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In this study, we develop a fractional-calculus based constitutive model for capturing nonlocal interactions over the multiphysics response in solids. More specifically, we develop constitutive relations for nonlocal piezoelectricity incorporating fractional-order kinematic relations to capture the long-range interactions over electrical and mechanical field variables. This study breaks new ground by developing fractional-order constitutive models for a two-way multiphysics (electro-mechanical) coupling, specifically the direct and converse piezoelectric effect. It is expected that long-range interactions over each field variable (elastic and electrical) can be leveraged to develop metastructures with enhanced multiphysics coupling. To better illustrate this, we choose the example of a smart beam composed of a nonlocal substrate and a piezoelectric layer. We establish the analytical and numerical framework to analyze nonlocal smart beams based on variational principles. The fractional-Finite Element (f-FE) numerical solver, facilitating multiphysics coupling, undergoes comprehensive validation through multiple case studies. Finally, detailed studies point towards tuning the multiphysics coupling possible via nonlocal interactions across the domain., Comment: 36 pages, 21 figures

We present a parameter estimation algorithm on kilonova light curves using likelihood-free inference. Our inference is optimized through a pre-trained embedding network that marginalizes the time of arrival and the luminosity distance of the signal. We find that parameter inference utilizing a pre-trained embedding outperforms the use of likelihood-free inference alone, reducing training time and offering the capability to marginalize over certain nuisance parameters. The model is capable of retrieving the intrinsic parameters of the kilonova light curves with a comparable accuracy and precision to nested sampling methods while taking significantly less computational time. This framework has been integrated into the publicly available Nuclear Multi-Messenger Astronomy codebase so users can leverage the model for their inference purposes. This algorithm is broadly applicable to parameterized or simulated light curves of other transient objects.

The explainability of black-box machine learning algorithms, commonly known as Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), has become crucial for financial and other regulated industrial applications due to regulatory requirements and the need for transparency in business practices. Among the various paradigms of XAI, Explainable Case-Based Reasoning (XCBR) stands out as a pragmatic approach that elucidates the output of a model by referencing actual examples from the data used to train or test the model. Despite its potential, XCBR has been relatively underexplored for many algorithms such as tree-based models until recently. We start by observing that most XCBR methods are defined based on the distance metric learned by the algorithm. By utilizing a recently proposed technique to extract the distance metric learned by Random Forests (RFs), which is both geometry- and accuracy-preserving, we investigate various XCBR methods. These methods amount to identify special points from the training datasets, such as prototypes, critics, counter-factuals, and semi-factuals, to explain the predictions for a given query of the RF. We evaluate these special points using various evaluation metrics to assess their explanatory power and effectiveness., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables

Using 1533 type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) from the five-year sample of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), we investigate the effects of projected galactocentric separation between the SNe and their host galaxies on their light curves and standardization. We show, for the first time, that the difference in SN Ia post-standardization brightnesses between high and low-mass hosts reduces from $0.078\pm0.011$ mag in the full sample to $0.036 \pm 0.018$ mag for SNe Ia located in the outer regions of their host galaxies, while increasing to $0.100 \pm 0.014$ mag for SNe in the inner regions. In these inner regions, the step can be reduced (but not removed) using a model where the $R_V$ of dust along the line-of-sight to the SN changes as a function of galaxy properties. To explain the remaining difference, we use the distributions of the SN Ia stretch parameter to test whether the inferred age of SN progenitors are more varied in the inner regions of galaxies. We find that the proportion of high-stretch SNe Ia in red (older) environments is more prominent in outer regions and that the outer regions stretch distributions are overall more homogeneous compared to inner regions, but conclude that this effect cannot explain the reduction in significance of any Hubble residual step in outer regions. We conclude that the standardized distances of SNe Ia located in the outer regions of galaxies are less affected by their global host galaxy properties than those in the inner regions., Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures

Due to the dynamic nature of financial markets, maintaining models that produce precise predictions over time is difficult. Often the goal isn't just point prediction but determining uncertainty. Quantifying uncertainty, especially the aleatoric uncertainty due to the unpredictable nature of market drivers, helps investors understand varying risk levels. Recently, quantile regression forests (QRF) have emerged as a promising solution: Unlike most basic quantile regression methods that need separate models for each quantile, quantile regression forests estimate the entire conditional distribution of the target variable with a single model, while retaining all the salient features of a typical random forest. We introduce a novel approach to compute quantile regressions from random forests that leverages the proximity (i.e., distance metric) learned by the model and infers the conditional distribution of the target variable. We evaluate the proposed methodology using publicly available datasets and then apply it towards the problem of forecasting the average daily volume of corporate bonds. We show that using quantile regression using Random Forest proximities demonstrates superior performance in approximating conditional target distributions and prediction intervals to the original version of QRF. We also demonstrate that the proposed framework is significantly more computationally efficient than traditional approaches to quantile regressions., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables

The trading ecosystem of the Municipal (muni) bond is complex and unique. With nearly 2\% of securities from over a million securities outstanding trading daily, determining the value or relative value of a bond among its peers is challenging. Traditionally, relative value calculation has been done using rule-based or heuristics-driven approaches, which may introduce human biases and often fail to account for complex relationships between the bond characteristics. We propose a data-driven model to develop a supervised similarity framework for the muni bond market based on CatBoost algorithm. This algorithm learns from a large-scale dataset to identify bonds that are similar to each other based on their risk profiles. This allows us to evaluate the price of a muni bond relative to a cohort of bonds with a similar risk profile. We propose and deploy a back-testing methodology to compare various benchmarks and the proposed methods and show that the similarity-based method outperforms both rule-based and heuristic-based methods., Comment: 9 pages, 7 tables, 8 figures

Our research investigates the capability of modern multimodal reasoning models, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), to facilitate vision-powered assistants for multi-step daily activities. Such assistants must be able to 1) encode relevant visual history from the assistant's sensors, e.g., camera, 2) forecast future actions for accomplishing the activity, and 3) replan based on the user in the loop. To evaluate the first two capabilities, grounding visual history and forecasting in short and long horizons, we conduct benchmarking of two prominent classes of multimodal LLM approaches -- Socratic Models and Vision Conditioned Language Models (VCLMs) on video-based action anticipation tasks using offline datasets. These offline benchmarks, however, do not allow us to close the loop with the user, which is essential to evaluate the replanning capabilities and measure successful activity completion in assistive scenarios. To that end, we conduct a first-of-its-kind user study, with 18 participants performing 3 different multi-step cooking activities while wearing an egocentric observation device called Aria and following assistance from multimodal LLMs. We find that the Socratic approach outperforms VCLMs in both offline and online settings. We further highlight how grounding long visual history, common in activity assistance, remains challenging in current models, especially for VCLMs, and demonstrate that offline metrics do not indicate online performance., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

In many real-world classification or recognition tasks, it is often difficult to collect training examples that exhaust all possible classes due to, for example, incomplete knowledge during training or ever changing regimes. Therefore, samples from unknown/novel classes may be encountered in testing/deployment. In such scenarios, the classifiers should be able to i) perform classification on known classes, and at the same time, ii) identify samples from unknown classes. This is known as open-set recognition. Although random forest has been an extremely successful framework as a general-purpose classification (and regression) method, in practice, it usually operates under the closed-set assumption and is not able to identify samples from new classes when run out of the box. In this work, we propose a novel approach to enabling open-set recognition capability for random forest classifiers by incorporating distance metric learning and distance-based open-set recognition. The proposed method is validated on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art distance-based open-set recognition methods.

We present galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements using a sample of low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs) drawn from the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 (Y3) data as lenses. LSBGs are diffuse galaxies with a surface brightness dimmer than the ambient night sky. These dark-matter-dominated objects are intriguing due to potentially unusual formation channels that lead to their diffuse stellar component. Given the faintness of LSBGs, using standard observational techniques to characterize their total masses proves challenging. Weak gravitational lensing, which is less sensitive to the stellar component of galaxies, could be a promising avenue to estimate the masses of LSBGs. Our LSBG sample consists of 23,790 galaxies separated into red and blue color types at $g-i\ge 0.60$ and $g-i< 0.60$, respectively. Combined with the DES Y3 shear catalog, we measure the tangential shear around these LSBGs and find signal-to-noise ratios of 6.67 for the red sample, 2.17 for the blue sample, and 5.30 for the full sample. We use the clustering redshifts method to obtain redshift distributions for the red and blue LSBG samples. Assuming all red LSBGs are satellites, we fit a simple model to the measurements and estimate the host halo mass of these LSBGs to be $\log(M_{\rm host}/M_{\odot}) = 12.98 ^{+0.10}_{-0.11}$. We place a 95% upper bound on the subhalo mass at $\log(M_{\rm sub}/M_{\odot})<11.51$. By contrast, we assume the blue LSBGs are centrals, and place a 95% upper bound on the halo mass at $\log(M_\mathrm{host}/M_\odot) < 11.84$. We find that the stellar-to-halo mass ratio of the LSBG samples is consistent with that of the general galaxy population. This work illustrates the viability of using weak gravitational lensing to constrain the halo masses of LSBGs., Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures

We report a gravitational-wave parameter estimation algorithm, AMPLFI, based on likelihood-free inference using normalizing flows. The focus of AMPLFI is to perform real-time parameter estimation for candidates detected by machine-learning based compact binary coalescence search, Aframe. We present details of our algorithm and optimizations done related to data-loading and pre-processing on accelerated hardware. We train our model using binary black-hole (BBH) simulations on real LIGO-Virgo detector noise. Our model has $\sim 6$ million trainable parameters with training times $\lesssim 24$ hours. Based on online deployment on a mock data stream of LIGO-Virgo data, Aframe + AMPLFI is able to pick up BBH candidates and infer parameters for real-time alerts from data acquisition with a net latency of $\sim 6$s., Comment: Submitted to MLST

We developed an autonomous experimentation platform to accelerate interpretable scientific discovery in ultrafast nanophotonics, targeting a novel method to steer spontaneous emission from reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces. Controlling spontaneous emission is crucial for clean-energy solutions in illumination, thermal radiation engineering, and remote sensing. Despite the potential of reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces with embedded sources for spatiotemporal control, achieving arbitrary far-field control remains challenging. Here, we present a self-driving lab (SDL) platform that addresses this challenge by discovering the governing equations for predicting the far-field emission profile from light-emitting metasurfaces. We discover that both the spatial gradient (grating-like) and the curvature (lens-like) of the local refractive index are key factors in steering spontaneous emission. The SDL employs a machine-learning framework comprising: (1) a variational autoencoder for generating complex spatial refractive index profiles, (2) an active learning agent for guiding experiments with real-time closed-loop feedback, and (3) a neural network-based equation learner to uncover structure-property relationships. The SDL demonstrated a four-fold enhancement in peak emission directivity (up to 77%) over a 72{\deg} field of view within ~300 experiments. Our findings reveal that combinations of positive gratings and lenses are as effective as negative lenses and gratings for all emission angles, offering a novel strategy for controlling spontaneous emission beyond conventional Fourier optics., Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures in main text, 5 figures in supplementary information

The existence of temperature gradients within eukaryotic cells has been postulated as a source of natural convection in the cytoplasm, i.e. bulk fluid motion as a result of temperature-difference-induced density gradients. Recent computations have predicted that a temperature differential of $\Delta T \approx 1$ K between the cell nucleus and the cell membrane could be strong enough to drive significant intracellular material transport. We use numerical computations and theoretical calculations to revisit this problem in order to further understand the impact of temperature gradients on flow generation and advective transport within cells. Surprisingly, our computations yield flows that are an order of magnitude weaker than those obtained previously for the same relative size and position of the nucleus with respect to the cell membrane. To understand this discrepancy, we develop a semi-analytical solution of the convective flow inside a model cell using a bi-spherical coordinate framework, for the case of an axisymmetric cell geometry (i.e. when the displacement of the nucleus from the cell centre is aligned with gravity). We also calculate exact solutions for the flow when the nucleus is located concentrically inside the cell. The results from both theoretical analyses agree with our numerical results, thus providing a robust estimate of the strength of cytoplasmic natural convection and demonstrating that these are much weaker than previously predicted. Finally, we investigate the ability of the aforementioned flows to redistribute solute within a cell. Our calculations reveal that, in all but unrealistic cases, cytoplasmic convection has a negligible contribution toward enhancing the diffusion-dominated mass transfer of cellular material.

This paper introduces long-context Granite code models that support effective context windows of up to 128K tokens. Our solution for scaling context length of Granite 3B/8B code models from 2K/4K to 128K consists of a light-weight continual pretraining by gradually increasing its RoPE base frequency with repository-level file packing and length-upsampled long-context data. Additionally, we also release instruction-tuned models with long-context support which are derived by further finetuning the long context base models on a mix of permissively licensed short and long-context instruction-response pairs. While comparing to the original short-context Granite code models, our long-context models achieve significant improvements on long-context tasks without any noticeable performance degradation on regular code completion benchmarks (e.g., HumanEval). We release all our long-context Granite code models under an Apache 2.0 license for both research and commercial use.

Deconvolving ("unfolding'') detector distortions is a critical step in the comparison of cross section measurements with theoretical predictions in particle and nuclear physics. However, most existing approaches require histogram binning while many theoretical predictions are at the level of statistical moments. We develop a new approach to directly unfold distribution moments as a function of another observable without having to first discretize the data. Our Moment Unfolding technique uses machine learning and is inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We demonstrate the performance of this approach using jet substructure measurements in collider physics. With this illustrative example, we find that our Moment Unfolding protocol is more precise than bin-based approaches and is as or more precise than completely unbinned methods., Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 1 table

We present a study of the weak lensing matter profiles of 698 South Pole Telescope (SPT) thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (tSZE) selected galaxy clusters in the redshift range $0.25

We search for dark matter annihilation from galaxy clusters in the energy range from 1-300 GeV using nearly 16 years of Fermi-LAT data. For this purpose, we use 350 galaxy clusters selected from the 2500 $\rm{deg^2}$ SPT-SZ survey. We model the dark matter distribution using the NFW profile for the main halo along with the Einasto profile for the substructure. The largest signal is seen for the cluster SPT-CL J2021-5257 with a significance of around $3\sigma$. The best-fit dark matter mass and annihilation cross-section for this cluster are equal to $(60.0 \pm 11.8)$ GeV and $\langle \sigma v \rangle= (6.0 \pm 0.6) \times 10^{-25} \rm{cm^3 s^{-1}}$ for the $\bar{b} b$ annihilation channel. However, this central estimate is in conflict with the limits on annihilation cross-section from dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and hence cannot be attributed to dark matter annihilation. Three other clusters show significance between $2-2.5\sigma$, whereas all the remaining clusters show null results. The most stringent 95\% c.l. upper limit for the WIMP annihilation cross-section among all the clusters is from SPT-CL J0455-4159, viz. $\langle \sigma v \rangle = 6.44 \times 10^{-26} \text{cm}^3 \text{s}^{-1}$ for $m_{\chi} = 10$ GeV and $b\bar{b}$ annihilation channel., Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in JCAP

Since its major release in 2006, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) has become the industry standard for interfacing a computer's hardware and operating system, replacing BIOS. UEFI has higher privileged security access to system resources than any other software component, including the system kernel. Hence, identifying and characterizing vulnerabilities in UEFI is extremely important for computer security. However, automated detection and characterization of UEFI vulnerabilities is a challenging problem. Static vulnerability analysis techniques are scalable but lack precision (reporting many false positives), whereas symbolic analysis techniques are precise but are hampered by scalability issues due to path explosion and the cost of constraint solving. In this paper, we introduce a technique called STatic Analysis guided Symbolic Execution (STASE), which integrates both analysis approaches to leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. We begin with a rule-based static vulnerability analysis on LLVM bitcode to identify potential vulnerability targets for symbolic execution. We then focus symbolic execution on each target to achieve precise vulnerability detection and signature generation. STASE relies on the manual specification of reusable vulnerability rules and attacker-controlled inputs. However, it automates the generation of harnesses that guide the symbolic execution process, addressing the usability and scalability of symbolic execution, which typically requires manual harness generation to reduce the state space. We implemented and applied STASE to the implementations of UEFI code base. STASE detects and generates vulnerability signatures for 5 out of 9 recently reported PixieFail vulnerabilities and 13 new vulnerabilities in Tianocore's EDKII codebase.

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are prime candidate sources of the high-energy, astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube. This is demonstrated by the real-time multi-messenger detection of the blazar TXS 0506+056 and the recent evidence of neutrino emission from NGC 1068 from a separate time-averaged study. However, the production mechanism of the astrophysical neutrinos in AGN is not well established which can be resolved via correlation studies with photon observations. For neutrinos produced due to photohadronic interactions in AGN, in addition to a correlation of neutrinos with high-energy photons, there would also be a correlation of neutrinos with photons emitted at radio wavelengths. In this work, we perform an in-depth stacking study of the correlation between 15 GHz radio observations of AGN reported in the MOJAVE XV catalog, and ten years of neutrino data from IceCube. We also use a time-dependent approach which improves the statistical power of the stacking analysis. No significant correlation was found for both analyses and upper limits are reported. When compared to the IceCube diffuse flux, at 100 TeV and for a spectral index of 2.5, the upper limits derived are $\sim3\%$ and $\sim9\%$ for the time-averaged and time-dependent case, respectively., Comment: 14 Pages 7 Figures

We present a search for an eV-scale sterile neutrino using 7.5 years of data from the IceCube DeepCore detector. The analysis uses a sample of 21,914 events with energies between 5 and 150 GeV to search for sterile neutrinos through atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance. Improvements in event selection and treatment of systematic uncertainties provide greater statistical power compared to previous DeepCore sterile neutrino searches. Our results are compatible with the absence of mixing between active and sterile neutrino states, and we place constraints on the mixing matrix elements $|U_{\mu 4}|^2 < 0.0534$ and $|U_{\tau 4}|^2 < 0.0574$ at 90% CL under the assumption that $\Delta m^2_{41}\geq 1\;\mathrm{eV^2}$. These null results add to the growing tension between anomalous appearance results and constraints from disappearance searches in the 3+1 sterile neutrino landscape., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Version accepted by Physical Review D for publication

The SHALON atmospheric Cherenkov telescope has detected very high energy gamma-ray emission at TeV energies from eight red dwarfs, namely, V388 Cas, V547 Cas, V780 Tau, V962 Tau, V1589 Cyg, GJ 1078, GJ 3684 and GL 851.1. Consequently, these red dwarfs have been suggested as sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In this work, we search for soft gamma-ray emission from these TeV bright red dwarfs between 0.75-30 MeV using archival data from the COMPTEL gamma-ray imaging telescope, as a follow-up to a similar search for GeV gamma-ray emission using the Fermi-LAT telescope. Although, prima-facie, we detect non-zero photon flux from three red dwarfs with high significance, these signals can attributed to contamination from nearby sources such as Crab and Cygnus, which are within the angular resolution of COMPTEL, and have been previously detected as very bright point sources at MeV energies. Therefore, we could not detect any statistically significant signal ($>3\sigma$) from any of these eight red dwarfs from 0.75-30 MeV. We then report the 95% confidence level upper limits on the differential photon flux (at 30 MeV), integral photon flux and integral energy flux for all of the eight red dwarfs. The integral energy flux limits range between $10^{-11}-10^{-10} \rm{ergs/cm^2/s}$., Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in JCAP

The aim of the research was to compare the quality parameters of Seawater before and after hydrodynamic cavitation treatment. The Hydrodynamic Cavitation Method for water treatment gives the highest reduction in Turbidity (100%), the second highest reduction in TSS (83.86%), and the lowest reduction in Na+ (8.47%), according to the study and analysis of various quality parameters. When compared to CPCB Water Quality Criteria, treated water is suitable for outdoor bathing; it again satisfies the standards for classes SW-I, SW-II, SW-III, SW-IV and SW-V, i.e., treated sea water can be used for a variety of purposes, including bathing, contact water sports, commercial fishing, mariculture, ecologically sensitive zones, aesthetics, harbour, waters Navigation and Controlled water disposal. The SAR value of treated water, which is 1.72, indicates it is appropriate for all types of soil and crops. The treated water's WQI, which is 65, showed that it is of Fair quality and may be used for industrial and irrigation uses. Water quality can be improved by recycling the treated water for an additional 24 hours using the hydrodynamic cavitation method. Recycling of one time treated sea water will result in higher-quality water that can be used for a variety of purposes. The Hydrodynamic Cavitation method by using venturi - orifice is proven to be the most effective over the other methods. Because it does not require any chemical reagent, hence does not produce any hazardous chemical waste, and maintains an eco-friendly and economically sustainable, environment benign technique for the treatment of Seawater., Comment: 19 Pages, 14 Tables, 9 Figures

Coordinate transformations significantly simplify power systems computations. Most notably, the classical Clarke and dq0 transformations are widely used in three-phase systems, as together they transform balanced abc quantities into constant-valued signals. However, during unbalanced operation, the utility of these transformations diminishes, since a null 0 coordinate cannot be ensured and oscillating signals emerge. While recently proposed transformations ensure a null 0 coordinate, they still do not lead to constant-valued signals in the dq0 domain. In this letter, we propose a generalized vector locus transformation that ensures both a null 0 coordinate and constant-valued signals. Moreover, we show that, in the balanced case, the classical amplitude-invariant Clarke transformation is an instance of the proposed transformation.

Gene sequence search is a fundamental operation in computational genomics. Due to the petabyte scale of genome archives, most gene search systems now use hashing-based data structures such as Bloom Filters (BF). The state-of-the-art systems such as Compact bit-slicing signature index (COBS) and Repeated And Merged Bloom filters (RAMBO) use BF with Random Hash (RH) functions for gene representation and identification. The standard recipe is to cast the gene search problem as a sequence of membership problems testing if each subsequent gene substring (called kmer) of Q is present in the set of kmers of the entire gene database D. We observe that RH functions, which are crucial to the memory and the computational advantage of BF, are also detrimental to the system performance of gene-search systems. While subsequent kmers being queried are likely very similar, RH, oblivious to any similarity, uniformly distributes the kmers to different parts of potentially large BF, thus triggering excessive cache misses and causing system slowdown. We propose a novel hash function called the Identity with Locality (IDL) hash family, which co-locates the keys close in input space without causing collisions. This approach ensures both cache locality and key preservation. IDL functions can be a drop-in replacement for RH functions and help improve the performance of information retrieval systems. We give a simple but practical construction of IDL function families and show that replacing the RH with IDL functions reduces cache misses by a factor of 5x, thus improving query and indexing times of SOTA methods such as COBS and RAMBO by factors up to 2x without compromising their quality. We also provide a theoretical analysis of the false positive rate of BF with IDL functions. Our hash function is the first study that bridges Locality Sensitive Hash (LSH) and RH to obtain cache efficiency., Comment: 13 pages

Smart contracts led to the emergence of the decentralized finance (DeFi) marketplace within blockchain ecosystems, where diverse participants engage in financial activities. In traditional finance, there are possibilities to create values, e.g., arbitrage offers to create value from market inefficiencies or front-running offers to extract value for the participants having privileged roles. Such opportunities are readily available -- searching programmatically in DeFi. It is commonly known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in the literature. In this survey, first, we show how lucrative such opportunities can be. Next, we discuss how protocol-following participants trying to capture such opportunities threaten to sabotage blockchain's performance and the core tenets of decentralization, transparency, and trustlessness that blockchains are based on. Then, we explain different attempts by the community in the past to address these issues and the problems introduced by these solutions. Finally, we review the current state of research trying to restore trustlessness and decentralization to provide all DeFi participants with a fair marketplace.

This study explores a green pathway for urea synthesis using plasma-ice interaction with gas mixtures of N2 + CO2 and NH3 + CO2. Electrical and optical emission spectroscopy were employed to characterize the plasmas, revealing that urea formation involves complex reactions driven by high-energy species, producing reactive nitrogen and carbon intermediates that further react to form urea. Physicochemical analyses of plasma-treated ice showed increased pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and reduced oxidation-reduction potential (ORP). Optimization of plasma process parameters (gas pressure, applied voltage, and treatment time) was performed to enhance urea formation. Among these parameters, plasma treatment time had the most substantial influence. Increasing treatment time from 20 to 60 minutes significantly impacted physicochemical properties: for N2 + CO2 plasma, pH increased by 21.05%, EC by 184.7%, and ORP decreased by 27.48%; for NH3 + CO2 plasma, pH increased by 27.37%, EC by 239.05%, and ORP decreased by 72.67%, respectively. The study shows that NH3 + CO2 plasma produces a significantly higher concentration of urea (7.7 mg L-1) compared to N2 + CO2 plasma (0.55 mg L-1). This is attributed to the direct availability and reactivity of ammonia, which simplifies reaction pathways and enhances intermediate formation. These findings highlight the potential of plasma-ice interaction as an energy-efficient and environmentally friendly method for urea synthesis, offering a sustainable alternative to conventional processes.

We search for a redshift dependence of $\sigma_8^0$ using 23 growth rate measurements from redshift space distortions and peculiar velocity measurements as a consistency check of $\Lambda$CDM. For this purpose we use the dataset from arXiv:1806.10822 consisting of 22 measurements, which has been vetted for internal consistencies. Eighteen of these measurements have been obtained from the Gold-2017 sample, collated from multiple redshift space distortion surveys between 2009 and 2016, whereas the remaining four have been obtained from the eBOSS DR14 quasar survey. We also added one additional data point from the BOSS DR12 CMASS galaxy sample. We find that for this dataset the $\sigma_8^0$ values are consistent between the low redshift and high redshift samples using three different redshift cuts. This implies that the growth rate measurements are consistent with a constant $\sigma_8^0$ in accord with $\Lambda$CDM, assuming there are no uncontrolled systematics in this dataset., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in EPJC

We present LRM-Zero, a Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) trained entirely on synthesized 3D data, achieving high-quality sparse-view 3D reconstruction. The core of LRM-Zero is our procedural 3D dataset, Zeroverse, which is automatically synthesized from simple primitive shapes with random texturing and augmentations (e.g., height fields, boolean differences, and wireframes). Unlike previous 3D datasets (e.g., Objaverse) which are often captured or crafted by humans to approximate real 3D data, Zeroverse completely ignores realistic global semantics but is rich in complex geometric and texture details that are locally similar to or even more intricate than real objects. We demonstrate that our LRM-Zero, trained with our fully synthesized Zeroverse, can achieve high visual quality in the reconstruction of real-world objects, competitive with models trained on Objaverse. We also analyze several critical design choices of Zeroverse that contribute to LRM-Zero's capability and training stability. Our work demonstrates that 3D reconstruction, one of the core tasks in 3D vision, can potentially be addressed without the semantics of real-world objects. The Zeroverse's procedural synthesis code and interactive visualization are available at: https://desaixie.github.io/lrm-zero/., Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures. Our code and interactive visualization are available at: https://desaixie.github.io/lrm-zero/. v2: NeurIPS 2024 Camera Ready version

We present a study of the stellar and baryonic Tully-Fisher relation within the redshift range of $0.6 \leq z \leq 2.5$ utilizing observations of \sfgs. This dataset, as explored in \citet{GS23}, comprises of disk-like galaxies spanning a stellar mass range of $8.89 \leq \log(M_{star} \ [\mathrm{M_\odot}]) \leq 11.5$, baryonic mass range of $9.0 \leq \log(M_{bar} [\mathrm{M_\odot}]) \leq 11.5$, and circular velocity range of $1.65 \leq \log(V_c \ [{\rm km/s}]) \leq 2.85$. Stellar masses of these objects are estimated using spectral energy distribution fitting techniques, while gas masses are determined via scaling relations. Circular velocities are directly derived from the Rotation Curves (RCs), after meticulously correcting for beam smearing and pressure support. Our analysis confirms that our sample adheres to the fundamental mass-size relations of galaxies and reflects the evolution of velocity dispersion in galaxies, in line with previous findings. This reaffirms the reliability of our photometric and kinematic parameters (i.e., $M_{star}$ and $V_c$), thereby enabling a comprehensive examination of the Tully-Fisher relation. To attain robust results, we employed a novel orthogonal likelihood fitting technique designed to minimize intrinsic scatter around the best-fit line, as required at \hz. For the STFR, we obtained a slope of $\alpha=3.03\pm 0.25$, an offset of $\beta = 3.34\pm 0.53$, and an intrinsic scatter of $\zeta_{int}=0.08$ dex. Correspondingly, the BTFR yielded $\alpha=3.21\pm 0.28$, $\beta=3.16\pm 0.61$, and $\zeta_{int}=0.09$ dex. Our findings suggest a subtle deviation in the stellar and baryonic Tully-Fisher relation with respect to local studies, which is most-likely due to the evolutionary processes governing disk formation., Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. The uniqueness of this work lies in the robustness of circular velocity measurements of high-z galaxies (see Sharma et al. 2023) and the fitting techniques. In particular, we employed an orthogonal likelihood fitting technique, tested and verified on mock observations (see Appendix). Fitting code is publicly available on the GitHub repository (link in paper)

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.

The recent IceCube detection of TeV neutrino emission from the nearby active galaxy NGC 1068 suggests that active galactic nuclei (AGN) could make a sizable contribution to the diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos. The absence of TeV $\gamma$-rays from NGC 1068 indicates neutrino production in the vicinity of the supermassive black hole, where the high radiation density leads to $\gamma$-ray attenuation. Therefore, any potential neutrino emission from similar sources is not expected to correlate with high-energy $\gamma$-rays. Disk-corona models predict neutrino emission from Seyfert galaxies to correlate with keV X-rays, as they are tracers of coronal activity. Using through-going track events from the Northern Sky recorded by IceCube between 2011 and 2021, we report results from a search for individual and aggregated neutrino signals from 27 additional Seyfert galaxies that are contained in the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS). Besides the generic single power-law, we evaluate the spectra predicted by the disk-corona model. Assuming all sources to be intrinsically similar to NGC 1068, our findings constrain the collective neutrino emission from X-ray bright Seyfert galaxies in the Northern Hemisphere, but, at the same time, show excesses of neutrinos that could be associated with the objects NGC 4151 and CGCG 420-015. These excesses result in a 2.7$\sigma$ significance with respect to background expectations., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are promising candidate sources of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos since they provide environments rich in matter and photon targets where cosmic ray interactions may lead to the production of gamma rays and neutrinos. We searched for high-energy neutrino emission from AGN using the $\textit{Swift}$-BAT Spectroscopic Survey (BASS) catalog of hard X-ray sources and 12 years of IceCube muon track data. First, upon performing a stacked search, no significant emission was found. Second, we searched for neutrinos from a list of 43 candidate sources and found an excess from the direction of two sources, Seyfert galaxies NGC 1068 and NGC 4151. We observed NGC 1068 at flux $\phi_{\nu_{\mu}+\bar{\nu}_{\mu}}$ = $4.02_{-1.52}^{+1.58} \times 10^{-11}$ TeV$^{-1}$ cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ normalized at 1 TeV, with power-law spectral index, $\gamma$ = 3.10$^{+0.26}_{-0.22}$, consistent with previous IceCube results. The observation of a neutrino excess from the direction of NGC 4151 is at a post-trial significance of 2.9$\sigma$. If interpreted as an astrophysical signal, the excess observed from NGC 4151 corresponds to a flux $\phi_{\nu_{\mu}+\bar{\nu}_{\mu}}$ = $1.51_{-0.81}^{+0.99} \times 10^{-11}$ TeV$^{-1}$ cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ normalized at 1 TeV and $\gamma$ = 2.83$^{+0.35}_{-0.28}$.

We present $griz$ photometric light curves for the full 5 years of the Dark Energy Survey Supernova program (DES-SN), obtained with both forced Point Spread Function (PSF) photometry on Difference Images (DIFFIMG) performed during survey operations, and Scene Modelling Photometry (SMP) on search images processed after the survey. This release contains $31,636$ DIFFIMG and $19,706$ high-quality SMP light curves, the latter of which contains $1635$ photometrically-classified supernovae that pass cosmology quality cuts. This sample spans the largest redshift ($z$) range ever covered by a single SN survey ($0.1

We report constraints on a variety of non-standard cosmological models using the full 5-year photometrically-classified type Ia supernova sample from the Dark Energy Survey (DES-SN5YR). Both Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Suspiciousness calculations find no strong evidence for or against any of the non-standard models we explore. When combined with external probes, the AIC and Suspiciousness agree that 11 of the 15 models are moderately preferred over Flat-$\Lambda$CDM suggesting additional flexibility in our cosmological models may be required beyond the cosmological constant. We also provide a detailed discussion of all cosmological assumptions that appear in the DES supernova cosmology analyses, evaluate their impact, and provide guidance on using the DES Hubble diagram to test non-standard models. An approximate cosmological model, used to perform bias corrections to the data holds the biggest potential for harbouring cosmological assumptions. We show that even if the approximate cosmological model is constructed with a matter density shifted by $\Delta\Omega_m\sim0.2$ from the true matter density of a simulated data set the bias that arises is sub-dominant to statistical uncertainties. Nevertheless, we present and validate a methodology to reduce this bias., Comment: Published to MNRAS on 20 August 2024; v2 updates to the accepted version

Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are a critical tool in measuring the accelerating expansion of the universe. Recent efforts to improve these standard candles have focused on incorporating the effects of dust on distance measurements with SNe Ia. In this paper, we use the state-of-the-art Dark Energy Survey 5 year sample to evaluate two different families of dust models: empirical extinction models derived from SNe Ia data, and physical attenuation models from the spectra of galaxies. Among the SNe Ia-derived models, we find that a logistic function of the total-to-selective extinction RV best recreates the correlations between supernova distance measurements and host galaxy properties, though an additional 0.02 magnitudes of grey scatter are needed to fully explain the scatter in SNIa brightness in all cases. These empirically-derived extinction distributions are highly incompatible with the physical attenuation models from galactic spectral measurements. From these results, we conclude that SNe Ia must either preferentially select extreme ends of galactic dust distributions, or that the characterisation of dust along the SNe Ia line-of-sight is incompatible with that of galactic dust distributions.

We present a precise measurement of cosmological time dilation using the light curves of 1504 type Ia supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey spanning a redshift range $0.1\lesssim z\lesssim 1.2$. We find that the width of supernova light curves is proportional to $(1+z)$, as expected for time dilation due to the expansion of the Universe. Assuming type Ia supernovae light curves are emitted with a consistent duration $\Delta t_{\rm em}$, and parameterising the observed duration as $\Delta t_{\rm obs}=\Delta t_{\rm em}(1+z)^b$, we fit for the form of time dilation using two methods. Firstly, we find that a power of $b \approx 1$ minimises the flux scatter in stacked subsamples of light curves across different redshifts. Secondly, we fit each target supernova to a stacked light curve (stacking all supernovae with observed bandpasses matching that of the target light curve) and find $b=1.003\pm0.005$ (stat) $\pm\,0.010$ (sys). Thanks to the large number of supernovae and large redshift-range of the sample, this analysis gives the most precise measurement of cosmological time dilation to date, ruling out any non-time-dilating cosmological models at very high significance., Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures. Updated in response to reviewer feedback. Accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)

We measure the current expansion rate of the Universe, Hubble's constant $H_0$, by calibrating the absolute magnitudes of supernovae to distances measured by Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. This `inverse distance ladder' technique provides an alternative to calibrating supernovae using nearby absolute distance measurements, replacing the calibration with a high-redshift anchor. We use the recent release of 1829 supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey spanning $0.01\lt z \lt1.13$ anchored to the recent Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurements from DESI spanning $0.30 \lt z_{\mathrm{eff}} \lt 2.33$. To trace cosmology to $z=0$, we use the third-, fourth- and fifth-order cosmographic models, which, by design, are agnostic about the energy content and expansion history of the universe. With the inclusion of the higher-redshift DESI-BAO data, the third-order model is a poor fit to both data sets, with the fourth-order model being preferred by the Akaike Information Criterion. Using the fourth-order cosmographic model, we find $H_0=67.19^{+0.66}_{-0.64}\mathrm{~km} \mathrm{~s}^{-1} \mathrm{~Mpc}^{-1}$, in agreement with the value found by Planck without the need to assume Flat-$\Lambda$CDM. However the best-fitting expansion history differs from that of Planck, providing continued motivation to investigate these tensions.

We present the first three-parameter fit to a 3+1 sterile neutrino model using 7.634 years of data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory on $\nu_\mu+\overline{\nu}_\mu$ charged-current interactions in the energy range 500--9976 GeV. Our analysis is sensitive to the mass-squared splitting between the heaviest and lightest mass state ($\Delta m_{41}^2$), the mixing matrix element connecting muon flavor to the fourth mass state ($|U_{\mu4}|^2$), and the element connecting tau flavor to the fourth mass state ($|U_{\tau4}|^2$). Predicted propagation effects in matter enhance the signature through a resonance as atmospheric neutrinos from the Northern Hemisphere traverse the Earth to the IceCube detector at the South Pole. The remaining sterile neutrino matrix elements are left fixed, with $|U_{e4}|^2= 0$ and $\delta_{14}=0$, as they have a negligible effect, and $\delta_{24}=\pi$ is set to give the most conservative limits. The result is consistent with the no-sterile neutrino hypothesis with a probability of 4.3%. Profiling the likelihood of each parameter yields the 90\% confidence levels: $ 2.4\,\mathrm{eV}^{2} < \Delta m_{41}^2 <9.6\,\mathrm{eV}^{2} $ , $0.0081 < |U_{\mu4}|^2 < 0.10$ , and $|U_{\tau4}|^2< 0.035$, which narrows the allowed parameter-space for $|U_{\tau4}|^2$. However, the primary result of this analysis is the first map of the 3+1 parameter space exploring the interdependence of $\Delta m_{41}^2$, $|U_{\mu4}|^2$, and $|U_{\tau4}|^2$., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. Published in PLB