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Published work

36 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Skills-Coach: A Self-Evolving Skill Optimizer via Training-Free GRPO

We introduce Skills-Coach, a novel automated framework designed to significantly enhance the self-evolution of skills within Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. Addressing the current fragmentation of the skill ecosystem, Skills-Coach explores the boundaries of skill capabilities, thereby facilitating the comprehensive competency coverage essential for intelligent applications. The framework comprises four core modules: a Diverse Task Generation Module that systematically creates a comprehensive test suite for various skills; a Lightweight Optimization Module dedicated to optimizing skill prompts and their corresponding code; a Comparative Execution Module facilitating the execution and evaluation of both original and optimized skills; and a Traceable Evaluation Module, which rigorously evaluates performance against specified criteria. Skills-Coach offers flexible execution options through its virtual and real modes. To validate its efficacy, we introduce Skill-X, a comprehensive benchmark dataset consisting of 48 diverse skills. Experimental results demonstrate that Skills-Coach achieves significant performance improvements in skill capability across a wide range of categories, highlighting its potential to advance the development of more robust and adaptable LLM-based agents.

preprint2024arXiv

Quench Dynamics in Holographic First-Order Phase Transition

In this work, we investigate the real-time dynamics of quenching a state from phase separation in a holographic model of first-order phase transition. In addition to the typical phase-separated and high-energy final states, we have discovered a novel dynamical process that drives the system to a low-temperature supercooled final state within a narrow range of quench parameters. The critical behavior is also revealed during the fully non-linear dynamics. Following a sudden quench with critical parameters, the phase separation can be attracted to a critical nucleus. Specifically, the critical nucleus will subsequently shrink in size and eventually disappear for super-critical parameters, where the system is actually supercooled with a temperature lower than the initial one. While for sub-critical parameters, the nucleus will grow in size and finally reform a phase separation, where the absorbed quenching energy is reflected in the increment of the latent heat.

preprint2024arXiv

Spreading and Structural Balance on Signed Networks

Two competing types of interactions often play an important part in shaping system behavior, such as activatory or inhibitory functions in biological systems. Hence, signed networks, where each connection can be either positive or negative, have become popular models over recent years. However, the primary focus of the literature is on the unweighted and structurally unbalanced ones, where all cycles have an even number of negative edges. Hence here, we first introduce a classification of signed networks into balanced, antibalanced or strictly unbalanced ones, and then characterize each type of signed networks in terms of the spectral properties of the signed weighted adjacency matrix. In particular, we show that the spectral radius of the matrix with signs is smaller than that without if and only if the signed network is strictly unbalanced. These properties are important to understand the dynamics on signed networks, both linear and nonlinear ones. Specifically, we find consistent patterns in a linear and a nonlinear dynamics theoretically, depending on their type of balance. We also propose two measures to further characterize strictly unbalanced networks, motivated by perturbation theory. Finally, we numerically verify these properties through experiments on both synthetic and real networks.

preprint2023arXiv

Extended black hole thermodynamics from extended Iyer-Wald formalism

In recent years, there has been significant interest in the field of extended black hole thermodynamics, where the cosmological constant and/or other coupling parameters are treated as thermodynamic variables. Drawing inspiration from the Iyer-Wald formalism, which reveals the intrinsic and universal structure of conventional black hole thermodynamics, we illustrate that a proper extension of this formalism also unveils the underlying theoretical structure of extended black hole thermodynamics. As a remarkable consequence, for any gravitational theory described by a diffeomorphism invariant action, it is always possible to construct a consistent extended thermodynamics using this extended formalism.

preprint2023arXiv

Knowledge Distillation to Ensemble Global and Interpretable Prototype-Based Mammogram Classification Models

State-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning mammogram classifiers, trained with weakly-labelled images, often rely on global models that produce predictions with limited interpretability, which is a key barrier to their successful translation into clinical practice. On the other hand, prototype-based models improve interpretability by associating predictions with training image prototypes, but they are less accurate than global models and their prototypes tend to have poor diversity. We address these two issues with the proposal of BRAIxProtoPNet++, which adds interpretability to a global model by ensembling it with a prototype-based model. BRAIxProtoPNet++ distills the knowledge of the global model when training the prototype-based model with the goal of increasing the classification accuracy of the ensemble. Moreover, we propose an approach to increase prototype diversity by guaranteeing that all prototypes are associated with different training images. Experiments on weakly-labelled private and public datasets show that BRAIxProtoPNet++ has higher classification accuracy than SOTA global and prototype-based models. Using lesion localisation to assess model interpretability, we show BRAIxProtoPNet++ is more effective than other prototype-based models and post-hoc explanation of global models. Finally, we show that the diversity of the prototypes learned by BRAIxProtoPNet++ is superior to SOTA prototype-based approaches.

preprint2023arXiv

Protected Transverse Electric Waves in Topological Dielectric Waveguides

Waveguides are fundamental components in communication systems. However, they suffer from reflection and scattering losses at sharp routes or defects. The breakthrough in developing topological photonic crystals (PhCs) provides promising solutions to robust signal transmission. In this work, we propose a new mechanism for protecting wave-guiding modes by decorating the boundaries of a conventional waveguide with valley-Hall PhCs. This special layout enables the robust propagation of conventional transverse electric waves against defects and bends. Moreover, the proposed waveguide is compatible with the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW). High efficient mode conversion from the SIW to the proposed waveguide is achievable. By leveraging the idea of topology to conventional waveguides, we provide a powerful and practical tool that can largely improve the performance of microwave and millimeter-wave integrated circuits while reserving the features of wave-guiding modes.

preprint2022arXiv

ACPL: Anti-curriculum Pseudo-labelling for Semi-supervised Medical Image Classification

Effective semi-supervised learning (SSL) in medical image analysis (MIA) must address two challenges: 1) work effectively on both multi-class (e.g., lesion classification) and multi-label (e.g., multiple-disease diagnosis) problems, and 2) handle imbalanced learning (because of the high variance in disease prevalence). One strategy to explore in SSL MIA is based on the pseudo labelling strategy, but it has a few shortcomings. Pseudo-labelling has in general lower accuracy than consistency learning, it is not specifically designed for both multi-class and multi-label problems, and it can be challenged by imbalanced learning. In this paper, unlike traditional methods that select confident pseudo label by threshold, we propose a new SSL algorithm, called anti-curriculum pseudo-labelling (ACPL), which introduces novel techniques to select informative unlabelled samples, improving training balance and allowing the model to work for both multi-label and multi-class problems, and to estimate pseudo labels by an accurate ensemble of classifiers (improving pseudo label accuracy). We run extensive experiments to evaluate ACPL on two public medical image classification benchmarks: Chest X-Ray14 for thorax disease multi-label classification and ISIC2018 for skin lesion multi-class classification. Our method outperforms previous SOTA SSL methods on both datasets

preprint2022arXiv

Artifact-Tolerant Clustering-Guided Contrastive Embedding Learning for Ophthalmic Images

Ophthalmic images and derivatives such as the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness map are crucial for detecting and monitoring ophthalmic diseases (e.g., glaucoma). For computer-aided diagnosis of eye diseases, the key technique is to automatically extract meaningful features from ophthalmic images that can reveal the biomarkers (e.g., RNFL thinning patterns) linked to functional vision loss. However, representation learning from ophthalmic images that links structural retinal damage with human vision loss is non-trivial mostly due to large anatomical variations between patients. The task becomes even more challenging in the presence of image artifacts, which are common due to issues with image acquisition and automated segmentation. In this paper, we propose an artifact-tolerant unsupervised learning framework termed EyeLearn for learning representations of ophthalmic images. EyeLearn has an artifact correction module to learn representations that can best predict artifact-free ophthalmic images. In addition, EyeLearn adopts a clustering-guided contrastive learning strategy to explicitly capture the intra- and inter-image affinities. During training, images are dynamically organized in clusters to form contrastive samples in which images in the same or different clusters are encouraged to learn similar or dissimilar representations, respectively. To evaluate EyeLearn, we use the learned representations for visual field prediction and glaucoma detection using a real-world ophthalmic image dataset of glaucoma patients. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods verified the effectiveness of EyeLearn for learning optimal feature representations from ophthalmic images.

preprint2022arXiv

Coarse-to-Fine: Hierarchical Multi-task Learning for Natural Language Understanding

Generalized text representations are the foundation of many natural language understanding tasks. To fully utilize the different corpus, it is inevitable that models need to understand the relevance among them. However, many methods ignore the relevance and adopt a single-channel model (a coarse paradigm) directly for all tasks, which lacks enough rationality and interpretation. In addition, some existing works learn downstream tasks by stitches skill block(a fine paradigm), which might cause irrationalresults due to its redundancy and noise. Inthis work, we first analyze the task correlation through three different perspectives, i.e., data property, manual design, and model-based relevance, based on which the similar tasks are grouped together. Then, we propose a hierarchical framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm, with the bottom level shared to all the tasks, the mid-level divided to different groups, and the top-level assigned to each of the tasks. This allows our model to learn basic language properties from all tasks, boost performance on relevant tasks, and reduce the negative impact from irrelevant tasks. Our experiments on 13 benchmark datasets across five natural language understanding tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method.

preprint2022arXiv

Collapsing dust thin shells in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity

We investigate gravitational collapse of a spherically symmetric thin shell in the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet (EGB) gravity. Under the recently proposed 4D limit, we find that the collapsing shell will be bounced back at a small radius, without forming a singularity. This bouncing behavior is similar to those of a test particle and a homogeneous spherical dust star, in accordance with the expectation that the Gauss-Bonnet term will modify the small scale behavior of the Einstein gravity. We analyze the causal structure of the dynamic spacetime that represents the bouncing process, finding that the thin shell has an oscillation behavior on the Penrose diagram, which means that the thin shell results in a novel type of black hole with respect to observers outside the event horizon that the collapse forms. We also find that the weak cosmic censorship conjecture holds in this model. Further implications of such a regular gravitational collapse are discussed.

preprint2022arXiv

Contrastive Transformer-based Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Polyp Frame Detection

Current polyp detection methods from colonoscopy videos use exclusively normal (i.e., healthy) training images, which i) ignore the importance of temporal information in consecutive video frames, and ii) lack knowledge about the polyps. Consequently, they often have high detection errors, especially on challenging polyp cases (e.g., small, flat, or partially visible polyps). In this work, we formulate polyp detection as a weakly-supervised anomaly detection task that uses video-level labelled training data to detect frame-level polyps. In particular, we propose a novel convolutional transformer-based multiple instance learning method designed to identify abnormal frames (i.e., frames with polyps) from anomalous videos (i.e., videos containing at least one frame with polyp). In our method, local and global temporal dependencies are seamlessly captured while we simultaneously optimise video and snippet-level anomaly scores. A contrastive snippet mining method is also proposed to enable an effective modelling of the challenging polyp cases. The resulting method achieves a detection accuracy that is substantially better than current state-of-the-art approaches on a new large-scale colonoscopy video dataset introduced in this work.

preprint2022arXiv

Critical phenomena in dynamical scalarization of charged black hole

We report a new black hole scalarization mechanism and disclose novel dynamical critical phenomena in the process of the nonlinear accretion of the scalar field into black holes. The accretion process can transform a seed black hole into a final scalarized or bald black hole, depending on the initial parameter of the scalar field $p$. There is a critical parameter $p_{\ast}$ and near it all intermediate solutions are attracted to a critical solution and stay there for a time scaling as $T\propto-γ\ln|p-p_{\ast}|$. At late times, the solutions evolve into scalarized black holes if $p>p_{\ast}$, or bald black holes if $p<p_{\ast}$. The final masses of the resulting scalarized/bald black holes satisfy power-laws $M_{p}-M_{\pm}\propto|p-p_{\ast}|^{γ_{\pm}}$ where $M_{\pm}$ are the masses of the scalarized/bald black holes when $p\to p_\ast$ from above/below, and $γ_{\pm}$ the corresponding exponents.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep One-Class Classification via Interpolated Gaussian Descriptor

One-class classification (OCC) aims to learn an effective data description to enclose all normal training samples and detect anomalies based on the deviation from the data description. Current state-of-the-art OCC models learn a compact normality description by hyper-sphere minimisation, but they often suffer from overfitting the training data, especially when the training set is small or contaminated with anomalous samples. To address this issue, we introduce the interpolated Gaussian descriptor (IGD) method, a novel OCC model that learns a one-class Gaussian anomaly classifier trained with adversarially interpolated training samples. The Gaussian anomaly classifier differentiates the training samples based on their distance to the Gaussian centre and the standard deviation of these distances, offering the model a discriminability w.r.t. the given samples during training. The adversarial interpolation is enforced to consistently learn a smooth Gaussian descriptor, even when the training data is small or contaminated with anomalous samples. This enables our model to learn the data description based on the representative normal samples rather than fringe or anomalous samples, resulting in significantly improved normality description. In extensive experiments on diverse popular benchmarks, including MNIST, Fashion MNIST, CIFAR10, MVTec AD and two medical datasets, IGD achieves better detection accuracy than current state-of-the-art models. IGD also shows better robustness in problems with small or contaminated training sets. Code is available at https://github.com/tianyu0207/IGD.

preprint2022arXiv

Design of a Biomimetic Tactile Sensor for Material Classification

Tactile sensing typically involves active exploration of unknown surfaces and objects, making it especially effective at processing the characteristics of materials and textures. A key property extracted by human tactile perception is surface roughness, which relies on measuring vibratory signals using the multi-layered fingertip structure. Existing robotic systems lack tactile sensors that are able to provide high dynamic sensing ranges, perceive material properties, and maintain a low hardware cost. In this work, we introduce the reference design and fabrication procedure of a miniature and low-cost tactile sensor consisting of a biomimetic cutaneous structure, including the artificial fingerprint, dermis, epidermis, and an embedded magnet-sensor structure which serves as a mechanoreceptor for converting mechanical information to digital signals. The presented sensor is capable of detecting high-resolution magnetic field data through the Hall effect and creating high-dimensional time-frequency domain features for material texture classification. Additionally, we investigate the effects of different superficial sensor fingerprint patterns for classifying materials through both simulation and physical experimentation. After extracting time series and frequency domain features, we assess a k-nearest neighbors classifier for distinguishing between different materials. The results from our experiments show that our biomimetic tactile sensors with fingerprint ridges can classify materials with more than 8% higher accuracy and lower variability than ridge-less sensors. These results, along with the low cost and customizability of our sensor, demonstrate high potential for lowering the barrier to entry for a wide array of robotic applications, including model-less tactile sensing for texture classification, material inspection, and object recognition.

preprint2022arXiv

Experimental Realization of a Quantum Refrigerator Driven by Indefinite Causal Orders

Indefinite causal order (ICO) is playing a key role in recent quantum technologies. Here, we experimentally study quantum thermodynamics driven by ICO on nuclear spins using the nuclear magnetic resonance system. We realize the ICO of two thermalizing channels to exhibit how the mechanism works, and show that the working substance can be cooled or heated albeit it undergoes thermal contacts with reservoirs of the same temperature. Moreover, we construct a single cycle of the ICO refrigerator based on the Maxwell&#39;s demon mechanism, and evaluate its performance by measuring the work consumption and the heat energy extracted from the low-temperature reservoir. Unlike classical refrigerators in which the coefficient of performance (COP) is perversely higher the closer the temperature of the high-temperature and low-temperature reservoirs are to each other, the ICO refrigerator&#39;s COP is always bounded to small values due to the non-unit success probability in projecting the ancillary qubit to the preferable subspace. To enhance the COP, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a general framework based on the density matrix exponentiation (DME) approach, as an extension to the ICO refrigeration. The COP is observed to be enhanced by more than three times with the DME approach. Our work demonstrates a new way for non-classical heat exchange, and paves the way towards construction of quantum refrigerators on a quantum system.

preprint2022arXiv

Face Anti-Spoofing by Learning Polarization Cues in a Real-World Scenario

Face anti-spoofing is the key to preventing security breaches in biometric recognition applications. Existing software-based and hardware-based face liveness detection methods are effective in constrained environments or designated datasets only. Deep learning method using RGB and infrared images demands a large amount of training data for new attacks. In this paper, we present a face anti-spoofing method in a real-world scenario by automatic learning the physical characteristics in polarization images of a real face compared to a deceptive attack. A computational framework is developed to extract and classify the unique face features using convolutional neural networks and SVM together. Our real-time polarized face anti-spoofing (PAAS) detection method uses a on-chip integrated polarization imaging sensor with optimized processing algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the PAAS technique to counter diverse face spoofing attacks (print, replay, mask) in uncontrolled indoor and outdoor conditions by learning polarized face images of 33 people. A four-directional polarized face image dataset is released to inspire future applications within biometric anti-spoofing field.

preprint2022arXiv

Generalized Visual Quality Assessment of GAN-Generated Face Images

Recent years have witnessed the dramatically increased interest in face generation with generative adversarial networks (GANs). A number of successful GAN algorithms have been developed to produce vivid face images towards different application scenarios. However, little work has been dedicated to automatic quality assessment of such GAN-generated face images (GFIs), even less have been devoted to generalized and robust quality assessment of GFIs generated with unseen GAN model. Herein, we make the first attempt to study the subjective and objective quality towards generalized quality assessment of GFIs. More specifically, we establish a large-scale database consisting of GFIs from four GAN algorithms, the pseudo labels from image quality assessment (IQA) measures, as well as the human opinion scores via subjective testing. Subsequently, we develop a quality assessment model that is able to deliver accurate quality predictions for GFIs from both available and unseen GAN algorithms based on meta-learning. In particular, to learn shared knowledge from GFIs pairs that are born of limited GAN algorithms, we develop the convolutional block attention (CBA) and facial attributes-based analysis (ABA) modules, ensuring that the learned knowledge tends to be consistent with human visual perception. Extensive experiments exhibit that the proposed model achieves better performance compared with the state-of-the-art IQA models, and is capable of retaining the effectiveness when evaluating GFIs from the unseen GAN algorithms.

preprint2022arXiv

Logarithmic correction to black hole entropy from the nonlocality of quantum gravity

It has been known for many years that the leading correction to the black hole entropy is a logarithmic term, which is universal and closely related to conformal anomaly. A fully consistent analysis of this issue has to take quantum backreactions to the black hole geometry into account. However, it was always unclear how to naturally derive the modified black hole metric especially from an effective action, because the problem refers to the elusive non-locality of quantum gravity. In this paper, we show that this problem can be resolved within an effective field theory (EFT) framework of quantum gravity. Our work suggests that the EFT approach provides a powerful and self-consistent tool for studying the quantum gravitational corrections to black hole geometries and thermodynamics.

preprint2022arXiv

NVUM: Non-Volatile Unbiased Memory for Robust Medical Image Classification

Real-world large-scale medical image analysis (MIA) datasets have three challenges: 1) they contain noisy-labelled samples that affect training convergence and generalisation, 2) they usually have an imbalanced distribution of samples per class, and 3) they normally comprise a multi-label problem, where samples can have multiple diagnoses. Current approaches are commonly trained to solve a subset of those problems, but we are unaware of methods that address the three problems simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a new training module called Non-Volatile Unbiased Memory (NVUM), which non-volatility stores running average of model logits for a new regularization loss on noisy multi-label problem. We further unbias the classification prediction in NVUM update for imbalanced learning problem. We run extensive experiments to evaluate NVUM on new benchmarks proposed by this paper, where training is performed on noisy multi-label imbalanced chest X-ray (CXR) training sets, formed by Chest-Xray14 and CheXpert, and the testing is performed on the clean multi-label CXR datasets OpenI and PadChest. Our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art CXR classifiers and previous methods that can deal with noisy labels on all evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/FBLADL/NVUM.

preprint2022arXiv

Perturbed and Strict Mean Teachers for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation

Consistency learning using input image, feature, or network perturbations has shown remarkable results in semi-supervised semantic segmentation, but this approach can be seriously affected by inaccurate predictions of unlabelled training images. There are two consequences of these inaccurate predictions: 1) the training based on the &#34;strict&#34; cross-entropy (CE) loss can easily overfit prediction mistakes, leading to confirmation bias; and 2) the perturbations applied to these inaccurate predictions will use potentially erroneous predictions as training signals, degrading consistency learning. In this paper, we address the prediction accuracy problem of consistency learning methods with novel extensions of the mean-teacher (MT) model, which include a new auxiliary teacher, and the replacement of MT&#39;s mean square error (MSE) by a stricter confidence-weighted cross-entropy (Conf-CE) loss. The accurate prediction by this model allows us to use a challenging combination of network, input data and feature perturbations to improve the consistency learning generalisation, where the feature perturbations consist of a new adversarial perturbation. Results on public benchmarks show that our approach achieves remarkable improvements over the previous SOTA methods in the field. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyliu01/PS-MT.

preprint2022arXiv

Pixel-wise Energy-biased Abstention Learning for Anomaly Segmentation on Complex Urban Driving Scenes

State-of-the-art (SOTA) anomaly segmentation approaches on complex urban driving scenes explore pixel-wise classification uncertainty learned from outlier exposure, or external reconstruction models. However, previous uncertainty approaches that directly associate high uncertainty to anomaly may sometimes lead to incorrect anomaly predictions, and external reconstruction models tend to be too inefficient for real-time self-driving embedded systems. In this paper, we propose a new anomaly segmentation method, named pixel-wise energy-biased abstention learning (PEBAL), that explores pixel-wise abstention learning (AL) with a model that learns an adaptive pixel-level anomaly class, and an energy-based model (EBM) that learns inlier pixel distribution. More specifically, PEBAL is based on a non-trivial joint training of EBM and AL, where EBM is trained to output high-energy for anomaly pixels (from outlier exposure) and AL is trained such that these high-energy pixels receive adaptive low penalty for being included to the anomaly class. We extensively evaluate PEBAL against the SOTA and show that it achieves the best performance across four benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/tianyu0207/PEBAL.

preprint2022arXiv

The topological RN-AdS black holes cannot be overcharged by the new version of gedanken experiment

In this paper, we test the weak cosmic censorship conjecture (WCCC) for n >= 4 dimensional nearly extremal RN-AdS black holes with non-trivial topologies, namely plane and hyperbola, using the new version of gedanken experiment proposed by Sorce and Wald. Provided that the non-electromagnetic part of the stress tensor of matter fields satisfies the null energy condition and the linear stability condition holds, we find that the black holes cannot be overcharged under the second-order perturbation approximation, which includes the self-force and finite-size effects. As a result, we conclude that the violation of Hubeny type never occurs and the WCCC holds for the topological RN-AdS black hole.

preprint2022arXiv

Thermodynamic equilibrium condition and the first law of thermodynamics for charged perfect fluids in electromagnetic and gravitational fields

We provide a proof of the necessary and sufficient condition on the profile of the temperature, chemical potential, and angular velocity for a charged perfect fluid in dynamic equilibrium to be in thermodynamic equilibrium not only in fixed but also in dynamical electromagnetic and gravitational fields. In passing, we also present the corresponding expression for the first law of thermodynamics for such a charged star.

preprint2021arXiv

Detecting, Localising and Classifying Polyps from Colonoscopy Videos using Deep Learning

In this paper, we propose and analyse a system that can automatically detect, localise and classify polyps from colonoscopy videos. The detection of frames with polyps is formulated as a few-shot anomaly classification problem, where the training set is highly imbalanced with the large majority of frames consisting of normal images and a small minority comprising frames with polyps. Colonoscopy videos may contain blurry images and frames displaying feces and water jet sprays to clean the colon -- such frames can mistakenly be detected as anomalies, so we have implemented a classifier to reject these two types of frames before polyp detection takes place. Next, given a frame containing a polyp, our method localises (with a bounding box around the polyp) and classifies it into five different classes. Furthermore, we study a method to improve the reliability and interpretability of the classification result using uncertainty estimation and classification calibration. Classification uncertainty and calibration not only help improve classification accuracy by rejecting low-confidence and high-uncertain results, but can be used by doctors to decide how to decide on the classification of a polyp. All the proposed detection, localisation and classification methods are tested using large data sets and compared with relevant baseline approaches.

preprint2021arXiv

Holographic Abrikosov lattice: vortex matter from black hole

The AdS/CFT correspondence provides a unique way to study the vortex matter phases in superconductors. We solved the nonlinear equations of motion for the Abelain-Higgs theory living on the AdS$_4$ black hole boundary that is dual to a two dimensional strongly coupled type II superconductor at temperature $T$ with a perpendicular external uniform magnetic field $B_0$. We found the associated two critical magnetic fields, $B_{c1}(T)$ and $B_{c2}(T)$. For $B_0 < B_{c1}(T)$ the magnetic field will be expelled out by the superconductor resembling the Meissner effect and the superconductivity will be destroyed when $B_0 > B_{c2}(T)$. The Abrikosov lattice appears in the range $B_{c1}(T) < B_0 < B_{c2}(T)$ including, due to the finite size and boundary effect, several kinds of configurations such as hexagonal, square and slightly irregular square lattices, when the magnetic field is increased. The upper and lower critical fields behave as inverse squares of coherence length and magnetic penetration depth respectively which matches the well known consensus.

preprint2021arXiv

Unsupervised Dual Adversarial Learning for Anomaly Detection in Colonoscopy Video Frames

The automatic detection of frames containing polyps from a colonoscopy video sequence is an important first step for a fully automated colonoscopy analysis tool. Typically, such detection system is built using a large annotated data set of frames with and without polyps, which is expensive to be obtained. In this paper, we introduce a new system that detects frames containing polyps as anomalies from a distribution of frames from exams that do not contain any polyps. The system is trained using a one-class training set consisting of colonoscopy frames without polyps -- such training set is considerably less expensive to obtain, compared to the 2-class data set mentioned above. During inference, the system is only able to reconstruct frames without polyps, and when it tries to reconstruct a frame with polyp, it automatically removes (i.e., photoshop) it from the frame -- the difference between the input and reconstructed frames is used to detect frames with polyps. We name our proposed model as anomaly detection generative adversarial network (ADGAN), comprising a dual GAN with two generators and two discriminators. We show that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art result on this data set, compared with recently proposed anomaly detection systems.

preprint2020arXiv

Dynamical Phase Transition from Nonequilibrium Dynamics of Dark Solitons

By holographic duality, we identify a novel dynamical phase transition which results from the temperature dependence of non-equilibrium dynamics of dark solitons in a superfluid.For a non-equilibrium superfluid system with an initial density of dark solitons, there exists a critical temperature $T_d$,above which the system relaxes to equilibrium by producing sound waves, while below which it goes through an intermediate phase with a finite density of vortex-antivortex pairs. In particular, as $T_d$ is approached from below, the density of vortex pairs scales as $(T_d - T)^γ$ with the critical exponent $γ= 1/2$.

preprint2020arXiv

Few-Shot Anomaly Detection for Polyp Frames from Colonoscopy

Anomaly detection methods generally target the learning of a normal image distribution (i.e., inliers showing healthy cases) and during testing, samples relatively far from the learned distribution are classified as anomalies (i.e., outliers showing disease cases). These approaches tend to be sensitive to outliers that lie relatively close to inliers (e.g., a colonoscopy image with a small polyp). In this paper, we address the inappropriate sensitivity to outliers by also learning from inliers. We propose a new few-shot anomaly detection method based on an encoder trained to maximise the mutual information between feature embeddings and normal images, followed by a few-shot score inference network, trained with a large set of inliers and a substantially smaller set of outliers. We evaluate our proposed method on the clinical problem of detecting frames containing polyps from colonoscopy video sequences, where the training set has 13350 normal images (i.e., without polyps) and less than 100 abnormal images (i.e., with polyps). The results of our proposed model on this data set reveal a state-of-the-art detection result, while the performance based on different number of anomaly samples is relatively stable after approximately 40 abnormal training images.

preprint2020arXiv

Holographic boiling and generalized thermodynamic description beyond local equilibrium

Tuning a very simple two-component holographic superfluid model, we can have a first order phase transition between two superfluid phases in the probe limit. Inspired by the potential landscape discussion, an intuitive physical picture for systems with first order phase transitions is provided. We stress that holography perfectly offers a generalized thermodynamic description of certain strongly coupled systems even out of local equilibrium, which enables us to carefully study domain wall structures of the system under first order phase transitions, either static or in real time dynamics. We numerically construct the 1D domain wall configuration and compute the surface tension of the domain wall from its generalized grand potential. We also numerically simulate the real time dynamics of a 2D bubble nucleation process (holographic boiling). The surface tension of the 1D domain wall nicely matches the final state of the 2D bubble nucleation process when the bubble radius is large enough.

preprint2020arXiv

Holographic Superfluid Solitons with Backreaction

Solitons are important nonperturbative excitations in superfluids. For holographic superfluids, we numerically construct dark solitons that have the symmetry-restored phase at their core. A central point is that we include the gravitational back-reaction of the matter fields, which becomes important at low temperatures. We study in detail the properties of these solitons under variation of the back-reaction strength via tuning the gravitational constant. In particular, the depletion fraction of the particle number density at the core of the solitons is carefully investigated. In agreement with the probe-limit analysis, the depletion fraction shows the same qualitative behavior as in Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) theory, even if the back-reaction is included. We find that the depletion decreases with increasing back-reaction strength. Moreover, the inclusion of back-reaction enables us to obtain the effective energy density of solitons within holography, which together with an evaluation of the surface tension leads to a simple physical explanation for the snake instability of dark solitons.

preprint2020arXiv

Hybrid Multiple Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation in Aerial Images

Semantic segmentation in very high resolution (VHR) aerial images is one of the most challenging tasks in remote sensing image understanding. Most of the current approaches are based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). However, standard convolution with local receptive fields fails in modeling global dependencies. Prior researches have indicated that attention-based methods can capture long-range dependencies and further reconstruct the feature maps for better representation. Nevertheless, limited by the mere perspective of spacial and channel attention and huge computation complexity of self-attention mechanism, it is unlikely to model the effective semantic interdependencies between each pixel-pair of remote sensing data of complex spectra. In this work, we propose a novel attention-based framework named Hybrid Multiple Attention Network (HMANet) to adaptively capture global correlations from the perspective of space, channel and category in a more effective and efficient manner. Concretely, a class augmented attention (CAA) module embedded with a class channel attention (CCA) module can be used to compute category-based correlation and recalibrate the class-level information. Additionally, we introduce a simple yet effective region shuffle attention (RSA) module to reduce feature redundant and improve the efficiency of self-attention mechanism via region-wise representations. Extensive experimental results on the ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our HMANet over other state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Large-area printing of ferroelectric surface and super-domains for efficient solar water splitting

Surface electronic structures of the photoelectrodes determine the activity and efficiency of the photoelectrochemical water splitting, but the controls of their surface structures and interfacial chemical reactions remain challenging. Here, we use ferroelectric BiFeO3 as a model system to demonstrate an efficient and controllable water splitting reaction by large-area constructing the hydroxyls-bonded surface. The up-shift of band edge positions at this surface enables and enhances the interfacial holes and electrons transfer through the hydroxyl-active-sites, leading to simultaneously enhanced oxygen and hydrogen evolutions. Furthermore, printing of ferroelectric super-domains with microscale checkboard up/down electric fields separates the distribution of reduction/oxidation catalytic sites, enhancing the charge separation and giving rise to an order of magnitude increase of the photocurrent. This large-area printable ferroelectric surface and super-domains offer an alternative platform for controllable and high-efficient photocatalysis.

preprint2020arXiv

On NOMA-Based mmWave Communications

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication are two promising techniques to increase the system capacity in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile network. The former can achieve high spectral efficiency by modulating the information in power domain and the latter can provide extremely large spectrum resources. Fluctuating two-ray (FTR) channel model has already been proved to accurately agree with the small-scale fading effects in mmWave communications in experiments. In this paper, the performance of NOMA-based communications over FTR channels in mmWave communication systems is investigated in terms of outage probability (OP) and ergodic capacity (EC). Specifically, we consider the scenario that one base station (BS) transmits signals to two users simultaneously under NOMA scheme. The BS and users are all equipped with a single antenna. Two power allocation strategies are considered: the first one is a general (fixed) power allocation scheme under which we derive the OP and EC of NOMA users in closed form; the other one is an optimal power allocation scheme that can achieve the maximum sum rate for the whole system. Under the second scheme, not only the closed-form OP and EC but also the upper and lower bounds of EC are derived. Furthermore, we also derive the asymptotic expression for the OP in high average SNR region to investigate the diversity order under these two schemes. Finally, we show the correctness and accuracy of our derived expressions by Monte-Carlo simulation.

preprint2020arXiv

Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression

In this paper, we study the problem of learning Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) for regression. Current architectures of GCNs are limited to the small receptive field of convolution filters and shared transformation matrix for each node. To address these limitations, we propose Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks (SemGCN), a novel neural network architecture that operates on regression tasks with graph-structured data. SemGCN learns to capture semantic information such as local and global node relationships, which is not explicitly represented in the graph. These semantic relationships can be learned through end-to-end training from the ground truth without additional supervision or hand-crafted rules. We further investigate applying SemGCN to 3D human pose regression. Our formulation is intuitive and sufficient since both 2D and 3D human poses can be represented as a structured graph encoding the relationships between joints in the skeleton of a human body. We carry out comprehensive studies to validate our method. The results prove that SemGCN outperforms state of the art while using 90% fewer parameters.

preprint2019arXiv

Experimental Observation of Equilibrium and Dynamical Quantum Phase Transitions via Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators

The out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC) have been established as a fundamental concept for quantifying quantum information scrambling and diagnosing quantum chaotic behavior. Recently, it was theoretically proposed that the OTOC can be used as an order parameter to dynamically detect both equilibrium quantum phase transitions (EQPTs) and dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs) in one-dimensional many-body systems. Here we report the first experimental observation of EQPTs and DQPTs in a quantum spin chain via quench dynamics of OTOC on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum simulator. We observe that the quench dynamics of both the order parameter and the two-body correlation function cannot detect the DQPTs, but the OTOC can unambiguously detect the DQPTs. Moreover, we demonstrate that the long-time average value of the OTOC in quantum quench signals the equilibrium quantum critical point and ordered quantum phases, thus one can measure the EQPTs from the non-equilibrium quantum quench dynamics. Our experiment paves a way for experimentally investigating DQPTs through OTOCs and for studying the EQPTs through the non-equilibrium quantum quench dynamics with quantum simulators.

preprint2010arXiv

Thermodynamics of Black Holes from Equipartition of Energy and Holography

A gravitational potential in the relativistic case is introduced as an alternative to Wald&#39;s potential used by Verlinde, which reproduces the familiar entropy/area relation S=A/4 (in the natural units) when Verlinde&#39;s idea is applied to the black hole case. Upon using the equipartition rule, the correct form of the Komar mass (energy) can also be obtained, which leads to the Einstein equations. It is explicitly shown that our entropy formula agrees with Verlinde&#39;s entropy variation formula in spherical cases. The stationary space-times, especially the Kerr-Newman black hole, are then discussed, where it is shown that the equipartition rule involves the reduced mass, instead of the ADM mass, on the horizon of the black hole.