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Published work

35 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis

An agent skill is a configuration package that equips an LLM-driven agent with a concrete capability, such as reading email, executing shell commands, or signing blockchain transactions. Each skill is a hybrid artifact-a structured half declares executable interfaces, while a prose half dictates when and how those interfaces fire-and the prose is reinterpreted probabilistically on every invocation. Conventional static analyzers parse the structured half but ignore the prose; LLM-based tools read the prose but cannot reproducibly prove that a tainted input reaches a high-impact sink. We present Semia, a static auditor for agent skills. Semia lifts each skill into the Skill Description Language (SDL), a Datalog fact base that captures LLM-triggered actions, prose-defined conditions, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Synthesizing a fact base that is both structurally sound and semantically faithful to the original prose is the central challenge; we address it with Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis (CGRS), a propose-verify-evaluate loop that refines LLM candidates until convergence. Security properties (e.g., indirect injection, secret leakage, confused deputies, unguarded sinks, etc.) over an agent skill can then be reduced to Datalog reachability queries. We evaluate Semia on 13,728 real-world skills from public marketplaces. Semia renders all of them auditable and finds that more than half carry at least one critical semantic risk. On a stratified sample of 541 expert-labeled skills, Semia achieves 97.7% recall and an F1 of 90.6%, substantially outperforming signature-based scanners and LLM baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Automated Transpilation of Imperative to Functional Code using Neural-Guided Program Synthesis (Extended Version)

While many mainstream languages such as Java, Python, and C# increasingly incorporate functional APIs to simplify programming and improve parallelization/performance, there are no effective techniques that can be used to automatically translate existing imperative code to functional variants using these APIs. Motivated by this problem, this paper presents a transpilation approach based on inductive program synthesis for modernizing existing code. Our method is based on the observation that the overwhelming majority of source/target programs in this setting satisfy an assumption that we call trace-compatibility: not only do the programs share syntactically identical low-level expressions, but these expressions also take the same values in corresponding execution traces. Our method leverages this observation to design a new neural-guided synthesis algorithm that (1) uses a novel neural architecture called cognate grammar network (CGN) and (2) leverages a form of concolic execution to prune partial programs based on intermediate values that arise during a computation. We have implemented our approach in a tool called NGST2 and use it to translate imperative Java and Python code to functional variants that use the Stream and functools APIs respectively. Our experiments show that NGST2 significantly outperforms several baselines and that our proposed neural architecture and pruning techniques are vital for achieving good results.

preprint2022arXiv

Crescent: Taming Memory Irregularities for Accelerating Deep Point Cloud Analytics

3D perception in point clouds is transforming the perception ability of future intelligent machines. Point cloud algorithms, however, are plagued by irregular memory accesses, leading to massive inefficiencies in the memory sub-system, which bottlenecks the overall efficiency. This paper proposes Crescent, an algorithm-hardware co-design system that tames the irregularities in deep point cloud analytics while achieving high accuracy. To that end, we introduce two approximation techniques, approximate neighbor search and selectively bank conflict elision, that &#34;regularize&#34; the DRAM and SRAM memory accesses. Doing so, however, necessarily introduces accuracy loss, which we mitigate by a new network training procedure that integrates approximation into the network training process. In essence, our training procedure trains models that are conditioned upon a specific approximate setting and, thus, retain a high accuracy. Experiments show that Crescent doubles the performance and halves the energy consumption compared to an optimized baseline accelerator with < 1% accuracy loss. The code of our paper is available at: https://github.com/horizon-research/crescent.

preprint2022arXiv

Determination of building flood risk maps from LiDAR mobile mapping data

With increasing urbanization, flooding is a major challenge for many cities today. Based on forecast precipitation, topography, and pipe networks, flood simulations can provide early warnings for areas and buildings at risk of flooding. Basement windows, doors, and underground garage entrances are common places where floodwater can flow into a building. Some buildings have been prepared or designed considering the threat of flooding, but others have not. Therefore, knowing the heights of these facade openings helps to identify places that are more susceptible to water ingress. However, such data is not yet readily available in most cities. Traditional surveying of the desired targets may be used, but this is a very time-consuming and laborious process. This research presents a new process for the extraction of windows and doors from LiDAR mobile mapping data. Deep learning object detection models are trained to identify these objects. Usually, this requires to provide large amounts of manual annotations. In this paper, we mitigate this problem by leveraging a rule-based method. In a first step, the rule-based method is used to generate pseudo-labels. A semi-supervised learning strategy is then applied with three different levels of supervision. The results show that using only automatically generated pseudo-labels, the learning-based model outperforms the rule-based approach by 14.6% in terms of F1-score. After five hours of human supervision, it is possible to improve the model by another 6.2%. By comparing the detected facade openings&#39; heights with the predicted water levels from a flood simulation model, a map can be produced which assigns per-building flood risk levels. This information can be combined with flood forecasting to provide a more targeted disaster prevention guide for the city&#39;s infrastructure and residential buildings.

preprint2022arXiv

FIBA: Frequency-Injection based Backdoor Attack in Medical Image Analysis

In recent years, the security of AI systems has drawn increasing research attention, especially in the medical imaging realm. To develop a secure medical image analysis (MIA) system, it is a must to study possible backdoor attacks (BAs), which can embed hidden malicious behaviors into the system. However, designing a unified BA method that can be applied to various MIA systems is challenging due to the diversity of imaging modalities (e.g., X-Ray, CT, and MRI) and analysis tasks (e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation). Most existing BA methods are designed to attack natural image classification models, which apply spatial triggers to training images and inevitably corrupt the semantics of poisoned pixels, leading to the failures of attacking dense prediction models. To address this issue, we propose a novel Frequency-Injection based Backdoor Attack method (FIBA) that is capable of delivering attacks in various MIA tasks. Specifically, FIBA leverages a trigger function in the frequency domain that can inject the low-frequency information of a trigger image into the poisoned image by linearly combining the spectral amplitude of both images. Since it preserves the semantics of the poisoned image pixels, FIBA can perform attacks on both classification and dense prediction models. Experiments on three benchmarks in MIA (i.e., ISIC-2019 for skin lesion classification, KiTS-19 for kidney tumor segmentation, and EAD-2019 for endoscopic artifact detection), validate the effectiveness of FIBA and its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in attacking MIA models as well as bypassing backdoor defense. Source code will be available at https://github.com/HazardFY/FIBA.

preprint2022arXiv

Injecting Numerical Reasoning Skills into Knowledge Base Question Answering Models

Embedding-based methods are popular for Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA), but few current models have numerical reasoning skills and thus struggle to answer ordinal constrained questions. This paper proposes a new embedding-based KBQA framework which particularly takes numerical reasoning into account. We present NumericalTransformer on top of NSM, a state-of-the-art embedding-based KBQA model, to create NT-NSM. To enable better training, we propose two pre-training tasks with explicit numerical-oriented loss functions on two generated training datasets and a template-based data augmentation method for enriching ordinal constrained QA dataset. Extensive experiments on KBQA benchmarks demonstrate that with the help of our training algorithm, NT-NSM is empowered with numerical reasoning skills and substantially outperforms the baselines in answering ordinal constrained questions.

preprint2022arXiv

Real-Time Gaze Tracking with Event-Driven Eye Segmentation

Gaze tracking is increasingly becoming an essential component in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Modern gaze tracking al gorithms are heavyweight; they operate at most 5 Hz on mobile processors despite that near-eye cameras comfortably operate at a r eal-time rate ($>$ 30 Hz). This paper presents a real-time eye tracking algorithm that, on average, operates at 30 Hz on a mobile processor, achieves \ang{0.1}--\ang{0.5} gaze accuracies, all the while requiring only 30K parameters, one to two orders of magn itude smaller than state-of-the-art eye tracking algorithms. The crux of our algorithm is an Auto~ROI mode, which continuously pr edicts the Regions of Interest (ROIs) of near-eye images and judiciously processes only the ROIs for gaze estimation. To that end, we introduce a novel, lightweight ROI prediction algorithm by emulating an event camera. We discuss how a software emulation of events enables accurate ROI prediction without requiring special hardware. The code of our paper is available at https://github.com/horizon-research/edgaze.

preprint2022arXiv

Storage capacity of networks with discrete synapses and sparsely encoded memories

Attractor neural networks (ANNs) are one of the leading theoretical frameworks for the formation and retrieval of memories in networks of biological neurons. In this framework, a pattern imposed by external inputs to the network is said to be learned when this pattern becomes a fixed point attractor of the network dynamics. The storage capacity is the maximum number of patterns that can be learned by the network. In this paper, we study the storage capacity of fully-connected and sparsely-connected networks with a binarized Hebbian rule, for arbitrary coding levels. Our results show that a network with discrete synapses has a similar storage capacity as the model with continuous synapses, and that this capacity tends asymptotically towards the optimal capacity, in the space of all possible binary connectivity matrices, in the sparse coding limit. We also derive finite coding level corrections for the asymptotic solution in the sparse coding limit. The result indicates the capacity of network with Hebbian learning rules converges to the optimal capacity extremely slowly when the coding level becomes small. Our results also show that in networks with sparse binary connectivity matrices, the information capacity per synapse is larger than in the fully connected case, and thus such networks store information more efficiently.

preprint2022arXiv

The ASTRID Simulation: Galaxy Formation and Reionization

We introduce the ASTRID simulation, a large-scale cosmological hydrodynamic simulation in a $250$ Mpc/h box with $2\times 5500^3$ particles. ASTRID contains a large number of high redshift galaxies, which can be compared to future survey data, and resolves galaxies in halos more massive than $2\times 10^9 M_\odot$. ASTRID has been run from $z=99$ to $z=3$. As a particular focus is modelling the high redshift Universe, it contains models for inhomogeneous hydrogen and helium reionization, baryon relative velocities and massive neutrinos, as well as supernova and AGN feedback. The black hole model includes mergers driven by dynamical friction rather than repositioning. We briefly summarise the implemented models, and the technical choices we took when developing the simulation code. We validate the model, showing good agreement with observed UV luminosity functions, galaxy stellar mass functions and specific star formation rates. We show that the redshift at which a given galaxy underwent hydrogen reionization has a large effect on the halo gas fraction. Finally, at $z=6$, halos with $M \sim 2\times 10^9 M_\odot$ which have been reionized have a star formation rate $1.5$ times greater than those which have not yet been reionized.

preprint2022arXiv

The ASTRID simulation: the evolution of Supermassive Black Holes

We present the evolution of black holes (BHs) and their relationship with their host galaxies in Astrid, a large-volume cosmological hydrodynamical simulation with box size 250 $h^{-1} \rm Mpc$ containing $2\times5500^3$ particles evolved to z=3. Astrid statistically models BH gas accretion and AGN feedback to their environments, applies a power-law distribution for BH seed mass $M_{\rm sd}$, uses a dynamical friction model for BH dynamics and executes a physical treatment of BH mergers. The BH population is broadly consistent with empirical constraints on the BH mass function, the bright end of the luminosity functions, and the time evolution of BH mass and accretion rate density. The BH mass and accretion exhibit a tight correlation with host stellar mass and star formation rate. We trace BHs seeded before z>10 down to z=3, finding that BHs carry virtually no imprint of the initial $M_{\rm sd}$ except those with the smallest $M_{\rm sd}$, where less than 50\% of them have doubled in mass. Gas accretion is the dominant channel for BH growth compared to BH mergers. With dynamical friction, Astrid predicts a significant delay for BH mergers after the first encounter of a BH pair, with a typical elapse time of about 200 Myrs. There are in total $4.5 \times 10^5$ BH mergers in Astrid at z>3, $\sim 10^3$ of which have X-ray detectable EM counterparts: a bright kpc scale dual AGN with $L_X>10^{43}$ erg/s. BHs with $M_{\rm BH} \sim 10^{7-8} M_{\odot}$ experience the most frequent mergers. Galaxies that host BH mergers are unbiased tracers of the overall $M_{\rm BH} - M_{*}$ relation. Massive ($>10^{11} M_{\odot}$) galaxies have a high occupation number (>10) of BHs, and hence host the majority of BH mergers.

preprint2022arXiv

The BlueTides Mock Image Catalogue: Simulated observations of high-redshift galaxies and predictions for JWST imaging surveys

We present a mock image catalogue of ~100,000 MUV=-22.5 to -19.6 mag galaxies at z=7-12 from the BlueTides cosmological simulation. We create mock images of each galaxy with the James Webb (JWST), Hubble, Roman, and Euclid Space Telescopes, as well as Subaru, and VISTA, with a range of near- and mid-infrared filters. We perform photometry on the mock images to estimate the success of these instruments for detecting high-z galaxies. We predict that JWST will have unprecedented power in detecting high-z galaxies, with a 95% completeness limit at least 2.5 magnitudes fainter than VISTA and Subaru, 1.1 magnitudes fainter than Hubble, and 0.9 magnitudes fainter than Roman, for the same wavelength and exposure time. Focusing on JWST, we consider a range of exposure times and filters, and find that the NIRCam F356W and F277W filters will detect the faintest galaxies, with 95% completeness at m=27.4 mag in 10ks exposures. We also predict the number of high-z galaxies that will be discovered by upcoming JWST imaging surveys. We predict that the COSMOS-Web survey will detect ~1000 MUV<-20.1 mag galaxies at 6.5<z<7.5, by virtue of its large survey area. JADES-Medium will detect almost 100% of MUV<-20 mag galaxies at z<8.5 due to its significant depth, however with its smaller survey area it will detect only ~100 of these galaxies at 6.5<z<7.5. Cosmic variance results in a large range in the number of predicted galaxies each survey will detect, which is more evident in smaller surveys such as CEERS and the PEARLS NEP and GOODS-S fields.

preprint2022arXiv

The DESI $N$-body Simulation Project -- II. Suppressing sample variance with fast simulations

Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will construct a large and precise three-dimensional map of our Universe. The survey effective volume reaches $\sim20\Gpchcube$. It is a great challenge to prepare high-resolution simulations with a much larger volume for validating the DESI analysis pipelines. \textsc{AbacusSummit} is a suite of high-resolution dark-matter-only simulations designed for this purpose, with $200\Gpchcube$ (10 times DESI volume) for the base cosmology. However, further efforts need to be done to provide a more precise analysis of the data and to cover also other cosmologies. Recently, the CARPool method was proposed to use paired accurate and approximate simulations to achieve high statistical precision with a limited number of high-resolution simulations. Relying on this technique, we propose to use fast quasi-$N$-body solvers combined with accurate simulations to produce accurate summary statistics. This enables us to obtain 100 times smaller variance than the expected DESI statistical variance at the scales we are interested in, e.g. $k < 0.3\hMpc$ for the halo power spectrum. In addition, it can significantly suppress the sample variance of the halo bispectrum. We further generalize the method for other cosmologies with only one realization in \textsc{AbacusSummit} suite to extend the effective volume $\sim 20$ times. In summary, our proposed strategy of combining high-fidelity simulations with fast approximate gravity solvers and a series of variance suppression techniques sets the path for a robust cosmological analysis of galaxy survey data.

preprint2022arXiv

The Impact of Dust on the Sizes of Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization

We study the sizes of galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization using a sample of ~100,000 galaxies from the BlueTides cosmological hydrodynamical simulation from z=7 to 11. We measure the galaxy sizes from stellar mass and luminosity maps, defining the effective radius as the minimum radius which could enclose the pixels containing 50% of the total mass/light in the image. We find an inverse relationship between stellar mass and effective half-mass radius, suggesting that the most massive galaxies are more compact and dense than lower mass galaxies, which have flatter mass distributions. We find a mildly negative relation between intrinsic far-ultraviolet luminosity and size, while we find a positive size-luminosity relation when measured from dust-attenuated images. This suggests that dust is the predominant cause of the observed positive size-luminosity relation, with dust preferentially attenuating bright sight lines resulting in a flatter emission profile and thus larger measured effective radii. We study the size-luminosity relation across the rest-frame ultraviolet and optical, and find that the slope decreases at longer wavelengths; this is a consequence of the relation being caused by dust, which produces less attenuation at longer wavelengths. We find that the far-ultraviolet size-luminosity relation shows mild evolution from z=7 to 11, and galaxy size evolves with redshift as $R\propto(1+z)^{-m}$, where $m=0.662\pm0.009$. Finally, we investigate the sizes of z=7 quasar host galaxies, and find that while the intrinsic sizes of quasar hosts are small relative to the overall galaxy sample, they have comparable sizes when measured from dust-attenuated images.

preprint2021arXiv

A fast particle-mesh simulation of non-linear cosmological structure formation with massive neutrinos

Quasi-N-body simulations, such as FastPM, provide a fast way to simulate cosmological structure formation, but have yet to adequately include the effects of massive neutrinos. We present a method to include neutrino particles in FastPM, enabling computation of the CDM and total matter power spectra to percent-level accuracy in the non-linear regime. The CDM-neutrino cross-power can also be computed at a sufficient accuracy to constrain cosmological observables. To avoid the shot noise that typically plagues neutrino particle simulations, we employ a quasi-random algorithm to sample the relevant Fermi-Dirac distribution when setting the initial neutrino thermal velocities. We additionally develop an effective distribution function to describe a set of non-degenerate neutrinos as a single particle to speed up non-degenerate simulations. The simulation is accurate for the full range of physical interest, $M_ν\lesssim 0.6$eV, and applicable to redshifts $z\lesssim2$. Such accuracy can be achieved by initializing particles with the two-fluid approximation transfer functions (using the REPS package). Convergence can be reached in $\sim 25$ steps, with a starting redshift of $z=99$. Probing progressively smaller scales only requires an increase in the number of CDM particles being simulated, while the number of neutrino particles can remain fixed at a value less than or similar to the number of CDM particles. In turn, the percentage increase in runtime-per-step due to neutrino particles is between $\sim 5-20\%$ for runs with $1024^3$ CDM particles, and decreases as the number of CDM particles is increased. The code has been made publicly available, providing an invaluable resource to produce fast predictions for cosmological surveys and studying reconstruction.

preprint2021arXiv

Falx: Synthesis-Powered Visualization Authoring

Modern visualization tools aim to allow data analysts to easily create exploratory visualizations. When the input data layout conforms to the visualization design, users can easily specify visualizations by mapping data columns to visual channels of the design. However, when there is a mismatch between data layout and the design, users need to spend significant effort on data transformation. We propose Falx, a synthesis-powered visualization tool that allows users to specify visualizations in a similarly simple way but without needing to worry about data layout. In Falx, users specify visualizations using examples of how concrete values in the input are mapped to visual channels, and Falx automatically infers the visualization specification and transforms the data to match the design. In a study with 33 data analysts on four visualization tasks involving data transformation, we found that users can effectively adopt Falx to create visualizations they otherwise cannot implement.

preprint2021arXiv

Massive Black Hole Mergers with Orbital Information: Predictions from the ASTRID Simulation

We examine massive black hole (MBH) mergers and their associated gravitational wave signals from the large-volume cosmological simulation Astrid. Astrid includes galaxy formation and black hole models recently updated with a MBH seed population between $3\times 10^4M_{\odot}/h$ and $3\times 10^5M_{\odot}/h$ and a sub-grid dynamical friction (DF) model to follow the MBH dynamics down to $1.5\;\text{ckpc}/h$. We calculate initial eccentricities of MBH orbits directly from the simulation at kpc-scales, and find orbital eccentricities above $0.7$ for most MBH pairs before the numerical merger. After approximating unresolved evolution on scales below ${\sim 200\,\text{pc}}$, we find that the in-simulation DF on large scales accounts for more than half of the total orbital decay time ($\sim 500\,\text{Myrs}$) due to DF. The binary hardening time is an order of magnitude longer than the DF time, especially for the seed-mass binaries ($M_\text{BH}<2M_\text{seed}$). As a result, only $\lesssim20\%$ of seed MBH pairs merge at $z>3$ after considering both unresolved DF evolution and binary hardening. These $z>3$ seed-mass mergers are hosted in a biased population of galaxies with the highest stellar masses of $>10^9\,M_\odot$. With the higher initial eccentricity prediction from Astrid, we estimate an expected merger rate of $0.3-0.7$ per year from the $z>3$ MBH population. This is a factor of $\sim 7$ higher than the prediction using the circular orbit assumption. The LISA events are expected at a similar rate, and comprise $\gtrsim 60\%$ seed-seed mergers, $\sim 30\%$ involving only one seed-mass MBH, and $\sim 10\%$ mergers of non-seed MBHs.

preprint2021arXiv

Phases of learning dynamics in artificial neural networks: with or without mislabeled data

Despite tremendous success of deep neural network in machine learning, the underlying reason for its superior learning capability remains unclear. Here, we present a framework based on statistical physics to study dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives learning in neural networks. By using the minibatch gradient ensemble, we construct order parameters to characterize dynamics of weight updates in SGD. Without mislabeled data, we find that the SGD learning dynamics transitions from a fast learning phase to a slow exploration phase, which is associated with large changes in order parameters that characterize the alignment of SGD gradients and their mean amplitude. In the case with randomly mislabeled samples, SGD learning dynamics falls into four distinct phases. The system first finds solutions for the correctly labeled samples in phase I, it then wanders around these solutions in phase II until it finds a direction to learn the mislabeled samples during phase III, after which it finds solutions that satisfy all training samples during phase IV. Correspondingly, the test error decreases during phase I and remains low during phase II; however, it increases during phase III and reaches a high plateau during phase IV. The transitions between different phases can be understood by changes of order parameters that characterize the alignment of mean gradients for the correctly and incorrectly labeled samples and their (relative) strength during learning. We find that individual sample losses for the two datasets are most separated during phase II, which leads to a cleaning process to eliminate mislabeled samples for improving generalization.

preprint2021arXiv

The DESI $N$-body Simulation Project I: Testing the Robustness of Simulations for the DESI Dark Time Survey

Analysis of large galaxy surveys requires confidence in the robustness of numerical simulation methods. The simulations are used to construct mock galaxy catalogs to validate data analysis pipelines and identify potential systematics. We compare three $N$-body simulation codes, ABACUS, GADGET, and SWIFT, to investigate the regimes in which their results agree. We run $N$-body simulations at three different mass resolutions, $6.25\times10^{8}$, $2.11\times10^{9}$, and $5.00\times10^{9}~h^{-1}$M$_{\odot}$, matching phases to reduce the noise within the comparisons. We find systematic errors in the halo clustering between different codes are smaller than the DESI statistical error for $s > 20\, h^{-1}$Mpc in the correlation function in redshift space. Through the resolution comparison we find that simulations run with a mass resolution of $2.1\times10^{9}~h^{-1}$M$_{\odot}$ are sufficiently converged for systematic effects in the halo clustering to be smaller than the DESI statistical error at scales larger than $20 \, h^{-1}$Mpc. These findings show that the simulations are robust for extracting cosmological information from large scales which is the key goal of the DESI survey. Comparing matter power spectra, we find the codes agree to within 1% for $k \leq 10~h$Mpc$^{-1}$. We also run a comparison of three initial condition generation codes and find good agreement. In addition, we include a quasi-$N$-body code, FastPM, since we plan use it for certain DESI analyses. The impact of the halo definition and galaxy-halo relation will be presented in a follow up study.

preprint2020arXiv

Cosmic variance of $z>7$ galaxies: Prediction from BlueTides

In the coming decade, a new generation of telescopes, including JWST and WFIRST, will probe the period of the formation of first galaxies and quasars, and open up the last frontier for structure formation. Recent simulations as well as observations have suggested that these galaxies are strongly clustered (with large scale bias $\gtrsim6$), and therefore have significant cosmic variance. In this work, we use \texttt{BlueTides}, the largest volume cosmological simulation of galaxy formation, to directly estimate the cosmic variance for current and upcoming surveys. Given its resolution and volume, \texttt{BlueTides} can probe the bias and cosmic variance of $z>7$ galaxies between magnitude $M_{UV}\sim-16$ to $M_{UV}\sim-22$ over survey areas $\sim0.1\ \mathrm{arcmin}^2$ to $\sim 10~\mathrm{deg}^2$. Within this regime, the cosmic variance decreases with survey area/ volume as a power law with exponents between $\sim-0.25$ to $\sim-0.45$. For the planned $10~\mathrm{deg}^2$ field of WFIRST, the cosmic variance is between $3\%$ to $10\%$. Upcoming JWST medium/ deep surveys with areas up to $A\sim100\ \mathrm{arcmin}^2$ will have cosmic variance ranging from $\sim 20-50\%$. Lensed surveys have the highest cosmic variance $\gtrsim 40\%$; the cosmic variance of $M_{UV}\lesssim-16$ galaxies is $\lesssim100\%$ up to $z\sim11$. At higher redshifts such as $z\sim12~(14)$, effective volumes of $\gtrsim(8~\mathrm{Mpc}/h)^3$ ($\gtrsim(12\ \mathrm{Mpc}/h)^3$) are required to limit the cosmic variance to within $100\%$. Finally, we find that cosmic variance is larger than Poisson variance and forms the dominant component of the overall uncertainty in all current and upcoming surveys. We present our calculations in the form of simple fitting functions and an online cosmic variance calculator (CV_AT_COSMIC_DAWN) which we publicly release.

preprint2020arXiv

Exclusive quarkonium production or decay in soft gluon factorization

In this paper, we study the application of the recently proposed soft gluon factorization (SGF) to exclusive quarkonium production or decay. We find that in the nonrelativistic QCD factorization framework there are too many nonperturbative parameters. Thanks to the factorization of kinematical physics from dynamical physics, the SGF significantly reduces the number of nonperturbative parameters. Therefore, the SGF can improve our predictive power of exclusive quarkonium production or decay. By applying to $η_c+γ$ production at B-factories, our result is the closest one to data among all theoretical calculations.

preprint2020arXiv

How neural networks find generalizable solutions: Self-tuned annealing in deep learning

Despite the tremendous success of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm in deep learning, little is known about how SGD finds generalizable solutions in the high-dimensional weight space. By analyzing the learning dynamics and loss function landscape, we discover a robust inverse relation between the weight variance and the landscape flatness (inverse of curvature) for all SGD-based learning algorithms. To explain the inverse variance-flatness relation, we develop a random landscape theory, which shows that the SGD noise strength (effective temperature) depends inversely on the landscape flatness. Our study indicates that SGD attains a self-tuned landscape-dependent annealing strategy to find generalizable solutions at the flat minima of the landscape. Finally, we demonstrate how these new theoretical insights lead to more efficient algorithms, e.g., for avoiding catastrophic forgetting.

preprint2020arXiv

Imaging Systematics and Clustering of DESI Main Targets

We evaluate the impact of imaging systematics on the clustering of luminous red galaxies (LRG), emission-line galaxies (ELG) and quasars (QSO) targeted for the upcoming Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. Using Data Release 7 of the DECam Legacy Survey, we study the effects of astrophysical foregrounds, stellar contamination, differences between north galactic cap and south galactic cap measurements, and variations in imaging depth, stellar density, galactic extinction, seeing, airmass, sky brightness, and exposure time before presenting survey masks and weights to mitigate these effects. With our sanitized samples in hand, we conduct a preliminary analysis of the clustering amplitude and evolution of the DESI main targets. From measurements of the angular correlation functions, we determine power law fits $r_0 = 7.78 \pm 0.26$ $h^{-1}$Mpc, $γ= 1.98 \pm 0.02$ for LRGs and $r_0 = 5.45 \pm 0.1$ $h^{-1}$Mpc, $γ= 1.54 \pm 0.01$ for ELGs. Additionally, from the angular power spectra, we measure the linear biases and model the scale dependent biases in the weakly nonlinear regime. Both sets of clustering measurements show good agreement with survey requirements for LRGs and ELGs, attesting that these samples will enable DESI to achieve precise cosmological constraints. We also present clustering as a function of magnitude, use cross-correlations with external spectroscopy to infer $dN/dz$ and measure clustering as a function of luminosity, and probe higher order clustering statistics through counts-in-cells moments.

preprint2020arXiv

Large scale simulations of H and He reionization and heating driven by stars and more energetic sources

We present simulations of cosmic reionization and reheating from $z=18$ to $z=5$, investigating the role of stars (emitting soft UV-photons), nuclear black holes (BHs, with power-law spectra), X-ray binaries (XRBs, with hard X-ray dominated spectra), and the supernova-associated thermal bremsstrahlung of the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM, with soft X-ray spectra). We post-process the hydrodynamical simulation Massive-Black II (MBII) with multifrequency ionizing radiative transfer. The source properties are directly derived from the physical environment of MBII, and our only real free parameter is the ionizing escape fraction $f_{\rm esc}$. We find that, among the models explored here, the one with an escape fraction that decreases with decreasing redshift yields results most in line with observations, such as of the neutral hydrogen fraction and the Thomson scattering optical depth. Stars are the main driver of hydrogen reionization and consequently of the thermal history of the intergalactic medium (IGM). We obtain $\langle x_{\rm HII} \rangle = 0.99998$ at $z=6$ for all source types, with volume averaged temperatures $\langle T \rangle \sim 20,000~{\rm K}$. BHs are rare and negligible to hydrogen reionization, but conversely they are the only sources which can fully ionize helium, increasing local temperatures by $\sim 10^4~{\rm K}$. The thermal and ionization state of the neutral and lowly ionized hydrogen differs significantly with different source combinations, with ISM and (to a lesser extent) XRBs, playing a significant role and, as a consequence, determining the transition from absorption to emission of the 21 cm signal from neutral hydrogen.

preprint2020arXiv

Mesorasi: Architecture Support for Point Cloud Analytics via Delayed-Aggregation

Point cloud analytics is poised to become a key workload on battery-powered embedded and mobile platforms in a wide range of emerging application domains, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality, where efficiency is paramount. This paper proposes Mesorasi, an algorithm-architecture co-designed system that simultaneously improves the performance and energy efficiency of point cloud analytics while retaining its accuracy. Our extensive characterizations of state-of-the-art point cloud algorithms show that, while structurally reminiscent of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), point cloud algorithms exhibit inherent compute and memory inefficiencies due to the unique characteristics of point cloud data. We propose delayed-aggregation, a new algorithmic primitive for building efficient point cloud algorithms. Delayed-aggregation hides the performance bottlenecks and reduces the compute and memory redundancies by exploiting the approximately distributive property of key operations in point cloud algorithms. Delayed-aggregation let point cloud algorithms achieve 1.6x speedup and 51.1% energy reduction on a mobile GPU while retaining the accuracy (-0.9% loss to 1.2% gains). To maximize the algorithmic benefits, we propose minor extensions to contemporary CNN accelerators, which can be integrated into a mobile Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) without modifying other SoC components. With additional hardware support, Mesorasi achieves up to 3.6x speedup.

preprint2020arXiv

More accurate simulations with separate initial conditions for baryons and dark matter

We revisit techniques for performing cosmological simulations with both baryons and cold dark matter when each fluid has different initial conditions, as is the case at the end of the radiation era. Most simulations do not reproduce the linear prediction for the difference between the cold dark matter and baryon perturbations. We show that this is due to the common use of offset regular grids when setting up the particle initial conditions. The correct behaviour can be obtained without any loss of simulation resolution by using a Lagrangian glass for the baryon particles. We further show that the difference between cold dark matter and baryons may affect predictions for the Lyman-alpha forest flux power spectrum at the 5% level, potentially impacting current cosmological constraints.

preprint2020arXiv

Nebular Line Emission During the Epoch of Reionization

Nebular emission lines associated with galactic HII regions carry information about both physical properties of the ionised gas and the source of ionising photons as well as providing the opportunity of measuring accurate redshifts and thus distances once a cosmological model is assumed. While nebular line emission has been extensively studied at lower redshift there are currently only few constraints within the epoch of reionisation (EoR, $z>6$), chiefly due to the lack of sensitive near-IR spectrographs. However, this will soon change with the arrival of the Webb Telescope providing sensitive near-IR spectroscopy covering the rest-frame UV and optical emission of galaxies in the EoR. In anticipation of Webb we combine the large cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Bluetides with photoionisation modelling to predict the nebular emission line properties of galaxies at $z=8\to 13$. We find good agreement with the, albeit limited, existing direct and indirect observational constraints on equivalent widths though poorer agreement with luminosity function constraints.

preprint2020arXiv

Phase separation in the advective Cahn-Hilliard equation

The Cahn--Hilliard equation is a classic model of phase separation in binary mixtures that exhibits spontaneous coarsening of the phases. We study the Cahn--Hilliard equation with an imposed advection term in order to model the stirring and eventual mixing of the phases. The main result is that if the imposed advection is sufficiently mixing then no phase separation occurs, and the solution instead converges exponentially to a homogeneous mixed state. The mixing effectiveness of the imposed drift is quantified in terms of the dissipation time of the associated advection-hyperdiffusion equation, and we produce examples of velocity fields with a small dissipation time. We also study the relationship between this quantity and the dissipation time of the standard advection-diffusion equation.

preprint2020arXiv

Real-Time Spatio-Temporal LiDAR Point Cloud Compression

Compressing massive LiDAR point clouds in real-time is critical to autonomous machines such as drones and self-driving cars. While most of the recent prior work has focused on compressing individual point cloud frames, this paper proposes a novel system that effectively compresses a sequence of point clouds. The idea to exploit both the spatial and temporal redundancies in a sequence of point cloud frames. We first identify a key frame in a point cloud sequence and spatially encode the key frame by iterative plane fitting. We then exploit the fact that consecutive point clouds have large overlaps in the physical space, and thus spatially encoded data can be (re-)used to encode the temporal stream. Temporal encoding by reusing spatial encoding data not only improves the compression rate, but also avoids redundant computations, which significantly improves the compression speed. Experiments show that our compression system achieves 40x to 90x compression rate, significantly higher than the MPEG&#39;s LiDAR point cloud compression standard, while retaining high end-to-end application accuracies. Meanwhile, our compression system has a compression speed that matches the point cloud generation rate by today LiDARs and out-performs existing compression systems, enabling real-time point cloud transmission.

preprint2020arXiv

Singular hyperbolic metrics and negative subharmonic functions

We propose a conjecture that the monodromy group of a singular hyperbolic metric on a non-hyperbolic Riemann surface is {\it Zariski dense} in ${\rm PSL}(2,\,{\Bbb R})$. By using meromorphic differentials and affine connections, we obtain an evidence of the conjecture that the monodromy group of the singular hyperbolic metric can not be contained in four classes of one-dimensional Lie subgroups of ${\rm PSL}(2,\,{\Bbb R})$. Moreover, we confirm the conjecture if the Riemann surface is either one of the once punctured Riemann sphere, the twice punctured Riemann sphere, a once punctured torus and a compact Riemann surface.

preprint2020arXiv

The complete study on polarization of $Υ(nS)$ hadroproduction at QCD next-to-leading order

Applying the nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics factorization formalism to the $Υ(1S,2S,3S)$ hadroproduction, a complete analysis on the polarization parameters $λ_θ$, $λ_{θϕ}$, $λ_ϕ$ for the production are presented at QCD next-to-leading order. With the long-distance matrix elements extracted from experimental data for the production rate and polarization parameter $λ_θ$ of $Υ$ hadroproduction, our results provide a good description for the measured parameters $λ_{θϕ}$ and $λ_ϕ$ in both the helicity and the Collins-Soper frames. In our calculations the frame invariant parameter $\tildeλ$ is consistent in the two frames. Finally, it is pointed out that there are discrepancies for $\tildeλ$ between available experimental data and corresponding theoretical predictions.

preprint2020arXiv

The early growth of supermassive black holes in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with constrained Gaussian realizations

The paper examines the early growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with different BH seeding scenarios. Employing the constrained Gaussian realization, we reconstruct the initial conditions in the large-volume BlueTides simulation and run them to $z=6$ to cross-validate that the method reproduces the first quasars and their environments. Our constrained simulations in a volume of $(15\, h^{-1}{\rm Mpc})^3$ successfully recover the evolution of large-scale structure and the stellar and BH masses in the vicinity of a $\sim10^{12}\, M_{\odot}$ halo which we identified in BlueTides at $z\sim7$ hosting a $\sim10^9\, M_{\odot}$ SMBH. Among our constrained simulations, only the ones with a low-tidal field and high-density peak in the initial conditions induce the fastest BH growth required to explain the $z>6$ quasars. We run two sets of simulations with different BH seed masses of $5\times10^3$, $5\times10^4$, and $5\times10^5\, h^{-1}M_{\odot}$, (a) with the same ratio of halo to BH seed mass and (b) with the same halo threshold mass. At $z=6$, all the SMBHs converge in mass to $\sim10^9\, M_{\odot}$ except for the one with the smallest seed in (b) undergoing critical BH growth and reaching $10^8$ -- $10^9\, M_{\odot}$, albeit with most of the growth in (b) delayed compared to set (a). The finding of eight BH mergers in the small-seed scenario (four with masses $10^4$ -- $10^6\, M_{\odot}$ at $z>12$), six in the intermediate-seed scenario, and zero in the large-seed scenario suggests that the vast BHs in the small-seed scenario merge frequently during the early phases of the growth of SMBHs. The increased BH merger rate for the low-mass BH seed and halo threshold scenario provides an exciting prospect for discriminating BH formation mechanisms with the advent of multi-messenger astrophysics and next-generation gravitational wave facilities.

preprint2019arXiv

High mass and halo resolution from fast low resolution simulations

Generating mocks for future sky surveys requires large volumes and high resolutions, which is computationally expensive even for fast simulations. In this work we try to develop numerical schemes to calibrate various halo and matter statistics in fast low resolution simulations compared to high resolution N-body and hydrodynamic simulations. For the halos, we improve the initial condition accuracy and develop a halo finder &#34;relaxed-FOF&#34;, where we allow different linking length for different halo mass and velocity dispersions. We show that our relaxed-FoF halo finder improves the common statistics, such as halo bias, halo mass function, halo auto power spectrum in real space and in redshift space, cross correlation coefficient with the reference halo catalog, and halo-matter cross power spectrum. We also incorporate the potential gradient descent (PGD) method into fast simulations to improve the matter distribution at nonlinear scale. By building a lightcone output, we show that the PGD method significantly improves the weak lensing convergence tomographic power spectrum. With these improvements FastPM is comparable to the high resolution full N-body simulation of the same mass resolution, with two orders of magnitude fewer time steps. These techniques can be used to improve the halo and matter statistics of FastPM simulations for mock catalogs of future surveys such as DESI and LSST.

preprint2019arXiv

Neutron Spin Resonance in the Heavily Hole-doped KFe$_{2}$As$_{2}$ Superconductor

We report high-resolution neutron scattering measurements of the low energy spin fluctuations of KFe$_{2}$As$_{2}$, the end member of the hole-doped Ba$_{1-x}$K$_x$Fe$_2$As$_2$ family with only hole pockets, above and below its superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ ($\sim$ 3.5 K). Our data reveals clear spin fluctuations at the incommensurate wave vector ($0.5\pmδ$, 0, $L$), ($δ$ = 0.2)(1-Fe unit cell), which exhibit $L$-modulation peaking at $L=0.5$. Upon cooling to the superconducting state, the incommensurate spin fluctuations gradually open a spin-gap and form a sharp spin resonance mode. The incommensurability ($2δ$ = 0.4) of the resonance mode ($\sim1.2$ meV) is considerably larger than the previously reported value ($2δ$ $\approx0.32$) at higher energies ($\ge\sim6$ meV). The determination of the momentum structure of spin fluctuation in the low energy limit allows a direct comparison with the realistic Fermi surface and superconducting gap structure. Our results point to an $s$-wave pairing with a reversed sign between the hole pockets near the zone center in KFe$_{2}$As$_{2}$.

preprint2019arXiv

QSO obscuration at high redshift ($z \gtrsim 7$): Predictions from the BlueTides simulation

High-$z$ AGNs hosted in gas rich galaxies are expected to grow through significantly obscured accretion phases. This may limit or bias their observability. In this work, we use \textsc{BlueTides}, a large volume cosmological simulation of galaxy formation to examine quasar obscuration for the highest-redshift ($z \geq 7$) supermassive black holes residing in the center of galaxies. We find that for the bright quasars, most of the high column density gas ($>90\%$) resides in the innermost regions of the host galaxy, (typically within $< 10$ ckpc), while the gas in the outskirts is a minor contributor to the $N_\mathrm H$. The brightest quasars can have large angular variations in galactic obscuration, over 2 orders of magnitude, where the lines of sight with the lowest obscuration are those formed via strong gas outflows driven by AGN feedback. We find that for the overall AGN population, the mean $N_\mathrm H$ is generally larger for high luminosity and BH mass, while the $N_\mathrm H$ distribution is significantly broadened, developing a low $N_\mathrm H $ wing due to the angular variations driven by the AGN outflows/feedback. The obscured fraction P($N_{\rm H} > 10^{23} {\rm cm}^{-2}$) typically range from 0.6 to 1.0 for increasing $L_{X}$ (with $L_X > 10^{43} \rm{ergs/s}$), with no clear trend of redshift evolution. With respect to the galaxy host property, we find a linear relation between $N_{\rm H}$, $M_*$ and $M_{\rm H_2}$ with $\log N_{\rm H} = (0.24 \pm 0.03) \log M_{*} + (20.7 \pm 0.3)$ and $\log N_{\rm H} = (0.47 \pm 0.03) \log M_{\rm H_2} + (18.4 \pm 0.3)$. The dust optical depth in the UV band $τ_{\mathrm UV}$ has tight positive correlation with $N_{\rm H}$. Our dust extincted UVLF is about 1.5 dex lower than the intrinsic UVLF, implying that more than 99\% of the $z \sim 7$ AGNs are heavily dust extincted and therefore would be missed by the UV band observation.

preprint2019arXiv

SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python

SciPy is an open source scientific computing library for the Python programming language. SciPy 1.0 was released in late 2017, about 16 years after the original version 0.1 release. SciPy has become a de facto standard for leveraging scientific algorithms in the Python programming language, with more than 600 unique code contributors, thousands of dependent packages, over 100,000 dependent repositories, and millions of downloads per year. This includes usage of SciPy in almost half of all machine learning projects on GitHub, and usage by high profile projects including LIGO gravitational wave analysis and creation of the first-ever image of a black hole (M87). The library includes functionality spanning clustering, Fourier transforms, integration, interpolation, file I/O, linear algebra, image processing, orthogonal distance regression, minimization algorithms, signal processing, sparse matrix handling, computational geometry, and statistics. In this work, we provide an overview of the capabilities and development practices of the SciPy library and highlight some recent technical developments.