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Published work

44 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

TripVVT: A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset and a Coarse-Mask Baseline for In-the-Wild Video Virtual Try-On

Due to the scarcity of large-scale in-the-wild triplet data and the improper use of masks, the performance of video virtual try-on models remains limited. In this paper, we first introduce **TripVVT-10K**, the largest and most diverse in-the-wild triplet dataset to date, providing explicit video-level cross-garment supervision that existing video datasets lack. Built upon this resource, we develop **TripVVT**, a Diffusion Transformer-based framework that replaces fragile garment masks with a simple, stable human-mask prior, enabling reliable background preservation while remaining robust to real-world motion, occlusion, and cluttered scenes. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further establish **TripVVT-Bench**, a 100-case benchmark covering diverse garments, complex environments, and multi-person scenarios, with metrics spanning video quality, try-on fidelity, background consistency, and temporal coherence. Compared to state-of-the-art academic and commercial systems, TripVVT achieves superior video quality and garment fidelity while markedly improving generalization to challenging in-the-wild videos. We publicly release the dataset and benchmark, which we believe provide a solid foundation for advancing controllable, realistic, and temporally stable video virtual try-on.

preprint2024arXiv

3D-SSGAN: Lifting 2D Semantics for 3D-Aware Compositional Portrait Synthesis

Existing 3D-aware portrait synthesis methods can generate impressive high-quality images while preserving strong 3D consistency. However, most of them cannot support the fine-grained part-level control over synthesized images. Conversely, some GAN-based 2D portrait synthesis methods can achieve clear disentanglement of facial regions, but they cannot preserve view consistency due to a lack of 3D modeling abilities. To address these issues, we propose 3D-SSGAN, a novel framework for 3D-aware compositional portrait image synthesis. First, a simple yet effective depth-guided 2D-to-3D lifting module maps the generated 2D part features and semantics to 3D. Then, a volume renderer with a novel 3D-aware semantic mask renderer is utilized to produce the composed face features and corresponding masks. The whole framework is trained end-to-end by discriminating between real and synthesized 2D images and their semantic masks. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of 3D-SSGAN in controllable part-level synthesis while preserving 3D view consistency.

preprint2023arXiv

Designing Filter Functions of Frequency-Modulated Pulses for High-Fidelity Two-Qubit Gates in Ion Chains

High-fidelity two-qubit gates in quantum computers are often hampered by fluctuating experimental parameters. The effects of time-varying parameter fluctuations lead to coherent noise on the qubits, which can be suppressed by designing control signals with appropriate filter functions. Here, we develop filter functions for Mølmer-Sørensen gates of trapped-ion quantum computers that accurately predict the change in gate error due to small parameter fluctuations at any frequency. We then design the filter functions of frequency-modulated laser pulses, and compare this method with pulses that are robust to static offsets of the motional-mode frequencies. Experimentally, we measure the noise spectrum of the motional modes and use it for designing the filter functions, which improves the gate fidelity from 99.23(7)% to 99.55(7)% in a five-ion chain.

preprint2023arXiv

P2M2-Net: Part-Aware Prompt-Guided Multimodal Point Cloud Completion

Inferring missing regions from severely occluded point clouds is highly challenging. Especially for 3D shapes with rich geometry and structure details, inherent ambiguities of the unknown parts are existing. Existing approaches either learn a one-to-one mapping in a supervised manner or train a generative model to synthesize the missing points for the completion of 3D point cloud shapes. These methods, however, lack the controllability for the completion process and the results are either deterministic or exhibiting uncontrolled diversity. Inspired by the prompt-driven data generation and editing, we propose a novel prompt-guided point cloud completion framework, coined P2M2-Net, to enable more controllable and more diverse shape completion. Given an input partial point cloud and a text prompt describing the part-aware information such as semantics and structure of the missing region, our Transformer-based completion network can efficiently fuse the multimodal features and generate diverse results following the prompt guidance. We train the P2M2-Net on a new large-scale PartNet-Prompt dataset and conduct extensive experiments on two challenging shape completion benchmarks. Quantitative and qualitative results show the efficacy of incorporating prompts for more controllable part-aware point cloud completion and generation. Code and data are available at https://github.com/JLU-ICL/P2M2-Net.

preprint2023arXiv

Realization of Scalable Cirac-Zoller Multi-Qubit Gates

The universality theorem in quantum computing states that any quantum computational task can be decomposed into a finite set of logic gates operating on one and two qubits. However, the process of such decomposition is generally inefficient, often leading to exponentially many gates to realize an arbitrary computational task. Practical processor designs benefit greatly from availability of multi-qubit gates that operate on more than two qubits to implement the desired circuit. In 1995, Cirac and Zoller proposed a method to realize native multi-qubit controlled-$Z$ gates in trapped ion systems, which has a stringent requirement on ground-state cooling of the motional modes utilized by the gate. An alternative approach, the Mølmer-Sørensen gate, is robust against residual motional excitation and has been a foundation for many high-fidelity gate demonstrations. This gate does not scale well beyond two qubits, incurring additional overhead when used to construct many target algorithms. Here, we take advantage of novel performance benefits of long ion chains to realize fully programmable and scalable high-fidelity Cirac-Zoller gates.

preprint2022arXiv

A Practical Guide to Counterfactual Estimators for Causal Inference with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data

This paper introduces a simple framework of counterfactual estimation for causal inference with time-series cross-sectional data, in which we estimate the average treatment effect on the treated by directly imputing counterfactual outcomes for treated observations. We discuss several novel estimators under this framework, including the fixed effects counterfactual estimator, interactive fixed effects counterfactual estimator, and matrix completion estimator. They provide more reliable causal estimates than conventional twoway fixed effects models when treatment effects are heterogeneous or unobserved time-varying confounders exist. Moreover, we propose a new dynamic treatment effects plot, along with several diagnostic tests, to help researchers gauge the validity of the identifying assumptions. We illustrate these methods with two political economy examples and develop an open-source package, fect, in both R and Stata to facilitate implementation.

preprint2022arXiv

Advanced Conditional Variational Autoencoders (A-CVAE): Towards interpreting open-domain conversation generation via disentangling latent feature representation

Currently end-to-end deep learning based open-domain dialogue systems remain black box models, making it easy to generate irrelevant contents with data-driven models. Specifically, latent variables are highly entangled with different semantics in the latent space due to the lack of priori knowledge to guide the training. To address this problem, this paper proposes to harness the generative model with a priori knowledge through a cognitive approach involving mesoscopic scale feature disentanglement. Particularly, the model integrates the macro-level guided-category knowledge and micro-level open-domain dialogue data for the training, leveraging the priori knowledge into the latent space, which enables the model to disentangle the latent variables within the mesoscopic scale. Besides, we propose a new metric for open-domain dialogues, which can objectively evaluate the interpretability of the latent space distribution. Finally, we validate our model on different datasets and experimentally demonstrate that our model is able to generate higher quality and more interpretable dialogues than other models.

preprint2022arXiv

AutoQML: Automated Quantum Machine Learning for Wi-Fi Integrated Sensing and Communications

Commercial Wi-Fi devices can be used for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) to jointly exchange data and monitor indoor environment. In this paper, we investigate a proof-of-concept approach using automated quantum machine learning (AutoQML) framework called AutoAnsatz to recognize human gesture. We address how to efficiently design quantum circuits to configure quantum neural networks (QNN). The effectiveness of AutoQML is validated by an in-house experiment for human pose recognition, achieving state-of-the-art performance greater than 80% accuracy for a limited data size with a significantly small number of trainable parameters.

preprint2022arXiv

AutoTransfer: Subject Transfer Learning with Censored Representations on Biosignals Data

We provide a regularization framework for subject transfer learning in which we seek to train an encoder and classifier to minimize classification loss, subject to a penalty measuring independence between the latent representation and the subject label. We introduce three notions of independence and corresponding penalty terms using mutual information or divergence as a proxy for independence. For each penalty term, we provide several concrete estimation algorithms, using analytic methods as well as neural critic functions. We provide a hands-off strategy for applying this diverse family of regularization algorithms to a new dataset, which we call "AutoTransfer". We evaluate the performance of these individual regularization strategies and our AutoTransfer method on EEG, EMG, and ECoG datasets, showing that these approaches can improve subject transfer learning for challenging real-world datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

CLIP-Forge: Towards Zero-Shot Text-to-Shape Generation

Generating shapes using natural language can enable new ways of imagining and creating the things around us. While significant recent progress has been made in text-to-image generation, text-to-shape generation remains a challenging problem due to the unavailability of paired text and shape data at a large scale. We present a simple yet effective method for zero-shot text-to-shape generation that circumvents such data scarcity. Our proposed method, named CLIP-Forge, is based on a two-stage training process, which only depends on an unlabelled shape dataset and a pre-trained image-text network such as CLIP. Our method has the benefits of avoiding expensive inference time optimization, as well as the ability to generate multiple shapes for a given text. We not only demonstrate promising zero-shot generalization of the CLIP-Forge model qualitatively and quantitatively, but also provide extensive comparative evaluations to better understand its behavior.

preprint2022arXiv

Cyclic Arbitrage in Decentralized Exchanges

Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) enable users to create markets for exchanging any pair of cryptocurrencies. The direct exchange rate of two tokens may not match the cross-exchange rate in the market, and such price discrepancies open up arbitrage possibilities with trading through different cryptocurrencies cyclically. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation on cyclic arbitrages in DEXes. We propose a theoretical framework for studying cyclic arbitrage. With our framework, we analyze the profitability conditions and optimal trading strategies of cyclic transactions. We further examine exploitable arbitrage opportunities and the market size of cyclic arbitrages with transaction-level data of Uniswap V2. We find that traders have executed 292,606 cyclic arbitrages over eleven months and exploited more than 138 million USD in revenue. However, the revenue of the most profitable unexploited opportunity is persistently higher than 1 ETH (4,000 USD), which indicates that DEX markets may not be efficient enough. By analyzing how traders implement cyclic arbitrages, we find that traders can utilize smart contracts to issue atomic transactions and the atomic implementations could mitigate users' financial loss in cyclic arbitrage from the price impact.

preprint2022arXiv

Data-Driven Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm for Cyber-Physical Power Systems

Quantum technology provides a ground-breaking methodology to tackle challenging computational issues in power systems, especially for Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) dominant cyber-physical systems that have been widely developed to promote energy sustainability. The systems' maximum power or data sections are essential for monitoring, operation, and control, while high computational effort is required. Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) provides a promising means to search for these sections by leveraging quantum resources. However, its performance highly relies on the critical parameters, especially for weighted graphs. We present a data-driven QAOA, which transfers quasi-optimal parameters between weighted graphs based on the normalized graph density, and verify the strategy with 39,774 instances. Without parameter optimization, our data-driven QAOA is comparable with the Goemans-Williamson algorithm. This work advances QAOA and pilots the practical application of quantum technique to power systems in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, heralding its next-generation computation in the quantum era.

preprint2022arXiv

Determination of Multi-mode Motional Quantum States in a Trapped Ion System

Trapped atomic ions are a versatile platform for studying interactions between spins and bosons by coupling the internal states of the ions to their motion. Measurement of complex motional states with multiple modes is challenging, because all motional state populations can only be measured indirectly through the spin state of ions. Here we present a general method to determine the Fock state distributions and to reconstruct the density matrix of an arbitrary multi-mode motional state. We experimentally verify the method using different entangled states of multiple radial modes in a 5-ion chain. This method can be extended to any system with Jaynes-Cummings type interactions.

preprint2022arXiv

Enhancing Dual-Encoders with Question and Answer Cross-Embeddings for Answer Retrieval

Dual-Encoders is a promising mechanism for answer retrieval in question answering (QA) systems. Currently most conventional Dual-Encoders learn the semantic representations of questions and answers merely through matching score. Researchers proposed to introduce the QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. To keep independent encoding of questions and answers during inference stage, variational auto-encoder is further introduced to reconstruct answers (questions) from question (answer) embeddings as an auxiliary task to enhance QA interaction in representation learning in training stage. However, the needs of text generation and answer retrieval are different, which leads to hardness in training. In this work, we propose a framework to enhance the Dual-Encoders model with question answer cross-embeddings and a novel Geometry Alignment Mechanism (GAM) to align the geometry of embeddings from Dual-Encoders with that from Cross-Encoders. Extensive experimental results show that our framework significantly improves Dual-Encoders model and outperforms the state-of-the-art method on multiple answer retrieval datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Experimental Realization of the Rabi-Hubbard Model with Trapped Ions

Quantum simulation provides important tools in studying strongly correlated many-body systems with controllable parameters. As a hybrid of two fundamental models in quantum optics and in condensed matter physics, the Rabi-Hubbard model demonstrates rich physics through the competition between local spin-boson interactions and long-range boson hopping. Here we report an experimental realization of the Rabi-Hubbard model using up to $16$ trapped ions and present a controlled study of its equilibrium properties and quantum dynamics. We observe the ground-state quantum phase transition by slowly quenching the coupling strength, and measure the quantum dynamical evolution in various parameter regimes. With the magnetization and the spin-spin correlation as probes, we verify the prediction of the model Hamiltonian by comparing theoretical results in small system sizes with experimental observations. For larger-size systems of $16$ ions and $16$ phonon modes, the effective Hilbert space dimension exceeds $2^{57}$, whose dynamics is intractable for classical supercomputers.

preprint2022arXiv

Exploring Transformer's potential on automatic piano transcription

Most recent research about automatic music transcription (AMT) uses convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks to model the mapping from music signals to symbolic notation. Based on a high-resolution piano transcription system, we explore the possibility of incorporating another powerful sequence transformation tool -- the Transformer -- to deal with the AMT problem. We argue that the properties of the Transformer make it more suitable for certain AMT subtasks. We confirm the Transformer's superiority on the velocity detection task by experiments on the MAESTRO dataset and a cross-dataset evaluation on the MAPS dataset. We observe a performance improvement on both frame-level and note-level metrics after introducing the Transformer network.

preprint2022arXiv

Hidden Inverses: Coherent Error Cancellation at the Circuit Level

Coherent gate errors are a concern in many proposed quantum computing architectures. These errors can be effectively handled through composite pulse sequences for single-qubit gates, however, such techniques are less feasible for entangling operations. In this work, we benchmark our coherent errors by comparing the actual performance of composite single-qubit gates to the predicted performance based on characterization of individual single-qubit rotations. We then propose a compilation technique, which we refer to as hidden inverses, that creates circuits robust to these coherent errors. We present experimental data showing that these circuits suppress both overrotation and phase misalignment errors in our trapped ion system.

preprint2022arXiv

Improved Pump Setpoint Selection Using a Calibrated Hydraulic Model of a High-Pressure Irrigation System

This paper presents a case study of the operational management of the Robinvale high-pressure piped irrigation water delivery system (RVHPS) in Australia. Based on datasets available, improved pump setpoint selection using a calibrated hydraulic model is investigated. The first step was to implement pre-processing of measured flow and pressure data to identify errors in the data and possible faulty sensors. An EPANET hydraulic simulation model was updated with calibrated pipe roughness height values by using the processed pressure and flow data. Then, new pump setpoints were selected using the calibrated model given the actual measured demands such that the pressures in the network were minimized subject to required customer service standards. Based on a two-day simulation, it was estimated that 4.7% savings in pumping energy cost as well as 4.7% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved by applying the new pump setpoints.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning to Learn Quantum Turbo Detection

This paper investigates a turbo receiver employing a variational quantum circuit (VQC). The VQC is configured with an ansatz of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). We propose a 'learning to learn' (L2L) framework to optimize the turbo VQC decoder such that high fidelity soft-decision output is generated. Besides demonstrating the proposed algorithm's computational complexity, we show that the L2L VQC turbo decoder can achieve an excellent performance close to the optimal maximum-likelihood performance in a multiple-input multiple-output system.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-Band Wi-Fi Sensing with Matched Feature Granularity

Complementary to the fine-grained channel state information (CSI) from the physical layer and coarse-grained received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements, the mid-grained spatial beam attributes (e.g., beam SNR) that are available at millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands during the mandatory beam training phase can be repurposed for Wi-Fi sensing applications. In this paper, we propose a multi-band Wi-Fi fusion method for Wi-Fi sensing that hierarchically fuses the features from both the fine-grained CSI at sub-6 GHz and the mid-grained beam SNR at 60 GHz in a granularity matching framework. The granularity matching is realized by pairing two feature maps from the CSI and beam SNR at different granularity levels and linearly combining all paired feature maps into a fused feature map with learnable weights. To further address the issue of limited labeled training data, we propose an autoencoder-based multi-band Wi-Fi fusion network that can be pre-trained in an unsupervised fashion. Once the autoencoder-based fusion network is pre-trained, we detach the decoders and append multi-task sensing heads to the fused feature map by fine-tuning the fusion block and re-training the multi-task heads from the scratch. The multi-band Wi-Fi fusion framework is thoroughly validated by in-house experimental Wi-Fi sensing datasets spanning three tasks: 1) pose recognition; 2) occupancy sensing; and 3) indoor localization. Comparison to four baseline methods (i.e., CSI-only, beam SNR-only, input fusion, and feature fusion) demonstrates the granularity matching improves the multi-task sensing performance. Quantitative performance is evaluated as a function of the number of labeled training data, latent space dimension, and fine-tuning learning rates.

preprint2022arXiv

Non-decreasing Payment Rules for Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions are used to allocate resources in domains where bidders have complex preferences over bundles of goods. However, the behavior of bidders under different payment rules is not well understood, and there has been limited success in finding Bayes-Nash equilibria of such auctions due to the computational difficulties involved. In this paper, we introduce non-decreasing payment rules. Under such a rule, the payment of a bidder cannot decrease when he increases his bid, which is a natural and desirable property. VCG-nearest, the payment rule most commonly used in practice, violates this property and can thus be manipulated in surprising ways. In contrast, we show that many other payment rules are non-decreasing. We also show that a non-decreasing payment rule imposes a structure on the auction game that enables us to search for an approximate Bayes-Nash equilibrium much more efficiently than in the general case. Finally, we introduce the utility planes BNE algorithm, which exploits this structure and outperforms a state-of-the-art algorithm by multiple orders of magnitude.

preprint2022arXiv

Observing frustrated quantum magnetism in two-dimensional ion crystals

Two-dimensional (2D) quantum magnetism is a paradigm in strongly correlated many-body physics. The understanding of 2D quantum magnetism can be expedited by employing a controllable quantum simulator that faithfully maps 2D-spin Hamiltonians. The 2D quantum simulators can exhibit exotic phenomena such as frustrated quantum magnetism and topological order and can be used to show quantum computational advantages. Many experimental platforms are being developed, including Rydberg atoms and superconducting annealers. However, with trapped-ion systems, which showed the most advanced controllability and quantum coherence, quantum magnetism was explored in one-dimensional chains. Here, we report simulations of frustrated quantum magnetism with 2D ion crystals. We create a variety of spin-spin interactions for quantum magnets, including those that exhibit frustration by driving different vibrational modes and adiabatically prepare the corresponding ground states. The experimentally measured ground states are consistent with the theoretical predictions and are highly degenerate for geometrically frustrated spin models in two dimensions. Quantum coherence of the ground states is probed by reversing the time evolution of the B-field to the initial value and then measuring the extent to which the remaining state coincides with the initial state. Our results open the door for quantum simulations with 2D ion crystals.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantum Transfer Learning for Wi-Fi Sensing

Beyond data communications, commercial-off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices can be used to monitor human activities, track device locomotion, and sense the ambient environment. In particular, spatial beam attributes that are inherently available in the 60-GHz IEEE 802.11ad/ay standards have shown to be effective in terms of overhead and channel measurement granularity for these indoor sensing tasks. In this paper, we investigate transfer learning to mitigate domain shift in human monitoring tasks when Wi-Fi settings and environments change over time. As a proof-of-concept study, we consider quantum neural networks (QNN) as well as classical deep neural networks (DNN) for the future quantum-ready society. The effectiveness of both DNN and QNN is validated by an in-house experiment for human pose recognition, achieving greater than 90% accuracy with a limited data size.

preprint2022arXiv

RotateQVS: Representing Temporal Information as Rotations in Quaternion Vector Space for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Temporal factors are tied to the growth of facts in realistic applications, such as the progress of diseases and the development of political situation, therefore, research on Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) attracks much attention. In TKG, relation patterns inherent with temporality are required to be studied for representation learning and reasoning across temporal facts. However, existing methods can hardly model temporal relation patterns, nor can capture the intrinsic connections between relations when evolving over time, lacking of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal modeling method which represents temporal entities as Rotations in Quaternion Vector Space (RotateQVS) and relations as complex vectors in Hamilton's quaternion space. We demonstrate our method can model key patterns of relations in TKG, such as symmetry, asymmetry, inverse, and can further capture time-evolved relations by theory. Empirically, we show that our method can boost the performance of link prediction tasks over four temporal knowledge graph benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

The Evolution of Blockchain: from Lit to Dark

Transactions submitted through the blockchain peer-to-peer (P2P) network may leak out exploitable information. We study the economic incentives behind the adoption of blockchain dark venues, where users' transactions are observable only by miners on these venues. We show that miners may not fully adopt dark venues to preserve rents extracted from arbitrageurs, hence creating execution risk for users. The dark venue neither eliminates frontrunning risk nor reduces transaction costs. It strictly increases the payoff of miners, weakly increases the payoff of users, and weakly reduces arbitrageurs' profits. We provide empirical support for our main implications, and show that they are economically significant. A 1% increase in the probability of being frontrun raises users' adoption rate of the dark venue by 0.6%. Arbitrageurs' cost-to-revenue ratio increases by a third with a dark venue.

preprint2022arXiv

Understanding the Relationship Between Core Constraints and Core-Selecting Payment Rules in Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions (CAs) allow bidders to express complex preferences for bundles of goods being auctioned. However, the behavior of bidders under different payment rules is often unclear. In this paper, we aim to understand how core constraints interact with different core-selecting payment rules. In particular, we examine the natural and desirable non-decreasing property of payment rules, which states that bidders cannot decrease their payments by increasing their bids. Previous work showed that, in general, the widely used VCG-nearest payment rule violates the non-decreasing property in single-minded CAs. We prove that under a single effective core constraint, the VCG-nearest payment rule is non-decreasing. In order to determine in which auctions single effective core constraints occur, we introduce a conflict graph representation of single-minded CAs and find sufficient conditions for the single effective core constraint in CAs. Finally, we study the consequences on the behavior of the bidders and show that no over-bidding exists in any Nash equilibrium for non-decreasing core-selecting payment rules.

preprint2022arXiv

Variational Quantum Compressed Sensing for Joint User and Channel State Acquisition in Grant-Free Device Access Systems

This paper introduces a new quantum computing framework integrated with a two-step compressed sensing technique, applied to a joint channel estimation and user identification problem. We propose a variational quantum circuit (VQC) design as a new denoising solution. For a practical grant-free communications system having correlated device activities, variational quantum parameters for Pauli rotation gates in the proposed VQC system are optimized to facilitate to the non-linear estimation. Numerical results show that the VQC method can outperform modern compressed sensing techniques using an element-wise denoiser.

preprint2021arXiv

Medical Image Segmentation with Limited Supervision: A Review of Deep Network Models

Despite the remarkable performance of deep learning methods on various tasks, most cutting-edge models rely heavily on large-scale annotated training examples, which are often unavailable for clinical and health care tasks. The labeling costs for medical images are very high, especially in medical image segmentation, which typically requires intensive pixel/voxel-wise labeling. Therefore, the strong capability of learning and generalizing from limited supervision, including a limited amount of annotations, sparse annotations, and inaccurate annotations, is crucial for the successful application of deep learning models in medical image segmentation. However, due to its intrinsic difficulty, segmentation with limited supervision is challenging and specific model design and/or learning strategies are needed. In this paper, we provide a systematic and up-to-date review of the solutions above, with summaries and comments about the methodologies. We also highlight several problems in this field, discussed future directions observing further investigations.

preprint2021arXiv

Protograph-Based Design for QC Polar Codes

We propose a new family of polar coding which realizes high coding gain, low complexity, and high throughput by introducing a protograph-based design. The proposed technique called as quasi-cyclic (QC) polar codes can be highly parallelized without sacrificing decoding complexity. We analyze short cycles in the protograph polar codes and develop a design method to increase the girth. Our approach can resolve the long-standing unsolved problem that belief propagation (BP) decoding does not work well for polar codes due to the inherently short cycles. We demonstrate that a high lifting factor of QC polar codes can improve the performance and that QC polar codes with BP decoding can outperform conventional polar codes with state-of-the-art list decoding. Moreover, we show that a greedy pruning method can improve the performance-complexity trade-off.

preprint2021arXiv

Robust distributed model predictive control of linear systems: analysis and synthesis

To provide robustness of distributed model predictive control (DMPC), this work proposes a robust DMPC formulation for discrete-time linear systems subject to unknown-but-bounded disturbances. Taking advantage of the structure of certain classes of distributed systems seen in applications with interagent coupling like vehicle platooning, a novel robust DMPC is formulated. The proposed approach is characterised by separable terminal costs and locally robust terminal sets, with the latter sets adaptively estimated in the online optimisation problem. A constraint tightening approach based on a set-membership approach is used to guarantee constraint satisfaction for coupled subsystems in the presence of disturbances. Under this formulation, the closed-loop system is shown to be recursively feasible and input-to-state stable. To aid in the deployment of the proposed robust DMPC, a possible synthesis method and design conditions for practical implementation are presented. Finally, simulation results with a mass-spring-damper system are provided to demonstrate the proposed robust DMPC.

preprint2021arXiv

The Dust Mass of Supernova Remnants in M31

The dust temperature and mass of the supernova remnants (SNRs) in M31 are estimated by fitting the infrared spectral energy distribution calculated from the images in the Spitzer/IRAC4 and MIPS24, Herschel/PACS70, 100, 160, and Herschel/SPIRE250, 350$μ$m band. Twenty SNRs with relatively reliable photometry exhibit an average dust temperature of $20.1^{+1.8}_{-1.5}$K, which is higher than the surrounding and indicating the heating effect of supernova explosion. The dust mass of these SNRs ranges from about 100 to 800$ M_{\odot}$, much bigger than the SNRs in the Milky Way. On the other hand, this yields the dust surface density of $0.10^{+0.07}_{-0.04}{ M_{\odot} \rm pc^{-2}}$, about half of the surrounding area, which implies that about half dust in the SNRs is destroyed by the supernova explosion. The dust temperature, the radius, and thus the dust mass all demonstrate that the studied SNRs are old and very likely in the snowplow or even fade away phase because of the limitation by the far distance and observation resolution of M31, and the results can serve as a reference to the final effect of supernova explosion on the surrounding dust.

preprint2020arXiv

A Systematic Study of the dust of Galactic Supernova Remnants I. The Distance and the Extinction

By combining the photometric, spectroscopic, and astrometric information of the stars in the sightline of SNRs, the distances to and the extinctions of 32 Galactic supernova remnants (SNRs) are investigated. The stellar atmospheric parameters are from the SDSS$-$DR14$/$APOGEE and LAMOST$-$DR5$/$LEGUE spectroscopic surveys. The multi-band photometry, from optical to infrared, are collected from the {\it Gaia}, APASS, Pan--STARRS1, 2MASS, and {\it WISE} surveys. With the calibrated {\it Gaia} distances of individual stars, the distances to 15 of 32 SNRs are well determined from their produced extinction and association with molecular clouds. The upper limits of distance are derived for 3 SNRs. The color excess ratios $E(g_{\rm P1}-λ) / E(g_{\rm P1}-r_{\rm P1})$ of 32 SNRs are calculated, and their variation with wavebands is fitted by a simple dust model. The inferred dust grain size distribution bifurcates: while the graphite grains have comparable size to the average ISM dust, the silicate grains are generally larger. Along the way, the average extinction law from optical to near-infrared of the Milky Way is derived from the 1.3 million star sample and found to agree with the CCM89 law with $R_{\rm V}=3.15$.

preprint2020arXiv

Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement in Incomplete Networks [Technical Report]

The Byzantine agreement problem is considered to be a core problem in distributed systems. For example, Byzantine agreement is needed to build a blockchain, a totally ordered log of records. Blockchains are asynchronous distributed systems, fault-tolerant against Byzantine nodes. In the literature, the asynchronous byzantine agreement problem is studied in a fully connected network model where every node can directly send messages to every other node. This assumption is questionable in many real-world environments. In the reality, nodes might need to communicate by means of an incomplete network, and Byzantine nodes might not forward messages. Furthermore, Byzantine nodes might not behave correctly and, for example, corrupt messages. Therefore, in order to truly understand Byzantine Agreement, we need both ingredients: asynchrony and incomplete communication networks. In this paper, we study the asynchronous Byzantine agreement problem in incomplete networks. A classic result by Danny Dolev proved that in a distributed system with n nodes in the presence of f Byzantine nodes, the vertex connectivity of the system communication graph should be at least (2f+1). While Dolev's result was for synchronous deterministic systems, we demonstrate that the same bound also holds for asynchronous randomized systems. We show that the bound is tight by presenting a randomized algorithm, and a matching lower bound.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Graph Random Process for Relational-Thinking-Based Speech Recognition

Lying at the core of human intelligence, relational thinking is characterized by initially relying on innumerable unconscious percepts pertaining to relations between new sensory signals and prior knowledge, consequently becoming a recognizable concept or object through coupling and transformation of these percepts. Such mental processes are difficult to model in real-world problems such as in conversational automatic speech recognition (ASR), as the percepts (if they are modelled as graphs indicating relationships among utterances) are supposed to be innumerable and not directly observable. In this paper, we present a Bayesian nonparametric deep learning method called deep graph random process (DGP) that can generate an infinite number of probabilistic graphs representing percepts. We further provide a closed-form solution for coupling and transformation of these percept graphs for acoustic modeling. Our approach is able to successfully infer relations among utterances without using any relational data during training. Experimental evaluations on ASR tasks including CHiME-2 and CHiME-5 demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of our method.

preprint2020arXiv

DeepSlicing: Deep Reinforcement Learning Assisted Resource Allocation for Network Slicing

Network slicing enables multiple virtual networks run on the same physical infrastructure to support various use cases in 5G and beyond. These use cases, however, have very diverse network resource demands, e.g., communication and computation, and various performance metrics such as latency and throughput. To effectively allocate network resources to slices, we propose DeepSlicing that integrates the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). DeepSlicing decomposes the network slicing problem into a master problem and several slave problems. The master problem is solved based on convex optimization and the slave problem is handled by DRL method which learns the optimal resource allocation policy. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated through network simulations.

preprint2020arXiv

Disentangled Adversarial Transfer Learning for Physiological Biosignals

Recent developments in wearable sensors demonstrate promising results for monitoring physiological status in effective and comfortable ways. One major challenge of physiological status assessment is the problem of transfer learning caused by the domain inconsistency of biosignals across users or different recording sessions from the same user. We propose an adversarial inference approach for transfer learning to extract disentangled nuisance-robust representations from physiological biosignal data in stress status level assessment. We exploit the trade-off between task-related features and person-discriminative information by using both an adversary network and a nuisance network to jointly manipulate and disentangle the learned latent representations by the encoder, which are then input to a discriminative classifier. Results on cross-subjects transfer evaluations demonstrate the benefits of the proposed adversarial framework, and thus show its capabilities to adapt to a broader range of subjects. Finally we highlight that our proposed adversarial transfer learning approach is also applicable to other deep feature learning frameworks.

preprint2020arXiv

Generative Deep Learning Model for a Multi-level Nano-Optic Broadband Power Splitter

We propose a novel Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) model, enhanced with adversarial censoring and active learning, for the generation of 550 nm broad bandwidth (1250 nm to 1800 nm) power splitters with arbitrary splitting ratio. The device footprint is 2.25 x 2.25 μ m2 with a 20 x 20 etched hole combination. It is the first demonstration to apply the CVAE model and the adversarial censoring for the photonics problems. We confirm that the optimized device has an overall performance close to 90% across all bandwidths from 1250 nm to 1800 nm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the smallest broadband power splitter with arbitrary ratio.

preprint2020arXiv

Lattice PUF: A Strong Physical Unclonable Function Provably Secure against Machine Learning Attacks

We propose a strong physical unclonable function (PUF) provably secure against machine learning (ML) attacks with both classical and quantum computers. Its security is derived from cryptographic hardness of learning decryption functions of public-key cryptosystems. Our design compactly realizes the decryption function of the learning-with-errors (LWE) cryptosystem. Due to the fundamental connection of LWE to lattice problems, we call the construction the lattice PUF. Lattice PUF is constructed using a physically obfuscated key (POK), an LWE decryption function block, and a linear-feedback shift register (LFSR) as a pseudo-random number generator. The POK provides the secret key of the LWE decryption function; its stability is ensured by a fuzzy extractor (FE). To reduce the challenge size, we exploit distributional relaxations of space-efficient LWEs. That allows only a small challenge-seed to be transmitted with the full-length challenge generated by the LFSR, resulting in a 100X reduction of communication cost. To prevent an active challenge-manipulation attack, a self-incrementing counter is embedded into the challenge seed. We prototyped the lattice PUF with 2^136 challenge-response pairs (CRPs) on a Spartan 6 FPGA, which required 45 slices for the PUF logic proper and 233 slices for the FE. Simulation-based evaluation shows the mean (std) of uniformity to be 49.98% (1.58%), of uniqueness to be 50.00% (1.58%), and of reliability to be 1.26% (2.88%). The LWE concrete hardness estimator guarantees that a successful ML attack of the lattice PUF will require the infeasible 2^128 CPU operations. Several classes of empirical ML attacks, including support vector machine, logistic regression, and deep neural networks, are used: in all attacks, the prediction error remains above 49.76% after 1 million training CRPs.

preprint2020arXiv

LUVLi Face Alignment: Estimating Landmarks' Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood

Modern face alignment methods have become quite accurate at predicting the locations of facial landmarks, but they do not typically estimate the uncertainty of their predicted locations nor predict whether landmarks are visible. In this paper, we present a novel framework for jointly predicting landmark locations, associated uncertainties of these predicted locations, and landmark visibilities. We model these as mixed random variables and estimate them using a deep network trained with our proposed Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood (LUVLi) loss. In addition, we release an entirely new labeling of a large face alignment dataset with over 19,000 face images in a full range of head poses. Each face is manually labeled with the ground-truth locations of 68 landmarks, with the additional information of whether each landmark is unoccluded, self-occluded (due to extreme head poses), or externally occluded. Not only does our joint estimation yield accurate estimates of the uncertainty of predicted landmark locations, but it also yields state-of-the-art estimates for the landmark locations themselves on multiple standard face alignment datasets. Our method's estimates of the uncertainty of predicted landmark locations could be used to automatically identify input images on which face alignment fails, which can be critical for downstream tasks.

preprint2020arXiv

Single ion-qubit exceeding one hour coherence time

Realizing a long coherence time quantum memory is a major challenge of current quantum technology. Here, we report a single \Yb ion-qubit memory with over one hour coherence time, an order of improvement compared to the state-of-the-art record. The long coherence time memory is realized by addressing various technical challenges such as ambient magnetic-field noise, phase noise and leakage of the microwave oscillator. Moreover, systematically study the decoherence process of our quantum memory by quantum process tomography, which enables to apply the strict criteria of quantum coherence, relative entropy of coherence. We also benchmark our quantum memory by its ability in preserving quantum information, i.e., the robustness of quantum memory, which clearly shows that over 6000 s, our quantum memory preserves non-classical quantum information. Our results verify the stability of the quantum memory in hours level and indicate its versatile applicability in various scenarios.

preprint2020arXiv

Stochastic Bottleneck: Rateless Auto-Encoder for Flexible Dimensionality Reduction

We propose a new concept of rateless auto-encoders (RL-AEs) that enable a flexible latent dimensionality, which can be seamlessly adjusted for varying distortion and dimensionality requirements. In the proposed RL-AEs, instead of a deterministic bottleneck architecture, we use an over-complete representation that is stochastically regularized with weighted dropouts, in a manner analogous to sparse AE (SAE). Unlike SAEs, our RL-AEs employ monotonically increasing dropout rates across the latent representation nodes such that the latent variables become sorted by importance like in principal component analysis (PCA). This is motivated by the rateless property of conventional PCA, where the least important principal components can be discarded to realize variable rate dimensionality reduction that gracefully degrades the distortion. In contrast, since the latent variables of conventional AEs are equally important for data reconstruction, they cannot be simply discarded to further reduce the dimensionality after the AE model is trained. Our proposed stochastic bottleneck framework enables seamless rate adaptation with high reconstruction performance, without requiring predetermined latent dimensionality at training. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed RL-AEs can achieve variable dimensionality reduction while achieving low distortion compared to conventional AEs.

preprint2019arXiv

Randomness expansion secured by quantum contextuality

The output randomness from a random number generator can be certified by observing the violation of quantum contextuality inequalities based on the Kochen-Specker theorem. Contextuality can be tested in a single quantum system, which significantly simplifies the experimental requirements to observe the violation comparing to the ones based on nonlocality tests. However, it is not yet resolved how to ensure compatibilities for sequential measurements that is required in contextuality tests. Here, we employ a modified Klyachko-Can-Binicioğlu-Shumovsky contextuality inequality, which can ease the strict compatibility requirement on measurements. On a trapped single \Ba ion system, we experimentally demonstrate violation of the contextuality inequality and realize self-testing quantum random number expansion by closing detection loopholes. We perform $1.29 \times 10^8$ trials of experiments and extract the randomness of $8.06 \times 10^5$ bits with a speed of 270 bits s$^{-1}$. Our demonstration paves the way for the practical high-speed spot-checking quantum random number expansion and other secure information processing applications.

preprint2018arXiv

Frequency stabilization of a 650 nm laser to I$_{2}$ spectrum for trapped $^{138}$Ba$^{+}$ ions

The optical manipulation of Ba$^{+}$ ions is mainly performed by a 493 nm laser for the S$_{1/2}$-P$_{1/2}$ transition and a 650 nm laser for the P$_{1/2}$-D$_{3/2}$ transition. Since the branching ratio between the 493 nm and 650 nm transitions of a single Ba$^{+}$ ion is comparable, stabilization systems of both lasers are equally important for Doppler cooling, sub-Doppler cooling, optical pumping and state detection. The stabilization system of a 493 nm laser to an absolute Te$_2$ reference has been well established. However, the stabilization of a 650 nm laser has not been presented before. Here we report twenty spectral lines of I$_{2}$ in the range of 0.9 GHz above the resonance of the P$_{1/2}$-D$_{3/2}$ transition. We stabilize the 650 nm laser through the optical cavity to the lowest one among these lines, which is about 350 MHz apart, as the absolute frequency reference. Furthermore, we measure the frequency differences between these iodine lines and the Ba$^+$ resonance through fluorescence excitation spectrum with well-resolved dark states, which is in agreement with the theoretical expectation. The presented stabilization scheme enables us to perform precise experiments with Ba$^{+}$ ions.