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Published work

191 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Harmonizing Generative Retrieval and Ranking in Chain-of-Recommendation

Generative recommender systems have recently emerged as a promising paradigm by formulating next-item prediction as an auto-regressive semantic IDs generation, such as OneRec series works. However, with the next-item-agnostic prediction paradigm, its could beam out some next potential items via Semantic IDs but hard to estimate which items are better from them, e.g., select the top-10 from beam-256 items, leading to a gap between generation and ranking performance. To fulfill this gap, we propose RecoChain, a unified generative retrieval and ranking framework that integrates candidate generation and ranking within a single Transformer backbone. Specifically, in inference, the model first generates candidate items via hierarchical semantic ID prediction, then performs the SIM-based ranking process to estimate the click possibility of corresponding item candidate continuously. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively bridges the gap between generative retrieval and ranking, achieving improved Top-K recommendation performance while maintaining strong generative capability.

preprint2025arXiv

FDP: A Frequency-Decomposition Preprocessing Pipeline for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Brain MRI

Due to the diversity of brain anatomy and the scarcity of annotated data, supervised anomaly detection for brain MRI remains challenging, driving the development of unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) approaches. Current UAD methods typically utilize artificially generated noise perturbations on healthy MRIs to train generative models for normal anatomy reconstruction, enabling anomaly detection via residual maps. However, such simulated anomalies lack the biophysical fidelity and morphological complexity characteristic of true clinical lesions. To advance UAD in brain MRI, we conduct the first systematic frequency-domain analysis of pathological signatures, revealing two key properties: (1) anomalies exhibit unique frequency patterns distinguishable from normal anatomy, and (2) low-frequency signals maintain consistent representations across healthy scans. These insights motivate our Frequency-Decomposition Preprocessing (FDP) framework, the first UAD method to leverage frequency-domain reconstruction for simultaneous pathology suppression and anatomical preservation. FDP can integrate seamlessly with existing anomaly simulation techniques, consistently enhancing detection performance across diverse architectures while maintaining diagnostic fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that FDP consistently improves anomaly detection performance when integrated with existing methods. Notably, FDP achieves a 17.63% increase in DICE score with LDM while maintaining robust improvements across multiple baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ls1rius/MRI_FDP.

preprint2025arXiv

Ultrahigh-Energy Gamma-ray Emission Associated with Black Hole-Jet Systems

Black holes (BH), one of the most intriguing objects in the universe, can manifest themselves through electromagnetic radiation initiated by the accretion flow. Some stellar-mass BHs drive relativistic jets when accreting matter from their companion stars, forming microquasars. Non-thermal emission from the radio to tera-electronvolt (TeV) gamma-ray band has been observed from microquasars, indicating the acceleration of relativistic particles. Here we report detection of four microquasars (SS 433, V4641 Sgr, GRS 1915+105, MAXI J1820+070) of spectrum extending to the ultrahigh-energy (UHE; photon energy $E>100$ TeV) band and one microquasar (Cygnus X-1) of spectrum approaching 100 TeV, using the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). Notably, the total emission associated with SS 433 cannot be interpreted with a single leptonic component. In the UHE band, its emission is in spatial coincidence with a giant atomic cloud, which is consistent with a hadronic origin. An elongated source is discovered from V4641 Sgr with the spectrum continuing up to 800 TeV. The detection of UHE gamma rays demonstrates that accreting BHs and their environments can operate as extremely efficient accelerators of particles out of 1 peta-electronvolt (PeV), suggesting microquasars to be important contributors to Galactic cosmic rays especially around the `knee' region.

preprint2024arXiv

Geometric topics related to Besov type spaces on the Grushin setting

The Grushin spaces, as one of the most important models in the Carnot-Carathéodory space, are a class of locally compact and geodesic metric spaces which admit a dilation. Function spaces on Grushin spaces and some related geometric problems are always the research hotspots in this field. Firstly, we investigate two classes of Besov type spaces based on the Grushin semigroup and the fractional Grushin semigroup, respectively, and prove some important properties of these two Besov type spaces. Moreover, we also reveal the relationship between them. Secondly, we establish the isoperimetric inequality for the fractional perimeter, which is defined by the Grushin-Laplace operator on Grushin spaces. Finally, we combine the semigroup theory with a nonlocal calculus for the Grushin-Laplace operator to obtain the Sobolev type inequality. As a corollary, we also obtain the embedding theorem for Besov type spaces.

preprint2024arXiv

Mutual Information as Intrinsic Reward of Reinforcement Learning Agents for On-demand Ride Pooling

The emergence of on-demand ride pooling services allows each vehicle to serve multiple passengers at a time, thus increasing drivers' income and enabling passengers to travel at lower prices than taxi/car on-demand services (only one passenger can be assigned to a car at a time like UberX and Lyft). Although on-demand ride pooling services can bring so many benefits, ride pooling services need a well-defined matching strategy to maximize the benefits for all parties (passengers, drivers, aggregation companies and environment), in which the regional dispatching of vehicles has a significant impact on the matching and revenue. Existing algorithms often only consider revenue maximization, which makes it difficult for requests with unusual distribution to get a ride. How to increase revenue while ensuring a reasonable assignment of requests brings a challenge to ride pooling service companies (aggregation companies). In this paper, we propose a framework for vehicle dispatching for ride pooling tasks, which splits the city into discrete dispatching regions and uses the reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to dispatch vehicles in these regions. We also consider the mutual information (MI) between vehicle and order distribution as the intrinsic reward of the RL algorithm to improve the correlation between their distributions, thus ensuring the possibility of getting a ride for unusually distributed requests. In experimental results on a real-world taxi dataset, we demonstrate that our framework can significantly increase revenue up to an average of 3\% over the existing best on-demand ride pooling method.

preprint2023arXiv

Centralized Cooperative Exploration Policy for Continuous Control Tasks

The deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm works brilliantly on solving various complex control tasks. This phenomenal success can be partly attributed to DRL encouraging intelligent agents to sufficiently explore the environment and collect diverse experiences during the agent training process. Therefore, exploration plays a significant role in accessing an optimal policy for DRL. Despite recent works making great progress in continuous control tasks, exploration in these tasks has remained insufficiently investigated. To explicitly encourage exploration in continuous control tasks, we propose CCEP (Centralized Cooperative Exploration Policy), which utilizes underestimation and overestimation of value functions to maintain the capacity of exploration. CCEP first keeps two value functions initialized with different parameters, and generates diverse policies with multiple exploration styles from a pair of value functions. In addition, a centralized policy framework ensures that CCEP achieves message delivery between multiple policies, furthermore contributing to exploring the environment cooperatively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CCEP achieves higher exploration capacity. Empirical analysis shows diverse exploration styles in the learned policies by CCEP, reaping benefits in more exploration regions. And this exploration capacity of CCEP ensures it outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods across multiple continuous control tasks shown in experiments.

preprint2023arXiv

Epitaxially Driven Phase Selectivity of Sn in Hybrid Quantum Nanowires

Hybrid semiconductor/superconductor nanowires constitute a pervasive platform for studying gate-tunable superconductivity and the emergence of topological behavior. Their low-dimensionality and crystal structure flexibility facilitate novel heterostructure growth and efficient material optimization; crucial prerequisites for accurately constructing complex multi-component quantum materials. Here, we present an extensive optimization of Sn growth on InSb, InAsSb and InAs nanowires. We demonstrate how the growth conditions and the crystal structure/symmetry of the semiconductor drive the formation of either semi-metallic $\mathrm{α-Sn}$ or superconducting $\mathrm{β-Sn}$. For InAs nanowires, we obtain phase-pure, superconducting $\mathrm{β-Sn}$ shells. However, for InSb and InAsSb nanowires, an initial epitaxial $\mathrm{α-Sn}$ phase evolves into a polycrystalline shell of coexisting $\mathrmα$ and $\mathrmβ$ phases, where the $β/α$ volume ratio increases with Sn shell thickness. Whether these nanowires exhibit superconductivity or not critically relies on the $\mathrm{β-Sn}$ content. Therefore, this work provides key insights into Sn phase control on a variety of semiconductors, with consequences for the yield of superconducting hybrids suitable for generating topological systems.

preprint2023arXiv

Real-World Image Super Resolution via Unsupervised Bi-directional Cycle Domain Transfer Learning based Generative Adversarial Network

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have exhibited impressive performance on image super-resolution tasks. However, these deep learning-based super-resolution methods perform poorly in real-world super-resolution tasks, where the paired high-resolution and low-resolution images are unavailable and the low-resolution images are degraded by complicated and unknown kernels. To break these limitations, we propose the Unsupervised Bi-directional Cycle Domain Transfer Learning-based Generative Adversarial Network (UBCDTL-GAN), which consists of an Unsupervised Bi-directional Cycle Domain Transfer Network (UBCDTN) and the Semantic Encoder guided Super Resolution Network (SESRN). First, the UBCDTN is able to produce an approximated real-like LR image through transferring the LR image from an artificially degraded domain to the real-world LR image domain. Second, the SESRN has the ability to super-resolve the approximated real-like LR image to a photo-realistic HR image. Extensive experiments on unpaired real-world image benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2023arXiv

Semantic Encoder Guided Generative Adversarial Face Ultra-Resolution Network

Face super-resolution is a domain-specific image super-resolution, which aims to generate High-Resolution (HR) face images from their Low-Resolution (LR) counterparts. In this paper, we propose a novel face super-resolution method, namely Semantic Encoder guided Generative Adversarial Face Ultra-Resolution Network (SEGA-FURN) to ultra-resolve an unaligned tiny LR face image to its HR counterpart with multiple ultra-upscaling factors (e.g., 4x and 8x). The proposed network is composed of a novel semantic encoder that has the ability to capture the embedded semantics to guide adversarial learning and a novel generator that uses a hierarchical architecture named Residual in Internal Dense Block (RIDB). Moreover, we propose a joint discriminator which discriminates both image data and embedded semantics. The joint discriminator learns the joint probability distribution of the image space and latent space. We also use a Relativistic average Least Squares loss (RaLS) as the adversarial loss to alleviate the gradient vanishing problem and enhance the stability of the training procedure. Extensive experiments on large face datasets have proved that the proposed method can achieve superior super-resolution results and significantly outperform other state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

preprint2022arXiv

A deep domain decomposition method based on Fourier features

In this paper we present a Fourier feature based deep domain decomposition method (F-D3M) for partial differential equations (PDEs). Currently, deep neural network based methods are actively developed for solving PDEs, but their efficiency can degenerate for problems with high frequency modes. In this new F-D3M strategy, overlapping domain decomposition is conducted for the spatial domain, such that high frequency modes can be reduced to relatively low frequency ones. In each local subdomain, multi Fourier feature networks (MFFNets) are constructed, where efficient boundary and interface treatments are applied for the corresponding loss functions. We present a general mathematical framework of F-D3M, validate its accuracy and demonstrate its efficiency with numerical experiments.

preprint2022arXiv

A Novel Generative Convolutional Neural Network for Robot Grasp Detection on Gaussian Guidance

The vision-based grasp detection method is an important research direction in the field of robotics. However, due to the rectangle metric of the grasp detection rectangle's limitation, a false-positive grasp occurs, resulting in the failure of the real-world robot grasp task. In this paper, we propose a novel generative convolutional neural network model to improve the accuracy and robustness of robot grasp detection in real-world scenes. First, a Gaussian-based guided training method is used to encode the quality of the grasp point and grasp angle in the grasp pose, highlighting the highest-quality grasp point position and grasp angle and reducing the generation of false-positive grasps. Simultaneously, deformable convolution is used to obtain the shape features of the object in order to guide the subsequent network to the position. Furthermore, a global-local feature fusion method is introduced in order to efficiently obtain finer features during the feature reconstruction stage, allowing the network to focus on the features of the grasped objects. On the Cornell Grasping Datasets and Jacquard Datasets, our method achieves excellent performance of 99.0$\%$ and 95.9$\%$, respectively. Finally, the proposed method is put to the test in a real-world robot grasping scenario.

preprint2022arXiv

Ancient and recent collisions revealed by phosphate minerals in the Chelyabinsk meteorite

The collision history of asteroids is an important archive of inner Solar System evolution. Evidence for these collisions is brought to Earth by meteorites, which can preserve impact-reset radioisotope mineral ages. However, as meteorites often preserve numerous mineral ages, their interpretation is controversial. Here, we combine analysis of phosphate U-Pb ages and mineral microtextures to construct a collision history for the highly shocked Chelyabinsk meteorite. We show that phosphate U-Pb ages in the meteorite are independent of thermal history at macro-to-microscales, correlating instead with phosphate microtexture. Isotopic data from pristine phosphate domains is largely concordant, whereas fracture-damaged domains universally display discordance. Combining both populations best constrains upper (4,473 +/- 11 Ma) and lower intercept (-9 +/- 55 Ma, i.e., within error of the present day) U-Pb ages for Chelyabinsk phosphates. We conclude that all phosphate U-Pb ages were completely reset during an ancient high energy collision. Fracture-damaged phosphate domains experienced further Pb-loss during mild collisional heating in the geologically recent past, and must be targeted to properly constrain a lower intercept age. Targeting textural sub-populations of phosphate grains can significantly improve the calculation and interpretation of U-Pb ages, permitting more robust reconstruction of both ancient and recent asteroidal collision histories.

preprint2022arXiv

Better automation of beamline control at HEPS

At the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) where up to 90 beamlines can be provided in the future, minimisation of workload for individual beamlines and maximisation of knowledge about one beamline that can be applied to other beamlines is essential to minimise the total complexity in beamline control. Presented in this paper are our efforts to achieve these goals by composing relatively simple utilities and mechanisms to automate tasks, and always remembering to keep our automation solutions simple and clear. After an introduction to our choice of basic software in EPICS-based beamline control, the issues encountered in introducing package management to EPICS modules, as well as our solutions to them, are presented; then the design and implementation of our packaging system is concisely discussed. After a presentation of our efforts to reduce the need for self-built multi-device EPICS IOC applications by providing reusable modular IOC executables, our implementation of easily maintainable multi-IOC setups through the separation and minimisation of each user's IOC configurations is given. Finally, the ongoing project of comprehensive beamline services at HEPS to further simplify configuration management on multiple scales, ranging from individual beamline devices to all beamlines at HEPS, is introduced.

preprint2022arXiv

BV spaces and the perimeters related to Schrodinger operators with inverse-square potentials and applications to the rank-one theorem

For $a \ge - {( \frac{d}{2}- 1)^2} $ and $2σ= {d - 2}-( {{{(d - 2)}^2} + 4a})^{1/2}$, let $$\begin{cases}\mathcal{H}_{a}= - Δ+ \frac{a} {{{{ | x |}^2}}},\\ \mathcal{\widetilde{H}}_σ= 2\big( { - Δ+ \frac{σ^2} {{{{ | x |}^2}}}}\big)\end{cases}$$ be two Schrödinger operators with inverse-square potentials. In this paper, on the domain $Ω\subset {\mathbb {R}^d}\backslash \{ 0\}, d\geq 2,$ %apart from the origin, the ${\mathcal{H} _a}$-BV space $\mathcal{B} {\mathcal{V} _{{\mathcal{H} _a}}}(Ω)$ and the ${\mathcal{\widetilde{H}}_σ}$-BV space $\mathcal{B} {\mathcal{V} _{{\mathcal{\widetilde H} _σ}}}(Ω)$ related to $\mathcal{H}_{a}$ and $\mathcal{\widetilde{H}}_σ$ are introduced, respectively. We investigate a series of basic properties of $\mathcal{B} {\mathcal{V} _{{\mathcal{H} _a}}}(Ω)$ and $\mathcal{B} {\mathcal{V} _{{\mathcal{\widetilde H} _σ}}}(Ω)$. Furthermore, we prove that ${\mathcal{\widetilde{H}}_σ}$-restricted BV functions can be characterized equivalently via their subgraphs. As applications, we derive the rank-one theorem for ${\mathcal{\widetilde{H}}_σ}$-restricted BV functions.

preprint2022arXiv

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Hypergraph Convolution

Recent years have witnessed the great success of multi-agent systems (MAS). Value decomposition, which decomposes joint action values into individual action values, has been an important work in MAS. However, many value decomposition methods ignore the coordination among different agents, leading to the notorious "lazy agents" problem. To enhance the coordination in MAS, this paper proposes HyperGraph CoNvolution MIX (HGCN-MIX), a method that incorporates hypergraph convolution with value decomposition. HGCN-MIX models agents as well as their relationships as a hypergraph, where agents are nodes and hyperedges among nodes indicate that the corresponding agents can coordinate to achieve larger rewards. Then, it trains a hypergraph that can capture the collaborative relationships among agents. Leveraging the learned hypergraph to consider how other agents' observations and actions affect their decisions, the agents in a MAS can better coordinate. We evaluate HGCN-MIX in the StarCraft II multi-agent challenge benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that HGCN-MIX can train joint policies that outperform or achieve a similar level of performance as the current state-of-the-art techniques. We also observe that HGCN-MIX has an even more significant improvement of performance in the scenarios with a large amount of agents. Besides, we conduct additional analysis to emphasize that when the hypergraph learns more relationships, HGCN-MIX can train stronger joint policies.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep Learning-based Inertial Odometry for Pedestrian Tracking using Attention Mechanism and Res2Net Module

Pedestrian dead reckoning is a challenging task due to the low-cost inertial sensor error accumulation. Recent research has shown that deep learning methods can achieve impressive performance in handling this issue. In this letter, we propose inertial odometry using a deep learning-based velocity estimation method. The deep neural network based on Res2Net modules and two convolutional block attention modules is leveraged to restore the potential connection between the horizontal velocity vector and raw inertial data from a smartphone. Our network is trained using only fifty percent of the public inertial odometry dataset (RoNIN) data. Then, it is validated on the RoNIN testing dataset and another public inertial odometry dataset (OXIOD). Compared with the traditional step-length and heading system-based algorithm, our approach decreases the absolute translation error (ATE) by 76%-86%. In addition, compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning method (RoNIN), our method improves its ATE by 6%-31.4%.

preprint2022arXiv

DeStripe: A Self2Self Spatio-Spectral Graph Neural Network with Unfolded Hessian for Stripe Artifact Removal in Light-sheet Microscopy

Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) is a cutting-edge volumetric imaging technique that allows for three-dimensional imaging of mesoscopic samples with decoupled illumination and detection paths. Although the selective excitation scheme of such a microscope provides intrinsic optical sectioning that minimizes out-of-focus fluorescence background and sample photodamage, it is prone to light absorption and scattering effects, which results in uneven illumination and striping artifacts in the images adversely. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose a blind stripe artifact removal algorithm in LSFM, called DeStripe, which combines a self-supervised spatio-spectral graph neural network with unfolded Hessian prior. Specifically, inspired by the desirable properties of Fourier transform in condensing striping information into isolated values in the frequency domain, DeStripe firstly localizes the potentially corrupted Fourier coefficients by exploiting the structural difference between unidirectional stripe artifacts and more isotropic foreground images. Affected Fourier coefficients can then be fed into a graph neural network for recovery, with a Hessian regularization unrolled to further ensure structures in the standard image space are well preserved. Since in realistic, stripe-free LSFM barely exists with a standard image acquisition protocol, DeStripe is equipped with a Self2Self denoising loss term, enabling artifact elimination without access to stripe-free ground truth images. Competitive experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of DeStripe in recovering corrupted biomarkers in LSFM with both synthetic and real stripe artifacts.

preprint2022arXiv

Direct manipulation of a superconducting spin qubit strongly coupled to a transmon qubit

Spin qubits in semiconductors are currently one of the most promising architectures for quantum computing. However, they face challenges in realizing multi-qubit interactions over extended distances. Superconducting spin qubits provide a promising alternative by encoding a qubit in the spin degree of freedom of an Andreev level. Such an Andreev spin qubit could leverage the advantages of circuit quantum electrodynamic, enabled by an intrinsic spin-supercurrent coupling. The first realization of an Andreev spin qubit encoded the qubit in the excited states of a semiconducting weak-link, leading to frequent decay out of the computational subspace. Additionally, rapid qubit manipulation was hindered by the need for indirect Raman transitions. Here, we exploit a different qubit subspace, using the spin-split doublet ground state of an electrostatically-defined quantum dot Josephson junction with large charging energy. Additionally, we use a magnetic field to enable direct spin manipulation over a frequency range of 10 GHz. Using an all-electric microwave drive we achieve Rabi frequencies exceeding 200 MHz. We furthermore embed the Andreev spin qubit in a superconducting transmon qubit, demonstrating strong coherent qubit-qubit coupling. These results are a crucial step towards a hybrid architecture that combines the beneficial aspects of both superconducting and semiconductor qubits.

preprint2022arXiv

Disordered Hyperuniform Quasi-1D Materials

Carbon nanotubes are quasi-one-dimensional systems that possess superior transport, mechanical, optical, and chemical properties. In this work, we generalize the notion of disorder hyperuniformity, a recently discovered exotic state of matter with hidden long-range order, to quasi-one-dimensional materials. As a proof of concept, we then apply the generalized framework to quantify the density fluctuations in amorphous carbon nanotubes containing randomly distributed Stone-Wales defects. We demonstrate that all of these amorphous nanotubes are hyperuniform, i.e., the infinite-wavelength density fluctuations of these systems are completely suppressed, regardless of the diameter, rolling axis, number of rolling sheets, and defect fraction of the nanotubes. We find that these amorphous nanotubes are energetically more stable than nanotubes with periodically distributed Stone-Wales defects. Moreover, certain semiconducting defect-free carbon nanotubes become metallic as sufficiently large amounts of defects are randomly introduced. This structural study of amorphous nanotubes strengthens our fundamental understanding of these systems, and suggests possible exotic physical properties, as endowed by their disordered hyperuniformity. Our findings also shed light on the effect of dimensionality reduction on the hyperuniformity property of materials.

preprint2022arXiv

Dual-Domain Reconstruction Networks with V-Net and K-Net for fast MRI

Purpose: To introduce a dual-domain reconstruction network with V-Net and K-Net for accurate MR image reconstruction from undersampled k-space data. Methods: Most state-of-the-art reconstruction methods apply U-Net or cascaded U-Nets in image domain and/or k-space domain. Nevertheless, these methods have following problems: (1) Directly applying U-Net in k-space domain is not optimal for extracting features in k-space domain; (2) Classical image-domain oriented U-Net is heavy-weight and hence is inefficient to be cascaded many times for yielding good reconstruction accuracy; (3) Classical image-domain oriented U-Net does not fully make use information of encoder network for extracting features in decoder network; and (4) Existing methods are ineffective in simultaneously extracting and fusing features in image domain and its dual k-space domain. To tackle these problems, we propose in this paper (1) an image-domain encoder-decoder sub-network called V-Net which is more light-weight for cascading and effective in fully utilizing features in the encoder for decoding, (2) a k-space domain sub-network called K-Net which is more suitable for extracting hierarchical features in k-space domain, and (3) a dual-domain reconstruction network where V-Nets and K-Nets are parallelly and effectively combined and cascaded. Results: Extensive experimental results on the challenging fastMRI dataset demonstrate that the proposed KV-Net can reconstruct high-quality images and outperform current state-of-the-art approaches with fewer parameters. Conclusions: To reconstruct images effectively and efficiently from incomplete k-space data, we have presented a parallel dual-domain KV-Net to combine K-Nets and V-Nets. The KV-Net is more lightweight than state-of-the-art methods but achieves better reconstruction performance.

preprint2022arXiv

Electrical and thermal transport in van der Waals magnets 2H-M$_x$TaS$_2$ (M = Mn, Co)

We report a detailed study of electrical and thermal transport properties in 2H-M$_x$TaS$_2$ (M = Mn, Co) magnets where M atoms are intercalated in the van der Waals gap. The intercalation induces ferromagentism with an easy-plane anisotropy in 2H-Mn$_x$TaS$_2$, but ferromagnetism with a strong uniaxial anisotropy in 2H-Co$_{0.22}$TaS$_2$, which finally evolves into a three-dimensional antiferromagnetism in 2H-Co$_{0.34}$TaS$_2$. Temperature-dependent electrical resistivity shows metallic behavior for all samples. Thermopower is negative in the whole temperature range for 2H-Co$_x$TaS$_2$, whereas the sign changes from negative to positive with increasing Mn for 2H-Mn$_x$TaS$_2$. The diffusive thermoelectric response dominates in both high- and low-temperature ranges for all samples. A clear kink in electrical resistivity, a weak anomaly in thermal conductivity, as well as a slope change in thermopower were observed at the magnetic transitions for 2H-Mn$_{0.28}$TaS$_2$ ($T_\textrm{c}$ $\approx$ 82 K) and 2H-Co$_{0.34}$TaS$_2$ ($T_\textrm{N}$ $\approx$ 36 K), respectively, albeit weaker for lower $x$ crystals. Co-intercalation promoted ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic transition is further confirmed by the Hall resistivity; the sign change of the ordinary Hall coefficient indicates a multi-band behavior in 2H-Co$_x$TaS$_2$.

preprint2022arXiv

Ferroelectric superdomain controlled graphene plasmon for tunable mid-infrared photodetector with dual-band spectral selectivity

Dual-band infrared photodetectors (DBIPs) can discriminate desired signals from complex scenes and thus are highly expected for threat-warning, remote sensing, and astronomy applications. Conventional DBIPs with high-performances are, however, typically based on semiconductor thin films, but remain the challenges of complex spatial align, expensive growth and cooling requirement. Here, we report a tunable graphene plasmonic photodetector with dual-band infrared spectral selectivity driven by ferroelectric superdomain. The periodic ferroelectric polarization array with nanoscale ring shapes provides ultrahigh electrostatic field for spatially doping of monolayer graphene to desired patterns, and is further used to excite and confine intrinsic graphene plasmons. Our devices exhibit tunable resonance photoresponse in both two bands of 3.7-16.3 um and 15.1-52.1 um. The numerical calculations show that our devices own ultrahigh responsivities of 667-1080 A W-1 at room temperature in range of 5-50 um. Our devices make possible the applications of infrared imaging system and both stationary and motion state of objects detection. These investigations provide a novel approach for advanced infrared system construction by employing simple, low-cost, uncooling multispectral detectors array.

preprint2022arXiv

Giant thermoelectric power factor anisotropy in PtSb$_{1.4}$Sn$_{0.6}$

We report giant anisotropy in thermoelectric power factor ($S^2σ$) of marcasite structure-type PtSb$_{1.4}$Sn$_{0.6}$. PtSb$_{1.4}$Sn$_{0.6}$, synthesized using ambient pressure flux growth method upon mixing Sb and Sn on the same atomic site, is a new phase different from both PtSb$_2$ and PtSn$_2$ that crystallize in the cubic $Pa\bar{3}$ pyrite and $Fm\bar{3}m$ fluorite unit cell symmetry, respectively. Giant difference in $S^2σ$ for heat flow applied along different principal directions of the orthorhombic unit cell mostly stems from anisotropic Seebeck coefficients.

preprint2022arXiv

HoVer-Trans: Anatomy-aware HoVer-Transformer for ROI-free Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Ultrasound Images

Ultrasonography is an important routine examination for breast cancer diagnosis, due to its non-invasive, radiation-free and low-cost properties. However, the diagnostic accuracy of breast cancer is still limited due to its inherent limitations. It would be a tremendous success if we can precisely diagnose breast cancer by breast ultrasound images (BUS). Many learning-based computer-aided diagnostic methods have been proposed to achieve breast cancer diagnosis/lesion classification. However, most of them require a pre-define ROI and then classify the lesion inside the ROI. Conventional classification backbones, such as VGG16 and ResNet50, can achieve promising classification results with no ROI requirement. But these models lack interpretability, thus restricting their use in clinical practice. In this study, we propose a novel ROI-free model for breast cancer diagnosis in ultrasound images with interpretable feature representations. We leverage the anatomical prior knowledge that malignant and benign tumors have different spatial relationships between different tissue layers, and propose a HoVer-Transformer to formulate this prior knowledge. The proposed HoVer-Trans block extracts the inter- and intra-layer spatial information horizontally and vertically. We conduct and release an open dataset GDPH&SYSUCC for breast cancer diagnosis in BUS. The proposed model is evaluated in three datasets by comparing with four CNN-based models and two vision transformer models via five-fold cross validation. It achieves state-of-the-art classification performance with the best model interpretability. In the meanwhile, our proposed model outperforms two senior sonographers on the breast cancer diagnosis when only one BUS image is given.

preprint2022arXiv

Inline Tests

Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate inline tests through several language features and a common testing scenario in which inline tests could be beneficial. For example, inline tests can allow a developer to test a regular expression in place. We also define language-agnostic requirements for inline testing frameworks. Lastly, we implement I-Test, the first inline testing framework. I-Test works for Python and Java, and it satisfies most of the requirements. We evaluate I-Test on open-source projects by using it to test 144 statements in 31 Python programs and 37 Java programs. We also perform a user study. All nine user study participants say that inline tests are easy to write and that inline testing is beneficial. The cost of running inline tests is negligible, at 0.007x--0.014x, and our inline tests helped find two faults that have been fixed by the developers.

preprint2022arXiv

INTERN: A New Learning Paradigm Towards General Vision

Enormous waves of technological innovations over the past several years, marked by the advances in AI technologies, are profoundly reshaping the industry and the society. However, down the road, a key challenge awaits us, that is, our capability of meeting rapidly-growing scenario-specific demands is severely limited by the cost of acquiring a commensurate amount of training data. This difficult situation is in essence due to limitations of the mainstream learning paradigm: we need to train a new model for each new scenario, based on a large quantity of well-annotated data and commonly from scratch. In tackling this fundamental problem, we move beyond and develop a new learning paradigm named INTERN. By learning with supervisory signals from multiple sources in multiple stages, the model being trained will develop strong generalizability. We evaluate our model on 26 well-known datasets that cover four categories of tasks in computer vision. In most cases, our models, adapted with only 10% of the training data in the target domain, outperform the counterparts trained with the full set of data, often by a significant margin. This is an important step towards a promising prospect where such a model with general vision capability can dramatically reduce our reliance on data, thus expediting the adoption of AI technologies. Furthermore, revolving around our new paradigm, we also introduce a new data system, a new architecture, and a new benchmark, which, together, form a general vision ecosystem to support its future development in an open and inclusive manner. See project website at https://opengvlab.shlab.org.cn .

preprint2022arXiv

Iterative Self-consistent Parallel Magnetic Resonance Imaging Reconstruction based on Nonlocal Low-Rank Regularization

Iterative self-consistent parallel imaging reconstruction (SPIRiT) is an effective self-calibrated reconstruction model for parallel magnetic resonance imaging (PMRI). The joint L1 norm of wavelet coefficients and joint total variation (TV) regularization terms are incorporated into the SPIRiT model to improve the reconstruction performance. The simultaneous two-directional low-rankness (STDLR) in k-space data is incorporated into SPIRiT to realize improved reconstruction. Recent methods have exploited the nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) of images by imposing nonlocal low-rankness of similar patches to achieve a superior performance. To fully utilize both the NSS in Magnetic resonance (MR) images and calibration consistency in the k-space domain, we propose a nonlocal low-rank (NLR)-SPIRiT model by incorporating NLR regularization into the SPIRiT model. We apply the weighted nuclear norm (WNN) as a surrogate of the rank and employ the Nash equilibrium (NE) formulation and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to efficiently solve the NLR-SPIRiT model. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of NLR-SPIRiT over the state-of-the-art methods via three objective metrics and visual comparison.

preprint2022arXiv

LDC-VAE: A Latent Distribution Consistency Approach to Variational AutoEncoders

Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as an important aspect of generative models, have received a lot of research interests and reached many successful applications. However, it is always a challenge to achieve the consistency between the learned latent distribution and the prior latent distribution when optimizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), and finally leads to an unsatisfactory performance in data generation. In this paper, we propose a latent distribution consistency approach to avoid such substantial inconsistency between the posterior and prior latent distributions in ELBO optimizing. We name our method as latent distribution consistency VAE (LDC-VAE). We achieve this purpose by assuming the real posterior distribution in latent space as a Gibbs form, and approximating it by using our encoder. However, there is no analytical solution for such Gibbs posterior in approximation, and traditional approximation ways are time consuming, such as using the iterative sampling-based MCMC. To address this problem, we use the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to approximate the Gibbs posterior. Meanwhile, we use the SVGD to train a sampler net which can obtain efficient samples from the Gibbs posterior. Comparative studies on the popular image generation datasets show that our method has achieved comparable or even better performance than several powerful improvements of VAEs.

preprint2022arXiv

Mamba: a systematic software solution for beamline experiments at HEPS

To cater for the diverse experiment requirements at the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) with often limited human resources, Bluesky is chosen as the basis for our software framework, Mamba. In our attempt to address Bluesky's lack of integrated GUIs, command injection with feedback is chosen as the main way for the GUIs to cooperate with the CLI; a RPC service is provided, which also covers functionalities unsuitable for command injection, as well as pushing of status updates. In order to fully support high-frequency applications like fly scans, Bluesky's support for asynchronous control is being improved; to support high-throughput experiments, Mamba Data Worker (MDW) is being developed to cover the complexity in asynchronous online data processing for these experiments. To systematically simplify the specification of metadata, scan parameters and data-processing graphs for each type of experiments, an experiment parameter generator (EPG) will be developed; experiment-specific modules to automate preparation steps will also be made. The integration of off-the-shelf code in Mamba for domain-specific needs is under investigation, and Mamba GUI Studio (MGS) is being developed to simplify the implementation and integration of GUIs.

preprint2022arXiv

Mapping evolving population geography in China

China's demographic changes have important global economic and geopolitical implications. Yet, our understanding of such transitions at the micro-spatial scale remains limited due to spatial inconsistency of the census data caused by administrative boundary adjustments. To fill this gap, we manually collected and built a population census panel from 2010 to 2020 at both the county and prefectural-city levels. We show that the massive internal migration drives China's increasing population concentration and regional disparity, resulting in severe population aging in shrinking cities and increasing gender imbalance in growing cities.

preprint2022arXiv

Meta Knowledge Distillation

Recent studies pointed out that knowledge distillation (KD) suffers from two degradation problems, the teacher-student gap and the incompatibility with strong data augmentations, making it not applicable to training state-of-the-art models, which are trained with advanced augmentations. However, we observe that a key factor, i.e., the temperatures in the softmax functions for generating probabilities of both the teacher and student models, was mostly overlooked in previous methods. With properly tuned temperatures, such degradation problems of KD can be much mitigated. However, instead of relying on a naive grid search, which shows poor transferability, we propose Meta Knowledge Distillation (MKD) to meta-learn the distillation with learnable meta temperature parameters. The meta parameters are adaptively adjusted during training according to the gradients of the learning objective. We validate that MKD is robust to different dataset scales, different teacher/student architectures, and different types of data augmentation. With MKD, we achieve the best performance with popular ViT architectures among compared methods that use only ImageNet-1K as training data, ranging from tiny to large models. With ViT-L, we achieve 86.5% with 600 epochs of training, 0.6% better than MAE that trains for 1,650 epochs.

preprint2022arXiv

MetroGAN: Simulating Urban Morphology with Generative Adversarial Network

Simulating urban morphology with location attributes is a challenging task in urban science. Recent studies have shown that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have the potential to shed light on this task. However, existing GAN-based models are limited by the sparsity of urban data and instability in model training, hampering their applications. Here, we propose a GAN framework with geographical knowledge, namely Metropolitan GAN (MetroGAN), for urban morphology simulation. We incorporate a progressive growing structure to learn hierarchical features and design a geographical loss to impose the constraints of water areas. Besides, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework for the complex structure of urban systems. Results show that MetroGAN outperforms the state-of-the-art urban simulation methods by over 20% in all metrics. Inspiringly, using physical geography features singly, MetroGAN can still generate shapes of the cities. These results demonstrate that MetroGAN solves the instability problem of previous urban simulation GANs and is generalizable to deal with various urban attributes.

preprint2022arXiv

Nebula Graph: An open source distributed graph database

This paper introduces the recent work of Nebula Graph, an open-source, distributed, scalable, and native graph database. We present a system design trade-off and a comprehensive overview of Nebula Graph internals, including graph data models, partitioning strategies, secondary indexes, optimizer rules, storage-side transactions, graph query languages, observability, graph processing frameworks, and visualization tool-kits. In addition, three sets of large-scale graph b

preprint2022arXiv

Optimal quantum optical control of spin in diamond

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center spin represents an appealing candidate for quantum information processing. Besides the widely used microwave control, its coherent manipulation may also be achieved using laser as mediated by the excited energy levels. Nevertheless, the multiple levels of the excited state of NV center spin make the coherent transition process become complex and may affect the fidelity of coherent manipulation. Here, we adopt the strategy of optimal quantum control to accelerate coherent state transfer in the ground state manifold of NV center spin using laser. The results demonstrate improved performance in both the speed and the fidelity of coherent state transfer which will be useful for optical control of NV center spin in diamond.

preprint2022arXiv

Pedestrian Dead Reckoning System using Quasi-static Magnetic Field Detection

Kalman filter-based Inertial Navigation System (INS) is a reliable and efficient method to estimate the position of a pedestrian indoors. Classical INS-based methodology which is called IEZ (INS-EKF-ZUPT) makes use of an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), a Zero velocity UPdaTing (ZUPT) to calculate the position and attitude of a person. However, heading error which is a key factor of the whole Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) system is unobservable for IEZ-based PDR system. To minimize the error, Electronic Com-pass (EC) algorithm becomes a valid method. But magnetic disturbance may have a big negative effect on it. In this paper, the Quasi-static Magnetic field Detection (QMD) method is proposed to detect the pure magnetic field and then selects EC algorithm or Heuristic heading Drift Reduction algorithm (HDR) according to the detection result, which implements the complementation of the two methods. Meanwhile, the QMD, EC, and HDR algorithms are integrated into the IEZ framework to form a new PDR solution which is named Advanced IEZ (AIEZ).

preprint2022arXiv

Polaronic Conductivity in Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$ Single Crystals

Intrinsic, two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnetic semiconductors are an important class of materials for spin-charge conversion applications. Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$ retains long-range magnetic order in bilayer at cryogenic temperatures and shows complex magnetic interactions with considerable magnetic anisotropy. Here, we performed a series of structural, magnetic, X-ray scattering, electronic, thermal transport and first-principles calculation studies which reveal that localized electronic charge carriers in Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$ are dressed by surrounding lattice and are involved in polaronic transport via hopping that is sensitive on details of magnetocrystalline anisotropy. This opens possibility for manipulation of charge transport in Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$ - based devices by electron-phonon- and spin-orbit coupling-based tailoring of polaron properties.

preprint2022arXiv

Privacy-Preserving Personalized Fitness Recommender System (P3FitRec): A Multi-level Deep Learning Approach

Recommender systems have been successfully used in many domains with the help of machine learning algorithms. However, such applications tend to use multi-dimensional user data, which has raised widespread concerns about the breach of users privacy. Meanwhile, wearable technologies have enabled users to collect fitness-related data through embedded sensors to monitor their conditions or achieve personalized fitness goals. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-aware personalized fitness recommender system. We introduce a multi-level deep learning framework that learns important features from a large-scale real fitness dataset that is collected from wearable IoT devices to derive intelligent fitness recommendations. Unlike most existing approaches, our approach achieves personalization by inferring the fitness characteristics of users from sensory data and thus minimizing the need for explicitly collecting user identity or biometric information, such as name, age, height, weight. In particular, our proposed models and algorithms predict (a) personalized exercise distance recommendations to help users to achieve target calories, (b) personalized speed sequence recommendations to adjust exercise speed given the nature of the exercise and the chosen route, and (c) personalized heart rate sequence to guide the user of the potential health status for future exercises. Our experimental evaluation on a real-world Fitbit dataset demonstrated high accuracy in predicting exercise distance, speed sequence, and heart rate sequence compared to similar studies. Furthermore, our approach is novel compared to existing studies as it does not require collecting and using users sensitive information, and thus it preserves the users privacy.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantifying navigation complexity in transportation networks

The complexity of navigation in cities has increased with the expansion of urban areas, creating challenging transportation problems that drive many studies on the navigability of networks. However, due to the lack of individual mobility data, large-scale empirical analysis of the wayfinder's real-world navigation is rare. Here, using 225 million subway trips from three major cities in China, we quantify navigation difficulty from an information perspective. Our results reveal that 1) people conserve a small number of repeatedly used routes, and 2) the navigation information in the subnetworks formed by those routes is much smaller than the theoretical value in the global network, suggesting that the decision cost for actual trips is significantly smaller than the theoretical upper limit found in previous studies. By modeling routing behaviors in growing networks, we show that while the global network becomes difficult to navigate, navigability can be improved in subnetworks. We further present a universal linear relationship between the empirical and theoretical search information, which allows the two metrics to predict each other. Our findings demonstrate how large-scale observations can quantify real-world navigation behaviors and aid in evaluating transportation planning.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantum Fisher information measurement and verification of the quantum Cramér-Rao bound in a solid-state qubit

The quantum Cramér-Rao bound sets a fundamental limit on the accuracy of unbiased parameter estimation in quantum systems, relating the uncertainty in determining a parameter to the inverse of the quantum Fisher information. We experimentally demonstrate near saturation of the quantum Cramér-Rao bound in the phase estimation of a solid-state spin system, provided by a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. This is achieved by comparing the experimental uncertainty in phase estimation with an independent measurement of the related quantum Fisher information. The latter is independently extracted from coherent dynamical responses of the system under weak parametric modulations, without performing any quantum-state tomography. While optimal parameter estimation has already been observed for quantum devices involving a limited number of degrees of freedom, our method offers a versatile and powerful experimental tool to explore the Cramér-Rao bound and the quantum Fisher information in systems of higher complexity, as relevant for quantum technologies.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantum phase transition in magnetic nanographenes on a lead superconductor

Quantum spins, referred to the spin operator preserved by full SU(2) symmetry in the absence of the magnetic anistropy, have been proposed to host exotic interactions with superconductivity4. However, spin orbit coupling and crystal field splitting normally cause a significant magnetic anisotropy for d/f-shell spins on surfaces6,9, breaking SU(2) symmetry and fabricating the spins with Ising properties10. Recently, magnetic nanographenes have been proven to host intrinsic quantum magnetism due to their negligible spin orbital coupling and crystal field splitting. Here, we fabricate three atomically precise nanographenes with the same magnetic ground state of spin S=1/2 on Pb(111) through engineering sublattice imbalance in graphene honeycomb lattice. Scanning tunneling spectroscopy reveals the coexistence of magnetic bound states and Kondo screening in such hybridized system. Through engineering the magnetic exchange strength between the unpaired spin in nanographenes and cooper pairs, quantum phase transition from the singlet to the doublet state has been observed, in consistent with quantum models of spins on superconductors. Our work demonstrates delocalized graphene magnetism host highly tunable magnetic bound states with cooper pairs, which can be further developed to study the Majorana bound states and other rich quantum physics of low-dimensional quantum spins on superconductors.

preprint2022arXiv

Rethinking Robust Representation Learning Under Fine-grained Noisy Faces

Learning robust feature representation from large-scale noisy faces stands out as one of the key challenges in high-performance face recognition. Recent attempts have been made to cope with this challenge by alleviating the intra-class conflict and inter-class conflict. However, the unconstrained noise type in each conflict still makes it difficult for these algorithms to perform well. To better understand this, we reformulate the noise type of each class in a more fine-grained manner as N-identities|K^C-clusters. Different types of noisy faces can be generated by adjusting the values of \nkc. Based on this unified formulation, we found that the main barrier behind the noise-robust representation learning is the flexibility of the algorithm under different N, K, and C. For this potential problem, we propose a new method, named Evolving Sub-centers Learning~(ESL), to find optimal hyperplanes to accurately describe the latent space of massive noisy faces. More specifically, we initialize M sub-centers for each class and ESL encourages it to be automatically aligned to N-identities|K^C-clusters faces via producing, merging, and dropping operations. Images belonging to the same identity in noisy faces can effectively converge to the same sub-center and samples with different identities will be pushed away. We inspect its effectiveness with an elaborate ablation study on the synthetic noisy dataset with different N, K, and C. Without any bells and whistles, ESL can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods on large-scale noisy faces

preprint2022arXiv

Role of Local Ru Hexamers in Superconductivity of Ruthenium Phosphide

Superconductivity in binary ruthenium pnictides occurs proximal to and upon suppression of a mysterious non-magnetic ground state, preceded by a pseudogap phase associated with Fermi surface instability, and its critical temperature, T$_{c}$, is maximized around the pseudogap quantum critical point. By analogy with isoelectronic iron based counterparts, antiferromagnetic fluctuations became "usual suspects" as putative mediators of superconducting pairing. Here we report on a high temperature local symmetry breaking in RuP, the parent of the maximum-Tc branch of these novel superconductors, revealed by combined nanostructure-sensitive powder and single crystal X-ray total scattering experiments. Large local Ru$_{6}$ hexamer distortions associated with orbital-charge trimerization form above the two-stage electronic transition in RuP. While hexamer ordering enables the nonmagnetic ground state and presumed complex oligomerization, the relevance of pseudogap fluctuations for superconductivity emerges as a distinct prospect. As a transition metal system in which partial d-manifold filling combined with high crystal symmetry promotes electronic instabilities, this represents a further example of local electronic precursors underpinning the macroscopic collective behavior of quantum materials.

preprint2022arXiv

Self-slimmed Vision Transformer

Vision transformers (ViTs) have become the popular structures and outperformed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on various vision tasks. However, such powerful transformers bring a huge computation burden, because of the exhausting token-to-token comparison. The previous works focus on dropping insignificant tokens to reduce the computational cost of ViTs. But when the dropping ratio increases, this hard manner will inevitably discard the vital tokens, which limits its efficiency. To solve the issue, we propose a generic self-slimmed learning approach for vanilla ViTs, namely SiT. Specifically, we first design a novel Token Slimming Module (TSM), which can boost the inference efficiency of ViTs by dynamic token aggregation. As a general method of token hard dropping, our TSM softly integrates redundant tokens into fewer informative ones. It can dynamically zoom visual attention without cutting off discriminative token relations in the images, even with a high slimming ratio. Furthermore, we introduce a concise Feature Recalibration Distillation (FRD) framework, wherein we design a reverse version of TSM (RTSM) to recalibrate the unstructured token in a flexible auto-encoder manner. Due to the similar structure between teacher and student, our FRD can effectively leverage structure knowledge for better convergence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our SiT. It demonstrates that our method can speed up ViTs by 1.7x with negligible accuracy drop, and even speed up ViTs by 3.6x while maintaining 97% of their performance. Surprisingly, by simply arming LV-ViT with our SiT, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/SiT.

preprint2022arXiv

Self-supervised graph neural networks for accurate prediction of Néel temperature

Antiferromagnetic materials are exciting quantum materials with rich physics and great potential for applications. It is highly demanded of the accurate and efficient theoretical method for determining the critical transition temperatures, Néel temperatures, of antiferromagnetic materials. The powerful graph neural networks (GNN) that succeed in predicting material properties lose their advantage in predicting magnetic properties due to the small dataset of magnetic materials, while conventional machine learning models heavily depend on the quality of material descriptors. We propose a new strategy to extract high-level material representations by utilizing self-supervised training of GNN on large-scale unlabeled datasets. According to the dimensional reduction analysis, we find that the learned knowledge about elements and magnetism transfers to the generated atomic vector representations. Compared with popular manually constructed descriptors and crystal graph convolutional neural networks, self-supervised material representations can help us obtain a more accurate and efficient model for Néel temperatures, and the trained model can successfully predict high Néel temperature antiferromagnetic materials. Our self-supervised GNN may serve as a universal pre-training framework for various material properties.

preprint2022arXiv

Sensitivity tests of cosmic velocity fields to massive neutrinos

We investigate impacts of massive neutrinos on the cosmic velocity fields, employing high-resolution cosmological $N$-body simulations provided by the information-optimized CUBE code, where cosmic neutrinos are evolved using collisionless hydrodynamics and their perturbations can be accurately resolved. In this study we focus, for the first time, on the analysis of massive-neutrino induced suppression effects in various cosmic velocity field components of velocity magnitude, divergence, vorticity and dispersion. By varying the neutrino mass sum $M_ν$ from 0 -- 0.4 eV, the simulations show that, the power spectra of vorticity -- exclusively sourced by non-linear structure formation that is affected by massive neutrinos significantly -- is very sensitive to the mass sum, which potentially provide novel signatures in detecting massive neutrinos. Furthermore, using the chi-square statistic, we quantitatively test the sensitivity of the density and velocity power spectra to the neutrino mass sum. Indeed, we find that, the vorticity spectrum has the highest sensitivity, and the null hypothesis of massless neutrinos is incompatible with both vorticity and divergence spectra from $M_ν=0.1$ eV at high significance ($p$-value $= 0.03$ and $0.07$, respectively). These results demonstrate clearly the importance of peculiar velocity field measurements, in particular of vorticity and divergence components, in determination of neutrino mass and mass hierarchy.

preprint2022arXiv

Short-range Crystalline Order-Tuned Conductivity in Cr$_2$Si$_2$Te$_6$ van der Waals Magnetic Crystals

Two-dimensional magnetic materials (2DMM) are significant for studies on the nature of 2D long range magnetic order but also for future spintronic devices. Of particular interest are 2DMM where spins can be manipulated by electrical conduction. Whereas Cr$_2$Si$_2$Te$_6$ exhibits magnetic order in few-layer crystals, its large band gap inhibits electronic conduction. Here we show that the defect-induced short-range crystal order in Cr$_2$Si$_2$Te$_6$ on the length scale below 0.6 nm induces substantially reduced band gap and robust semiconducting behavior down to 2 K that turns to metallic above 10 GPa. Our results will be helpful to design conducting state in 2DMM and call for spin-resolved measurement of the electronic structure in exfoliated ultrathin crystals.

preprint2022arXiv

Spectroscopy of spin-split Andreev levels in a quantum dot with superconducting leads

We use a hybrid superconductor-semiconductor transmon device to perform spectroscopy of a quantum dot Josephson junction tuned to be in a spin-1/2 ground state with an unpaired quasiparticle. Due to spin-orbit coupling, we resolve two flux-sensitive branches in the transmon spectrum, depending on the spin of the quasi-particle. A finite magnetic field shifts the two branches in energy, favoring one spin state and resulting in the anomalous Josephson effect. We demonstrate the excitation of the direct spin-flip transition using all-electrical control. Manipulation and control of the spin-flip transition enable the future implementation of charging energy protected Andreev spin qubits.

preprint2022arXiv

Spin-polarized imaging of strongly interacting fermions in the ferrimagnetic state of Weyl candidate CeBi

CeBi has an intricate magnetic phase diagram whose fully-polarized state has recently been suggested as a Weyl semimetal, though the role of $f$ states in promoting strong interactions has remained elusive. Here we focus on the less-studied, but also time-reversal symmetry-breaking ferrimagnetic phase of CeBi, where our density functional theory (DFT) calculations predict additional Weyl nodes near the Fermi level $E_\mathrm{F}$. We use spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to image the surface ferrimagnetic order on the itinerant Bi $p$ states, indicating their orbital hybridization with localized Ce $f$ states. We observe suppression of this spin-polarized signature at $E_\mathrm{F}$, coincident with a Fano line shape in the conductance spectra, suggesting the Bi $p$ states partially Kondo screen the $f$ magnetic moments, and this $p-f$ hybridization causes strong Fermi-level band renormalization. The $p$ band flattening is supported by our quasiparticle interference (QPI) measurements, which also show band splitting in agreement with DFT, painting a consistent picture of a strongly interacting magnetic Weyl semimetal.

preprint2022arXiv

Suppression of Superconductivity and Nematic Order in Fe$_{1-y}$Se$_{1-x}$S$_x$ (0$\leq$$x$$\leq$1, $y$$\leq$0.1) Crystals by Anion Height Disorder

Connections between crystal chemistry and critical temperature $T_c$ have been in the focus of superconductivity, one of the most widely studied phenomena in physics, chemistry and materials science alike. In most Fe-based superconductors, materials chemistry and physics conspire so that $T_c$ correlates with the average anion height above the Fe plane, i. e. with the geometry of the FeAs4 or FeCh4 (Ch = Te, Se, or S) tetrahedron. By synthesizing Fe$_{1-y}$Se$_{1-x}$S$_x$ (0$\leq$$x$$\leq$1, $y$$\leq$0.1), we find that in alloyed crystals $T_c$ is not correlated with the anion height like it is for most other Fe superconductors. Instead, changes in $T_c$($x$) and tetragonal-to-orthorombic (nematic) transition $T_s$($x$) upon cooling are correlated with disorder in Fe vibrations in the direction orthogonal to Fe planes, along the crystallographic c-axis. The disorder stems from the random nature of S substitution, causing deformed Fe(Se,S)4 tetrahedra with different Fe-Se and Fe-S bond distances. Our results provide evidence of $T_c$ and $T_s$ suppression by disorder in anion height. The connection to local crystal chemistry may be exploited in computational prediction of new superconducting materials with Fe/S building blocks.

preprint2022arXiv

Swift and Sure: Hardness-aware Contrastive Learning for Low-dimensional Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) has shown great potential in automatic knowledge graph (KG) completion and knowledge-driven tasks. However, recent KGE models suffer from high training cost and large storage space, thus limiting their practicality in real-world applications. To address this challenge, based on the latest findings in the field of Contrastive Learning, we propose a novel KGE training framework called Hardness-aware Low-dimensional Embedding (HaLE). Instead of the traditional Negative Sampling, we design a new loss function based on query sampling that can balance two important training targets, Alignment and Uniformity. Furthermore, we analyze the hardness-aware ability of recent low-dimensional hyperbolic models and propose a lightweight hardness-aware activation mechanism. The experimental results show that in the limited training time, HaLE can effectively improve the performance and training speed of KGE models on five commonly-used datasets. After training just a few minutes, the HaLE-trained models are competitive compared to the state-of-the-art models in both low- and high-dimensional conditions.

preprint2022arXiv

The effect of $f$-$c$ hybridization on the $γ\rightarrowα$ phase transition of cerium studied by lanthanum doping

The hybridization between the localized 4$f$ level ($f$) with conduction ($c$) states in $γ$-Ce upon cooling has been previously revealed in single crystalline thin films experimentally and theoretically, whereas its influence on the $γ\rightarrowα$ phase transition was not explicitly verified, due to the fact that the phase transition happened in the bulk-layer, leaving the surface in the $γ$ phase. Here in our work, we circumvent this issue by investigating the effect of alloying addition of La on Ce, by means of crystal structure, electronic transport and ARPES measurements, together with a phenomenological periodic Anderson model and a modified Anderson impurity model. Our current researches indicate that the weakening of $f$-$c$ hybridization is the major factor in the suppression of $γ\rightarrowα$ phase transition by La doping. The consistency of our results with the effects of other rare earth and actinide alloying additions on the $γ\rightarrowα$ phase transition of Ce is also discussed. Our work demonstrates the importance of the interaction of $f$ and $c$ electrons in understanding the unconventional phase transition in Ce, which is intuitive for further researches on other rare earth and actinide metals and alloys with similar phase transition behaviors.

preprint2022arXiv

The underestimation of high pressure in DFT+$U$ simulation for the wide range cold-pressure of lanthanide metals

Density functional theory plus $U$ (DFT+$U$) is one of the most efficient first-principles methods to simulate the cold pressure properties of strongly-correlated materials. However, the applicability of DFT+$U$ at ultra-high pressure is not sufficiently studied, especially in the widely-used augmented schemes [such as projector augmented wave (PAW) and linearized augmented plane wave (LAPW)]. This work has systematically investigated the performance of DFT+$U$ in PAW and LAPW at the pressure up to several hundred GPa for the lanthanide metals, which is a typical strongly-correlated series. We found DFT+$U$ simulation in PAW exhibits an unphysical underestimating of force at high pressure. By delicate analysis and comparison with local-orbital-independent hybrid functional results, we have demonstrated that this unphysical behavior is related to a normalization problem on the local density matrix caused by the overlap of local orbitals in PAW under high pressure. Additionally, we observed a slight softening of force in DFT+$U$ in heavy lanthanides (Tm, Yb and Lu) at high pressure comparing with the DFT results without the influence of local orbital overlap, and it might be related to the enhancement of bonding effect in correlation correction methods at high pressure. Our work reveals the underestimating of high pressure in DFT+$U$ simulation, analyses two sources of this unusual behavior and proposes their mechanism. Most importantly, our investigation highlights the breakdown of DFT+$U$ for high pressure simulation in VASP package based on PAW framework.

preprint2022arXiv

The universality in urban commuting across and within cities

Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on $\sim$ 50 million individuals' smartphone data from 234 Chinese cities to show that urban commuting obeys remarkable regularities. These regularities can be generalized as two laws: (i) the scale-invariance of the average commuting distance across cities, which is a long-awaited validation of Marchetti's constant conjecture, and (ii) a universal inverted U-shape of the commuting distance as a function of the distance from the city centre within cities, indicating that the city centre's attraction is bounded. Motivated by such empirical findings, we develop a simple urban growth model that connects individual-level mobility choices with macroscopic urban spatial structure and faithfully explains both commuting laws. Our results further show that the scale-invariants of human mobility will ultimately lead to the polycentric transition in cities, which could be used to better inform urban development strategies.

preprint2022arXiv

Thermal transport and mixed valence in ZrTe$_3$ doped with Hf and Se

Two-dimensional transition metal trichalcogenides (TMTC's) feature covalently bonded metal-chalcogen layers separated by the van der Waals (vdW) gap. Similar to transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), TMTCs often host charge density waves (CDWs) and superconductivity but unlike TMDCs atomic chains in the crystal structure give rise to quasi one-dimensional (quasi 1D) conduction. ZrTe$_3$ features CDW below $T_{\textrm{CDW}}$ = 63 K and filamentary superconductivity below 2 K that can be enhanced by pressure or chemical substitution. Here we report the presence of mixed valent Zr$^{2+}$ and Zr$^{4+}$ atoms in ZrTe$_3$ crystals that is reduced by doping in ZrTe$_{3-x}$Se$_x$ and Zr$_{1-y}$Hf$_y$Te$_3$. Superconductivity is enhanced via disorder in Te2-Te3 atomic chains that are associated with CDW formation. Hf substitution on Zr atomic site enhances $T_{\textrm{CDW}}$ due to unperturbed Te2-Te3 chain periodicity and enhanced electron-phonon coupling. Weak electronic correlations in ZrTe$_{3-x}$Se$_x$ are likely governed by the lattice contraction effects.

preprint2022arXiv

Thermoelectricity and electronic correlations enhancement in FeS by slight Se substitution

We report thermoelectric studies of FeS$_{1-x}$Se$_x$ ($x$ = 0, 0.06) superconducting single crystals that feature high irreversibility fields and critical current density $J_c$ comparable to materials with much higher superconducting critical temperatures ($T_c$'s). The ratio of $T_c$ to the Fermi temperature $T_F$ is very small indicating weak electronic correlations. With a slight selenium substitution on sulfur site in FeS both $T_c$/$T_F$ and the effective mass $m^*$ rise considerably, implying increase in electronic correlation of the bulk conducting states. The first-principle calculations show rise of the density of states at the Fermi level in FeS$_{0.94}$Se$_{0.06}$ when compared to FeS which is related not only to Fe but also to chalcogen-derived electronic states.

preprint2022arXiv

Topological Defects Induced High-Spin Quartet State in Truxene-Based Molecular Graphenoids

Topological defects in graphene materials introduce exotic properties which are absent in their defect-free counterparts with both fundamental importance and technological implications. Although individual topological defects have been widely studied, collective magnetic behaviors originating from well-organized multiple topological defects remain a great challenge. Here, we studied the collective magnetic properties originating from three pentagon topological defects in truxene-based molecular graphenoids by using scanning tunneling microscopy and non-contact atomic force microscopy. Unpaired $π$ electrons are introduced into the aromatic topology of truxene molecular graphenoids one by one by dissociating hydrogen atoms at the pentagon defects via atom manipulation. Scanning tunneling spectroscopy measurements together with density functional theory calculations suggest that the unpaired electrons are ferromagnetically coupled, forming a collective high-spin quartet state of S=3/2. Our work demonstrates that the collective spin ordering can be realized through engineering regular patterned topological defects in molecular graphenoids, providing a new platform for designer one-dimensional ferromagnetic spin chains and two-dimensional ferromagnetic networks.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Robust Face Recognition with Comprehensive Search

Data cleaning, architecture, and loss function design are important factors contributing to high-performance face recognition. Previously, the research community tries to improve the performance of each single aspect but failed to present a unified solution on the joint search of the optimal designs for all three aspects. In this paper, we for the first time identify that these aspects are tightly coupled to each other. Optimizing the design of each aspect actually greatly limits the performance and biases the algorithmic design. Specifically, we find that the optimal model architecture or loss function is closely coupled with the data cleaning. To eliminate the bias of single-aspect research and provide an overall understanding of the face recognition model design, we first carefully design the search space for each aspect, then a comprehensive search method is introduced to jointly search optimal data cleaning, architecture, and loss function design. In our framework, we make the proposed comprehensive search as flexible as possible, by using an innovative reinforcement learning based approach. Extensive experiments on million-level face recognition benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our newly-designed search space for each aspect and the comprehensive search. We outperform expert algorithms developed for each single research track by large margins. More importantly, we analyze the difference between our searched optimal design and the independent design of the single factors. We point out that strong models tend to optimize with more difficult training datasets and loss functions. Our empirical study can provide guidance in future research towards more robust face recognition systems.

preprint2022arXiv

UniFormer: Unified Transformer for Efficient Spatiotemporal Representation Learning

It is a challenging task to learn rich and multi-scale spatiotemporal semantics from high-dimensional videos, due to large local redundancy and complex global dependency between video frames. The recent advances in this research have been mainly driven by 3D convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. Although 3D convolution can efficiently aggregate local context to suppress local redundancy from a small 3D neighborhood, it lacks the capability to capture global dependency because of the limited receptive field. Alternatively, vision transformers can effectively capture long-range dependency by self-attention mechanism, while having the limitation on reducing local redundancy with blind similarity comparison among all the tokens in each layer. Based on these observations, we propose a novel Unified transFormer (UniFormer) which seamlessly integrates merits of 3D convolution and spatiotemporal self-attention in a concise transformer format, and achieves a preferable balance between computation and accuracy. Different from traditional transformers, our relation aggregator can tackle both spatiotemporal redundancy and dependency, by learning local and global token affinity respectively in shallow and deep layers. We conduct extensive experiments on the popular video benchmarks, e.g., Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, and Something-Something V1&V2. With only ImageNet-1K pretraining, our UniFormer achieves 82.9%/84.8% top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400/Kinetics-600, while requiring 10x fewer GFLOPs than other state-of-the-art methods. For Something-Something V1 and V2, our UniFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performances of 60.9% and 71.2% top-1 accuracy respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniFormer.

preprint2022arXiv

Unifying Visual Perception by Dispersible Points Learning

We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and universal visual perception head for variant visual tasks, e.g., classification, object detection, instance segmentation and pose estimation, and different frameworks, such as one-stage or two-stage pipelines. Our approach effectively identifies an object in an image while simultaneously generating a high-quality bounding box or contour-based segmentation mask or set of keypoints. The method, called UniHead, views different visual perception tasks as the dispersible points learning via the transformer encoder architecture. Given a fixed spatial coordinate, UniHead adaptively scatters it to different spatial points and reasons about their relations by transformer encoder. It directly outputs the final set of predictions in the form of multiple points, allowing us to perform different visual tasks in different frameworks with the same head design. We show extensive evaluations on ImageNet classification and all three tracks of the COCO suite of challenges, including object detection, instance segmentation and pose estimation. Without bells and whistles, UniHead can unify these visual tasks via a single visual head design and achieve comparable performance compared to expert models developed for each task.We hope our simple and universal UniHead will serve as a solid baseline and help promote universal visual perception research. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniHead.

preprint2022arXiv

UniNet: Unified Architecture Search with Convolution, Transformer, and MLP

Recently, transformer and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) architectures have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks. However, how to effectively combine those operators to form high-performance hybrid visual architectures still remains a challenge. In this work, we study the learnable combination of convolution, transformer, and MLP by proposing a novel unified architecture search approach. Our approach contains two key designs to achieve the search for high-performance networks. First, we model the very different searchable operators in a unified form, and thus enable the operators to be characterized with the same set of configuration parameters. In this way, the overall search space size is significantly reduced, and the total search cost becomes affordable. Second, we propose context-aware downsampling modules (DSMs) to mitigate the gap between the different types of operators. Our proposed DSMs are able to better adapt features from different types of operators, which is important for identifying high-performance hybrid architectures. Finally, we integrate configurable operators and DSMs into a unified search space and search with a Reinforcement Learning-based search algorithm to fully explore the optimal combination of the operators. To this end, we search a baseline network and scale it up to obtain a family of models, named UniNets, which achieve much better accuracy and efficiency than previous ConvNets and Transformers. In particular, our UniNet-B5 achieves 84.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming EfficientNet-B7 and BoTNet-T7 with 44% and 55% fewer FLOPs respectively. By pretraining on the ImageNet-21K, our UniNet-B6 achieves 87.4%, outperforming Swin-L with 51% fewer FLOPs and 41% fewer parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniNet.

preprint2021arXiv

ACDnet: An action detection network for real-time edge computing based on flow-guided feature approximation and memory aggregation

Interpreting human actions requires understanding the spatial and temporal context of the scenes. State-of-the-art action detectors based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have demonstrated remarkable results by adopting two-stream or 3D CNN architectures. However, these methods typically operate in a non-real-time, ofline fashion due to system complexity to reason spatio-temporal information. Consequently, their high computational cost is not compliant with emerging real-world scenarios such as service robots or public surveillance where detection needs to take place at resource-limited edge devices. In this paper, we propose ACDnet, a compact action detection network targeting real-time edge computing which addresses both efficiency and accuracy. It intelligently exploits the temporal coherence between successive video frames to approximate their CNN features rather than naively extracting them. It also integrates memory feature aggregation from past video frames to enhance current detection stability, implicitly modeling long temporal cues over time. Experiments conducted on the public benchmark datasets UCF-24 and JHMDB-21 demonstrate that ACDnet, when integrated with the SSD detector, can robustly achieve detection well above real-time (75 FPS). At the same time, it retains reasonable accuracy (70.92 and 49.53 frame mAP) compared to other top-performing methods using far heavier configurations. Codes will be available at https://github.com/dginhac/ACDnet.

preprint2021arXiv

Anomalous Hall effect in weak-itinerant ferrimagnet FeCr$_2$Te$_4$

We carried out a comprehensive study of electronic transport, thermal and thermodynamic properties in FeCr$_2$Te$_4$ single crystals. It exhibits bad-metallic behavior and anomalous Hall effect (AHE) below a weak-itinerant paramagentic-to-ferrimagnetic transition $T_c$ $\sim$ 123 K. The linear scaling between the anomalous Hall resistivity $ρ_{xy}$ and the longitudinal resistivity $ρ_{xx}$ implies that the AHE in FeCr$_2$Te$_4$ is most likely dominated by extrinsic skew-scattering mechanism rather than intrinsic KL or extrinsic side-jump mechanism, which is supported by our Berry phase calculations.

preprint2021arXiv

Design and characterization of a low-vibration laboratory with cylindrical inertia block geometry

Many modern nanofabrication and imaging techniques require an ultra-quiet environment to reach optimal resolution. Isolation from ambient vibrations is often achieved by placing the sensitive instrument atop a massive block that floats on air springs and is surrounded by acoustic barriers. Because typical building noise drops off above 120 Hz, it is advantageous to raise the flexural resonance frequencies of the inertia block and instrument far above 120 Hz. However, it can be challenging to obtain a high fundamental frequency of the floating block using a simple rectangular design. Here we design, construct, and characterize a vibration isolation system with a cylindrical inertia block, whose lowest resonance frequency of 249 Hz shows good agreement between finite element analysis simulation and directly measured modes. Our simulations show that a cylindrical design can achieve higher fundamental resonance frequency than a rectangular design of the same mass.

preprint2021arXiv

Prediction of Spin Polarized Fermi Arcs in Quasiparticle Interference of CeBi

We predict that CeBi in the ferromagnetic state is a Weyl semimetal. Our calculations within density functional theory show the existence of two pairs of Weyl nodes on the momentum path $(0, 0, k_z)$ at $15$ meV} above and $100$ meV below the Fermi level. Two corresponding Fermi arcs are obtained on surfaces of mirror-symmetric (010)-oriented slabs at $E=15$ meV and both arcs are interrupted into three segments due to hybridization with a set of trivial surface bands. By studying the spin texture of surface states, we find the two Fermi arcs are strongly spin-polarized but in opposite directions, which can be detected by spin-polarized ARPES measurements. Our theoretical study of quasiparticle interference (QPI) for a nonmagnetic impurity at the Bi site also reveals several features related to the Fermi arcs. Specifically, we predict that the spin polarization of the Fermi arcs leads to a bifurcation-shaped feature only in the spin-dependent QPI spectrum, serving as a fingerprint of the Weyl nodes.

preprint2021arXiv

The Sariçiçek howardite fall in Turkey: Source crater of HED meteorites on Vesta and impact risk of Vestoids

The Sariçiçek howardite meteorite shower consisting of 343 documented stones occurred on 2 September 2015 in Turkey and is the first documented howardite fall. Cosmogenic isotopes show that Sariçiçek experienced a complex cosmic ray exposure history, exposed during ~12-14 Ma in a regolith near the surface of a parent asteroid, and that an ca.1 m sized meteoroid was launched by an impact 22 +/- 2 Ma ago to Earth (as did one third of all HED meteorites). SIMS dating of zircon and baddeleyite yielded 4550.4 +/- 2.5 Ma and 4553 +/- 8.8 Ma crystallization ages for the basaltic magma clasts. The apatite U-Pb age of 4525 +/- 17 Ma, K-Ar age of ~3.9 Ga, and the U,Th-He ages of 1.8 +/- 0.7 and 2.6 +/- 0.3 Ga are interpreted to represent thermal metamorphic and impact-related resetting ages, respectively. Petrographic, geochemical and O-, Cr- and Ti- isotopic studies confirm that Sariçiçek belongs to the normal clan of HED meteorites. Petrographic observations and analysis of organic material indicate a small portion of carbonaceous chondrite material in the Sariçiçek regolith and organic contamination of the meteorite after a few days on soil. Video observations of the fall show an atmospheric entry at 17.3 +/- 0.8 kms-1 from NW, fragmentations at 37, 33, 31 and 27 km altitude, and provide a pre-atmospheric orbit that is the first dynamical link between the normal HED meteorite clan and the inner Main Belt. Spectral data indicate the similarity of Sariçiçek with the Vesta asteroid family spectra, a group of asteroids stretching to delivery resonances, which includes (4) Vesta. Dynamical modeling of meteoroid delivery to Earth shows that the disruption of a ca.1 km sized Vesta family asteroid or a ~10 km sized impact crater on Vesta is required to provide sufficient meteoroids <4 m in size to account for the influx of meteorites from this HED clan.

preprint2021arXiv

Train a One-Million-Way Instance Classifier for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning

This paper presents a simple unsupervised visual representation learning method with a pretext task of discriminating all images in a dataset using a parametric, instance-level classifier. The overall framework is a replica of a supervised classification model, where semantic classes (e.g., dog, bird, and ship) are replaced by instance IDs. However, scaling up the classification task from thousands of semantic labels to millions of instance labels brings specific challenges including 1) the large-scale softmax computation; 2) the slow convergence due to the infrequent visiting of instance samples; and 3) the massive number of negative classes that can be noisy. This work presents several novel techniques to handle these difficulties. First, we introduce a hybrid parallel training framework to make large-scale training feasible. Second, we present a raw-feature initialization mechanism for classification weights, which we assume offers a contrastive prior for instance discrimination and can clearly speed up converge in our experiments. Finally, we propose to smooth the labels of a few hardest classes to avoid optimizing over very similar negative pairs. While being conceptually simple, our framework achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches, i.e., SimCLR, MoCoV2, and PIC under ImageNet linear evaluation protocol and on several downstream visual tasks, verifying that full instance classification is a strong pretraining technique for many semantic visual tasks.

preprint2021arXiv

Two Quasi-periodic Fast-propagating Magnetosonic Wave Events Observed In Active Region NOAA 11167

We report a detailed observational study of two quasi-periodic fast-propagating (QFP) magnetosonic wave events occurred on 2011 March 09 and 10, respectively. Interestingly, both the two events have two wave trains (WTs): one main and strong (WT-1) whereas the second appears small and weak (WT-2). Peculiar and common characteristics of the two events are observed, namely: 1) the two QFP waves are accompanied with brightenings during the whole stage of the eruptions; 2) both the two main wave trains are nearly propagating along the same direction; 3) EUV waves are found to be associated with the two events. Investigating various aspects of the target events, we argue that: 1) the second event is accompanied with a flux rope eruption during the whole stage; 2) the second event eruption produces a new filament-like (FL) dark feature; 3) the ripples of the two WT-2 QFP waves seem to result from different triggering mechanisms. Based on the obtained observational results, we propose that the funnel-like coronal loop system is indeed playing an important role in the two WT-1 QFP waves. The development of the second WT-2 QFP wave can be explained as due to the dispersion of the main EUV front. The co-existence of the two events offer thereby a significant opportunity to reveal what driving mechanisms and structures are tightly related to the waves.

preprint2020arXiv

1st place solution for AVA-Kinetics Crossover in AcitivityNet Challenge 2020

This technical report introduces our winning solution to the spatio-temporal action localization track, AVA-Kinetics Crossover, in ActivityNet Challenge 2020. Our entry is mainly based on Actor-Context-Actor Relation Network. We describe technical details for the new AVA-Kinetics dataset, together with some experimental results. Without any bells and whistles, we achieved 39.62 mAP on the test set of AVA-Kinetics, which outperforms other entries by a large margin. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Siyu-C/ACAR-Net.

preprint2020arXiv

1st Place Solutions for OpenImage2019 -- Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

This article introduces the solutions of the two champion teams, `MMfruit' for the detection track and `MMfruitSeg' for the segmentation track, in OpenImage Challenge 2019. It is commonly known that for an object detector, the shared feature at the end of the backbone is not appropriate for both classification and regression, which greatly limits the performance of both single stage detector and Faster RCNN \cite{ren2015faster} based detector. In this competition, we observe that even with a shared feature, different locations in one object has completely inconsistent performances for the two tasks. \textit{E.g. the features of salient locations are usually good for classification, while those around the object edge are good for regression.} Inspired by this, we propose the Decoupling Head (DH) to disentangle the object classification and regression via the self-learned optimal feature extraction, which leads to a great improvement. Furthermore, we adjust the soft-NMS algorithm to adj-NMS to obtain stable performance improvement. Finally, a well-designed ensemble strategy via voting the bounding box location and confidence is proposed. We will also introduce several training/inferencing strategies and a bag of tricks that give minor improvement. Given those masses of details, we train and aggregate 28 global models with various backbones, heads and 3+2 expert models, and achieves the 1st place on the OpenImage 2019 Object Detection Challenge on the both public and private leadboards. Given such good instance bounding box, we further design a simple instance-level semantic segmentation pipeline and achieve the 1st place on the segmentation challenge.

preprint2020arXiv

3D Gated Recurrent Fusion for Semantic Scene Completion

This paper tackles the problem of data fusion in the semantic scene completion (SSC) task, which can simultaneously deal with semantic labeling and scene completion. RGB images contain texture details of the object(s) which are vital for semantic scene understanding. Meanwhile, depth images capture geometric clues of high relevance for shape completion. Using both RGB and depth images can further boost the accuracy of SSC over employing one modality in isolation. We propose a 3D gated recurrent fusion network (GRFNet), which learns to adaptively select and fuse the relevant information from depth and RGB by making use of the gate and memory modules. Based on the single-stage fusion, we further propose a multi-stage fusion strategy, which could model the correlations among different stages within the network. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance and the effectiveness of the proposed GRFNet for data fusion in SSC. Code will be made available.

preprint2020arXiv

A First Look at Commercial 5G Performance on Smartphones

We conduct to our knowledge a first measurement study of commercial 5G performance on smartphones by closely examining 5G networks of three carriers (two mmWave carriers, one mid-band carrier) in three U.S. cities. We conduct extensive field tests on 5G performance in diverse urban environments. We systematically analyze the handoff mechanisms in 5G and their impact on network performance. We explore the feasibility of using location and possibly other environmental information to predict the network performance. We also study the app performance (web browsing and HTTP download) over 5G. Our study consumes more than 15 TB of cellular data. Conducted when 5G just made its debut, it provides a "baseline" for studying how 5G performance evolves, and identifies key research directions on improving 5G users' experience in a cross-layer manner. We have released the data collected from our study (referred to as 5Gophers) at https://fivegophers.umn.edu/www20.

preprint2020arXiv

A gridded establishment dataset as a proxy for economic activity in China

Measuring the geographical distribution of economic activity plays a key role in scientific research and policymaking. However, previous studies and data on economic activity either have a coarse spatial resolution or cover a limited time span, and the high-resolution characteristics of socioeconomic dynamics are largely unknown. Here, we construct a dataset on the economic activity of mainland China, the gridded establishment dataset (GED), which measures the volume of establishments at a 0.01$^{\circ}$ latitude by 0.01$^{\circ}$ longitude scale. Specifically, our dataset captures the geographically based opening and closing of approximately 25.5 million firms that registered in mainland China over the period 2005-2015. The characteristics of fine granularity and long-term observability give the GED a high application value. The dataset not only allows us to quantify the spatiotemporal patterns of the establishments, urban vibrancy and socioeconomic activity, but also helps us uncover the fundamental principles underlying the dynamics of industrial and economic development.

preprint2020arXiv

A novel multimodal approach for hybrid brain-computer interface

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies have been widely used in many areas. In particular, non-invasive technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG) or near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) have been used to detect motor imagery, disease, or mental state. It has been already shown in literature that the hybrid of EEG and NIRS has better results than their respective individual signals. The fusion algorithm for EEG and NIRS sources is the key to implement them in real-life applications. In this research, we propose three fusion methods for the hybrid of the EEG and NIRS-based brain-computer interface system: linear fusion, tensor fusion, and $p$th-order polynomial fusion. Firstly, our results prove that the hybrid BCI system is more accurate, as expected. Secondly, the $p$th-order polynomial fusion has the best classification results out of the three methods, and also shows improvements compared with previous studies. For a motion imagery task and a mental arithmetic task, the best detection accuracy in previous papers were 74.20\% and 88.1\%, whereas our accuracy achieved was 77.53\% and 90.19\% . Furthermore, unlike complex artificial neural network methods, our proposed methods are not as computationally demanding.

preprint2020arXiv

A statistical study of the plasma and composition distribution inside magnetic clouds: 1998-2011

A comprehensive analysis of plasma and composition characteristics inside magnetic clouds (MCs) observed by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft from 1998 February to 2011 August is presented. The results show that MCs have specific interior structures, and MCs of different speeds show differences in composition and structure. Compared with the slow MCs, fast MCs have enhanced mean charge states of iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, $\mathrm{O^{7+}/O^{6+}}$, $\mathrm{C^{6+}/C^{5+}}$, $\mathrm{C^{6+}/C^{4+}}$ and $\mathrm{Fe^{\geq16+}/Fe_{total}}$ values. For ionic species in fast MCs, a higher atomic number represents a greater enhancement of mean charge state than slow MCs. We also find that both the fast and slow MCs display bimodal structure distribution in the mean iron charge state ($\mathrm{\langle Q\rangle Fe}$), which suggests that the existence of flux rope prior to the eruption is common. Furthermore, the $\mathrm{\langle Q\rangle Fe} $, $\mathrm{Fe^{\geq16+}/Fe_{total}}$, and $\mathrm{O^{7+}/O^{6+}}$ ratio distribution inside fast MCs have the feature that the posterior peak is higher than the anterior one. This result agrees with the "standard model" for CME/flares, by which magnetic reconnection occurs beneath the flux rope, thereby ionizing the ions of the posterior part of flux rope sufficiently by high-energy electron collisions or by direct heating in the reconnection region.

preprint2020arXiv

An empirical "high-confidence" candidate zone for $Fermi$ BL Lacertae objects

In the third catalog of active galactic nuclei detected by the $Fermi$ Large Area Telescope Clean (3LAC) sample, there are 402 blazars candidates of uncertain type (BCU). The proposed analysis will help to evaluate the potential optical classification flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) versus BL Lacertae (BL Lacs) objects of BCUs, which can help to understand which is the most elusive class of blazar hidden in the Fermi sample. By studying the 3LAC sample, we found some critical values of $γ$-ray photon spectral index ($Γ_{\rm ph}$), variability index (VI) and radio flux (${\rm F_R}$) of the sources separate known FSRQs and BL Lac objects. We further utilize those values to defined an empirical "high-confidence" candidate zone that can be used to classify the BCUs. Within such a zone ($Γ_{\rm ph}<2.187$, log${\rm F_R}<2.258$ and ${ \rm logVI <1.702}$), we found that 120 BCUs can be classified BL Lac candidates with a higher degree of confidence (with a misjudged rate $<1\%$). Our results suggest that an empirical "high confidence" diagnosis is possible to distinguish the BL Lacs from the Fermi observations based on only on the direct observational data of $Γ_{\rm ph}$, VI and ${\rm F_R}$.

preprint2020arXiv

Anisotropic Convolutional Networks for 3D Semantic Scene Completion

As a voxel-wise labeling task, semantic scene completion (SSC) tries to simultaneously infer the occupancy and semantic labels for a scene from a single depth and/or RGB image. The key challenge for SSC is how to effectively take advantage of the 3D context to model various objects or stuffs with severe variations in shapes, layouts and visibility. To handle such variations, we propose a novel module called anisotropic convolution, which properties with flexibility and power impossible for the competing methods such as standard 3D convolution and some of its variations. In contrast to the standard 3D convolution that is limited to a fixed 3D receptive field, our module is capable of modeling the dimensional anisotropy voxel-wisely. The basic idea is to enable anisotropic 3D receptive field by decomposing a 3D convolution into three consecutive 1D convolutions, and the kernel size for each such 1D convolution is adaptively determined on the fly. By stacking multiple such anisotropic convolution modules, the voxel-wise modeling capability can be further enhanced while maintaining a controllable amount of model parameters. Extensive experiments on two SSC benchmarks, NYU-Depth-v2 and NYUCAD, show the superior performance of the proposed method. Our code is available at https://waterljwant.github.io/SSC/

preprint2020arXiv

Anisotropic magnetocaloric effect and critical behavior in CrCl$_3$

We report anisotropic magnetocaloric effect and magnetic critical behavior in van der Waals crystal CrCl$_3$. The maximum magnetic entropy change $-ΔS_M^{max} \sim 14.6$ J kg$^{-1}$ K$^{-1}$ and the relative cooling power $RCP \sim 340.3$ J kg$^{-1}$ near $T_c$ with a magnetic field change of 5 T are much larger when compared to CrI$_{3}$ or CrBr$_{3}$. The rescaled $ΔS_M(T,H)$ curves collapse onto a universal curve, confirming the second order ferromagnetic transition. Further critical behavior analysis around $T_c$ presents a set of critical exponents $β$ = 0.28(1) with $T_c$ = 19.4(2) K, $γ$ = 0.89(1) with $T_c$ = 18.95(8) K, and $δ$ = 4.6(1) at $T_c$ = 19 K, which are close to those of theoretical tricritical mean field model.

preprint2020arXiv

Anisotropic magnetocaloric effect and critical behavior in CrSbSe$_3$

We report anisotropic magnetocaloric effect and critical behavior in quasi-one-dimensional ferromagnetic CrSbSe$_3$ single crystal. The maximum magnetic entropy change $-ΔS_M^{max}$ is 2.16 J kg$^{-1}$ K$^{-1}$ for easy $a$ axis (2.03 J kg$^{-1}$ K$^{-1}$ for hard $b$ axis) and the relative cooling power $RCP$ is 163.1 J kg$^{-1}$ for easy $a$ axis (142.1 J kg$^{-1}$ for hard $b$ axis) near $T_c$ with a magnetic field change of 50 kOe. The magnetocrystalline anisotropy constant $K_u$ is estimated to be 148.5 kJ m$^{-3}$ at 10 K, decreasing to 39.4 kJ m$^{-3}$ at 70 K. The rescaled $ΔS_M(T,H)$ curves along all three axes collapse onto a universal curve, respectively, confirming the second order ferromagnetic transition. Further critical behavior analysis around $T_c \sim$ 70 K gives that the critical exponents $β$ = 0.26(1), $γ$ = 1.32(2), and $δ$ = 6.17(9) for $H\parallel a$, while $β$ = 0.28(2), $γ$ = 1.02(1), and $δ$ = 4.14(16) for $H\parallel b$. The determined critical exponents suggest that the anisotropic magnetic coupling in CrSbSe$_3$ is strongly dependent on orientations of the applied magnetic field.

preprint2020arXiv

Change Detection in Heterogeneous Optical and SAR Remote Sensing Images via Deep Homogeneous Feature Fusion

Change detection in heterogeneous remote sensing images is crucial for disaster damage assessment. Recent methods use homogenous transformation, which transforms the heterogeneous optical and SAR remote sensing images into the same feature space, to achieve change detection. Such transformations mainly operate on the low-level feature space and may corrupt the semantic content, deteriorating the performance of change detection. To solve this problem, this paper presents a new homogeneous transformation model termed deep homogeneous feature fusion (DHFF) based on image style transfer (IST). Unlike the existing methods, the DHFF method segregates the semantic content and the style features in the heterogeneous images to perform homogeneous transformation. The separation of the semantic content and the style in homogeneous transformation prevents the corruption of image semantic content, especially in the regions of change. In this way, the detection performance is improved with accurate homogeneous transformation. Furthermore, we present a new iterative IST (IIST) strategy, where the cost function in each IST iteration measures and thus maximizes the feature homogeneity in additional new feature subspaces for change detection. After that, change detection is accomplished accurately on the original and the transformed images that are in the same feature space. Real remote sensing images acquired by SAR and optical satellites are utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed DHFF method achieves significant improvement for change detection in heterogeneous optical and SAR remote sensing images, in terms of both accuracy rate and Kappa index.

preprint2020arXiv

Commands 4 Autonomous Vehicles (C4AV) Workshop Summary

The task of visual grounding requires locating the most relevant region or object in an image, given a natural language query. So far, progress on this task was mostly measured on curated datasets, which are not always representative of human spoken language. In this work, we deviate from recent, popular task settings and consider the problem under an autonomous vehicle scenario. In particular, we consider a situation where passengers can give free-form natural language commands to a vehicle which can be associated with an object in the street scene. To stimulate research on this topic, we have organized the \emph{Commands for Autonomous Vehicles} (C4AV) challenge based on the recent \emph{Talk2Car} dataset (URL: https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/eccv-2020-commands-4-autonomous-vehicles). This paper presents the results of the challenge. First, we compare the used benchmark against existing datasets for visual grounding. Second, we identify the aspects that render top-performing models successful, and relate them to existing state-of-the-art models for visual grounding, in addition to detecting potential failure cases by evaluating on carefully selected subsets. Finally, we discuss several possibilities for future work.

preprint2020arXiv

Comparative Analyses of Plasma Properties and Composition in Two Types of Small-Scale Interplanetary Flux-ropes

The origin of small-scale interplanetary magnetic flux-ropes (SIMFRs) and the relationship between SIMFRs and magnetic clouds (MCs) are still controversial. In this study, two populations of SMIFRs were collected, i.e., SIMFRs originating from the Sun (SIMFR-SUN) and those originating from the solar wind (SIMFR-SW). We defined the SIMFR-SUN (SIMFR-SW) as the SMIFRs that include (exclude) the counter-streaming suprathermal electrons and stay away from (close to) the heliospheric current sheet. After fitting with force-free flux-rope model, 52 SIMFR-SUN and 57 SIMFR-SW events observed by Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) from 1998 February to 2011 August were qualified. Using the approach of relating the measurements to their spatial position within the flux-ropes, a comparative survey of plasma and composition characteristics inside the two populations of SIMFRs is presented. Results show that the two populations of SIMFRs have apparent differences. Compared with SIMFR-SW, SIMFR-SUN are MC-like, featuring lower central proton density, higher Vrad, higher low-FIP element abundances, higher and more fluctuate average ion charge-states and the ion chargestate ratios which are related to the heating in low corona. In addition, for the ion charge-state distributions inside SIMFR-SUN, the sunward side is higher than earthward, which might be caused by the flare heating during eruption. Moreover, both SIMFR-SUN and MCs show anti-correlation between plasma beta and He/P trend. These characteristics indicate that SIMFR-SUN and MCs are very likely to have the identical origination. This study supports the two-source origin of SIMFRs, i.e., the solar corona and the solar wind.

preprint2020arXiv

Complementary Boundary Generator with Scale-Invariant Relation Modeling for Temporal Action Localization: Submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2020

This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2020 Task 1 (\textbf{temporal action localization/detection}). Temporal action localization requires to not only precisely locate the temporal boundaries of action instances, but also accurately classify the untrimmed videos into specific categories. In this paper, we decouple the temporal action localization task into two stages (i.e. proposal generation and classification) and enrich the proposal diversity through exhaustively exploring the influences of multiple components from different but complementary perspectives. Specifically, in order to generate high-quality proposals, we consider several factors including the video feature encoder, the proposal generator, the proposal-proposal relations, the scale imbalance, and ensemble strategy. Finally, in order to obtain accurate detections, we need to further train an optimal video classifier to recognize the generated proposals. Our proposed scheme achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the temporal action localization task with \textbf{42.26} average mAP on the challenge testing set.

preprint2020arXiv

Complete Strain Mapping of Nanosheets of Tantalum Disulfide

Quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) materials hold promise for future electronics because of their unique band structures that result in electronic and mechanical properties sensitive to crystal strains in all three dimensions. Quantifying crystal strain is a prerequisite to correlating it with the performance of the device, and calls for high resolution but spatially resolved rapid characterization methods. Here we show that using fly-scan nano X-ray diffraction we can accomplish a tensile strain sensitivity below 0.001% with a spatial resolution of better than 80 nm over a spatial extent of 100 $μ$m on quasi 2D flakes of 1T-TaS2. Coherent diffraction patterns were collected from a $\sim$ 100 nm thick sheet of 1T-TaS2 by scanning 12keV focused X-ray beam across and rotating the sample. We demonstrate that the strain distribution around micron and sub-micron sized 'bubbles' that are present in the sample may be reconstructed from these images. The experiments use state of the art synchrotron instrumentation, and will allow rapid and non-intrusive strain mapping of thin film samples and electronic devices based on quasi 2D materials.

preprint2020arXiv

Cost-effectiveness Analysis of Antiepidemic Policies and Global Situation Assessment of COVID-19

With a two-layer contact-dispersion model and data in China, we analyze the cost-effectiveness of three types of antiepidemic measures for COVID-19: regular epidemiological control, local social interaction control, and inter-city travel restriction. We find that: 1) intercity travel restriction has minimal or even negative effect compared to the other two at the national level; 2) the time of reaching turning point is independent of the current number of cases, and only related to the enforcement stringency of epidemiological control and social interaction control measures; 3) strong enforcement at the early stage is the only opportunity to maximize both antiepidemic effectiveness and cost-effectiveness; 4) mediocre stringency of social interaction measures is the worst choice. Subsequently, we cluster countries/regions into four groups based on their control measures and provide situation assessment and policy suggestions for each group.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Spectrum Sensing and Aggregation in Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

In this paper, the problem of dynamic spectrum sensing and aggregation is investigated in a wireless network containing N correlated channels, where these channels are occupied or vacant following an unknown joint 2-state Markov model. At each time slot, a single cognitive user with certain bandwidth requirement either stays idle or selects a segment comprising C (C < N) contiguous channels to sense. Then, the vacant channels in the selected segment will be aggregated for satisfying the user requirement. The user receives a binary feedback signal indicating whether the transmission is successful or not (i.e., ACK signal) after each transmission, and makes next decision based on the sensing channel states. Here, we aim to find a policy that can maximize the number of successful transmissions without interrupting the primary users (PUs). The problem can be considered as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) due to without full observation of system environment. We implement a Deep Q-Network (DQN) to address the challenge of unknown system dynamics and computational expenses. The performance of DQN, Q-Learning, and the Improvident Policy with known system dynamics is evaluated through simulations. The simulation results show that DQN can achieve near-optimal performance among different system scenarios only based on partial observations and ACK signals.

preprint2020arXiv

Depth Based Semantic Scene Completion with Position Importance Aware Loss

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) refers to the task of inferring the 3D semantic segmentation of a scene while simultaneously completing the 3D shapes. We propose PALNet, a novel hybrid network for SSC based on single depth. PALNet utilizes a two-stream network to extract both 2D and 3D features from multi-stages using fine-grained depth information to efficiently captures the context, as well as the geometric cues of the scene. Current methods for SSC treat all parts of the scene equally causing unnecessary attention to the interior of objects. To address this problem, we propose Position Aware Loss(PA-Loss) which is position importance aware while training the network. Specifically, PA-Loss considers Local Geometric Anisotropy to determine the importance of different positions within the scene. It is beneficial for recovering key details like the boundaries of objects and the corners of the scene. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superior performance. Models and Video demo can be found at: https://github.com/UniLauX/PALNet.

preprint2020arXiv

Discriminability Distillation in Group Representation Learning

Learning group representation is a commonly concerned issue in tasks where the basic unit is a group, set, or sequence. Previously, the research community tries to tackle it by aggregating the elements in a group based on an indicator either defined by humans such as the quality and saliency, or generated by a black box such as the attention score. This article provides a more essential and explicable view. We claim the most significant indicator to show whether the group representation can be benefited from one of its element is not the quality or an inexplicable score, but the discriminability w.r.t. the model. We explicitly design the discrimiability using embedded class centroids on a proxy set. We show the discrimiability knowledge has good properties that can be distilled by a light-weight distillation network and can be generalized on the unseen target set. The whole procedure is denoted as discriminability distillation learning (DDL). The proposed DDL can be flexibly plugged into many group-based recognition tasks without influencing the original training procedures. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks have proven the effectiveness of DDL for both accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, it pushes forward the state-of-the-art results on these tasks by an impressive margin.

preprint2020arXiv

DPGN: Distribution Propagation Graph Network for Few-shot Learning

Most graph-network-based meta-learning approaches model instance-level relation of examples. We extend this idea further to explicitly model the distribution-level relation of one example to all other examples in a 1-vs-N manner. We propose a novel approach named distribution propagation graph network (DPGN) for few-shot learning. It conveys both the distribution-level relations and instance-level relations in each few-shot learning task. To combine the distribution-level relations and instance-level relations for all examples, we construct a dual complete graph network which consists of a point graph and a distribution graph with each node standing for an example. Equipped with dual graph architecture, DPGN propagates label information from labeled examples to unlabeled examples within several update generations. In extensive experiments on few-shot learning benchmarks, DPGN outperforms state-of-the-art results by a large margin in 5% $\sim$ 12% under supervised setting and 7% $\sim$ 13% under semi-supervised setting. Code will be released.

preprint2020arXiv

Dual Gaussian-based Variational Subspace Disentanglement for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging and essential task in night-time intelligent surveillance systems. Except for the intra-modality variance that RGB-RGB person re-identification mainly overcomes, VI-ReID suffers from additional inter-modality variance caused by the inherent heterogeneous gap. To solve the problem, we present a carefully designed dual Gaussian-based variational auto-encoder (DG-VAE), which disentangles an identity-discriminable and an identity-ambiguous cross-modality feature subspace, following a mixture-of-Gaussians (MoG) prior and a standard Gaussian distribution prior, respectively. Disentangling cross-modality identity-discriminable features leads to more robust retrieval for VI-ReID. To achieve efficient optimization like conventional VAE, we theoretically derive two variational inference terms for the MoG prior under the supervised setting, which not only restricts the identity-discriminable subspace so that the model explicitly handles the cross-modality intra-identity variance, but also enables the MoG distribution to avoid posterior collapse. Furthermore, we propose a triplet swap reconstruction (TSR) strategy to promote the above disentangling process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two VI-ReID datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Dynamic State Estimation for Power System Control and Protection

Dynamic state estimation (DSE) accurately tracks the dynamics of a power system and provides the evolution of the system state in real-time. This paper focuses on the control and protection applications of DSE, comprehensively presenting different facets of control and protection challenges arising in modern power systems. It is demonstrated how these challenges are effectively addressed with DSE-enabled solutions. As precursors to these solutions, reformulation of DSE considering both synchrophasor and sampled value measurements and comprehensive comparisons of DSE and observers have been presented. The usefulness and necessity of DSE based solutions in ensuring system stability, reliable protection and security, and resilience by revamping of control and protection methods are shown through examples, practical applications, and suggestions for further development.

preprint2020arXiv

Frobenius $n$-exangulated categories

Herschend-Liu-Nakaoka introduced the notion of $n$-exangulated categories as higher dimensional analogues of extriangulated categories defined by Nakaoka-Palu. The class of $n$-exangulated categories contains $n$-exact categories and $(n+2)$-angulated categories as examples. In this article, we introduce a notion of Frobenius $n$-exangulated categories which are a generalization of Frobenius $n$-exact categories. We show that the stable category of a Frobenius $n$-exangulated category is an $(n+2)$-angulated category. As an application, this result generalizes the work by Jasso. We provide a class of $n$-exangulated categories which are neither $n$-exact categories nor $(n+2)$-angulated categories. Finally, we discuss an application of the main results and give some examples illustrating it.

preprint2020arXiv

Generalizing Tensor Decomposition for N-ary Relational Knowledge Bases

With the rapid development of knowledge bases (KBs), link prediction task, which completes KBs with missing facts, has been broadly studied in especially binary relational KBs (a.k.a knowledge graph) with powerful tensor decomposition related methods. However, the ubiquitous n-ary relational KBs with higher-arity relational facts are paid less attention, in which existing translation based and neural network based approaches have weak expressiveness and high complexity in modeling various relations. Tensor decomposition has not been considered for n-ary relational KBs, while directly extending tensor decomposition related methods of binary relational KBs to the n-ary case does not yield satisfactory results due to exponential model complexity and their strong assumptions on binary relations. To generalize tensor decomposition for n-ary relational KBs, in this work, we propose GETD, a generalized model based on Tucker decomposition and Tensor Ring decomposition. The existing negative sampling technique is also generalized to the n-ary case for GETD. In addition, we theoretically prove that GETD is fully expressive to completely represent any KBs. Extensive evaluations on two representative n-ary relational KB datasets demonstrate the superior performance of GETD, significantly improving the state-of-the-art methods by over 15\%. Moreover, GETD further obtains the state-of-the-art results on the benchmark binary relational KB datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Hyperspectral Classification Based on 3D Asymmetric Inception Network with Data Fusion Transfer Learning

Hyperspectral image(HSI) classification has been improved with convolutional neural network(CNN) in very recent years. Being different from the RGB datasets, different HSI datasets are generally captured by various remote sensors and have different spectral configurations. Moreover, each HSI dataset only contains very limited training samples and thus it is prone to overfitting when using deep CNNs. In this paper, we first deliver a 3D asymmetric inception network, AINet, to overcome the overfitting problem. With the emphasis on spectral signatures over spatial contexts of HSI data, AINet can convey and classify the features effectively. In addition, the proposed data fusion transfer learning strategy is beneficial in boosting the classification performance. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach beat all of the state-of-art methods on several HSI benchmarks, including Pavia University, Indian Pines and Kennedy Space Center(KSC). Code can be found at: https://github.com/UniLauX/AINet.

preprint2020arXiv

Image Retrieval for Structure-from-Motion via Graph Convolutional Network

Conventional image retrieval techniques for Structure-from-Motion (SfM) suffer from the limit of effectively recognizing repetitive patterns and cannot guarantee to create just enough match pairs with high precision and high recall. In this paper, we present a novel retrieval method based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to generate accurate pairwise matches without costly redundancy. We formulate image retrieval task as a node binary classification problem in graph data: a node is marked as positive if it shares the scene overlaps with the query image. The key idea is that we find that the local context in feature space around a query image contains rich information about the matchable relation between this image and its neighbors. By constructing a subgraph surrounding the query image as input data, we adopt a learnable GCN to exploit whether nodes in the subgraph have overlapping regions with the query photograph. Experiments demonstrate that our method performs remarkably well on the challenging dataset of highly ambiguous and duplicated scenes. Besides, compared with state-of-the-art matchable retrieval methods, the proposed approach significantly reduces useless attempted matches without sacrificing the accuracy and completeness of reconstruction.

preprint2020arXiv

Kondo scenario of the γ-α phase transition in single crystalline Cerium thin films

The physical mechanism driving the $γ$-$α$ phase transition of face-centre-cubic (fcc) cerium (Ce) remains controversial until now. In this work, high quality single crystalline fcc-Ce thin films were grown on Graphene/6$H$-SiC(0001) substrate, and explored by XRD and ARPES measurement. XRD spectra showed a clear $γ$-$α$ phase transition at $T_{γ-α}\approx$ 50 K, which is retarded by strain effect from substrate comparing with $T_{γ-α}$ (about 140 K) of the bulk Ce metal. However, APRES spectra did not show any signature of $α$-phase emerging in the surface-layer from 300 K to 17 K, which implied that $α$-phase might form at the bulk-layer of our Ce thin films. Besides, an evident Kondo dip near Fermi energy was observed in the APRES spectrum at 80 K, indicting the formation of Kondo singlet states in $γ$-Ce. Furthermore, the DFT+DMFT calculations were performed to simulate the electronic structures and the theoretical spectral functions agreed well with the experimental ARPES spectra. In $γ$-Ce, the behavior of the self-energy's imaginary part at low frequency not only confirmed that the Kondo singlet states emerged at $T_{\rm KS} \geq 80$ K, but also implied that they became coherent states at a lower characteristic temperature ($T_{\rm coh}\sim 40$ K) due to the indirect RKKY interaction among $f$-$f$ electrons. Besides, $T_{\rm coh}$ from the theoretical simulation was close to $T_{γ-α}$ from the XRD spectra. These issues suggested that the Kondo scenario might play an important role in the $γ$-$α$ phase transition of cerium thin films.

preprint2020arXiv

KPNet: Towards Minimal Face Detector

The small receptive field and capacity of minimal neural networks limit their performance when using them to be the backbone of detectors. In this work, we find that the appearance feature of a generic face is discriminative enough for a tiny and shallow neural network to verify from the background. And the essential barriers behind us are 1) the vague definition of the face bounding box and 2) tricky design of anchor-boxes or receptive field. Unlike most top-down methods for joint face detection and alignment, the proposed KPNet detects small facial keypoints instead of the whole face by in a bottom-up manner. It first predicts the facial landmarks from a low-resolution image via the well-designed fine-grained scale approximation and scale adaptive soft-argmax operator. Finally, the precise face bounding boxes, no matter how we define it, can be inferred from the keypoints. Without any complex head architecture or meticulous network designing, the KPNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on generic face detection and alignment benchmarks with only $\sim1M$ parameters, which runs at 1000fps on GPU and is easy to perform real-time on most modern front-end chips.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Where to Focus for Efficient Video Object Detection

Transferring existing image-based detectors to the video is non-trivial since the quality of frames is always deteriorated by part occlusion, rare pose, and motion blur. Previous approaches exploit to propagate and aggregate features across video frames by using optical flow-warping. However, directly applying image-level optical flow onto the high-level features might not establish accurate spatial correspondences. Therefore, a novel module called Learnable Spatio-Temporal Sampling (LSTS) has been proposed to learn semantic-level correspondences among adjacent frame features accurately. The sampled locations are first randomly initialized, then updated iteratively to find better spatial correspondences guided by detection supervision progressively. Besides, Sparsely Recursive Feature Updating (SRFU) module and Dense Feature Aggregation (DFA) module are also introduced to model temporal relations and enhance per-frame features, respectively. Without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet VID dataset with less computational complexity and real-time speed. Code will be made available at https://github.com/jiangzhengkai/LSTS.

preprint2020arXiv

Long-Range Gesture Recognition Using Millimeter Wave Radar

Millimeter wave (mmWave) based gesture recognition technology provides a good human computer interaction (HCI) experience. Prior works focus on the close-range gesture recognition, but fall short in range extension, i.e., they are unable to recognize gestures more than one meter away from considerable noise motions. In this paper, we design a long-range gesture recognition model which utilizes a novel data processing method and a customized artificial Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Firstly, we break down gestures into multiple reflection points and extract their spatial-temporal features which depict gesture details. Secondly, we design a CNN to learn changing patterns of extracted features respectively and output the recognition result. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed system by implementing on a commodity mmWave radar. Besides, we also provide more extensive assessments to demonstrate that the proposed system is practical in several real-world scenarios.

preprint2020arXiv

Low-Temperature Thermopower in CoSbS

We report giant thermopower S = 2.5 mV/K in CoSbS single crystals, a material that shows strong high-temperature thermoelectric performance when doped with Ni or Se. Changes of low temperature thermopower induced by magnetic field point to mechanism of electronic diffusion of carriers in the heavy valence band. Intrinsic magnetic susceptibility is consistent with the Kondo- Insulator-like accumulation of electronic states around the gap edges. This suggests that giant thermopower stems from temperature-dependent renormalization of the non-interacting bands and buildup of the electronic correlations on cooling.

preprint2020arXiv

Magnetic mixed valent semimetal EuZnSb$_2$ with Dirac states in the band structure

We report discovery of new antiferromagnetic semimetal EuZnSb$_2$, obtained and studied in the form of single crystals. Electric resistivity, magnetic susceptibility and heat capacity indicate antiferromagnetic order of Eu with $T_N$ = 20 K. The effective moment of Eu$^{2+}$ inferred from the magnetization and specific heat measurement is 3.5 $μ_B$, smaller than the theoretical value of Eu$^{2+}$ due to presence of both Eu$^{3+}$ and Eu$^{2+}$. Magnetic field-dependent resistivity measurements suggest dominant quasi two dimensional Fermi surfaces whereas the first-principle calculations point to the presence of Dirac fermions. Therefore, EuZnSb$_2$ could represent the first platform to study the interplay of dynamical charge fluctuations, localized magnetic 4$f$ moments and Dirac states with Sb orbital character.

preprint2020arXiv

Modeling Event Propagation via Graph Biased Temporal Point Process

Temporal point process is widely used for sequential data modeling. In this paper, we focus on the problem of modeling sequential event propagation in graph, such as retweeting by social network users, news transmitting between websites, etc. Given a collection of event propagation sequences, conventional point process model consider only the event history, i.e. embed event history into a vector, not the latent graph structure. We propose a Graph Biased Temporal Point Process (GBTPP) leveraging the structural information from graph representation learning, where the direct influence between nodes and indirect influence from event history is modeled respectively. Moreover, the learned node embedding vector is also integrated into the embedded event history as side information. Experiments on a synthetic dataset and two real-world datasets show the efficacy of our model compared to conventional methods and state-of-the-art.

preprint2020arXiv

Neutrino effects on the morphology of cosmic large-scale structure

In this work, we propose a powerful probe of neutrino effects on the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe, i.e., Minkowski functionals (MFs). The morphology of LSS can be fully described by four MFs. This tool, with strong statistical power, is robust to various systematics and can comprehensively probe all orders of N-point statistics. By using a pair of high-resolution N-body simulations, for the first time, we comprehensively studied the subtle neutrino effects on the morphology of LSS. For an ideal LSS survey of volume $\sim1.73$ Gpc$^3$/$h^3$, neutrino signals are mainly detected from void regions with a significant level up to $\thicksim 10σ$ and $\thicksim 300σ$ for CDM and total matter density fields, respectively. This demonstrates its enormous potential for much improving the neutrino mass constraint in the data analysis of up-coming ambitious LSS surveys.

preprint2020arXiv

On the relation between relative rigid and support tilting

Let B be an extriangulated category with enough projectives and enough injectives. Let C be a fully rigid subcategory of B which admits a twin cotorsion pair ((C,K),(K,D)). The quotient category B/K is abelian, we assume that it is hereditary and has finite length. In this article, we study the relation between support tilting subcategories of B/K and maximal relative rigid subcategories of B. More precisely, we show that the image of any cluster tilting subcategory of B is support tilting in B/K and any support tilting subcategory in B/K can be lifted to a unique relative maximal rigid subcategory in B. We also give a bijection between these two classes of subcategories if C is generated by an object.

preprint2020arXiv

PulseGAN: Learning to generate realistic pulse waveforms in remote photoplethysmography

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a non-contact technique for measuring cardiac signals from facial videos. High-quality rPPG pulse signals are urgently demanded in many fields, such as health monitoring and emotion recognition. However, most of the existing rPPG methods can only be used to get average heart rate (HR) values due to the limitation of inaccurate pulse signals. In this paper, a new framework based on generative adversarial network, called PulseGAN, is introduced to generate realistic rPPG pulse signals through denoising the chrominance signals. Considering that the cardiac signal is quasi-periodic and has apparent time-frequency characteristics, the error losses defined in time and spectrum domains are both employed with the adversarial loss to enforce the model generating accurate pulse waveforms as its reference. The proposed framework is tested on the public UBFC-RPPG database in both within-database and cross-database configurations. The results show that the PulseGAN framework can effectively improve the waveform quality, thereby enhancing the accuracy of HR, the heart rate variability (HRV) and the interbeat interval (IBI). The proposed method achieves the best performance compared to the denoising autoencoder (DAE) and CHROM, with the mean absolute error of AVNN (the average of all normal-to-normal intervals) improving 20.85% and 41.19%, and the mean absolute error of SDNN (the standard deviation of all NN intervals) improving 20.28% and 37.53%, respectively, in the cross-database test. This framework can be easily extended to other existing deep learning based rPPG methods, which is expected to expand the application scope of rPPG techniques.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantifying urban areas with multi-source data based on percolation theory

Quantifying urban areas is crucial for addressing associated urban issues such as environmental and sustainable problems. Remote sensing data, especially the nighttime light images, have been widely used to delineate urbanized areas across the world. Meanwhile, some emerging urban data, such as volunteered geographical information (e.g., OpenStreetMap) and social sensing data (e.g., mobile phone and social media), have also shown great potential in revealing urban boundaries and dynamics. However, consistent and robust methods to quantify urban areas from these multi-source data have remained elusive. Here, we propose a percolation-based method to extract urban areas from these multi-source urban data. We derive the optimal urban/non-urban threshold by considering the critical nature of urban systems with the support of the percolation theory. Furthermore, we apply the method with three open-source datasets - population, road, and nighttime light - to 28 countries. We show that the proposed method captures the similar urban characteristics in terms of urban areas from multi-source data, and Zipf's law holds well in most countries. The accuracy of the derived urban areas by different datasets has been validated with the Landsat-based reference data in 10 cities, and the accuracy can be further improved through data fusion ($κ=0.69-0.85$, mean $κ=0.78$). Our study not only provides an efficient method to quantify urban areas with open-source data, but also deepens the understanding of urban systems and sheds some light on multi-source data fusion in geographical fields.

preprint2020arXiv

Revisiting the Sibling Head in Object Detector

The ``shared head for classification and localization'' (sibling head), firstly denominated in Fast RCNN~\cite{girshick2015fast}, has been leading the fashion of the object detection community in the past five years. This paper provides the observation that the spatial misalignment between the two object functions in the sibling head can considerably hurt the training process, but this misalignment can be resolved by a very simple operator called task-aware spatial disentanglement (TSD). Considering the classification and regression, TSD decouples them from the spatial dimension by generating two disentangled proposals for them, which are estimated by the shared proposal. This is inspired by the natural insight that for one instance, the features in some salient area may have rich information for classification while these around the boundary may be good at bounding box regression. Surprisingly, this simple design can boost all backbones and models on both MS COCO and Google OpenImage consistently by ~3% mAP. Further, we propose a progressive constraint to enlarge the performance margin between the disentangled and the shared proposals, and gain ~1% more mAP. We show the \algname{} breaks through the upper bound of nowadays single-model detector by a large margin (mAP 49.4 with ResNet-101, 51.2 with SENet154), and is the core model of our 1st place solution on the Google OpenImage Challenge 2019.

preprint2020arXiv

Room-Temperature Skyrmion Thermopower in Fe3Sn2

We present first room-temperature thermoelectric signature of the skyrmion lattice. This was observed in Fe3Sn2, a Kagome Dirac crystal with massive Dirac fermions that features high-temperature skyrmion phase. The room-temperature skyrmion lattice shows magnetic-field dependence of the wavevector whereas thermopower is dominated by the electronic diffusion mechanism, allowing for the skyrmionic bubble lattice detection. Our results pave the way for the future skyrmion-based devices based on the manipulation of the thermal gradient.

preprint2020arXiv

Rotate-and-Render: Unsupervised Photorealistic Face Rotation from Single-View Images

Though face rotation has achieved rapid progress in recent years, the lack of high-quality paired training data remains a great hurdle for existing methods. The current generative models heavily rely on datasets with multi-view images of the same person. Thus, their generated results are restricted by the scale and domain of the data source. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised framework that can synthesize photo-realistic rotated faces using only single-view image collections in the wild. Our key insight is that rotating faces in the 3D space back and forth, and re-rendering them to the 2D plane can serve as a strong self-supervision. We leverage the recent advances in 3D face modeling and high-resolution GAN to constitute our building blocks. Since the 3D rotation-and-render on faces can be applied to arbitrary angles without losing details, our approach is extremely suitable for in-the-wild scenarios (i.e. no paired data are available), where existing methods fall short. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach has superior synthesis quality as well as identity preservation over the state-of-the-art methods, across a wide range of poses and domains. Furthermore, we validate that our rotate-and-render framework naturally can act as an effective data augmentation engine for boosting modern face recognition systems even on strong baseline models.

preprint2020arXiv

Search to Distill: Pearls are Everywhere but not the Eyes

Standard Knowledge Distillation (KD) approaches distill the knowledge of a cumbersome teacher model into the parameters of a student model with a pre-defined architecture. However, the knowledge of a neural network, which is represented by the network's output distribution conditioned on its input, depends not only on its parameters but also on its architecture. Hence, a more generalized approach for KD is to distill the teacher's knowledge into both the parameters and architecture of the student. To achieve this, we present a new Architecture-aware Knowledge Distillation (AKD) approach that finds student models (pearls for the teacher) that are best for distilling the given teacher model. In particular, we leverage Neural Architecture Search (NAS), equipped with our KD-guided reward, to search for the best student architectures for a given teacher. Experimental results show our proposed AKD consistently outperforms the conventional NAS plus KD approach, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the ImageNet classification task under various latency settings. Furthermore, the best AKD student architecture for the ImageNet classification task also transfers well to other tasks such as million level face recognition and ensemble learning.

preprint2020arXiv

Single Cell Transcriptome Research in Human Placenta

Human placenta is a complex and heterogeneous organ interfacing between the mother and the fetus that supports fetal development. Alterations to placental structural components are associated with various pregnancy complications. To reveal the heterogeneity among various placenta cell types in normal and diseased placentas, as well as elucidate molecular interactions within a population of placental cells, a new genomics technology called single cell RNA-Seq (or scRNA-seq) has been employed in the last couple of years. Here we review the principles of scRNA-seq technology, and summarize the recent human placenta studies at scRNA-seq level across gestational ages as well as in pregnancy complications such as preterm birth and preeclampsia. We list the computational analysis platforms and resources available for the public use. Lastly, we discuss the future areas of interest for placenta single cell studies, as well as the data analytics needed to accomplish them.

preprint2020arXiv

Site testing campaign for the Large Optical/infrared Telescope of China: Overview

The Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT) is a ground-based 12m diameter optical/infrared telescope which is proposed to be built in the western part of China in the next decade. Based on satellite remote sensing data, along with geographical, logistical and political considerations, three candidate sites were chosen for ground-based astronomical performance monitoring. These sites include: Ali in Tibet, Daocheng in Sichuan, and Muztagh Ata in Xinjiang. Up until now, all three sites have continuously collected data for two years. In this paper, we will introduce this site testing campaign, and present its monitoring results obtained during the period between March 2017 and March 2019.

preprint2020arXiv

Spin-Triplet Excitonic Insulator: The Case of Graphone

While various excitonic insulators have been studied in the literature, due to the perceived too-small spin splitting, spin-triplet excitonic insulator is rare. In two-dimensional systems such as a graphone, however, it is possible, as revealed by first-principles calculations coupled with Bethe-Salpeter equation. The critical temperature, given by an effective Hamiltonian, is 11.5 K. While detecting excitonic insulators is still a daunting challenge, the condensation of triplet excitons will result in spin superfluidity, which can be directly measured by a transport experiment. Nonlocal dielectric screening also leads to an unexpected phenomenon, namely, an indirect-to-direct transition crossover between single-particle band and exciton dispersion in graphone, which offers yet another test by experiment.

preprint2020arXiv

Temporal Interlacing Network

For a long time, the vision community tries to learn the spatio-temporal representation by combining convolutional neural network together with various temporal models, such as the families of Markov chain, optical flow, RNN and temporal convolution. However, these pipelines consume enormous computing resources due to the alternately learning process for spatial and temporal information. One natural question is whether we can embed the temporal information into the spatial one so the information in the two domains can be jointly learned once-only. In this work, we answer this question by presenting a simple yet powerful operator -- temporal interlacing network (TIN). Instead of learning the temporal features, TIN fuses the two kinds of information by interlacing spatial representations from the past to the future, and vice versa. A differentiable interlacing target can be learned to control the interlacing process. In this way, a heavy temporal model is replaced by a simple interlacing operator. We theoretically prove that with a learnable interlacing target, TIN performs equivalently to the regularized temporal convolution network (r-TCN), but gains 4% more accuracy with 6x less latency on 6 challenging benchmarks. These results push the state-of-the-art performances of video understanding by a considerable margin. Not surprising, the ensemble model of the proposed TIN won the $1^{st}$ place in the ICCV19 - Multi Moments in Time challenge. Code is made available to facilitate further research at https://github.com/deepcs233/TIN

preprint2020arXiv

Three-dimensional Fermi surface and small effective masses in Mo8Ga41

We report Fermi surface characteristics of Mo8Ga41, a two-gap superconductor with critical temperature Tc = 10 K, obtained from quantum oscillation measurements. Four major frequencies have been observed with relatively small quasiparticle masses. Angular dependence of major frequencies indicates three-dimensional Fermi surface sheets. This argues for a relatively isotropic superconducting state and, given its relatively high Tc, shows that a search for materials in this class could be of interest for superconducting wire applications.

preprint2020arXiv

Three-dimensional Ising Ferrimagnetism of Cr-Fe-Cr trimers in FeCr2Te4

We carried out a comprehensive study of magnetic critical behavior in single crystals of ternary chalcogenide FeCr$_2$Te$_4$ that undergoes a ferrimagnetic transition below $T_c$ $\sim$ 123 K. Detailed critical behavior analysis and scaled magnetic entropy change indicate a second-order ferrimagentic transition. Critical exponents $β= 0.30(1)$ with $T_c = 122.4(5)$ K, $γ= 1.22(1)$ with $T_c = 122.8(1)$ K, and $δ= 4.24(2)$ at $T_c$ $\sim$ 123 K suggest that the spins approach three-dimensional Ising ($β$ = 0.325, $γ$ = 1.24, and $δ$ = 4.82) model coupled with the attractive long-range interactions between spins that decay as $J(r)\approx r^{-4.88}$. Our results suggest that the ferrimagnetism in FeCr$_2$Te$_4$ is due to itinerant ferromagnetism among the antiferromagnetically coupled Cr-Fe-Cr trimers.

preprint2020arXiv

Top-1 Solution of Multi-Moments in Time Challenge 2019

In this technical report, we briefly introduce the solutions of our team 'Efficient' for the Multi-Moments in Time challenge in ICCV 2019. We first conduct several experiments with popular Image-Based action recognition methods TRN, TSN, and TSM. Then a novel temporal interlacing network is proposed towards fast and accurate recognition. Besides, the SlowFast network and its variants are explored. Finally, we ensemble all the above models and achieve 67.22\% on the validation set and 60.77\% on the test set, which ranks 1st on the final leaderboard. In addition, we release a new code repository for video understanding which unifies state-of-the-art 2D and 3D methods based on PyTorch. The solution of the challenge is also included in the repository, which is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/X-Temporal.

preprint2020arXiv

Transparent Gatable Superconducting Shadow Junctions

Gate tunable junctions are key elements in quantum devices based on hybrid semiconductor-superconductor materials. They serve multiple purposes ranging from tunnel spectroscopy probes to voltage-controlled qubit operations in gatemon and topological qubits. Common to all is that junction transparency plays a critical role. In this study, we grow single crystalline InAs, InSb and $\mathrm{InAs_{1-x}Sb_x}$ nanowires with epitaxial superconductors and in-situ shadowed junctions in a single-step molecular beam epitaxy process. We investigate correlations between fabrication parameters, junction morphologies, and electronic transport properties of the junctions and show that the examined in-situ shadowed junctions are of significantly higher quality than the etched junctions. By varying the edge sharpness of the shadow junctions we show that the sharpest edges yield the highest junction transparency for all three examined semiconductors. Further, critical supercurrent measurements reveal an extraordinarily high $I_\mathrm{C} R_\mathrm{N}$, close to the KO$-$2 limit. This study demonstrates a promising engineering path towards reliable gate-tunable superconducting qubits.

preprint2020arXiv

Understanding the mesoscopic scaling patterns within cities

Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale systematically with population sizes across cities, also known as urban scaling laws. However, at the mesoscopic level, we lack an understanding of whether the simple scaling relationship holds within cities, which is a fundamental question regarding the spatial origin of scaling in urban systems. Here, by analyzing four extensive datasets covering millions of mobile phone users and urban facilities, we investigate the scaling phenomena within cities. We find that the mesoscopic infrastructure volume and socioeconomic activity scale sub- and super-linearly with the active population, respectively. For a same scaling phenomenon, however, the exponents vary in cities of similar population sizes. To explain these empirical observations, we propose a conceptual framework by considering the heterogeneous distributions of population and facilities, and the spatial interactions between them. Analytical and numerical results suggest that, despite the large number of complexities that influence urban activities, the simple interaction rules can effectively explain the observed regularity and heterogeneity in scaling behaviors within cities.

preprint2020arXiv

Universal Urban Spreading Pattern of COVID-19 and Its Underlying Mechanism

Currently, the global situation of COVID-19 is aggravating, pressingly calling for efficient control and prevention measures. Understanding spreading pattern of COVID-19 has been widely recognized as a vital step for implementing non-pharmaceutical measures. Previous studies investigated such an issue in large-scale (e.g., inter-country or inter-state) scenarios while urban spreading pattern still remains an open issue. Here, we fill this gap by leveraging the trajectory data of 197,808 smartphone users (including 17,808 anonymous confirmed cases) in 9 cities in China. We find a universal spreading pattern in all cities: the spatial distribution of confirmed cases follows a power-law-like model and the spreading centroid is time-invariant. Moreover, we reveal that human mobility in a city drives the spatialtemporal spreading process: long average travelling distance results in a high growth rate of spreading radius and wide spatial diffusion of confirmed cases. With such insight, we adopt Kendall model to simulate urban spreading of COVID-19 that can well fit the real spreading process. Our results unveil the underlying mechanism behind the spatial-temporal urban evolution of COVID-19, and can be used to evaluate the performance of mobility restriction policies implemented by many governments and to estimate the evolving spreading situation of COVID-19.

preprint2019arXiv

A comprehensive statistical study on gamma-ray bursts

In order to obtain an overview of the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), we need a full sample. In this paper, we collected 6289 GRBs (from GRB 910421 to GRB 160509A) from the literature, including prompt emission, afterglow and host galaxy properties. We hope to use this large sample to reveal the intrinsic properties of GRB. We have listed all the data in machine readable tables, including the properties of the GRBs, correlation coefficients and linear regression results of two arbitrary parameters, and linear regression results of any three parameters. These machine readable tables could be used as a data reservoir for further studies on the classifications or correlations. One may find some intrinsic properties from these statistical results. With this comprehensive table, it is possible to find relations between different parameters, and to classify the GRBs into different kinds of sub-groups. With the completion, it may reveal the nature of GRBs and may be used as tools like pseudo-redshift indicators, standard candles, etc. All the machine readable data and statistical results are available on the website of the journal.

preprint2019arXiv

Boosting Throughput and Efficiency of Hardware Spiking Neural Accelerators using Time Compression Supporting Multiple Spike Codes

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are the third generation of neural networks and can explore both rate and temporal coding for energy-efficient event-driven computation. However, the decision accuracy of existing SNN designs is contingent upon processing a large number of spikes over a long period. Nevertheless, the switching power of SNN hardware accelerators is proportional to the number of spikes processed while the length of spike trains limits throughput and static power efficiency. This paper presents the first study on developing temporal compression to significantly boost throughput and reduce energy dissipation of digital hardware SNN accelerators while being applicable to multiple spike codes. The proposed compression architectures consist of low-cost input spike compression units, novel input-and-output-weighted spiking neurons, and reconfigurable time constant scaling to support large and flexible time compression ratios. Our compression architectures can be transparently applied to any given pre-designed SNNs employing either rate or temporal codes while incurring minimal modification of the neural models, learning algorithms, and hardware design. Using spiking speech and image recognition datasets, we demonstrate the feasibility of supporting large time compression ratios of up to 16x, delivering up to 15.93x, 13.88x, and 86.21x improvements in throughput, energy dissipation, the tradeoffs between hardware area, runtime, energy, and classification accuracy, respectively based on different spike codes on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA. These results are achieved while incurring little extra hardware overhead.

preprint2019arXiv

Critical behavior and magnetocaloric effect in VI$_3$

Layered van der Waals ferromagnets are promising candidates for designing new spintronic devices. Here we investigated the critical properties and magnetocaloric effect connected with ferromagnetic transition in layered van der Waals VI$_3$ single crystals. The critical exponents $β= 0.244(5)$ with a critical temperature $T_c = 50.10(2)$ K and $γ= 1.028(12)$ with $T_c = 49.97(5)$ K are obtained from the modified Arrott plot, whereas $δ= 5.24(2)$ is obtained from a critical isotherm analysis at $T_c = 50$ K. The magnetic entropy change $-ΔS_M(T,H)$ features a maximum at $T_c$, i.e., $-ΔS_M^{max} \sim$ 2.64 (2.27) J kg$^{-1}$ K$^{-1}$ with out-of-plane (in-plane) field change of 5 T. This is consistent with $-ΔS_M^{max}$ $\sim$ 2.80 J kg$^{-1}$ K$^{-1}$ deduced from heat capacity and the corresponding adiabatic temperature change $ΔT_{ad}$ $\sim$ 0.96 K with out-of-plane field change of 5 T. The critical analysis suggests that the ferromagnetic phase transition in VI$_3$ is situated close to a three- to two-dimensional critical point. The rescaled $ΔS_M(T,H)$ curves collapse onto a universal curve, confirming a second-order type of the magnetic transition and reliability of the obtained critical exponents.

preprint2019arXiv

Magnetic anisotropy and entropy change in trigonal Cr$_{0.62}$Te

We present a comprehensive investigation on anisotropic magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of the quasi-two-dimensional weak itinerant ferromagnet trigonal Cr$_{0.62}$Te single crystals. Magnetic-anisotropy-induced satellite transition $T^*$ is observed at low fields applied parallel to the $ab$ plane below $T_c$. The $T^*$ is featured by an anomalous magnetization downturn, similar to that in structurally related CrI$_3$, and shows a monotonous shift towards lower temperature with increasing field. Magnetocrystalline anisotropy is also reflected in magnetic entropy change $ΔS_M(T,H)$ and relative cooling power RCP. Given the high $T_c$, Cr$_{0.62}$Te crystals are materials of interest for nanofabrication in basic science and applied technology.

preprint2019arXiv

Probing ultracold chemistry using ion spectrometry

Rapid progress in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics techniques enabled the creation of ultracold samples of molecular species and opened opportunities to explore chemistry in the ultralow temperature regime. In particular, both the external and internal quantum degrees of freedom of the reactant atoms and molecules are controlled, allowing studies that explored the role of the long range potential in ultracold reactions. The kinetics of these reactions have typically been determined using the loss of reactants as proxies. To extend such studies into the short-range, we developed an experimental apparatus that combines the production of quantum-state-selected ultracold KRb molecules with ion mass and kinetic energy spectrometry, and directly observed KRb + KRb reaction intermediates and products [Science, 2019, 366, 1111]. Here, we present the apparatus in detail. For future studies that aim for detecting the quantum states of the reaction products, we demonstrate a photodissociation based scheme to calibrate the ion kinetic energy spectrometer at low energies.

preprint2019arXiv

Quantum sensing with a single-qubit pseudo-Hermitian system

Quantum sensing exploits fundamental features of quantum system to achieve highly efficient measurement of physical quantities. Here, we propose a strategy to realize a single-qubit pseudo-Hermitian sensor from a dilated two-qubit Hermitian system. The pseudo-Hermitian sensor exhibits divergent susceptibility in dynamical evolution that does not necessarily involve exceptional point. We demonstrate its potential advantages to overcome noises that cannot be averaged out by repetitive measurements. The proposal is feasible with the state-of-art experimental capability in a variety of qubit systems, and represents a step towards the application of non-Hermitian physics in quantum sensing.

preprint2019arXiv

Stable halogen 2D Materials: the case of iodine and astatine

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have wide applications towards electronic devices, energy storages, and catalysis, et al. So far, most of the pure element 2D materials are composed of group IIIA,IVA, and VA elements. Beyond the scope, the orbit hybrid configuration becomes a key fact to influence 2D structure stably. Here we show a sp2d3 hybridization in the outmost electrons with O-shell for Iodine and P-shell for astatine element, builds up triangle configuration (beta-type) to form 2D structures beta-iodiene and beta-astatiene. Each atom is connected by pi bonds, and surrounded by 6 atoms. The pi bonds become possible, and band gap approaches zero because of interaction of unpaired single electron to each atom, depending on reducing bond length. By applying compression strain or spin orbit coupling (SOC), the Dirac points or topological nontrivial points can be available in the beta-iodiene and beta-astatiene. Our discovery has paved a new way to construction of 2D materials.

preprint2019arXiv

Valence transition in topological Kondo insulator

We investigate the valence transition in three-dimensional topological Kondo insulator through slave-boson analysis of periodic Anderson model. By including the effect of intra-atomic Coulomb correlation $U_{fc}$ between conduction and local electrons, we find a first-order valence transition from Kondo region to mixed valence upon ascending of local level above a critical $U_{fc}$, and this valence transition usually occurs very close to or simultaneously with a topological transition. Near the parameter region of zero-temperature valence transition, rise of temperature can generate a thermal valence transition from mixed valence to Kondo region, accompanied by a first-order topological transition. Remarkably, above a critical $U_{fc}$ which is considerable smaller than that generating paramagnetic valence transition, the original continuous antiferromagnetic transition is shifted to first order one, at which a discontinuous valence shift takes place. Upon increased $U_{fc}$, the paramagnetic valence transition approaches then converges with the first-order antiferromagnetic transition, leaving an significant valence shift on the magnetic boundary. The continuous antiferromagnetic transition, first-order antiferromagnetic transition, paramagnetic valence transition and topological transitions are all summarized in a global phase diagram. Our proposed exotic transition processes can help to understand the thermal valence variation as well as the valence shift around the pressure-induced magnetic transition in topological Kondo insulator candidates and in other heavy-fermion systems.

preprint2018arXiv

Abelian categories arising from cluster tilting subcategories

For a triangulated category T, if C is a cluster-tilting subcategory of T, then the quotient category T\C is an abelian category. Under certain conditions, the converse also holds. This is an very important result of cluster-tilting theory, due to Koenig-Zhu and Beligiannis. Now let B be a suitable extriangulated category, which is a simultaneous generalization of triangulated categories and exact categories. We introduce the notion of pre-cluster tilting subcategory C of B, which is a generalization of cluster tilting subcategory. We show that C is cluster tilting if and only if B/C is abelian.

preprint2018arXiv

Abelian categories arising from cluster-tilting subcategories II: quotient functors

In this paper, we consider a kind of ideal quotient of an extriangulated category such that the ideal is the kernel of a functor from this extriangulated category to an abelian category. We study a condition when the functor is dense and full, in another word, the ideal quotient becomes abelian. Moreover, a new equivalent characterization of cluster-tilting subcategories is given by applying homological methods according to this functor. As an application, we show that in a connected 2-Calabi-Yau triangulated category B, a functorially finite, extension closed subcategory T of B is cluster tilting if and only if B/T is an abelian category.

preprint2018arXiv

Imaging emergent heavy Dirac fermions of a topological Kondo insulator

Kondo insulators are primary candidates in the search for strongly correlated topological quantum phases, which may host topological order, fractionalization, and non-Abelian statistics. Within some Kondo insulators, the hybridization gap is predicted to protect a nontrivial topological invariant and to harbor emergent heavy Dirac fermion surface modes. We use high-energy-resolution spectroscopic imaging in real and momentum space on the Kondo insulator, SmB$_6$. On cooling through $T^*_Δ\approx$ 35 K we observe the opening of an insulating gap that expands to $Δ\approx$ 10 meV at 2 K. Within the gap, we image the formation of linearly dispersing surface states with effective masses reaching $m^* = (410\pm20)m_e$. We thus demonstrate existence of a strongly correlated topological Kondo insulator phase hosting the heaviest known Dirac fermions.

preprint2018arXiv

Localizations of the hearts of cotorsion pairs associated with mutations

In this article, we study localizations of hearts of cotorsion pairs (U,V) where U is rigid on an extriangulated category B. The hearts of such cotorsion pairs are equivalent to the functor categories over the stable category of U. Inspired by Marsh and Palu, we consider the mutation of U that induces a cotorsion pair (U',V'). Generally speaking, the hearts of (U,V) and (U',V') are not equivalent to each other, but we will give a generalized pseudo-Morita equivalence between certain localizations of their hearts.

preprint2017arXiv

Hearts of twin Cotorsion pairs on extriangulated categories

In this article, we study the heart of a cotorsion pairs on an exact category and a triangulated category in a unified meathod, by means of the notion of an extriangulated category. We prove that the heart is abelian, and construct a cohomological functor to the heart. If the extriangulated category has enough projectives, this functor gives an equivalence between the heart and the category of coherent functors over the coheart modulo projectives. We also show how an n-cluster tilting subcategory of an extriangulated category gives rise to a family of cotorsion pairs with equivalent hearts.

preprint2016arXiv

Adiabatic quantum parameter amplification for generic robust quantum sensing

Quantum enhanced sensing provides a powerful tool for the precise measurement of physical parameters that is applicable in many areas of science and technology. The achievable gain in sensitivity is largely limited by the influence of noise and decoherence. Here, we propose a paradigm of adiabatic quantum parameter amplification to overcome this limitation. We demonstrate that it allows to achieve generic robust quantum sensing, namely it is robust against noise that may even acting on the same degree of freedom as the field. Furthermore, the proposal achieves entanglement-free Heisenberg limit sensitivity that surpasses the limit of classical statistics.

preprint2016arXiv

Atomic Lattice Disorder in Charge Density Wave Phases of Exfoliated Dichalcogenides (1T-TaS2)

Charge density waves (CDW) and their concomitant periodic lattice distortions (PLD) govern the electronic properties in many layered transition-metal dichalcogenides. In particular, 1T-TaS2 undergoes a metal-to-insulator phase transition as the PLD becomes commensurate with the crystal lattice. Here we directly image PLDs of the nearly-commensurate (NC) and commensurate (C) phases in thin exfoliated 1T-TaS2 using atomic resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy at room and cryogenic temperature. At low temperatures, we observe commensurate PLD superstructures, suggesting ordering of the CDWs both in- and out-of-plane. In addition, we discover stacking transitions in the atomic lattice that occur via one bond length shifts. Interestingly, the NC PLDs exist inside both the stacking domains and their boundaries. Transitions in stacking order are expected to create fractional shifts in the CDW between layers and may be another route to manipulate electronic phases in layered dichalcogenides.

preprint2016arXiv

Channel Measurements and Models for High-Speed Train Wireless Communication Systems in Tunnel Scenarios: A Survey

The rapid developments of high-speed trains (HSTs) introduce new challenges to HST wireless communication systems. Realistic HST channel models play a critical role in designing and evaluating HST communication systems. Due to the length limitation, bounding of tunnel itself, and waveguide effect, channel characteristics in tunnel scenarios are very different from those in other HST scenarios. Therefore, accurate tunnel channel models considering both large-scale and small-scale fading characteristics are essential for HST communication systems. Moreover, certain characteristics of tunnel channels have not been investigated sufficiently. This article provides a comprehensive review of the measurement campaigns in tunnels and presents some tunnel channel models using various modeling methods. Finally, future directions in HST tunnel channel measurements and modeling are discussed.

preprint2016arXiv

Crafting GBD-Net for Object Detection

The visual cues from multiple support regions of different sizes and resolutions are complementary in classifying a candidate box in object detection. Effective integration of local and contextual visual cues from these regions has become a fundamental problem in object detection. In this paper, we propose a gated bi-directional CNN (GBD-Net) to pass messages among features from different support regions during both feature learning and feature extraction. Such message passing can be implemented through convolution between neighboring support regions in two directions and can be conducted in various layers. Therefore, local and contextual visual patterns can validate the existence of each other by learning their nonlinear relationships and their close interactions are modeled in a more complex way. It is also shown that message passing is not always helpful but dependent on individual samples. Gated functions are therefore needed to control message transmission, whose on-or-offs are controlled by extra visual evidence from the input sample. The effectiveness of GBD-Net is shown through experiments on three object detection datasets, ImageNet, Pascal VOC2007 and Microsoft COCO. This paper also shows the details of our approach in wining the ImageNet object detection challenge of 2016, with source code provided on \url{https://github.com/craftGBD/craftGBD}.

preprint2016arXiv

Distinct surface and bulk charge density waves in ultrathin 1T-TaS2

We employ low-frequency Raman spectroscopy to study the nearly commensurate (NC) to commensurate (C) charge density wave (CDW) transition in 1T-TaS2 ultrathin flakes protected from oxidation. We identify new modes originating from C phase CDW phonons that are distinct from those seen in bulk 1T-TaS2. We attribute these to CDW modes from the surface layers. By monitoring individual modes with temperature, we find that surfaces undergo a separate, low-hysteresis NC-C phase transition that is decoupled from the transition in the bulk layers. This indicates the activation of a secondary phase nucleation process in the limit of weak interlayer interaction, which can be understood from energy considerations.

preprint2016arXiv

Half exact functors associated with cotorsion pairs on exact categories

In the previous article "Hearts of twin cotorsion pairs on exact categories", we introduced the notion of the heart for any cotorsion pair on an exact category with enough projectives and injectives, and showed that it is an abelian category. In this paper, we construct a half exact functor from the exact category to the heart. This is analog of the construction of Abe and Nakaoka for triangulated categories. We will also use this half exact functor to find out a sufficient condition when two different hearts are equivalent.

preprint2016arXiv

Heegner Points on Modular Curves

In this paper, we study the Heegner points on more general modular curves other than $X_0(N)$, which generalizes Gross' work "Heegner points on $X_0(N)$". The explicit Gross-Zagier formula and the Euler system property are stated in this case. Using such kind of Heegner points, we construct certain families of quadratic twists of $X_0(36)$, with the ranks of Mordell-Weil groups being zero and one respectively, and show that the $2$-part of their BSD conjectures hold.

preprint2016arXiv

Intrinsic diamagnetism in the Weyl semimetal TaAs

We investigate the magnetic properties of TaAs, a prototype Weyl semimetal. TaAs crystals show weak diamagnetism with magnetic susceptibility of about -7 * 10^{-7} emu/(g*Oe) at 5 K. A general feature is the appearance of a minimum at around 185 K in magnetization measurements as a function of temperature. No phase transition is observed in the temperature range between 5 K and 400 K. The magnetic properties indicate that the intrinsic Fermi level in TaAs is not located at the Weyl nodes, in agreement with the theory prediction.

preprint2016arXiv

Large Range Manipulation of Exciton Species in Monolayer WS2

Unconventional emissions from exciton and trion in monolayer WS2 are studied by photoexcitation. Excited by 532nm laser beam, the carrier species in the monolayer WS2 are affected by the excess electrons escaping from photoionization of donor impurity, the concentration of which varies with different locations of the sample. Simply increasing the excitation power at room temperature, the excess electron and thus the intensity ratio of excited trion and exciton can be continuously tuned over a large range from 0.1 to 7.7. Furthermore, this intensity ratio can also be manipulated by varying temperature. However, in this way the resonance energy of the exciton and trion show red-shifts with increasing temperature due to electron-phonon coupling. The binding energy of the trion is determined to be ~23meV and independent to temperature, indicating strong Coulomb interaction of carriers in such 2D materials.

preprint2016arXiv

Modulation Classification for MIMO-OFDM Signals via Approximate Bayesian Inference

The problem of modulation classification for a multiple-antenna (MIMO) system employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is investigated under the assumption of unknown frequency-selective fading channels and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The classification problem is formulated as a Bayesian inference task, and solutions are proposed based on Gibbs sampling and mean field variational inference. The proposed methods rely on a selection of the prior distributions that adopts a latent Dirichlet model for the modulation type and on the Bayesian network formalism. The Gibbs sampling method converges to the optimal Bayesian solution and, using numerical results, its accuracy is seen to improve for small sample sizes when switching to the mean field variational inference technique after a number of iterations. The speed of convergence is shown to improve via annealing and random restarts. While most of the literature on modulation classification assume that the channels are flat fading, that the number of receive antennas is no less than that of transmit antennas, and that a large number of observed data symbols are available, the proposed methods perform well under more general conditions. Finally, the proposed Bayesian methods are demonstrated to improve over existing non-Bayesian approaches based on independent component analysis and on prior Bayesian methods based on the `superconstellation' method.

preprint2016arXiv

On the Exploration of Convolutional Fusion Networks for Visual Recognition

Despite recent advances in multi-scale deep representations, their limitations are attributed to expensive parameters and weak fusion modules. Hence, we propose an efficient approach to fuse multi-scale deep representations, called convolutional fusion networks (CFN). Owing to using 1$\times$1 convolution and global average pooling, CFN can efficiently generate the side branches while adding few parameters. In addition, we present a locally-connected fusion module, which can learn adaptive weights for the side branches and form a discriminatively fused feature. CFN models trained on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets demonstrate remarkable improvements over the plain CNNs. Furthermore, we generalize CFN to three new tasks, including scene recognition, fine-grained recognition and image retrieval. Our experiments show that it can obtain consistent improvements towards the transferring tasks.

preprint2016arXiv

Pairing symmetry of heavy fermion superconductivity in the two-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg lattice model

In the two-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg lattice model away from half-filled, the local antiferromagnetic exchange coupling can provide the pairing mechanism of quasiparticles via the Kondo screening effect, leading to the heavy fermion superconductivity. We find that the pairing symmetry \textit{strongly} depends on the Fermi surface (FS) structure in the normal metallic state. When $J_{H}/J_{K}$ is very small, the FS is a small hole-like circle around the corner of the Brillouin zone, and the s-wave pairing symmetry has a lower ground state energy. For the intermediate coupling values of $J_{H}/J_{K}$, the extended s-wave pairing symmetry gives the favored ground state. However, when $J_{H}/J_{K}$ is larger than a critical value, the FS transforms into four small hole pockets crossing the boundary of the magnetic Brillouin zone, and the d-wave pairing symmetry becomes more favorable. In that regime, the resulting superconducting state is characterized by either nodal d-wave or nodeless d-wave state, depending on the conduction electron filling factor as well. A continuous phase transition exists between these two states. This result may be related to the phase transition of the nodal d-wave state to a fully gapped state, which is recently observed in Yb doped CeCoIn$_{5}$.

preprint2016arXiv

Phase diagram of Kondo-Heisenberg model on honeycomb lattice with geometrical frustration

We calculated the phase diagram of the Kondo-Heisenberg model on two-dimensional honeycomb lattice with both nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic spin exchanges, to investigate the interplay between RKKY and Kondo interactions at presence of magnetic frustration. Within a mean-field decoupling technology in slave-fermion representation, we derived the zero-temperature phase diagram as a function of Kondo coupling $J_k$ and frustration strength $Q$. The geometrical frustration can destroy the magnetic order, driving the original antiferromagnetic (AF) phase to non-magnetic valence bond state (VBS). In addition, we found two distinct VBS. As $J_k$ is increased, a phase transition from AF to Kondo paramagnetic (KP) phase occurs, without the intermediate phase coexisting AF order with Kondo screening found in square lattice systems. In the KP phase, the enhancement of frustration weakens the Kondo screening effect, resulting in a phase transition from KP to VBS. We also found a process to recover the AF order from VBS by increasing $J_k$ in a wide range of frustration strength. Our work may provide deeper understanding for the phase transitions in heavy-fermion materials, particularly for those exhibiting triangular frustration.

preprint2016arXiv

POI: Multiple Object Tracking with High Performance Detection and Appearance Feature

Detection and learning based appearance feature play the central role in data association based multiple object tracking (MOT), but most recent MOT works usually ignore them and only focus on the hand-crafted feature and association algorithms. In this paper, we explore the high-performance detection and deep learning based appearance feature, and show that they lead to significantly better MOT results in both online and offline setting. We make our detection and appearance feature publicly available. In the following part, we first summarize the detection and appearance feature, and then introduce our tracker named Person of Interest (POI), which has both online and offline version.

preprint2016arXiv

Revealing travel patterns and city structure with taxi trip data

Detecting regional spatial structures based on spatial interactions is crucial in applications ranging from urban planning to traffic control. In the big data era, various movement trajectories are available for studying spatial structures. This research uses large scale Shanghai taxi trip data extracted from GPS-enabled taxi trajectories to reveal traffic flow patterns and urban structure of the city. Using the network science methods, 15 temporally stable regions reflecting the scope of people's daily travels are found using community detection method on the network built from short trips, which represent residents' daily intra-urban travels and exhibit a clear pattern. In each region, taxi traffic flows are dominated by a few 'hubs' and 'hubs' in suburbs impact more trips than 'hubs' in urban areas. Land use conditions in urban regions are different from those in suburban areas. Additionally, 'hubs' in urban area associate with office buildings and commercial areas more, whereas residential land use is more common in suburban hubs. The taxi flow structures and land uses reveal the polycentric and layered concentric structure of Shanghai. Finally, according to the temporal variations of taxi flows and the diversity levels of taxi trip lengths, we explore the total taxi traffic properties of each region and proved the city structure we find. External trips across regions also take large proportion of the total traffic in each region, especially in suburbs. The results could help transportation policy making and shed light on the way to reveal urban structures with big data.

preprint2016arXiv

Spatial interferences in the electron transport of heavy fermion materials

The scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy and the point contact spectroscopy represent one of the major progresses in recent heavy fermion research. Both have revealed important information on the composite nature of the emergent heavy electron quasiparticles. However, a detailed and thorough microscopic understanding of the similarities and differences in the underlying physical processes of these techniques is still lacking. Here we study the electron transport in the normal state of the periodic Anderson lattice by using the Keldysh nonequilibrium Green's function technique. In addition to the well-known Fano interference between the conduction and f-electron channels, our results further reveal the effect of spatial interference between different spatial paths at the interface on the differential conductance and their interesting interplay with the band features such as the hybridization gap and the Van Hove singularity. We find that the spatial interference leads to a weighted average in the momentum space for the electron transport and could cause suppression of the electronic band features under certain circumstances. In particular, it reduces the capability of probing the f-electron spectral weight near the edges of the hybridization gap for large interface depending on the Fermi surface of the lead. Our results indicates an intrinsic inefficiency of the point contact spectroscopy in probing the f-electrons.

preprint2016arXiv

Storytelling of Photo Stream with Bidirectional Multi-thread Recurrent Neural Network

Visual storytelling aims to generate human-level narrative language (i.e., a natural paragraph with multiple sentences) from a photo streams. A typical photo story consists of a global timeline with multi-thread local storylines, where each storyline occurs in one different scene. Such complex structure leads to large content gaps at scene transitions between consecutive photos. Most existing image/video captioning methods can only achieve limited performance, because the units in traditional recurrent neural networks (RNN) tend to "forget" the previous state when the visual sequence is inconsistent. In this paper, we propose a novel visual storytelling approach with Bidirectional Multi-thread Recurrent Neural Network (BMRNN). First, based on the mined local storylines, a skip gated recurrent unit (sGRU) with delay control is proposed to maintain longer range visual information. Second, by using sGRU as basic units, the BMRNN is trained to align the local storylines into the global sequential timeline. Third, a new training scheme with a storyline-constrained objective function is proposed by jointly considering both global and local matches. Experiments on three standard storytelling datasets show that the BMRNN model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2016arXiv

Superconductivity and Charge Density Wave in ZrTe$_{3-x}$Se$_{x}$

Charge density wave (CDW), the periodic modulation of the electronic charge density, will open a gap on the Fermi surface that commonly leads to decreased or vanishing conductivity. On the other hand superconductivity, a commonly believed competing order, features a Fermi surface gap that results in infinite conductivity. Here we report that superconductivity emerges upon Se doping in CDW conductor ZrTe$_{3}$ when the long range CDW order is gradually suppressed. Superconducting critical temperature $T_c(x)$ in ZrTe$_{3-x}$Se$_x$ (${0\leq}x\leq0.1$) increases up to 4 K plateau for $0.04$$\leq$$x$$\leq$$0.07$. Further increase in Se content results in diminishing $T_{c}$ and filametary superconductivity. The CDW modes from Raman spectra are observed in $x$ = 0.04 and 0.1 crystals, where signature of ZrTe$_{3}$ CDW order in resistivity vanishes. The electronic-scattering for high $T_{c}$ crystals is dominated by local CDW fluctuations at high temperures, the resistivity is linear up to highest measured $T=300K$ and contributes to substantial in-plane anisotropy.

preprint2016arXiv

Three-dimensional bulk electronic structure of the Kondo lattice CeIn3 revealed by photoemission

We show the three-dimensional electronic structure of the Kondo lattice CeIn3 using soft x-ray angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy in the paramagnetic state. For the first time, we have directly observed the three-dimensional topology of the Fermi surface of CeIn3 by photoemission. The Fermi surface has a complicated hole pocket centred at the Γ-Z line and an elliptical electron pocket centred at the R point of the Brillouin zone. Polarization and photon-energy dependent photoemission results both indicate the nearly localized nature of the 4f electrons in CeIn3, consistent with the theoretical prediction by means of the combination of density functional theory and single-site dynamical meanfield theory. Those results illustrate that the f electrons of CeIn3, which is the parent material of CeMIn5 compounds, are closer to the localized description than the layered CeMIn5 compounds.

preprint2016arXiv

Topology Discovery for Linear Wireless Networks with Application to Train Backbone Inauguration

A train backbone network consists of a sequence of nodes arranged in a linear topology. A key step that enables communication in such a network is that of topology discovery, or train inauguration, whereby nodes learn in a distributed fashion the physical topology of the backbone network. While the current standard for train inauguration assumes wired links between adjacent backbone nodes, this work investigates the more challenging scenario in which the nodes communicate wirelessly. The key motivations for this desired switch from wired topology discovery to wireless one are the flexibility and capability for expansion and upgrading of a wireless backbone. The implementation of topology discovery over wireless channels is made difficult by the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, and by fading and interference. A novel topology discovery protocol is proposed that overcomes these issues and requires relatively minor changes to the wired standard. The protocol is shown via analysis and numerical results to be robust to the impairments caused by the wireless channel including interference from other trains.

preprint2016arXiv

Understanding doping, vacancy, lattice stability and superconductivity in KxFe2-ySe2

Metal-intercalated iron selenides are a class of superconductors that have received much attention but are less understood in comparison with their FeAs-based counterparts. Here, the controversial issues such as Fe vacancy, the real phase responsible for superconductivity, and lattice stability have been addressed based on first-principles calculations. New insights into the distinct features in terms of carrier doping have been revealed.

preprint2015arXiv

Defect-induced magnetism in SiC: Interplay between ferromagnetism and paramagnetism

Defect-induced ferromagnetism has triggered a lot of investigations and controversies. The major issue is that the induced ferromagnetic signal is so weak that it can sufficiently be accounted for by trace contamination. To resolve this issue, we studied the variation of the magnetic properties of SiC after neutron irradiation with fluence covering four orders of magnitude. A large paramagnetic component has been induced and scales up with defect concentration, which can be well accounted for by uncoupled divacancies. However, the ferromagnetic contribution is still weak and only appears in the low fluence range of neutrons or after annealing treatments. First-principles calculations hint towards a mutually exclusive role of the concentration of defects: Defects favor spin polarization at the expense of magnetic interaction. Combining both experimental and first-principles calculation results, the defect-induced ferromagnetism can be understood as a local effect which cannot be scaled up with the volume. Therefore, our investigation answers the long-standing question why the defect-induced ferromagnetic signal is weak.

preprint2015arXiv

Fine Magnetic Structure and Origin of Counter-Streaming Mass Flows in a Quiescent Solar Prominence

We present high-resolution observations of a quiescent solar prominence which was consisted of a vertical and a horizontal foot encircled by an overlying spine, and counter-streaming mass flows were ubiquitous in the prominence. While the horizontal foot and the spine were connecting to the solar surface, the vertical foot was suspended above the solar surface and supported by a semicircular bubble structure. The bubble first collapsed and then reformed at a similar height, finally, it started to oscillate for a long time. We find that the collapsing and oscillation of the bubble boundary were tightly associated with a flare-like feature located at the bottom of the bubble. Based on the observational results, we propose that the prominence should be composed of an overlying horizontal spine encircling a low-lying horizontal and a vertical foot, in which the horizontal foot was consisted of shorter field lines running partially along the spine and with the both ends connecting to the solar surface, while the vertical foot was consisted of piling-up dips due to the sagging of the spine fields and supported by a bipolar magnetic system formed by parasitic polarities (i.e., the bubble). The upflows in the vertical foot were possibly caused by the magnetic reconnection at the separator between the bubble and the overlying dips, which intruded into the persistent downflow field and formed the picture of counter-streaming mass flows. In addition, the counter-streaming flows in the horizontal foot were possibly caused by the imbalanced pressure at the both ends.

preprint2015arXiv

Ghost Cities Analysis Based on Positioning Data in China

Real estate projects are developed excessively in China in this decade. Many new housing districts are built, but they far exceed the actual demand in some cities. These cities with a high housing vacancy rate are called ghost cities. The real situation of vacant housing areas in China has not been studied in previous research. This study, using Baidu positioning data, presents the spatial distribution of the vacant housing areas in China and classifies cities with a large vacant housing area as cities or tourism sites. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that we detected and analyzed the ghost cities in China at such fine scale. To understand the human dynamic in ghost cities, we select one city and one tourism sites as cases to analyze the features of human dynamics. This study illustrates the capability of big data in sensing our cities objectively and comprehensively.

preprint2015arXiv

Performance assessment of CsI(Tl) screens on various substrates for X-ray imaging

Thallium-doped cesium iodide (CsI(Tl)) screens are widely used in X-ray imaging devices because of the columnar structure of CsI(Tl) layer, but few reports focus on the optical role of the substrate in the screen system. In this paper, four substrates including fused silica (SiO2), silver-film coated SiO2, graphite (C) and fiber optic plate (FOP) are used to fabricate CsI(Tl) screens by thermal evaporation. Their imaging performance is evaluated by relative light output (RLO), modulation transfer function (MTF), normalized noise power spectrum (NNPS) and noise equivalent quanta (NEQ). The results reveal that although CsI(Tl) film on graphite plate yields images with the lowest light output, it presents relatively higher spatial resolution and better signal-to-noise characteristics. However, films on SiO2 plate obtain low MTF but high NNPS curves, whether or not coated with silver film. Furthermore, scintillation screens on FOP have bright images with low NNPS and high NEQ, but have the lowest MTF. By controlling the substrate optical features, CsI(Tl) films can be tailed to suit a given application.

preprint2015arXiv

Phase evolution of the two-dimensional Kondo lattice model near half-filling

Within a mean-field approximation, the ground state and finite temperature phase diagrams of the two-dimensional Kondo lattice model have been carefully studied as functions of the Kondo coupling $J$ and the conduction electron concentration $n_{c}$. In addition to the conventional hybridization between local moments and itinerant electrons, a staggered hybridization is proposed to characterize the interplay between the antiferromagnetism and the Kondo screening effect. As a result, a heavy fermion antiferromagnetic phase is obtained and separated from the pure antiferromagnetic ordered phase by a first-order Lifshitz phase transition, while a continuous phase transition exists between the heavy fermion antiferromagnetic phase and the Kondo paramagnetic phase. We have developed a efficient theory to calculate these phase boundaries. As $n_{c}$ decreases from the half-filling, the region of the heavy fermion antiferromagnetic phase shrinks and finally disappears at a critical point $n_{c}^{*}=0.8228$, leaving a first-order critical line between the pure antiferromagnetic phase and the Kondo paramagnetic phase for $n_{c}<n_{c}^{* }$. At half-filling limit, a finite temperature phase diagram is also determined on the Kondo coupling and temperature ($J$-$T$) plane. Notably, as the temperature is increased, the region of the heavy fermion antiferromagnetic phase is reduced continuously, and finally converges to a single point, together with the pure antiferromagnetic phase and the Kondo paramagnetic phase. The phase diagrams with such triple point may account for the observed phase transitions in related heavy fermion materials.

preprint2015arXiv

Urban spatial-temporal activity structures: a New Approach to Inferring the Intra-urban Functional Regions via Social Media Check-In Data

Most existing literature focuses on the exterior temporal rhythm of human movement to infer the functional regions in a city, but they neglects the underlying interdependence between the functional regions and human activities which uncovers more detailed characteristics of regions. In this research, we proposed a novel model based on the low rank approximation (LRA) to detect the functional regions using the data from about 15 million check-in records during a yearlong period in Shanghai, China. We find a series of latent structures, called urban spatial-temporal activity structure (USTAS). While interpreting these structures, a series of outstanding underlying associations between the spatial and temporal activity patterns can be found. Moreover, we can not only reproduce the observed data with a lower dimensional representative but also simultaneously project both the spatial and temporal activity patterns in the same coordinate system. By utilizing the K-means clustering algorithm, five significant types of clusters which are directly annotated with a corresponding combination of temporal activities can be obtained. This provides a clear picture of how the groups of regions are associated with different activities at different time of day. Besides the commercial and transportation dominant area, we also detect two kinds of residential areas, the developed residential areas and the developing residential areas. We further verify the spatial distribution of these clusters in the view of urban form analysis. The results shows a high consistency with the government planning from the same periods, indicating our model is applicable for inferring the functional regions via social media check-in data, and can benefit a wide range of fields, such as urban planning, public services and location-based recommender systems and other purposes.

preprint2014arXiv

Delineating Intra-Urban Spatial Connectivity Patterns by Travel-Activities: A Case Study of Beijing, China

Travel activities have been widely applied to quantify spatial interactions between places, regions and nations. In this paper, we model the spatial connectivities between 652 Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZs) in Beijing by a taxi OD dataset. First, we unveil the gravitational structure of intra-urban spatial connectivities of Beijing. On overall, the inter-TAZ interactions are well governed by the Gravity Model $G_{ij} = λp_{i}p_{j}/d_{ij}$, where $p_{i}$, $p_{j}$ are degrees of TAZ $i$, $j$ and $d_{ij}$ the distance between them, with a goodness-of-fit around 0.8. Second, the network based analysis well reveals the polycentric form of Beijing. Last, we detect the semantics of inter-TAZ connectivities based on their spatiotemporal patterns. We further find that inter-TAZ connections deviating from the Gravity Model can be well explained by link semantics.

preprint2014arXiv

Modulation Classification via Gibbs Sampling Based on a Latent Dirichlet Bayesian Network

A novel Bayesian modulation classification scheme is proposed for a single-antenna system over frequency-selective fading channels. The method is based on Gibbs sampling as applied to a latent Dirichlet Bayesian network (BN). The use of the proposed latent Dirichlet BN provides a systematic solution to the convergence problem encountered by the conventional Gibbs sampling approach for modulation classification. The method generalizes, and is shown to improve upon, the state of the art.

preprint2013arXiv

A Qualitative Representation and Similarity Measurement Method in Geographic Information Retrieval

The modern geographic information retrieval technology is based on quantitative models and methods. The semantic information in web documents and queries cannot be effectively represented, leading to information lost or misunderstanding so that the results are either unreliable or inconsistent. A new qualitative approach is thus proposed for supporting geographic information retrieval based on qualitative representation, semantic matching, and qualitative reasoning. A qualitative representation model and the corresponding similarity measurement method are defined. Information in documents and user queries are represented using propositional logic, which considers the thematic and geographic semantics synthetically. Thematic information is represented as thematic propositions on the base of domain ontology. Similarly, spatial information is represented as geo-spatial propositions with the support of geographic knowledge base. Then the similarity is divided into thematic similarity and spatial similarity. The former is calculated by the weighted distance of proposition keywords in the domain ontology, and the latter similarity is further divided into conceptual similarity and spatial similarity. Represented by propositions and information units, the similarity measurement can take evidence theory and fuzzy logic to combine all sub similarities to get the final similarity between documents and queries. This novel retrieval method is mainly used to retrieve the qualitative geographic information to support the semantic matching and results ranking. It does not deal with geometric computation and is consistent with human commonsense cognition, and thus can improve the efficiency of geographic information retrieval technology.

preprint2013arXiv

Diffraction, Refraction, and Reflection of An Extreme-Ultraviolet Wave Observed during Its Interactions with Remote Active Regions

We present observations of the diffraction, refraction, and reflection of a global extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) wave propagating in the solar corona. These intriguing phenomena are observed when the wave interacts with two remote active regions, and they together exhibit the wave property of this EUV wave. When the wave approached AR11465, it became weaker and finally disappeared in the active region, but a few minutes latter a new wavefront appeared behind the active region, and it was not concentric with the incoming wave. In addition, a reflected wave was also observed simultaneously on the wave incoming side. When the wave approached AR11459, it transmitted through the active region directly and without reflection. The formation of the new wavefront and the transmission could be explained with diffraction and refraction effects, respectively. We propose that the different behaviors observed during the interactions may caused by different speed gradients at the boundaries of the two active regions. For the origin of the EUV wave, we find that it formed ahead of a group of expanding loops a few minutes after the start of the loops' expansion, which represents the initiation of the associated coronal mass ejection (CME). Based on these results, we conclude that the EUV wave should be a nonlinear magnetosonic wave or shock driven by the associated CME, which propagated faster than the ambient fast-mode speed and gradually slowed down to an ordinary linear wave. Our observations support the hybrid model that includes both fast wave and slow non-wave components.

preprint2013arXiv

Further results on the nullity of signed graphs

The nullity of a graph is the multiplicity of the eigenvalues zero in its spectrum. A signed graph is a graph with a sign attached to each of its edges. In this paper, we obtain the coefficient theorem of the characteristic polynomial of a signed graph, give two formulae on the nullity of signed graphs with cut-points. As applications of the above results, we investigate the nullity of the bicyclic signed graph $Γ(\infty(p,q,l))$, obtain the nullity set of unbalanced bicyclic signed graphs, and thus determine the nullity set of bicyclic signed graphs.

preprint2013arXiv

Modulation Classification of MIMO-OFDM Signals by Independent Component Analysis and Support Vector Machines

A modulation classification (MC) scheme based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) in conjunction with either maximum likelihood (ML) or Support Vector Machines (SVM) is proposed for MIMO-OFDM signals over frequency selective, time varying channels. The method is blind in the sense that it is assumed that the receiver has no information about the channel and transmitted signals other than that the spatial streams of signals are statistically independent. The processing consists of separation of the MIMO streams followed by modulation classification of the separated signals. While in general, blind separation of signals over frequency selective channels is a difficult problem, the non-frequency selective nature of the channel experienced by individual symbols in a MIMO-OFDM system enables the application of well-known ICA algorithms. Modulation classification is implemented by maximum likelihood and by an SVM-based modulation classification method relying on pre-selected modulation-dependent features. To improve performance in time varying channels, the invariance of the channel is exploited across the coherence bandwidth and the time coherence. The proposed method is shown to perform with high probability of correct classification over realistic ITU pedestrian and vehicular channels. An upper bound on the probability of correct classification is developed based on the Cramer Rao bound of channel estimation.

preprint2013arXiv

New Superconductivity in Layered 1T-TaS2-xSex Single Crystals Fabricated by Chemical Vapor Transport

Layered transition-metal dichalcogenides 1T-TaS2-xSex (0<=x<=2) single crystals have been successfully fabricated by using a chemical vapor transport technique in which Ta locates in octahedral coordination with S and Se atoms. This is the first superconducting example by the substitution of S site, which violates an initial rule based on the fact that superconductivity merely emerges in 1T-TaS2 by applying the high pressure or substitution of Ta site. We demonstrate the appearance of a series of electronic states in 1T-TaS2-xSex with Se content. Namely, the Mott phase melts into a nearly commensurate charge-density-wave (NCCDW) phase, superconductivity in a wide x range develops within the NCCDW state, and finally commensurate charge-density-wave (CCDW) phase reproduces for heavy Se content. The present results reveal that superconductivity is only characterized by robust Ta 5d band, demonstrating the universal nature in 1T-TaS2 systems that superconductivity and NCCDW phase coexist in the real space.

preprint2013arXiv

Nonequilibrium shot noise spectrum through a quantum dot in the Kondo regime: A master equation approach under self-consistent Born approximation

We construct a number($n$)-resolved master equation (ME) approach under self-consistent Born approximation (SCBA) for noise spectrum calculation. The formulation is essentially non-Markovian and incorporates properly the interlay of the multi-tunneling processes and many-body correlations. We apply this approach to the challenging nonequilibrium Kondo system and predict a profound nonequilibrium Kondo signature in the shot noise spectrum. The proposed $n$-SCBA-ME scheme goes completely beyond the scope of the Born-Markovian master equation approach, in the sense of being applicable to the shot noise of transport under small bias voltage, in non-Markovian regime, and with strong Coulomb correlations as favorably demonstrated in the nonequilibrium Kondo system.

preprint2013arXiv

Number-resolved master equation approach to quantum transport under the self-consistent Born approximation

We construct a particle-number(n)-resolved master equation (ME) approach under the self-consistent Born approximation (SCBA) for quantum transport through mesoscopic systems. The formulation is essentially non-Markovian and incorporates the interlay of the multi-tunneling processes and many-body correlations. The proposed n-SCBA-ME goes completely beyond the scope of the Born-Markov master equation, being applicable to transport under small bias voltage, in non-Markovian regime and with strong Coulomb correlations. For steady state, it can recover not only the exact result of noninteracting transport under arbitrary voltages, but also the challenging nonequilibrium Kondo effect. Moreover, the n-SCBA-ME approach is efficient for the study of shot noise.We demonstrate the application by a couple of representative examples, including particularly the nonequilibrium Kondo system.

preprint2013arXiv

Quotients of exact categories by cluster tilting subcategories as module categories

We prove that some subquotient categories of exact categories are abelian. This generalizes a result by Koenig-Zhu in the case of (algebraic) triangulated categories. As a particular case, if an exact category B with enough projectives and injectives has a cluster tilting subcategory M, then B/M is abelian. More precisely, it is equivalent to the category of finitely presented modules over the stable category of M.

preprint2013arXiv

Uncovering patterns of inter-urban trip and spatial interaction from social media check-in data

The article revisits spatial interaction and distance decay from the perspective of human mobility patterns and spatially-embedded networks based on an empirical data set. We extract nationwide inter-urban movements in China from a check-in data set that covers half million individuals and 370 cities to analyze the underlying patterns of trips and spatial interactions. By fitting the gravity model, we find that the observed spatial interactions are governed by a power law distance decay effect. The obtained gravity model also well reproduces the exponential trip displacement distribution. However, due to the ecological fallacy issue, the movement of an individual may not obey the same distance decay effect. We also construct a spatial network where the edge weights denote the interaction strengths. The communities detected from the network are spatially connected and roughly consistent with province boundaries. We attribute this pattern to different distance decay parameters between intra-province and inter-province trips.

preprint2013arXiv

Weak ferromagnetism with the Kondo screening effect in the Kondo lattice systems

We carefully consider the interplay between ferromagnetism and the Kondo screening effect in the conventional Kondo lattice systems at finite temperatures. Within an effective mean-field theory for small conduction electron densities, a complete phase diagram has been determined. In the ferromagnetic ordered phase, there is a characteristic temperature scale to indicate the presence of the Kondo screening effect. We further find two distinct ferromagnetic long-range ordered phases coexisting with the Kondo screening effect: spin fully polarized and partially polarized states. A continuous phase transition exists to separate the partially polarized ferromagnetic ordered phase from the paramagnetic heavy Fermi liquid phase. These results may be used to explain the weak ferromagnetism observed recently in the Kondo lattice materials.

preprint2012arXiv

D-wave superconductivity induced by short-range antiferromagnetic correlations in the two-dimensional Kondo lattice model

The possible heavy fermion superconductivity is carefully reexamined in the two-dimensional Kondo lattice model with an antiferromagnetic Heisenberg superexchange between local magnetic moments. In order to establish an effective mean field theory in the limit of the paramagnetic heavy Fermi liquid and near the half-filling case, we find that the spinon singlet pairing from the local antiferromagnetic short-range correlations can reduce the ground state energy substantially. In the presence of the Kondo screening effect, the Cooper pairs between the conduction electrons is induced. Depending on the ratio of the Heisenberg and the Kondo exchange couplings, the resulting superconducting state is characterized by either a d-wave nodal or d-wave nodeless state, and a continuous phase transition exists between these two states. These results are related to some quasi-two dimensional heary fermion superconductors.

preprint2012arXiv

Evidence for the Wave Nature of an Extreme Ultraviolet Wave Observed by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly Onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory

Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) waves have been found for about 15 years. However, significant controversy remains over their physical natures and origins. In this paper, we report an EUV wave that was accompanied by an X1.9 flare and a partial halo coronal mass ejection. Using high temporal and spatial resolution observations taken by the {\em Solar Dynamics Observatory} and the Solar-TErrestrial RElations Observatory, we are able to investigate the detailed kinematics of the EUV wave. We find several arguments that support the fast-mode wave scenario: (1) The speed of the EUV wave (570 km/s) is higher than the sound speed of quiet-Sun corona. (2) Significant deceleration of the EUV wave (-130 m/s2) is found during its propagation. (3) The EUV wave resulted in the oscillations of a loop and a filament along its propagation path, and a reflected wave from the polar coronal hole is also detected. (4) Refraction or reflection effect is observed when the EUV wave was passing through two coronal bright points. (5) The dimming region behind the wavefront stopped to expand when the wavefront started to become diffuse. (6) The profiles of the wavefront exhibited a dispersive nature, and the magnetosonic Mach number of the EUV wave derived from the highest intensity jump is about 1.4. In addition, triangulation indicates that the EUV wave propagated within a height range of about 60-100 Mm above the photosphere. We propose that the EUV wave observed should be a nonlinear fast-mode magnetosonic wave that propagated freely in the corona after it was driven by the CME expanding flanks during the initial period.

preprint2012arXiv

Observational Study Of the Quasi-Periodic Fast Propagating Magnetosonic Waves and the Associated Flare on 2011 May 30

On 2011 May 30, quasi-periodic fast propagating (QFP) magnetosonic waves accompanied by a C2.8 flare were directly imaged by the Atomospheric Imaging Assembly instrument on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The QFP waves successively emanated from the flare kernel, they propagated along a cluster of open coronal loops with a phase speed of 834 km/s during the flare's rising phase, and the multiple arc-shaped wave trains can be fitted with a series of concentric circles. We generate the k-omega diagram of the Fourier power and find a straight ridge that represents the dispersion relation of the waves. Along the ridge, we find a lot of prominent nodes which represent the available frequencies of the QFP waves. On the other hand, the frequencies of the flare are also obtained by analyzing the flare light curves using the wavelet technique. The results indicate that almost all the main frequencies of the flare are consistent with those of the QFP waves. This suggests that the flare and the QFP waves were possibly excited by a common physical origin. On the other hand, a few low frequencies revealed by the k-omega diagram can not be found in the accompanying flare. We propose that these low frequencies were possibly due to the leakage of the pressure-driven p-mode oscillations from the photosphere into the low corona, which should be a noticeable mechanism for driving the QFP waves observed in the corona.

preprint2012arXiv

On a Coronal Blowout Jet: The First Observation of a Simultaneously Produced Bubble-like CME and a Jet-like CME in a Solar Event

The coronal blowout jet is a peculiar category among various jet phenomena, of which the sheared base arch, often carrying a small filament, experiences a miniature version of blowout eruption that produces large-scale coronal mass ejection (CME). In this paper, we report such a coronal blowout jet with high-resolution multi-wavelength and multi-angle observations taken from Solar Dynamics Observatory, Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, and Big Bear Solar Observatory. For the first time, we find that a simultaneous bubble-like and a jet-like CMEs were dynamically related to the blowout jet that showed cool and hot components next to each other. Our observational results indicate that: (1) the cool component was resulted from the eruption of the filament contained within the jet's base arch, and it further caused the bubble-like CME; (2) the jet-like CME was associated with the hot component, which was the outward moving heated plasmas generated by the reconnection of the base arch and its ambient open field lines. On the other hand, bifurcation of the jet's cool component was also observed, which was resulted from the uncoupling of the erupting filament's two legs that were highly twisted at the very beginning. Based on these results, we propose a model to interpret the coronal blowout jet, of which the external reconnection not only produces the jet-like CME but also leads to the rising of the filament. Subsequently, internal reconnection starts underneath the rising filament and thereby causes the bubble-like CME.

preprint2012arXiv

Simultaneous Observations of a Large-Scale Wave Event in the Solar Atmosphere: From Photosphere to Corona

For the first time, we report a large-scale wave that was observed simultaneously in the photosphere, chromosphere, transition region and low corona layers of the solar atmosphere. Using the high temporal and high spatial resolution observations taken by the Solar Magnetic Activity Research Telescope at Hida Observatory and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard Solar Dynamic Observatory, we find that the wave evolved synchronously at different heights of the solar atmosphere, and it propagated at a speed of 605 km/s and showed a significant deceleration (-424 m/s2) in the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) observations. During the initial stage, the wave speed in the EUV observations was 1000 km/s, similar to those measured from the AIA 1700 Å (967 km/s) and 1600 Å (893 km/s) observations. The wave was reflected by a remote region with open fields, and a slower wave-like feature at a speed of 220 km/s was also identified following the primary fast wave. In addition, a type-II radio burst was observed to be associated with the wave. We conclude that this wave should be a fast magnetosonic shock wave, which was firstly driven by the associated coronal mass ejection and then propagated freely in the corona. As the shock wave propagated, its legs swept the solar surface and thereby resulted in the wave signatures observed in the lower layers of the solar atmosphere. The slower wave-like structure following the primary wave was probably caused by the reconfiguration of the low coronal magnetic fields, as predicted in the field-line stretching model.

preprint2012arXiv

Sympathetic Partial and Full Filament Eruptions Observed in One Solar Breakout Event

We report two sympathetic solar eruptions, including a partial and a full flux rope eruption in a quadrupolar magnetic region, where a large and a small filament resided above the middle and the east neutral lines respectively. The large filament first rose slowly at a speed of 8 km/s for 23 minutes and then it was accelerated to 102 km/s. Finally, this filament erupted successfully and caused a coronal mass ejection. During the slow rising phase, various evidence for breakout-like external reconnection has been identified at high and low temperature lines. The eruption of the small filament started around the end of the large filament's slow rising. This filament erupted partially and no associating coronal mass ejection could be detected. Based on a potential field extrapolation, we find that the topology of the three-dimensional coronal field above the source region is composed of three low-lying lobes and a large overlying flux system, and a null point located between the middle lobe and the overlying antiparallel flux system. We propose a possible mechanism within the framework of the magnetic breakout model to interpret the sympathetic filament eruptions, in which the magnetic implosion mechanism is thought to be a possible linkage between the sympathetic eruptions, and the external reconnection at the null point transfers field lines from the middle lobe to the lateral lobes and thereby leads to the full (partial) eruption of the observed large (small) filament. Other possible mechanisms are also discussed briefly. We conclude that the structural properties of coronal fields are important for producing sympathetic eruptions.

preprint2011arXiv

A Time Series of Filament Eruptions Observed by Three Eyes from Space: From Failed to Successful Eruptions

We present stereoscopic observations of six sequent eruptions of a filament in the active region NOAA 11045 on 2010 Feb 8, with the advantage of the STEREO twin viewpoints in combination with the earth viewpoint from SOHO instruments and ground-based telescopes. The last one of the six eruptions is with a coronal mass ejection, while the others are not. The flare in this successful one is more intensive than in the others. Moreover, the filament material velocity of the successful one is also the largest among them. Interestingly, all the filament velocities are found proportional to their flare powers. We calculate magnetic field intensity at low altitude, the decay indexes of the external field above the filament, and the asymmetry properties of the overlying fields before and after the failed eruptions and find little difference between them, indicating the same coronal confinement for the failed and the successful eruptions. The results suggest that, besides the confinement of coronal magnetic field, the energy released in low corona should be another crucial element for production of a failed or successful filament eruption. That is, only a coronal mass ejection can be launched away if the energy released exceeds some critical value, given the same coronal conditions.

preprint2011arXiv

Circular photogalvanic effect induced by near-infrared radiation in InAs quantum wires patterned quasi two-dimensional electron system

In this work we investigated the InAs/InAlAs quantum wires (QWRs) superlattice by optically exciting the structure with near-infrared radiation. By varying the helicity of the radiation at room temperature we observed the circular photogalvanic effect related to the $C_{2v}$ symmetry of the structure, which could be attributed to the formation of a quasi two-dimensional system underlying in the vicinity of the QWRs pattern. The ratio of Rashba and Dresselhaus terms shows an evolution of the spin-orbit interaction in quasi two-dimensional structure with the QWR layer deposition thickness.

preprint2011arXiv

Hardy spaces associated with Schrodinger operators on the Heisenberg group

Let $L= -Δ_{\mathbb{H}^n}+V$ be a Schrödinger operator on the Heisenberg group $\mathbb{H}^n$, where $Δ_{\mathbb{H}^n}$ is the sub-Laplacian and the nonnegative potential $V$ belongs to the reverse Hölder class $B_{\frac{Q}{2}}$ and $Q$ is the homogeneous dimension of $\mathbb{H}^n$. The Riesz transforms associated with the Schrödinger operator $L$ are bounded from $L^1(\mathbb{H}^n)$ to $L^{1,\infty}(\mathbb{H}^n)$. The $L^1$ integrability of the Riesz transforms associated with $L$ characterizes a certain Hardy type space denoted by $H^1_L(\mathbb{H}^n)$ which is larger than the usual Hardy space $H^1(\mathbb{H}^n)$. We define $H^1_L(\mathbb{H}^n)$ in terms of the maximal function with respect to the semigroup $\big \{e^{-s L}:\; s>0 \big\}$, and give the atomic decomposition of $H^1_L(\mathbb{H}^n)$. As an application of the atomic decomposition theorem, we prove that $H^1_L(\mathbb{H}^n)$ can be characterized by the Riesz transforms associated with $L$. All results hold for stratified groups as well.

preprint2011arXiv

Kinematics and Fine Structure of An Unwinding Polar Jet Observed by SDO/AIA

We present an observational study of the kinematics and fine structure of an unwinding polar jet, with high temporal and spatial observations taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) and the Solar Magnetic Activity Research Telescope (SMART). During the rising period, the shape of the jet resembled a cylinder with helical structures on the surface, while the mass of the jet was mainly distributed on the cylinder's shell. In the radial direction, the jet expanded successively at its western side. The radial expansion presented three distinct phases: the gradually expanding phase, the fast expanding phase, and the steady phase. Each phase lasted for about 12 minutes. The angular speed of the unwinding jet and the twist transferred into the outer corona during the eruption are estimated to be 11.1 \times 10{-3} rad/s (period = 564 s) and 1.17 to 2.55 turns (or 2.34 to 5.1π) respectively. On the other hand, by calculating the azimuthal component of the magnetic field in the jet and comparing the free energy stored in the non-potential magnetic field with the jet's total energy, we find that the non-potential magnetic field in the jet is enough to supply the energy for the ejection. These new observational results strongly support the scenario that the jets are driven by the magnetic twist, which is stored in the twisted closed field of a bipole, and released through magnetic reconnection between the bipole and its ambient open field.

preprint2011arXiv

Large-deviation analysis for counting statistics in mesoscopic transports

We present an efficient approach, based on a number-conditioned master equation, for large-deviation analysis in mesoscopic transports. Beyond the conventional full-counting-statistics study, the large-deviation approach encodes complete information of both the typical trajectories and the rare ones, in terms of revealing a continuous change of the dynamical phase in trajectory space. The approach is illustrated with two examples: (i) transport through a single quantum dot, where we reveal the inhomogeneous distribution of trajectories in general case and find a particular scale invariance point in trajectory statistics; and (ii) transport through a double dots, where we find a dynamical phase transition between two distinct phases induced by the Coulomb correlation and quantum interference.

preprint2011arXiv

Multiple Lifshitz transitions driven by short-range antiferromagnetic correlations in the two-dimensional Kondo lattice model

With a mean field approach, the heavy Fermi liquid in the two-dimensional Kondo lattice model is carefully considered in the presence of short-range antiferromagnetic correlations. As the ratio of the local Heisenberg superexchange coupling to the Kondo coupling increases, the Fermi surface structure changes dramatically. From the analysis of the ground state energy density, multiple Lifshitz type phase transitions occur at zero temperature.

preprint2010arXiv

Truly Random Number Generation Based on Measurement of Phase Noise of Laser

We present a simple approach to realize truly random number generation based on measurement of the phase noise of a single mode vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL). The true randomness of the quantum phase noise originates from the spontaneous emission of photons and the random bit generation rate is ultimately limited only by the laser linewidth. With the final bit generation rate of 20 Mbit/s, the physically guaranteed truly random bit sequence passes the three standard random tests. Moreover, for the first time, a {\it continuously} generated random bit sequence up to 14 Gbit is verified by two additional criteria for its true randomness.

preprint2010arXiv

Truly random number generation via entropy amplification

We present a simple setup to implement truly random number generator based on the measurement of the laser phase noise. From the entropy point of view, we estimate the number of truly random bits that can be extracted from the sampled Byte. With a simple method of adopting the $m$-least-significant-bit, we amplify the entropy of the original bit sequence and realize a truly random bit generation rate of $300$ Mbps.

preprint2010arXiv

Vacuum induced Berry phases in single-mode Jaynes-Cummings models

Motivated by the work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 220404 (2002)] for detecting the vacuum-induced Berry phases with two-mode Jaynes-Cummings models (JCMs), we show here that, for a parameter-dependent single-mode JCM, certain atom-field states also acquire the photon-number-dependent Berry phases after the parameter slowly changed and eventually returned to its initial value. This geometric effect related to the field quantization still exists, even the filed is kept in its vacuum state. Specifically, a feasible Ramsey interference experiment with cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) system is designed to detect the vacuum-induced Berry phase.

preprint2009arXiv

Plasmon-phonon Strongly-Coupled Mode in Epitaxial Graphene

We report the dispersion measurements, using angle-resolved reflection electron-energy-loss-spectroscopy (AREELS), on two-dimensional (2D) plasmons in single and multilayer graphene which couple strongly to surface optical phonon (FK phonon) modes of silicon carbide substrate. The coupled modes show discrete dispersion behaviors in the single and bilayer graphene. With increasing graphene layers on SiC(0001), a transition from plasmon-like dispersion to phonon-like dispersion is observed. For plasmon-like modes, the dispersion is strongly damped by electron-hole pair excitations at entering single-particle continuum, while phonon-like mode is undamped. In the region free of coupling, the graphene 2D plasmon exhibits acoustic behavior with linear dispersion with slope and damping determined by the Fermi surface topology.

preprint2009arXiv

Slow Light of an Amplitude Modulated Gaussian Pulse in Cesium Vapor

Slow light of an amplitude modulated Gaussian (AMG) pulse in cesium vapor is demonstrated and studied, as an appropriate amplitude modulation to a single pulse can expand its spectrum and thus increase the utilization efficiency of the bandwidth of a slow light system. In a single-$Λ$ type electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) system, the slowed AMG pulse experiences severe distortion, mainly owing to the frequency dependent transmission of medium. Additionally, due to its spectral distribution, the frequency dependent dispersion of the medium causes simultaneous slow and fast light of different spectral components and thus a certain dispersive distortion of the AMG pulse. Further, a post-processing method is proposed to recover the slowed (distorted) pulse, which indicates that by introducing a linear optical system with a desired gain spectrum we can recover the pulse in an "all-optical" way. Finally, we discuss the limitations during this compensation procedure in detail. Although it is demonstrated in the cesium vapor using EIT, this method should be applicable to a wide range of slow light systems.