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Published work

142 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Unified Value Alignment for Generative Recommendation in Industrial Advertising

Generative Recommendation (GR) reformulates recommendation as a next-token generation problem and has shown promise in industrial applications. However, extending GR to industrial advertising is non-trivial because the system must optimize not only user interest but also commercial value. Existing GR pipelines remain largely semantics-centric, making it difficult to align value signals across tokenization, decoding, and online serving. To address this issue, we propose UniVA, a Unified Value Alignment framework for advertising recommendation. We first introduce a Commercial SID tokenizer that injects value-related attributes into SID construction, yielding value-discriminative item representations. We then develop a Generation-as-Ranking SID Decoder jointly optimized by supervised learning and eCPM-aware reinforcement learning, which fuses value scores into next-item SID generation to perform generation and ranking in one decoding process. Finally, we design a value-guided personalized beam search that reuses generation-as-ranking logits as online value guidance and applies a personalized trie tree to constrain decoding to request-valid SID paths. Experiments on the Tencent WeChat Channels advertising platform show that UniVA achieves a 37.04\% improvement in offline Hit Rate@100 over the baseline and a 1.5\% GMV lift in online A/B tests.

preprint2022arXiv

A Soft-Thresholding Operator for Sparse Time-Varying Effects in Survival Models

We consider a class of Cox models with time-dependent effects that may be zero over certain unknown time regions or, in short, sparse time-varying effects. The model is particularly useful for biomedical studies as it conveniently depicts the gradual evolution of effects of risk factors on survival. Statistically, estimating and drawing inference on infinite dimensional functional parameters with sparsity (e.g., time-varying effects with zero-effect time intervals) present enormous challenges. To address them, we propose a new soft-thresholding operator for modeling sparse, piecewise smooth and continuous time-varying coefficients in a Cox time-varying effects model. Unlike the common regularized methods, our approach enables one to estimate non-zero time-varying effects and detect zero regions simultaneously, and construct a new type of sparse confidence intervals that accommodate zero regions. This leads to a more interpretable model with a straightforward inference procedure. We develop an efficient algorithm for inference in the target functional space, show that the proposed method enjoys desired theoretical properties, and present its finite sample performance by way of simulations. We apply the proposed method to analyze the data of the Boston Lung Cancer Survivor Cohort, an epidemiological cohort study investigating the impacts of risk factors on lung cancer survival, and obtain clinically useful results.

preprint2022arXiv

Active Coding Piezoelectric Metasurfaces

The manipulation of acoustic waves plays an important role in a wide range of applications. Currently, acoustic wave manipulation typically relies on either acoustic metasurfaces or phased array transducers. The elements of metasurfaces are designed and optimized for a target frequency, which thus limits their bandwidth. Phased array transducers, suffering from high-cost and complex control circuits, are usually limited by the array size and the filling ratio of the control units. In this work, we introduce active coding piezoelectric metasurfaces; demonstrate commonly implemented acoustic wave manipulation functionalities such as beam steering, beam focusing and vortex beam focusing, acoustic tweezers; and eventually realize ultrasound imaging. The information coded on the piezoelectric metasurfaces herein is frequency independent and originates from the polarization directions, pointing either up or down, of the piezoelectric materials. Such a piezoelectric metasurface is driven by a single electrode and acts as a controllable active sound source, which combines the advantages of acoustic metasurfaces and phased array transducers while keeping the devices structurally simple and compact. Our coding piezoelectric metasurfaces can lead to potential technological innovations in underwater acoustic wave modulation, acoustic tweezers, biomedical imaging, industrial non-destructive testing and neural regulation.

preprint2022arXiv

Analysis of A New Adaptive Time Filter Algorithm for The Unsteady Stokes/Darcy Model

In this report, we propose a new adaptive time filter algorithm for the unsteady Stokes/Darcy model. First we present a first order $θ$-scheme with the variable time step which is one parameter family of Linear Multi-step methods and use a time filter algorithm to increase the convergence order to second order with almost no increasing the amount of computation. Furthermore, we construct coupled and decoupled adaptive algorithms. Then we analyze stabilities and the second-order accuracy of variable time-stepping algorithm for Linear Multi-step methods plus time filter, respectively. Finally, we use two numerical experiments to verify theoretical results including effectiveness, convergence and efficiency with adaptive method.

preprint2022arXiv

Anomalous Residual Surface Conductivity in a Superconductor with Strong Spin-Orbit Coupling

Conventional BCS superconductors are expected to exhibit a conductivity with vanishing dissipation with decreasing temperature. While bulk physical properties measurements indicate PdPb$_{2}$ is a conventional superconductor with a $T_c$ of 3.0 K, measurements of surface impedance through the microwave cavity perturbation technique indicate a large, non-vanishing dissipative component below $T_c$ that is at odds with conventional superconductivity. We demonstrate PdPb$_2$ to be a possible topological superconductor with a fully gapped bulk and a dissipative Majorana fluid surface.

preprint2022arXiv

CATRE: Iterative Point Clouds Alignment for Category-level Object Pose Refinement

While category-level 9DoF object pose estimation has emerged recently, previous correspondence-based or direct regression methods are both limited in accuracy due to the huge intra-category variances in object shape and color, etc. Orthogonal to them, this work presents a category-level object pose and size refiner CATRE, which is able to iteratively enhance pose estimate from point clouds to produce accurate results. Given an initial pose estimate, CATRE predicts a relative transformation between the initial pose and ground truth by means of aligning the partially observed point cloud and an abstract shape prior. In specific, we propose a novel disentangled architecture being aware of the inherent distinctions between rotation and translation/size estimation. Extensive experiments show that our approach remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art methods on REAL275, CAMERA25, and LM benchmarks up to a speed of ~85.32Hz, and achieves competitive results on category-level tracking. We further demonstrate that CATRE can perform pose refinement on unseen category. Code and trained models are available.

preprint2022arXiv

Coherent coupling of two remote magnonic resonators mediated by superconducting circuits

We demonstrate microwave-mediated distant magnon-magnon coupling on a superconducting circuit platform, incorporating chip-mounted single-crystal Y$_3$Fe$_5$O$_{12}$ (YIG) spheres. Coherent level repulsion and dissipative level attraction between the magnon modes of the two YIG spheres are demonstrated. The former is mediated by cavity photons of a superconducting resonator, and the latter is mediated by propagating photons of a coplanar waveguide. Our results open new avenues towards exploring integrated hybrid magnonic networks for coherent information processing on a quantum-compatible superconducting platform.

preprint2022arXiv

DEAR: A Novel Deep Learning-based Approach for Automated Program Repair

The existing deep learning (DL)-based automated program repair (APR) models are limited in fixing general software defects. % We present {\tool}, a DL-based approach that supports fixing for the general bugs that require dependent changes at once to one or multiple consecutive statements in one or multiple hunks of code. % We first design a novel fault localization (FL) technique for multi-hunk, multi-statement fixes that combines traditional spectrum-based (SB) FL with deep learning and data-flow analysis. It takes the buggy statements returned by the SBFL model, detects the buggy hunks to be fixed at once, and expands a buggy statement $s$ in a hunk to include other suspicious statements around $s$. We design a two-tier, tree-based LSTM model that incorporates cycle training and uses a divide-and-conquer strategy to learn proper code transformations for fixing multiple statements in the suitable fixing context consisting of surrounding subtrees. We conducted several experiments to evaluate {\tool} on three datasets: Defects4J (395 bugs), BigFix (+26k bugs), and CPatMiner (+44k bugs). On Defects4J dataset, {\tool} outperforms the baselines from 42\%--683\% in terms of the number of auto-fixed bugs with only the top-1 patches. On BigFix dataset, it fixes 31--145 more bugs than existing DL-based APR models with the top-1 patches. On CPatMiner dataset, among 667 fixed bugs, there are 169 (25.3\%) multi-hunk/multi-statement bugs. {\tool} fixes 71 and 164 more bugs, including 52 and 61 more multi-hunk/multi-statement bugs, than the state-of-the-art, DL-based APR models.

preprint2022arXiv

Evidence of Magnon-Mediated Orbital Magnetism in a Quasi-2D Topological Magnon Insulator

We explore spin dynamics in Cu(1,3-bdc), a quasi-2D topological magnon insulator. The results show that the thermal evolution of Landé $g$-factor ($g$) is anisotropic: $g_\textrm{in-plane}$ reduces while $g_\textrm{out-plane}$ increases with increasing temperature $T$. Moreover, the anisotropy of the $g$-factor ($Δg$) and the anisotropy of saturation magnetization ($ΔM_\textrm{s}$) are correlated below 4 K, but they diverge above 4 K. We show that the electronic orbital moment contributes to the $g$ anisotropy at lower $T$, while the topological orbital moment induced by thermally excited spin chirality dictates the $g$ anisotropy at higher $T$. Our work suggests an interplay among topology, spin chirality, and orbital magnetism in Cu(1,3-bdc).

preprint2022arXiv

Feature Learning and Ensemble Pre-Tasks Based Self-Supervised Speech Denoising and Dereverberation

Self-supervised learning (SSL) achieves great success in monaural speech enhancement, while the accuracy of the target speech estimation, particularly for unseen speakers, remains inadequate with existing pre-tasks. As speech signal contains multi-faceted information including speaker identity, paralinguistics, and spoken content, the latent representation for speech enhancement becomes a tough task. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of each feature which is commonly used in speech enhancement and exploit the feature combination in the SSL case. Besides, we propose an ensemble training strategy. The latent representation of the clean speech signal is learned, meanwhile, the dereverberated mask and the estimated ratio mask are exploited to denoise and dereverberate the mixture. The latent representation learning and the masks estimation are considered as two pre-tasks in the training stage. In addition, to study the effectiveness between the pre-tasks, we compare different training routines to train the model and further refine the performance. The NOISEX and DAPS corpora are used to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method, which also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Five-loop anomalous dimensions of $ϕ^Q$ operators in a scalar theory with $O(N)$ symmetry

We compute the complete $Q$-dependence of anomalous dimensions of traceless symmetric tensor operator $ϕ^Q$ in $O(N)$ scalar theory to five-loop. The renormalization factors are extracted from $ϕ^Q\rightarrow Qϕ$ form factors, and the integrand of form factors are constructed with the help of unitarity cut method. The anomalous dimensions match the known results in \cite{Badel:2019oxl, Antipin:2020abu}, where the leading and subleading terms in the large $Q$ limit were obtained using a semiclassical method.

preprint2022arXiv

GALOIS: Boosting Deep Reinforcement Learning via Generalizable Logic Synthesis

Despite achieving superior performance in human-level control problems, unlike humans, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) lacks high-order intelligence (e.g., logic deduction and reuse), thus it behaves ineffectively than humans regarding learning and generalization in complex problems. Previous works attempt to directly synthesize a white-box logic program as the DRL policy, manifesting logic-driven behaviors. However, most synthesis methods are built on imperative or declarative programming, and each has a distinct limitation, respectively. The former ignores the cause-effect logic during synthesis, resulting in low generalizability across tasks. The latter is strictly proof-based, thus failing to synthesize programs with complex hierarchical logic. In this paper, we combine the above two paradigms together and propose a novel Generalizable Logic Synthesis (GALOIS) framework to synthesize hierarchical and strict cause-effect logic programs. GALOIS leverages the program sketch and defines a new sketch-based hybrid program language for guiding the synthesis. Based on that, GALOIS proposes a sketch-based program synthesis method to automatically generate white-box programs with generalizable and interpretable cause-effect logic. Extensive evaluations on various decision-making tasks with complex logic demonstrate the superiority of GALOIS over mainstream baselines regarding the asymptotic performance, generalizability, and great knowledge reusability across different environments.

preprint2022arXiv

Geometric Effect of High-Resolution Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy on the Identification of Plasmons: An Example of Graphene

High-resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (HREELS) is one of the most powerful methods to detect the dispersion of plasmons. However, we find that in the HREELS measurement, the scattering geometric configuration will seriously affect the identification of plasmons. Here, taking graphene as an example, using the HREELS capable of two-dimensional energy-momentum mapping combined with the intensity distribution calculations, we visually display the intensity distribution of the scattering geometric factor. We demonstrate that the energy loss peaks from the scattering geometric effect may be misinterpreted as the features of an acoustic plasmon. In any HREELS measurement, it is necessary to evaluate the effect of the scattering geometry quantitatively to identify the intrinsic surface excitations.

preprint2022arXiv

Global and Local Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Semantic Segmentation of HR Remote Sensing Images

Supervised learning for semantic segmentation requires a large number of labeled samples, which is difficult to obtain in the field of remote sensing. Self-supervised learning (SSL), can be used to solve such problems by pre-training a general model with a large number of unlabeled images and then fine-tuning it on a downstream task with very few labeled samples. Contrastive learning is a typical method of SSL that can learn general invariant features. However, most existing contrastive learning methods are designed for classification tasks to obtain an image-level representation, which may be suboptimal for semantic segmentation tasks requiring pixel-level discrimination. Therefore, we propose a global style and local matching contrastive learning network (GLCNet) for remote sensing image semantic segmentation. Specifically, 1) the global style contrastive learning module is used to better learn an image-level representation, as we consider that style features can better represent the overall image features. 2) The local features matching contrastive learning module is designed to learn representations of local regions, which is beneficial for semantic segmentation. The experimental results show that our method mostly outperforms SOTA self-supervised methods and the ImageNet pre-training method. Specifically, with 1\% annotation from the original dataset, our approach improves Kappa by 6\% on the ISPRS Potsdam dataset relative to the existing baseline. Moreover, our method outperforms supervised learning methods when there are some differences between the datasets of upstream tasks and downstream tasks. Since SSL could directly learn the essential characteristics of data from unlabeled data, which is easy to obtain in the remote sensing field, this may be of great significance for tasks such as global mapping. The source code is available at https://github.com/GeoX-Lab/G-RSIM.

preprint2022arXiv

High Dimensional Gaussian Graphical Regression Models with Covariates

Though Gaussian graphical models have been widely used in many scientific fields, relatively limited progress has been made to link graph structures to external covariates. We propose a Gaussian graphical regression model, which regresses both the mean and the precision matrix of a Gaussian graphical model on covariates. In the context of co-expression quantitative trait locus (QTL) studies, our method can determine how genetic variants and clinical conditions modulate the subject-level network structures, and recover both the population-level and subject-level gene networks. Our framework encourages sparsity of covariate effects on both the mean and the precision matrix. In particular for the precision matrix, we stipulate simultaneous sparsity, i.e., group sparsity and element-wise sparsity, on effective covariates and their effects on network edges, respectively. We establish variable selection consistency first under the case with known mean parameters and then a more challenging case with unknown means depending on external covariates, and establish in both cases the $\ell_2$ convergence rates and the selection consistency of the estimated precision parameters. The utility and efficacy of our proposed method is demonstrated through simulation studies and an application to a co-expression QTL study with brain cancer patients.

preprint2022arXiv

Hybrid magnonics for short-wavelength spin waves facilitated by a magnetic heterostructure

Recent research on hybrid magnonics has been restricted by the long magnon wavelengths of the ferromagnetic resonance modes. We present an experiment on the hybridization of 250-nm wavelength magnons with microwave photons in a multimode magnonic system consists of a planar cavity and a magnetic bilayer. The coupling between magnon modes in the two magnetic layers, i.e., the uniform mode in Permalloy (Py) and the perpendicular standing spin waves (PSSWs) in YIG, serves as an effective means for exciting short-wavelength PSSWs, which is further hybridized with the photon mode of the microwave resonator. The demonstrated magnon-photon coupling approaches the superstrong coupling regime, and can even be achieved near zero bias field.

preprint2022arXiv

Individualized Risk Assessment of Preoperative Opioid Use by Interpretable Neural Network Regression

Preoperative opioid use has been reported to be associated with higher preoperative opioid demand, worse postoperative outcomes, and increased postoperative healthcare utilization and expenditures. Understanding the risk of preoperative opioid use helps establish patient-centered pain management. In the field of machine learning, deep neural network (DNN) has emerged as a powerful means for risk assessment because of its superb prediction power; however, the blackbox algorithms may make the results less interpretable than statistical models. Bridging the gap between the statistical and machine learning fields, we propose a novel Interpretable Neural Network Regression (INNER), which combines the strengths of statistical and DNN models. We use the proposed INNER to conduct individualized risk assessment of preoperative opioid use. Intensive simulations and an analysis of 34,186 patients expecting surgery in the Analgesic Outcomes Study (AOS) show that the proposed INNER not only can accurately predict the preoperative opioid use using preoperative characteristics as DNN, but also can estimate the patient specific odds of opioid use without pain and the odds ratio of opioid use for a unit increase in the reported overall body pain, leading to more straightforward interpretations of the tendency to use opioids than DNN. Our results identify the patient characteristics that are strongly associated with opioid use and is largely consistent with the previous findings, providing evidence that INNER is a useful tool for individualized risk assessment of preoperative opioid use.

preprint2022arXiv

Mass Testing and Characterization of 20-inch PMTs for JUNO

Main goal of the JUNO experiment is to determine the neutrino mass ordering using a 20kt liquid-scintillator detector. Its key feature is an excellent energy resolution of at least 3 % at 1 MeV, for which its instruments need to meet a certain quality and thus have to be fully characterized. More than 20,000 20-inch PMTs have been received and assessed by JUNO after a detailed testing program which began in 2017 and elapsed for about four years. Based on this mass characterization and a set of specific requirements, a good quality of all accepted PMTs could be ascertained. This paper presents the performed testing procedure with the designed testing systems as well as the statistical characteristics of all 20-inch PMTs intended to be used in the JUNO experiment, covering more than fifteen performance parameters including the photocathode uniformity. This constitutes the largest sample of 20-inch PMTs ever produced and studied in detail to date, i.e. 15,000 of the newly developed 20-inch MCP-PMTs from Northern Night Vision Technology Co. (NNVT) and 5,000 of dynode PMTs from Hamamatsu Photonics K. K.(HPK).

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-task Learning for Gaussian Graphical Regressions with High Dimensional Covariates

Gaussian graphical regression is a powerful means that regresses the precision matrix of a Gaussian graphical model on covariates, permitting the numbers of the response variables and covariates to far exceed the sample size. Model fitting is typically carried out via separate node-wise lasso regressions, ignoring the network-induced structure among these regressions. Consequently, the error rate is high, especially when the number of nodes is large. We propose a multi-task learning estimator for fitting Gaussian graphical regression models; we design a cross-task group sparsity penalty and a within task element-wise sparsity penalty, which govern the sparsity of active covariates and their effects on the graph, respectively. For computation, we consider an efficient augmented Lagrangian algorithm, which solves subproblems with a semi-smooth Newton method. For theory, we show that the error rate of the multi-task learning based estimates has much improvement over that of the separate node-wise lasso estimates, because the cross-task penalty borrows information across tasks. To address the main challenge that the tasks are entangled in a complicated correlation structure, we establish a new tail probability bound for correlated heavy-tailed (sub-exponential) variables with an arbitrary correlation structure, a useful theoretical result in its own right. Finally, the utility of our method is demonstrated through simulations as well as an application to a gene co-expression network study with brain cancer patients.

preprint2022arXiv

Online Active Regression

Active regression considers a linear regression problem where the learner receives a large number of data points but can only observe a small number of labels. Since online algorithms can deal with incremental training data and take advantage of low computational cost, we consider an online extension of the active regression problem: the learner receives data points one by one and immediately decides whether it should collect the corresponding labels. The goal is to efficiently maintain the regression of received data points with a small budget of label queries. We propose novel algorithms for this problem under $\ell_p$ loss where $p\in[1,2]$. To achieve a $(1+ε)$-approximate solution, our proposed algorithms only require $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-1} d \log(nκ))$ queries of labels, where $n$ is the number of data points and $κ$ is a quantity, called the condition number, of the data points. The numerical results verify our theoretical results and show that our methods have comparable performance with offline active regression algorithms.

preprint2022arXiv

Online Easy Example Mining for Weakly-supervised Gland Segmentation from Histology Images

Developing an AI-assisted gland segmentation method from histology images is critical for automatic cancer diagnosis and prognosis; however, the high cost of pixel-level annotations hinders its applications to broader diseases. Existing weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods in computer vision achieve degenerative results for gland segmentation, since the characteristics and problems of glandular datasets are different from general object datasets. We observe that, unlike natural images, the key problem with histology images is the confusion of classes owning to morphological homogeneity and low color contrast among different tissues. To this end, we propose a novel method Online Easy Example Mining (OEEM) that encourages the network to focus on credible supervision signals rather than noisy signals, therefore mitigating the influence of inevitable false predictions in pseudo-masks. According to the characteristics of glandular datasets, we design a strong framework for gland segmentation. Our results exceed many fully-supervised methods and weakly-supervised methods for gland segmentation over 4.4% and 6.04% at mIoU, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/OEEM.

preprint2022arXiv

PEAR: Personalized Re-ranking with Contextualized Transformer for Recommendation

The goal of recommender systems is to provide ordered item lists to users that best match their interests. As a critical task in the recommendation pipeline, re-ranking has received increasing attention in recent years. In contrast to conventional ranking models that score each item individually, re-ranking aims to explicitly model the mutual influences among items to further refine the ordering of items given an initial ranking list. In this paper, we present a personalized re-ranking model (dubbed PEAR) based on contextualized transformer. PEAR makes several major improvements over the existing methods. Specifically, PEAR not only captures feature-level and item-level interactions, but also models item contexts from both the initial ranking list and the historical clicked item list. In addition to item-level ranking score prediction, we also augment the training of PEAR with a list-level classification task to assess users' satisfaction on the whole ranking list. Experimental results on both public and production datasets have shown the superior effectiveness of PEAR compared to the previous re-ranking models.

preprint2022arXiv

Recent Increase of Tropical Cyclone Rapid Intensification in Global Coastal Regions

Rapid intensification (RI) is likely the most crucial contributor to the development of strong tropical cyclones and the largest source of prediction error resulting in great threats to life and property, which can become more threatening with proximity to landfall. While enormous efforts have been devoted to studying the basin-wide fluctuation, temporal-spatial variations of global RI events remain uncertain. Here, we show that, compared with open oceans where the annual RI counts do not show any significant change, the coastal offshore regions within 400 km from the coastline host significantly more RI events, with the RI count tripled from 1980 to 2020. Reasons responsible for the coastal RI occurrence are analysed, with the dominant large-scale environmental factors identified. This work yields an important new finding that an increasing threat of RI in coastal regions has occurred in the preceding decades, which may continue in a future warming climate.

preprint2022arXiv

SSORN: Self-Supervised Outlier Removal Network for Robust Homography Estimation

The traditional homography estimation pipeline consists of four main steps: feature detection, feature matching, outlier removal and transformation estimation. Recent deep learning models intend to address the homography estimation problem using a single convolutional network. While these models are trained in an end-to-end fashion to simplify the homography estimation problem, they lack the feature matching step and/or the outlier removal step, which are important steps in the traditional homography estimation pipeline. In this paper, we attempt to build a deep learning model that mimics all four steps in the traditional homography estimation pipeline. In particular, the feature matching step is implemented using the cost volume technique. To remove outliers in the cost volume, we treat this outlier removal problem as a denoising problem and propose a novel self-supervised loss to solve the problem. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing deep learning models.

preprint2022arXiv

Streaming Algorithms with Large Approximation Factors

We initiate a broad study of classical problems in the streaming model with insertions and deletions in the setting where we allow the approximation factor $α$ to be much larger than $1$. Such algorithms can use significantly less memory than the usual setting for which $α= 1+ε$ for an $ε\in (0,1)$. We study large approximations for a number of problems in sketching and streaming and the following are some of our results. For the $\ell_p$ norm/quasinorm $\|x\|_p$ of an $n$-dimensional vector $x$, $0 < p \le 2$, we show that obtaining a $\poly(n)$-approximation requires the same amount of memory as obtaining an $O(1)$-approximation for any $M = n^{Θ(1)}$. For estimating the $\ell_p$ norm, $p > 2$, we show an upper bound of $O(n^{1-2/p} (\log n \allowbreak \log M)/α^{2})$ bits for an $α$-approximation, and give a matching lower bound, for almost the full range of $α\geq 1$ for linear sketches. For the $\ell_2$-heavy hitters problem, we show that the known lower bound of $Ω(k \log n\log M)$ bits for identifying $(1/k)$-heavy hitters holds even if we are allowed to output items that are $1/(αk)$-heavy, for almost the full range of $α$, provided the algorithm succeeds with probability $1-O(1/n)$. We also obtain a lower bound for linear sketches that is tight even for constant probability algorithms. For estimating the number $\ell_0$ of distinct elements, we give an $n^{1/t}$-approximation algorithm using $O(t\log \log M)$ bits of space, as well as a lower bound of $Ω(t)$ bits, both excluding the storage of random bits.

preprint2022arXiv

Tunable magnetically induced transparency spectra in magnon-magnon coupled Y3Fe5O12/permalloy bilayers

Hybrid magnonic systems host a variety of characteristic quantum phenomena such as the magnetically-induced transparency (MIT) and Purcell effect, which are considered useful for future coherent quantum information processing. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a tunable MIT effect in the Y3Fe5O12(YIG)/Permalloy(Py) magnon-magnon coupled system via changing the magnetic field orientations. By probing the magneto-optic effects of Py and YIG, we identify clear features of MIT spectra induced by the mode hybridization between the uniform mode of Py and the perpendicular standing spin-wave modes of YIG. By changing the external magnetic field orientations, we observe a tunable coupling strength between the YIG's spin-wave modes and the Py's uniform mode, upon the application of an out-of-plane magnetic field. This observation is theoretically interpreted by a geometrical consideration of the Py and YIG magnetization under the oblique magnetic field even at a constant interfacial exchange coupling. Our findings show high promise for investigating tunable coherent phenomena with hybrid magnonic platforms.

preprint2022arXiv

UNet#: A UNet-like Redesigning Skip Connections for Medical Image Segmentation

As an essential prerequisite for developing a medical intelligent assistant system, medical image segmentation has received extensive research and concentration from the neural network community. A series of UNet-like networks with encoder-decoder architecture has achieved extraordinary success, in which UNet2+ and UNet3+ redesign skip connections, respectively proposing dense skip connection and full-scale skip connection and dramatically improving compared with UNet in medical image segmentation. However, UNet2+ lacks sufficient information explored from the full scale, which will affect the learning of organs' location and boundary. Although UNet3+ can obtain the full-scale aggregation feature map, owing to the small number of neurons in the structure, it does not satisfy the segmentation of tiny objects when the number of samples is small. This paper proposes a novel network structure combining dense skip connections and full-scale skip connections, named UNet-sharp (UNet\#) for its shape similar to symbol \#. The proposed UNet\# can aggregate feature maps of different scales in the decoder sub-network and capture fine-grained details and coarse-grained semantics from the full scale, which benefits learning the exact location and accurately segmenting the boundary of organs or lesions. We perform deep supervision for model pruning to speed up testing and make it possible for the model to run on mobile devices; furthermore, designing two classification-guided modules to reduce false positives achieves more accurate segmentation results. Various experiments of semantic segmentation and instance segmentation on different modalities (EM, CT, MRI) and dimensions (2D, 3D) datasets, including the nuclei, brain tumor, liver, and lung, demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models.

preprint2022arXiv

Unseasonal super ionospheric plasma bubble and scintillations seeded by the 2022 Tonga Volcano Eruption related perturbations

The Hunga-Tonga volcano eruption at 04:14:45 UT on 15 January 2022 produced various waves propagating globally, disturbing the background atmosphere and ionosphere. Coinciding with the arrival of perturbation waves, several equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) were consecutively generated at post-sunset hours over the East/Southeast Asian region, with the largest extension to middle latitudes. These EPBs caused intense L-band amplitude scintillations at middle-to-low latitudes, with signal fading depths up to ~16 dB. Considering the very rare occurrence of EPBs during this season in East/Southeast Asian sector and the significantly modulated background ionosphere, we believe that the perturbation waves launched by the volcano eruption triggered the generation of unseasonal super EPBs. The ionospheric perturbations linked with the 2022 Tonga volcano eruption propagated coincidently through the East/Southeast Asia longitude sector near sunset, modulated the equatorial F region bottomside plasma density and acted as the seeding source for the generation of unseasonal super bubbles. Our results implicate that volcano eruption could indirectly affect the satellite communication links in the region more than ten thousand kilometers away.

preprint2022arXiv

Unsupervised Image Deraining: Optimization Model Driven Deep CNN

The deep convolutional neural network has achieved significant progress for single image rain streak removal. However, most of the data-driven learning methods are full-supervised or semi-supervised, unexpectedly suffering from significant performance drops when dealing with real rain. These data-driven learning methods are representative yet generalize poor for real rain. The opposite holds true for the model-driven unsupervised optimization methods. To overcome these problems, we propose a unified unsupervised learning framework which inherits the generalization and representation merits for real rain removal. Specifically, we first discover a simple yet important domain knowledge that directional rain streak is anisotropic while the natural clean image is isotropic, and formulate the structural discrepancy into the energy function of the optimization model. Consequently, we design an optimization model-driven deep CNN in which the unsupervised loss function of the optimization model is enforced on the proposed network for better generalization. In addition, the architecture of the network mimics the main role of the optimization models with better feature representation. On one hand, we take advantage of the deep network to improve the representation. On the other hand, we utilize the unsupervised loss of the optimization model for better generalization. Overall, the unsupervised learning framework achieves good generalization and representation: unsupervised training (loss) with only a few real rainy images (input) and physical meaning network (architecture). Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world rain datasets show the superiority of the proposed method.

preprint2022arXiv

VALHALLA: Visual Hallucination for Machine Translation

Designing better machine translation systems by considering auxiliary inputs such as images has attracted much attention in recent years. While existing methods show promising performance over the conventional text-only translation systems, they typically require paired text and image as input during inference, which limits their applicability to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a visual hallucination framework, called VALHALLA, which requires only source sentences at inference time and instead uses hallucinated visual representations for multimodal machine translation. In particular, given a source sentence an autoregressive hallucination transformer is used to predict a discrete visual representation from the input text, and the combined text and hallucinated representations are utilized to obtain the target translation. We train the hallucination transformer jointly with the translation transformer using standard backpropagation with cross-entropy losses while being guided by an additional loss that encourages consistency between predictions using either ground-truth or hallucinated visual representations. Extensive experiments on three standard translation datasets with a diverse set of language pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over both text-only baselines and state-of-the-art methods. Project page: http://www.svcl.ucsd.edu/projects/valhalla.

preprint2022arXiv

WSSS4LUAD: Grand Challenge on Weakly-supervised Tissue Semantic Segmentation for Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, and adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the most common subtype. Exploiting the potential value of the histopathology images can promote precision medicine in oncology. Tissue segmentation is the basic upstream task of histopathology image analysis. Existing deep learning models have achieved superior segmentation performance but require sufficient pixel-level annotations, which is time-consuming and expensive. To enrich the label resources of LUAD and to alleviate the annotation efforts, we organize this challenge WSSS4LUAD to call for the outstanding weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) techniques for histopathology images of LUAD. Participants have to design the algorithm to segment tumor epithelial, tumor-associated stroma and normal tissue with only patch-level labels. This challenge includes 10,091 patch-level annotations (the training set) and over 130 million labeled pixels (the validation and test sets), from 87 WSIs (67 from GDPH, 20 from TCGA). All the labels were generated by a pathologist-in-the-loop pipeline with the help of AI models and checked by the label review board. Among 532 registrations, 28 teams submitted the results in the test phase with over 1,000 submissions. Finally, the first place team achieved mIoU of 0.8413 (tumor: 0.8389, stroma: 0.7931, normal: 0.8919). According to the technical reports of the top-tier teams, CAM is still the most popular approach in WSSS. Cutmix data augmentation has been widely adopted to generate more reliable samples. With the success of this challenge, we believe that WSSS approaches with patch-level annotations can be a complement to the traditional pixel annotations while reducing the annotation efforts. The entire dataset has been released to encourage more researches on computational pathology in LUAD and more novel WSSS techniques.

preprint2022arXiv

Zigzag magnetic order in a novel tellurate compound Na$_{4-δ}$NiTeO$_{6}$ with $\mathit{S}$ = 1 chains

Na$_{4-δ}$NiTeO$_{6}$ is a rare example in the transition-metal tellurate family of realizing an $S$ = 1 spin-chain structure. By performing neutron powder diffraction measurements, the ground-state magnetic structure of Na$_{4-δ}$NiTeO$_{6}$ is determined. These measurements reveal that below $T\rm_{N}$ ${\sim}$ 6.8(2) K, the Ni$^{2+}$ moments form a screwed ferromagnetic (FM) spin-chain structure running along the crystallographic $a$ axis but these FM spin chains are coupled antiferromagnetically along the $b$ and $c$ directions, giving rise to a magnetic propagation vector of $k$ = (0, 1/2, 1/2). This zigzag magnetic order is well supported by first-principles calculations. The moment size of Ni$^{2+}$ spins is determined to be 2.1(1) $μ$$\rm_{B}$ at 3 K, suggesting a significant quenching of the orbital moment due to the crystalline electric field (CEF) effect. The previously reported metamagnetic transition near $H\rm_{C}$ ${\sim}$ 0.1 T can be understood as a field-induced spin-flip transition. The relatively easy tunability of the dimensionality of its magnetism by external parameters makes Na$_{4-δ}$NiTeO$_{6}$ a promising candidate for further exploring various types of novel spin-chain physics.

preprint2021arXiv

A Context-based Automated Approach for Method Name Consistency Checking and Suggestion

Misleading method names in software projects can confuse developers, which may lead to software defects and affect code understandability. In this paper, we present DeepName, a context-based, deep learning approach to detect method name inconsistencies and suggest a proper name for a method. The key departure point is the philosophy of "Show Me Your Friends, I'll Tell You Who You Are". Unlike the state-of-the-art approaches, in addition to the method's body, we also consider the interactions of the current method under study with the other ones including the caller and callee methods, and the sibling methods in the same enclosing class. The sequences of sub-tokens in the program entities' names in the contexts are extracted and used as the input for an RNN-based encoder-decoder to produce the representations for the current method. We modify that RNN model to integrate the copy mechanism and our newly developed component, called the non-copy mechanism, to emphasize on the possibility of a certain sub-token not to be copied to follow the current sub-token in the currently generated method name. We conducted several experiments to evaluate DeepName on large datasets with +14M methods. For consistency checking, DeepName improves the state-of-the-art approach by 2.1%, 19.6%, and 11.9% relatively in recall, precision, and F-score, respectively. For name suggestion, DeepName improves relatively over the state-of-the-art approaches in precision (1.8%--30.5%), recall (8.8%--46.1%), and F-score (5.2%--38.2%). To assess DeepName's usefulness, we detected inconsistent methods and suggested new method names in active projects. Among 50 pull requests, 12 were merged into the main branch. In total, in 30/50 cases, the team members agree that our suggested method names are more meaningful than the current names.

preprint2021arXiv

Comments on large central charge $T\bar{T}$ deformed conformal field theory and cutoff AdS holography

In this article we study large central charge partition function and entanglement entropy of $T\bar{T}$ deformed two dimensional conformal field theory, following the approach to $T\bar{T}$ deformation as integrated infinitesimal double trace deformation used by Guica et al.. For sphere partition function and entanglement entropy of half great circle with antipodal points being the entangling surface, we obtain different results compared to previous works, with more reasonable CFT limits and qualitatively different behaviour as the deformation parameter $μ$ goes to infinity, which contradicts the simple version of the cutoff AdS holography proposal. For a modified version of cutoff AdS holography which is supposed to work only in the sector of classical pure gravity, we show that the flow equation of the metric and one point function of energy-momentum tensor in $T\bar{T}$ deformation corresponds to the flow equation of the boundary metric and Brown-York tensor on a cutoff surface in AdS space as the cutoff surface moves in the direction of normal geodesics. In addition the flow equation of gravity on-shell action takes the form of $T\bar{T}$ deformation, with straightforward generalization to higher dimensions. As an example we give a holographic computation of the sphere partition function of $T\bar{T}$ CFT.

preprint2021arXiv

Echo state graph neural networks with analogue random resistor arrays

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest, from social networks to drug discovery, in learning representations of graph-structured data. However, graph neural networks, the machine learning models for handling graph-structured data, face significant challenges when running on conventional digital hardware, including von Neumann bottleneck incurred by physically separated memory and processing units, slowdown of Moore's law due to transistor scaling limit, and expensive training cost. Here we present a novel hardware-software co-design, the random resistor array-based echo state graph neural network, which addresses these challenges. The random resistor arrays not only harness low-cost, nanoscale and stackable resistors for highly efficient in-memory computing using simple physical laws, but also leverage the intrinsic stochasticity of dielectric breakdown to implement random projections in hardware for an echo state network that effectively minimizes the training cost thanks to its fixed and random weights. The system demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both graph classification using the MUTAG and COLLAB datasets and node classification using the CORA dataset, achieving 34.2x, 93.2x, and 570.4x improvement of energy efficiency and 98.27%, 99.46%, and 95.12% reduction of training cost compared to conventional graph learning on digital hardware, respectively, which may pave the way for the next generation AI system for graph learning.

preprint2021arXiv

Estimation and Inference for High Dimensional Generalized Linear Models: A Splitting and Smoothing Approach

The focus of modern biomedical studies has gradually shifted to explanation and estimation of joint effects of high dimensional predictors on disease risks. Quantifying uncertainty in these estimates may provide valuable insight into prevention strategies or treatment decisions for both patients and physicians. High dimensional inference, including confidence intervals and hypothesis testing, has sparked much interest. While much work has been done in the linear regression setting, there is lack of literature on inference for high dimensional generalized linear models. We propose a novel and computationally feasible method, which accommodates a variety of outcome types, including normal, binomial, and Poisson data. We use a "splitting and smoothing" approach, which splits samples into two parts, performs variable selection using one part and conducts partial regression with the other part. Averaging the estimates over multiple random splits, we obtain the smoothed estimates, which are numerically stable. We show that the estimates are consistent, asymptotically normal, and construct confidence intervals with proper coverage probabilities for all predictors. We examine the finite sample performance of our method by comparing it with the existing methods and applying it to analyze a lung cancer cohort study.

preprint2021arXiv

Fault Localization with Code Coverage Representation Learning

In this paper, we propose DeepRL4FL, a deep learning fault localization (FL) approach that locates the buggy code at the statement and method levels by treating FL as an image pattern recognition problem. DeepRL4FL does so via novel code coverage representation learning (RL) and data dependencies RL for program statements. Those two types of RL on the dynamic information in a code coverage matrix are also combined with the code representation learning on the static information of the usual suspicious source code. This combination is inspired by crime scene investigation in which investigators analyze the crime scene (failed test cases and statements) and related persons (statements with dependencies), and at the same time, examine the usual suspects who have committed a similar crime in the past (similar buggy code in the training data). For the code coverage information, DeepRL4FL first orders the test cases and marks error-exhibiting code statements, expecting that a model can recognize the patterns discriminating between faulty and non-faulty statements/methods. For dependencies among statements, the suspiciousness of a statement is seen taking into account the data dependencies to other statements in execution and data flows, in addition to the statement by itself. Finally, the vector representations for code coverage matrix, data dependencies among statements, and source code are combined and used as the input of a classifier built from a Convolution Neural Network to detect buggy statements/methods. Our empirical evaluation shows that DeepRL4FL improves the top-1 results over the state-of-the-art statement-level FL baselines from 173.1% to 491.7%. It also improves the top-1 results over the existing method-level FL baselines from 15.0% to 206.3%.

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

Self-Supervised Learning based Monaural Speech Enhancement with Multi-Task Pre-Training

In self-supervised learning, it is challenging to reduce the gap between the enhancement performance on the estimated and target speech signals with existed pre-tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-task pre-training method to improve the speech enhancement performance with self-supervised learning. Within the pre-training autoencoder (PAE), only a limited set of clean speech signals are required to learn their latent representations. Meanwhile, to solve the limitation of single pre-task, the proposed masking module exploits the dereverberated mask and estimated ratio mask to denoise the mixture as the second pre-task. Different from the PAE, where the target speech signals are estimated, the downstream task autoencoder (DAE) utilizes a large number of unlabeled and unseen reverberant mixtures to generate the estimated mixtures. The trained DAE is shared by the learned representations and masks. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

preprint2020arXiv

A Revisit to De-biased Lasso for Generalized Linear Models

De-biased lasso has emerged as a popular tool to draw statistical inference for high-dimensional regression models. However, simulations indicate that for generalized linear models (GLMs), de-biased lasso inadequately removes biases and yields unreliable confidence intervals. This motivates us to scrutinize the application of de-biased lasso in high-dimensional GLMs. When $p >n$, we detect that a key sparsity condition on the inverse information matrix generally does not hold in a GLM setting, which likely explains the subpar performance of de-biased lasso. Even in a less challenging "large $n$, diverging $p$" scenario, we find that de-biased lasso and the maximum likelihood method often yield confidence intervals with unsatisfactory coverage probabilities. In this scenario, we examine an alternative approach for further bias correction by directly inverting the Hessian matrix without imposing the matrix sparsity assumption. We establish the asymptotic distributions of any linear combinations of the resulting estimates, which lay the theoretical groundwork for drawing inference. Simulations show that this refined de-biased estimator performs well in removing biases and yields an honest confidence interval coverage. We illustrate the method by analyzing a prospective hospital-based Boston Lung Cancer Study, a large scale epidemiology cohort investigating the joint effects of genetic variants on lung cancer risk.

preprint2020arXiv

An Adversarial Attack Defending System for Securing In-Vehicle Networks

In a modern vehicle, there are over seventy Electronics Control Units (ECUs). For an in-vehicle network, ECUs communicate with each other by following a standard communication protocol, such as Controller Area Network (CAN). However, an attacker can easily access the in-vehicle network to compromise ECUs through a WLAN or Bluetooth. Though there are various deep learning (DL) methods suggested for securing in-vehicle networks, recent studies on adversarial examples have shown that attackers can easily fool DL models. In this research, we further explore adversarial examples in an in-vehicle network. We first discover and implement two adversarial attack models that are harmful to a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)-based detection model used in the in-vehicle network. Then, we propose an Adversarial Attack Defending System (AADS) for securing an in-vehicle network. Specifically, we focus on brake-related ECUs in an in-vehicle network. Our experimental results demonstrate that adversaries can easily attack the LSTM-based detection model with a success rate of over 98%, and the proposed AADS achieves over 99% accuracy for detecting adversarial attacks.

preprint2020arXiv

Arbitrary Talking Face Generation via Attentional Audio-Visual Coherence Learning

Talking face generation aims to synthesize a face video with precise lip synchronization as well as a smooth transition of facial motion over the entire video via the given speech clip and facial image. Most existing methods mainly focus on either disentangling the information in a single image or learning temporal information between frames. However, cross-modality coherence between audio and video information has not been well addressed during synthesis. In this paper, we propose a novel arbitrary talking face generation framework by discovering the audio-visual coherence via the proposed Asymmetric Mutual Information Estimator (AMIE). In addition, we propose a Dynamic Attention (DA) block by selectively focusing the lip area of the input image during the training stage, to further enhance lip synchronization. Experimental results on benchmark LRW dataset and GRID dataset transcend the state-of-the-art methods on prevalent metrics with robust high-resolution synthesizing on gender and pose variations.

preprint2020arXiv

Bayesian Survival Analysis Using Gamma Processes with Adaptive Time Partition

In Bayesian semi-parametric analyses of time-to-event data, non-parametric process priors are adopted for the baseline hazard function or the cumulative baseline hazard function for a given finite partition of the time axis. However, it would be controversial to suggest a general guideline to construct an optimal time partition. While a great deal of research has been done to relax the assumption of the fixed split times for other non-parametric processes, to our knowledge, no methods have been developed for a gamma process prior, which is one of the most widely used in Bayesian survival analysis. In this paper, we propose a new Bayesian framework for proportional hazards models where the cumulative baseline hazard function is modeled a priori by a gamma process. A key feature of the proposed framework is that the number and position of interval cutpoints are treated as random and estimated based on their posterior distributions.

preprint2020arXiv

Berry Phase Enforced Spinor Pairing

Pairing symmetry plays a central role in the study of superconductivity. It is usually characterized by integer partial-waves, for example, $s$-, $p$-, $d$-waves. In this article, we investigate a new class of topological superconductivity whose gap functions possess a half-odd-integer monopole charge and, therefore, fractionalized half-odd-integer partial-wave symmetry in three dimensions. This exotic pairing occurs between Fermi surfaces of which Chern numbers are differed by an odd integer. The corresponding superconducting gap function is represented by monopole harmonics with half-odd-integer monopole charges, and thus carries spinor partial-wave symmetries. The spinor gap function can exhibit an odd number of nodes on a closed Fermi surface, which distinguishes it from all the previously known superconducting pairing symmetry. In the presence of spatial inhomogeneity of order parameters, its superfluid velocity exhibits a fractionalized Mermin-Ho relation.

preprint2020arXiv

Coherent spin pumping in a strongly coupled magnon-magnon hybrid system

We experimentally identify coherent spin pumping in the magnon-magnon hybrid modes of permalloy/yttrium iron garnet (Py/YIG) bilayers. Using broadband ferromagnetic resonance, an "avoided crossing" is observed between the uniform mode of Py and the spin wave mode of YIG due to the fieldlike interfacial exchange coupling. We also identify additional linewidth suppression and enhancement for the in-phase and out-of-phase hybrid modes, respectively, \textcolor{black}{which can be interpreted as concerted dampinglike torque from spin pumping}. Our analysis predicts inverse proportionality of both fieldlike and dampinglike torques to the square root of the Py thickness, which quantitatively agrees with experiments.

preprint2020arXiv

Cosmetic-Aware Makeup Cleanser

Face verification aims at determining whether a pair of face images belongs to the same identity. Recent studies have revealed the negative impact of facial makeup on the verification performance. With the rapid development of deep generative models, this paper proposes a semanticaware makeup cleanser (SAMC) to remove facial makeup under different poses and expressions and achieve verification via generation. The intuition lies in the fact that makeup is a combined effect of multiple cosmetics and tailored treatments should be imposed on different cosmetic regions. To this end, we present both unsupervised and supervised semantic-aware learning strategies in SAMC. At image level, an unsupervised attention module is jointly learned with the generator to locate cosmetic regions and estimate the degree. At feature level, we resort to the effort of face parsing merely in training phase and design a localized texture loss to serve complements and pursue superior synthetic quality. The experimental results on four makeuprelated datasets verify that SAMC not only produces appealing de-makeup outputs at a resolution of 256*256, but also facilitates makeup-invariant face verification through image generation.

preprint2020arXiv

Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination via Disentangling Independent Factors

The cross-sensor gap is one of the challenges that have aroused much research interests in Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR). Although recent methods have attempted to fill the gap with deep generative networks, most of them suffer from the inevitable misalignment between different face modalities. Instead of imaging sensors, the misalignment primarily results from facial geometric variations that are independent of the spectrum. Rather than building a monolithic but complex structure, this paper proposes a Pose Aligned Cross-spectral Hallucination (PACH) approach to disentangle the independent factors and deal with them in individual stages. In the first stage, an Unsupervised Face Alignment (UFA) module is designed to align the facial shapes of the near-infrared (NIR) images with those of the visible (VIS) images in a generative way, where UV maps are effectively utilized as the shape guidance. Thus the task of the second stage becomes spectrum translation with aligned paired data. We develop a Texture Prior Synthesis (TPS) module to achieve complexion control and consequently generate more realistic VIS images than existing methods. Experiments on three challenging NIR-VIS datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach in producing visually appealing images and achieving state-of-the-art performance in HFR.

preprint2020arXiv

Cutoff $\rm AdS_3$ versus $\rm T\bar{T}$ $\rm CFT_2$ in the large central charge sector: correlators of energy-momentum tensor

In this article we probe the proposed holographic duality between $T\bar{T}$ deformed two dimensional conformal field theory and the gravity theory of $\rm AdS_3$ with a Dirichlet cutoff by computing correlators of energy-momentum tensor. We focus on the large central charge sector of the $T\bar{T}$ CFT in a Euclidean plane and in a sphere, and compute the correlators of energy-momentum tensor using an operator identity promoted from the classical trace relation. The result agrees with a computation of classical pure gravity in $\rm AdS_3$ with the corresponding cutoff surface, given a holographic dictionary which identifies gravity parameters with $T\bar{T}$ CFT parameters.

preprint2020arXiv

Deterministic Sparse Fourier Transform with an ell_infty Guarantee

In this paper we revisit the deterministic version of the Sparse Fourier Transform problem, which asks to read only a few entries of $x \in \mathbb{C}^n$ and design a recovery algorithm such that the output of the algorithm approximates $\hat x$, the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of $x$. The randomized case has been well-understood, while the main work in the deterministic case is that of Merhi et al.\@ (J Fourier Anal Appl 2018), which obtains $O(k^2 \log^{-1}k \cdot \log^{5.5}n)$ samples and a similar runtime with the $\ell_2/\ell_1$ guarantee. We focus on the stronger $\ell_{\infty}/\ell_1$ guarantee and the closely related problem of incoherent matrices. We list our contributions as follows. 1. We find a deterministic collection of $O(k^2 \log n)$ samples for the $\ell_\infty/\ell_1$ recovery in time $O(nk \log^2 n)$, and a deterministic collection of $O(k^2 \log^2 n)$ samples for the $\ell_\infty/\ell_1$ sparse recovery in time $O(k^2 \log^3n)$. 2. We give new deterministic constructions of incoherent matrices that are row-sampled submatrices of the DFT matrix, via a derandomization of Bernstein's inequality and bounds on exponential sums considered in analytic number theory. Our first construction matches a previous randomized construction of Nelson, Nguyen and Woodruff (RANDOM'12), where there was no constraint on the form of the incoherent matrix. Our algorithms are nearly sample-optimal, since a lower bound of $Ω(k^2 + k \log n)$ is known, even for the case where the sensing matrix can be arbitrarily designed. A similar lower bound of $Ω(k^2 \log n/ \log k)$ is known for incoherent matrices.

preprint2020arXiv

Direct Imaging of Resonant Phonon-Magnon Coupling

Direct detection of phonons is important for the investigation of information interconversion between the resonantly coupled magnons and phonons. Here we report resonant coupling of magnons and phonons, which can be directly visualized by using micro focused Brillouin light scattering in Ni/LiNbO3 hybrid heterostructures. The patterns of surface acoustic wave phonons, originating from the interference between the original wave ψ0(A_0,k) and reflected wave ψ1(A_1,-k), can be modulated by magnetic field due to the magnon-phonon coupling. By analyzing the information of phonons obtained from Brillouin spectroscopy, the properties of the magnon system (Ni film), e.g., ferromagnetic resonance field and resonance linewidth can be determined. The results provide spatially resolved information about phonon manipulation and detection in a coupled magnon-phonon system.

preprint2020arXiv

Estimation of time-varying reproduction numbers underlying epidemiological processes: a new statistical tool for the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly evolved into an unprecedented crisis. The susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) model and its variants have been used for modeling the pandemic. However, time-independent parameters in the classical models may not capture the dynamic transmission and removal processes, governed by virus containment strategies taken at various phases of the epidemic. Moreover, very few models account for possible inaccuracies of the reported cases. We propose a Poisson model with time-dependent transmission and removal rates to account for possible random errors in reporting and estimate a time-dependent disease reproduction number, which may be used to assess the effectiveness of virus control strategies. We apply our method to study the pandemic in several severely impacted countries, and analyze and forecast the evolving spread of the coronavirus. We have developed an interactive web application to facilitate readers' use of our method.

preprint2020arXiv

Experimental parameters, combined dynamics, and nonlinearity of a Magnonic-Opto-Electronic Oscillator (MOEO)

We report the construction and characterization of a comprehensive magnonic-opto-electronic oscillator (MOEO) system based on 1550-nm photonics and yttirum iron garnet (YIG) magnonics. The system exhibits a rich and synergistic parameter space because of the ability to control individual photonic, electronic, and magnonic components. Taking advantage of the spin wave dispersion of YIG, the frequency self-generation as well as the related nonlinear processes become sensitive to the external magnetic field. Besides being known as a narrowband filter and a delay element, the YIG delayline possesses spin wave modes that can be controlled to mix with the optoelectronic modes to generate higher-order harmonic beating modes. With the high sensitivity and external tunability, the MOEO system may find usefulness in sensing applications in magnetism and spintronics beyond optoelectronics and photonics.

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

Graph Structural-topic Neural Network

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) achieved tremendous success by effectively gathering local features for nodes. However, commonly do GCNs focus more on node features but less on graph structures within the neighborhood, especially higher-order structural patterns. However, such local structural patterns are shown to be indicative of node properties in numerous fields. In addition, it is not just single patterns, but the distribution over all these patterns matter, because networks are complex and the neighborhood of each node consists of a mixture of various nodes and structural patterns. Correspondingly, in this paper, we propose Graph Structural-topic Neural Network, abbreviated GraphSTONE, a GCN model that utilizes topic models of graphs, such that the structural topics capture indicative graph structures broadly from a probabilistic aspect rather than merely a few structures. Specifically, we build topic models upon graphs using anonymous walks and Graph Anchor LDA, an LDA variant that selects significant structural patterns first, so as to alleviate the complexity and generate structural topics efficiently. In addition, we design multi-view GCNs to unify node features and structural topic features and utilize structural topics to guide the aggregation. We evaluate our model through both quantitative and qualitative experiments, where our model exhibits promising performance, high efficiency, and clear interpretability.

preprint2020arXiv

Informative Sample Mining Network for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation

The performance of multi-domain image-to-image translation has been significantly improved by recent progress in deep generative models. Existing approaches can use a unified model to achieve translations between all the visual domains. However, their outcomes are far from satisfying when there are large domain variations. In this paper, we reveal that improving the sample selection strategy is an effective solution. To select informative samples, we dynamically estimate sample importance during the training of Generative Adversarial Networks, presenting Informative Sample Mining Network. We theoretically analyze the relationship between the sample importance and the prediction of the global optimal discriminator. Then a practical importance estimation function for general conditions is derived. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-stage sample training scheme to reduce sample hardness while preserving sample informativeness. Extensive experiments on a wide range of specific image-to-image translation tasks are conducted, and the results demonstrate our superiority over current state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Input-Sparsity Low Rank Approximation in Schatten Norm

We give the first input-sparsity time algorithms for the rank-$k$ low rank approximation problem in every Schatten norm. Specifically, for a given $n\times n$ matrix $A$, our algorithm computes $Y,Z\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times k}$, which, with high probability, satisfy $\|A-YZ^T\|_p \leq (1+ε)\|A-A_k\|_p$, where $\|M\|_p = \left (\sum_{i=1}^n σ_i(M)^p \right )^{1/p}$ is the Schatten $p$-norm of a matrix $M$ with singular values $σ_1(M), \ldots, σ_n(M)$, and where $A_k$ is the best rank-$k$ approximation to $A$. Our algorithm runs in time $\tilde{O}(\operatorname{nnz}(A) + mn^{α_p}\operatorname{poly}(k/ε))$, where $α_p = 0$ for $p\in [1,2)$ and $α_p = (ω-1)(1-2/p)$ for $p>2$ and $ω\approx 2.374$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication. For the important case of $p = 1$, which corresponds to the more "robust" nuclear norm, we obtain $\tilde{O}(\operatorname{nnz}(A) + m \cdot \operatorname{poly}(k/ε))$ time, which was previously only known for the Frobenius norm ($p = 2$). Moreover, since $α_p < ω- 1$ for every $p$, our algorithm has a better dependence on $n$ than that in the singular value decomposition for every $p$. Crucial to our analysis is the use of dimensionality reduction for Ky-Fan $p$-norms.

preprint2020arXiv

Machine learning models for the secondary Bjerknes force between two insonated bubbles

The secondary Bjerknes force plays a significant role in the evolution of bubble clusters. However, due to the complex dependence of the force on multiple parameters, it is highly non-trivial to include the effects of this force in the simulations of bubble clusters. In this paper, machine learning is used to develop a data-driven model for the secondary Bjerknes force between two insonated bubbles as a function of the equilibrium radii of the bubbles, the distance between the bubbles, the amplitude and the frequency of the pressure. The force varies over several orders of magnitude, which poses a serious challenge for the usual machine learning models. To overcome this difficulty, the magnitudes and the signs of the force are separated and modelled separately. A nonlinear regression is obtained with a feed-forward network model for the logarithm of the magnitude, whereas the sign is modelled by a support-vector machine model. The principle, the practical aspects related to the training and validation of the machine models are introduced. The predictions from the models are checked against the values computed from the Keller-Miksis equations. The results show that the models are extremely efficient while providing accurate estimate of the force. The models make it computationally feasible for the future simulations of the bubble clusters to include the effects of the secondary Bjerknes force.

preprint2020arXiv

Modified Gaussian Process Regression Models for Cyclic Capacity Prediction of Lithium-ion Batteries

This paper presents the development of machine learning-enabled data-driven models for effective capacity predictions for lithium-ion batteries under different cyclic conditions. To achieve this, a model structure is first proposed with the considerations of battery ageing tendency and the corresponding operational temperature and depth-of-discharge. Then based on a systematic understanding of covariance functions within the Gaussian process regression, two related data-driven models are developed. Specifically, by modifying the isotropic squared exponential kernel with an automatic relevance determination structure, 'Model A' could extract the highly relevant input features for capacity predictions. Through coupling the Arrhenius law and a polynomial equation into a compositional kernel, 'Model B' is capable of considering the electrochemical and empirical knowledge of battery degradation. The developed models are validated and compared on the Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide (NMC) lithium-ion batteries with various cycling patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that the modified Gaussian process regression model considering the battery electrochemical and empirical ageing signature outperforms other counterparts and is able to achieve satisfactory results for both one-step and multi-step predictions. The proposed technique is promising for battery capacity predictions under various cycling cases.

preprint2020arXiv

Nearly Linear Row Sampling Algorithm for Quantile Regression

We give a row sampling algorithm for the quantile loss function with sample complexity nearly linear in the dimensionality of the data, improving upon the previous best algorithm whose sampling complexity has at least cubic dependence on the dimensionality. Based upon our row sampling algorithm, we give the fastest known algorithm for quantile regression and a graph sparsification algorithm for balanced directed graphs. Our main technical contribution is to show that Lewis weights sampling, which has been used in row sampling algorithms for $\ell_p$ norms, can also be applied in row sampling algorithms for a variety of loss functions. We complement our theoretical results by experiments to demonstrate the practicality of our approach.

preprint2020arXiv

Octopus: Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Evaluation of Loan Stacking

With the rise of online lenders, the loan stacking problem has become a significant issue in the financial industry. One of the key steps in the fight against it is the querying of the loan history of a borrower from peer lenders. This is especially important in markets without a trusted credit bureau. To protect participants privacy and business interests, we want to hide borrower identities and lenders data from the loan originator, while simultaneously verifying that the borrower authorizes the query. In this paper, we propose Octopus, a distributed system to execute the query while meeting all the above security requirements. Theoretically, Octopus is sound. Practically, it integrates multiple optimizations to reduce communication and computation overhead. Evaluation shows that Octopus can run on 800 geographically distributed servers and can perform a query within about 0.5 seconds on average.

preprint2020arXiv

PrivPy: Enabling Scalable and General Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

We introduce PrivPy, a practical privacy-preserving collaborative computation framework, especially optimized for machine learning tasks. PrivPy provides an easy-to-use and highly compatible Python programming front-end which supports high-level array operations and different secure computation engines to allow for security assumptions and performance trade-offs. With PrivPy, programmers can write modern machine learning algorithms conveniently and efficiently in Python. We also design and implement a new efficient computation engine, with which people can use competing cloud providers to efficiently perform general arithmetics over real numbers. We demonstrate the usability and scalability of PrivPy using common machine learning models (e.g. logistic regression and convolutional neural networks) and real-world datasets (including a 5000-by-1-million matrix).

preprint2020arXiv

Probing magnon-magnon coupling in exchange coupled Y$_3$Fe$_5$O$_{12}$/Permalloy bilayers with magneto-optical effects

We demonstrate the magnetically-induced transparency (MIT) effect in Y$_3$Fe$_5$O$_{12}$(YIG)/Permalloy(Py) coupled bilayers. The measurement is achieved via a heterodyne detection of the coupled magnetization dynamics using a single wavelength that probes the magneto-optical Kerr and Faraday effects of Py and YIG, respectively. Clear features of the MIT effect are evident from the deeply modulated ferromagnetic resonance of Py due to the perpendicular-standing-spin-wave of YIG. We develop a phenomenological model that nicely reproduces the experimental results including the induced amplitude and phase evolution caused by the magnon-magnon coupling. Our work offers a new route towards studying phase-resolved spin dynamics and hybrid magnonic systems.

preprint2020arXiv

Streaming Complexity of SVMs

We study the space complexity of solving the bias-regularized SVM problem in the streaming model. This is a classic supervised learning problem that has drawn lots of attention, including for developing fast algorithms for solving the problem approximately. One of the most widely used algorithms for approximately optimizing the SVM objective is Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), which requires only $O(\frac{1}{λε})$ random samples, and which immediately yields a streaming algorithm that uses $O(\frac{d}{λε})$ space. For related problems, better streaming algorithms are only known for smooth functions, unlike the SVM objective that we focus on in this work. We initiate an investigation of the space complexity for both finding an approximate optimum of this objective, and for the related ``point estimation'' problem of sketching the data set to evaluate the function value $F_λ$ on any query $(θ, b)$. We show that, for both problems, for dimensions $d=1,2$, one can obtain streaming algorithms with space polynomially smaller than $\frac{1}{λε}$, which is the complexity of SGD for strongly convex functions like the bias-regularized SVM, and which is known to be tight in general, even for $d=1$. We also prove polynomial lower bounds for both point estimation and optimization. In particular, for point estimation we obtain a tight bound of $Θ(1/\sqrtε)$ for $d=1$ and a nearly tight lower bound of $\widetildeΩ(d/ε^2)$ for $d = Ω( \log(1/ε))$. Finally, for optimization, we prove a $Ω(1/\sqrtε)$ lower bound for $d = Ω( \log(1/ε))$, and show similar bounds when $d$ is constant.

preprint2020arXiv

Sublinear-Time Algorithms for Compressive Phase Retrieval

In the compressive phase retrieval problem, or phaseless compressed sensing, or compressed sensing from intensity only measurements, the goal is to reconstruct a sparse or approximately $k$-sparse vector $x \in \mathbb{R}^n$ given access to $y= |Φx|$, where $|v|$ denotes the vector obtained from taking the absolute value of $v\in\mathbb{R}^n$ coordinate-wise. In this paper we present sublinear-time algorithms for different variants of the compressive phase retrieval problem which are akin to the variants considered for the classical compressive sensing problem in theoretical computer science. Our algorithms use pure combinatorial techniques and near-optimal number of measurements.

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

Vortices in a Monopole Superconducting Weyl Semi-metal

A monopole harmonic superconductor is a novel topological phase of matter with topologically protected gap nodes that result from the non-trivial Berry phase structure of Cooper pairs. In this work we propose to realize a monopole superconductor by the proximity effect between a time-reversal broken Weyl semi-metal and an $s$-wave superconductor. Furthermore, we study the zero-energy vortex bound states in this system by projection methods and by exact solutions. The zero modes exhibit a non-trivial phase winding in real space as a result of the non-trivial winding of the order parameter in momentum space. By mapping the Hamiltonian to the $(1+1)$d Dirac Hamiltonian, it is shown that the zero modes, analogous to the Jackiw-Rebbi mode, are protected by the index theorem. Finally, we propose possible experimental realizations.

preprint2020arXiv

Weakly Supervised Lesion Localization With Probabilistic-CAM Pooling

Localizing thoracic diseases on chest X-ray plays a critical role in clinical practices such as diagnosis and treatment planning. However, current deep learning based approaches often require strong supervision, e.g. annotated bounding boxes, for training such systems, which is infeasible to harvest in large-scale. We present Probabilistic Class Activation Map (PCAM) pooling, a novel global pooling operation for lesion localization with only image-level supervision. PCAM pooling explicitly leverages the excellent localization ability of CAM during training in a probabilistic fashion. Experiments on the ChestX-ray14 dataset show a ResNet-34 model trained with PCAM pooling outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both the classification task and the localization task. Visual examination on the probability maps generated by PCAM pooling shows clear and sharp boundaries around lesion regions compared to the localization heatmaps generated by CAM. PCAM pooling is open sourced at https://github.com/jfhealthcare/Chexpert.

preprint2019arXiv

Distinguishing antiferromagnetic spin sublattices via the spin Seebeck effect

Antiferromagnets are beneficial for future spintronic applications due to their zero magnetic moment and ultrafast dynamics. But gaining direct access to their antiferromagnetic order and identifying the properties of individual magnetic sublattices, especially in thin films and small-scale devices, remains a formidable challenge. So far, the existing read-out techniques such as anisotropic magnetoresistance, tunneling anisotropic magnetoresistance, and spin-Hall magnetoresistance, are even functions of sublattice magnetization and thus allow us to detect different orientations of the Néel order for antiferromagnets with multiple easy axes. In contrast direct electrical detection of oppositely oriented spin states along the same easy axes (e.g., in uniaxial antiferromagnets) requires sensitivity to the direction of individual sublattices and thus is more difficult. In this study, using spin Seebeck effect, we report the electrical detection of the two sublattices in a uniaxial antiferromagnet Cr2O3. We find the rotational symmetry and hysteresis behavior of the spin Seebeck signals measured at the top and bottom surface reflect the dierction of the surface sublattice moments, but not the Néel order or the net moment in the bulk. Our results demonstrate the important role of interface spin sublattices in generating the spin Seebeck voltages, which provide a way to access each sublattice independently, enables us to track the full rotation of the magnetic sublattice, and distinguish different and antiparallel antiferromagnetic states in uniaxial antiferromagnets.

preprint2019arXiv

Magnetic damping modulation in $IrMn_{3}/Ni_{80}Fe_{20}$ via the magnetic spin Hall effect

Non-collinear antiferromagnets can have additional spin Hall effects due to the net chirality of their magnetic spin structure, which provides for more complex spin-transport phenomena compared to ordinary non-magnetic materials. Here we investigated how ferromagnetic resonance of permalloy ($Ni_{80}Fe_{20}$) is modulated by spin Hall effects in adjacent epitaxial $IrMn_{3}$ films. We observe a large dc modulation of the ferromagnetic resonance linewidth for currents applied along the [001] $IrMn_{3}$ direction. This very strong angular dependence of spin-orbit torques from dc currents through the bilayers can be explained by the magnetic spin Hall effect where $IrMn_{3}$ provides novel pathways for modulating magnetization dynamics electrically.

preprint2019arXiv

Minorization-Maximization-based Steepest Ascent for Large-scale Survival Analysis with Time-Varying Effects: Application to the National Kidney Transplant Dataset

The time-varying effects model is a flexible and powerful tool for modeling the dynamic changes of covariate effects. However, in survival analysis, its computational burden increases quickly as the number of sample sizes or predictors grows. Traditional methods that perform well for moderate sample sizes and low-dimensional data do not scale to massive data. Analysis of national kidney transplant data with a massive sample size and large number of predictors defy any existing statistical methods and software. In view of these difficulties, we propose a Minorization-Maximization-based steepest ascent procedure for estimating the time-varying effects. Leveraging the block structure formed by the basis expansions, the proposed procedure iteratively updates the optimal block-wise direction along which the approximate increase in the log-partial likelihood is maximized. The resulting estimates ensure the ascent property and serve as refinements of the previous step. The performance of the proposed method is examined by simulations and applications to the analysis of national kidney transplant data.

preprint2019arXiv

Monopole Charge Density Wave States in Weyl Semimetals

We study a new class of topological charge density wave states exhibiting monopole harmonic symmetries. The density-wave ordering is equivalent to pairing in the particle-hole channel due to Fermi surface nesting under interactions. When electron and hole Fermi surfaces carry different Chern numbers, the particle-hole pairing exhibits a non-trivial Berry phase inherited from band structure topology independent of concrete density-wave ordering mechanism. The associated density-wave gap functions become nodal, and the net nodal vorticity is determined by the monopole charge of the pairing Berry phase. The gap function nodes become zero-energy Weyl nodes of the bulk spectra of quasi-particle excitations. These states can occur in doped Weyl semimetals with nested electron and hole Fermi surfaces enclosing Weyl nodes of the same chirality in the weak coupling regime. Topologically non-trivial low-energy Fermi arc surface states appear in the density-wave ordering state as a consequence of the emergent zero-energy Weyl nodes.

preprint2019arXiv

Phonon Transport Controlled by Ferromagnetic Resonance

The resonant coupling of phonons and magnons is important for the interconversion of phononic and spin degrees of freedom. We studied the phonon transmission in LiNbO3 manipulated by the dynamic magnetization in a Ni thin film. It was observed that the phonons could be absorbed strongly through resonant magnon-phonon coupling, which was realized by optimizing the interfacial coupling between Ni and LiNbO3. The line shapes of phonon transmission were further investigated considering the magnon-phonon interconversion in the elastically driven ferromagnetic resonance process. The results promote unique routes for phonon manipulation and detection in the presence of magnetization dynamics.

preprint2019arXiv

Small scale reconstruction in three-dimensional Kolmogorov flows using four-dimensional variational data assimilation

We apply the four dimensional variational method to reconstruct the small scales of three-dimensional turbulent velocity fields with a moderate Reynolds number, given a time sequence of measurement data on a coarse set of grid points. The results show that, reconstruction is successful when the resolution of the measurement data, given in terms of the wavenumber, is at the order of the threshold value $k_c = 0.2η_K^{-1}$ where $η_K$ is the Kolmogorov length scale of the flow. When the data are available over a period of one large eddy turn-over time scale, the filtered enstrophy and other small scale quantities are reconstructed with a $30\%$ or smaller normalized point-wise error, and a $90\%$ point-wise correlation. The spectral correlation between the reconstructed and target fields is higher than $80\%$ for all wavenumbers. Minimum volume enclosing ellipsoids (MVEEs) and MVEE trees are introduced to quantitatively compare the geometry of non-local structures. Results show that, for the majority samples, errors in the locations and the sizes of the reconstructed structures are within $15\%$, and those in the orientations is within $15^\circ$. This investigation demonstrates that satisfactory reconstruction of the scales two or more octaves smaller is possible if data at large scales are available for at least one large eddy turn-over time. In comparison, a direct substitution scheme results in three times bigger point-wise discrepancy in enstrophy. The spectral difference between the reconstructed and target velocity fields is more than ten times higher than what is obtained with the four dimensional variational method.

preprint2019arXiv

Spin-Wave frequency division multiplexing in an yttrium iron garnet microstripe magnetized by inhomogeneous field

Spin waves are promising candidates for information processing and transmission in a broad frequency range. In the realization of magnonic devices, the frequency depended division of the spin wave frequencies is a critical function for parallel information processing. In this work, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept spin-wave frequency division multiplexing method by magnetizing a homogenous magnetic microstripe with an inhomogeneous field. The symmetry breaking additional field is introduced by a permalloy stripe simply placed in lateral proximity to the waveguide. Spin waves with different frequencies can propagate independently, simultaneously and separately in space along the shared waveguide. This work brings new potentials for parallel information transmission and processing in magnonics.

preprint2017arXiv

Robust and Real-time Deep Tracking Via Multi-Scale Domain Adaptation

Visual tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Recently, some deep-learning-based tracking algorithms have been achieving record-breaking performances. However, due to the high complexity of deep learning, most deep trackers suffer from low tracking speed, and thus are impractical in many real-world applications. Some new deep trackers with smaller network structure achieve high efficiency while at the cost of significant decrease on precision. In this paper, we propose to transfer the feature for image classification to the visual tracking domain via convolutional channel reductions. The channel reduction could be simply viewed as an additional convolutional layer with the specific task. It not only extracts useful information for object tracking but also significantly increases the tracking speed. To better accommodate the useful feature of the target in different scales, the adaptation filters are designed with different sizes. The yielded visual tracker is real-time and also illustrates the state-of-the-art accuracies in the experiment involving two well-adopted benchmarks with more than 100 test videos.

preprint2016arXiv

Characterization of spin relaxation anisotropy in Co using spin pumping

Ferromagnets are believed to exhibit strongly anisotropic spin relaxation, with relaxation lengths for spin longitudinal to magnetization significantly longer than those for spin transverse to magnetization. Here we characterize the anisotropy of spin relaxation in Co using the spin pumping contribution to Gilbert damping in noncollinearly magnetized Py$_{1-x}$Cu$_{x}$/Cu/Co trilayer structures. The static magnetization angle between Py$_{1-x}$Cu$_{x}$ and Co, adjusted under field bias perpendicular to film planes, controls the projections of longitudinal and transverse spin current pumped from Py$_{1-x}$Cu$_{x}$ into Co. We find nearly isotropic absorption of pure spin current in Co using this technique; fits to a diffusive transport model yield the longitudinal spin relaxation length $< 2$ nm in Co. The longitudinal spin relaxation lengths found are an order of magnitude smaller than those determined by current-perpendicular-to-planes giant magnetoresistance measurements, but comparable with transverse spin relaxation lengths in Co determined by spin pumping.

preprint2016arXiv

Classification with Ultrahigh-Dimensional Features

Although much progress has been made in classification with high-dimensional features \citep{Fan_Fan:2008, JGuo:2010, CaiSun:2014, PRXu:2014}, classification with ultrahigh-dimensional features, wherein the features much outnumber the sample size, defies most existing work. This paper introduces a novel and computationally feasible multivariate screening and classification method for ultrahigh-dimensional data. Leveraging inter-feature correlations, the proposed method enables detection of marginally weak and sparse signals and recovery of the true informative feature set, and achieves asymptotic optimal misclassification rates. We also show that the proposed procedure provides more powerful discovery boundaries compared to those in \citet{CaiSun:2014} and \citet{JJin:2009}. The performance of the proposed procedure is evaluated using simulation studies and demonstrated via classification of patients with different post-transplantation renal functional types.

preprint2016arXiv

Conditional Screening for Ultra-high Dimensional Covariates with Survival Outcomes

Identifying important biomarkers that are predictive for cancer patients' prognosis is key in gaining better insights into the biological influences on the disease and has become a critical component of precision medicine. The emergence of large-scale biomedical survival studies, which typically involve excessive number of biomarkers, has brought high demand in designing efficient screening tools for selecting predictive biomarkers. The vast amount of biomarkers defies any existing variable selection methods via regularization. The recently developed variable screening methods, though powerful in many practical setting, fail to incorporate prior information on the importance of each biomarker and are less powerful in detecting marginally weak while jointly important signals. We propose a new conditional screening method for survival outcome data by computing the marginal contribution of each biomarker given priorly known biological information. This is based on the premise that some biomarkers are known to be associated with disease outcomes a priori. Our method possesses sure screening properties and a vanishing false selection rate. The utility of the proposal is further confirmed with extensive simulation studies and analysis of a Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) dataset.

preprint2016arXiv

In a World That Counts: Clustering and Detecting Fake Social Engagement at Scale

How can web services that depend on user generated content discern fake social engagement activities by spammers from legitimate ones? In this paper, we focus on the social site of YouTube and the problem of identifying bad actors posting inorganic contents and inflating the count of social engagement metrics. We propose an effective method, Leas (Local Expansion at Scale), and show how the fake engagement activities on YouTube can be tracked over time by analyzing the temporal graph based on the engagement behavior pattern between users and YouTube videos. With the domain knowledge of spammer seeds, we formulate and tackle the problem in a semi-supervised manner --- with the objective of searching for individuals that have similar pattern of behavior as the known seeds --- based on a graph diffusion process via local spectral subspace. We offer a fast, scalable MapReduce deployment adapted from the localized spectral clustering algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our deployment at Google by achieving an manual review accuracy of 98% on YouTube Comments graph in practice. Comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithm CopyCatch, Leas achieves 10 times faster running time. Leas is actively in use at Google, searching for daily deceptive practices on YouTube's engagement graph spanning over a billion users.

preprint2016arXiv

Instance-sensitive Fully Convolutional Networks

Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been proven very successful for semantic segmentation, but the FCN outputs are unaware of object instances. In this paper, we develop FCNs that are capable of proposing instance-level segment candidates. In contrast to the previous FCN that generates one score map, our FCN is designed to compute a small set of instance-sensitive score maps, each of which is the outcome of a pixel-wise classifier of a relative position to instances. On top of these instance-sensitive score maps, a simple assembling module is able to output instance candidate at each position. In contrast to the recent DeepMask method for segmenting instances, our method does not have any high-dimensional layer related to the mask resolution, but instead exploits image local coherence for estimating instances. We present competitive results of instance segment proposal on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.

preprint2016arXiv

Topological septet pairing with spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ fermions -- high partial-wave channel counterpart of the $^3$He-B phase

We systematically generalize the exotic $^3$He-B phase, which not only exhibits unconventional symmetry but is also isotropic and topologically non-trivial, to arbitrary partial-wave channels with multi-component fermions. The concrete example with four-component fermions is illustrated including the isotropic $f$, $p$ and $d$-wave pairings in the spin septet, triplet, and quintet channels, respectively. The odd partial-wave channel pairings are topologically non-trivial, while pairings in even partial-wave channels are topologically trivial. The topological index reaches the largest value of $N^2$ in the $p$-wave channel ($N$ is half of the fermion component number). The surface spectra exhibit multiple linear and even high order Dirac cones. Applications to multi-orbital condensed matter systems and multi-component ultra-cold large spin fermion systems are discussed.

preprint2016arXiv

Towards Concolic Testing for Hybrid Systems

Hybrid systems exhibit both continuous and discrete behavior. Analyzing hybrid systems is known to be hard. Inspired by the idea of concolic testing (of programs), we investigate whether we can combine random sampling and symbolic execution in order to effectively verify hybrid systems. We identify a sufficient condition under which such a combination is more effective than random sampling. Furthermore, we analyze different strategies of combining random sampling and symbolic execution and propose an algorithm which allows us to dynamically switch between them so as to reduce the overall cost. Our method has been implemented as a web-based checker named HyChecker. HyChecker has been evaluated with benchmark hybrid systems and a water treatment system in order to test its effectiveness.

preprint2016arXiv

Wavenumber-dependent Gilbert damping in metallic ferromagnets

New terms to the dynamical equation of magnetization motion, associated with spin transport, have been reported over the past several years. Each newly identified term is thought to possess both a real and an imaginary effective field leading to fieldlike and dampinglike torques on magnetization. Here we show that three metallic ferromagnets possess an imaginary effective-field term which mirrors the well-known real effective-field term associated with exchange in spin waves. Using perpendicular standing spin wave resonance between 2-26 GHz, we evaluate the magnitude of the finite-wavenumber ($k$) dependent Gilbert damping $α$ in three typical device ferromagnets, Ni$_{79}$Fe$_{21}$, Co, and Co$_{40}$Fe$_{40}$B$_{20}$, and demonstrate for the first time the presence of a $k^2$ term as $Δα=Δα_0+A_{k}\cdot k^2$ in all three metals. We interpret the new term as the continuum analog of spin pumping, predicted recently, and show that its magnitude, $A_{k}$=0.07-0.1 nm$^2$, is consistent with transverse spin relaxation lengths as measured by conventional (interlayer) spin pumping.

preprint2015arXiv

Compositional Memory for Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) emerges as one of the most fascinating topics in computer vision recently. Many state of the art methods naively use holistic visual features with language features into a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module, neglecting the sophisticated interaction between them. This coarse modeling also blocks the possibilities of exploring finer-grained local features that contribute to the question answering dynamically over time. This paper addresses this fundamental problem by directly modeling the temporal dynamics between language and all possible local image patches. When traversing the question words sequentially, our end-to-end approach explicitly fuses the features associated to the words and the ones available at multiple local patches in an attention mechanism, and further combines the fused information to generate dynamic messages, which we call episode. We then feed the episodes to a standard question answering module together with the contextual visual information and linguistic information. Motivated by recent practices in deep learning, we use auxiliary loss functions during training to improve the performance. Our experiments on two latest public datasets suggest that our method has a superior performance. Notably, on the DARQUAR dataset we advanced the state of the art by 6$\%$, and we also evaluated our approach on the most recent MSCOCO-VQA dataset.

preprint2015arXiv

DeepTrack: Learning Discriminative Feature Representations Online for Robust Visual Tracking

Deep neural networks, albeit their great success on feature learning in various computer vision tasks, are usually considered as impractical for online visual tracking because they require very long training time and a large number of training samples. In this work, we present an efficient and very robust tracking algorithm using a single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for learning effective feature representations of the target object, in a purely online manner. Our contributions are multifold: First, we introduce a novel truncated structural loss function that maintains as many training samples as possible and reduces the risk of tracking error accumulation. Second, we enhance the ordinary Stochastic Gradient Descent approach in CNN training with a robust sample selection mechanism. The sampling mechanism randomly generates positive and negative samples from different temporal distributions, which are generated by taking the temporal relations and label noise into account. Finally, a lazy yet effective updating scheme is designed for CNN training. Equipped with this novel updating algorithm, the CNN model is robust to some long-existing difficulties in visual tracking such as occlusion or incorrect detections, without loss of the effective adaption for significant appearance changes. In the experiment, our CNN tracker outperforms all compared state-of-the-art methods on two recently proposed benchmarks which in total involve over 60 video sequences. The remarkable performance improvement over the existing trackers illustrates the superiority of the feature representations which are learned

preprint2015arXiv

Energy Efficiency of Hybrid-ARQ under Statistical Queuing Constraints

In this paper, energy efficiency of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) schemes with statistical queuing constraints is studied for both constant-rate and random Markov arrivals by characterizing the minimum energy per bit and wideband slope. The energy efficiency is investigated when either an outage constraint is imposed and (the transmission rate is selected accordingly) or the transmission rate is optimized to maximize the throughput. In both cases, it is also assumed that there is a limitation on the number of retransmissions due to deadline constraints. Under these assumptions, closed-form expressions are obtained for the minimum energy per bit and wideband slope for HARQ with chase combining (CC). Through numerical results, the performances of HARQ-CC and HARQ with incremental redundancy (IR) are compared. Moreover, the impact of source variations/burstiness, deadline constraints, outage probability, queuing constraints on the energy efficiency is analyzed.

preprint2015arXiv

Exact results for itinerant ferromagnetism in a $t_{2g}$ orbital system on cubic and square lattices

We study itinerant ferromagnetism in a $t_{2g}$ multi-orbital Hubbard system in the cubic lattice, which consists of three planar oriented orbital bands of $d_{xy}$, $d_{yz}$, and $d_{zx}$. Electrons in each orbital band can only move within a two-dimensional plane in the three-dimensional lattice parallel to the corresponding orbital orientation. Electrons of different orbitals interact through the on-site multi-orbital interactions including Hund's coupling. The strong coupling limit is considered in which there are no doubly occupied orbitals but multiple on-site occupations are allowed. We show that, in the case in which there is one and only one hole for each orbital band in each layer parallel to the orbital orientation, the ground state is a fully spin-polarized itinerant ferromagnetic state, which is unique apart from the trivial spin degeneracy. When the lattice is reduced into a single two-dimensional layer, the $d_{zx}$ and $d_{yz}$ bands become quasi-one-dimensional while the $d_{xy}$ band remains two-dimensional. The ground state ferromagnetism also appears in the strong-coupling limit as a generalization of the double exchange mechanism. Possible applications to the systems of SrRuO$_3$ and LaAlO$_3$/SrTiO$_3$ interface are discussed.

preprint2015arXiv

Free-hand Sketch Synthesis with Deformable Stroke Models

We present a generative model which can automatically summarize the stroke composition of free-hand sketches of a given category. When our model is fit to a collection of sketches with similar poses, it discovers and learns the structure and appearance of a set of coherent parts, with each part represented by a group of strokes. It represents both consistent (topology) as well as diverse aspects (structure and appearance variations) of each sketch category. Key to the success of our model are important insights learned from a comprehensive study performed on human stroke data. By fitting this model to images, we are able to synthesize visually similar and pleasant free-hand sketches.

preprint2015arXiv

Higher Spin Lifshitz Theories and the KdV-Hierarchy

In this paper three dimensional higher spin theories in the Chern-Simons formulation with gauge algebra $sl(N,R)$ are investigated which have Lifshitz symmetry with scaling exponent $z$. We show that an explicit map exists for all $z$ and $N$ relating the Lifshitz Chern-Simons theory to the $(n,m)$ element of the KdV hierarchy. Furthermore we show that the map and hence the conserved charges are independent of $z$. We derive these result from the Drinfeld-Sokolov formalism of integrable systems.

preprint2015arXiv

Inertial terms to magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic thin films

Inertial magnetization dynamics have been predicted at ultrahigh speeds, or frequencies approaching the energy relaxation scale of electrons, in ferromagnetic metals. Here we identify inertial terms to magnetization dynamics in thin Ni$_{79}$Fe$_{21}$ and Co films near room temperature. Effective magnetic fields measured in high-frequency ferromagnetic resonance (115-345 GHz) show an additional stiffening term which is quadratic in frequency and $\sim$ 80 mT at the high frequency limit of our experiment. Our results extend understanding of magnetization dynamics at sub-picosecond time scales.

preprint2015arXiv

Learning Discriminative Representations for Semantic Cross Media Retrieval

Heterogeneous gap among different modalities emerges as one of the critical issues in modern AI problems. Unlike traditional uni-modal cases, where raw features are extracted and directly measured, the heterogeneous nature of cross modal tasks requires the intrinsic semantic representation to be compared in a unified framework. This paper studies the learning of different representations that can be retrieved across different modality contents. A novel approach for mining cross-modal representations is proposed by incorporating explicit linear semantic projecting in Hilbert space. The insight is that the discriminative structures of different modality data can be linearly represented in appropriate high dimension Hilbert spaces, where linear operations can be used to approximate nonlinear decisions in the original spaces. As a result, an efficient linear semantic down mapping is jointly learned for multimodal data, leading to a common space where they can be compared. The mechanism of "feature up-lifting and down-projecting" works seamlessly as a whole, which accomplishes crossmodal retrieval tasks very well. The proposed method, named as shared discriminative semantic representation learning (\textbf{SDSRL}), is tested on two public multimodal dataset for both within- and inter- modal retrieval. The experiments demonstrate that it outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in most scenarios.

preprint2015arXiv

Neural Self Talk: Image Understanding via Continuous Questioning and Answering

In this paper we consider the problem of continuously discovering image contents by actively asking image based questions and subsequently answering the questions being asked. The key components include a Visual Question Generation (VQG) module and a Visual Question Answering module, in which Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are used. Given a dataset that contains images, questions and their answers, both modules are trained at the same time, with the difference being VQG uses the images as input and the corresponding questions as output, while VQA uses images and questions as input and the corresponding answers as output. We evaluate the self talk process subjectively using Amazon Mechanical Turk, which show effectiveness of the proposed method.

preprint2015arXiv

Neutrino Physics with JUNO

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a 20 kton multi-purpose underground liquid scintillator detector, was proposed with the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy as a primary physics goal. It is also capable of observing neutrinos from terrestrial and extra-terrestrial sources, including supernova burst neutrinos, diffuse supernova neutrino background, geoneutrinos, atmospheric neutrinos, solar neutrinos, as well as exotic searches such as nucleon decays, dark matter, sterile neutrinos, etc. We present the physics motivations and the anticipated performance of the JUNO detector for various proposed measurements. By detecting reactor antineutrinos from two power plants at 53-km distance, JUNO will determine the neutrino mass hierarchy at a 3-4 sigma significance with six years of running. The measurement of antineutrino spectrum will also lead to the precise determination of three out of the six oscillation parameters to an accuracy of better than 1\%. Neutrino burst from a typical core-collapse supernova at 10 kpc would lead to ~5000 inverse-beta-decay events and ~2000 all-flavor neutrino-proton elastic scattering events in JUNO. Detection of DSNB would provide valuable information on the cosmic star-formation rate and the average core-collapsed neutrino energy spectrum. Geo-neutrinos can be detected in JUNO with a rate of ~400 events per year, significantly improving the statistics of existing geoneutrino samples. The JUNO detector is sensitive to several exotic searches, e.g. proton decay via the $p\to K^++\barν$ decay channel. The JUNO detector will provide a unique facility to address many outstanding crucial questions in particle and astrophysics. It holds the great potential for further advancing our quest to understanding the fundamental properties of neutrinos, one of the building blocks of our Universe.

preprint2015arXiv

On the Throughput of Multi-Source Multi-Destination Relay Networks with Queueing Constraints

In this paper, the throughput of relay networks with multiple source-destination pairs under queueing constraints has been investigated for both variable-rate and fixed-rate schemes. When channel side information (CSI) is available at the transmitter side, transmitters can adapt their transmission rates according to the channel conditions, and achieve the instantaneous channel capacities. In this case, the departure rates at each node have been characterized for different system parameters, which control the power allocation, time allocation and decoding order. In the other case of no CSI at the transmitters, a simple automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol with fixed rate transmission is used to provide reliable communication. Under this ARQ assumption, the instantaneous departure rates at each node can be modeled as an ON-OFF process, and the probabilities of ON and OFF states are identified. With the characterization of the arrival and departure rates at each buffer, stability conditions are identified and effective capacity analysis is conducted for both cases to determine the system throughput under statistical queueing constraints. In addition, for the variable-rate scheme, the concavity of the sum rate is shown for certain parameters, helping to improve the efficiency of parameter optimization. Finally, via numerical results, the influence of system parameters and the behavior of the system throughput are identified.

preprint2015arXiv

Random Bits Regression: a Strong General Predictor for Big Data

To improve accuracy and speed of regressions and classifications, we present a data-based prediction method, Random Bits Regression (RBR). This method first generates a large number of random binary intermediate/derived features based on the original input matrix, and then performs regularized linear/logistic regression on those intermediate/derived features to predict the outcome. Benchmark analyses on a simulated dataset, UCI machine learning repository datasets and a GWAS dataset showed that RBR outperforms other popular methods in accuracy and robustness. RBR (available on https://sourceforge.net/projects/rbr/) is very fast and requires reasonable memories, therefore, provides a strong, robust and fast predictor in the big data era.

preprint2015arXiv

Sketch-based 3D Shape Retrieval using Convolutional Neural Networks

Retrieving 3D models from 2D human sketches has received considerable attention in the areas of graphics, image retrieval, and computer vision. Almost always in state of the art approaches a large amount of "best views" are computed for 3D models, with the hope that the query sketch matches one of these 2D projections of 3D models using predefined features. We argue that this two stage approach (view selection -- matching) is pragmatic but also problematic because the "best views" are subjective and ambiguous, which makes the matching inputs obscure. This imprecise nature of matching further makes it challenging to choose features manually. Instead of relying on the elusive concept of "best views" and the hand-crafted features, we propose to define our views using a minimalism approach and learn features for both sketches and views. Specifically, we drastically reduce the number of views to only two predefined directions for the whole dataset. Then, we learn two Siamese Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), one for the views and one for the sketches. The loss function is defined on the within-domain as well as the cross-domain similarities. Our experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method is significantly better than state of the art approaches, and outperforms them in all conventional metrics.

preprint2015arXiv

Time-reversal Invariant SU(2) Hofstadter Problem in Three Dimensional Lattices

We formulate the lattice version of the three-dimensional SU(2) Landau level problem with time reversal invariance. By taking a Landau-type gauge, the system is reduced into the one-dimensional SU(2) Harper equation characterized by a periodic spin-dependent gauge potential. The surface spectra indicate the spatial separation of helical states with opposite eigenvalues of the lattice helicty operator. The band topology is investigated from both the analysis of the boundary helical Fermi surfaces and the calculation of the Z2-index based on the bulk wavefunctions. The transition between a 3D weak topological insulator to a strong one is studied as varying the anisotropy of hopping parameters.

preprint2015arXiv

Unconventional symmetries of Fermi liquid and Cooper pairing properties with electric and magnetic dipolar fermions

The rapid experimental progress of ultra-cold dipolar fermions opens up a whole new opportunity to investigate novel many-body physics of fermions. In this article, we review theoretical studies of the Fermi liquid theory and Cooper pairing instabilities of both electric and magnetic dipolar fermionic systems from the perspective of unconventional symmetries. When the electric dipole moments are aligned by the external electric field, their interactions exhibit the explicit $d_{r^2-3z^2}$ anisotropy. The Fermi liquid properties, including the single-particle spectra, thermodynamic susceptibilities, and collective excitations, are all affected by this anisotropy. The electric dipolar interaction provides a mechanism for the unconventional spin triplet Cooper pairing, which is different from the usual spin-fluctuation mechanism in solids and the superfluid $^3$He. Furthermore, the competition between pairing instabilities in the singlet and triplet channels gives rise to a novel time-reversal symmetry breaking superfluid state. Unlike electric dipole moments which are induced by electric fields and unquantized, magnetic dipole moments are intrinsic proportional to the hyperfine-spin operators with a Lande factor. Its effects even manifest in unpolarized systems exhibiting an isotropic but spin-orbit coupled nature. The resultant spin-orbit coupled Fermi liquid theory supports a collective sound mode exhibiting a topologically non-trivial spin distribution over the Fermi surface. It also leads to a novel $p$-wave spin triplet Cooper pairing state whose spin and orbital angular momentum are entangled to the total angular momentum $J=1$ dubbed the $J$-triplet pairing. This $J$-triplet pairing phase is different from both the spin-orbit coupled $^3$He-$B$ phase with $J=0$ and the spin-orbit decoupled $^3$He-$A$ phase.

preprint2014arXiv

A General Quaternion-valued Gradient Operator and Its Applications to Computational Fluid Dynamics and Adaptive Beamforming

Quaternion-valued signal processing has received increasing attention recently. One key operation involved in derivation of all kinds of adaptive algorithms is the gradient operator. Although there have been some derivations of this operator in literature with different level of details, it is still not fully clear how this operator can be derived in the most general case and how it can be applied to various signal processing problems. In this work, we will give a general derivation of the quaternion-valued gradient operator and then apply it to two different areas. One is to combine with the classic computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach in wind profile prediction and the other one is to apply the result to the adaptive beamforming problem for vector sensor arrays.

preprint2014arXiv

A geometric heat flow for vector fields

In this paper we introduce and study a geometric heat flow to find Killing vector fields on closed Riemannian manifolds with positive sectional curvature. We study its various properties, prove the global existence of the solution of this flow, discuss its convergence and possible applications, and its relation to the Navier-Stokes equations on manifolds and Kazdan-Warner-Bourguignon-Ezin identity for conformal Killing vector fields. We also provide two new criterions on the existence of Killing vector fields. The similar flow to finding holomorphic vector fields on Kähler manifolds will be studied in \cite{LL2}.

preprint2014arXiv

A Zero-attracting Quaternion-valued Least Mean Square Algorithm for Sparse System Identification

Recently, quaternion-valued signal processing has received more and more attention. In this paper, the quaternion-valued sparse system identification problem is studied for the first time and a zero-attracting quaternion-valued least mean square (LMS) algorithm is derived by considering the $l_1$ norm of the quaternion-valued adaptive weight vector. By incorporating the sparsity information of the system into the update process, a faster convergence speed is achieved, as verified by simulation results.

preprint2014arXiv

Competing orders in the 2D half-filled SU(2N) Hubbard model through the pinning field quantum Monte-Carlo simulations

We non-perturbatively investigate the ground state magnetic properties of the 2D half-filled SU($2N$) Hubbard model in the square lattice by using the projector determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations combined with the method of local pinning fields. Long-range Neel orders are found for both the SU(4) and SU(6) cases at small and intermediate values of $U$. In both cases, the long-range Neel moments exhibit non-monotonic behavior with respect to $U$, which first grow and then drop as $U$ increases. This result is fundamentally different from the SU(2) case in which the Neel moments increase monotonically and saturate. In the SU(6) case, a transition to the columnar dimer phase is found in the strong interaction regime.

preprint2014arXiv

Exact Results on Itinerant Ferromagnetism in Multi-orbital Systems on Square and Cubic Lattices

We study itinerant ferromagnetism in multi-orbital Hubbard models in certain two-dimensional square and three-dimensional cubic lattices. In the strong coupling limit where doubly occupied orbitals are not allowed, we prove that the fully spin-polarized states are the unique ground states, apart from the trivial spin degeneracies, for a large region of fillings factors. Possible applications to p-orbital bands with ultra-cold fermions in optical lattices, and electronic 3d-orbital bands in transition-metal oxides, are discussed.

preprint2014arXiv

On The Communication Complexity of Linear Algebraic Problems in the Message Passing Model

We study the communication complexity of linear algebraic problems over finite fields in the multi-player message passing model, proving a number of tight lower bounds. Specifically, for a matrix which is distributed among a number of players, we consider the problem of determining its rank, of computing entries in its inverse, and of solving linear equations. We also consider related problems such as computing the generalized inner product of vectors held on different servers. We give a general framework for reducing these multi-player problems to their two-player counterparts, showing that the randomized $s$-player communication complexity of these problems is at least $s$ times the randomized two-player communication complexity. Provided the problem has a certain amount of algebraic symmetry, which we formally define, we can show the hardest input distribution is a symmetric distribution, and therefore apply a recent multi-player lower bound technique of Phillips et al. Further, we give new two-player lower bounds for a number of these problems. In particular, our optimal lower bound for the two-player version of the matrix rank problem resolves an open question of Sun and Wang. A common feature of our lower bounds is that they apply even to the special "threshold promise" versions of these problems, wherein the underlying quantity, e.g., rank, is promised to be one of just two values, one on each side of some critical threshold. These kinds of promise problems are commonplace in the literature on data streaming as sources of hardness for reductions giving space lower bounds.

preprint2014arXiv

Physical Computing With No Clock to Implement the Gaussian Pyramid of SIFT Algorithm

Physical computing is a technology utilizing the nature of electronic devices and circuit topology to cope with computing tasks. In this paper, we propose an active circuit network to implement multi-scale Gaussian filter, which is also called Gaussian Pyramid in image preprocessing. Various kinds of methods have been tried to accelerate the key stage in image feature extracting algorithm these years. Compared with existing technologies, GPU parallel computing and FPGA accelerating technology, physical computing has great advantage on processing speed as well as power consumption. We have verified that processing time to implement the Gaussian pyramid of the SIFT algorithm stands on nanosecond level through the physical computing technology, while other existing methods all need at least hundreds of millisecond. With an estimate on the stray capacitance of the circuit, the power consumption is around 670pJ to filter a 256x256 image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most fast processing technology to accelerate the SIFT algorithm, and it is also a rather energy-efficient method, thanks to the proposed physical computing technology.

preprint2014arXiv

Properties and Applications of a Restricted HR Gradient Operator

For quaternionic signal processing algorithms, the gradients of a quaternion-valued function are required for gradient-based methods. Given the non-commutativity of quaternion algebra, the definition of the gradients is non-trivial. The HR gradient operator provides a viable framework and has found a number of applications. However, the applications so far have been mainly limited to real-valued quaternion functions and linear quaternion-valued functions. To generalize the operator to nonlinear quaternion functions, we define a restricted version of the HR operator. The restricted HR gradient operator comes in two versions, the left and the right ones. We then present a detailed analysis of the properties of the operators, including several different product rules and chain rules. Using the new rules, we derive explicit expressions for the derivatives of a class of regular nonlinear quaternion-valued functions, and prove that the restricted HR gradients are consistent with the gradients in real domain.

preprint2014arXiv

Status of CSNS H- ion source

A new H^- ion source has been installed successfully and will be used to serve the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS). In this paper, we report various components of the ion source, including discharge chamber, temperature, cooling system, extraction electrodes, analyzing magnet, remote control system and so on. Compared to the previous experimental ion source, some improvements have been made to make the ion source more compact and convenient. In the present arrangement, the Penning field is generated by a pair of pole tip extensions on the analyzing magnet instead of by a separate circuit. For the remote control system, F3RP61-2L is applied to the accelerator online control system for the first time. In the running of the ion source, a stable pulse H- beam with a current of 50 mA at an energy of 50 keV is produced. The extraction frequency and pulse width is 25 Hz and 500microsecond, respectively. Furthermore, an emittance scanner has been installed and measurements are in progress.

preprint2014arXiv

The honeycomb lattice with multi-orbital structure: topological and quantum anomalous Hall insulators with large gaps

We construct a minimal four-band model for the two-dimensional (2D) topological insulators and quantum anomalous Hall insulators based on the $p_x$- and $p_y$-orbital bands in the honeycomb lattice. The multiorbital structure allows the atomic spin-orbit coupling which lifts the degeneracy between two sets of on-site Kramers doublets $j_z=\pm\frac{3}{2}$ and $j_z=\pm\frac{1}{2}$. Because of the orbital angular momentum structure of Bloch-wave states at $Γ$ and $K(K^\prime)$ points, topological gaps are equal to the atomic spin-orbit coupling strengths, which are much larger than those based on the mechanism of the $s$-$p$ band inversion. In the weak and intermediate regime of spin-orbit coupling strength, topological gaps are the global gap. The energy spectra and eigen wave functions are solved analytically based on Clifford algebra. The competition among spin-orbit coupling $λ$, sublattice asymmetry $m$ and the Néel exchange field $n$ results in band crossings at $Γ$ and $K (K^\prime)$ points, which leads to various topological band structure transitions. The quantum anomalous Hall state is reached under the condition that three gap parameters $λ$, $m$, and $n$ satisfy the triangle inequality. Flat bands also naturally arise which allow a local construction of eigenstates. The above mechanism is related to several classes of solid state semiconducting materials.

preprint2013arXiv

Beyond Physical Connections: Tree Models in Human Pose Estimation

Simple tree models for articulated objects prevails in the last decade. However, it is also believed that these simple tree models are not capable of capturing large variations in many scenarios, such as human pose estimation. This paper attempts to address three questions: 1) are simple tree models sufficient? more specifically, 2) how to use tree models effectively in human pose estimation? and 3) how shall we use combined parts together with single parts efficiently? Assuming we have a set of single parts and combined parts, and the goal is to estimate a joint distribution of their locations. We surprisingly find that no latent variables are introduced in the Leeds Sport Dataset (LSP) during learning latent trees for deformable model, which aims at approximating the joint distributions of body part locations using minimal tree structure. This suggests one can straightforwardly use a mixed representation of single and combined parts to approximate their joint distribution in a simple tree model. As such, one only needs to build Visual Categories of the combined parts, and then perform inference on the learned latent tree. Our method outperformed the state of the art on the LSP, both in the scenarios when the training images are from the same dataset and from the PARSE dataset. Experiments on animal images from the VOC challenge further support our findings.

preprint2013arXiv

Eigenvalues and entropies under the harmonic-Ricci flow

In this paper, the author discusses the eigenvalues and entropies under the harmonic-Ricci flow, which is the Ricci flow coupled with the harmonic map flow. We give an alternative proof of results for compact steady and expanding harmonic-Ricci breathers. In the second part, we derive some monotonicity formulas for eigenvalues of Laplacian under the harmonic-Ricci flow. Finally, we obtain the first variation of the shrinker and expanding entropies of the harmonic-Ricci flow.

preprint2013arXiv

Generalized Ricci flow II: existence for noncompact complete manifolds

In this paper, we continue to study the generalized Ricci flow. We give a criterion on steady gradient Ricci soliton on complete and noncompact Riemannian manifolds that is Ricci-flat, and then introduce a natural flow whose stable points are Ricci-flat metrics. Modifying the argument used by Shi and List, we prove the short time existence and higher order derivatives estimates.

preprint2013arXiv

High-Dimensional Topological Insulators with Quaternionic Analytic Landau Levels

We study the 3D topological insulators in the continuum by coupling spin-1/2 fermions to the Aharonov-Casher SU(2) gauge field. They exhibit flat Landau levels in which orbital angular momentum and spin are coupled with a fixed helicity. The 3D lowest Landau level wavefunctions exhibit the quaternionic analyticity as a generalization of the complex analyticity of the 2D case. Each Landau level contributes one branch of gapless helical Dirac modes to the surface spectra, whose topological properties belong to the Z2-class. The flat Landau levels can be generalized to an arbitrary dimension. Interaction effects and experimental realizations are also studied.

preprint2013arXiv

Learning Visual Symbols for Parsing Human Poses in Images

Parsing human poses in images is fundamental in extracting critical visual information for artificial intelligent agents. Our goal is to learn self-contained body part representations from images, which we call visual symbols, and their symbol-wise geometric contexts in this parsing process. Each symbol is individually learned by categorizing visual features leveraged by geometric information. In the categorization, we use Latent Support Vector Machine followed by an efficient cross validation procedure to learn visual symbols. Then, these symbols naturally define geometric contexts of body parts in a fine granularity. When the structure of the compositional parts is a tree, we derive an efficient approach to estimating human poses in images. Experiments on two large datasets suggest our approach outperforms state of the art methods.

preprint2013arXiv

Numerical method for real root isolation of semi-algebraic system and its applications

In this paper, based on the homotopy continuation method and the interval Newton method, an efficient algorithm is introduced to isolate the real roots of semi-algebraic system. Tests on some random examples and a variety of problems including transcendental functions arising in many applications show that the new algorithm reduces the cost substantially compared with the traditional symbolic approaches.

preprint2013arXiv

On the Throughput of Hybrid-ARQ under QoS Constraints

Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) is a high performance communication protocol, leading to effective use of the wireless channel and the resources with only limited feedback about the channel state information (CSI) to the transmitter. In this paper, the throughput of HARQ with incremental redundancy (IR) and fixed transmission rate is studied in the presence of quality of service (QoS) constraints imposed as limitations on buffer overflow probabilities. In particular, tools from the theory of renewal processes and stochastic network calculus are employed to characterize the maximum arrival rates that can be supported by the wireless channel when HARQ-IR is adopted. Effective capacity is employed as the throughput metric and a closed-form expression for the effective capacity of HARQ-IR is determined for small values of the QoS exponent. The impact of the fixed transmission rate, QoS constraints, and hard deadline limitations on the throughput is investigated and comparisons with regular ARQ operation are provided.

preprint2013arXiv

Spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking in the boundary Majorana flat bands

We study the boundary Majorana modes for the single component p-wave weak topological superconductors or superfluids, which form zero energy flat bands protected by time-reversal symmetry in the orbital channel. However, due to the divergence of density of states, the band flatness of the edge Majorana modes is unstable under spontaneously generated spatial variations of Cooper pairing phases. Staggered current loops appear near the boundary and thus time-reversal symmetry is spontaneously broken in the orbital channel. This effect can appear in both condensed matter and ultra-cold atom systems.

preprint2013arXiv

Topological insulators with SU(2) Landau levels

We construct continuum models of 3D and 4D topological insulators by coupling spin-1/2 fermions to an SU(2) background gauge field, which is equivalent to a spatially dependent spin-orbit coupling. Higher dimensional generalizations of flat Landau levels are obtained in the Landau-like gauge. The 2D helical Dirac modes with opposite helicities and 3D Weyl modes with opposite chiralities are spatially separated along the third and fourth dimensions, respectively. Stable 2D helical Fermi surfaces and 3D chiral Fermi surfaces appear on open boundaries, respectively. The charge pumping in 4D Landau level systems shows quantized 4D quantum Hall effect.

preprint2013arXiv

Traveling Waves in a Three Species Competition-cooperation System

This paper studies the traveling wave solutions to a three species competition cooperation system. The existence of the traveling waves is investigated via monotone iteration method. The upper and lower solutions come from either the waves of KPP equation or those of certain Lotka Volterra system. We also derive the asymptotics and uniqueness of the wave solutions. The results are then applied to a Lotka Volterra system with spatially averaged and temporally delayed competition.

preprint2013arXiv

Unconventional states of bosons with synthetic spin-orbit coupling

Spin-orbit coupling with bosons gives rise to novel properties that are absent in usual bosonic systems. Under very general conditions, the conventional ground state wavefunctions of bosons are constrained by the "no-node" theorem to be positive-definite. In contrast, the linear-dependence of spin-orbit coupling leads to complex-valued condensate wavefunctions beyond this theorem. In this article, we review the study of this class of unconventional Bose-Einstein condensations focusing on their topological properties. Both the 2D Rashba and 3D $\vecσ \cdot \vec{p}$-type Weyl spin-orbit couplings give rise to Landau-level-like quantization of single-particle levels in the harmonic trap. The interacting condensates develop the half-quantum vortex structure spontaneously breaking time-reversal symmetry and exhibit topological spin textures of the skyrmion type. In particular, the 3D Weyl coupling generates topological defects in the quaternionic phase space as an SU(2) generalization of the usual U(1) vortices. Rotating spin-orbit coupled condensates exhibit rich vortex structures due to the interplay between vorticity and spin texture. In the Mott-insulating states in optical lattices, quantum magnetism is characterized by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya type exchange interactions.

preprint2012arXiv

2D and 3D topological insulators with isotropic and parity-breaking Landau levels

We investigate topological insulating states in both two and three dimensions with the harmonic potential and strong spin-orbit couplings breaking the inversion symmetry. Landau-level like quantizations appear with the full 2D and 3D rotational symmetry and time-reversal symmetry. Inside each band, states are labeled by their angular momenta over which energy dispersions are strongly suppressed by spin-orbit coupling to nearly flat. The radial quantization generates energy gaps between neighboring bands at the order of the harmonic frequency. Helical edge or surface states appear on open boundaries characterized by the Z2 index. These Hamiltonians can be viewed from the dimensional reduction of the high dimensional quantum Hall states in 3D and 4D flat spaces. These states can be realized with ultra-cold fermions inside harmonic traps with the synthetic gauge fields.

preprint2012arXiv

Isotropic Landau levels of Dirac fermions in high dimensions

We generalize the Landau levels of two-dimensional Dirac fermions to three dimensions and above with the full rotational symmetry. Similarly to the two-dimensional case, there exists a branch of zero energy Landau levels of fractional fermion modes for the massless Dirac fermions. The spectra of other Landau levels distribute symmetrically with respect to the zero energy scaling with the square root of the Landau-level indices. This mechanism is a nonminimal coupling of Dirac fermions to the background fields. This high dimensional relativistic Landau-level problem is a square-root problem of its previous studied nonrelativistic version investigated in Li and Wu [arXiv:1103.5422 (2011)].

preprint2012arXiv

Single-domain shape anisotropy in near-macroscopic Ni$_{80}$Fe$_{20}$ thin-film rectangles

Shape anisotropy provides a simple mechanism to adjust the local bias field in patterned structures. It is well known that for ellipsoidal particles $<1$ $μ$m in size, a quasi-single domain state can be realized with uniform anisotropy field. For larger patterned ferromagnetic thin-film elements, domain formation is thought to limit the effectiveness of shape anisotropy. In our work we show that very soft lithographically patterned Ni$_{80}$Fe$_{20}$ films with control of induced magnetic anisotropy can exhibit shape anisotropy fields in agreement with single-domain models, for both hysteresis loop measurements at low field and ferromagnetic resonance measurements at high field. We show the superiority of the fluxmetric form over the magnetometric form of anisotropy estimate for thin films with control dimensions from 10 $μ$m to 150 $μ$m and in-plane aspect ratios above 10.

preprint2012arXiv

Spin-orbit coupled Fermi liquid theory of ultra-cold magnetic dipolar fermions

We investigate Fermi liquid states of the ultra-cold magnetic dipolar Fermi gases in the simplest two-component case including both thermodynamic instabilities and collective excitations. The magnetic dipolar interaction is invariant under the simultaneous spin-orbit rotation, but not under either the spin or the orbit one. Therefore, the corresponding Fermi liquid theory is intrinsically spin-orbit coupled. This is a fundamental feature of magnetic dipolar Fermi gases different from electric dipolar ones. The Landau interaction matrix is calculated and is diagonalized in terms of the spin-orbit coupled partial-wave channels of the total angular momentum J. The leading thermodynamic instabilities lie in the channels of ferromagnetism hybridized with the ferronematic order with J = 1+ and the spin-current mode with J = 1-, where + and - represent even and odd parities, respectively. An exotic propagating collective mode is identified as spin-orbit coupled Fermi surface oscillations in which spin distribution on the Fermi surface exhibits a topologically nontrivial hedgehog configuration.

preprint2012arXiv

Sure screening for estimating equations in ultra-high dimensions

As the number of possible predictors generated by high-throughput experiments continues to increase, methods are needed to quickly screen out unimportant covariates. Model-based screening methods have been proposed and theoretically justified, but only for a few specific models. Model-free screening methods have also recently been studied, but can have lower power to detect important covariates. In this paper we propose EEScreen, a screening procedure that can be used with any model that can be fit using estimating equations, and provide unified results on its finite-sample screening performance. EEScreen thus generalizes many recently proposed model-based and model-free screening procedures. We also propose iEEScreen, an iterative version of EEScreen, and show that it is closely related to a recently studied boosting method for estimating equations. We show via simulations for two different estimating equations that EEScreen and iEEScreen are useful and flexible screening procedures, and demonstrate our methods on data from a multiple myeloma study.

preprint2012arXiv

The J-triplet Cooper pairing with magnetic dipolar interactions

Recently, cold atomic Fermi gases with the large magnetic dipolar interaction have been laser cooled down to quantum degeneracy. Different from electric-dipoles which are classic vectors, atomic magnetic dipoles are quantum-mechanical matrix operators proportional to the hyperfine-spin of atoms, thus provide rich opportunities to investigate exotic many-body physics. Furthermore, unlike anisotropic electric dipolar gases, unpolarized magnetic dipolar systems are isotropic under simultaneous spin-orbit rotation. These features give rise to a robust mechanism for a novel pairing symmetry: orbital p-wave (L=1) spin triplet (S=1) pairing with total angular momentum of the Cooper pair J=1. This pairing is markedly different from both the $^3$He-B phase in which J=0 and the $^3$He-$A$ phase in which $J$ is not conserved. It is also different from the p-wave pairing in the single-component electric dipolar systems in which the spin degree of freedom is frozen.

preprint2010arXiv

Doping and dimensionality effects on the core-level spectra of layered ruthenates

Core-level spectra of the Mn-doped Sr3Ru2O7 and Srn+1RunO3n+1 (n = 1, 2 and 3) crystals are investigated with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Doping of Mn to Sr3Ru2O7 considerably affects the distribution of core-level spectral weight. The satellite of Ru 3d core levels exhibits a substantial change with doping, indicating an enhanced electron localization across the doping- induced metal-insulator transition. However, the Ru 3p core levels remain identical with Mn-doping, thus showing no sign of doping-induced multiple Ru valences. In the Srn+1RunO3n+1 (n = 1, 2 and 3), the Ru 3d core-level spectra are similar, indicating that the chemical bonding environment around Ru ions remains the same for different layered compounds. Meanwhile the Sr 3d shallow core levels shift to higher binding energy with increasing n, suggesting their participation in Sr-O bonding with structural evolution.

preprint2009arXiv

Anyons from fermions with conventional two-body interactions

Emergent anyons are the key elements of the topological quantum computation and topological quantum memory. We study a two-component fermion model with conventional two-body interaction in an open boundary condition and show that several subsets in the low-lying excitations obey the same fusion rules as those of the toric code model. Those string-like non-local excitations in a given subset obey mutual semionic statistics. We show how to peel off one of such subset from other degenerate subsets and manipulate anyons in cold dipolar Fermi atoms or cold dipolar fermionic heteronuclear molecules in optical lattices by means of the established techniques.

preprint2009arXiv

Approximate Sparse Recovery: Optimizing Time and Measurements

An approximate sparse recovery system consists of parameters $k,N$, an $m$-by-$N$ measurement matrix, $Φ$, and a decoding algorithm, $\mathcal{D}$. Given a vector, $x$, the system approximates $x$ by $\widehat x =\mathcal{D}(Φx)$, which must satisfy $\| \widehat x - x\|_2\le C \|x - x_k\|_2$, where $x_k$ denotes the optimal $k$-term approximation to $x$. For each vector $x$, the system must succeed with probability at least 3/4. Among the goals in designing such systems are minimizing the number $m$ of measurements and the runtime of the decoding algorithm, $\mathcal{D}$. In this paper, we give a system with $m=O(k \log(N/k))$ measurements--matching a lower bound, up to a constant factor--and decoding time $O(k\log^c N)$, matching a lower bound up to $\log(N)$ factors. We also consider the encode time (i.e., the time to multiply $Φ$ by $x$), the time to update measurements (i.e., the time to multiply $Φ$ by a 1-sparse $x$), and the robustness and stability of the algorithm (adding noise before and after the measurements). Our encode and update times are optimal up to $\log(N)$ factors.

preprint2003arXiv

D-branes in Topological Minimal Models: the Landau-Ginzburg Approach

We study D-branes in topologically twisted N=2 minimal models using the Landau-Ginzburg realization. In the cases of A and D-type minimal models we provide what we believe is an exhaustive list of topological branes and compute the corresponding boundary OPE algebras as well as all disk correlators. We also construct examples of topological branes in E-type minimal models. We compare our results with the boundary state formalism, where possible, and find agreement.