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X-ray polarization is a unique new probe of the particle acceleration in astrophysical jets made possible through the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer. Here we report on the first dense X-ray polarization monitoring campaign on the blazar Mrk 421. Our observations were accompanied by an even denser radio and optical polarization campaign. We find significant short-timescale variability in both X-ray polarization degree and angle, including a $\sim90^\circ$ angle rotation about the jet axis. We attribute this to random variations of the magnetic field, consistent with the presence of turbulence but also unlikely to be explained by turbulence alone. At the same time, the degree of lower-energy polarization is significantly lower and shows no more than mild variability. Our campaign provides further evidence for a scenario in which energy-stratified shock-acceleration of relativistic electrons, combined with a turbulent magnetic field, is responsible for optical to X-ray synchrotron emission in blazar jets., Comment: 23 pages, including 8 pages of appendices. 12 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to ApJ

Improving the efficiency and performance of implicit neural representations in 3D, particularly Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Signed Distance Fields (SDF) is crucial for enabling their use in real-time applications. These models, while capable of generating photo-realistic novel views and detailed 3D reconstructions, often suffer from high computational costs and slow inference times. To address this, we introduce a novel neural network layer called the "magnituder", designed to reduce the number of training parameters in these models without sacrificing their expressive power. By integrating magnituders into standard feed-forward layer stacks, we achieve improved inference speed and adaptability. Furthermore, our approach enables a zero-shot performance boost in trained implicit neural representation models through layer-wise knowledge transfer without backpropagation, leading to more efficient scene reconstruction in dynamic environments.

We prove that every topological action of a countable group on a metrizable space can be realized as a bi-Lipschitz action with respect to some compatible metric. This extends a result due to U. Hamenst\"{a}dt regarding finitely generated groups, and our proof is based upon her idea. This also gives a simple proof of a theorem due to Deroin, Kleptsyn and Navas regarding one-manifolds. We also establish an analogous result for closed subgroups of locally compact groups., Comment: 7 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the MSJ-SI

Let $G$ be a countable group with no finitely generated subgroup of exponential growth. We show that every action of $G$ on a countable set preserving a linear (respectively, circular) order can be realised as the restriction of some action by $C^1$ diffeomorphisms on an interval (respectively, the circle) to an invariant subset. As a consequence, every action of $G$ by homeomorphisms on a compact connected one-manifold can be made $C^1$ upon passing to a semi-conjugate action. The proof is based on a functional characterisation of groups of local subexponential growth., Comment: 14 pages

Regularization of deep neural networks has been an important issue to achieve higher generalization performance without overfitting problems. Although the popular method of Dropout provides a regularization effect, it causes inconsistent properties in the output, which may degrade the performance of deep neural networks. In this study, we propose a new module called stochastic average pooling, which incorporates Dropout-like stochasticity in pooling. We describe the properties of stochastic subsampling and average pooling and leverage them to design a module without any inconsistency problem. The stochastic average pooling achieves a regularization effect without any potential performance degradation due to the inconsistency issue and can easily be plugged into existing architectures of deep neural networks. Experiments demonstrate that replacing existing average pooling with stochastic average pooling yields consistent improvements across a variety of tasks, datasets, and models., Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures

The problem of career trajectory prediction (CTP) aims to predict one's future employer or job position. While several CTP methods have been developed for this problem, we posit that none of these methods (1) jointly considers the mutual ternary dependency between three key units (i.e., user, position, and company) of a career and (2) captures the characteristic shifts of key units in career over time, leading to an inaccurate understanding of the job movement patterns in the labor market. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel solution, named as CAPER, that solves the challenges via sophisticated temporal knowledge graph (TKG) modeling. It enables the utilization of a graph-structured knowledge base with rich expressiveness, effectively preserving the changes in job movement patterns. Furthermore, we devise an extrapolated career reasoning task on TKG for a realistic evaluation. The experiments on a real-world career trajectory dataset demonstrate that CAPER consistently and significantly outperforms four baselines, two recent TKG reasoning methods, and five state-of-the-art CTP methods in predicting one's future companies and positions-i.e., on average, yielding 6.80% and 34.58% more accurate predictions, respectively.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become essential tools for graph representation learning in various domains, such as social media and healthcare. However, they often suffer from fairness issues due to inherent biases in node attributes and graph structure, leading to unfair predictions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN framework, DAB-GNN, that Disentangles, Amplifies, and deBiases attribute, structure, and potential biases in the GNN mechanism. DAB-GNN employs a disentanglement and amplification module that isolates and amplifies each type of bias through specialized disentanglers, followed by a debiasing module that minimizes the distance between subgroup distributions to ensure fairness. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that DAB-GNN significantly outperforms ten state-of-the-art competitors in terms of achieving an optimal balance between accuracy and fairness.

Kerr-Newman black holes in a de Sitter space have the limit of rotating Nariai black holes with the near-horizon geometry of a warped ${\rm dS}_3 \times {\rm S}^1/Z_2$ when the black hole horizon and the cosmological horizon coincide or approach close to each other. We study the effect of rotation on the emission of charges in the near-extremal rotating charged Nariai black hole and compare it to those from the near-extremal Nariai black hole and near-extremal Kerr-Newman black hole in de Sitter space. The emission has an exponential amplification for charges with high energy and becomes catastrophic when the two horizons are very close to each together. The angular momentum of black holes decreases the mean number of charges by a factor not by an order. We observe a catastrophic emission of boson condensation for charges with the effective energy equal to the chemical potential in the spacelike outer region of the cosmological horizon. Further, the rotating charged Nariai black holes can evolve into singular spacetimes with a naked singularity by the Schwinger pair production., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2309.00218

We conduct a systematic analysis of the early multi-band light curves and colors of 19 Type Ia Supernovae (SNe) from the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network SN Program, including 16 previously unpublished events. Seven are detected $\lesssim$ 1 day since the estimated epoch of first light and the rest within $\lesssim$ 3 days. Some show excess emission within $<$ 0.5 days to $\sim$ 2 days, but most show pure power-law rises. The colors are initially diverse before $\sim$ 5 days, but converge to a similar color at $\sim$ 10 days. We identify at least three populations based on 2--5-day color evolution: (1) "early-blues" exhibit slowly-evolving colors consistent with a $\sim$ 17,000 K blackbody; (2) "early-reds" have initially blue $B-V$ and red $V-i$ colors that cannot simultaneously be fit with a blackbody -- likely due to suppression of $B$- and $i$-band flux by Fe II/III and Ca II -- and evolve more rapidly; and (3) "early-yellows" evolve blueward, consistent with thermal heating from $\sim$ 8,000 to 13,000 K. The distributions of early-blue and early-red colors are compatible with them being either distinct populations -- with early-reds comprising (60 $\pm$ 15)% of them -- or extreme ends of one continuous population; whereas the early-yellow population identified here is clearly distinct. Compared to the other populations, early-blues in our sample differ by exhibiting excess emission within 1--2 days, nearly constant peak brightness regardless of $\Delta M_{15}(B)$ after standardization, and shallower Si II features. Early-blues also prefer star-forming host environments, while early-yellows and, to a lesser extent, early-reds prefer quiescent ones. These preferences appear to indicate at least two Type Ia SN production channels based on stellar population age, while early-reds and early-blues may still share a common origin., Comment: Submitted for publication in ApJ. 48 pages, 29 figures, 7 tables

The electroweak monopole, when coupled to gravity, turns to the Reissner-Nordstrom type primordial magnetic blackhole whose mass is bounded below, with the lower bound $M_P \sqrt \alpha$. This changes the overall picture of the monopole production mechanism in the early universe drastically and has deep implications in cosmolpgy. In particular, this enhances the possibility that the electroweak monopoles turned to the primordial magnetic blackholes could become the seed of stellar objects and galaxies, and account for the dark matter of the universe. Moreover, this tells that we have a new type of primordial blackhole different from the popular primordial blackhole in cosmology, the electroweak primordial magnetic blackhole based on a totally different production mechanism. We discuss the physical implications of the electroweak primordial magnetic blackhole.

We present an inverse image-formation module that can enhance the robustness of existing visual SLAM pipelines for casually captured scenarios. Casual video captures often suffer from motion blur and varying appearances, which degrade the final quality of coherent 3D visual representation. We propose integrating the physical imaging into the SLAM system, which employs linear HDR radiance maps to collect measurements. Specifically, individual frames aggregate images of multiple poses along the camera trajectory to explain prevalent motion blur in hand-held videos. Additionally, we accommodate per-frame appearance variation by dedicating explicit variables for image formation steps, namely white balance, exposure time, and camera response function. Through joint optimization of additional variables, the SLAM pipeline produces high-quality images with more accurate trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can be incorporated into recent visual SLAM pipelines using various scene representations, such as neural radiance fields or Gaussian splatting., Comment: ECCV 2024

We present multiwavelength polarization measurements of the luminous blazar Mrk~501 over a 14-month period. The 2--8 keV X-ray polarization was measured with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) with six 100-ks observations spanning from 2022 March to 2023 April. Each IXPE observation was accompanied by simultaneous X-ray data from NuSTAR, Swift/XRT, and/or XMM-Newton. Complementary optical-infrared polarization measurements were also available in the B, V, R, I, and J bands, as were radio polarization measurements from 4.85 GHz to 225.5 GHz. Among the first five IXPE observations, we did not find significant variability in the X-ray polarization degree and angle with IXPE. However, the most recent sixth observation found an elevated polarization degree at $>3\sigma$ above the average of the other five observations. The optical and radio measurements show no apparent correlations with the X-ray polarization properties. Throughout the six IXPE observations, the X-ray polarization degree remained higher than, or similar to, the R-band optical polarization degree, which remained higher than the radio value. This is consistent with the energy-stratified shock scenario proposed to explain the first two IXPE observations, in which the polarized X-ray, optical, and radio emission arises from different regions., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ

The presence of extended Main Sequence Turn-Off (eMSTO) in the open clusters has been attributed to various factors, such as spread in rotation rates, binary stars, and dust-like extinction from stellar excretion discs. We present a comprehensive analysis of the eMSTO in the open cluster NGC 2355. Using spectra from the Gaia-ESO archives, we find that the stars in the red part of the eMSTO have a higher mean v sin i value of 135.3$\pm$4.6 km s$^{-1}$ compared to the stars in the blue part that have an average v sin i equal to 81.3$\pm$5.6 km s$^{-1}$. This suggests that the eMSTO in NGC 2355 is possibly caused by the spread in rotation rates of stars. We do not find any substantial evidence of the dust-like extinction from the eMSTO stars using ultraviolet data from the Swift survey. The estimated synchronization time for low mass ratio close binaries in the blue part of the eMSTO suggests that they would be mostly slow-rotating if present. However, the stars in the blue part of the eMSTO are preferentially located in the outer region of the cluster indicating that they may lack low mass ratio close binaries. The spread in rotation rates of eMSTO stars in NGC 2355 is most likely caused by the star-disc interaction mechanism. The stars in the lower main sequence beyond the eMSTO region of NGC 2355 are slow-rotating (mean v sin i = 26.5$\pm$1.3 km s$^{-1}$) possibly due to the magnetic braking of their rotations., Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

Ferroelectric field-effect-transistor (FEFET) has emerged as a scalable solution for 3D NAND and embedded flash (eFlash), with recent progress in achieving large memory window (MW) using metal-insulator-ferroelectric-insulator-semiconductor (MIFIS) gate stacks. Although the physical origin of the large MW in the MIFIS stack has already been discussed, its retention characteristics have not been explored yet. Here, we demonstrate MIFIS FEFET with a maximum MW of 9.7 V, and show that MIFIS FEFET has unstable retention characteristics, especially after erase. We discover the origin of the unstable retention characteristics and prove our hypothesis with absolute polarization measurement and different operation modes, showing that the unstable retention characteristics is a fundamental issue. Based on the understanding, we discuss a novel charge compensation model and promising engineering methodologies to achieve stable retention in MIFIS FEFET., Comment: We are submitting this to an IEEE journal but because of delays, we would like to share the information

Photon-magnon coupling, where electromagnetic waves interact with spin waves, and negative refraction, which bends the direction of electromagnetic waves unnaturally, constitute critical foundations and advancements in the realms of optics, spintronics, and quantum information technology. Here, we explore a magnetic-field-controlled, on-off switchable, nonreciprocal negative refraction within a non-Hermitian photon-magnon hybrid system. By integrating an yttrium iron garnet film with an inverted split-ring resonator, we discover pronounced negative refraction driven by the system's non-Hermitian properties. This phenomenon exhibits unique nonreciprocal behavior dependent on the signal's propagation direction. Our analytical model sheds light on the crucial interplay between coherent and dissipative coupling, significantly altering permittivity and permeability's imaginary components, crucial for negative refraction's emergence. This work pioneers new avenues for employing negative refraction in photon-magnon hybrid systems, signaling substantial advancements in quantum hybrid systems., Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures

In the evolving landscape of computer vision (CV) technologies, the automatic detection and interpretation of gender and emotion in images is a critical area of study. This paper investigates social biases in CV models, emphasizing the limitations of traditional evaluation metrics such as precision, recall, and accuracy. These metrics often fall short in capturing the complexities of gender and emotion, which are fluid and culturally nuanced constructs. Our study proposes a sociotechnical framework for evaluating CV models, incorporating both technical performance measures and considerations of social fairness. Using a dataset of 5,570 images related to vaccination and climate change, we empirically compared the performance of various CV models, including traditional models like DeepFace and FER, and generative models like GPT-4 Vision. Our analysis involved manually validating the gender and emotional expressions in a subset of images to serve as benchmarks. Our findings reveal that while GPT-4 Vision outperforms other models in technical accuracy for gender classification, it exhibits discriminatory biases, particularly in response to transgender and non-binary personas. Furthermore, the model's emotion detection skew heavily towards positive emotions, with a notable bias towards associating female images with happiness, especially when prompted by male personas. These findings underscore the necessity of developing more comprehensive evaluation criteria that address both validity and discriminatory biases in CV models. Our proposed framework provides guidelines for researchers to critically assess CV tools, ensuring their application in communication research is both ethical and effective. The significant contribution of this study lies in its emphasis on a sociotechnical approach, advocating for CV technologies that support social good and mitigate biases rather than perpetuate them.

Highly magnetized neutron stars have quantum refraction effects on pulsar emission due to the non-linearity of the quantum electrodynamics (QED) action. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the polarization states of pulsar emission under the quantum refraction effects, combined with the dependence on the emission frequency; we solve a system of evolution equations of the Stokes vector, where the birefringent vector, in which such effects are encoded, acts on the Stokes vector. At a fixed frequency of emission, depending on the magnitude of the birefringent vector, dominated mostly by the magnetic field strength, the evolution of the Stokes vector largely exhibits three different patterns: (i) monotonic, or (ii) half-oscillatory, or (iii) highly oscillatory behaviors. These features are understood and confirmed by means of approximate analytical solutions to the evolution equations., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures

We report the X-ray polarization properties of the high-synchrotron-peaked (HSP) blazar PKS 2155$-$304 based on observations with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). We observed the source between Oct 27 and Nov 7, 2023. We also conducted an extensive contemporaneous multiwavelength (MW) campaign. We find that during the first half ($T_1$) of the IXPE pointing, the source exhibited the highest X-ray polarization degree detected for an HSP blazar thus far, (30.7$\pm$2.0)%, which dropped to (15.3$\pm$2.1)% during the second half ($T_2$). The X-ray polarization angle remained stable during the IXPE pointing at 129.4$^\circ$$\pm$1.8$^\circ$ and 125.4$^\circ$$\pm$3.9$^\circ$ during $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. Meanwhile, the optical polarization degree remained stable during the IXPE pointing, with average host-galaxy-corrected values of (4.3$\pm$0.7)% and (3.8$\pm$0.9)% during the $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. During the IXPE pointing, the optical polarization angle changed achromatically from $\sim$140$^\circ$ to $\sim$90$^\circ$ and back to $\sim$130$^\circ$. Despite several attempts, we only detected (99.7% conf.) the radio polarization once (during $T_2$, at 225.5 GHz): with degree (1.7$\pm$0.4)% and angle 112.5$^\circ$$\pm$5.5$^\circ$. The direction of the broad pc-scale jet is rather ambiguous and has been found to point to the east and south at different epochs; however, on larger scales (> 1.5 pc) the jet points toward the southeast ($\sim$135$^\circ$), similar to all of the MW polarization angles. Moreover, the X-ray to optical polarization degree ratios of $\sim$7 and $\sim$4 during $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively, are similar to previous IXPE results for several HSP blazars. These findings, combined with the lack of correlation of temporal variability between the MW polarization properties, agree with an energy-stratified shock-acceleration scenario in HSP blazars., Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables, Accepted for publication in A&A

Dynamical systems are often time-varying, whose modeling requires a function that evolves with respect to time. Recent studies such as the neural ordinary differential equation proposed a time-dependent neural network, which provides a neural network varying with respect to time. However, we claim that the architectural choice to build a time-dependent neural network significantly affects its time-awareness but still lacks sufficient validation in its current states. In this study, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the architecture of modern time-dependent neural networks. Here, we report a vulnerability of vanishing timestep embedding, which disables the time-awareness of a time-dependent neural network. Furthermore, we find that this vulnerability can also be observed in diffusion models because they employ a similar architecture that incorporates timestep embedding to discriminate between different timesteps during a diffusion process. Our analysis provides a detailed description of this phenomenon as well as several solutions to address the root cause. Through experiments on neural ordinary differential equations and diffusion models, we observed that ensuring alive time-awareness via proposed solutions boosted their performance, which implies that their current implementations lack sufficient time-dependency., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures

Vision transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a variety of vision tasks. Despite their promising capabilities, training a ViT requires a large amount of diverse data. Several studies empirically found that using rich data augmentations, such as Mixup, Cutmix, and random erasing, is critical to the successful training of ViTs. Now, the use of rich data augmentations has become a standard practice in the current state. However, we report a vulnerability to this practice: Certain data augmentations such as Mixup cause a variance shift in the positional embedding of ViT, which has been a hidden factor that degrades the performance of ViT during the test phase. We claim that achieving a stable effect from positional embedding requires a specific condition on the image, which is often broken for the current data augmentation methods. We provide a detailed analysis of this problem as well as the correct configuration for these data augmentations to remove the side effects of variance shift. Experiments showed that adopting our guidelines improves the performance of ViTs compared with the current configuration of data augmentations., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures

Ensuring extremely high reliability is essential for channel coding in 6G networks. The next-generation of ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (xURLLC) scenario within 6G networks requires a frame error rate (FER) below 10-9. However, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, the standard in 5G new radio (NR), encounter a challenge known as the error floor phenomenon, which hinders to achieve such low rates. To tackle this problem, we introduce an innovative solution: boosted neural min-sum (NMS) decoder. This decoder operates identically to conventional NMS decoders, but is trained by novel training methods including: i) boosting learning with uncorrected vectors, ii) block-wise training schedule to address the vanishing gradient issue, iii) dynamic weight sharing to minimize the number of trainable weights, iv) transfer learning to reduce the required sample count, and v) data augmentation to expedite the sampling process. Leveraging these training strategies, the boosted NMS decoder achieves the state-of-the art performance in reducing the error floor as well as superior waterfall performance. Remarkably, we fulfill the 6G xURLLC requirement for 5G LDPC codes without the severe error floor. Additionally, the boosted NMS decoder, once its weights are trained, can perform decoding without additional modules, making it highly practical for immediate application., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures

We discuss that some light baryon resonances exhibit properties which cannot be described when attributing a three-valence quark structure to them. Besides pointing out the hadron resonances which clearly require description beyond the quark model, we focus on the third $s_{11},~ N^*$ state and its decay to final states consisting of the lightest hyperon resonances which have a partial width comparable to that for the decay to $\pi N$. Such properties of the mentioned nucleon resonance get manifested in the cross sections and other observables related to processes producing the lightest hyperon resonances. We show that all these findings arise from the strong association of the baryon resonances to the dynamics among the ground-state hadrons., Comment: Proceedings for the XLV Symposium on Nuclear Physics, held in Cocoyoc, Morelos, Mexico

Error correcting codes (ECCs) are indispensable for reliable transmission in communication systems. The recent advancements in deep learning have catalyzed the exploration of ECC decoders based on neural networks. Among these, transformer-based neural decoders have achieved state-of-the-art decoding performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-attention Message-Passing Transformer (CrossMPT), which shares key operational principles with conventional message-passing decoders. While conventional transformer-based decoders employ self-attention mechanism without distinguishing between the types of input vectors (i.e., magnitude and syndrome vectors), CrossMPT updates the two types of input vectors separately and iteratively using two masked cross-attention blocks. The mask matrices are determined by the code's parity-check matrix, which explicitly captures the irrelevant relationship between two input vectors. Our experimental results show that CrossMPT significantly outperforms existing neural network-based decoders for various code classes. Notably, CrossMPT achieves this decoding performance improvement, while significantly reducing the memory usage, complexity, inference time, and training time., Comment: 17 pages

We are concerned about action selection in the basal ganglia (BG). We quantitatively analyze functions of direct pathway (DP) and indirect pathway (IP) for action selection in a spiking neural network with 3 competing channels. For such quantitative analysis, in each channel, we obtain the competition degree ${\cal C}_d$, given by the ratio of strength of DP (${\cal S}_{DP}$) to strength of IP (${\cal S}_{IP}$) (i.e., ${\cal C}_d = {\cal S}_{DP} / {\cal S}_{IP}$). Then, a desired action is selected in the channel with the largest ${\cal C}_d$. Desired action selection is made mainly due to strong focused inhibitory projection to the output nucleus, SNr (substantia nigra pars reticulata) via the DP in the corresponding channel. Unlike the case of DP, there are two types of IPs; intra-channel IP and inter-channel IP, due to widespread diffusive excitation from the STN (subthalamic nucleus). The intra-channel IP serves a function of brake to suppress the desired action selection. In contrast, the inter-channel IP to the SNr in the neighboring channels suppresses competing actions, leading to highlight the desired action selection. In this way, function of the inter-channel IP is opposite to that of the intra-channel IP. However, to the best of our knowledge, no quantitative analysis for such functions of the DP and the two IPs was made. Here, through direct calculations of the DP and the intra- and the inter-channel IP presynaptic currents into the SNr in each channel, we obtain the competition degree of each channel to determine a desired action, and then functions of the DP and the intra- and inter-channel IPs are quantitatively made clear.