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Recent Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) have made significant advancements in multi-modal alignment by employing lightweight connection modules to facilitate the representation and fusion of knowledge from existing pre-trained uni-modal models. However, these methods still rely on modality-specific and direction-specific connectors, leading to compartmentalized knowledge representations and reduced computational efficiency, which limits the model's ability to form unified multi-modal representations. To address these issues, we introduce a novel training framework, Alt-MoE, which employs the Mixture of Experts (MoE) as a unified multi-directional connector across modalities, and employs a multi-step sequential alternating unidirectional alignment strategy, which converges to bidirectional alignment over iterations. The extensive empirical studies revealed the following key points: 1) Alt-MoE achieves competitive results by integrating diverse knowledge representations from uni-modal models. This approach seamlessly fuses the specialized expertise of existing high-performance uni-modal models, effectively synthesizing their domain-specific knowledge into a cohesive multi-modal representation. 2) Alt-MoE efficiently scales to new tasks and modalities without altering its model architecture or training strategy. Furthermore, Alt-MoE operates in latent space, supporting vector pre-storage and real-time retrieval via lightweight multi-directional MoE, thereby facilitating massive data processing. Our methodology has been validated on several well-performing uni-modal models (LLAMA3, Qwen2, and DINOv2), achieving competitive results on a wide range of downstream tasks and datasets., Comment: work in progress

Next-generation wireless networks are expected to develop a novel paradigm of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) to enable both the high-accuracy sensing and high-speed communications. However, conventional mono-static ISAC systems, which simultaneously transmit and receive at the same equipment, may suffer from severe self-interference, and thus significantly degrade the system performance.To address this issue, this paper studies a multi-static ISAC system for cooperative target localization and communications, where the transmitter transmits ISAC signal to multiple receivers (REs) deployed at different positions. We derive the closed-form Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (CRB) on the joint estimations of both the transmission delay and Doppler shift for cooperative target localization, and the CRB minimization problem is formulated by considering the cooperative cost and communication rate requirements for the REs. To solve this problem, we first decouple it into two subproblems for RE selection and transmit beamforming, respectively. Then, a minimax linkage-based method is proposed to solve the RE selection subproblem, and a successive convex approximation algorithm is adopted to deal with the transmit beamforming subproblem with non-convex constraints. Finally, numerical results validate our analysis and reveal that our proposed multi-static ISAC scheme achieves better ISAC performance than the conventional mono-static ones when the number of cooperative REs is large.

Stock volatility prediction is an important task in the financial industry. Recent advancements in multimodal methodologies, which integrate both textual and auditory data, have demonstrated significant improvements in this domain, such as earnings calls (Earnings calls are public available and often involve the management team of a public company and interested parties to discuss the company's earnings). However, these multimodal methods have faced two drawbacks. First, they often fail to yield reliable models and overfit the data due to their absorption of stochastic information from the stock market. Moreover, using multimodal models to predict stock volatility suffers from gender bias and lacks an efficient way to eliminate such bias. To address these aforementioned problems, we use adversarial training to generate perturbations that simulate the inherent stochasticity and bias, by creating areas resistant to random information around the input space to improve model robustness and fairness. Our comprehensive experiments on two real-world financial audio datasets reveal that this method exceeds the performance of current state-of-the-art solution. This confirms the value of adversarial training in reducing stochasticity and bias for stock volatility prediction tasks.

The ability to learn compact, high-quality, and easy-to-optimize representations for visual data is paramount to many applications such as novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. Recent work has shown substantial success in using tensor networks to design such compact and high-quality representations. However, the ability to optimize tensor-based representations, and in particular, the highly compact tensor train representation, is still lacking. This has prevented practitioners from deploying the full potential of tensor networks for visual data. To this end, we propose 'Prolongation Upsampling Tensor Train (PuTT)', a novel method for learning tensor train representations in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our method involves the prolonging or `upsampling' of a learned tensor train representation, creating a sequence of 'coarse-to-fine' tensor trains that are incrementally refined. We evaluate our representation along three axes: (1). compression, (2). denoising capability, and (3). image completion capability. To assess these axes, we consider the tasks of image fitting, 3D fitting, and novel view synthesis, where our method shows an improved performance compared to state-of-the-art tensor-based methods. For full results see our project webpage: https://sebulo.github.io/PuTT_website/, Comment: Project webpage: https://sebulo.github.io/PuTT_website/

This paper studies the performance trade-off in a multi-user backscatter communication (BackCom) system for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), where the multi-antenna ISAC transmitter sends excitation signals to power multiple single-antenna passive backscatter devices (BD), and the multi-antenna ISAC receiver performs joint sensing (localization) and communication tasks based on the backscattered signals from all BDs. Specifically, the localization performance is measured by the Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (CRB) on the transmission delay and direction of arrival (DoA) of the backscattered signals, whose closed-form expression is obtained by deriving the corresponding Fisher information matrix (FIM), and the communication performance is characterized by the sum transmission rate of all BDs. Then, to characterize the trade-off between the localization and communication performances, the CRB minimization problem with the communication rate constraint is formulated, and is shown to be non-convex in general. By exploiting the hidden convexity, we propose an approach that combines fractional programming (FP) and Schur complement techniques to transform the original problem into an equivalent convex form. Finally, numerical results reveal the trade-off between the CRB and sum transmission rate achieved by our proposed method.

State space models (SSMs) with selection mechanisms and hardware-aware architectures, namely Mamba, have recently demonstrated significant promise in long-sequence modeling. Since the self-attention mechanism in transformers has quadratic complexity with image size and increasing computational demands, the researchers are now exploring how to adapt Mamba for computer vision tasks. This paper is the first comprehensive survey aiming to provide an in-depth analysis of Mamba models in the field of computer vision. It begins by exploring the foundational concepts contributing to Mamba's success, including the state space model framework, selection mechanisms, and hardware-aware design. Next, we review these vision mamba models by categorizing them into foundational ones and enhancing them with techniques such as convolution, recurrence, and attention to improve their sophistication. We further delve into the widespread applications of Mamba in vision tasks, which include their use as a backbone in various levels of vision processing. This encompasses general visual tasks, Medical visual tasks (e.g., 2D / 3D segmentation, classification, and image registration, etc.), and Remote Sensing visual tasks. We specially introduce general visual tasks from two levels: High/Mid-level vision (e.g., Object detection, Segmentation, Video classification, etc.) and Low-level vision (e.g., Image super-resolution, Image restoration, Visual generation, etc.). We hope this endeavor will spark additional interest within the community to address current challenges and further apply Mamba models in computer vision.

The escalating influx of data generated by networked edge devices, coupled with the growing awareness of data privacy, has restricted the traditional data analytics workflow, where the edge data are gathered by a centralized server to be further utilized by data analysts. To continue leveraging vast edge data to support various data-incentive applications, a transformative shift is promoted in computing paradigms from centralized data processing to privacy-preserved distributed data processing. The need to perform data analytics on private edge data motivates federated analytics (FA), an emerging technique to support collaborative data analytics among diverse data owners without centralizing the raw data. Despite the wide applications of FA in industry and academia, a comprehensive examination of existing research efforts in FA has been notably absent. This survey aims to bridge this gap by first providing an overview of FA, elucidating key concepts, and discussing its relationship with similar concepts. We then conduct a thorough examination of FA, including its key challenges, taxonomy, and enabling techniques. Diverse FA applications, including statistical metrics, frequency-related applications, database query operations, FL-assisting FA tasks, and other wireless network applications are then carefully reviewed. We complete the survey with several open research issues, future directions, and a comprehensive lessons learned part. This survey intends to provide a holistic understanding of the emerging FA techniques and foster the continued evolution of privacy-preserving distributed data processing in the emerging networked society., Comment: This survey has been submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials

This paper revisits few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation (FS-PCS), with a focus on two significant issues in the state-of-the-art: foreground leakage and sparse point distribution. The former arises from non-uniform point sampling, allowing models to distinguish the density disparities between foreground and background for easier segmentation. The latter results from sampling only 2,048 points, limiting semantic information and deviating from the real-world practice. To address these issues, we introduce a standardized FS-PCS setting, upon which a new benchmark is built. Moreover, we propose a novel FS-PCS model. While previous methods are based on feature optimization by mainly refining support features to enhance prototypes, our method is based on correlation optimization, referred to as Correlation Optimization Segmentation (COSeg). Specifically, we compute Class-specific Multi-prototypical Correlation (CMC) for each query point, representing its correlations to category prototypes. Then, we propose the Hyper Correlation Augmentation (HCA) module to enhance CMC. Furthermore, tackling the inherent property of few-shot training to incur base susceptibility for models, we propose to learn non-parametric prototypes for the base classes during training. The learned base prototypes are used to calibrate correlations for the background class through a Base Prototypes Calibration (BPC) module. Experiments on popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of COSeg over existing methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/ZhaochongAn/COSeg, Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2024

First-principles calculations have been used to investigate the electronic and topological properties of the two-dimensional C6-2x(BN)x biphenylene network, a graphene-like structure composed of not only hexagonal ring but also octagonal and square rings. Nontrivial topological properties have been found in two of them, with a stoichiometry of C4BN and C2(BN)2. The former C4BN is predicted to be a type-II Dirac semimetal with a superconducting critical temperature Tc=0.38K, which is similar to the pure carbon biphenylene network (C-BPN). The latter shows a novel isolated edge state exists between the conduction and valence bands. By regulation of strains and virtual-crystal approximation calculations, we found the annihilation of two pairs of Dirac points (DPs) in the non-high symmetric region (non-HSR) causes the two corresponding edge states stick together to generate this isolated edge state. In addition, we found that one pair of DPs arises from the shift of DPs in the C-BPN, while another new pair of DPs emerges around the Time Reversal Invariant Momenta (TRIM) point X due to the doping of boron and nitrogen. We constructed a tight-binding (TB) model to reveal the mechanism of forming the isolated edge state from the C-BPN to C2(BN)2. This study not only demonstrates the existence and mechanism of forming the isolated edge state in semimetals, but also provides an example in which the DPs can move away from the high-symmetry region., Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures, with supplementary materials

Robust metallic surface states (MSS) of topological insulator (TI) against imperfections and perturbations are important in broad applications such as chemical catalysis and quantum computing. Unfortunately, they are suffered from the narrow band gap that can be accessed. Searching for MSS with large bulk band gap beyond conventional TIs becomes a quest. In this work, inspired by the adiabatic connection principle in real space, we identify that all electrides, a new class of emerging materials, must host robust and universal MSS that resists any disturbances, in spite of the fact that some of them could be classified as trivial in standard topology theory. This counterintuitive property is traced to the specific charge localization-delocalization change intrinsic to electride when approaching the crystalline surface or interface, which is a kind of interstice-centered to atom-centered transition in the real-space topology of the charge density distribution, and is sharply different from the band inversion in the standard topology theory. The new mechanism circumvents the obstacle that limits the band gap of TI. Robust and universal MSS in an electride that conventionally-determined as trivial but with a colossal band gap beyond 6.13 eV are demonstrated. This gap size is about 6-fold larger than the highest record of known "wide-gap" TIs, thus opens up new avenues to universal MSS with gigantic bulk gap., Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, with supporting information

The emerging Web 3.0 paradigm aims to decentralize existing web services, enabling desirable properties such as transparency, incentives, and privacy preservation. However, current Web 3.0 applications supported by blockchain infrastructure still cannot support complex data analytics tasks in a scalable and privacy-preserving way. This paper introduces the emerging federated analytics (FA) paradigm into the realm of Web 3.0 services, enabling data to stay local while still contributing to complex web analytics tasks in a privacy-preserving way. We propose FedWeb, a tailored FA design for important frequent pattern mining tasks in Web 3.0. FedWeb remarkably reduces the number of required participating data owners to support privacy-preserving Web 3.0 data analytics based on a novel distributed differential privacy technique. The correctness of mining results is guaranteed by a theoretically rigid candidate filtering scheme based on Hoeffding's inequality and Chebychev's inequality. Two response budget saving solutions are proposed to further reduce participating data owners. Experiments on three representative Web 3.0 scenarios show that FedWeb can improve data utility by ~25.3% and reduce the participating data owners by ~98.4%., Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'24)

Embodied carbon is the total carbon released from the processes associated with a product from cradle to gate. In many industry sectors, embodied carbon dominates the overall carbon footprint. Embodied carbon accounting, i.e., to estimate the embodied carbon of a product, has become an important research topic. Existing studies derive the embodied carbon through life cycle analysis (LCA) reports. Current LCA reports only provide the carbon emission of a product class, e.g., 28nm CPU, yet a product instance can be manufactured from diverse regions and in diverse time periods, e.g., a winter period of Ireland (Intel). It is known that the carbon emission depends on the electricity generation process which has spatial and temporal dynamics. Therefore, the embodied carbon of a specific product instance can largely differ from its product class. In this paper, we present new spatial-temporal embodied carbon models for embodied carbon accounting. We observe significant differences between current embodied carbon models and our spatial-temporal embodied carbon models, e.g., for 7nm CPU the difference can be 13.69%.

Optimization via simulation has been well established to find optimal solutions and designs in complex systems. However, it still faces modeling and computational challenges when extended to the multi-stage setting. This survey reviews the models and methodologies of single-stage optimization via simulation and multi-stage stochastic programming. These are necessary theoretical components to push forward the development of sequential decision making via simulation. We identify the key challenge of sequential decision making via simulation as the appropriate modeling of the stage-wise value function, for which we survey the state-of-the-art meta-models and their potential solution algorithms.

Difference features obtained by comparing the images of two periods play an indispensable role in the change detection (CD) task. However, a pair of bi-temporal images can exhibit diverse changes, which may cause various difference features. Identifying changed pixels with differ difference features to be the same category is thus a challenge for CD. Most nowadays' methods acquire distinctive difference features in implicit ways like enhancing image representation or supervision information. Nevertheless, informative image features only guarantee object semantics are modeled and can not guarantee that changed pixels have similar semantics in the difference feature space and are distinct from those unchanged ones. In this work, the generalized representation of various changes is learned straightforwardly in the difference feature space, and a novel Changes-Aware Transformer (CAT) for refining difference features is proposed. This generalized representation can perceive which pixels are changed and which are unchanged and further guide the update of pixels' difference features. CAT effectively accomplishes this refinement process through the stacked cosine cross-attention layer and self-attention layer. After refinement, the changed pixels in the difference feature space are closer to each other, which facilitates change detection. In addition, CAT is compatible with various backbone networks and existing CD methods. Experiments on remote sensing CD data set and street scene CD data set show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and has excellent generalization.

This paper proposes decentralized stability conditions for multi-converter systems based on the combination of the small gain theorem and the small phase theorem. Instead of directly computing the closed-loop dynamics, e.g., eigenvalues of the state-space matrix, or using the generalized Nyquist stability criterion, the proposed stability conditions are more scalable and computationally lighter, which aim at evaluating the closed-loop system stability by comparing the individual converter dynamics with the network dynamics in a decentralized and open-loop manner. Moreover, our approach can handle heterogeneous converters' dynamics and is suitable to analyze large-scale multi-converter power systems that contain grid-following (GFL), grid-forming (GFM) converters, and synchronous generators. Compared with other decentralized stability conditions, e.g., passivity-based stability conditions, the proposed conditions are significantly less conservative and can be generally satisfied in practice across the whole frequency range.

Multifocus image fusion is an effective way to overcome the limitation of optical lenses. Many existing methods obtain fused results by generating decision maps. However, such methods often assume that the focused areas of the two source images are complementary, making it impossible to achieve simultaneous fusion of multiple images. Additionally, the existing methods ignore the impact of hard pixels on fusion performance, limiting the visual quality improvement of fusion image. To address these issues, a combining generation and recombination model, termed as GRFusion, is proposed. In GRFusion, focus property detection of each source image can be implemented independently, enabling simultaneous fusion of multiple source images and avoiding information loss caused by alternating fusion. This makes GRFusion free from the number of inputs. To distinguish the hard pixels from the source images, we achieve the determination of hard pixels by considering the inconsistency among the detection results of focus areas in source images. Furthermore, a multi-directional gradient embedding method for generating full focus images is proposed. Subsequently, a hard-pixel-guided recombination mechanism for constructing fused result is devised, effectively integrating the complementary advantages of feature reconstruction-based method and focused pixel recombination-based method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of the proposed method.The source code will be released on https://github.com/xxx/xxx.

With the emerging diffusion models, recently, text-to-video generation has aroused increasing attention. But an important bottleneck therein is that generative videos often tend to carry some flickers and artifacts. In this work, we propose a dual-stream diffusion net (DSDN) to improve the consistency of content variations in generating videos. In particular, the designed two diffusion streams, video content and motion branches, could not only run separately in their private spaces for producing personalized video variations as well as content, but also be well-aligned between the content and motion domains through leveraging our designed cross-transformer interaction module, which would benefit the smoothness of generated videos. Besides, we also introduce motion decomposer and combiner to faciliate the operation on video motion. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method could produce amazing continuous videos with fewer flickers., Comment: 8pages, 7 figures

A compact K\"ahler manifold $\left( M,\omega ,J\right) $ with $T$-symmetry admits a natural mixed polarization $\mathcal{P}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ whose real directions come from the $T$-action. In \cite{LW1}, we constructed a one-parameter family of K\"ahler structures $\left( \omega ,J_{t}\right) $'s with the same underlying K\"a hler form $\omega $ and $J_{0}=J$, such that (i) there is a $T$-equivariant biholomorphism between $\left( M,J_{0}\right) $ and $\left( M,J_{t}\right) $ and (ii) K\"ahler polarizations $\mathcal{P} _{t}$'s corresponding to $J_{t}$'s converge to $\mathcal{P}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ as $t$ goes to infinity. In this paper, we study the quantum analog of above results. Assume $L$ is a pre-quantum line bundle on $\left( M,\omega \right) $. Let $\mathcal{H}_{t}$ and $ \mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ be quantum spaces defined using polarizations $\mathcal{P}_{t}$ and $\mathcal{P}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ respectively. In particular, $\mathcal{H}_{t}=H_{\bar{\partial}_{t}}^{0}\left( M,L\right) $. They are both representations of $T$. We show that (i) there is a $T$-equivariant isomorphism between $\mathcal{H}_{0}$ and $\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ and (ii) for regular $T$-weight $\lambda $, corresponding $\lambda $-weight spaces $ \mathcal{H}_{t,\lambda }$'s converge to $\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix},\lambda }$ as $t$ goes to infinity., Comment: 24pages. Comments are welcome!

Recently, inference privacy has attracted increasing attention. The inference privacy concern arises most notably in the widely deployed edge-cloud video analytics systems, where the cloud needs the videos captured from the edge. The video data can contain sensitive information and subject to attack when they are transmitted to the cloud for inference. Many privacy protection schemes have been proposed. Yet, the performance of a scheme needs to be determined by experiments or inferred by analyzing the specific case. In this paper, we propose a new metric, \textit{privacy protectability}, to characterize to what degree a video stream can be protected given a certain video analytics task. Such a metric has strong operational meaning. For example, low protectability means that it may be necessary to set up an overall secure environment. We can also evaluate a privacy protection scheme, e.g., assume it obfuscates the video data, what level of protection this scheme has achieved after obfuscation. Our definition of privacy protectability is rooted in information theory and we develop efficient algorithms to estimate the metric. We use experiments on real data to validate that our metric is consistent with empirical measurements on how well a video stream can be protected for a video analytics task.

We propose a logarithmic parametrization form of energy density for the scalar field dark energy in the framework of the standard theory of gravity, which supports the necessary transition from the decelerated to the accelerated behavior of the Universe. The model under consideration is constrained by available observational data, including cosmic chronometers data-sets (CC), Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) data-sets, and Supernovae (SN) data-sets, consisting of only two parameters $\alpha$ and $\beta$. The combined $CC$+$BAO$+$SN$ data-sets yields a transition redshift of $z_{tr}=0.79^{+0.02}_{-0.02}$, where the model exhibits signature-flipping and is consistent with recent observations. For the combined data-sets, the present value of the deceleration parameter is calculated to be $q_{0}=-0.43^{+0.06}_{-0.06}$. Furthermore, the analysis yields constraints on both the parameter density value for matter and the present value of the Hubble parameter, with values of $\Omega_{m0}=0.25849^{+0.00026}_{-0.00025}$ and $H_{0}=67.79_{-0.59}^{+0.59}$ $km/s/Mpc$, respectively, consistent with the results obtained from Planck 2018. Finally, the study investigates how the mass of a black hole evolves over time in a Universe with both matter and dark energy. It reveals that the black hole mass increases initially but stops increasing as dark energy dominates., Comment: The European Physical Journal C published version

Topological surface states (TSS) in the prototypical topological insulator (TI) Bi2Se3 are frequently characterized using optical probes, but electron-hole interactions and their effect on surface localization and optical response of the TSS remain unexplored. Here, we use ab initio calculations to understand excitonic effects in the bulk and surface of Bi2Se3. We identify multiple series of chiral excitons that exhibit both bulk and TSS character, due to exchange-driven mixing. Our results address fundamental questions about the degree to which electron-hole interactions can relax the topological protection of surface states and dipole selection rules for circularly polarized light in TIs by elucidating the complex intermixture of bulk and surface states excited in optical measurements and their coupling to light., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

In this work, non-destructive virtual diagnostics are applied to retrieve the electron beam time of arrival and energy in a relativistic ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) beamline using independently-measured machine parameters. This technique has the potential to improve temporal resolution of pump and probe UED scans. Fluctuations in time of arrival have multiple components, including a shot-to-shot jitter and a long-term drift which can be separately addressed by closed loop feedback systems. A linear-regression-based model is used to fit the beam energy and time of arrival and is shown to be able to predict accurately behavior for both on long and short time scales. More advanced time-series analysis based on machine learning techniques can be applied to improve this prediction further., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

Let $M$ be a compact K\"ahler manifold equipped with a pre-quantum line bundle $L$. In [9], using $T$-symmetry, we constructed a polarization $\mathcal{P}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ on $M$, which generalizes real polarizations on toric manifolds. In this paper, we obtain the following results for the quantum space $\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ associated to $\mathcal{P}_{\mathrm{mix}}$. First, $\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ consists of distributional sections of $L$ with supports inside $\mu^{-1}(\mathfrak{t}^{*}_{\mathbb{Z}})$. This gives $\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}}=\bigoplus_{\lambda \in \mathfrak{t}^{*}_{\mathbb{Z}} } \mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}, \lambda}$. Second, the above decomposition of $\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ coincides with the weight decomposition for the $T$-symmetry. Third, an isomorphism $\mathcal{H}_{\mathrm{mix}, \lambda} \cong H^{0}( M//_{\lambda}T, L//_{\lambda}T)$, for regular $\lambda$. Namely, geometric quantization commutes with symplectic reduction., Comment: 24 pages. Comments are welcome!

3D object detection is a critical task in autonomous driving. Recently multi-modal fusion-based 3D object detection methods, which combine the complementary advantages of LiDAR and camera, have shown great performance improvements over mono-modal methods. However, so far, no methods have attempted to utilize the instance-level contextual image semantics to guide the 3D object detection. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective Painting Adaptive Instance-prior for 3D object detection (PAI3D) to fuse instance-level image semantics flexibly with point cloud features. PAI3D is a multi-modal sequential instance-level fusion framework. It first extracts instance-level semantic information from images, the extracted information, including objects categorical label, point-to-object membership and object position, are then used to augment each LiDAR point in the subsequent 3D detection network to guide and improve detection performance. PAI3D outperforms the state-of-the-art with a large margin on the nuScenes dataset, achieving 71.4 in mAP and 74.2 in NDS on the test split. Our comprehensive experiments show that instance-level image semantics contribute the most to the performance gain, and PAI3D works well with any good-quality instance segmentation models and any modern point cloud 3D encoders, making it a strong candidate for deployment on autonomous vehicles.

Let $(M, \omega, J)$ be a K\"ahler manifold, equipped with an effective Hamiltonian torus action $\rho: T \rightarrow \mathrm{Diff}(M, \omega, J)$ by isometries with moment map $\mu: M \rightarrow \mathfrak{t}^{*}$. We first construct a singular mixed polarization $\mathcal{P}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ on $M$. Second, we construct a one-parameter family of complex structures $J_{t}$ on $M$ which are compatible with $\omega$. Furthermore, the path of corresponding K\"ahler metrics $g_{t}$ is a complete geodesic ray in the space of K\"ahler metrics of $M$, when $M$ is compact. Finally, we show that the corresponding family of K\"ahler polarizations $\mathcal{P}_{t}$ associated to $J_{t}$ converges to $\mathcal{P}_{\mathrm{mix}}$ as $t \rightarrow \infty$., Comment: 24 pages, comments welcome! v2: Minor changes based on referee's suggestions. To appear in Adv. Math

In this paper, the synchronization of heterogeneous agents interacting over a dynamical network is studied. The edge dynamics can model the inter-agent communications which are often heterogeneous by nature. They can also model the controllers of the agents which may be different for each agent or uniform for all the agents. Novel synchronization conditions are obtained for both cases from a phase perspective by exploiting a recently developed small phase theorem. The conditions scale well with the network and reveal the trade-off between the phases of node dynamics and edge dynamics. We also study the synchronizability problem which aims to characterize the allowable diversity of the agents for which controllers can be designed so as to achieve synchronization. The allowable diversity is captured in terms of phase conditions engaging the residue matrices of the agents at their persistent modes. Controller design algorithms are provided for the cases of agent-dependent and uniform controllers, respectively.

The decarbonization of the power sector plays a pivotal role in economy-wide decarbonization to set the world on track to limit warming to 1.5{\deg}C by 2050. Carbon emission markets can play a significant role in this transition by putting a price on carbon and giving electricity producers an incentive to reduce their emissions. In this paper, we study the operational equilibrium of an integrated regional/jurisdictional energy system that comprises an electricity market, a natural gas market, and a carbon emission market. We first propose the novel role of a regional carbon market operator (CMO). Different than the conventional cap-and-trade carbon trading mechanism, the proposed CMO manages carbon allowance trading in a centralized jurisdictional carbon emission market. We then develop the formulation to identify the operational equilibrium of the electricity, natural gas, and carbon emission markets based on their interactions. The proposed equilibrium can be obtained by solving the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions of all three operational models simultaneously. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach is more flexible, consistent, and effective in mitigating carbon emissions compared with the cap-and-trade mechanism.

The retirement of unabated coal power plants, the plummeting cost of renewable energy technologies, along with more aggressive public policies and regulatory reforms, are occurring at an unprecedented speed to decarbonize the power and energy systems towards the 2030 and 2050 climate goals. This article aims to establish a carbon-oriented framework to examine the role carbon emission is playing within a power grid that is rapidly transitioning to an integrated multi-energy system. We divide the carbon flows in the multi-energy systems into three stages: carbon allowances initialization/allocation, exchanging/pricing, and circulation. Then, we discuss how cross-disciplinary technologies, such as game theory, optimization, and machine learning can facilitate the modeling and analysis of the proposed framework.

Let $(X, \omega, J)$ be a toric variety of dimension $2n$ determined by a Delzant polytope. In this paper, we first construct the polarizations $\shP_{k}$ by the Hamiltonian $T^{k}$-action on $X$ (see Theorem 3.11). We will show that $\shP_{k}$ is a singular mixed polarization for $1\le k < n$, and $\shP_{n}$ is a singular real polarization which coincides with the real polarization studied in \cite{BFMN} on the open dense subset of $X$. Then for each $1\le k \le n$, we will find a one-parameter family of K\"ahler polarizations $\shP_{k,t}$ on $X$ that converges to $\shP_{k}$ (see Theorem 3.12). Finally, we will show that $\shH_{k,t}^{T}$ the space of $T^{k}$-invariant $J_{k,t}$-holomorphic sections converges to $\shH_{k}^{0}$ (see Theorem 3.18)., Comment: We can generalize to a better result

In order to be applicable in real-world scenario, Boundary Attacks (BAs) were proposed and ensured one hundred percent attack success rate with only decision information. However, existing BA methods craft adversarial examples by leveraging a simple random sampling (SRS) to estimate the gradient, consuming a large number of model queries. To overcome the drawback of SRS, this paper proposes a Latin Hypercube Sampling based Boundary Attack (LHS-BA) to save query budget. Compared with SRS, LHS has better uniformity under the same limited number of random samples. Therefore, the average on these random samples is closer to the true gradient than that estimated by SRS. Various experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets including MNIST, CIFAR, and ImageNet-1K. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed LHS-BA over the state-of-the-art BA methods in terms of query efficiency. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/GZHU-DVL/LHS-BA.

We propose a Transformer-based NeRF (TransNeRF) to learn a generic neural radiance field conditioned on observed-view images for the novel view synthesis task. By contrast, existing MLP-based NeRFs are not able to directly receive observed views with an arbitrary number and require an auxiliary pooling-based operation to fuse source-view information, resulting in the missing of complicated relationships between source views and the target rendering view. Furthermore, current approaches process each 3D point individually and ignore the local consistency of a radiance field scene representation. These limitations potentially can reduce their performance in challenging real-world applications where large differences between source views and a novel rendering view may exist. To address these challenges, our TransNeRF utilizes the attention mechanism to naturally decode deep associations of an arbitrary number of source views into a coordinate-based scene representation. Local consistency of shape and appearance are considered in the ray-cast space and the surrounding-view space within a unified Transformer network. Experiments demonstrate that our TransNeRF, trained on a wide variety of scenes, can achieve better performance in comparison to state-of-the-art image-based neural rendering methods in both scene-agnostic and per-scene finetuning scenarios especially when there is a considerable gap between source views and a rendering view.

In this paper, we extend the definition of phases of sectorial matrices to those of semi-sectorial matrices, which are possibly singular. Properties of the phases are also extended, including those of the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse, compressions and Schur complements, matrix sums and products. In particular, a majorization relation is established between the phases of the nonzero eigenvalues of $AB$ and the phases of the compressions of $A$ and $B$, which leads to a generalized matrix small phase theorem. For the matrices which are not necessarily semi-sectorial, we define their (largest and smallest) essential phases via diagonal similarity transformation. An explicit expression for the essential phases of a Laplacian matrix of a directed graph is obtained., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.03630

Particle accelerators for high energy physics will generate TeV-scale particle beams in large, multi-Km size machines colliding high brightness beams at the interaction point [1-4]. The high luminosity in such machines is achieved by producing very small asymmetric beam size at the interaction point, with short durations to minimize beam-beam effects. Tuning energy, timing and position of the beam for optimal performance will require high-precision controls of amplitude and phase of high-frequency electromagnetic fields and real-time processing of complex algorithms. The stability of the colliding beams has a large impact on the collider's effective luminosity. Therefore, the technology readiness level of diagnostic and control systems will be a major consideration in the collider design. The technical requirements of such systems depend on the specifics of beam parameters, such as transverse and longitudinal dimensions, charge/pulse and beam pulse format, which are driven by the accelerating technology of choice. While feedback systems with single bunch position monitor resolution below 50 nm and latency <300 ns have been demonstrated in beam test facilities, many advanced collider concepts make use of higher repetition rates, brighter beams and higher accelerating frequencies, and will require better performance, up to 1-2 order of magnitude, demanding aggressive R&D to be able to deliver and maintain the targeted luminosity., Comment: contribution to Snowmass 2021

Breakdowns may occur in high-voltage applications even in ultrahigh vacuum conditions. Previously, we showed that it is important to pay attention to the post-breakdown voltage recovery in order to limit the appearance of secondary breakdowns associated with the primary ones. This can improve the overall efficiency of the high-voltage device. In this study, we focus on the optimization of the linear post-breakdown voltage recovery, with the principle aim of alleviating the problem of the secondary breakdowns. We investigate voltage recovery scenarios with different starting voltages and slopes of linear voltage increase by using a pulsed dc system. We find that a higher number of pulses during the voltage recovery produces fewer secondary BDs and a lower overall breakdown rate. Lowering the number of pulses led to more dramatic voltage recovery resulting in higher breakdown rates. A steeper voltage increase rate lead to a more localized occurrence of the secondary breakdowns near the end of the voltage recovery period. It was also found that the peak BD probability is regularly observed around 1 s after the end of the ramping period and that its value decreases exponentially with the amount of energy put into the system during the ramping. The value also decays exponentially with a half-life of (1.4$\pm$0.3) ms if the voltage only increased between the voltage recovery steps., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

We theoretically study the conditions under which two laser fields can undergo Coherent Perfect Absorption (CPA) when shined on a single-mode bi-directional optical cavity coupled with two two- level quantum emitters (natural atoms, artificial atoms, quantum dots, qubits, etc.). In addition to being indirectly coupled through the cavity-mediated field, in our Tavis-Cummings model the two quantum emitters (QEs) are allowed to interact directly via the dipole-dipole interaction (DDI). Under the mean-field approximation and low-excitation assumption, in this work, we particularly focus on the impact of DDI on the existence of CPA in the presence of decoherence mechanisms (spontaneous emission from the QEs and the leakage of photons from the cavity walls). We also present a dressed-state analysis of the problem to discuss the underlying physics related to the allowed polariton state transitions in the Jaynes-Tavis-Cummings ladder. As a key result, we find that in the strong-coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics, the strong DDI and the emitter-cavity detuning can act together to achieve the CPA at two laser frequencies tunable by the inter-atomic separation which are not possible to attain with a single QE in the presence of detuning. Our CPA results are potentially applicable in building quantum memories that are an essential component in long-distance quantum networking., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures

In Artificial Intelligence, interpreting the results of a Machine Learning technique often termed as a black box is a difficult task. A counterfactual explanation of a particular "black box" attempts to find the smallest change to the input values that modifies the prediction to a particular output, other than the original one. In this work we formulate the problem of finding a counterfactual explanation as an optimization problem. We propose a new "sparsity algorithm" which solves the optimization problem, while also maximizing the sparsity of the counterfactual explanation. We apply the sparsity algorithm to provide a simple suggestion to publicly traded companies in order to improve their credit ratings. We validate the sparsity algorithm with a synthetically generated dataset and we further apply it to quarterly financial statements from companies in financial, healthcare and IT sectors of the US market. We provide evidence that the counterfactual explanation can capture the nature of the real statement features that changed between the current quarter and the following quarter when ratings improved. The empirical results show that the higher the rating of a company the greater the "effort" required to further improve credit rating., Comment: 16 pages, 11 tables, 3 figures

On edge devices, data scarcity occurs as a common problem where transfer learning serves as a widely-suggested remedy. Nevertheless, transfer learning imposes a heavy computation burden to resource-constrained edge devices. Existing task allocation works usually assume all submitted tasks are equally important, leading to inefficient resource allocation at a task level when directly applied in Multi-task Transfer Learning (MTL). To address these issues, we first reveal that it is crucial to measure the impact of tasks on overall decision performance improvement and quantify \emph{task importance}. We then show that task allocation with task importance for MTL (TATIM) is a variant of the NP-complete Knapsack problem, where the complicated computation to solve this problem needs to be conducted repeatedly under varying contexts. To solve TATIM with high computational efficiency, we propose a Data-driven Cooperative Task Allocation (DCTA) approach. Finally, we evaluate the performance of DCTA by not only a trace-driven simulation, but also a new comprehensive real-world AIOps case study that bridges model and practice via a new architecture and main components design within the AIOps system. Extensive experiments show that our DCTA reduces 3.24 times of processing time, and saves 48.4\% energy consumption compared with the state-of-the-art when solving TATIM., Comment: 15 pages, published in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON Parallel and Distributed Systems, VOL. 31, NO. 6, JUNE 2020

In this paper, we define the phase response for a class of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) linear time-invariant (LTI) systems whose frequency responses are (semi-)sectorial at all frequencies. The newly defined phase concept subsumes the well-known notions of positive real systems and negative imaginary systems. We formulate a small phase theorem for feedback stability, which complements the celebrated small gain theorem. The small phase theorem lays the foundation of a phase theory of MIMO systems. We also discuss time-domain interpretations of phase-bounded systems via both energy signal analysis and power signal analysis. In addition, a sectored real lemma is derived for the computation of MIMO phases, which serves as a natural counterpart of the bounded real lemma.

We investigate the dynamic evolution and thermodynamic process of a driven quantum system immersed in a finite-temperature heat bath. A Born-Markovian quantum master equation is formally derived for the time-dependent system with discrete energy levels. This quantum master equation can be applied to situations with a broad range of driving speeds and bath temperatures and thus be used to study the finite-time quantum thermodynamics even when nonadiabatic transition and dissipation coexist. The dissipative Landau-Zener model is analyzed as an example. The population evolution and transition probability of the model reveal the importance of the competition between driving and dissipation beyond the adiabatic regime. Moreover, local maximums of irreversible entropy production occur at intermediate sweep velocity and finite temperature, which the low-dissipation model cannot describe., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures

Deep CNN-based methods have so far achieved the state of the art results in multi-view 3D object reconstruction. Despite the considerable progress, the two core modules of these methods - multi-view feature extraction and fusion, are usually investigated separately, and the object relations in different views are rarely explored. In this paper, inspired by the recent great success in self-attention-based Transformer models, we reformulate the multi-view 3D reconstruction as a sequence-to-sequence prediction problem and propose a new framework named 3D Volume Transformer (VolT) for such a task. Unlike previous CNN-based methods using a separate design, we unify the feature extraction and view fusion in a single Transformer network. A natural advantage of our design lies in the exploration of view-to-view relationships using self-attention among multiple unordered inputs. On ShapeNet - a large-scale 3D reconstruction benchmark dataset, our method achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy in multi-view reconstruction with fewer parameters ($70\%$ less) than other CNN-based methods. Experimental results also suggest the strong scaling capability of our method. Our code will be made publicly available.

We study the Hankel determinant generated by a deformed Hermite weight with one jump $w(z,t,\gamma)=e^{-z^2+tz}|z-t|^{\gamma}(A+B\theta(z-t))$, where $A\geq 0$, $A+B\geq 0$, $t\in\textbf{R}$, $\gamma>-1$ and $z\in\textbf{R}$. By using the ladder operators for the corresponding monic orthogonal polynomials, and their relative compatibility conditions, we obtain a series of difference and differential equations to describe the relations among $\alpha_n$, $\beta_n$, $R_n(t)$ and $r_n(t)$. Especially, we find that the auxiliary quantities $R_n(t)$ and $r_n(t)$ satisfy the coupled Riccati equations, and $R_n(t)$ satisfies a particular Painlev\'{e} IV equation. Based on above results, we show that $\sigma_n(t)$ and $\hat{\sigma}_n(t)$, two quantities related to the Hankel determinant and $R_n(t)$, satisfy the continuous and discrete $\sigma-$form equations, respectively. In the end, we also discuss the large $n$ asymptotic behavior of $R_n(t)$, which produce the expansion of the logarithmic of the Hankel determinant and the asymptotic of the second order differential equation of the monic orthogonal polynomials.

In 2012, SEC mandated all corporate filings for any company doing business in US be entered into the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system. In this work we are investigating ways to analyze the data available through EDGAR database. This may serve portfolio managers (pension funds, mutual funds, insurance, hedge funds) to get automated insights into companies they invest in, to better manage their portfolios. The analysis is based on Artificial Neural Networks applied to the data.} In particular, one of the most popular machine learning methods, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture, originally developed to interpret and classify images, is now being used to interpret financial data. This work investigates the best way to input data collected from the SEC filings into a CNN architecture. We incorporate accounting principles and mathematical methods into the design of three image encoding methods. Specifically, two methods are derived from accounting principles (Sequential Arrangement, Category Chunk Arrangement) and one is using a purely mathematical technique (Hilbert Vector Arrangement). In this work we analyze fundamental financial data as well as financial ratio data and study companies from the financial, healthcare and IT sectors in the United States. We find that using imaging techniques to input data for CNN works better for financial ratio data but is not significantly better than simply using the 1D input directly for fundamental data. We do not find the Hilbert Vector Arrangement technique to be significantly better than other imaging techniques., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 13 tables in the main content. IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Signed graphs have appeared in a broad variety of applications, ranging from social networks to biological networks, from distributed control and computation to power systems. In this paper, we investigate spectral properties of signed Laplacians for undirected signed graphs. We find conditions on the negative weights under which a signed Laplacian is positive semidefinite via the Kron reduction and multiport network theory. For signed Laplacians that are indefinite, we characterize their inertias with the same framework. Furthermore, we build connections between signed Laplacians, generalized M-matrices, and eventually exponentially positive matrices., Comment: online publication in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control

The emergence of the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic has forced academic conferences to be held entirely in a virtual manner. While prior studies have advocated the merits of virtual conferences in terms of energy and cost savings, organizers are increasingly facing the prospect of planning and executing them systematically, in order to deliver a rich conference-attending-experience for all participants. Starting from March 2020, tens of conferences have been held virtually. Past conferences have revealed numerous challenges, from budget planning, to selecting the supporting virtual platforms. Among these, two special challenges were identified: 1) how to deliver talks to geo-distributed attendees and 2) how to stimulate social interactions among attendees. These are the two important goals of an academic conference. In this paper, we advocate a mirror program approach for academic conferences. More specifically, the conference program is executed in multiple parallel (mirrored) programs, so that each mirror program can fit a different time zone. This can effectively address the first challenge.

Intense terahertz (THz) electromagnetic fields have been utilized to reveal a variety of extremely nonlinear optical effects in many materials through nonperturbative driving of elementary and collective excitations. However, such nonlinear photoresponses have not yet been discovered in light-emitting diodes (LEDs), letting alone employing them as fast, cost effective,compact, and room-temperature-operating THz detectors and cameras. Here we report ubiquitously available LEDs exhibited gigantic and fast photovoltaic signals with excellent signal-to-noise ratios when being illuminated by THz field strengths >50 kV/cm. We also successfully demonstrated THz-LED detectors and camera prototypes. These unorthodox THz detectors exhibited high responsivities (>1 kV/W) with response time shorter than those of pyroelectric detectors by four orders of magnitude. The detection mechanism was attributed to THz-field-induced nonlinear impact ionization and Schottky contact. These findings not only help deepen our understanding of strong THz field-matter interactions but also greatly contribute to the applications of strong-field THz diagnosis.

This paper formulates and studies the problem of controlling a networked SIS model using a single input in which the network structure is described by a connected undirected graph. A necessary and sufficient condition on the values of curing and infection rates for the healthy state to be exponentially stable is obtained via the analysis of signed Laplacians when the control input is the curing budget of a single agent. In the case when the healthy state is stabilizable, an explicit expression for the minimum curing budget is provided. The utility of the algorithm is demonstrated using a simulation over a network of cities in the northeastern United States.

Recent literature implements machine learning techniques to assess corporate credit rating based on financial statement reports. In this work, we analyze the performance of four neural network architectures (MLP, CNN, CNN2D, LSTM) in predicting corporate credit rating as issued by Standard and Poor's. We analyze companies from the energy, financial and healthcare sectors in US. The goal of the analysis is to improve application of machine learning algorithms to credit assessment. To this end, we focus on three questions. First, we investigate if the algorithms perform better when using a selected subset of features, or if it is better to allow the algorithms to select features themselves. Second, is the temporal aspect inherent in financial data important for the results obtained by a machine learning algorithm? Third, is there a particular neural network architecture that consistently outperforms others with respect to input features, sectors and holdout set? We create several case studies to answer these questions and analyze the results using ANOVA and multiple comparison testing procedure., Comment: 19 pages, 10 tables

With the great success of networks, it witnesses the increasing demand for the interpretation of the internal network mechanism, especially for the net decision-making logic. To tackle the challenge, the Concept-harmonized HierArchical INference (CHAIN) is proposed to interpret the net decision-making process. For net-decisions being interpreted, the proposed method presents the CHAIN interpretation in which the net decision can be hierarchically deduced into visual concepts from high to low semantic levels. To achieve it, we propose three models sequentially, i.e., the concept harmonizing model, the hierarchical inference model, and the concept-harmonized hierarchical inference model. Firstly, in the concept harmonizing model, visual concepts from high to low semantic-levels are aligned with net-units from deep to shallow layers. Secondly, in the hierarchical inference model, the concept in a deep layer is disassembled into units in shallow layers. Finally, in the concept-harmonized hierarchical inference model, a deep-layer concept is inferred from its shallow-layer concepts. After several rounds, the concept-harmonized hierarchical inference is conducted backward from the highest semantic level to the lowest semantic level. Finally, net decision-making is explained as a form of concept-harmonized hierarchical inference, which is comparable to human decision-making. Meanwhile, the net layer structure for feature learning can be explained based on the hierarchical visual concepts. In quantitative and qualitative experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of CHAIN at the instance and class levels.

For a long time, there have been huge discrepancies between different models and experiments concerning the liquid-liquid phase transition (LLPT) in dense hydrogen. In this work, we present the results of extensive calculations of the LLPT in dense hydrogen using the most expensive first-principle path-integral molecular dynamics simulations available. The nonlocal density functional rVV10 and hybrid functional PBE0 are used to improve the description of the electronic structure of hydrogen. Of all the density functional theory calculations available, we report the most consistent results through quantum Monte Carlo simulations and coupled electron-ion Monte Carlo simulations of the LLPT in dense hydrogen. The critical point of the first-order LLPT is estimated above 2000 K according to the equation of state. Moreover, the metallization pressure obtained from the jump of dc electrical conductivity almost coincides with the plateau of equation of state.

Many emerging AI applications request distributed machine learning (ML) among edge systems (e.g., IoT devices and PCs at the edge of the Internet), where data cannot be uploaded to a central venue for model training, due to their large volumes and/or security/privacy concerns. Edge devices are intrinsically heterogeneous in computing capacity, posing significant challenges to parameter synchronization for parallel training with the parameter server (PS) architecture. This paper proposes ADSP, a parameter synchronization scheme for distributed machine learning (ML) with heterogeneous edge systems. Eliminating the significant waiting time occurring with existing parameter synchronization models, the core idea of ADSP is to let faster edge devices continue training, while committing their model updates at strategically decided intervals. We design algorithms that decide time points for each worker to commit its model update, and ensure not only global model convergence but also faster convergence. Our testbed implementation and experiments show that ADSP outperforms existing parameter synchronization models significantly in terms of ML model convergence time, scalability and adaptability to large heterogeneity., Comment: Copyright 2020, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved