η$, $D^0\to K_L^0ω$, and $D^0\to K_L^0η^{\prime}$, obtained by analyzing $2.93\,\rm fb^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV with the BESIII detector. Taking the world averages of the branching fractions of $D^0\to K_S^0ϕ$, $D^0\to K_S^0η$, $D^0\to K_S^0ω$, and $D^0\to K_S^0η^{\prime}$, the $K_S^0$-$K_L^0$ asymmetry $\mathcal{R}(D^0)$ in these decay modes are obtained. The CP asymmetries in these decays are also determined. No significant $CP$ violation is observed.

preprint2022arXiv

Measurements of the absolute branching fractions of hadronic $D$-meson decays involving kaons and pions

By analyzing an electron-positron collision data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $2.93\,\rm fb^{-1}$ taken at the center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV with the BESIII detector, we obtain for the first time the absolute branching fractions for seven $D^0$ and $D^+$ hadronic decay modes and search for the hadronic decay $D^0\to K^0_S K^0_Sπ^0$ with much improved sensitivity. The results are ${\mathcal B}(D^0\to K^0_Sπ^0π^0π^0 )=( 7.64\pm 0.30\pm 0.29)\times 10^{-3}$, ${\mathcal B}(D^0\to K^-π^+π^0π^0π^0 )=( 9.54\pm 0.30\pm 0.31)\times 10^{-3}$, ${\mathcal B}(D^0\to K^0_Sπ^+π^-π^0π^0)=(12.66\pm 0.45\pm 0.43)\times 10^{-3}$, ${\mathcal B}(D^+\to K^0_Sπ^+π^0π^0 )=(29.04\pm 0.62\pm 0.87)\times 10^{-3}$, ${\mathcal B}(D^+\to K^0_Sπ^+π^+π^-π^0)=(15.28\pm 0.57\pm 0.60)\times 10^{-3}$, ${\mathcal B}(D^+\to K^0_Sπ^+π^0π^0π^0)=( 5.54\pm 0.44\pm 0.32)\times 10^{-3}$, ${\mathcal B}(D^+\to K^-π^+π^+π^0π^0 )=( 4.95\pm 0.26\pm 0.19)\times 10^{-3}$, ${\mathcal B}({D^0\to K^0_S K^0_Sπ^0}) < 1.57 \times 10^{-4}$ at the 90\% confidence level. Here the first uncertainties are statistical and the second ones systematic. The newly studied decays greatly enrich the knowledge of the $D\to \bar Kπππ$ and $D\to \bar Kππππ$ hadronic decays, and open a bridge to access more two-body hadronic $D$ decays containing scalar, vector, axial and tensor mesons in the charm sector.

preprint2022arXiv

Med-DANet: Dynamic Architecture Network for Efficient Medical Volumetric Segmentation

For 3D medical image (e.g. CT and MRI) segmentation, the difficulty of segmenting each slice in a clinical case varies greatly. Previous research on volumetric medical image segmentation in a slice-by-slice manner conventionally use the identical 2D deep neural network to segment all the slices of the same case, ignoring the data heterogeneity among image slices. In this paper, we focus on multi-modal 3D MRI brain tumor segmentation and propose a dynamic architecture network named Med-DANet based on adaptive model selection to achieve effective accuracy and efficiency trade-off. For each slice of the input 3D MRI volume, our proposed method learns a slice-specific decision by the Decision Network to dynamically select a suitable model from the predefined Model Bank for the subsequent 2D segmentation task. Extensive experimental results on both BraTS 2019 and 2020 datasets show that our proposed method achieves comparable or better results than previous state-of-the-art methods for 3D MRI brain tumor segmentation with much less model complexity. Compared with the state-of-the-art 3D method TransBTS, the proposed framework improves the model efficiency by up to 3.5x without sacrificing the accuracy. Our code will be publicly available soon.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-wavelength Variation Phenomena of PKS 0735+178 on Diverse Timescale

BL Lac object PKS 0735+178 showed some complex multi-wavelength variation phenomena in the previous studies, especially for its color behavior. Bluer-when-brighter, redder-when-brighter and achromatic behavior were all found to be possible long-term trends of PKS 0735+178. In this work, we collected the long-term multi-wavelength data of PKS 0735+178, and also performed a multi-color optical monitoring on intraday timescale. The intraday variability was detected on one night. On the long timescale, a possible 22-day time lag was found between the $R$ and $γ$-ray bands. The results of the cross-correlation analysis exhibited strong correlations between various optical bands on both intraday and long timescale. However, only a mild correlation was found between the long-term $γ$-ray and $R$-band light curves, which could be interpreted by the different emission mechanisms of the $γ$-ray and optical emissions. PKS 0735+178 showed a significant harder-when-brighter in the $γ$-ray band, which is consistent with the observed optical bluer-when-brighter trend on both long-term and intraday timescales. We found that the HWB and BWB trends will be enhanced during the active states, especially for the historical low state. Such phenomenon indicates a special activity-dependent color behavior of PKS 0735+178, and it could be well interpreted by the jet emission model.

preprint2022arXiv

Multiset-Equivariant Set Prediction with Approximate Implicit Differentiation

Most set prediction models in deep learning use set-equivariant operations, but they actually operate on multisets. We show that set-equivariant functions cannot represent certain functions on multisets, so we introduce the more appropriate notion of multiset-equivariance. We identify that the existing Deep Set Prediction Network (DSPN) can be multiset-equivariant without being hindered by set-equivariance and improve it with approximate implicit differentiation, allowing for better optimization while being faster and saving memory. In a range of toy experiments, we show that the perspective of multiset-equivariance is beneficial and that our changes to DSPN achieve better results in most cases. On CLEVR object property prediction, we substantially improve over the state-of-the-art Slot Attention from 8% to 77% in one of the strictest evaluation metrics because of the benefits made possible by implicit differentiation.

preprint2022arXiv

NEDMP: Neural Enhanced Dynamic Message Passing

Predicting stochastic spreading processes on complex networks is critical in epidemic control, opinion propagation, and viral marketing. We focus on the problem of inferring the time-dependent marginal probabilities of states for each node which collectively quantifies the spreading results. Dynamic Message Passing (DMP) has been developed as an efficient inference algorithm for several spreading models, and it is asymptotically exact on locally tree-like networks. However, DMP can struggle in diffusion networks with lots of local loops. We address this limitation by using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to learn the dependency amongst messages implicitly. Specifically, we propose a hybrid model in which the GNN module runs jointly with DMP equations. The GNN module refines the aggregated messages in DMP iterations by learning from simulation data. We demonstrate numerically that after training, our model's inference accuracy substantially outperforms DMP in conditions of various network structure and dynamics parameters. Moreover, compared to pure data-driven models, the proposed hybrid model has a better generalization ability for out-of-training cases, profiting from the explicitly utilized dynamics priors in the hybrid model. A PyTorch implementation of our model is at https://github.com/FeiGSSS/NEDMP.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of $a_0(1710)^+ \to K_S^0K^+$ in study of the $D_s^+\to K_S^0K^+π^0$ decay

Using $e^+e^-$ annihilation data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 6.32 fb$^{-1}$ collected at center-of-mass energies between 4.178 GeV and 4.226 GeV with the BESIII detector, we perform the first amplitude analysis of the decay $D_s^+\to K_S^0K^+π^0$ and determine the relative branching fractions and phases for intermediate processes. We observe the $a_0(1710)^+$, the isovector partner of the $f_0(1710)$ and $f_0(1770)$ mesons, in its decay to $K_S^0K^+$ for the first time. In addition, we measure the ratio $\frac{\mathcal{B}(D_{s}^{+} \to \bar{K}^{*}(892)^{0}K^{+})}{\mathcal{B}(D_{s}^{+} \to \bar{K}^{0}K^{*}(892)^{+})}$ to be $2.35^{+0.42}_{-0.23\text{stat.}}\pm 0.10_{\rm syst.}$. Finally, we provide a precision measurement of the absolute branching fraction $\mathcal{B}(D_s^+\to K_S^0K^+π^0) = (1.46\pm 0.06_{\text{stat.}}\pm 0.05_{\text{syst.}})\%$.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of $η_c(2S) \to 3(π^+π^-)$ and measurements of $χ_{cJ} \to 3(π^+π^-)$ in $ψ(3686)$ radiative transitions

The hadronic decay $η_c(2S) \to 3(π^+π^-)$ is observed with a statistical significance of 9.3 standard deviations using $(448.1\pm2.9)\times10^6$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected by the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider. The measured mass and width of $η_c(2S)$ are $(3643.4 \pm 2.3 (\rm stat.) \pm 4.4 (\rm syst.))$ MeV/$c^2$ and $(19.8 \pm 3.9 (\rm stat.) \pm 3.1 (\rm syst.))$ MeV, respectively, which are consistent with the world average values within two standard deviations. The product branching fraction $\mathcal{B}[ψ(3686)\to γη_c(2S)]\times\mathcal{B}[η_c(2S)\to3(π^+π^-)]$ is measured to be $(9.2 \pm 1.0 (\rm stat.) \pm 0.9 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-6}$. Using $\mathcal{B}[ψ(3686)\to γη_c(2S)]=(7.0^{+3.4}_{-2.5})\times10^{-4}$, we obtain $\mathcal{B}[η_c(2S) \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (1.31 \pm 0.15 (\rm stat.) \pm 0.13 (\rm syst.)(^{+0.64}_{-0.47}) (\rm extr))\times10^{-2}$, where the third uncertainty is from $\mathcal{B}[ψ(3686) \to γη_c(2S)]$. We also measure the $χ_{cJ} \to 3(π^+π^-)$ ($J=0, 1, 2$) decays via $ψ(3686) \to γχ_{cJ}$ transitions. The branching fractions are $\mathcal{B}[χ_{c0} \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (2.080\pm0.006 (\rm stat.)\pm0.068 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-2}$, $\mathcal{B}[χ_{c1} \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (1.092\pm0.004 (\rm stat.)\pm0.035 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-2}$, and $\mathcal{B}[χ_{c2} \to 3(π^+π^-)] = (1.565\pm0.005 (\rm stat.)\pm0.048 (\rm syst.))\times10^{-2}$.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of resonance structures in $e^+e^-\to π^+π^-ψ_2(3823)$ and mass measurement of $ψ_2(3823)$

Using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 11.3 $\rm fb^{-1}$ collected at center-of-mass energies from $4.23$ to $4.70$ GeV with the BESIII detector, we measure the product of the $e^+e^-\to π^+π^-ψ_2(3823)$ cross section and the branching fraction $\mathcal{B}[ψ_2(3823)\to γχ_{c1}]$. For the first time, resonance structure is observed in the cross section line shape of $e^+e^-\to π^+π^-ψ_2(3823)$ with significances exceeding $5σ$. A fit to data with two coherent Breit-Wigner resonances modeling the $\sqrt{s}$-dependent cross section yields $M(R_1)=4406.9\pm 17.2\pm 4.5$ MeV/$c^2$, $Γ(R_1)=128.1\pm 37.2\pm 2.3$ MeV, and $M(R_2)=4647.9\pm 8.6\pm 0.8$ MeV/$c^2$, $Γ(R_2)=33.1\pm 18.6\pm 4.1$ MeV. Though weakly disfavored by the data, a single resonance with $M(R)=4417.5\pm26.2\pm3.5$ MeV/$c^2$, $Γ(R)=245\pm48\pm13$ MeV is also possible to interpret data. This observation deepens our understanding of the nature of the vector charmoniumlike states. The mass of the $ψ_2(3823)$ state is measured as $(3823.12\pm 0.43\pm 0.13)$ MeV/$c^2$, which is the most precise measurement to date.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of the double Dalitz decay $η'\to e^+e^-e^+e^-$

Based on $(10087 \pm 44)\times10^6$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector at BEPCII, the double Dalitz decay $η'\to e^+e^-e^+e^-$ is observed for the first time via the $J/ψ\toγη'$ decay process. The significance is found to be 5.7$σ$ with systematic uncertainties taken into consideration. Its branching fraction is determined to be $\mathcal{B}(η'\to e^+ e^- e^+ e^-) =(4.5\pm1.0(\mathrm{stat.})\pm0.5(\mathrm{sys.})) \times 10^{-6}$.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of the electromagnetic Dalitz decay $D^{\ast 0}\to D^{0}e^{+}e^{-}$

Based on 3.19 fb$^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ collision data accumulated at the center-of-mass energy 4.178 GeV with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII collider, the electromagnetic Dalitz decay $D^{\ast 0}\to D^{0}e^{+}e^{-}$ is observed for the first time with a statistical significance of $13.2σ$. The ratio of the branching fraction of $D^{\ast 0}\to D^{0}e^{+}e^{-}$ to that of $D^{\ast 0}\to D^{0} γ$ is measured to be $(11.08\pm0.76\pm0.49)\times 10^{-3}$. By using the world average value of the branching fraction of $D^{\ast 0}\to D^{0} γ$, the branching fraction of $D^{\ast 0}\to D^{0}e^{+}e^{-}$ is determined to be $(3.91\pm0.27\pm0.17\pm0.10)\times 10^{-3}$, where the first uncertainty is statistical, the second systematic and the third external branching fractions.

preprint2022arXiv

Observation of the Singly Cabibbo-Suppressed Decay $Λ_{c}^{+} \to nπ^{+}$

The singly Cabibbo-suppressed decay $Λ_{c}^{+} \to nπ^{+}$ is observed for the first time with a statistical significance of $7.3σ$ by using 3.9 $\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ of $e^{+}e^{-}$ collision data collected at center-of-mass energies between 4.612 and 4.699 GeV with the BESIII detector at BEPCII. The branching fraction of $Λ_{c}^{+} \to nπ^{+}$ is measured to be $(6.6\pm1.2_{\rm stat}\pm0.4_{\rm syst})\times 10^{-4}$. By taking the upper limit of branching fractions of $Λ_{c}^{+} \to pπ^0$ from the Belle experiment, the ratio of branching fractions between $Λ_{c}^{+} \to nπ^{+}$ and $Λ_{c}^{+} \to pπ^0$ is calculated to be larger than 7.2 at the 90% confidence level, which disagrees with the current predictions of available phenomenological models. In addition, the branching fractions of the Cabibbo-favored decays $Λ_{c}^{+} \to Λπ^{+}$ and $Λ_{c}^{+} \to Σ^{0}π^{+}$ are measured to be $(1.31\pm0.08_{\rm stat}\pm0.05_{\rm syst})\times 10^{-2}$ and $(1.22\pm0.08_{\rm stat}\pm0.07_{\rm syst})\times 10^{-2}$, respectively, which are consistent with previous results.

preprint2022arXiv

Partial wave analysis of $J/ψ\to γη^{\prime} η^{\prime}$

Using a sample of $(10.09~\pm~0.04)\times10^{9} ~J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector, a partial wave analysis of $J/ψ\toγη^{\prime}η^{\prime}$ is performed. The masses and widths of the observed resonances and their branching fractions are reported. The main contribution is from $J/ψ\rightarrowγf_0(2020)$ with $f_0(2020)\rightarrowη^{\prime}η^{\prime}$, which is found with a significance of greater than 25$σ$. The product branching fraction ${\cal B}\left(J/ψ\rightarrowγf_0(2020)\right)\cdot{\cal B}\left(f_0(2020)\rightarrowη^{\prime}η^{\prime}\right)$ is measured to be $(2.63\pm0.06({\rm stat.})^{+0.31}_{-0.46}({\rm syst.}))\times10^{-4}$.

preprint2022arXiv

PartNet: A Recursive Part Decomposition Network for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Shape Segmentation

Deep learning approaches to 3D shape segmentation are typically formulated as a multi-class labeling problem. Existing models are trained for a fixed set of labels, which greatly limits their flexibility and adaptivity. We opt for top-down recursive decomposition and develop the first deep learning model for hierarchical segmentation of 3D shapes, based on recursive neural networks. Starting from a full shape represented as a point cloud, our model performs recursive binary decomposition, where the decomposition network at all nodes in the hierarchy share weights. At each node, a node classifier is trained to determine the type (adjacency or symmetry) and stopping criteria of its decomposition. The features extracted in higher level nodes are recursively propagated to lower level ones. Thus, the meaningful decompositions in higher levels provide strong contextual cues constraining the segmentations in lower levels. Meanwhile, to increase the segmentation accuracy at each node, we enhance the recursive contextual feature with the shape feature extracted for the corresponding part. Our method segments a 3D shape in point cloud into an unfixed number of parts, depending on the shape complexity, showing strong generality and flexibility. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance, both for fine-grained and semantic segmentation, on the public benchmark and a new benchmark of fine-grained segmentation proposed in this work. We also demonstrate its application for fine-grained part refinements in image-to-shape reconstruction.

preprint2022arXiv

Pay More Attention to History: A Context Modelling Strategy for Conversational Text-to-SQL

Conversational text-to-SQL aims at converting multi-turn natural language queries into their corresponding SQL (Structured Query Language) representations. One of the most intractable problems of conversational text-to-SQL is modelling the semantics of multi-turn queries and gathering the proper information required for the current query. This paper shows that explicitly modelling the semantic changes by adding each turn and the summarization of the whole context can bring better performance on converting conversational queries into SQLs. In particular, we propose two conversational modelling tasks in both turn grain and conversation grain. These two tasks simply work as auxiliary training tasks to help with multi-turn conversational semantic parsing. We conducted empirical studies and achieved new state-of-the-art results on the large-scale open-domain conversational text-to-SQL dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly improves the performance of multi-turn semantic parsing.

preprint2022arXiv

PC-GANs: Progressive Compensation Generative Adversarial Networks for Pan-sharpening

The fusion of multispectral and panchromatic images is always dubbed pansharpening. Most of the available deep learning-based pan-sharpening methods sharpen the multispectral images through a one-step scheme, which strongly depends on the reconstruction ability of the network. However, remote sensing images always have large variations, as a result, these one-step methods are vulnerable to the error accumulation and thus incapable of preserving spatial details as well as the spectral information. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step model for pan-sharpening that sharpens the MS image through the progressive compensation of the spatial and spectral information. Firstly, a deep multiscale guided generative adversarial network is used to preliminarily enhance the spatial resolution of the MS image. Starting from the pre-sharpened MS image in the coarse domain, our approach then progressively refines the spatial and spectral residuals over a couple of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that have reverse architectures. The whole model is composed of triple GANs, and based on the specific architecture, a joint compensation loss function is designed to enable the triple GANs to be trained simultaneously. Moreover, the spatial-spectral residual compensation structure proposed in this paper can be extended to other pan-sharpening methods to further enhance their fusion results. Extensive experiments are performed on different datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

preprint2022arXiv

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces with Outdated Channel State Information: Centralized vs. Distributed Deployments

In this paper, we investigate the performance of an RIS-aided wireless communication system subject to outdated channel state information that may operate in both the near- and far-field regions. In particular, we take two RIS deployment strategies into consideration: (i) the centralized deployment, where all the reflecting elements are installed on a single RIS and (ii) the distributed deployment, where the same number of reflecting elements are placed on multiple RISs. For both deployment strategies, we derive accurate closed-form approximations for the ergodic capacity, and we introduce tight upper and lower bounds for the ergodic capacity to obtain useful design insights. From this analysis, we unveil that an increase of the transmit power, the Rician-K factor, the accuracy of the channel state information and the number of reflecting elements help improve the system performance. Moreover, we prove that the centralized RIS-aided deployment may achieve a higher ergodic capacity as compared with the distributed RIS-aided deployment when the RIS is located near the base station or near the user. In different setups, on the other hand, we prove that the distributed deployment outperforms the centralized deployment. Finally, the analytical results are verified by using Monte Carlo simulations.

preprint2022arXiv

SAGA: Stochastic Whole-Body Grasping with Contact

The synthesis of human grasping has numerous applications including AR/VR, video games and robotics. While methods have been proposed to generate realistic hand-object interaction for object grasping and manipulation, these typically only consider interacting hand alone. Our goal is to synthesize whole-body grasping motions. Starting from an arbitrary initial pose, we aim to generate diverse and natural whole-body human motions to approach and grasp a target object in 3D space. This task is challenging as it requires modeling both whole-body dynamics and dexterous finger movements. To this end, we propose SAGA (StochAstic whole-body Grasping with contAct), a framework which consists of two key components: (a) Static whole-body grasping pose generation. Specifically, we propose a multi-task generative model, to jointly learn static whole-body grasping poses and human-object contacts. (b) Grasping motion infilling. Given an initial pose and the generated whole-body grasping pose as the start and end of the motion respectively, we design a novel contact-aware generative motion infilling module to generate a diverse set of grasp-oriented motions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which is a novel generative framework to synthesize realistic and expressive whole-body motions that approach and grasp randomly placed unseen objects. Code and models are available at https://jiahaoplus.github.io/SAGA/saga.html.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for $X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c0}$ and $X(3872)\toππχ_{c0}$ at BESIII

Using 9.9 fb$^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ collision data collected by the BESIII detector at center-of-mass energies between 4.15 and 4.30 GeV, we search for the processes $e^+e^-\toγX(3872)$ with $X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0χ_{c0}$ and $X(3872)\rightarrowππχ_{c0}$. Depending on the fitting model, the statistical significance for $X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c0}$ ranges from 1.3$σ$ to 2.8$σ$. We set upper limits (at 90\% C.L.) of $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^+π^-J/ψ)}<3.6$, $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^+π^-χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^+π^-J/ψ)}<0.68$, and $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0π^0χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^+π^-J/ψ)}<1.7$. Combined with the BESIII measurement of $X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c1}$, we also set an upper limit of $\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\rightarrowπ^0χ_{c0})}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toπ^0χ_{c1})}<4.4$.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for baryon and lepton number violating decays $D^{0}\to \bar{p}e^{+}$ and $D^{0}\to pe^{-}$

Using an electron-positron collision data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.93~fb$^{-1}$ collected with the BESIII detector at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV, we search for the baryon and lepton number violating decays $D^{0}\to \bar{p}e^{+}$ and $D^{0}\to pe^{-}$. No obvious signals are found with the current statistics. The upper limits on the branching fractions for $D^{0}\to \bar{p}e^{+}$ and $D^{0}\to pe^{-}$ are set to be $1.2\times 10^{-6}$ and $2.2\times 10^{-6}$ at 90\% confidence level, respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for baryon and lepton number violation decay $D^{\pm}\to n(\bar{n})e^{\pm}$

Using a data set of electron-positron collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of ${\rm 2.93~fb^{-1}}$ taken with the BESIII detector at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV, a search for the baryon ($B$) and lepton ($L$) number violating decays $D^{\pm}\to n(\bar{n})e^{\pm}$ is performed. No signal is observed and the upper limits on the branching fractions at the $90\%$ confidence level are set to be $1.43\times10^{-5}$ for the decays $D^{+(-)}\to \bar{n}(n)e^{+(-)}$ with $Δ|B-L|=0$, and $2.91\times10^{-5}$ for the decays $D^{+(-)}\to n(\bar{n})e^{+(-)}$ with $Δ|B-L|=2$ , where $Δ|B-L|$ denotes the change in the difference between baryon and lepton numbers.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for invisible decays of the $Λ$ baryon

A search for invisible decays of the $Λ$ baryon is carried out in the process $J/ψ\toΛ\barΛ$ based on $(1.0087\pm0.0044)\times10^{10}$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector located at the BEPCII storage ring. No signals are found for the invisible decays of $Λ$ baryon, and the upper limit of the branching fraction is determined to be $7.4 \times 10^{-5}$ at the 90% confidence level. This is the first search for invisible decays of baryons; such searches will play an important role in constraining dark sector models related to the baryon asymmetry.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for new hadronic decays of $h_{c}$ and observation of $h_{c}\to p\bar{p}η$

A search for the hadronic decays of the $h_{c}$ meson to the final states $p\bar{p}π^{+}π^{-}π^{0}$, $p\bar{p}η$, and $p\bar{p}π^0$ via the process $ψ(3686) \to π^{0}{h_c}$ is performed using $(4.48\pm0.03)\times10^{8}$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector. The decay channel $h_{c}\to p\bar{p}η$ is observed for the first time with a significance greater than $5σ$ and a branching fraction of $\left( {6.41 \pm 1.74 \pm 0.53 \pm 1.00} \right) \times {10^{ -4}}$, where the uncertainties are statistical, systematic, and that from the branching fraction of $ψ(3686)\toπ^{0}h_{c}$. Strong evidence for the decay ${h_c} \to p\bar{p}{π^+}{π^-}{π^0}$ is found with a significance of $4.9σ$ and a branching fraction of $\left( {3.84 \pm 0.83 \pm0.69} \pm 0.58 \right) \times {10^{ - 3}}$. The significances include systematic uncertainties. No clear signal of the decay $h_c\to p\bar{p}π^{0}$ is found, and an upper limit of $6.59\times 10^{-4}$ on its branching fraction is set at the 90% confidence level.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for the decay $D^{0} \to π^{0} ν\barν$

We present the first experimental search for the rare charm decay $D^{0} \to π^{0} ν\barν$. It is based on an $e^+e^-$ collision sample consisting of $10.6\times10^{6}$ pairs of $D^0\bar{D}^0$ mesons collected by the BESIII detector at $\sqrt{s}$=3.773 GeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.93~fb$^{-1}$. A data-driven method is used to ensure the reliability of the background modeling. No significant $D^{0} \to π^{0} ν\barν$ signal is observed in data and an upper limit of the branching fraction is set to be $2.1\times 10^{-4}$ at the 90$\%$ confidence level. This is the first experimental constraint on charmed-hadron decays into dineutrino final states.

preprint2022arXiv

Search for the decay $h_c\rightarrowπ^0J/ψ$

A search for the decay $h_c\rightarrowπ^0J/ψ$ is performed using a sample of $h_c$ produced in the reaction $e^+e^-\rightarrowπ^+π^-h_c$. The data samples were collected with the BESIII detector at center-of-mass energies between 4.189 and 4.437 GeV, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 11 fb$^{-1}$. No significant signal is observed. Upper limits on the branching ratio $\mathcal{B}(h_c\rightarrowπ^0J/ψ)/\mathcal{B}(h_c\rightarrowγη_c\rightarrowγK^+K^-π^0)$ and on the branching fraction $\mathcal{B}(h_c\rightarrowπ^0J/ψ)$ are determined to be $7.5\times10^{-2}$ and $4.7\times10^{-4}$ at $90\%$ confidence level, respectively. The latter is derived from the former using the measured branching fraction of the normalization channel. This is the first determination of the upper limit of the decay $h_c\rightarrowπ^0J/ψ$.

preprint2022arXiv

Semi-Supervised Co-Analysis of 3D Shape Styles from Projected Lines

We present a semi-supervised co-analysis method for learning 3D shape styles from projected feature lines, achieving style patch localization with only weak supervision. Given a collection of 3D shapes spanning multiple object categories and styles, we perform style co-analysis over projected feature lines of each 3D shape and then backproject the learned style features onto the 3D shapes. Our core analysis pipeline starts with mid-level patch sampling and pre-selection of candidate style patches. Projective features are then encoded via patch convolution. Multi-view feature integration and style clustering are carried out under the framework of partially shared latent factor (PSLF) learning, a multi-view feature learning scheme. PSLF achieves effective multi-view feature fusion by distilling and exploiting consistent and complementary feature information from multiple views, while also selecting style patches from the candidates. Our style analysis approach supports both unsupervised and semi-supervised analysis. For the latter, our method accepts both user-specified shape labels and style-ranked triplets as clustering constraints.We demonstrate results from 3D shape style analysis and patch localization as well as improvements over state-of-the-art methods. We also present several applications enabled by our style analysis.

preprint2022arXiv

Service Modeling and Delay Analysis of Packet Delivery over a Wireless Link

For delay analysis of packet delivery over a wireless link, several novel ideas are introduced. One is to construct an equivalent $G/G/1$ non-lossy queueing model to ease the analysis, enabled by exploiting empirical models of packet error rate, packet service time and packet loss rate obtained from measurement. The second is to exploit a classical queueing theory result to approximate the mean delay. For estimating the delay distribution, the newly developed stochastic network calculus (SNC) theory is made use of, forming the third idea. To enable this SNC based analysis, a stochastic service curve characterization of the link is introduced, relying on a packet service time model obtained from the empirical models. The focused link is a 802.15.4 wireless link. Extensive experimental investigation under a wide range of settings was conducted. The proposed ideas are validated with the experiment results. The validation confirms that the proposed approaches, integrating both empirical and analytical modes, are effective for service modeling and delay analysis. This suggests an integrated approach, now found previously, for quantitative understanding of the delay performance of packet delivery over a wireless link.

preprint2022arXiv

Spatial Kramers-Kronig relation and unidirectional light reflection induced by Rydberg dipole-dipole interactions

Kramers-Kronig (KK) relation between the dispersion and absorption responses of a signal field can be mapped from the frequency domain into the space domain via the dipole-dipole interactions between a homogeneous sample of target atoms and a control atom. This is achieved by establishing an effective two-level configuration for the three-level target atoms in the single-photon far-detuned driving regime while maintaining a high Rydberg excitation for the three-level control atom in the single-photon resonant driving regime. We find in particular that it is viable to realize a dynamically tunable spatial KK relation supporting asymmetric and even unidirectional reflection for appropriate signal frequencies in a controlled range. Taking a periodic lattice of target atoms instead, multiple Bragg scattering can be further incorporated into spatial KK relation to largely enhance the nonzero reflectivity yet without breaking the asymmetric or unidirectional reflection.

preprint2022arXiv

The Wanderings of Odysseus in 3D Scenes

Our goal is to populate digital environments, in which digital humans have diverse body shapes, move perpetually, and have plausible body-scene contact. The core challenge is to generate realistic, controllable, and infinitely long motions for diverse 3D bodies. To this end, we propose generative motion primitives via body surface markers, or GAMMA in short. In our solution, we decompose the long-term motion into a time sequence of motion primitives. We exploit body surface markers and conditional variational autoencoder to model each motion primitive, and generate long-term motion by implementing the generative model recursively. To control the motion to reach a goal, we apply a policy network to explore the generative model's latent space and use a tree-based search to preserve the motion quality during testing. Experiments show that our method can produce more realistic and controllable motion than state-of-the-art data-driven methods. With conventional path-finding algorithms, the generated human bodies can realistically move long distances for a long period of time in the scene. Code is released for research purposes at: \url{https://yz-cnsdqz.github.io/eigenmotion/GAMMA/}

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Modern Card Games with Large-Scale Action Spaces Through Action Representation

Axie infinity is a complicated card game with a huge-scale action space. This makes it difficult to solve this challenge using generic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. We propose a hybrid RL framework to learn action representations and game strategies. To avoid evaluating every action in the large feasible action set, our method evaluates actions in a fixed-size set which is determined using action representations. We compare the performance of our method with the other two baseline methods in terms of their sample efficiency and the winning rates of the trained models. We empirically show that our method achieves an overall best winning rate and the best sample efficiency among the three methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Wireless Energy Transfer in RIS-Aided Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

In future sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks, the Internet-of-Everything (IoE) is expected to provide extremely massive connectivity for small battery-powered devices. Indeed, massive devices with limited energy storage capacity impose persistent energy demand hindering the lifetime of communication networks. As a remedy, wireless energy transfer (WET) is a key technology to address these critical energy supply issues. On the other hand, cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems offer an efficient network architecture to realize the roll-out of the IoE. In this article, we first propose the paradigm of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided CF massive MIMO systems for WET, including its potential application scenarios and system architecture. The four-stage transmission procedure is discussed and analyzed to illustrate the practicality of the architecture. Then we put forward and analyze the hardware design of RIS. Particularly, we discuss the three corresponding operating modes and the amalgamation of WET technology and RIS-aided CF massive MIMO. Representative simulation results are given to confirm the superior performance achieved by our proposed schemes. Also, we investigate the optimal location of deploying multiple RISs to achieve the best system performance. Finally, several important research directions of RIS-aided CF massive MIMO systems with WET are presented to inspire further potential investigation.

preprint2022arXiv

Zero Trust Architecture for 6G Security

The upcoming sixth generation (6G) network is envisioned to be more open and heterogeneous than earlier generations. This challenges conventional security architectures, which typically rely on the construction of a security perimeter at network boundaries. In this article, we propose a software-defined zero trust architecture (ZTA) for 6G networks, which is promising for establishing an elastic and scalable security regime. This architecture achieves secure access control through adaptive collaborations among the involved control domains, and can effectively prevent malicious access behaviors such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, malware spread, and zero-day exploits. We also introduce key design aspects of this architecture and show the simulation results of a case study, which shows the effectiveness and robustness of ZTA for 6G. Furthermore, we discuss open issues to further promote this new architecture.

preprint2021arXiv

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

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

preprint2021arXiv

An Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Method by Mutual Information Maximization

BERT is inefficient for sentence-pair tasks such as clustering or semantic search as it needs to evaluate combinatorially many sentence pairs which is very time-consuming. Sentence BERT (SBERT) attempted to solve this challenge by learning semantically meaningful representations of single sentences, such that similarity comparison can be easily accessed. However, SBERT is trained on corpus with high-quality labeled sentence pairs, which limits its application to tasks where labeled data is extremely scarce. In this paper, we propose a lightweight extension on top of BERT and a novel self-supervised learning objective based on mutual information maximization strategies to derive meaningful sentence embeddings in an unsupervised manner. Unlike SBERT, our method is not restricted by the availability of labeled data, such that it can be applied on different domain-specific corpus. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other unsupervised sentence embedding baselines on common semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks and downstream supervised tasks. It also outperforms SBERT in a setting where in-domain labeled data is not available, and achieves performance competitive with supervised methods on various tasks.

preprint2021arXiv

Cross section measurements of the $e^+e^-\to D^{*+}D^{*-}$ and $e^+e^-\to D^{*+}D^{-}$ processes at center-of-mass energies from 4.085 to 4.600 GeV

The Born cross sections of the $e^+e^-\to D^{*+}D^{*-}$ and $e^+e^-\to D^{*+}D^{-}$ processes are measured using $e^+e^-$ collision data collected with the BESIII experiment at center-of-mass energies from 4.085 to 4.600 GeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $15.7~{\rm fb}^{-1}$. The results are consistent with and more precise than the previous measurements by the Belle, Babar and CLEO collaborations. The measurements are essential for understanding the nature of vector charmonium and charmonium-like states.

preprint2021arXiv

Cross sections for the reactions $e^+e^-\rightarrow K^+K^-π^+π^-(π^0)$, $K^+K^-K^+K^-(π^0)$, $π^+π^-π^+π^-(π^0)$, $p\bar{p}π^+π^-(π^0)$ in the energy region between 3.773 and 4.600 GeV

Using the data samples collected in the energy range from 3.773 to 4.600 GeV with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider, we measure the dressed cross sections as a function of center-of-mass energy for $e^+e^-\rightarrow K^+K^-π^+π^-(π^0)$, $K^+K^-K^+K^-(π^0)$, $π^+π^-π^+π^-(π^0)$, and $p\bar{p}π^+π^-(π^0)$. The cross sections for $e^+e^-\rightarrow K^+K^-K^+K^-π^0$, $p\bar{p}π^+π^-(π^0)$ are the first measurements. Cross sections for the other five channels are much more precise than previous results in this energy region. We also search for charmonium and charmonium-like resonances, such as the $Y(4230)$, decaying into the same final states. We find evidence of the $ψ(4040)$ decaying to $π^+π^-π^+π^-π^0$ with a statistical significance of $3.6σ$. Upper limits are provided for other decays since no clear signals are observed.

preprint2021arXiv

Detecting Mixing Services via Mining Bitcoin Transaction Network with Hybrid Motifs

As the first decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency system allowing people to trade with pseudonymous addresses, Bitcoin has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, the P2P and pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin make transactions on this platform very difficult to track, thus triggering the emergence of various illegal activities in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Particularly, mixing services in Bitcoin, originally designed to enhance transaction anonymity, have been widely employed for money laundry to complicate trailing illicit fund. In this paper, we focus on the detection of the addresses belonging to mixing services, which is an important task for anti-money laundering in Bitcoin. Specifically, we provide a feature-based network analysis framework to identify statistical properties of mixing services from three levels, namely, network level, account level and transaction level. To better characterize the transaction patterns of different types of addresses, we propose the concept of Attributed Temporal Heterogeneous motifs (ATH motifs). Moreover, to deal with the issue of imperfect labeling, we tackle the mixing detection task as a Positive and Unlabeled learning (PU learning) problem and build a detection model by leveraging the considered features. Experiments on real Bitcoin datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our detection model and the importance of hybrid motifs including ATH motifs in mixing detection.

preprint2021arXiv

Formal Verification of Stochastic Systems with ReLU Neural Network Controllers

In this work, we address the problem of formal safety verification for stochastic cyber-physical systems (CPS) equipped with ReLU neural network (NN) controllers. Our goal is to find the set of initial states from where, with a predetermined confidence, the system will not reach an unsafe configuration within a specified time horizon. Specifically, we consider discrete-time LTI systems with Gaussian noise, which we abstract by a suitable graph. Then, we formulate a Satisfiability Modulo Convex (SMC) problem to estimate upper bounds on the transition probabilities between nodes in the graph. Using this abstraction, we propose a method to compute tight bounds on the safety probabilities of nodes in this graph, despite possible over-approximations of the transition probabilities between these nodes. Additionally, using the proposed SMC formula, we devise a heuristic method to refine the abstraction of the system in order to further improve the estimated safety bounds. Finally, we corroborate the efficacy of the proposed method with simulation results considering a robot navigation example and comparison against a state-of-the-art verification scheme.

preprint2021arXiv

JUNO Physics and Detector

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a 20 kton LS detector at 700-m underground. An excellent energy resolution and a large fiducial volume offer exciting opportunities for addressing many important topics in neutrino and astro-particle physics. With 6 years of data, the neutrino mass ordering can be determined at 3-4 sigma and three oscillation parameters can be measured to a precision of 0.6% or better by detecting reactor antineutrinos. With 10 years of data, DSNB could be observed at 3-sigma; a lower limit of the proton lifetime of 8.34e33 years (90% C.L.) can be set by searching for p->nu_bar K^+; detection of solar neutrinos would shed new light on the solar metallicity problem and examine the vacuum-matter transition region. A core-collapse supernova at 10 kpc would lead to ~5000 IBD and ~2000 (300) all-flavor neutrino-proton (electron) scattering events. Geo-neutrinos can be detected with a rate of ~400 events/year. We also summarize the final design of the JUNO detector and the key R&D achievements. All 20-inch PMTs have been tested. The average photon detection efficiency is 28.9% for the 15,000 MCP PMTs and 28.1% for the 5,000 dynode PMTs, higher than the JUNO requirement of 27%. Together with the >20 m attenuation length of LS, we expect a yield of 1345 p.e. per MeV and an effective energy resolution of 3.02%/\sqrt{E (MeV)}$ in simulations. The underwater electronics is designed to have a loss rate <0.5% in 6 years. With degassing membranes and a micro-bubble system, the radon concentration in the 35-kton water pool could be lowered to <10 mBq/m^3. Acrylic panels of radiopurity <0.5 ppt U/Th are produced. The 20-kton LS will be purified onsite. Singles in the fiducial volume can be controlled to ~10 Hz. The JUNO experiment also features a double calorimeter system with 25,600 3-inch PMTs, a LS testing facility OSIRIS, and a near detector TAO.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning to Represent and Predict Sets with Deep Neural Networks

In this thesis, we develop various techniques for working with sets in machine learning. Each input or output is not an image or a sequence, but a set: an unordered collection of multiple objects, each object described by a feature vector. Their unordered nature makes them suitable for modeling a wide variety of data, ranging from objects in images to point clouds to graphs. Deep learning has recently shown great success on other types of structured data, so we aim to build the necessary structures for sets into deep neural networks. The first focus of this thesis is the learning of better set representations (sets as input). Existing approaches have bottlenecks that prevent them from properly modeling relations between objects within the set. To address this issue, we develop a variety of techniques for different scenarios and show that alleviating the bottleneck leads to consistent improvements across many experiments. The second focus of this thesis is the prediction of sets (sets as output). Current approaches do not take the unordered nature of sets into account properly. We determine that this results in a problem that causes discontinuity issues with many set prediction tasks and prevents them from learning some extremely simple datasets. To avoid this problem, we develop two models that properly take the structure of sets into account. Various experiments show that our set prediction techniques can significantly benefit over existing approaches.

preprint2021arXiv

Measurement of Branching Fractions of $J/ψ$ and $ψ(3686)$ decays to $Σ^{+}$ and $\overlineΣ^-$

Using $1310.6\times10^{6}$ $J/ψ$ and $448.1\times10^{6}$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector, the branching fractions of $J/ψ$ and $ψ(3686)$ decays to $Σ^{+}\overlineΣ^{-}$ are measured to be $(10.61 \pm 0.04 \pm 0.36) \times 10^{-4}$ and $(2.52 \pm 0.04 \pm 0.09) \times 10^{-4}$, respectively. In addition, the ratio of $\mathcal{B}(ψ(3686) \rightarrow Σ^{+}\overlineΣ^{-})/\mathcal{B}(J/ψ\rightarrow Σ^{+}\overlineΣ^{-})$ is determined to be $(23.8 \pm 1.1)\%$ which violates the "$12\%$ rule".

preprint2021arXiv

Measurement of cross-section for $e^+e^-\toΞ^-\barΞ^+$ near threshold at BESIII

The Born cross-sections and effective form factors for process $e^+e^-\toΞ^-\barΞ^+$ are measured at eight center-of-mass energies between 2.644 and 3.080 GeV, using a total integrated luminosity of 363.9 pb$^{-1}$ $e^+e^-$ collision data collected with the BESIII detector at BEPCII. After performing a fit to the Born cross-section of $e^+e^-\toΞ^-\barΞ^+$, no significant threshold effect is observed.

preprint2021arXiv

Measurement of the $e^{+}e^{-}\toΣ^{0}\barΣ^{0}$ cross sections at center-of-mass energies from $2.3864$ to $3.0200$ GeV

The Born cross sections of $e^{+}e^{-}\to Σ^{0}\barΣ^{0}$ are measured at center-of-mass energies from $2.3864$ to $3.0200$ GeV using data samples with an integrated luminosity of $328.5$ pb$^{-1}$ collected with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII collider. The analysis makes use of a novel reconstruction method for energies near production threshold, while a single-tag method is employed at other center-of-mass energies. The measured cross sections are consistent with earlier results from BaBar, with a substantially improved precision. The cross-section lineshape can be well described by a perturbative QCD-driven energy function. In addition, the effective form factors of the $Σ^{0}$ baryon are determined. The results provide precise experimental input for testing various theoretical predictions.

preprint2021arXiv

Measurements of $e^+e^-\rightarrow η_{\rm c}π^+ π^-π^0$, $η_{\rm c}π^+ π^-$ and $η_{\rm c}π^0γ$ at $\sqrt{s}$ from 4.18 to 4.60\,GeV, and search for a $Z_{\rm c}$ state close to the $D\bar{D}$ threshold decaying to $η_{\rm c}π$ at $\sqrt{s}$ = 4.23 GeV

We study $η_{\rm c}$ production at center-of-mass energies $\sqrt{s}$ from 4.18 to 4.60 GeV in $e^+e^-$ annihilation data collected with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII storage ring, corresponding to 7.3 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity. We measure the cross sections of the three different exclusive reactions $e^+e^-\rightarrow η_{\rm c}π^+ π^-π^0$, $e^+e^- \rightarrow η_{\rm c}π^+ π^-$, and $e^+e^- \rightarrow η_{\rm c}π^0γ$. We find significant $η_{\rm c}$ production in $e^+e^-\rightarrow η_{\rm c}π^+ π^-π^0$ at $\sqrt{s}$ of 4.23 GeV and 4.26 GeV and observe a significant energy-dependent Born cross section that we measure to be consistent with the production via the intermediate $Y(4260)$ resonance. In addition, we perform a search for a charmonium-like $Z_{\rm c}$ state close to the $D\bar{D}$ threshold that decays to $η_{\rm c}π$, involving ground state charmonium, and observe no signal. Corresponding upper limits on the cross section of $η_{\rm c}$ and $Z_{\rm c}$ production are provided, where the yields are not found to be significant.

preprint2021arXiv

Model independent determination of the spin of the $Ω^{-}$ and its polarization alignment in $ψ(3686)\rightarrowΩ^{-}\barΩ^{+}$

We present an analysis of the process $ψ(3686) \to Ω^- \barΩ^+$ ($Ω^-\to K^-Λ$, $\barΩ^+\to K^+\barΛ$, $Λ\to pπ^-$, $\barΛ\to \bar{p}π^+$) based on a data set of $448\times 10^6$ $ψ(3686)$ decays collected with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII electron-positron collider. The helicity amplitudes for the process $ψ(3686) \to Ω^- \barΩ^+$ and the decay parameters of the subsequent decay $Ω^-\to K^-Λ$ $(\barΩ^+\to K^+\barΛ)$ are measured for the first time by a fit to the angular distribution of the complete decay chain. The branching fraction of $ψ(3686) \to Ω^- \barΩ^+$ is measured to be $(5.82\pm 0.12\pm 0.24)\times 10^{-5}$, with an improved precision compared to previous measurements.

preprint2021arXiv

Observation of $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrowηψ(2S)$ at center-of-mass energies from 4.236 to 4.600 GeV

Using a total of $5.25~{\rm fb}^{-1}$ of $e^{+}e^{-}$ collision data with center-of-mass energies from 4.236 to 4.600 GeV, we report the first observation of the process $e^{+}e^{-}\to ηψ(2S)$ with a statistical significance of $5σ$. The data sets were collected by the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII storage ring. We measure the yield of events integrated over center-of-mass energies and also present the energy dependence of the measured cross section.

preprint2021arXiv

Quantifying the importance of firms by means of reputation and network control

The reputation of firms is largely channeled through their ownership structure. We use this relation to determine reputation spillovers between transnational companies and their participated companies in an ownership network core of 1318 firms. We then apply concepts of network controllability to identify minimum sets of driver nodes (MDS) of 314 firms in this network. The importance of these driver nodes is classified regarding their control contribution, their operating revenue, and their reputation. The latter two are also taken as proxies for the access costs when utilizing firms as driver nodes. Using an enrichment analysis, we find that firms with high reputation maintain the controllability of the network, but rarely become top drivers, whereas firms with medium reputation most likely become top driver nodes. We further show that MDSs with lower access costs can be used to control the reputation dynamics in the whole network.

preprint2021arXiv

Random Shifting Intelligent Reflecting Surface for OTP Encrypted Data Transmission

In this paper, we propose a novel encrypted data transmission scheme using an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to generate secret keys in wireless communication networks. We show that perfectly secure one-time pad (OTP) communications can be established by using a simple random phase shifting of the IRS elements. To maximize the secure transmission rate, we design an optimal time slot allocation algorithm for the IRS secret key generation and the encrypted data transmission phases. Moreover, a theoretical expression of the key generation rate is derived based on Poisson point process (PPP) for the practical scenario when eavesdroppers' channel state information (CSI) is unavailable. Simulation results show that employing our IRS-based scheme can significantly improve the encrypted data transmission performance for a wide-range of wireless channel gains and system parameters.

preprint2021arXiv

Revealing the intrinsic superconducting gap anisotropy in surface-neutralized BaFe$_2$(As$_{0.7}$P$_{0.3}$)$_2$

Alkaline-earth iron arsenide (122) is one of the most studied families of iron-based superconductors, especially for angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. While extensive photoemission results have been obtained, the surface complexity of 122 caused by its charge-non-neutral surface is rarely considered. Here, we show that the surface of 122 can be neutralized by potassium deposition. In potassium-coated BaFe$_2$(As$_{0.7}$P$_{0.3}$)$_2$, the surface-induced spectral broadening is strongly suppressed, and hence the coherent spectra that reflect the intrinsic bulk electronic state recover. This enables the measuring of superconducting gap with unpreceded precision. The result shows the existence of two pairing channels. While the gap anisotropy on the outer hole/electron pockets can be well fitted using an s$_\pm$ gap function, the gap anisotropy on the inner hole/electron shows a clear deviation. Our results provide quantitative constraints for refining theoretical models and also demonstrate an experimental method for revealing the intrinsic electronic properties of 122 in future studies.

preprint2021arXiv

Search for the $X(2370)$ and observation of $η_{c}\toηηη^\prime$ in $J/ψ\toγηηη^{\prime}$

Using a sample of $1.31\times10^{9} ~J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector, we perform a study of $J/ψ\toγηηη^{\prime}$ to search for the $X(2370)$ and $η_{c}$ in the $ηηη^{\prime}$ invariant mass distribution. No significant signal for the $X(2370)$ is observed, and we set an upper limit for the product branching fraction of ${\cal B}(J/ψ\toγX(2370)\cdot{\cal B}(X(2370)\toηηη^{\prime}) < 9.2\times10^{-6}$ at the 90% confidence level. A clear $η_{c}$ signal is observed for the first time, yielding a product branching fraction of ${\cal B}(J/ψ\to γη_{c})\cdot{\cal B}(η_{c}\to ηηη^{\prime}) = (4.86\pm0.62~({\rm stat.})\pm0.45~({\rm sys.}))\times10^{-5}$.

preprint2021arXiv

Secret Key Generation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Wireless Communication Networks

We propose and analyze secret key generation using intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted wireless communication networks. To this end, we first formulate the minimum achievable secret key capacity for an IRS acting as a passive beamformer in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. Next, we develop an optimization framework for the IRS reflecting coefficients based on the secret key capacity lower bound. To derive a tractable and efficient solution, we design and analyze a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm for the proposed optimization. Simulation results show that employing our IRS-based algorithm can significantly improve the secret key generation capacity for a wide-range of wireless channel parameters.

preprint2021arXiv

Weak phases and CP-symmetry tests in sequential decays of entangled double-strange baryons

Using a sample of $1.31\times10^9$ $J/ψ$ events collected with the BESIII detector at the electron-positron collider BEPCII, we analyse the full $J/ψ\to$ $Ξ^-\overlineΞ^+$, $Ξ^-\to Λπ^-$, $Λ\to pπ^-$, $\overlineΞ^+\to\overlineΛπ^+$, $\overlineΛ\to\overline{p}π^+$ decay chain. A new method, exploiting the fact that the $Ξ^-\overlineΞ^+$ pair is entangled and sequentially decaying, and where the complete decay chains are reconstructed, is applied for the first time. This enables precision measurements of the decay parameters for the $Ξ^-\toΛπ^-$ decay ($α_Ξ$, $ϕ_Ξ$) as well as the $\overlineΞ^+\to\overlineΛπ^+$ decay ($\overlineα_Ξ$, $\overlineϕ_Ξ$). From the decay parameters, two independent CP tests were performed, quantified by the observables $A_{\rm CP}^Ξ$ and $Δϕ_Ξ$. Our results, $A_{\rm CP}^Ξ$ = $(6.0\pm13.4\pm5.6)\times10^{-3}$ and $Δϕ_Ξ= (-4.8\pm13.7\pm2.9)\times10^{-3}~{\rm rad}$, are consistent with CP symmetry. Furthermore, our method enables a separation of strong and weak $Ξ\toΛπ$ decay amplitudes. This results in the first direct measurement of the weak phase difference for any baryon decay. The result is found to be $(ξ_{P} - ξ_{S}) = (1.2\pm3.4\pm0.8)\times10^{-2}$ rad and is one of the most precise tests of CP symmetry for strange baryons. The strong phase difference is measured to be $(δ_P - δ_S) = (-4.0\pm3.3\pm1.7)\times10^{-2}$ rad. In addition, we provide an independent measurement of the recently debated $Λ$ decay parameter, $α_Λ = 0.757 \pm 0.011 \pm 0.008 $. The $Λ\overlineΛ$ asymmetry is measured to be $A_{\rm CP}^Λ = (-3.7\pm11.7\pm9.0)\times10^{-3}$.

preprint2020arXiv

$Σ^{+}$ and $\barΣ^-$ polarization in the $J/ψ$ and $ψ(3686)$ decays

From $1310.6\times10^{6}$ $J/ψ$ and $448.1\times10^{6}$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with the BESIII experiment, we report the first observation of $Σ^{+}$ and $\barΣ^{-}$ spin polarization in $e^+e^-\rightarrow J/ψ(ψ(3686)) \rightarrow Σ^{+} \barΣ^{-}$ decays. The relative phases of the form factors $ΔΦ$ have been measured to be $(-15.5\pm0.7\pm0.5)^{\circ}$ and $(21.7\pm4.0\pm0.8)^{\circ}$ with $J/ψ$ and $ψ(3686)$ data, respectively. The non-zero value of $ΔΦ$ allows for a direct and simultaneous measurement of the decay asymmetry parameters of $Σ^{+}\rightarrow p π^{0}~(α_0 = -0.998\pm0.037\pm0.009)$ and $\barΣ^{-}\rightarrow \bar{p} π^{0}~(\barα_0 = 0.990\pm0.037\pm0.011)$, the latter value being determined for the first time. The average decay asymmetry, $(α_{0} - \barα_{0})/2$, is calculated to be $-0.994\pm0.004\pm0.002$. The CP asymmetry $A_{\rm CP,Σ} = (α_0 + \barα_0)/(α_0 - \barα_0) = -0.004\pm0.037\pm0.010$ is extracted for the first time, and is found to be consistent with CP conservation.

preprint2020arXiv

5G Technologies Based Remote E-Health: Architecture, Applications, and Solutions

Currently, many countries are facing the problems of aging population, serious imbalance of medical resources supply and demand, as well as uneven geographical distribution, resulting in a huge demand for remote e-health. Particularly, with invasions of COVID-19, the health of people and even social stability have been challenged unprecedentedly. To contribute to these urgent problems, this article proposes a general architecture of the remote e-health, where the city hospital provides the technical supports and services for remote hospitals. Meanwhile, 5G technologies supported telemedicine is introduced to satisfy the high-speed transmission of massive multimedia medical data, and further realize the sharing of medical resources. Moreover, to turn passivity into initiative to prevent COVID-19, a broad area epidemic prevention and control scheme is also investigated, especially for the remote areas. We discuss their principles and key features, and foresee the challenges, opportunities, and future research trends. Finally, a node value and content popularity based caching strategy is introduced to provide a preliminary solution of the massive data storage and low-latency transmission.

preprint2020arXiv

A class of two or three weights linear codes and their complete weight enumerators

In the past few years, linear codes with few weights and their weight analysis have been widely studied. In this paper, we further investigate a class of two-weight or three-weight linear codes from defining sets and determine their weight and complete weight enumerators by application of the theory of quadratic forms and some special Weil sums over finite fields. Some punctured codes of the discussed linear codes are optimal or almost optimal with respect to the Griesmer bound. This paper generalizes some results in \cite{ZhuXu2017,Jian2019}.

preprint2020arXiv

A complete optical model for liquid-scintillator detectors

Liquid scintillator (LS) is widely used in various neutrino oscillation experiments, in particular, the reactor neutrino experiments. The complex absorption and re-emission processes of optical photons are known to be an important source of the non-linear and non-uniform response of LS detectors. Precise simulation of light propagation in LS is highly desirable to model the detector response and reduce the systematic errors. In this paper, we develop a novel optical model which can completely deal with the competitive photon absorption and subsequent re-emission processes of the LS components. It allows to directly plug in the laboratory measurements of the LS components to model any LS composition. Extensive measurements have been performed to obtain the essential optical parameters for this model. We validate the model with a bench-top experiment featuring a small LS volume. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for any given detector geometry, this model provides the capability of optimizing the LS recipe to maximize the light collection. It is valuable for designing future LS-based detectors and improving the agreement between Monte Carlo and data for current neutrino experiments.

preprint2020arXiv

Attention Guided Graph Convolutional Networks for Relation Extraction

Dependency trees convey rich structural information that is proven useful for extracting relations among entities in text. However, how to effectively make use of relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information from the dependency trees remains a challenging research question. Existing approaches employing rule based hard-pruning strategies for selecting relevant partial dependency structures may not always yield optimal results. In this work, we propose Attention Guided Graph Convolutional Networks (AGGCNs), a novel model which directly takes full dependency trees as inputs. Our model can be understood as a soft-pruning approach that automatically learns how to selectively attend to the relevant sub-structures useful for the relation extraction task. Extensive results on various tasks including cross-sentence n-ary relation extraction and large-scale sentence-level relation extraction show that our model is able to better leverage the structural information of the full dependency trees, giving significantly better results than previous approaches.

preprint2020arXiv

Better Set Representations For Relational Reasoning

Incorporating relational reasoning into neural networks has greatly expanded their capabilities and scope. One defining trait of relational reasoning is that it operates on a set of entities, as opposed to standard vector representations. Existing end-to-end approaches typically extract entities from inputs by directly interpreting the latent feature representations as a set. We show that these approaches do not respect set permutational invariance and thus have fundamental representational limitations. To resolve this limitation, we propose a simple and general network module called a Set Refiner Network (SRN). We first use synthetic image experiments to demonstrate how our approach effectively decomposes objects without explicit supervision. Then, we insert our module into existing relational reasoning models and show that respecting set invariance leads to substantial gains in prediction performance and robustness on several relational reasoning tasks.

preprint2020arXiv

Binary linear codes with few weights from Boolean functions

Boolean functions have very nice applications in cryptography and coding theory, which have led to a lot of research focusing on their applications. The objective of this paper is to construct binary linear codes with few weights from the defining set, which is defined by some special Boolean functions and some additional restrictions. First, we provide two general constructions of binary linear codes with three or four weights from Boolean functions with at most three Walsh transform values and determine the parameters of their dual codes. Then many classes of binary linear codes with explicit weight enumerators are obtained. Some binary linear codes and their duals obtained are optimal or almost optimal. The binary linear codes obtained in this paper may have a special interest in secret sharing schemes, association schemes, strongly regular graphs.

preprint2020arXiv

Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey

Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping the incumbent industry to smart industry featured with data-driven decision-making. However, intrinsic features of IoT result in a number of challenges such as decentralization, poor interoperability, privacy and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain technology brings the opportunities in addressing the challenges of IoT. In this paper, we investigate the integration of blockchain technology with IoT. We name such synthesis of blockchain and IoT as Blockchain of Things (BCoT). This paper presents an in-depth survey of BCoT and discusses the insights of this new paradigm. In particular, we first briefly introduce IoT and discuss the challenges of IoT. Then we give an overview of blockchain technology. We next concentrate on introducing the convergence of blockchain and IoT and presenting the proposal of BCoT architecture. We further discuss the issues about using blockchain for 5G beyond in IoT as well as industrial applications of BCoT. Finally, we outline the open research directions in this promising area.

preprint2020arXiv

Bremsstrahlung emission and plasma characterization driven by moderately relativistic laser-plasma interactions

Relativistic electrons generated by the interaction of petawatt-class short laser pulses with solid targets can be used to generate bright X-rays via bremsstrahlung. The efficiency of laser energy transfer into these electrons depends on multiple parameters including the focused intensity and pre-plasma level. This paper reports experimental results from the interaction of a high intensity petawatt-class glass laser pulses with solid targets at a maximum intensity of $10^{19}$ W/cm$^2$. In-situ measurements of specularly reflected light are used to provide an upper bound of laser absorption and to characterize focused laser intensity, the pre-plasma level and the generation mechanism of second harmonic light. The measured spectrum of electrons and bremsstrahlung radiation provide information about the efficiency of laser energy transfer.

preprint2020arXiv

Decentralized Blockchain for Privacy-Preserving Large-Scale Contact Tracing

Activity-tracking applications and location-based services using short-range communication (SRC) techniques have been abruptly demanded in the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for automated contact tracing. The attention from both public and policy keeps raising on related practical problems, including \textit{1) how to protect data security and location privacy? 2) how to efficiently and dynamically deploy SRC Internet of Thing (IoT) witnesses to monitor large areas?} To answer these questions, in this paper, we propose a decentralized and permissionless blockchain protocol, named \textit{Bychain}. Specifically, 1) a privacy-preserving SRC protocol for activity-tracking and corresponding generalized block structure is developed, by connecting an interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol and the key escrow mechanism. As a result, connections between personal identity and the ownership of on-chain location information are decoupled. Meanwhile, the owner of the on-chain location data can still claim its ownership without revealing the private key to anyone else. 2) An artificial potential field-based incentive allocation mechanism is proposed to incentivize IoT witnesses to pursue the maximum monitoring coverage deployment. We implemented and evaluated the proposed blockchain protocol in the real-world using the Bluetooth 5.0. The storage, CPU utilization, power consumption, time delay, and security of each procedure and performance of activities are analyzed. The experiment and security analysis is shown to provide a real-world performance evaluation.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Fresh Data Collection in UAV-assisted IoT Networks

Due to the flexibility and low operational cost, dispatching unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collect information from distributed sensors is expected to be a promising solution in Internet of Things (IoT), especially for time-critical applications. How to maintain the information freshness is a challenging issue. In this paper, we investigate the fresh data collection problem in UAV-assisted IoT networks. Particularly, the UAV flies towards the sensors to collect status update packets within a given duration while maintaining a non-negative residual energy. We formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to find the optimal flight trajectory of the UAV and transmission scheduling of the sensors that minimizes the weighted sum of the age of information (AoI). A UAV-assisted data collection algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is further proposed to overcome the curse of dimensionality. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DRL-based algorithm can significantly reduce the weighted sum of the AoI compared to other baseline algorithms.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Set Prediction Networks

Current approaches for predicting sets from feature vectors ignore the unordered nature of sets and suffer from discontinuity issues as a result. We propose a general model for predicting sets that properly respects the structure of sets and avoids this problem. With a single feature vector as input, we show that our model is able to auto-encode point sets, predict the set of bounding boxes of objects in an image, and predict the set of attributes of these objects.

preprint2020arXiv

Dense Small Satellite Networks for Modern Terrestrial Communication Systems: Benefits, Infrastructure, and Technologies

Dense small satellite networks (DSSN) in low earth orbits (LEO) can benefit several mobile terrestrial communication systems (MTCS). However, the potential benefits can only be achieved through careful consideration of DSSN infrastructure and identification of suitable DSSN technologies. In this paper, we discuss several components of DSSN infrastructure including satellite formations, orbital paths, inter-satellite communication (ISC) links, and communication architectures for data delivery from source to destination. We also review important technologies for DSSN as well as the challenges involved in the use of these technologies in DSSN. Several open research directions to enhance the benefits of DSSN for MTCS are also identified in the paper. A case study showing the integration benefits of DSSN in MTCS is also included.

preprint2020arXiv

Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Load Scheduling in Residential Smart Grids

The power consumption of households has been constantly growing over the years. To cope with this growth, intelligent management of the consumption profile of the households is necessary, such that the households can save the electricity bills, and the stress to the power grid during peak hours can be reduced. However, implementing such a method is challenging due to the existence of randomness in the electricity price and the consumption of the appliances. To address this challenge, we employ a model-free method for the households which works with limited information about the uncertain factors. More specifically, the interactions between households and the power grid can be modeled as a non-cooperative stochastic game, where the electricity price is viewed as a stochastic variable. To search for the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game, we adopt a method based on distributed deep reinforcement learning. Also, the proposed method can preserve the privacy of the households. We then utilize real-world data from Pecan Street Inc., which contains the power consumption profile of more than 1; 000 households, to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. In average, the results reveal that we can achieve around 12% reduction on peak-to-average ratio (PAR) and 11% reduction on load variance. With this approach, the operation cost of the power grid and the electricity cost of the households can be reduced.

preprint2020arXiv

Electronic Origin for the Enhanced Thermoelectric Efficiency of Cu2Se

Thermoelectric materials (TMs) can uniquely convert waste heat into electricity, which provides a potential solution for the global energy crisis that is increasingly severe. Bulk Cu2Se, with ionic conductivity of Cu ions, exhibits a significant enhancement of its thermoelectric figure of merit zT by a factor of ~3 near its structural transition around 400 K. Here, we show a systematic study of the electronic structure of Cu2Se and its temperature evolution using high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Upon heating across the structural transition, the electronic states near the corner of the Brillouin zone gradually disappear, while the bands near the centre of Brillouin zone shift abruptly towards high binding energies and develop an energy gap. Interestingly, the observed band reconstruction well reproduces the temperature evolution of the Seebeck coefficient of Cu2Se, providing an electronic origin for the drastic enhancement of the thermoelectric performance near 400 K. The current results not only bridge among structural phase transition, electronic structures, and thermoelectric properties in a condensed matter system, but also provide valuable insights into the search and design of new generation of thermoelectric materials.

preprint2020arXiv

Erratum to "Measurement of the $e^+e^-\toπ^+π^-$ cross section between 600 and 900 MeV using initial state radiation"

In Phys. Lett. B 753, 629-638 (2016) [arXiv:1507.08188] the BESIII collaboration published a cross section measurement of the process $e^+e^-\to π^+ π^-$ in the energy range between 600 and 900 MeV. In this erratum we report a corrected evaluation of the statistical errors in terms of a fully propagated covariance matrix. The correction also yields a reduced statistical uncertainty for the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, which now reads as $a_μ^{ππ\mathrm{, LO}}(600 - 900\,\mathrm{MeV}) = (368.2 \pm 1.5_{\rm stat} \pm 3.3_{\rm syst})\times 10^{-10}$. The central values of the cross section measurement and of $a_μ^{ππ\mathrm{, LO}}$, as well as the systematic uncertainties remain unchanged.

preprint2020arXiv

Estimation of genome size using k-mer frequencies from corrected long reads

The third-generation long reads sequencing technologies, such as PacBio and Nanopore, have great advantages over second-generation Illumina sequencing in de novo assembly studies. However, due to the inherent low base accuracy, third-generation sequencing data cannot be used for k-mer counting and estimating genomic profile based on k-mer frequencies. Thus, in current genome projects, second-generation data is also necessary for accurately determining genome size and other genomic characteristics. We show that corrected third-generation data can be used to count k-mer frequencies and estimate genome size reliably, in replacement of using second-generation data. Therefore, future genome projects can depend on only one sequencing technology to finish both assembly and k-mer analysis, which will largely decrease sequencing cost in both time and money. Moreover, we present a fast light-weight tool kmerfreq and use it to perform all the k-mer counting tasks in this work. We have demonstrated that corrected third-generation sequencing data can be used to estimate genome size and developed a new open-source C/C++ k-mer counting tool, kmerfreq, which is freely available at https://github.com/fanagislab/kmerfreq.

preprint2020arXiv

Feasibility and physics potential of detecting $^8$B solar neutrinos at JUNO

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory~(JUNO) features a 20~kt multi-purpose underground liquid scintillator sphere as its main detector. Some of JUNO's features make it an excellent experiment for $^8$B solar neutrino measurements, such as its low-energy threshold, its high energy resolution compared to water Cherenkov detectors, and its much large target mass compared to previous liquid scintillator detectors. In this paper we present a comprehensive assessment of JUNO's potential for detecting $^8$B solar neutrinos via the neutrino-electron elastic scattering process. A reduced 2~MeV threshold on the recoil electron energy is found to be achievable assuming the intrinsic radioactive background $^{238}$U and $^{232}$Th in the liquid scintillator can be controlled to 10$^{-17}$~g/g. With ten years of data taking, about 60,000 signal and 30,000 background events are expected. This large sample will enable an examination of the distortion of the recoil electron spectrum that is dominated by the neutrino flavor transformation in the dense solar matter, which will shed new light on the tension between the measured electron spectra and the predictions of the standard three-flavor neutrino oscillation framework. If $Δm^{2}_{21}=4.8\times10^{-5}~(7.5\times10^{-5})$~eV$^{2}$, JUNO can provide evidence of neutrino oscillation in the Earth at the about 3$σ$~(2$σ$) level by measuring the non-zero signal rate variation with respect to the solar zenith angle. Moveover, JUNO can simultaneously measure $Δm^2_{21}$ using $^8$B solar neutrinos to a precision of 20\% or better depending on the central value and to sub-percent precision using reactor antineutrinos. A comparison of these two measurements from the same detector will help elucidate the current tension between the value of $Δm^2_{21}$ reported by solar neutrino experiments and the KamLAND experiment.

preprint2020arXiv

First Measurements of $χ_{cJ}\rightarrow Σ^{-} \barΣ^{+} (J = 0, 1, 2)$ Decays

We measured the branching fractions of the decays $χ_{cJ}\toΣ^{-}\barΣ^{+}$ for the first time using the final states $n\bar{n}π^{+}π^{-}$. The data sample exploited here is $448.1\times10^{6}$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with BESIII. We find $\mathcal{B}(χ_{cJ}\rightarrowΣ^{-}\barΣ^{+}) = (51.3\pm2.4\pm4.1)\times10^{-5},\, (5.7\pm1.4\pm0.6)\times10^{-5},\, \rm{and}~ (4.4\pm1.7\pm0.5)\times10^{-5}$, for $J=0,1,2$, respectively, where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second systematic.

preprint2020arXiv

Frontal Low-rank Random Tensors for Fine-grained Action Segmentation

Fine-grained action segmentation in long untrimmed videos is an important task for many applications such as surveillance, robotics, and human-computer interaction. To understand subtle and precise actions within a long time period, second-order information (e.g. feature covariance) or higher is reported to be effective in the literature. However, extracting such high-order information is considerably non-trivial. In particular, the dimensionality increases exponentially with the information order, and hence gaining more representation power also increases the computational cost and the risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose an approach to representing high-order information for temporal action segmentation via a simple yet effective bilinear form. Specifically, our contributions are: (1) From the multilinear perspective, we derive a bilinear form of low complexity, assuming that the three-way tensor has low-rank frontal slices. (2) Rather than learning the tensor entries from data, we sample the entries from different underlying distributions, and prove that the underlying distribution influences the information order. (3) We employed our bilinear form as an intermediate layer in state-of-the-art deep neural networks, enabling to represent high-order information in complex deep models effectively and efficiently. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed bilinear form outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on the challenging temporal action segmentation task. One can see our project page for data, model and code: \url{https://vlg.inf.ethz.ch/projects/BilinearTCN/}.

preprint2020arXiv

FSPool: Learning Set Representations with Featurewise Sort Pooling

Traditional set prediction models can struggle with simple datasets due to an issue we call the responsibility problem. We introduce a pooling method for sets of feature vectors based on sorting features across elements of the set. This can be used to construct a permutation-equivariant auto-encoder that avoids this responsibility problem. On a toy dataset of polygons and a set version of MNIST, we show that such an auto-encoder produces considerably better reconstructions and representations. Replacing the pooling function in existing set encoders with FSPool improves accuracy and convergence speed on a variety of datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Generating 3D People in Scenes without People

We present a fully automatic system that takes a 3D scene and generates plausible 3D human bodies that are posed naturally in that 3D scene. Given a 3D scene without people, humans can easily imagine how people could interact with the scene and the objects in it. However, this is a challenging task for a computer as solving it requires that (1) the generated human bodies to be semantically plausible within the 3D environment (e.g. people sitting on the sofa or cooking near the stove), and (2) the generated human-scene interaction to be physically feasible such that the human body and scene do not interpenetrate while, at the same time, body-scene contact supports physical interactions. To that end, we make use of the surface-based 3D human model SMPL-X. We first train a conditional variational autoencoder to predict semantically plausible 3D human poses conditioned on latent scene representations, then we further refine the generated 3D bodies using scene constraints to enforce feasible physical interaction. We show that our approach is able to synthesize realistic and expressive 3D human bodies that naturally interact with 3D environment. We perform extensive experiments demonstrating that our generative framework compares favorably with existing methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We believe that our scene-conditioned 3D human generation pipeline will be useful for numerous applications; e.g. to generate training data for human pose estimation, in video games and in VR/AR. Our project page for data and code can be seen at: \url{https://vlg.inf.ethz.ch/projects/PSI/}.

preprint2020arXiv

Inclusive charged and neutral particle multiplicity distributions in $χ_{cJ}$ and $J/ψ$ decays

Using a sample of 106 million $ψ(3686)$ decays, $ψ(3686) \to γχ_{cJ} (J = 0, 1, 2)$ and $ψ(3686) \to γχ_{cJ}, χ_{cJ} \to γJ/ψ$ $(J = 1, 2)$ events are utilized to study inclusive $χ_{cJ} \to$ anything, $χ_{cJ} \to$ hadrons, and $J/ψ\to$ anything distributions, including distributions of the number of charged tracks, electromagnetic calorimeter showers, and $π^0$s, and to compare them with distributions obtained from the BESIII Monte Carlo simulation. Information from each Monte Carlo simulated decay event is used to construct matrices connecting the detected distributions to the input predetection "produced" distributions. Assuming these matrices also apply to data, they are used to predict the analogous produced distributions of the decay events. Using these, the charged particle multiplicities are compared with results from MARK I. Further, comparison of the distributions of the number of photons in data with those in Monte Carlo simulation indicates that G-parity conservation should be taken into consideration in the simulation.

preprint2020arXiv

Intelligent Charging Management of Electric Vehicles Considering Dynamic User Behavior and Renewable Energy: A Stochastic Game Approach

Uncoordinated charging of a rapidly growing number of electric vehicles (EVs) and the uncertainty associated with renewable energy resources may constitute a critical issue for the electric mobility (E-Mobility) in the transportation system especially during peak hours. To overcome this dire scenario, we introduce a stochastic game to study the complex interactions between the power grid and charging stations. In this context, existing studies have not taken into account the dynamics of customers' preference on charging parameters. In reality, however, the choice of the charging parameters may vary over time, as the customers may change their charging preferences. We model this behavior of customers with another stochastic game. Moreover, we define a quality of service (QoS) index to reflect how the charging process influences customers' choices on charging parameters. We also develop an online algorithm to reach the Nash equilibria for both stochastic games. Then, we utilize real data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm. The results reveal that the electricity cost with the proposed method can result in a saving of about 20% compared to the benchmark method, while also yielding a higher QoS in terms of charging and waiting time. Our results can be employed as guidelines for charging service providers to make efficient decisions under uncertainty relative to power generation of renewable energy.

preprint2020arXiv

Intervention scenarios to enhance knowledge transfer in a network of firm

We investigate a multi-agent model of firms in an R\&D network. Each firm is characterized by its knowledge stock $x_{i}(t)$, which follows a non-linear dynamics. It can grow with the input from other firms, i.e., by knowledge transfer, and decays otherwise. Maintaining interactions is costly. Firms can leave the network if their expected knowledge growth is not realized, which may cause other firms to also leave the network. The paper discusses two bottom-up intervention scenarios to prevent, reduce, or delay cascades of firms leaving. The first one is based on the formalism of network controllability, in which driver nodes are identified and subsequently incentivized, by reducing their costs. The second one combines node interventions and network interventions. It proposes the controlled removal of a single firm and the random replacement of firms leaving. This allows to generate small cascades, which prevents the occurrence of large cascades. We find that both approaches successfully mitigate cascades and thus improve the resilience of the R\&D network.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Posterior and Prior for Uncertainty Modeling in Person Re-Identification

Data uncertainty in practical person reID is ubiquitous, hence it requires not only learning the discriminative features, but also modeling the uncertainty based on the input. This paper proposes to learn the sample posterior and the class prior distribution in the latent space, so that not only representative features but also the uncertainty can be built by the model. The prior reflects the distribution of all data in the same class, and it is the trainable model parameters. While the posterior is the probability density of a single sample, so it is actually the feature defined on the input. We assume that both of them are in Gaussian form. To simultaneously model them, we put forward a distribution loss, which measures the KL divergence from the posterior to the priors in the manner of supervised learning. In addition, we assume that the posterior variance, which is essentially the uncertainty, is supposed to have the second-order characteristic. Therefore, a $Σ-$net is proposed to compute it by the high order representation from its input. Extensive experiments have been carried out on Market1501, DukeMTMC, MARS and noisy dataset as well.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Reinforced Attentional Representation for End-to-End Visual Tracking

Although numerous recent tracking approaches have made tremendous advances in the last decade, achieving high-performance visual tracking remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end network model to learn reinforced attentional representation for accurate target object discrimination and localization. We utilize a novel hierarchical attentional module with long short-term memory and multi-layer perceptrons to leverage both inter- and intra-frame attention to effectively facilitate visual pattern emphasis. Moreover, we incorporate a contextual attentional correlation filter into the backbone network to make our model trainable in an end-to-end fashion. Our proposed approach not only takes full advantage of informative geometries and semantics but also updates correlation filters online without fine-tuning the backbone network to enable the adaptation of variations in the target object's appearance. Extensive experiments conducted on several popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective and computationally efficient.

preprint2020arXiv

Measurement of Singly Cabibbo-Suppressed Decays $D \to ωππ$

Using 2.93 fb$^{-1}$ of $e^{+}e^{-}$ collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV by the BESIII detector at the BEPCII, we measure the branching fractions of the singly Cabibbo-suppressed decays $D \to ωππ$ to be $\mathcal{B}(D^0 \to ωπ^+π^-) = (1.33 \pm 0.16 \pm 0.12)\times 10^{-3}$ and $\mathcal{B}(D^+ \to ωπ^+π^0) =(3.87 \pm 0.83 \pm 0.25)\times 10^{-3}$, where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second ones systematic. The statistical significances are $12.9σ$ and $7.7 σ$, respectively. The precision of $\mathcal{B}(D^0 \to ωπ^+π^-)$ is improved by a factor of 2.1 over the CLEO measurement, and $\mathcal{B}(D^+ \to ωπ^+π^0)$ is measured for the first time. No significant signal of $\mathcal{B}(D^0 \to ωπ^0π^0)$ is observed, and the upper limit on the branching fraction is $\mathcal{B}(D^0 \to ωπ^0π^0) < 1.10 \times 10^{-3}$ at the $90\%$ confidence level. The branching fractions of $D\to ηππ$ are also measured and consistent with existing results.

preprint2020arXiv

Measurement of the Born Cross Sections for $e^+e^-\to D_s^+ D_{s1}(2460)^- +c.c.$ and $e^+e^-\to D_s^{\ast +} D_{s1}(2460)^- +c.c.$

The processes $e^+e^-\to D_s^+ D_{s1}(2460)^- +c.c.$ and $e^+e^-\to D_s^{\ast +} D_{s1}(2460)^- +c.c.$ are studied for the first time using data samples collected with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider. The Born cross sections of $e^+e^-\to D_s^+ D_{s1}(2460)^- +c.c.$ at nine center-of-mass energies between 4.467\,GeV and 4.600\,GeV and those of $e^+e^-\to D_s^{\ast +} D_{s1}(2460)^- +c.c.$ at ${\sqrt s}=$ 4.590\,GeV and 4.600\,GeV are measured. No obvious charmonium or charmonium-like structure is seen in the measured cross sections.

preprint2020arXiv

Model-theoretic Characterizations of Existential Rule Languages

Existential rules, a.k.a. dependencies in databases, and Datalog+/- in knowledge representation and reasoning recently, are a family of important logical languages widely used in computer science and artificial intelligence. Towards a deep understanding of these languages in model theory, we establish model-theoretic characterizations for a number of existential rule languages such as (disjunctive) embedded dependencies, tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs), (frontier-)guarded TGDs and linear TGDs. All these characterizations hold for arbitrary structures, and most of them also work on the class of finite structures. As a natural application of these characterizations, complexity bounds for the rewritability of above languages are also identified.

preprint2020arXiv

NASE: Learning Knowledge Graph Embedding for Link Prediction via Neural Architecture Search

Link prediction is the task of predicting missing connections between entities in the knowledge graph (KG). While various forms of models are proposed for the link prediction task, most of them are designed based on a few known relation patterns in several well-known datasets. Due to the diversity and complexity nature of the real-world KGs, it is inherently difficult to design a model that fits all datasets well. To address this issue, previous work has tried to use Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) to search for the best model for a given dataset. However, their search space is limited only to bilinear model families. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework for the link prediction task. First, the embeddings of the input triplet are refined by the Representation Search Module. Then, the prediction score is searched within the Score Function Search Module. This framework entails a more general search space, which enables us to take advantage of several mainstream model families, and thus it can potentially achieve better performance. We relax the search space to be continuous so that the architecture can be optimized efficiently using gradient-based search strategies. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with several state-of-the-art approaches.

preprint2020arXiv

Nonparametric Bayesian Deconvolution of a Symmetric Unimodal Density

We consider nonparametric measurement error density deconvolution subject to heteroscedastic measurement errors as well as symmetry about zero and shape constraints, in particular unimodality. The problem is motivated by applications where the observed data are estimated effect sizes from regressions on multiple factors, where the target is the distribution of the true effect sizes. We exploit the fact that any symmetric and unimodal density can be expressed as a mixture of symmetric uniform densities, and model the mixing density in a new way using a Dirichlet process location-mixture of Gamma distributions. We do the computations within a Bayesian context, describe a simple scalable implementation that is linear in the sample size, and show that the estimate of the unknown target density is consistent. Within our application context of regression effect sizes, the target density is likely to have a large probability near zero (the near null effects) coupled with a heavy-tailed distribution (the actual effects). Simulations show that unlike standard deconvolution methods, our Constrained Bayesian Deconvolution method does a much better job of reconstruction of the target density. Applications to a genome-wise association study (GWAS) and microarray data reveal similar results.

preprint2020arXiv

Observation of a resonant structure in $e^{+}e^{-} \to ωη$ and another in $e^{+}e^{-} \to ωπ^{0}$ at center-of-mass energies between 2.00 and 3.08 GeV

Born cross sections for the processes $e^+e^- \to ωη$ and $e^+e^- \to ωπ^{0}$ have been determined for center-of-mass energies between 2.00 and 3.08 GeV with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider. The results obtained in this work are consistent with previous measurements but with improved precision. Two resonant structures are observed. In the $e^{+}e^{-} \to ωη$ cross sections, a resonance with a mass of $(2179 \pm 21 \pm 3)\text{MeV}/c^2$ and a width of $(89 \pm 28 \pm 5)\text{MeV}$ is observed with a significance of 6.1$σ$. Its properties are consistent with the $ϕ(2170)$. In the $e^{+}e^{-} \toωπ^{0}$ cross sections, a resonance denoted $Y(2040)$ is observed with a significance of more than 10$σ$. Its mass and width are determined to be $(2034 \pm 13 \pm 9)\text{MeV}/c^2$ and $(234 \pm 30 \pm 25)\text{MeV}$, respectively, where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second ones are systematic.

preprint2020arXiv

Observation of a structure in $e^+e^- \to ϕη^{\prime}$ at $\sqrt{s}$ from 2.05 to 3.08 GeV

The process $e^{+}e^{-} \to ϕη^{\prime}$ has been studied for the first time in detail using data sample collected with the BESIII detector at the BEPCII collider at center of mass energies from 2.05 to 3.08 GeV. A resonance with quantum numbers $J^{PC}=1^{--}$ is observed with mass $M$ = (2177.5 $\pm$ 4.8 (stat) $\pm$ 19.5 (syst)) MeV/${ \it{c}^{\mathrm{2}}}$ and width $Γ$ = (149.0 $\pm$ 15.6 (stat) $\pm$ 8.9 (syst)) MeV with a statistical significance larger than 10$σ$. The observed structure could be identified with the $ϕ(2170)$, then the ratio of partial width between the $ϕη^{\prime}$ by BESIII and $ϕη$ by BABAR is ($\mathcal{B}^{R}_{ϕη}Γ^{R}_{ee})/{(\mathcal{B}^{R}_{ϕη^{\prime}}Γ^{R}_{ee})}$ = 0.23 $\pm$ 0.10 (stat) $\pm$ 0.18 (syst), which is smaller than the prediction of the $s\bar{s}g$ hybrid models by several orders of magnitude.

preprint2020arXiv

Observation of the $Y(4220)$ and $Y(4360)$ in the process $e^{+}e^{-} \to ηJ/ψ$

The cross sections of the process $e^{+}e^{-} \to ηJ/ψ$ at center-of-mass energies ($\sqrt{s}$) between 3.81 and 4.60 GeV are measured with high precision by using data samples collected with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII storage ring. Three structures are observed by analyzing the lineshape of the measured cross sections, and a maximum-likelihood fit including three resonances is performed by assuming the lowest lying structure is the $ψ(4040)$. For the other resonances, we obtain masses of $(4218.7 \pm 4.0 \pm 2.5)$ and $(4380.4 \pm 14.2 \pm 1.8)$ MeV/c$^{2}$ with corresponding widths of $(82.5 \pm 5.9 \pm 0.5)$ and $(147.0 \pm 63.0 \pm 25.8)$ MeV, respectively, where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second ones systematic. The measured resonant parameters are consistent with those of the $Y(4220)$ and $Y(4360)$ from pr evious measurements of different final states. For the first time, we observe the decays of the $Y(4220)$ and $Y(4360)$ into $ηJ/ψ$ final states.

preprint2020arXiv

On the Performance of Dual-Hop Systems over Mixed FSO/mmWave Fading Channels

Free-space optical (FSO) links are considered as a cost-efficient way to fill the backhaul/fronthaul connectivity gap between millimeter wave (mmWave) access networks and optical fiber based central networks. In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end performance of dual-hop mixed FSO/mmWave systems to address this combined use. The FSO link is modeled as a Gamma-Gamma fading channel using both heterodyne detection and indirect modulation/direct detection with pointing error impairments, while the mmWave link experiences the fluctuating two-ray fading. Under the assumption of both amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying, we derive novel closed-form expressions for the outage probability, average bit error probability (BER), ergodic capacity, effective capacity in terms of bivariate Fox's $H$-functions. Additionally, we discuss the diversity gain and provide other important engineering insights based on the high signal-to-noise-ratio analysis of the outage probability and the average BER. Finally, all our analytical results are verified using Monte Carlo simulations.

preprint2020arXiv

Perpetual Motion: Generating Unbounded Human Motion

The modeling of human motion using machine learning methods has been widely studied. In essence it is a time-series modeling problem involving predicting how a person will move in the future given how they moved in the past. Existing methods, however, typically have a short time horizon, predicting a only few frames to a few seconds of human motion. Here we focus on long-term prediction; that is, generating long sequences (potentially infinite) of human motion that is plausible. Furthermore, we do not rely on a long sequence of input motion for conditioning, but rather, can predict how someone will move from as little as a single pose. Such a model has many uses in graphics (video games and crowd animation) and vision (as a prior for human motion estimation or for dataset creation). To address this problem, we propose a model to generate non-deterministic, \textit{ever-changing}, perpetual human motion, in which the global trajectory and the body pose are cross-conditioned. We introduce a novel KL-divergence term with an implicit, unknown, prior. We train this using a heavy-tailed function of the KL divergence of a white-noise Gaussian process, allowing latent sequence temporal dependency. We perform systematic experiments to verify its effectiveness and find that it is superior to baseline methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Placement and Routing Optimization for Automated Inspection with UAVs: A Study in Offshore Wind Farm

Wind power is a clean and widely deployed alternative to reducing our dependence on fossil fuel power generation. Under this trend, more turbines will be installed in wind farms. However, the inspection of the turbines in an offshore wind farm is a challenging task because of the harsh environment (e.g., rough sea, strong wind, and so on) that leads to high risk for workers who need to work at considerable height. Also, inspecting increasing number of turbines requires long man hours. In this regard, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can play an important role for automated inspection of the turbines for the operator, thus reducing the inspection time, man hours, and correspondingly the risk for the workers. In this case, the optimal number of UAVs enough to inspect all turbines in the wind farm is a crucial parameter. In addition, finding the optimal path for the UAVs' routes for inspection is also important and is equally challenging. In this paper, we formulate a placement optimization problem to minimize the number of UAVs in the wind farm and a routing optimization problem to minimize the inspection time. Wind has an impact on the flying range and the flying speed of UAVs, which is taken into account for both problems. The formulated problems are NP-hard. We therefore design heuristic algorithms to find solutions to both problems, and then analyze the complexity of the proposed algorithms. The data of the Walney wind farm are then utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Simulation results clearly show that the proposed methods can obtain the optimal routing path for UAVs during the inspection.

preprint2020arXiv

Ramsey-biased spectroscopy of superconducting qubits under dispersion

We proposed a spectroscopic method that extends Ramsey's atomic spectroscopy to detect the transition frequency of a qubit fabricated on a superconducting circuit. The method uses a multi-interval train of qubit biases to implement an alternate resonant and dispersive couplings to an incident probe field. The consequent absorption spectrum of the qubit has a narrower linewidth at its transition frequency than that obtained from constantly biasing the qubit to resonance while the middle dispersive evolution incurs only a negligible shift in detected frequency. Modeling on transmon qubits, we find that the linewidth reduction reaches 23% and Ramsey fringes are simultaneously suppressed at extreme duration ratio of dispersion over resonance for a double-resonance scheme. If the scheme is augmented by an extra resonance segment, a further 37% reduction can be achieved.

preprint2020arXiv

RF-Rhythm: Secure and Usable Two-Factor RFID Authentication

Passive RFID technology is widely used in user authentication and access control. We propose RF-Rhythm, a secure and usable two-factor RFID authentication system with strong resilience to lost/stolen/cloned RFID cards. In RF-Rhythm, each legitimate user performs a sequence of taps on his/her RFID card according to a self-chosen secret melody. Such rhythmic taps can induce phase changes in the backscattered signals, which the RFID reader can detect to recover the user's tapping rhythm. In addition to verifying the RFID card's identification information as usual, the backend server compares the extracted tapping rhythm with what it acquires in the user enrollment phase. The user passes authentication checks if and only if both verifications succeed. We also propose a novel phase-hopping protocol in which the RFID reader emits Continuous Wave (CW) with random phases for extracting the user's secret tapping rhythm. Our protocol can prevent a capable adversary from extracting and then replaying a legitimate tapping rhythm from sniffed RFID signals. Comprehensive user experiments confirm the high security and usability of RF-Rhythm with false-positive and false-negative rates close to zero.

preprint2020arXiv

Search for New Hadronic Decays of $h_c$ and Observation of $h_c\rightarrow K^{+}K^{-}π^{+}π^{-}π^{0}$

Ten hadronic final states of the $h_c$ decays are investigated via the process $ψ(3686)\rightarrow π^0 h_c$, using a data sample of $(448.1 \pm 2.9) \times 10^6$ $ψ(3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector. The decay channel $h_c\rightarrow K^{+}K^{-}π^{+}π^{-}π^{0}$ is observed for the first time with a significance of $6.0 σ$. The corresponding branching fraction is determined to be $\mathcal{B}(h_c\rightarrow K^{+}K^{-}π^{+}π^{-}π^{0}) =(3.3 \pm 0.6 \pm 0.6)\times 10^{-3}$ (the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematical). Evidence for the decays $h_c\rightarrow π^{+} π^{-} π^{0} η$ and $h_c\rightarrow K^{0}_{S}K^{\pm}π^{\mp}π^{+}π^{-}$ is found with a significance of $3.6 σ$ and $3.8 σ$, respectively. The corresponding branching fractions (and upper limits) are obtained to be $\mathcal{B}(h_c\rightarrow π^{+} π^{-} π^{0} η) =(7.2 \pm 1.8 \pm 1.3)\times 10^{-3}$ $(< 1.8 \times 10^{-2})$ and $\mathcal{B}(h_c\rightarrow K^{0}_{S}K^{\pm}π^{\mp}π^{+}π^{-}) =(2.8 \pm 0.9 \pm 0.5)\times 10^{-3}$ $(<4.7\times 10^{-3})$. Upper limits on the branching fractions for the final states $h_c \rightarrow K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}$, $K^{+}K^{-}η$, $K^{+}K^{-}π^{+}π^{-}η$, $2(K^{+}K^{-})π^{0}$, $K^{+}K^{-}π^{0}η$, $K^{0}_{S}K^{\pm}π^{\mp}$, and $p\bar{p}π^{0}π^{0}$ are determined at a confidence level of 90\%.

preprint2020arXiv

Search for the decay $J/ψ\toγ+ \rm {invisible}$

We search for $J/ψ$ radiative decays into a weakly interacting neutral particle, namely an invisible particle, using the $J/ψ$ produced through the process $ψ(3686)\toπ^+π^-J/ψ$ in a data sample of $(448.1\pm2.9)\times 10^6$ $ψ(3686)$ decays collected by the BESIII detector at BEPCII. No significant signal is observed. Using a modified frequentist method, upper limits on the branching fractions are set under different assumptions of invisible particle masses up to 1.2 $\mathrm{\ Ge\kern -0.1em V}/c^2$. The upper limit corresponding to an invisible particle with zero mass is 7.0$\times 10^{-7}$ at the 90\% confidence level.

preprint2020arXiv

Search for the semileptonic decay $D^{0(+)}\to b_1(1235)^{-(0)} e^+ν_e$

Using $2.93~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ annihilation data collected at a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=3.773$ GeV with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII collider, we search for the semileptonic $D^{0(+)}$ decays into a $b_1(1235)^{-(0)}$ axial-vector meson for the first time. No significant signal is observed for either charge combination. The upper limits on the product branching fractions are ${\mathcal B}_{D^0\to b_1(1235)^- e^+ν_e}\cdot {\mathcal B}_{b_1(1235)^-\to ωπ^-}<1.12\times 10^{-4}$ and ${\mathcal B}_{D^+\to b_1(1235)^0 e^+ν_e}\cdot {\mathcal B}_{b_1(1235)^0\to ωπ^0}<1.75\times 10^{-4}$ at the 90\% confidence level.

preprint2020arXiv

Semantic Change Pattern Analysis

Change detection is an important problem in vision field, especially for aerial images. However, most works focus on traditional change detection, i.e., where changes happen, without considering the change type information, i.e., what changes happen. Although a few works have tried to apply semantic information to traditional change detection, they either only give the label of emerging objects without taking the change type into consideration, or set some kinds of change subjectively without specifying semantic information. To make use of semantic information and analyze change types comprehensively, we propose a new task called semantic change pattern analysis for aerial images. Given a pair of co-registered aerial images, the task requires a result including both where and what changes happen. We then describe the metric adopted for the task, which is clean and interpretable. We further provide the first well-annotated aerial image dataset for this task. Extensive baseline experiments are conducted as reference for following works. The aim of this work is to explore high-level information based on change detection and facilitate the development of this field with the publicly available dataset.

preprint2020arXiv

Short-term Load Forecasting with Dense Average Network

As an important part of the power system, power load forecasting directly affects the national economy. The data shows that improving the load forecasting accuracy by 0.01% can save millions of dollars for the power industry. Therefore, improving the accuracy of power load forecasting has always been the pursuing goals for a power system. Based on this goal, this paper proposes a novel connection, the dense average connection, in which the outputs of all preceding layers are averaged as the input of the next layer in a feed-forward fashion. Based on dense average connection , we construct the dense average network for power load forecasting. The predictions of the proposed model for two public datasets are better than those of existing methods. On this basis, we use the ensemble method to further improve the accuracy of the model. To verify the reliability of the model predictions, the robustness is analyzed and verified by adding input disturbances. The experimental results show that the proposed model is effective and robust for power load forecasting.

preprint2020arXiv

SK-Net: Deep Learning on Point Cloud via End-to-end Discovery of Spatial Keypoints

Since the PointNet was proposed, deep learning on point cloud has been the concentration of intense 3D research. However, existing point-based methods usually are not adequate to extract the local features and the spatial pattern of a point cloud for further shape understanding. This paper presents an end-to-end framework, SK-Net, to jointly optimize the inference of spatial keypoint with the learning of feature representation of a point cloud for a specific point cloud task. One key process of SK-Net is the generation of spatial keypoints (Skeypoints). It is jointly conducted by two proposed regulating losses and a task objective function without knowledge of Skeypoint location annotations and proposals. Specifically, our Skeypoints are not sensitive to the location consistency but are acutely aware of shape. Another key process of SK-Net is the extraction of the local structure of Skeypoints (detail feature) and the local spatial pattern of normalized Skeypoints (pattern feature). This process generates a comprehensive representation, pattern-detail (PD) feature, which comprises the local detail information of a point cloud and reveals its spatial pattern through the part district reconstruction on normalized Skeypoints. Consequently, our network is prompted to effectively understand the correlation between different regions of a point cloud and integrate contextual information of the point cloud. In point cloud tasks, such as classification and segmentation, our proposed method performs better than or comparable with the state-of-the-art approaches. We also present an ablation study to demonstrate the advantages of SK-Net.

preprint2020arXiv

Socially-Aware Robot Planning via Bandit Human Feedback

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing collision-free, dynamically feasible, and socially-aware trajectories for robots operating in environments populated by humans. We define trajectories to be social-aware if they do not interfere with humans in any way that causes discomfort. In this paper, discomfort is defined broadly and, depending on specific individuals, it can result from the robot being too close to a human or from interfering with human sight or tasks. Moreover, we assume that human feedback is a bandit feedback indicating a complaint or no complaint on the part of the robot trajectory that interferes with the humans, and it does not reveal any contextual information about the locations of the humans or the reason for a complaint. Finally, we assume that humans can move in the obstacle-free space and, as a result, human utility can change. We formulate this planning problem as an online optimization problem that minimizes the social value of the time-varying robot trajectory, defined by the total number of incurred human complaints. As the human utility is unknown, we employ zeroth order, or derivative-free, optimization methods to solve this problem, which we combine with off-the-shelf motion planners to satisfy the dynamic feasibility and collision-free specifications of the resulting trajectories. To the best of our knowledge, this is a new framework for socially-aware robot planning that is not restricted to avoiding collisions with humans but, instead, focuses on increasing the social value of the robot trajectories using only bandit human feedback.

preprint2020arXiv

Spatial Kramers-Kronig relation and controlled unidirectional reflection in cold atoms

We propose a model for realizing frequency-dependent spatial variations of the probe susceptibility in a cold atomic sample. It is found that the usual Kramers-Kronig (KK) relation between real and imaginary parts of the probe susceptibility in the frequency domain can be mapped into the space domain as a far detuned control field of intensity linearly varied in space is used. This non-Hermitian medium exhibits then a unidirectional reflectionless frequency band for probe photons incident from either the left or the right sample end. It is of special interest that we can tune the frequency band as well as choose the direction corresponding to the vanishing reflectivity by changing, respectively, the control field intensity and frequency. The nonzero reflectivity from the other direction is typically small for realistic atomic densities, but can be largely enhanced by incorporating the Bragg scattering into the spatial KK relation so as to achieve a high reflectivity contrast.

preprint2020arXiv

Study of BESIII Trigger Efficiencies with the 2018 $J/ψ$ Data

Using a dedicated data sample taken in 2018 on the $J/ψ$ peak, we perform a detailed study of the trigger efficiencies of the BESIII detector. The efficiencies are determined from three representative physics processes, namely Bhabha-scattering, dimuon production and generic hadronic events with charged particles. The combined efficiency of all active triggers approaches $100\%$ in most cases with uncertainties small enough as not to affect most physics analyses.

preprint2020arXiv

Study of open-charm decays and radiative transitions of the X(3872)

The processes $X(3872)\to D^{*0}\bar{D^{0}}+c.c.,~γJ/ψ,~γψ(2S),$ and $γD^{+}D^{-}$ are searched for in a $9.0~\rm fb^{-1}$ data sample collected at center-of-mass energies between $4.178$ and $4.278$ GeV with the BESIII detector. We observe $X(3872)\to D^{*0}\bar{D^{0}}+c.c.$ and find evidence for $X(3872)\toγJ/ψ$ with statistical significances of $7.4σ$ and $3.5σ$, respectively. No evident signals for $X(3872)\toγψ(2S)$ and $γD^{+}D^{-}$ are found, and upper limit on the relative branching ratio $R_{γψ} \equiv\frac{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toγψ(2S))}{\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\toγJ/ψ)}<0.59$ is set at 90$\%$ confidence level. Measurements of branching ratios relative to decay $X(3872)\toπ^+π^- J/ψ$ are also reported for decays $X(3872)\to D^{*0}\bar{D^{0}}+c.c., ~γψ(2S),~γJ/ψ$, $γD^{+}D^{-}$, as well as the non-$D^{*0}\bar{D}^{0}$ three-body decays $π^0 D^{0}\bar{D}^{0}$ and $γD^{0}\bar{D}^{0}$.

preprint2020arXiv

TAO Conceptual Design Report: A Precision Measurement of the Reactor Antineutrino Spectrum with Sub-percent Energy Resolution

The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO, also known as JUNO-TAO) is a satellite experiment of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO). A ton-level liquid scintillator detector will be placed at about 30 m from a core of the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant. The reactor antineutrino spectrum will be measured with sub-percent energy resolution, to provide a reference spectrum for future reactor neutrino experiments, and to provide a benchmark measurement to test nuclear databases. A spherical acrylic vessel containing 2.8 ton gadolinium-doped liquid scintillator will be viewed by 10 m^2 Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) of >50% photon detection efficiency with almost full coverage. The photoelectron yield is about 4500 per MeV, an order higher than any existing large-scale liquid scintillator detectors. The detector operates at -50 degree C to lower the dark noise of SiPMs to an acceptable level. The detector will measure about 2000 reactor antineutrinos per day, and is designed to be well shielded from cosmogenic backgrounds and ambient radioactivities to have about 10% background-to-signal ratio. The experiment is expected to start operation in 2022.

preprint2020arXiv

The gamma-ray and Optical Variability Analysis of the BL Lac Object 3FGL J0449.4-4350

We have assembled the historical light curves of the BL Lac Object 3FGL J0449.4-4350 at optical and gamma-ray bands, the time spanning about 10 years, analyzed the periodic variability of the light curves by using four different methods (Lomb-Scargle periodogram, REDFIT38, Jurkevich and DACF). We detected a marginally possible quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) of ~450 days. Assuming it originates from the helical motion jet in a supermassive binary black hole (SMBBH) system undergoing major merger, we estimate the primary black hole mass M~7.7*10^{9} M_sun. To explore the origin of the gamma-ray, we investigated the optical-gamma-ray correlations using discrete correlation function (DCF) method, and found that the correlation between the two bands is very significant. This strong correlation tends to imply lepton self-synchro-Compton (LSSC) model to produce the gamma-ray.

preprint2020arXiv

Thermal energy harvesting using pyroelectric-electrochemical coupling in ferroelectric materials

Recently, the coupling of ferroelectrics with electrochemical reactions has attracted increasing interest for harvesting waste heat. The change of polarisation of a ferroelectric with temperature can be used to influence chemical reactions, especially when the material is cycled near its Curie temperature. In this perspective, we introduce the principle of pyroelectric controlled electrochemical processes by harvesting waste heat energy and explore their potential electrochemical applications, such as water treatment, air purificiation and hydrogen generation. As an emerging approach for driving electrochemical reactions, the presence of thermal fluctuations and/or transient waste heat in the environment has the potential to be the primary thermal input for driving the change in polarisation of a pyroelectric to release charge for such reactions. There are a number of avenues to explore and we summarize strategies for forming multi-functional or hybrid materials and future directions such as selecting pyroelectrics with low Curie temperature (< 100 °C), improved heat conductivity, enhanced surface area or porosity, tailored microstructures and systems capable of operating over a broader temperature range.

preprint2020arXiv

Top-K Influential Nodes in Social Networks: A Game Perspective

Influence maximization, the fundamental of viral marketing, aims to find top-$K$ seed nodes maximizing influence spread under certain spreading models. In this paper, we study influence maximization from a game perspective. We propose a Coordination Game model, in which every individual makes its decision based on the benefit of coordination with its network neighbors, to study information propagation. Our model serves as the generalization of some existing models, such as Majority Vote model and Linear Threshold model. Under the generalized model, we study the hardness of influence maximization and the approximation guarantee of the greedy algorithm. We also combine several strategies to accelerate the algorithm. Experimental results show that after the acceleration, our algorithm significantly outperforms other heuristics, and it is three orders of magnitude faster than the original greedy method.

preprint2020arXiv

Transfer Reinforcement Learning under Unobserved Contextual Information

In this paper, we study a transfer reinforcement learning problem where the state transitions and rewards are affected by the environmental context. Specifically, we consider a demonstrator agent that has access to a context-aware policy and can generate transition and reward data based on that policy. These data constitute the experience of the demonstrator. Then, the goal is to transfer this experience, excluding the underlying contextual information, to a learner agent that does not have access to the environmental context, so that they can learn a control policy using fewer samples. It is well known that, disregarding the causal effect of the contextual information, can introduce bias in the transition and reward models estimated by the learner, resulting in a learned suboptimal policy. To address this challenge, in this paper, we develop a method to obtain causal bounds on the transition and reward functions using the demonstrator's data, which we then use to obtain causal bounds on the value functions. Using these value function bounds, we propose new Q learning and UCB-Q learning algorithms that converge to the true value function without bias. We provide numerical experiments for robot motion planning problems that validate the proposed value function bounds and demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can effectively make use of the data from the demonstrator to accelerate the learning process of the learner.

preprint2019arXiv

Deep Self-representative Concept Factorization Network for Representation Learning

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

preprint2019arXiv

Evolution of 3D Printing Methods and Materials for Electrochemical Energy Storage

Additive manufacturing has revolutionized the building of materials direct from design, allowing high resolution rapid prototyping in complex 3D designs with many materials. 3D printing hasenabled high strength damage-tolerant structures, bioprinted artificial organs and tissues, ultralight metals, medicine, education, prosthetics, architecture, consumer electronics,and as a prototyping tool for engineers and hobbyists alike. 3D printing has emerged as a useful tool for complex electrode and material assembly method for batteries and supercapacitors in recent years. The field initially grew from extrusion-based methods such as fused deposition modelling, and evolved to photopolymerization printing of intricate composites, while supercapacitor technologies less sensitive to solvents more often involved material jetting processes. Underpinning every part of a 3D printable battery and many other devices is the printing method and the nature of the feed material. Material purity, printing fidelity, accuracy, complexity, and the ability to form conductive, ceramic, glassy, or solvent-stable plastics relies on the nature of the feed material or composite to such an extent, that the future of 3D printable batteries and electrochemical energy storage devices will depend on materials and printing methods that are co-operatively informed by the requirements of the device and how it is fabricated. In this Perspective, we address the materials and methods requirements in 3D printable batteries and supercapacitors and outline requirements for the future of the field by linking existing performance limitations to the requirements of printable energy storage materials, casing materials and the direct printing of electrodes and electrolytes. We also look to the future by taking inspiration from additive manufacturing, to posit links between materials and printing methods to allow new form factor cells.

preprint2019arXiv

Possible phonon-induced electronic bi-stability in VO$_2$ for ultrafast memory at room temperature

VO$_{2}$ is a model material system which exhibits a metal to insulator transition at 67$^\circ$C. This holds potential for future ultrafast switching in memory devices, but typically requires a purely electronic process to avoid the slow lattice response. The role of lattice vibrations is thus important, but it is not well understood and it has been a long-standing source of controversy. We use a combination of ultrafast spectroscopy and ab initio quantum calculations to unveil the mechanism responsible for the transition. We identify an atypical Peierls vibrational mode which acts as a trigger for the transition. This rules out the long standing paradigm of a purely electronic Mott transition in VO$_{2}$; however, we found a new electron-phonon pathway for a purely reversible electronic transition in a true bi-stable fashion under specific conditions. This transition is very atypical, as it involves purely charge-like excitations and requires only small nuclear displacement. Our findings will prompt the design of future ultrafast electro-resistive non-volatile memory devices.

preprint2019arXiv

Quantum phase transitions and critical behaviors in the two-mode three-level quantum Rabi model

We explore an extended quantum Rabi model describing the interaction between a two-mode bosonic field and a three-level atom. Quantum phase transitions of this few degree of freedom model is found when the ratio $η$ of the atom energy scale to the bosonic field frequency approaches infinity. An analytical solution is provided when the two lowest-energy levels are degenerate. According to it, we recognize that the phase diagram of the model consists of three regions: one normal phase and two superradiant phases. The quantum phase transitions between the normal phase and the two superradiant phases are of second order relating to the spontaneous breaking of the discrete $Z_{2}$ symmetry. On the other hand, the quantum phase transition between the two different superradiant phases is discontinuous with a phase boundary line relating to the continuous $U(1)$ symmetry. For a large enough but finite $η$, the scaling function and critical exponents are derived analytically and verified numerically, from which the universality class of the model is identified.

preprint2019arXiv

Siamese Attentional Keypoint Network for High Performance Visual Tracking

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of three main aspects of visual tracking, i.e., the backbone network, the attentional mechanism, and the detection component, and propose a Siamese Attentional Keypoint Network, dubbed SATIN, for efficient tracking and accurate localization. Firstly, a new Siamese lightweight hourglass network is specially designed for visual tracking. It takes advantage of the benefits of the repeated bottom-up and top-down inference to capture more global and local contextual information at multiple scales. Secondly, a novel cross-attentional module is utilized to leverage both channel-wise and spatial intermediate attentional information, which can enhance both discriminative and localization capabilities of feature maps. Thirdly, a keypoints detection approach is invented to trace any target object by detecting the top-left corner point, the centroid point, and the bottom-right corner point of its bounding box. Therefore, our SATIN tracker not only has a strong capability to learn more effective object representations, but also is computational and memory storage efficiency, either during the training or testing stages. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose this approach. Without bells and whistles, experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several recent benchmark datasets, at a speed far exceeding 27 frames per second.

preprint2019arXiv

Super-resolution Imaging of the Fluorescent Dipole Assembly with Polarized Structured Illumination Microscopy

Fluorescence polarization microscopy images both the intensity and orientation of fluorescent dipoles, which plays a vital role in studying the molecular structure and dynamics of bio-complex. However, it is difficult to resolve the dipole assemblies on the subcellular structure and their dynamics in living cells with super-resolution. Here we report polarized structured illumination microscopy (pSIM), which decouples the entangled spatial and angular structured illumination through interpreting the dipoles in spatio-angular hyperspace. We demonstrate its application on a series of biological filamentous systems such as cytoskeleton networks and lambda-DNA, and report the dynamics of short actin sliding through myosin-coated surface. Further, pSIM reveals "side-by-side" organization of the actin ring structure in the membrane-associated periodic skeleton in hippocampal neurons. It also images the dipole dynamics of green fluorescent proteins labeled to the microtubules in live U2OS cells. pSIM can be applied directly to a large variety of commercial or home-built SIM systems.

preprint2016arXiv

Asymptotic Behavior of a Nonlocal KPP Equation with an Almost Periodic Nonlinearity

We consider a space-inhomogeneous Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov (KPP) equation with a nonlocal diffusion and an almost-periodic nonlinearity. By employing and adapting the theory of homogenization, we show that solutions of this equation asymptotically converge to its stationary states in regions of space separated by a front that is determined by a Hamilton-Jacobi variational inequality.

preprint2016arXiv

Band structure reconstruction across nematic order in high quality FeSe single crystal as revealed by optical spectroscopy study

We perform an in-plane optical spectroscopy measurement on high quality FeSe single crystals grown by a vapor transport technique. Below the structural transition at $T_{\rm s}\sim$90 K, the reflectivity spectrum clearly shows a gradual suppression around 400 cm$^{-1}$ and the conductivity spectrum shows a peak at higher frequency. The energy scale of this gap-like feature is comparable to the width of the band splitting observed by ARPES. The low-frequency conductivity consists of two Drude components and the overall plasma frequency is smaller than that of the FeAs based compounds, suggesting a lower carrier density or stronger correlation effect. The plasma frequency becomes even smaller below $T_{\rm s}$ which agrees with the very small Fermi energy estimated by other experiments. Similar to iron pnictides, a clear temperature-induced spectral weight transfer is observed for FeSe, being indicative of strong correlation effect.

preprint2016arXiv

Electronic Evidence for Type II Weyl Semimetal State in MoTe2

Topological quantum materials, including topological insulators and superconductors, Dirac semimetals and Weyl semimetals, have attracted much attention recently for their unique electronic structure, spin texture and physical properties. Very lately, a new type of Weyl semimetals has been proposed where the Weyl Fermions emerge at the boundary between electron and hole pockets in a new phase of matter, which is distinct from the standard type I Weyl semimetals with a point-like Fermi surface. The Weyl cone in this type II semimetals is strongly tilted and the related Fermi surface undergos a Lifshitz transition, giving rise to a new kind of chiral anomaly and other new physics. MoTe2 is proposed to be a candidate of a type II Weyl semimetal; the sensitivity of its topological state to lattice constants and correlation also makes it an ideal platform to explore possible topological phase transitions. By performing laser-based angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES) measurements with unprecedentedly high resolution, we have uncovered electronic evidence of type II semimetal state in MoTe2. We have established a full picture of the bulk electronic states and surface state for MoTe2 that are consistent with the band structure calculations. A single branch of surface state is identified that connects bulk hole pockets and bulk electron pockets. Detailed temperature-dependent ARPES measurements show high intensity spot-like features that is ~40 meV above the Fermi level and is close to the momentum space consistent with the theoretical expectation of the type II Weyl points. Our results constitute electronic evidence on the nature of the Weyl semimetal state that favors the presence of two sets of type II Weyl points in MoTe2.

preprint2016arXiv

Enhancing community detection by local structural information

Many real-world networks such as the gene networks, protein-protein interaction networks and metabolic networks exhibit community structures, meaning the existence of groups of densely connected vertices in the networks. Many local similarity measures in the networks are closely related to the concept of the community structures, and may have positive effect on community detection in the networks. Here, various local similarity measures are used to extract the local structural information and then are applied to community detection in the networks by using the edge-reweighting strategy. The effect of the local similarity measures on community detection is carefully investigated and compared in various networks. The experimental results show that the local similarity measures are crucial to the improvement for the community detection methods, while the positive effect of the local similarity measures is closely related to the networks under study and the applied community detection methods.

preprint2016arXiv

Expressive Completeness of Existential Rule Languages for Ontology-based Query Answering

Existential rules, also known as data dependencies in Databases, have been recently rediscovered as a promising family of languages for Ontology-based Query Answering. In this paper, we prove that disjunctive embedded dependencies exactly capture the class of recursively enumerable ontologies in Ontology-based Conjunctive Query Answering (OCQA). Our expressive completeness result does not rely on any built-in linear order on the database. To establish the expressive completeness, we introduce a novel semantic definition for OCQA ontologies. We also show that neither the class of disjunctive tuple-generating dependencies nor the class of embedded dependencies is expressively complete for recursively enumerable OCQA ontologies.

preprint2016arXiv

Integrating Deep Features for Material Recognition

We propose a method for integration of features extracted using deep representations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) each of which is learned using a different image dataset of objects and materials for material recognition. Given a set of representations of multiple pre-trained CNNs, we first compute activations of features using the representations on the images to select a set of samples which are best represented by the features. Then, we measure the uncertainty of the features by computing the entropy of class distributions for each sample set. Finally, we compute the contribution of each feature to representation of classes for feature selection and integration. We examine the proposed method on three benchmark datasets for material recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance by integrating deep features. Additionally, we introduce a new material dataset called EFMD by extending Flickr Material Database (FMD). By the employment of the EFMD with transfer learning for updating the learned CNN models, we achieve 84.0%+/-1.8% accuracy on the FMD dataset which is close to human performance that is 84.9%.

preprint2016arXiv

Query Answering with Inconsistent Existential Rules under Stable Model Semantics

Traditional inconsistency-tolerent query answering in ontology-based data access relies on selecting maximal components of an ABox/database which are consistent with the ontology. However, some rules in ontologies might be unreliable if they are extracted from ontology learning or written by unskillful knowledge engineers. In this paper we present a framework of handling inconsistent existential rules under stable model semantics, which is defined by a notion called rule repairs to select maximal components of the existential rules. Surprisingly, for R-acyclic existential rules with R-stratified or guarded existential rules with stratified negations, both the data complexity and combined complexity of query answering under the rule {repair semantics} remain the same as that under the conventional query answering semantics. This leads us to propose several approaches to handle the rule {repair semantics} by calling answer set programming solvers. An experimental evaluation shows that these approaches have good scalability of query answering under rule repairs on realistic cases.

preprint2016arXiv

Social Computing for Mobile Big Data in Wireless Networks

Mobile big data contains vast statistical features in various dimensions, including spatial, temporal, and the underlying social domain. Understanding and exploiting the features of mobile data from a social network perspective will be extremely beneficial to wireless networks, from planning, operation, and maintenance to optimization and marketing. In this paper, we categorize and analyze the big data collected from real wireless cellular networks. Then, we study the social characteristics of mobile big data and highlight several research directions for mobile big data in the social computing areas.

preprint2016arXiv

Value of peripheral nodes in controlling multilayer networks

We analyze the controllability of a two-layer network, where driver nodes can be chosen randomly only from one layer. Each layer contains a scale-free network with directed links and the node dynamics depends on the incoming links from other nodes. We combine the in-degree and out-degree values to assign an importance value $w$ to each node, and distinguish between peripheral nodes with low $w$ and central nodes with high $w$. Based on numerical simulations, we find that the controllable part of the network is larger when choosing low $w$ nodes to connect the two layers. The control is as efficient when peripheral nodes are driver nodes as it is for the case of more central nodes. However, if we assume a cost to utilize nodes that is proportional to their overall degree, utilizing peripheral nodes to connect the two layers or to act as driver nodes is not only the most cost-efficient solution, it is also the one that performs best in controlling the two-layer network among the different interconnecting strategies we have tested.

preprint2016arXiv

Variable selection via penalized credible regions with Dirichlet-Laplace global-local shrinkage priors

The method of Bayesian variable selection via penalized credible regions separates model fitting and variable selection. The idea is to search for the sparsest solution within the joint posterior credible regions. Although the approach was successful, it depended on the use of conjugate normal priors. More recently, improvements in the use of global-local shrinkage priors have been made for high-dimensional Bayesian variable selection. In this paper, we incorporate global-local priors into the credible region selection framework. The Dirichlet-Laplace (DL) prior is adapted to linear regression. Posterior consistency for the normal and DL priors are shown, along with variable selection consistency. We further introduce a new method to tune hyperparameters in prior distributions for linear regression. We propose to choose the hyperparameters to minimize a discrepancy between the induced distribution on R-square and a prespecified target distribution. Prior elicitation on R-square is more natural, particularly when there are a large number of predictor variables in which elicitation on that scale is not feasible. For a normal prior, these hyperparameters are available in closed form to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distributions.

preprint2015arXiv

Analysis and perturbation of degree correlation in complex networks

Degree correlation is an important topological property common to many real-world networks. In this paper, the statistical measures for characterizing the degree correlation in networks are investigated analytically. We give an exact proof of the consistency for the statistical measures, reveal the general linear relation in the degree correlation, which provide a simple and interesting perspective on the analysis of the degree correlation in complex networks. By using the general linear analysis, we investigate the perturbation of the degree correlation in complex networks caused by the addition of few nodes and the rich club. The results show that the assortativity of homogeneous networks such as the ER graphs is easily to be affected strongly by the simple structural changes, while it has only slight variation for heterogeneous networks with broad degree distribution such as the scale-free networks. Clearly, the homogeneous networks are more sensitive for the perturbation than the heterogeneous networks.

preprint2015arXiv

Axiomatizing Lüttgen and Vogler's ready simulation for finite processes in $\text{CLL}_R$

In the framework of logic labelled transition system, a variant of weak ready simulation has been presented by Lüttgen and Vogler. It has been shown that such behavioural preorder is the largest precongruence w.r.t parallel and conjunction composition satisfying desired properties. This paper offers a ground-complete axiomatization for this precongruence over processes containing no recursion in the calculus $\text{CLL}_R$. Compared with usual inference system for process calculus, in addition to axioms about process operators, such system contains a number of axioms to characterize the interaction between process operators and logical operators.

preprint2015arXiv

Dielectric spheres with maximum forward scattering and zero backscattering: A search for their material composition

Nanoparticles exhibiting zero backscattering but a large scattering cross section in the forward direction should play a key role as light diffracting elements in photonic devices like solar cells. Using Mie theory we address lossless dielectric spheres that were recently reported to possess a magnetodielectric response to the illuminating wave, and analyze their scattering cross section together with their zero-backwards scattering conditions. We show that there is an optimum particle refractive index (m = 2.47), which yields maximum forward scattering without backwards scattering of light.

preprint2015arXiv

Existential Rule Languages with Finite Chase: Complexity and Expressiveness

Finite chase, or alternatively chase termination, is an important condition to ensure the decidability of existential rule languages. In the past few years, a number of rule languages with finite chase have been studied. In this work, we propose a novel approach for classifying the rule languages with finite chase. Using this approach, a family of decidable rule languages, which extend the existing languages with the finite chase property, are naturally defined. We then study the complexity of these languages. Although all of them are tractable for data complexity, we show that their combined complexity can be arbitrarily high. Furthermore, we prove that all the rule languages with finite chase that extend the weakly acyclic language are of the same expressiveness as the weakly acyclic one, while rule languages with higher combined complexity are in general more succinct than those with lower combined complexity.

preprint2015arXiv

Experimental Observation of Incoherent-Coherent Crossover and Orbital Dependent Band Renormalization in Iron Chalcogenide Superconductors

The level of electronic correlation has been one of the key questions in understanding the nature of superconductivity. Among the iron-based superconductors, the iron chalcogenide family exhibits the strongest electron correlations. To gauge the correlation strength, we performed systematic angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy study on the iron chalcogenide series Fe$_{1+y}$Se$_x$Te$_{1-x}$ (0$<$x$<$0.59), a model system with the simplest structure. Our measurement reveals an incoherent to coherent crossover in the electronic structure as the selenium ratio increases and the system evolves from the weakly localized to more itinerant state. Furthermore, we found that the effective mass of bands dominated by the d$_{xy}$ orbital character significantly decreases with increasing selenium ratio, as compared to the d$_{xz}$/d$_{yz}$ orbital-dominated bands. The orbital dependent change in the correlation level agrees with theoretical calculations on the band structure renormalization, and may help to understand the onset of superconductivity in Fe$_{1+y}$Se$_x$Te$_{1-x}$.

preprint2015arXiv

Multi-resolution community detection based on generalized self-loop rescaling strategy

Community detection is of considerable importance for analyzing the structure and function of complex networks. Many real-world networks may possess community structures at multiple scales, and recently, various multi-resolution methods were proposed to identify the community structures at different scales. In this paper, we present a type of multi-resolution methods by using the generalized self-loop rescaling strategy. The self-loop rescaling strategy provides one uniform ansatz for the design of multi-resolution community detection methods. Many quality functions for community detection can be unified in the framework of the self-loop rescaling. The resulting multi-resolution quality functions can be optimized directly using the existing modularity-optimization algorithms. Several derived multi-resolution methods are applied to the analysis of community structures in several synthetic and real-world networks. The results show that these methods can find the pre-defined substructures in synthetic networks and real splits observed in real-world networks. Finally, we give a discussion on the methods themselves and their relationship. We hope that the study in the paper can be helpful for the understanding of the multi-resolution methods and provide useful insight into designing new community detection methods.

preprint2015arXiv

Nematic magnetoelastic effect contrasted between Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$Co$_{x}$)$_2$As$_2$ and FeSe

To elucidate the origin of nematic order in Fe-based superconductors, we report a Raman scattering study of lattice dynamics, which quantify the extent of $C_4$-symmetry breaking, in BaFe$_2$As$_2$ and FeSe. FeSe possesses a nematic ordering temperature $T_\mathrm{s}$ and orbital-related band-energy split below $T_\mathrm{s}$ that are similar to those in BaFe$_2$As$_2$, but unlike BaFe$_2$As$_2$ it has no long-range magnetic order. We find that the $E_g$ phonon-energy split in FeSe sets in only well below $T_\mathrm{s}$, and its saturated value is substantially smaller than that in BaFe$_2$As$_2$. Together with reported results for the Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$Co$_{x}$)$_2$As$_2$ family, the data suggest that magnetism exerts a major influence on the lattice.

preprint2015arXiv

Observation of universal strong orbital-dependent correlation effects in iron chalcogenides

Establishing the appropriate theoretical framework for unconventional superconductivity in the iron-based materials requires correct understanding of both the electron correlation strength and the role of Fermi surfaces. This fundamental issue becomes especially relevant with the discovery of the iron chalcogenide (FeCh) superconductors, the only iron-based family in proximity to an insulating phase. Here, we use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) to measure three representative FeCh superconductors, FeTe0.56Se0.44, K0.76Fe1.72Se2, and monolayer FeSe film grown on SrTiO3. We show that, these FeChs are all in a strongly correlated regime at low temperatures, with an orbital-selective strong renormalization in the dxy bands despite having drastically different Fermi-surface topologies. Furthermore, raising temperature brings all three compounds from a metallic superconducting state to a phase where the dxy orbital loses all spectral weight while other orbitals remain itinerant. These observations establish that FeChs display universal orbital-selective strong correlation behaviors that are insensitive to the Fermi surface topology, and are close to an orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP), hence placing strong constraints for theoretical understanding of iron-based superconductors.

preprint2015arXiv

Strong Gravitational Lensing in the Einstein-Proca Theory

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

preprint2014arXiv

A Logical Study of Partial Entailment

We introduce a novel logical notion--partial entailment--to propositional logic. In contrast with classical entailment, that a formula P partially entails another formula Q with respect to a background formula set Γintuitively means that under the circumstance of Γ, if P is true then some "part" of Q will also be true. We distinguish three different kinds of partial entailments and formalize them by using an extended notion of prime implicant. We study their semantic properties, which show that, surprisingly, partial entailments fail for many simple inference rules. Then, we study the related computational properties, which indicate that partial entailments are relatively difficult to be computed. Finally, we consider a potential application of partial entailments in reasoning about rational agents.

preprint2014arXiv

A Semiblind Two-Way Training Method for Discriminatory Channel Estimation in MIMO Systems

Discriminatory channel estimation (DCE) is a recently developed strategy to enlarge the performance difference between a legitimate receiver (LR) and an unauthorized receiver (UR) in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system. Specifically, it makes use of properly designed training signals to degrade channel estimation at the UR which in turn limits the UR's eavesdropping capability during data transmission. In this paper, we propose a new two-way training scheme for DCE through exploiting a whitening-rotation (WR) based semiblind method. To characterize the performance of DCE, a closed-form expression of the normalized mean squared error (NMSE) of the channel estimation is derived for both the LR and the UR. Furthermore, the developed analytical results on NMSE are utilized to perform optimal power allocation between the training signal and artificial noise (AN). The advantages of our proposed DCE scheme are two folds: 1) compared to the existing DCE scheme based on the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel estimator, the proposed scheme adopts a semiblind approach and achieves better DCE performance; 2) the proposed scheme is robust against active eavesdropping with the pilot contamination attack, whereas the existing scheme fails under such an attack.

preprint2014arXiv

An Experimental Study Towards Understanding Data Delivery Performance Over a WSN Link

The performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) depends fundamentally on how its various parameters are configured under different link quality conditions. Surprisingly, even though WSNs have been extensively researched, there still lacks an in-depth understanding on how parameter configurations affect, in particular jointly, the performance under different link quality conditions. To fill the gap, this paper presents an extensive experimental study on the performance of a wireless sensor network link, where measurement data of more than 200 million packets were collected. Different from existing work, we consider major parameters from different layers together and measure their joint effects on key performance metrics under an extensive set of parameter configurations. Based on the large amount of measurement data, we investigate the impacts of these parameters and their joint configurations on the performance, introduce empirical models to theoretically reason the impacts, discuss implications of the obtained results, and suggest practical guidelines for parameter configurations. Through these, a comprehensive overview of parameter configuration impacts on the erformance is provided, which provides new insights on wireless link performance in WSNs.

preprint2014arXiv

An Ordinal Bargaining Solution with Fixed-Point Property

Shapleys impossibility result indicates that the two-person bargaining problem has no non-trivial ordinal solution with the traditional game-theoretic bargaining model. Although the result is no longer true for bargaining problems with more than two agents, none of the well known bargaining solutions are ordinal. Searching for meaningful ordinal solutions, especially for the bilateral bargaining problem, has been a challenging issue in bargaining theory for more than three decades. This paper proposes a logic-based ordinal solution to the bilateral bargaining problem. We argue that if a bargaining problem is modeled in terms of the logical relation of players physical negotiation items, a meaningful bargaining solution can be constructed based on the ordinal structure of bargainers preferences. We represent bargainers demands in propositional logic and bargainers preferences over their demands in total preorder. We show that the solution satisfies most desirable logical properties, such as individual rationality (logical version), consistency, collective rationality as well as a few typical game-theoretic properties, such as weak Pareto optimality and contraction invariance. In addition, if all players demand sets are logically closed, the solution satisfies a fixed-point condition, which says that the outcome of a negotiation is the result of mutual belief revision. Finally, we define various decision problems in relation to our bargaining model and study their computational complexity.

preprint2014arXiv

Asymptotic Behavior of a Nonlocal KPP Equation with a Stationary Ergodic Nonlinearity

We consider a space-inhomogeneous Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov (KPP) equation with a nonlocal diffusion and a stationary ergodic nonlinearity. By employing and adapting the theory of stochastic homogenization, we show that solutions of this equation asymptotically converge to its stationary states in regions of space separated by a front that is determined by a Hamilton-Jacobi variational inequality.

preprint2014arXiv

Expressiveness of Logic Programs under General Stable Model Semantics

The stable model semantics had been recently generalized to non-Herbrand structures by several works, which provides a unified framework and solid logical foundations for answer set programming. This paper focuses on the expressiveness of normal and disjunctive programs under the general stable model semantics. A translation from disjunctive programs to normal programs is proposed for infinite structures. Over finite structures, some disjunctive programs are proved to be intranslatable to normal programs if the arities of auxiliary predicates and functions are bounded in a certain way. The equivalence of the expressiveness of normal programs and disjunctive programs over arbitrary structures is also shown to coincide with that over finite structures, and coincide with whether NP is closed under complement. Moreover, to capture the exact expressiveness, some intertranslatability results between logic program classes and fragments of second-order logic are obtained.

preprint2014arXiv

Multipartite $d-$level GHZ bases associated with generalized braid matrices

We investigate the generalized braid relation ($d-$level $N-$body braid relation) and its application to quantum entanglement. By means of finite-dimensional representations of Heisenberg-Weyl algebra, a set of $d^{N}\times d^{N}$ unitary matrix representations satisfying the generalized braid relation can be constructed. Such generalized braid matrices can entangle $d-$level $N-$partite quantum states. Acting the generalized braid matrices on the standard basis, one can obtain a set of maximally entangled basis. Further study shows that such entangled basis can be viewed as the $d-$level $N-$partite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) basis.

preprint2014arXiv

Sharp Bounds for Neuman Means in Terms of Geometric, Arithemtic and Quadratic Means

In this paper, we find the greatest values $α_{1}$, $α_{2}$, $α_{3}$, $α_{4}$, $α_{5}$, $α_{6}$, $α_{7}$, $α_{8}$ and the least values $β_{1}$, $β_{2}$, $β_{3}$, $β_{4}$, $β_{5}$, $β_{6}$, $β_{7}$, $β_{8}$ such that the double inequalities $$A^{α_{1}}(a,b)G^{1-α_{1}}(a,b)<N_{GA}(a,b)<A^{β_{1}}(a,b)G^{1-β_{1}}(a,b),$$ $$\frac{α_{2}}{G(a,b)}+\frac{1-α_{2}}{A(a,b)}<\frac{1}{N_{GA}(a,b)}<\frac{β_{2}}{G(a,b)}+\frac{1-β_{2}}{A(a,b)},$$ $$A^{α_{3}}(a,b)G^{1-α_{3}}(a,b)<N_{AG}(a,b)<A^{β_{3}}(a,b)G^{1-β_{3}}(a,b),$$ $$\frac{α_{4}}{G(a,b)}+\frac{1-α_{4}}{A(a,b)}<\frac{1}{N_{AG}(a,b)}<\frac{β_{4}}{G(a,b)}+\frac{1-β_{4}}{A(a,b)},$$ $$Q^{α_{5}}(a,b)A^{1-α_{5}}(a,b)<N_{AQ}(a,b)<Q^{β_{5}}(a,b)A^{1-β_{5}}(a,b),$$ $$\frac{α_{6}}{A(a,b)}+\frac{1-α_{6}}{Q(a,b)}<\frac{1}{N_{AQ}(a,b)}<\frac{β_{6}}{A(a,b)}+\frac{1-β_{6}}{Q(a,b)},$$ $$Q^{α_{7}}(a,b)A^{1-α_{7}}(a,b)<N_{QA}(a,b)<Q^{β_{7}}(a,b)A^{1-β_{7}}(a,b),$$ $$\frac{α_{8}}{A(a,b)}+\frac{1-α_{8}}{Q(a,b)}<\frac{1}{N_{QA}(a,b)}<\frac{β_{8}}{A(a,b)}+\frac{1-β_{8}}{Q(a,b)}$$ hold for all $a, b>0$ with $a\neq b$, where $G$, $A$ and $Q$ are respectively the geometric, arithmetic and quadratic means, and $N_{GA}$, $N_{AG}$, $N_{AQ}$ and $N_{QA}$ are the Neuman means derived from the Schwab-Borchardt mean.

preprint2014arXiv

Spectrum and Energy Efficiency Evaluation of Two-Tier Femtocell networks With Partially Open Channels

Two-tier femtocell networks is an efficient communication architecture that significantly improves throughput in indoor environments with low power consumption. Traditionally, a femtocell network is usually configured to be either completely open or completely closed in that its channels are either made available to all users or used by its own users only. This may limit network flexibility and performance. It is desirable for owners of femtocell base stations if a femtocell can partially open its channels for external users access. In such scenarios, spectrum and energy efficiency becomes a critical issue in the design of femtocell network protocols and structure. In this paper, we conduct performance analysis for two-tier femtocell networks with partially open channels. In particular, we build a Markov chain to model the channel access in the femtocell network and then derive the performance metrics in terms of the blocking probabilities. Based on stationary state probabilities derived by Markov chain models, spectrum and energy efficiency are modeled and analyzed under different scenarios characterized by critical parameters, including number of femtocells in a macrocell, average number of users, and number of open channels in a femtocell. Numerical and Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation results indicate that the number of open channels in a femtocell has an adverse impact on the spectrum and energy efficiency of two-tier femtocell networks. Results in this paper provide guidelines for trading off spectrum and energy efficiency of two-tier femtocell networks by configuring different numbers of open channels in a femtocell.

preprint2014arXiv

Topological Basis Associated with B-M-W algebra: Two Spin-1/2 Realization

In this letter, we study the two-spin-1/2 realization for the Birman-Murakami-Wenzl (B-M-W) algebra and the corresponding Yang-Baxter $\breve{R}(θ,ϕ)$ matrix. Based on the two-spin-1/2 realization for the B-M-W algebra, the three-dimensional topological space, which is spanned by topological basis, is investigated. By means of such topological basis realization, the four-dimensional Yang-Baxter $\breve{R}(θ,ϕ)$ can be reduced to Wigner $D^{J}$ function with $J=1$. The entanglement and Berry phase in the spectral parameter space are also explored. The results show that one can obtain a set of entangled basis via Yang-Baxter $\breve{R}(θ,ϕ)$ matrix acting on the standard basis, and the entanglement degree is maximum when the $\breve{R}_{i}(θ,ϕ)$ turns to the braiding operator.

preprint2014arXiv

Variable Forgetting in Reasoning about Knowledge

In this paper, we investigate knowledge reasoning within a simple framework called knowledge structure. We use variable forgetting as a basic operation for one agent to reason about its own or other agents\ knowledge. In our framework, two notions namely agents\ observable variables and the weakest sufficient condition play important roles in knowledge reasoning. Given a background knowledge base and a set of observable variables for each agent, we show that the notion of an agent knowing a formula can be defined as a weakest sufficient condition of the formula under background knowledge base. Moreover, we show how to capture the notion of common knowledge by using a generalized notion of weakest sufficient condition. Also, we show that public announcement operator can be conveniently dealt with via our notion of knowledge structure. Further, we explore the computational complexity of the problem whether an epistemic formula is realized in a knowledge structure. In the general case, this problem is PSPACE-hard; however, for some interesting subcases, it can be reduced to co-NP. Finally, we discuss possible applications of our framework in some interesting domains such as the automated analysis of the well-known muddy children puzzle and the verification of the revised Needham-Schroeder protocol. We believe that there are many scenarios where the natural presentation of the available information about knowledge is under the form of a knowledge structure. What makes it valuable compared with the corresponding multi-agent S5 Kripke structure is that it can be much more succinct.

preprint2013arXiv

A single diffractive optical element for implementing spectrum-splitting and beam-concentration functions simultaneously with high diffraction efficiency

In this paper, a novel method is proposed, and employed to design a single diffractive optical element (DOE) for implementing spectrum-splitting and beam-concentration (SSBC) functions simultaneously. We develop an optimization algorithm, through which the SSBC DOE can be optimized within an arbitrary thickness range, according to the limitations of modern photolithography technology. Theoretical simulation results reveal that the designed SSBC DOE has a high optical focusing efficiency. It is expected that the designed SSBC DOE should have practical applications in high-efficiency solar cell systems.

preprint2013arXiv

An Efficient MAC Protocol with Selective Grouping and Cooperative Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio networks, spectrum sensing is a crucial technique to discover spectrum opportunities for the Secondary Users (SUs). The quality of spectrum sensing is evaluated by both sensing accuracy and sensing efficiency. Here, sensing accuracy is represented by the false alarm probability and the detection probability while sensing efficiency is represented by the sensing overhead and network throughput. In this paper, we propose a group-based cooperative Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol called GC-MAC, which addresses the tradeoff between sensing accuracy and efficiency. In GC-MAC, the cooperative SUs are grouped into several teams. During a sensing period, each team senses a different channel while SUs in the same team perform the joint detection on the targeted channel. The sensing process will not stop unless an available channel is discovered. To reduce the sensing overhead, an SU-selecting algorithm is presented to selectively choose the cooperative SUs based on the channel dynamics and usage patterns. Then, an analytical model is built to study the sensing accuracy-efficiency tradeoff under two types of channel conditions: time-invariant channel and time-varying channel. An optimization problem that maximizes achievable throughput is formulated to optimize the important design parameters. Both saturation and non-saturation situations are investigated with respect to throughput and sensing overhead. Simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol is able to significantly decrease sensing overhead and increase network throughput with guaranteed sensing accuracy.

preprint2013arXiv

Electron transport in a ferromagnetic/normal/ferromagnetic tunnel junction based on the surface of a topological insulator

We theoretically study the electron transport properties in a ferromagnetic/normal/ferromagnetic tunnel junction, which is deposited on the top of a topological surface. The conductance at the parallel (\textbf{P}) configuration can be much bigger than that at the antiparallel (\textbf{AP}) configuration. Compared \textbf{P} with \textbf{AP} configuration, there exists a shift of phase which can be tuned by gate voltage. We find that the exchange field weakly affects the conductance of carriers for \textbf{P} configuration but can dramatically suppress the conductance of carriers for \textbf{AP} configuration. This controllable electron transport implies anomalous magnetoresistance in this topological spin valve, which may contribute to the development of spintronics . In addition, we find that there is a Fabry-Perot-like electron interference.

preprint2013arXiv

Electronic transport in ferromagnetic barriers on the surface of a topological insulator with $δ$ doping

We investigate electron transporting through a two-dimensional ferromagnetic/normal/ferromagnetic tunnel junction on the surface of a three-dimensional topological insulator with taking into $δ$ doping account. It is found that the conductance oscillates with the Fermi energy, the position and the aptitude of the $δ$ doping. Also the conductance depends sensitively on the direction of the magnetization of the two ferromagnets, which originate from the control of the spin flow due to spin-momentum locked. It is found that the conductance is the maximum at the parallel configuration while it is minimum at the antiparallel configuration and vice versa, which may stem from the half wave loss due to the electron wave entering through the antiparallel configuration. These characters are very helpful for making new types of magnetoresistance devices due to the practical applications.

preprint2013arXiv

On the Performance of Cooperative Spectrum Sensing under Quantization

In cognitive radio, the cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) plays a key role in determining the performance of secondary networks. However, there have not been feasible approaches that can analytically calculate the performance of CSS with regard to the multi-level quantization. In this paper, we not only show the cooperative false alarm probability and cooperative detection probability impacted by quantization, but also formulate them by two closed form expressions. These two expressions enable the calculation of cooperative false alarm probability and cooperative detection probability tractable efficiently, and provide a feasible approach for optimization of sensing performance. Additionally, to facilitate this calculation, we derive Normal approximation for evaluating the sensing performance conveniently. Furthermore, two optimization methods are proposed to achieve the high sensing performance under quantization.

preprint2013arXiv

Securing Cognitive Radio Networks against Primary User Emulation Attacks

Cognitive Radio (CR) is a promising technology for next-generation wireless networks in order to efficiently utilize the limited spectrum resources and satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for wireless applications and services. Security is a very important but not well addressed issue in CR networks. In this paper we focus on security problems arising from Primary User Emulation (PUE) attacks in CR networks. We present a comprehensive introduction to PUE attacks, from the attacking rationale and its impact on CR networks, to detection and defense approaches. In order to secure CR networks against PUE attacks, a two-level database-assisted detection approach is proposed to detect such attacks. Energy detection and location verification are combined for fast and reliable detection. An admission control based defense approach is proposed to mitigate the performance degradation of a CR network under a PUE attack. Illustrative results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed detection and defense approaches.

preprint2013arXiv

Suspicious Object Recognition Method in Video Stream Based on Visual Attention

We propose a state of the art method for intelligent object recognition and video surveillance based on human visual attention. Bottom up and top down attention are applied respectively in the process of acquiring interested object(saliency map) and object recognition. The revision of 4 channel PFT method is proposed for bottom up attention and enhances the speed and accuracy. Inhibit of return (IOR) is applied in judging the sequence of saliency object pop out. Euclidean distance of color distribution, object center coordinates and speed are considered in judging whether the target is match and suspicious. The extensive tests on videos and images show that our method in video analysis has high accuracy and fast speed compared with traditional method. The method can be applied into many fields such as video surveillance and security.

preprint2013arXiv

Toward Cloud-based Vehicular Networks with Efficient Resource Management

In the era of Internet of Things, all components in intelligent transportation systems will be connected to improve transport safety, relieve traffic congestion, reduce air pollution and enhance the comfort of driving. The vision of all vehicles connected poses a significant challenge to the collection and storage of large amounts of traffic-related data. In this article, we propose to integrate cloud computing into vehicular networks such that the vehicles can share computation resources, storage resources and bandwidth resources. The proposed architecture includes a vehicular cloud, a roadside cloud, and a central cloud. Then, we study cloud resource allocation and virtual machine migration for effective resource management in this cloud-based vehicular network. A game-theoretical approach is presented to optimally allocate cloud resources. Virtual machine migration due to vehicle mobility is solved based on a resource reservation scheme.

preprint2013arXiv

Wide temperature span of entropy change in first-order metamagnetic MnCo1-xFexSi

The crystal structure and magnetic properties of MnCoxFe1-xSi (x=0-0.5) compounds were investigated. With increasing Fe content, the unit cell changes anisotropically and the magnetic property evolves gradually: Curie temperature decreases continuously, the first-order metamagnetic transition from a low-temperature helical antiferromagnetic state to a high-temperature ferromagnetic state disappears gradually and then a spin-glass-like state and another antiferromagnetic state emerge in the low temperature region. The Curie transition leads to a moderate conventional entropy change. The metamagnetic transition not only yields a larger negative magnetocaloric effect at lower applied fields than in MnCoSi but also produces a very large temperature span (103 K for H=5 T) of delta S(T), which results in a large refrigerant capacity. These phenomena were explained in terms of crystal structure change and magnetoelastic coupling mechanism. The low-cost MnCo1-xFexSi compounds are promising candidates for near room temperature magnetic refrigeration applications because of the large isothermal entropy change and the wide working temperature span.

preprint2012arXiv

A Process Calculus with Logical Operators

In order to combine operational and logical styles of specifications in one unified framework, the notion of logic labelled transition systems (Logic LTS, for short) has been presented and explored by Lüttgen and Vogler in [TCS 373(1-2):19-40; Inform. & Comput. 208:845-867]. In contrast with usual LTS, two logical constructors $\wedge$ and $\vee$ over Logic LTSs are introduced to describe logical combinations of specifications. Hitherto such framework has been dealt with in considerable depth, however, process algebraic style way has not yet been involved and the axiomatization of constructors over Logic LTSs is absent. This paper tries to develop Lüttgen and Vogler's work along this direction. We will present a process calculus for Logic LTSs (CLL, for short). The language CLL is explored in detail from two different but equivalent views. Based on behavioral view, the notion of ready simulation is adopted to formalize the refinement relation, and the behavioral theory is developed. Based on proof-theoretic view, a sound and ground-complete axiomatic system for CLL is provided, which captures operators in CLL through (in)equational laws.

preprint2012arXiv

Estimating the value of containment strategies in delaying the arrival time of an influenza pandemic: A case study of travel restriction and patient isolation

With a simple phenomenological metapopulation model, which characterizes the invasion process of an influenza pandemic from a source to a subpopulation at risk, we compare the efficiency of inter- and intra-population interventions in delaying the arrival of an influenza pandemic. We take travel restriction and patient isolation as examples, since in reality they are typical control measures implemented at the inter- and intra-population levels, respectively. We find that the intra-population interventions, e.g., patient isolation, perform better than the inter-population strategies such as travel restriction if the response time is small. However, intra-population strategies are sensitive to the increase of the response time, which might be inevitable due to socioeconomic reasons in practice and will largely discount the efficiency.

preprint2012arXiv

Extraordinary transmission caused by symmetry breaking

The terahertz transmission properties of symmetrical and asymmetrical annular apertures arrays (AAAs) are investigated both experimentally and numerically. It is found that only odd order resonant modes are observed for the symmetrical structures but both odd and even order resonances can be shown for the asymmetrical structures. Breaking the symmetry of AAAs by gradually displacing the H-shaped AAAs to U-shaped AAAs allows an intensity modulation depth of 99% of the second order resonance. Simulation results verify the experimental conclusions well. This result provides a tremendous opportunity for terahertz wavelength tunable filtering, sensing, and near-field imaging.

preprint2012arXiv

Merging Process Algebra and Action-based Computation Tree Logic

Process algebra and temporal logic are two popular paradigms for the specification, verification and systematic development of reactive and concurrent systems. These two approaches take different standpoint for looking at specifications and verifications, and offer complementary advantages. In order to mix algebraic and logic styles of specification in a uniform framework, the notion of a logic labelled transition system (LLTS) has been presented and explored by Luttgen and Vogler. This paper intends to propose a LLTS-oriented process calculus which, in addition to usual process-algebraic operators, involves logic connectives (conjunction and disjunction) and standard temporal operators (always and unless). This calculus preserves usual properties of these logic operators, allows one to freely mix operational and logic operators, and supports compositional reasoning. Moreover, the links between this calculus and Action-based Computation Tree Logic (ACTL) including characteristic formulae of process terms, characteristic processes of ACTL formulae and Galois connection are explored.

preprint2012arXiv

Towards a temporal network analysis of interactive WiFi users

Complex networks are used to depict topological features of complex systems. The structure of a network characterizes the interactions among elements of the system, and facilitates the study of many dynamical processes taking place on it. In previous investigations, the topological infrastructure underlying dynamical systems is simplified as a static and invariable skeleton. However, this assumption cannot cover the temporal features of many time-evolution networks, whose components are evolving and mutating. In this letter, utilizing the log data of WiFi users in a Chinese university campus, we infuse the temporal dimension into the construction of dynamical human contact network. By quantitative comparison with the traditional aggregation approach, we find that the temporal contact network differs in many features, e.g., the reachability, the path length distribution. We conclude that the correlation between temporal path length and duration is not only determined by their definitions, but also influenced by the microdynamical features of human activities under certain social circumstance as well. The time order of individuals' interaction events plays a critical role in understanding many dynamical processes via human close proximity interactions studied in this letter. Besides, our study also provides a promising measure to identify the potential superspreaders by distinguishing the nodes functioning as the relay hub.

preprint2012arXiv

Ultrathin Terahertz Planar Lenses

Conventional optical components shape the wavefront of propagating light by adjusting the optical path length, which requires the use of rather thick lenses, especially for the adjustment of terahertz (THz) radiation due to its long wavelength. Two ultrathin THz planar lenses were designed and fabricated based on interface phase modulation of antenna resonance. The lens thicknesses were extremely reduced to 100 nm, which is only 1/4000th of the illuminating light wavelength. The focusing and imaging functions of the lenses were experimentally demonstrated. The ultrathin optical components described herein are a significant step toward the development of a micro-integrated THz system.

preprint2011arXiv

A Hop-by-hop Cross-layer Congestion Control Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Congestions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) could potentially cause packet loss, throughput impairment and energy waste. To address this issue, a hop-by-hop cross-layer congestion control scheme (HCCC) built on contention-based MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. According to MAC-layer channel information including buffer occupancy ratio and congestion degree of local node, HCCC dynamically adjusts channel access priority in MAC layer and data transmission rate of the node to tackle the problem of congestion. Simulations have been conducted to compare HCCC against closely-related existing schemes. The results show that HCCC exhibits considerable superiority in terms of packets loss ratio, throughput and energy efficiency.

preprint2011arXiv

CTL Model Update for System Modifications

Model checking is a promising technology, which has been applied for verification of many hardware and software systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of model update towards the development of an automatic system modification tool that extends model checking functions. We define primitive update operations on the models of Computation Tree Logic (CTL) and formalize the principle of minimal change for CTL model update. These primitive update operations, together with the underlying minimal change principle, serve as the foundation for CTL model update. Essential semantic and computational characterizations are provided for our CTL model update approach. We then describe a formal algorithm that implements this approach. We also illustrate two case studies of CTL model updates for the well-known microwave oven example and the Andrew File System 1, from which we further propose a method to optimize the update results in complex system modifications.

preprint2011arXiv

Electronic structure of BaNi$_2$As$_2$

BaNi$_2$As$_2$, with a first order phase transition around 131 K, is studied by the angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. The measured electronic structure is compared to the local density approximation calculations, revealing similar large electronlike bands around $\bar{M}$ and differences along $\barΓ$-$\bar{X}$. We further show that the electronic structure of BaNi$_2$As$_2$ is distinct from that of the sibling iron pnictides. Particularly, there is no signature of band folding, indicating no collinear SDW related magnetic ordering. Moreover, across the strong first order phase transition, the band shift exhibits a hysteresis, which is directly related to the significant lattice distortion in BaNi$_2$As$_2$.

preprint2011arXiv

Evolution of scaling emergence in large-scale spatial epidemic spreading

Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are two representatives of the scaling concepts, which play a significant role in the study of complexity science. The coexistence of the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law motivates different understandings on the dependence between these two scalings, which is still hardly been clarified. Methodology/Principal Findings: In this article, we observe an evolution process of the scalings: the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law are naturally shaped to coexist at the initial time, while the crossover comes with the emergence of their inconsistency at the larger time before reaching a stable state, where the Heaps' law still exists with the disappearance of strict Zipf's law. Such findings are illustrated with a scenario of large-scale spatial epidemic spreading, and the empirical results of pandemic disease support a universal analysis of the relation between the two laws regardless of the biological details of disease. Employing the United States(U.S.) domestic air transportation and demographic data to construct a metapopulation model for simulating the pandemic spread at the U.S. country level, we uncover that the broad heterogeneity of the infrastructure plays a key role in the evolution of scaling emergence. Conclusions/Significance: The analyses of large-scale spatial epidemic spreading help understand the temporal evolution of scalings, indicating the coexistence of the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law depends on the collective dynamics of epidemic processes, and the heterogeneity of epidemic spread indicates the significance of performing targeted containment strategies at the early time of a pandemic disease.

preprint2011arXiv

Magnetic Core-Shell Structure and Proximity Effect in 7 nm Single-Crystal Co3O4 Nanowires

We present a study of magnetic properties of single-crystal Co3O4 nanowires with diameter about 7 nm. The nanowires expose (111) planes composed of plenty of Co3+ cations and exhibit two Néel temperatures at 56 K (TN of wire cores) and 73 K (TN of wire shells), which are far above TN = 40 K of bulk Co3O4. This novel bahavior is attributed to symmetry breaking of surface Co3+ cations and magnetic proximity effect. The nanowire shells show macroscopic residual magnetic moments. Cooling in a magnetic field, a fraction of the residual moments are tightly pinned to the antiferromagnetic lattice, which results in an obvious horizontal and vertical shift of hysteresis loop. Our experiment demonstrates that the exchange bias field HE and the pinned magnetic moments Mpin follow a simple expression HE = aMpin with a a constant.

preprint2011arXiv

Mobility-dependent Low-frequency Noise in Graphene Field Effect Transistors

We have investigated the low-frequency 1/f noise of both suspended and on-substrate graphene field-effect transistors and its dependence on gate voltage, in the temperature range between 300K and 30K. We have found that the noise amplitude away from the Dirac point can be described by a generalized Hooge's relation in which the Hooge parameter αH is not constant but decreases monotonically with the device's mobility, with a universal dependence that is sample and temperature independent. The value of αH is also affected by the dynamics of disorder, which is not reflected in the DC transport characteristics and varies with sample and temperature. We attribute the diverse behavior of gate voltage dependence of the noise amplitude to the relative contributions from various scattering mechanisms, and to potential fluctuations near the Dirac point caused by charge carrier inhomogeneity. The higher carrier mobility of suspended graphene devices accounts for values of 1/f noise significantly lower than those observed in on-substrate graphene devices and most traditional electronic materials.

preprint2011arXiv

The experimental observation of quantum Hall effect of l = 3 chiral charge carriers in trilayer graphene

Low-energy electronic states in monolayer and bilayer graphenes present chiral charge carriers with unique and unusual properties of interest for electronic applications. Here, we report the magnetotransport measurements in the ABC-stacked trilayer graphene as a function of charge carrier density, magnetic field, and temperature, which show clear evidence of l = 3 chiral quasiparticles with cubic dispersion, existing in a large, 20x60 sq. microns device. Shubnikov-deHaas oscillations (SdHO) reveal the Berry's phase 3π, and the marked increase of cyclotron mass near charge neutrality, consistent with divergent behavior expected for l = 3 quasiparticles. We also observe the predicted unconventional sequence of quantum Hall effect (QHE) plateaus, +/-6e^2/h, +/-10e^2/h, ... .

preprint2011arXiv

Tunable band gap of graphane nanoribbons under uniaxial elastic strain: a first-principles study

In this Letter, we investigate the strain-induced band-gap modulation of both armchair and zigzag graphane nanoribbons based on the first-principles calculations. Within the elastic range, the band gap changes linearly with the uniaxial strain, where the band-gap of graphane nanoribbonsis more sensitive to compressive than tensile deformation. The band-gap deformation mainly originates from the shift of valence band edge of graphane nanoribbons under stain. Our results imply the great potential of graphane nanoribbons in the pressure sensor and optical electronics applications.

preprint2011arXiv

Ultrathin MgB2 films fabricated on Al2O3 substrate by hybrid physical-chemical vapor deposition with high Tc and Jc

Ultrathin MgB2 superconducting films with a thickness down to 7.5 nm are epitaxially grown on (0001) Al2O3 substrate by hybrid physical-chemical vapor deposition method. The films are phase-pure, oxidation-free and continuous. The 7.5 nm thin film shows a Tc(0) of 34 K, which is so far the highest Tc(0) reported in MgB2 with the same thickness. The critical current density of ultrathin MgB2 films below 10 nm is demonstrated for the first time as Jc ~ 10^6 A cm^{-2} for the above 7.5 nm sample at 16 K. Our results reveal the excellent superconducting properties of ultrathin MgB2 films with thicknesses between 7.5 and 40 nm on Al2O3 substrate.

preprint2010arXiv

Electronic structure of Fe1.04(Te0.66Se0.34)

We report the electronic structure of the iron-chalcogenide superconductor, Fe1.04(Te0.66Se0.34), obtained with high resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and density functional calculations. In photoemission measurements, various photon energies and polarizations are exploited to study the Fermi surface topology and symmetry properties of the bands. The measured band structure and their symmetry characters qualitatively agree with our density function theory calculations of Fe(Te0.66Se0.34), although the band structure is renormalized by about a factor of three. We find that the electronic structures of this iron-chalcogenides and the iron-pnictides have many aspects in common, however, significant differences exist near the Gamma-point. For Fe1.04(Te0.66Se0.34), there are clearly separated three bands with distinct even or odd symmetry that cross the Fermi energy (EF) near the zone center, which contribute to three hole-like Fermi surfaces. Especially, both experiments and calculations show a hole-like elliptical Fermi surface at the zone center. Moreover, no sign of spin density wave was observed in the electronic structure and susceptibility measurements of this compound.

preprint2010arXiv

High-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy study of the electronic structure of EuFe2As2

We report the high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy studies of electronic structure of EuFe2As2. The paramagnetic state data are found to be consistent with density-functional calculations. In the antiferromagnetic ordering state of Fe, our results show that the band splitting, folding, and hybridization evolve with temperature, which cannot be explained by a simple folding picture. Detailed measurements reveal that a tiny electron Fermi pocket and a tiny hole pocket are formed near (pi,pi) in the (0,0)-(pi,pi) direction, which qualitatively agree with the results of quantum oscillations, considering kz variation of Fermi surface. Furthermore, no noticeable change within the energy resolution is observed across the antiferromagnetic transition of Eu2+ ordering, suggesting weak coupling between Eu sublattice and FeAs sublattice.

preprint1997arXiv

Monte Carlo study of very weak first-order transitions in the three-dimensional Ashkin-Teller model

We propose numerical simulations of the Ashkin-Teller model as a foil for theoretical techniques for studying very weakly first-order phase transitions in three dimensions. The Ashkin-Teller model is a simple two-spin model whose parameters can be adjusted so that it has an arbitrarily weakly first-order phase transition. In this limit, there are quantities characterizing the first-order transition which are universal: we measure the relative discontinuity of the specific heat, the correlation length, and the susceptibility across the transition by Monte Carlo simulation.

preprint1996arXiv

Weakly first-order phase transitions: the epsilon expansion vs. numerical simulations

Some phase transitions of cosmological interest may be weakly first-order and cannot be analyzed by a simple perturbative expansion around mean field theory. We propose a simple two-scalar model--the cubic anisotropy model--as a foil for theoretical techniques to study such transitions, and we review its similarities and dissimilarities to the electroweak phase transition in the early universe. We present numerical Monte Carlo results for various discontinuities across very weakly first-order transitions in this model and, as an example, compare them to epsilon-expansion results. For this purpose, we have computed through next-to-next-to-leading order in epsilon.