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Important advances have recently been made in the search for materials with complex multi-phase landscapes that host photoinduced metastable collective states with exotic functionalities. In almost all cases so far, the desired phases are accessed by exploiting light-matter interactions via the imaginary part of the dielectric function through above-bandgap or resonant mode excitation. Nonresonant Raman excitation of coherent modes has been experimentally observed and proposed for dynamic material control, but the resulting atomic excursion has been limited to perturbative levels. Here, we demonstrate that it is possible to overcome this challenge by employing nonresonant ultrashort pulses with low photon energies well below the bandgap. Using mid-infrared pulses, we induce ferroelectric reversal in lithium niobate and phase switching in tin selenide and characterize the large-amplitude mode displacements through femtosecond Raman scattering, second harmonic generation, and x-ray diffraction. This approach, validated by first-principle calculations, defines a novel method for synthesizing hidden phases with unique functional properties and manipulating complex energy landscapes at reduced energy consumption and ultrafast speeds., Comment: 5 figures

This paper provides a new theory of the observed co-movement between overall wage inequality and its between-firm component. We develop and solve analytically a frictionless sorting model with two-sided heterogeneity, in which firms consist of distributions of tasks, choose how many workers to employ and reward their workers both through wages and amenities. We show that, for empirically-relevant parameter ranges, overall and between-firm inequality are firmly linked: A change in any of the models' primitives increases overall wage inequality if and only if it also increases the ratio of between-firm to overall inequality. Subsequently, we calibrate the model to match the Norwegian economy and find that the increase in wage inequality from 1995 to 2014 had a different primary cause (raising span-of-control cost) than the accompanying rise in welfare inequality (increased skill variance), and that the apparent decrease in wage inequality after 2015 masked a continued increase in welfare inequality.

Vulnerability detection is a crucial yet challenging task to identify potential weaknesses in software for cyber security. Recently, deep learning (DL) has made great progress in automating the detection process. Due to the complex multi-layer structure and a large number of parameters, a DL model requires massive labeled (vulnerable or secure) source code to gain knowledge to effectively distinguish between vulnerable and secure code. In the literature, many datasets have been created to train DL models for this purpose. However, these datasets suffer from several issues that will lead to low detection accuracy of DL models. In this paper, we define three critical issues (i.e., data imbalance, low vulnerability coverage, biased vulnerability distribution) that can significantly affect the model performance and three secondary issues (i.e., errors in source code, mislabeling, noisy historical data) that also affect the performance but can be addressed through a dedicated pre-processing procedure. In addition, we conduct a study of 14 papers along with 54 datasets for vulnerability detection to confirm these defined issues. Furthermore, we discuss good practices to use existing datasets and to create new ones., Comment: 2023 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&P;PW)

The significant increase in software production driven by automation and faster development lifecycles has resulted in a corresponding surge in software vulnerabilities. In parallel, the evolving landscape of software vulnerability detection, highlighting the shift from traditional methods to machine learning and large language models (LLMs), provides massive opportunities at the cost of resource-demanding computations. This paper thoroughly analyses LLMs' capabilities in detecting vulnerabilities within source code by testing models beyond their usual applications to study their potential in cybersecurity tasks. We evaluate the performance of six open-source models that are specifically trained for vulnerability detection against six general-purpose LLMs, three of which were further fine-tuned on a dataset that we compiled. Our dataset, alongside five state-of-the-art benchmark datasets, were used to create a pipeline to leverage a binary classification task, namely classifying code into vulnerable and non-vulnerable. The findings highlight significant variations in classification accuracy across benchmarks, revealing the critical influence of fine-tuning in enhancing the detection capabilities of small LLMs over their larger counterparts, yet only in the specific scenarios in which they were trained. Further experiments and analysis also underscore the issues with current benchmark datasets, particularly around mislabeling and their impact on model training and performance, which raises concerns about the current state of practice. We also discuss the road ahead in the field suggesting strategies for improved model training and dataset curation., Comment: Accepted to ESORICS 2024

As a critical component of modern infrastructure, data centers account for a huge amount of power consumption and greenhouse gas emission. This paper studies the electricity purchase strategy for a data center to lower its energy cost while integrating local renewable generation under uncertainty. To facilitate efficient and scalable decision-making, we propose a two-layer hierarchy where the lower layer consists of the operation of all electrical equipment in the data center and the upper layer determines the procurement and dispatch of electricity. At the lower layer, instead of device-level scheduling in real time, we propose to exploit the inherent flexibility in demand, such as thermostatically controlled loads and flexible computing tasks, and aggregate them into virtual batteries. By this means, the upper-layer decision only needs to take into account these virtual batteries, the size of which is generally small and independent of the data center scale. We further propose an online algorithm based on Lyapunov optimization to purchase electricity from the grid with a manageable energy cost, even though the prices, renewable availability, and battery specifications are uncertain and dynamic. In particular, we show that, under mild conditions, our algorithm can achieve bounded loss compared with the offline optimal cost, while strictly respecting battery operational constraints. Extensive simulation studies validate the theoretical analysis and illustrate the tradeoff between optimality and conservativeness.

Due to its high communication efficiency, over-the-air computation (AirComp) has been expected to carry out various computing tasks in the next-generation wireless networks. However, up to now, most applications of AirComp are explored in the analog domain, which limits the capability of AirComp in resisting the complex wireless environment, not to mention to integrate the AirComp technique to the existing universal communication standards, most of which are based on the digital system. In this paper, we propose a joint design of channel coding and digital modulation for digital AirComp transmission to attempt to reinforce the foundation for the application of AirComp in the digital system. Specifically, we first propose a non-binary LDPC-based channel coding scheme to enhance the error-correction capability of AirComp. Then, a digital modulation scheme is proposed to achieve the number summation from multiple transmitters via the lattice coding technique. We also provide simulation results to demonstrate the feasibility and the performance of the proposed design., Comment: This paper has been submitted to IEEE ICC 2024

As a two-dimensional (2D) dielectric material, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is in high demand for applications in photonics, nonlinear optics, and nanoelectronics. Unfortunately, the high-throughput preparation of macroscopic-scale, high-quality hBN flakes with controlled thickness is an ongoing challenge, limiting device fabrication and technological integration. Here, we present a metal thin-film exfoliation method to prepare hBN flakes with millimeter-scale dimension, near-unity yields, and tunable flake thickness distribution from 1-7 layers, a substantial improvement over scotch tape exfoliation. The single crystallinity and high quality of the exfoliated hBN are demonstrated with optical microscopy, atomic force microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and second harmonic generation. We further explore a possible mechanism for the effectiveness and selectivity based on thin-film residual stress measurements, density functional theory calculations, and transmission electron microscopy imaging of the deposited metal films. We find that the magnitude of the residual tensile stress induced by thin film deposition plays a key role in determining exfoliated flake thickness in a manner which closely resembles 3D semiconductor spalling. Lastly, we demonstrate that our exfoliated, large-area hBN flakes can be readily incorporated as encapsulating layers for other 2D monolayers. Altogether, this method brings us one step closer to the high throughput, mass production of hBN-based 2D photonic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices., Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures, work completed at Stanford University

In recent years, vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) has gained increasing importance in various applications such as assisted driving systems, traffic flow management, and vehicle tracking, due to the growth of intelligent transportation systems. However, the presence of extraneous background information and occlusions can interfere with the learning of discriminative features, leading to significant variations in the same vehicle image across different scenarios. This paper proposes a method, named graph network based on dynamic similarity adjacency matrices (DSAM-GN), which incorporates a novel approach for constructing adjacency matrices to capture spatial relationships of local features and reduce background noise. Specifically, the proposed method divides the extracted vehicle features into different patches as nodes within the graph network. A spatial attention-based similarity adjacency matrix generation (SASAMG) module is employed to compute similarity matrices of nodes, and a dynamic erasure operation is applied to disconnect nodes with low similarity, resulting in similarity adjacency matrices. Finally, the nodes and similarity adjacency matrices are fed into graph networks to extract more discriminative features for vehicle Re-ID. Experimental results on public datasets VeRi-776 and VehicleID demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with recent works., Comment: This paper has been accepted by the 20th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2023

Much research on Machine Learning testing relies on empirical studies that evaluate and show their potential. However, in this context empirical results are sensitive to a number of parameters that can adversely impact the results of the experiments and potentially lead to wrong conclusions (Type I errors, i.e., incorrectly rejecting the Null Hypothesis). To this end, we survey the related literature and identify 10 commonly adopted empirical evaluation hazards that may significantly impact experimental results. We then perform a sensitivity analysis on 30 influential studies that were published in top-tier SE venues, against our hazard set and demonstrate their criticality. Our findings indicate that all 10 hazards we identify have the potential to invalidate experimental findings, such as those made by the related literature, and should be handled properly. Going a step further, we propose a point set of 10 good empirical practices that has the potential to mitigate the impact of the hazards. We believe our work forms the first step towards raising awareness of the common pitfalls and good practices within the software engineering community and hopefully contribute towards setting particular expectations for empirical research in the field of deep learning testing.

Testing deep learning-based systems is crucial but challenging due to the required time and labor for labeling collected raw data. To alleviate the labeling effort, multiple test selection methods have been proposed where only a subset of test data needs to be labeled while satisfying testing requirements. However, we observe that such methods with reported promising results are only evaluated under simple scenarios, e.g., testing on original test data. This brings a question to us: are they always reliable? In this paper, we explore when and to what extent test selection methods fail for testing. Specifically, first, we identify potential pitfalls of 11 selection methods from top-tier venues based on their construction. Second, we conduct a study on five datasets with two model architectures per dataset to empirically confirm the existence of these pitfalls. Furthermore, we demonstrate how pitfalls can break the reliability of these methods. Concretely, methods for fault detection suffer from test data that are: 1) correctly classified but uncertain, or 2) misclassified but confident. Remarkably, the test relative coverage achieved by such methods drops by up to 86.85%. On the other hand, methods for performance estimation are sensitive to the choice of intermediate-layer output. The effectiveness of such methods can be even worse than random selection when using an inappropriate layer., Comment: 12 pages

Representing source code in a generic input format is crucial to automate software engineering tasks, e.g., applying machine learning algorithms to extract information. Visualizing code representations can further enable human experts to gain an intuitive insight into the code. Unfortunately, as of today, there is no universal tool that can simultaneously visualise different types of code representations. In this paper, we introduce a tool, CodeLens, which provides a visual interaction environment that supports various representation methods and helps developers understand and explore them. CodeLens is designed to support multiple programming languages, such as Java, Python, and JavaScript, and four types of code representations, including sequence of tokens, abstract syntax tree (AST), data flow graph (DFG), and control flow graph (CFG). By using CodeLens, developers can quickly visualize the specific code representation and also obtain the represented inputs for models of code. The Web-based interface of CodeLens is available at http://www.codelens.org. The demonstration video can be found at http://www.codelens.org/demo.

The costly human effort required to prepare the training data of machine learning (ML) models hinders their practical development and usage in software engineering (ML4Code), especially for those with limited budgets. Therefore, efficiently training models of code with less human effort has become an emergent problem. Active learning is such a technique to address this issue that allows developers to train a model with reduced data while producing models with desired performance, which has been well studied in computer vision and natural language processing domains. Unfortunately, there is no such work that explores the effectiveness of active learning for code models. In this paper, we bridge this gap by building the first benchmark to study this critical problem - active code learning. Specifically, we collect 11 acquisition functions~(which are used for data selection in active learning) from existing works and adapt them for code-related tasks. Then, we conduct an empirical study to check whether these acquisition functions maintain performance for code data. The results demonstrate that feature selection highly affects active learning and using output vectors to select data is the best choice. For the code summarization task, active code learning is ineffective which produces models with over a 29.64\% gap compared to the expected performance. Furthermore, we explore future directions of active code learning with an exploratory study. We propose to replace distance calculation methods with evaluation metrics and find a correlation between these evaluation-based distance methods and the performance of code models., Comment: 12 pages, ongoing work

The development of many optical quantum technologies depends on the availability of solid-state single quantum emitters with near-perfect optical coherence. However, a standing issue that limits systematic improvement is the significant sample heterogeneity and lack of mechanistic understanding of microscopic energy flow at the single emitter level and ultrafast timescales. Here we develop solution-phase single-particle pump-probe spectroscopy with photon correlation detection that captures sample-averaged dynamics in single molecules and/or defect states with unprecedented clarity at femtosecond resolution. We apply this technique to single quantum emitters in two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride, which suffers from significant heterogeneity and low quantum efficiency. From millisecond to nanosecond timescales, the translation diffusion, metastable-state-related bunching shoulders, rotational dynamics, and antibunching features are disentangled by their distinct photon-correlation timescales, which collectively quantify the normalized two-photon emission quantum yield. Leveraging its femtosecond resolution, spectral selectivity and ultralow noise (two orders of magnitude improvement over solid-state methods), we visualize electron-phonon coupling in the time domain at the single defect level, and discover the acceleration of polaronic formation driven by multi-electron excitation. Corroborated with results from a theoretical polaron model, we show how this translates to sample-averaged photon fidelity characterization of cascaded emission efficiency and optical decoherence time. Our work provides a framework for ultrafast spectroscopy in single emitters, molecules, or defects prone to photoluminescence intermittency and heterogeneity, opening new avenues of extreme-scale characterization and synthetic improvements for quantum information applications., Comment: 35 pages, 4 figures

The next era of program understanding is being propelled by the use of machine learning to solve software problems. Recent studies have shown surprising results of source code learning, which applies deep neural networks (DNNs) to various critical software tasks, e.g., bug detection and clone detection. This success can be greatly attributed to the utilization of massive high-quality training data, and in practice, data augmentation, which is a technique used to produce additional training data, has been widely adopted in various domains, such as computer vision. However, in source code learning, data augmentation has not been extensively studied, and existing practice is limited to simple syntax-preserved methods, such as code refactoring. Essentially, source code is often represented in two ways, namely, sequentially as text data and structurally as graph data, when it is used as training data in source code learning. Inspired by these analogy relations, we take an early step to investigate whether data augmentation methods that are originally used for text and graphs are effective in improving the training quality of source code learning. To that end, we first collect and categorize data augmentation methods in the literature. Second, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on four critical tasks and 11 DNN architectures to explore the effectiveness of 12 data augmentation methods (including code refactoring and 11 other methods for text and graph data). Our results identify the data augmentation methods that can produce more accurate and robust models for source code learning, including those based on mixup (e.g., SenMixup for texts and Manifold-Mixup for graphs), and those that slightly break the syntax of source code (e.g., random swap and random deletion for texts).

Graph neural network (GNN)-based graph learning has been popular in natural language and programming language processing, particularly in text and source code classification. Typically, GNNs are constructed by incorporating alternating layers which learn transformations of graph node features, along with graph pooling layers that use graph pooling operators (e.g., Max-pooling) to effectively reduce the number of nodes while preserving the semantic information of the graph. Recently, to enhance GNNs in graph learning tasks, Manifold-Mixup, a data augmentation technique that produces synthetic graph data by linearly mixing a pair of graph data and their labels, has been widely adopted. However, the performance of Manifold-Mixup can be highly affected by graph pooling operators, and there have not been many studies that are dedicated to uncovering such affection. To bridge this gap, we take an early step to explore how graph pooling operators affect the performance of Mixup-based graph learning. To that end, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study by applying Manifold-Mixup to a formal characterization of graph pooling based on 11 graph pooling operations (9 hybrid pooling operators, 2 non-hybrid pooling operators). The experimental results on both natural language datasets (Gossipcop, Politifact) and programming language datasets (JAVA250, Python800) demonstrate that hybrid pooling operators are more effective for Manifold-Mixup than the standard Max-pooling and the state-of-the-art graph multiset transformer (GMT) pooling, in terms of producing more accurate and robust GNN models., Comment: Accepted by Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) 2024

Inspired by the great success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in natural language processing (NLP), DNNs have been increasingly applied in source code analysis and attracted significant attention from the software engineering community. Due to its data-driven nature, a DNN model requires massive and high-quality labeled training data to achieve expert-level performance. Collecting such data is often not hard, but the labeling process is notoriously laborious. The task of DNN-based code analysis even worsens the situation because source code labeling also demands sophisticated expertise. Data augmentation has been a popular approach to supplement training data in domains such as computer vision and NLP. However, existing data augmentation approaches in code analysis adopt simple methods, such as data transformation and adversarial example generation, thus bringing limited performance superiority. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation approach MIXCODE that aims to effectively supplement valid training data, inspired by the recent advance named Mixup in computer vision. Specifically, we first utilize multiple code refactoring methods to generate transformed code that holds consistent labels with the original data. Then, we adapt the Mixup technique to mix the original code with the transformed code to augment the training data. We evaluate MIXCODE on two programming languages (Java and Python), two code tasks (problem classification and bug detection), four benchmark datasets (JAVA250, Python800, CodRep1, and Refactory), and seven model architectures (including two pre-trained models CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT). Experimental results demonstrate that MIXCODE outperforms the baseline data augmentation approach by up to 6.24% in accuracy and 26.06% in robustness., Comment: Accepted by SANER 2023

Deep learning (DL) plays a more and more important role in our daily life due to its competitive performance in industrial application domains. As the core of DL-enabled systems, deep neural networks (DNNs) need to be carefully evaluated to ensure the produced models match the expected requirements. In practice, the \emph{de facto standard} to assess the quality of DNNs in the industry is to check their performance (accuracy) on a collected set of labeled test data. However, preparing such labeled data is often not easy partly because of the huge labeling effort, i.e., data labeling is labor-intensive, especially with the massive new incoming unlabeled data every day. Recent studies show that test selection for DNN is a promising direction that tackles this issue by selecting minimal representative data to label and using these data to assess the model. However, it still requires human effort and cannot be automatic. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, named \textit{Aries}, that can estimate the performance of DNNs on new unlabeled data using only the information obtained from the original test data. The key insight behind our technique is that the model should have similar prediction accuracy on the data which have similar distances to the decision boundary. We performed a large-scale evaluation of our technique on two famous datasets, CIFAR-10 and Tiny-ImageNet, four widely studied DNN models including ResNet101 and DenseNet121, and 13 types of data transformation methods. Results show that the estimated accuracy by \textit{Aries} is only 0.03\% -- 2.60\% off the true accuracy. Besides, \textit{Aries} also outperforms the state-of-the-art labeling-free methods in 50 out of 52 cases and selection-labeling-based methods in 96 out of 128 cases., Comment: accepted to ICSE'23, preprint version

Distribution shift has been a longstanding challenge for the reliable deployment of deep learning (DL) models due to unexpected accuracy degradation. Although DL has been becoming a driving force for large-scale source code analysis in the big code era, limited progress has been made on distribution shift analysis and benchmarking for source code tasks. To fill this gap, this paper initiates to propose CodeS, a distribution shift benchmark dataset, for source code learning. Specifically, CodeS supports two programming languages (Java and Python) and five shift types (task, programmer, time-stamp, token, and concrete syntax tree). Extensive experiments based on CodeS reveal that 1) out-of-distribution detectors from other domains (e.g., computer vision) do not generalize to source code, 2) all code classification models suffer from distribution shifts, 3) representation-based shifts have a higher impact on the model than others, and 4) pre-trained bimodal models are relatively more resistant to distribution shifts., Comment: accepted by ICSE'23-NIER

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have gained considerable attention in the past decades due to their astounding performance in different applications, such as natural language modeling, self-driving assistance, and source code understanding. With rapid exploration, more and more complex DNN architectures have been proposed along with huge pre-trained model parameters. The common way to use such DNN models in user-friendly devices (e.g., mobile phones) is to perform model compression before deployment. However, recent research has demonstrated that model compression, e.g., model quantization, yields accuracy degradation as well as outputs disagreements when tested on unseen data. Since the unseen data always include distribution shifts and often appear in the wild, the quality and reliability of quantized models are not ensured. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study to characterize and help users understand the behaviors of quantized models. Our study considers 4 datasets spanning from image to text, 8 DNN architectures including feed-forward neural networks and recurrent neural networks, and 42 shifted sets with both synthetic and natural distribution shifts. The results reveal that 1) data with distribution shifts happen more disagreements than without. 2) Quantization-aware training can produce more stable models than standard, adversarial, and Mixup training. 3) Disagreements often have closer top-1 and top-2 output probabilities, and $Margin$ is a better indicator than the other uncertainty metrics to distinguish disagreements. 4) Retraining with disagreements has limited efficiency in removing disagreements. We opensource our code and models as a new benchmark for further studying the quantized models., Comment: 12 pages

Applying deep learning to science is a new trend in recent years which leads DL engineering to become an important problem. Although training data preparation, model architecture design, and model training are the normal processes to build DL models, all of them are complex and costly. Therefore, reusing the open-sourced pre-trained model is a practical way to bypass this hurdle for developers. Given a specific task, developers can collect massive pre-trained deep neural networks from public sources for re-using. However, testing the performance (e.g., accuracy and robustness) of multiple DNNs and recommending which model should be used is challenging regarding the scarcity of labeled data and the demand for domain expertise. In this paper, we propose a labeling-free (LaF) model selection approach to overcome the limitations of labeling efforts for automated model reusing. The main idea is to statistically learn a Bayesian model to infer the models' specialty only based on predicted labels. We evaluate LaF using 9 benchmark datasets including image, text, and source code, and 165 DNNs, considering both the accuracy and robustness of models. The experimental results demonstrate that LaF outperforms the baseline methods by up to 0.74 and 0.53 on Spearman's correlation and Kendall's $\tau$, respectively., Comment: 22 pages

Decoding via sequentially guessing the error pattern in a received noisy sequence has received attention recently, and ORBGRAND has been proposed as one such decoding algorithm that is capable of utilizing the soft information embedded in the received noisy sequence. An information theoretic study is conducted for ORBGRAND, and it is shown that the achievable rate of ORBGRAND using independent and identically distributed random codebooks almost coincides with the channel capacity, for an additive white Gaussian noise channel under antipodal input. For finite-length codes, improved guessing schemes motivated by the information theoretic study are proposed that attain lower error rates than ORBGRAND, especially in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime.

Active learning is an established technique to reduce the labeling cost to build high-quality machine learning models. A core component of active learning is the acquisition function that determines which data should be selected to annotate. State-of-the-art acquisition functions -- and more largely, active learning techniques -- have been designed to maximize the clean performance (e.g. accuracy) and have disregarded robustness, an important quality property that has received increasing attention. Active learning, therefore, produces models that are accurate but not robust. In this paper, we propose \emph{robust active learning}, an active learning process that integrates adversarial training -- the most established method to produce robust models. Via an empirical study on 11 acquisition functions, 4 datasets, 6 DNN architectures, and 15105 trained DNNs, we show that robust active learning can produce models with the robustness (accuracy on adversarial examples) ranging from 2.35\% to 63.85\%, whereas standard active learning systematically achieves negligible robustness (less than 0.20\%). Our study also reveals, however, that the acquisition functions that perform well on accuracy are worse than random sampling when it comes to robustness. We, therefore, examine the reasons behind this and devise a new acquisition function that targets both clean performance and robustness. Our acquisition function -- named density-based robust sampling with entropy (DRE) -- outperforms the other acquisition functions (including random) in terms of robustness by up to 24.40\% (3.84\% than random particularly), while remaining competitive on accuracy. Additionally, we prove that DRE is applicable as a test selection metric for model retraining and stands out from all compared functions by up to 8.21\% robustness., Comment: 10 pages

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which causes serious threats to security-critical applications. This motivated much research on providing mechanisms to make models more robust against adversarial attacks. Unfortunately, most of these defenses, such as gradient masking, are easily overcome through different attack means. In this paper, we propose MUTEN, a low-cost method to improve the success rate of well-known attacks against gradient-masking models. Our idea is to apply the attacks on an ensemble model which is built by mutating the original model elements after training. As we found out that mutant diversity is a key factor in improving success rate, we design a greedy algorithm for generating diverse mutants efficiently. Experimental results on MNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR10 show that MUTEN can increase the success rate of four attacks by up to 0.45.

We investigate multiple photon-assisted Landau-Zener (LZ) transitions in a hybrid circuit quantum electrodynamics device in which each of two interacting transmission-line resonators is coupled to a qubit, and the qubits are driven by periodic driving fields and also coupled to a common phonon mode. The quantum state of the entire composite system is modeled using the multi-$\rm D_2$ Ansatz in combination with the time-dependent Dirac-Frenkel variational principle. Applying a sinusoidal driving field to one of the qubits, this device is an ideal platform to study the photon-assisted LZ transitions by comparing the dynamics of the two qubits. A series of interfering photon-assisted LZ transitions take place if the photon frequency is much smaller than the driving amplitude. Once the two energy scales are comparable, independent LZ transitions arise and a transition pathway is revealed using an energy diagram. It is found that both adiabatic and nonadiabatic transitions are involved in the dynamics. Used to model environmental effects on the LZ transitions, the common phonon mode coupled to the qubits allows for more available states to facilitate the LZ transitions. An analytical formula is obtained to estimate the short-time phonon population and produces results in reasonable agreement with numerical calculations. Equipped with the knowledge of the photon-assisted LZ transitions in the system, we can precisely manipulate the qubit state and successfully generate the qubit dynamics with a square-wave pattern by applying driving fields to both qubits, opening up new venues to manipulate the states of qubits and photons in quantum information devices and quantum computers

A parity-check stopping (PCS) criterion for turbo decoding is proposed in [1], which shows its priority compared with the stopping criteria of Sign Change Ratio (SCR), Sign Difference Ratio (SDR), Cross Entropy (CE) and improved CEbased (Yu) method. But another well-known simple stopping criterion named Hard-Decision-Aided (HDA) criterion has not been compared in [1]. In this letter, through analysis we show that using max-log-MAP algorithm, PCS is equivalent to HDA; while simulations demonstrate that using log-MAP algorithm, PCS has nearly the same performance as HDA., Comment: CL

The demand for flexible broadband wireless services makes the pruning technique, including both shortening and puncturing, an indispensable component of error correcting codes. The analysis of the pruning process for structured lowdensity parity-check (LDPC) codes can be considerably simplified with their equivalent representations through base-matrices or protographs. In this letter, we evaluate the thresholds of the pruned base-matrices by using protograph based on extrinsic information transfer (PEXIT). We also provide an efficient method to optimize the pruning patterns, which can significantly improve the thresholds of both the full-length patterns and the sub-patterns. Numerical results show that the structured LDPC codes pruned by the improved patterns outperform those with the existing patterns., Comment: CL

Turbo codes and CRC codes are usually decoded separately according to the serially concatenated inner codes and outer codes respectively. In this letter, we propose a hybrid decoding algorithm of turbo-CRC codes, where the outer codes, CRC codes, are not used for error detection but as an assistance to improve the error correction performance. Two independent iterative decoding and reliability based decoding are carried out in a hybrid schedule, which can efficiently decode the two different codes as an entire codeword. By introducing an efficient error detecting method based on normalized Euclidean distance without CRC check, significant gain can be obtained by using the hybrid decoding method without loss of the error detection ability., Comment: WCL

Polar codes have attracted a lot of attention during past few years and have been adopted as a coding scheme for 5G standard. Successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoder provides high level error-correction performance for polar codes, but the implementation complexity grows rapidly with the increase of the list size. Since the computation cost of sorting, many works focus on reducing the sorting complexity for SCL decoder. In this paper, we propose a method for SCL which directly reduce the number of input elements of sorting network without performance loss. Compared with SCL decoder, the proposed method has up to 95\% less sorter size on average, and the performance loss is negligible.

In this paper, we propose an enhanced quasi-maximum likelihood (EQML) decoder for LDPC codes with short block lengths. After the failure of the conventional belief propagation (BP) decoding, the proposed EQML decoder selects unreliable variable nodes (VNs) and saturates their associated channel output values to generate a list of decoder input sequences. Each decoder input sequence in the list is then decoded by the conventional BP decoder to obtain the most likely codeword. To improve the accuracy of selecting unreliable VNs, we propose an edge-wise selection method based on the sign fluctuation of VNs' extrinsic messages. A partial pruning stopping (PPS) rule is also presented to reduce the decoding latency. Simulation results show that the proposed EQML decoder outperforms the conventional BP decoder and the augmented BP decoder for short LDPC codes. It even approaches the performance of ML decoding within 0.3 dB in terms of frame error rate. In addition, the proposed PPS rule achieves a lower decoding latency compared to the list decoding stopping rule.

A polar code extension method which supports incremental redundancy hybrid ARQ(IR-HARQ) is proposed in this paper. By copying information bits to proper positions of the extend part, the extended polar code can give additional protection for the bits weakly protected by the first transmission. A comparison between the proposed algorithm with directly generated polar code, LTE turbo code, and some other IR-HARQ supporting polar code is given. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has nearly the same performance as directly generated polar code, which is chosen as base line for comparison., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures

In this fluid dynamics video, we show thermocapillary actuation of a binary drop of water and heptanol where the binary drop in motion takes on a UFO-like shape. On a parylene-coated silicon surface subjected to a linear temperature gradient, a pure heptanol droplet quickly moves to the cold side by the Marangoni stress, while a pure water droplet remains stuck due to a large contact angle hysteresis. When the water droplet was encapsulated by a thin layer of heptanol and thermally actuated, the binary droplet takes on a peculiar shape resembling an UFO, i.e. an "unidentified" floating object as the mechanism is not yet completely understood. Our finding suggests that pure liquid droplets (e.g. aqueous solutions) that are not conducive to thermocapillary actuation can be made so by encapsulating them with another judiciously chosen liquid (e.g. heptanol)., Comment: Both large and small videos are included