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Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder marked by memory loss, executive dysfunction, and personality changes. Early diagnosis is challenging due to subtle symptoms and varied presentations, often leading to misdiagnosis with traditional unimodal diagnostic methods due to their limited scope. This study introduces an advanced multimodal classification model that integrates clinical, cognitive, neuroimaging, and EEG data to enhance diagnostic accuracy. The model incorporates a feature tagger with a tabular data coding architecture and utilizes the TimesBlock module to capture intricate temporal patterns in Electroencephalograms (EEG) data. By employing Cross-modal Attention Aggregation module, the model effectively fuses Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) spatial information with EEG temporal data, significantly improving the distinction between AD, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Normal Cognition. Simultaneously, we have constructed the first AD classification dataset that includes three modalities: EEG, MRI, and tabular data. Our innovative approach aims to facilitate early diagnosis and intervention, potentially slowing the progression of AD. The source code and our private ADMC dataset are available at https://github.com/JustlfC03/MSTNet., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

Visual place recognition (VPR) is an essential component of many autonomous and augmented/virtual reality systems. It enables the systems to robustly localize themselves in large-scale environments. Existing VPR methods demonstrate attractive performance at the cost of heavy pre-training and limited generalizability. When deployed in unseen environments, these methods exhibit significant performance drops. Targeting this issue, we present VIPeR, a novel approach for visual incremental place recognition with the ability to adapt to new environments while retaining the performance of previous environments. We first introduce an adaptive mining strategy that balances the performance within a single environment and the generalizability across multiple environments. Then, to prevent catastrophic forgetting in lifelong learning, we draw inspiration from human memory systems and design a novel memory bank for our VIPeR. Our memory bank contains a sensory memory, a working memory and a long-term memory, with the first two focusing on the current environment and the last one for all previously visited environments. Additionally, we propose a probabilistic knowledge distillation to explicitly safeguard the previously learned knowledge. We evaluate our proposed VIPeR on three large-scale datasets, namely Oxford Robotcar, Nordland, and TartanAir. For comparison, we first set a baseline performance with naive finetuning. Then, several more recent lifelong learning methods are compared. Our VIPeR achieves better performance in almost all aspects with the biggest improvement of 13.65% in average performance., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

\textbf{Background:} The initial observation of a negative-parity state in proximity to the ground state in the 1950s marked the advent of extensive research into octupole deformed nuclei. Since then, the physics of octupole deformed nuclei has consistently held a special interest within the field of nuclear physics. In the present era, with the advent of sophisticated radioactive ion beam (RIB) facilities and advanced detectors, coupled with the remarkable capabilities of high-performance computing, extensive and intensive explorations are being conducted from both experimental and theoretical perspectives to elucidate the physics of octupole deformed nuclei. \textbf{Results:} This work establishes the OD-RHF model, which provides a reliable tool for studying octupole nuclei over a fairly wide range. The reliability of the newly developed OD-RHF model is illustrated by taking the octupole nucleus $^{144}$Ba as an example. Furthermore, the octupole deformation effects in $^{144}$Ba is verified by using the RHF Lagrangians PKO$i$ ($i=1,2,3$) and the RMF one DD-ME2. The intrusion of the neutron $1i_{13/2}$ and proton $1h_{11/2}$ components is demonstrated to play an essential role in determining the notable octupole deformation of $^{144}$Ba using PKO$i$ ($i=1,2,3$) and DD-ME2. It is indicated that the Fock terms play an important role in stabilizing the octupole deformation. More specifically, due to the repulsive tensor coupling between the intrude components and the core of $^{144}$Ba, the tensor force component carried by the $\pi$-PV coupling, that contributes only via the Fock terms, plays an opposing role in the formation of the octupole deformation of $^{144}$Ba., Comment: 20pages, 3 figures

Ptychography is now integrated as a tool in mainstream microscopy allowing quantitative and high-resolution imaging capabilities over a wide field of view. However, its ultimate performance is inevitably limited by the available coherent flux when implemented using electrons or laboratory X-ray sources. We present a universal reconstruction algorithm with high tolerance to low coherence for both far-field and near-field ptychography. The approach is practical for partial temporal and spatial coherence and requires no prior knowledge of the source properties. Our initial visible-light and electron data show that the method can dramatically improve the reconstruction quality and accelerate the convergence rate of the reconstruction. The approach also integrates well into existing ptychographic engines. It can also improve mixed-state and numerical monochromatisation methods, requiring a smaller number of coherent modes or lower dimensionality of Krylov subspace while providing more stable and faster convergence. We propose that this approach could have significant impact on ptychography of weakly scattering samples.

3D occupancy perception holds a pivotal role in recent vision-centric autonomous driving systems by converting surround-view images into integrated geometric and semantic representations within dense 3D grids. Nevertheless, current models still encounter two main challenges: modeling depth accurately in the 2D-3D view transformation stage, and overcoming the lack of generalizability issues due to sparse LiDAR supervision. To address these issues, this paper presents GEOcc, a Geometric-Enhanced Occupancy network tailored for vision-only surround-view perception. Our approach is three-fold: 1) Integration of explicit lift-based depth prediction and implicit projection-based transformers for depth modeling, enhancing the density and robustness of view transformation. 2) Utilization of mask-based encoder-decoder architecture for fine-grained semantic predictions; 3) Adoption of context-aware self-training loss functions in the pertaining stage to complement LiDAR supervision, involving the re-rendering of 2D depth maps from 3D occupancy features and leveraging image reconstruction loss to obtain denser depth supervision besides sparse LiDAR ground-truths. Our approach achieves State-Of-The-Art performance on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset with the least image resolution needed and the most weightless image backbone compared with current models, marking an improvement of 3.3% due to our proposed contributions. Comprehensive experimentation also demonstrates the consistent superiority of our method over baselines and alternative approaches.

Single image super-resolution (SR) is an established pixel-level vision task aimed at reconstructing a high-resolution image from its degraded low-resolution counterpart. Despite the notable advancements achieved by leveraging deep neural networks for SR, most existing deep learning architectures feature an extensive number of layers, leading to high computational complexity and substantial memory demands. These issues become particularly pronounced in the context of infrared image SR, where infrared devices often have stringent storage and computational constraints. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel, efficient, and precise single infrared image SR model, termed the Lightweight Information Split Network (LISN). The LISN comprises four main components: shallow feature extraction, deep feature extraction, dense feature fusion, and high-resolution infrared image reconstruction. A key innovation within this model is the introduction of the Lightweight Information Split Block (LISB) for deep feature extraction. The LISB employs a sequential process to extract hierarchical features, which are then aggregated based on the relevance of the features under consideration. By integrating channel splitting and shift operations, the LISB successfully strikes an optimal balance between enhanced SR performance and a lightweight framework. Comprehensive experimental evaluations reveal that the proposed LISN achieves superior performance over contemporary state-of-the-art methods in terms of both SR quality and model complexity, affirming its efficacy for practical deployment in resource-constrained infrared imaging applications.

Implicit neural representations (INR) excel in encoding videos within neural networks, showcasing promise in computer vision tasks like video compression and denoising. INR-based approaches reconstruct video frames from content-agnostic embeddings, which hampers their efficacy in video frame regression and restricts their generalization ability for video interpolation. To address these deficiencies, Hybrid Neural Representation for Videos (HNeRV) was introduced with content-adaptive embeddings. Nevertheless, HNeRV's compression ratios remain relatively low, attributable to an oversight in leveraging the network's shallow features and inter-frame residual information. In this work, we introduce an advanced U-shaped architecture, Vector Quantized-NeRV (VQ-NeRV), which integrates a novel component--the VQ-NeRV Block. This block incorporates a codebook mechanism to discretize the network's shallow residual features and inter-frame residual information effectively. This approach proves particularly advantageous in video compression, as it results in smaller size compared to quantized features. Furthermore, we introduce an original codebook optimization technique, termed shallow codebook optimization, designed to refine the utility and efficiency of the codebook. The experimental evaluations indicate that VQ-NeRV outperforms HNeRV on video regression tasks, delivering superior reconstruction quality (with an increase of 1-2 dB in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR)), better bit per pixel (bpp) efficiency, and improved video inpainting outcomes., Comment: Under Review

Given the broad application of infrared technology across diverse fields, there is an increasing emphasis on investigating super-resolution techniques for infrared images within the realm of deep learning. Despite the impressive results of current Transformer-based methods in image super-resolution tasks, their reliance on the self-attentive mechanism intrinsic to the Transformer architecture results in images being treated as one-dimensional sequences, thereby neglecting their inherent two-dimensional structure. Moreover, infrared images exhibit a uniform pixel distribution and a limited gradient range, posing challenges for the model to capture effective feature information. Consequently, we suggest a potent Transformer model, termed Large Kernel Transformer (LKFormer), to address this issue. Specifically, we have designed a Large Kernel Residual Attention (LKRA) module with linear complexity. This mainly employs depth-wise convolution with large kernels to execute non-local feature modeling, thereby substituting the standard self-attentive layer. Additionally, we have devised a novel feed-forward network structure called Gated-Pixel Feed-Forward Network (GPFN) to augment the LKFormer's capacity to manage the information flow within the network. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that our method surpasses the most advanced techniques available, using fewer parameters and yielding considerably superior performance.The source code will be available at https://github.com/sad192/large-kernel-Transformer., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, accept Multimedia Tools and Applications

The precise characterization and modeling of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) requires more comprehensive and accurate data, which imposes heightened demands on intelligent sensing capabilities. To address this issue, Crowdsensing Intelligence (CSI) has been proposed to collect data from CPSS by harnessing the collective intelligence of a diverse workforce. Our first and second Distributed/Decentralized Hybrid Workshop on Crowdsensing Intelligence (DHW-CSI) have focused on principles and high-level processes of organizing and operating CSI, as well as the participants, methods, and stages involved in CSI. This letter reports the outcomes of the latest DHW-CSI, focusing on Autonomous Crowdsensing (ACS) enabled by a range of technologies such as decentralized autonomous organizations and operations, large language models, and human-oriented operating systems. Specifically, we explain what ACS is and explore its distinctive features in comparison to traditional crowdsensing. Moreover, we present the ``6A-goal" of ACS and propose potential avenues for future research.

In standard hospital blood tests, the traditional process requires doctors to manually isolate leukocytes from microscopic images of patients' blood using microscopes. These isolated leukocytes are then categorized via automatic leukocyte classifiers to determine the proportion and volume of different types of leukocytes present in the blood samples, aiding disease diagnosis. This methodology is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it also has a high propensity for errors due to factors such as image quality and environmental conditions, which could potentially lead to incorrect subsequent classifications and misdiagnosis. To address these issues, this paper proposes an innovative method of leukocyte detection: the Multi-level Feature Fusion and Deformable Self-attention DETR (MFDS-DETR). To tackle the issue of leukocyte scale disparity, we designed the High-level Screening-feature Fusion Pyramid (HS-FPN), enabling multi-level fusion. This model uses high-level features as weights to filter low-level feature information via a channel attention module and then merges the screened information with the high-level features, thus enhancing the model's feature expression capability. Further, we address the issue of leukocyte feature scarcity by incorporating a multi-scale deformable self-attention module in the encoder and using the self-attention and cross-deformable attention mechanisms in the decoder, which aids in the extraction of the global features of the leukocyte feature maps. The effectiveness, superiority, and generalizability of the proposed MFDS-DETR method are confirmed through comparisons with other cutting-edge leukocyte detection models using the private WBCDD, public LISC and BCCD datasets. Our source code and private WBCCD dataset are available at https://github.com/JustlfC03/MFDS-DETR., Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, accept Computers in Biology and Medicine 2024

We present AEGIS-Net, a novel indoor place recognition model that takes in RGB point clouds and generates global place descriptors by aggregating lower-level color, geometry features and higher-level implicit semantic features. However, rather than simple feature concatenation, self-attention modules are employed to select the most important local features that best describe an indoor place. Our AEGIS-Net is made of a semantic encoder, a semantic decoder and an attention-guided feature embedding. The model is trained in a 2-stage process with the first stage focusing on an auxiliary semantic segmentation task and the second one on the place recognition task. We evaluate our AEGIS-Net on the ScanNetPR dataset and compare its performance with a pre-deep-learning feature-based method and five state-of-the-art deep-learning-based methods. Our AEGIS-Net achieves exceptional performance and outperforms all six methods., Comment: Accepted by 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2024)

Deep model fusion/merging is an emerging technique that merges the parameters or predictions of multiple deep learning models into a single one. It combines the abilities of different models to make up for the biases and errors of a single model to achieve better performance. However, deep model fusion on large-scale deep learning models (e.g., LLMs and foundation models) faces several challenges, including high computational cost, high-dimensional parameter space, interference between different heterogeneous models, etc. Although model fusion has attracted widespread attention due to its potential to solve complex real-world tasks, there is still a lack of complete and detailed survey research on this technique. Accordingly, in order to understand the model fusion method better and promote its development, we present a comprehensive survey to summarize the recent progress. Specifically, we categorize existing deep model fusion methods as four-fold: (1) "Mode connectivity", which connects the solutions in weight space via a path of non-increasing loss, in order to obtain better initialization for model fusion; (2) "Alignment" matches units between neural networks to create better conditions for fusion; (3) "Weight average", a classical model fusion method, averages the weights of multiple models to obtain more accurate results closer to the optimal solution; (4) "Ensemble learning" combines the outputs of diverse models, which is a foundational technique for improving the accuracy and robustness of the final model. In addition, we analyze the challenges faced by deep model fusion and propose possible research directions for model fusion in the future. Our review is helpful in deeply understanding the correlation between different model fusion methods and practical application methods, which can enlighten the research in the field of deep model fusion., Comment: 46 pages

Deformed ground state of $^{32}$Mg is investigated using the axially deformed relativistic Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (D-RHFB) model with the effective Lagrangian PKA1, which provides coincident description with the experimental measurements. It is illustrated that obvious breaking of the pseudo-spin symmetry (PSS) given by PKA1, being consistent with the experimental observation in nearby isotone $^{40}$Ca, is crucial for describing correctly the deformed ground state by producing unique shape evolution of neutron orbit $1/2_4^+$ in $^{32}$Mg. The PSS breaking is essentially determined by characteristic in-medium balance between nuclear attractions and repulsions that is manifested as unparalleled density dependent behaviors for coupling strengths $g_\sigma$ and $g_\omega$ in dominant $\sigma$-scalar and $\omega$-vector channels., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

This paper studies how RAID (redundant array of independent disks) could take full advantage of modern SSDs (solid-state drives) with built-in transparent compression. In current practice, RAID users are forced to choose a specific RAID level (e.g., RAID 10 or RAID 5) with a fixed storage cost vs. speed performance trade-off. Commercial market is witnessing the emergence of a new family of SSDs that can internally perform hardware-based lossless compression on each 4KB LBA (logical block address) block, transparent to host OS and user applications. Beyond straightforwardly reducing the RAID storage cost, such modern SSDs make it possible to relieve RAID users from being locked into a fixed storage cost vs. speed performance trade-off. The key idea is simple: RAID systems opportunistically leverage higher-than-expected runtime user data compressibility to enable dynamic RAID level conversion to improve the speed performance without compromising the effective storage capacity. This paper presents design techniques to enable and optimize the practical implementation of such elastic RAID systems. For the purpose of demonstration, we implemented a Linux software-based elastic RAID prototype that supports dynamic conversion between RAID 5 and RAID 10. Compared with a baseline software-based RAID 5, under sufficient runtime data compressibility that enables the conversion from RAID 5 to RAID 10 over 60% user data, the elastic RAID could improve the 4KB random write IOPS (IO per second) by 42% and 4KB random read IOPS in degraded mode by 46%, while maintaining the same effective storage capacity.

To harness the intriguing properties of two-dimensional van der Waals (vdW) ferromagnets (FMs) for versatile applications, the key challenge lies in the reliable material synthesis for scalable device production. Here, we demonstrate the epitaxial growth of single-crystalline 1T-CrTe2 thin films on 2-inch sapphire substrates. Benefiting from the uniform surface energy of the dangling bond-free Al2O3(0001) surface, the layer-by-layer vdW growth mode is observed right from the initial growth stage, which warrants precise control of the sample thickness and atomically smooth surface morphology across the entire wafer. Moreover, the presence of the Coulomb interaction at the CrTe2/Al2O3 interface serves as an effective tuning parameter to tailor the anomalous Hall response, and the structural optimization of the CrTe2-based spin-orbit torque device leads to a substantial switching power reduction by 54%. Our results may lay out a general framework for the design of energy-efficient spintronics based on configurable vdW FMs., Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures

Federated Learning (FL) enables training a global model without sharing the decentralized raw data stored on multiple devices to protect data privacy. Due to the diverse capacity of the devices, FL frameworks struggle to tackle the problems of straggler effects and outdated models. In addition, the data heterogeneity incurs severe accuracy degradation of the global model in the FL training process. To address aforementioned issues, we propose a hierarchical synchronous FL framework, i.e., FedHiSyn. FedHiSyn first clusters all available devices into a small number of categories based on their computing capacity. After a certain interval of local training, the models trained in different categories are simultaneously uploaded to a central server. Within a single category, the devices communicate the local updated model weights to each other based on a ring topology. As the efficiency of training in the ring topology prefers devices with homogeneous resources, the classification based on the computing capacity mitigates the impact of straggler effects. Besides, the combination of the synchronous update of multiple categories and the device communication within a single category help address the data heterogeneity issue while achieving high accuracy. We evaluate the proposed framework based on MNIST, EMNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets and diverse heterogeneous settings of devices. Experimental results show that FedHiSyn outperforms six baseline methods, e.g., FedAvg, SCAFFOLD, and FedAT, in terms of training accuracy and efficiency., Comment: 10 pages, to appear in ICPP'2022

A broken interfacial inversion symmetry in ultrathin ferromagnet/heavy metal (FM/HM) bilayers is generally believed to be a prerequisite for accommodating the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) and for stabilizing chiral spin textures. In these bilayers, the strength of the DMI decays as the thickness of the FM layer increases and vanishes around a few nanometers. In the present study, through synthesizing relatively thick films of compositions CoPt or FePt, CoCu or FeCu, FeGd and FeNi, contributions to DMI from the composition gradient induced bulk magnetic asymmetry (BMA) and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) are systematically examined. Using Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy, both the sign and amplitude of DMI in films with controllable direction and strength of BMA, in the presence and absence of SOC are experimentally studied. In particular, we show that a sizable amplitude of DMI (0.15 mJ/m^2) can be realized in CoPt or FePt films with BMA and strong SOC, whereas negligible DMI strengths are observed in other thick films with BMA but without significant SOC. The pivotal roles of BMA and SOC are further examined based on the three-site Fert-Levy model and first-principles calculations. It is expected that our findings may help to further understand the origin of chiral magnetism and to design novel non-collinear spin textures., Comment: Physical Review Letters, in press