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This letter investigates the secure delivery performance of the rate-splitting multiple access scheme in land mobile satellite (LMS) systems, considering that the private messages intended by a terminal can be eavesdropped by any others from the broadcast signals. Specifically, the considered system has an N-antenna satellite and numerous single-antenna land users. Maximum ratio transmission (MRT) and matched-filtering (MF) precoding techniques are adopted at the satellite separately for the common messages (CMs) and for the private messages (PMs), which are both implemented based on the estimated LMS channels suffering from the Shadowed-Rician fading. Then, closed-form expressions are derived for the ergodic rates for decoding the CM, and for decoding the PM at the intended user respectively, and more importantly, we also derive the ergodic secrecy rate against eavesdropping. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate the correctness of the proposed analysis models, as well as to show some interesting comparisons., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

We investigate the utilization of a single generalized dephasing qubit for sensing a quantum reservoir, where the antisymmetric coupling between the qubit and its reservoir is broken. It is found that in addition to the decay factor encoding channel, the antisymmetric coupling breaking gives rise to another phase factor encoding channel. We introduce an optimal measurement for the generalized dephasing qubit which enables the practical measurement precision to reach the theoretical ultimate precision quantified by the quantum signal-to-noise ratio (QSNR). As an example, the generalized dephasing qubit is employed to estimate the $s$-wave scattering length of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. It is found that the phase-induced QSNR caused by the antisymmetric coupling breaking is at least two orders of magnitude higher than the decay-induced QSNR at the millisecond timescale and the optimal relative error can achieve a scaling $\propto 1/t$ with $t$ being the encoding time in long-term encoding. Our work opens a way for supersensitive sensing of quantum reservoirs.

Introducing disorderness in the superconducting materials has been considered promising to enhance the electromagnetic impedance and realize noise-resilient superconducting qubits. Despite a number of pioneering implementations, the understanding of the correlation between the material disorderness and the qubit coherence is still developing. Here, we demonstrate the first and a systematic characterization of fluxonium qubits with the superinductors made from titanium-aluminum-nitride with varied disorderness. From qubit noise spectroscopy, the flux noise and the dielectric loss are extracted as a measure of the coherence properties. Our results reveal that the $1/f$ flux noise dominates the qubit decoherence around the flux-frustration point, strongly correlated with the material disorderness; while the dielectric loss remains low under a wide range of material properties. From the flux-noise amplitudes, the areal density ($\sigma$) of the phenomenological spin defects and material disorderness are found to be approximately correlated by $\sigma \propto \rho_{xx}^3$, or effectively $(k_F l)^{-3}$. This work has provided new insights on the origin of decoherence channels within superconductors, and could serve as a useful guideline for material design and optimization.

Sequential location recommendation plays a huge role in modern life, which can enhance user experience, bring more profit to businesses and assist in government administration. Although methods for location recommendation have evolved significantly thanks to the development of recommendation systems, there is still limited utilization of geographic information, along with the ongoing challenge of addressing data sparsity. In response, we introduce a Proximity-aware based region representation for Sequential Recommendation (PASR for short), built upon the Self-Attention Network architecture. We tackle the sparsity issue through a novel loss function employing importance sampling, which emphasizes informative negative samples during optimization. Moreover, PASR enhances the integration of geographic information by employing a self-attention-based geography encoder to the hierarchical grid and proximity grid at each GPS point. To further leverage geographic information, we utilize the proximity-aware negative samplers to enhance the quality of negative samples. We conducted evaluations using three real-world Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN) datasets, demonstrating that PASR surpasses state-of-the-art sequential location recommendation methods

We study genuine tripartite entanglement and multipartite entanglement in arbitrary $n$-partite quantum systems based on complete orthogonal basis (COB). While the usual Bloch representation of a density matrix uses three types of generators, the density matrix with COB operators has one uniformed type of generators which may simplify related computations. We take the advantage of this simplicity to derive useful and operational criteria to detect genuine tripartite entanglement and multipartite entanglement. We first convert the general states to simpler forms by using the relationship between general symmetric informationally complete measurements and COB. Then we derive an operational criteria to detect genuine tripartite entanglement. We study multipartite entanglement in arbitrary dimensional multipartite systems. By providing detailed examples, we demonstrate that our criteria can detect more genuine entangled and multipartite entangled states than the previously existing criteria.

We give an improved criterion of genuine multipartite entanglement for an important class of multipartite quantum states using generalized Bloch representations of the density matrices. The practical criterion is designed based on the Weyl operators and can be used for detecting genuine multipartite entanglement in higher dimensional systems. The test is shown to be significantly stronger than some of the most recent criteria.

The Knowledge Tracing (KT) task plays a crucial role in personalized learning, and its purpose is to predict student responses based on their historical practice behavior sequence. However, the KT task suffers from data sparsity, which makes it challenging to learn robust representations for students with few practice records and increases the risk of model overfitting. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Cognition-Mode Aware Variational Representation Learning Framework (CMVF) that can be directly applied to existing KT methods. Our framework uses a probabilistic model to generate a distribution for each student, accounting for uncertainty in those with limited practice records, and estimate the student's distribution via variational inference (VI). In addition, we also introduce a cognition-mode aware multinomial distribution as prior knowledge that constrains the posterior student distributions learning, so as to ensure that students with similar cognition modes have similar distributions, avoiding overwhelming personalization for students with few practice records. At last, extensive experimental results confirm that CMVF can effectively aid existing KT methods in learning more robust student representations. Our code is available at https://github.com/zmy-9/CMVF., Comment: Accepted by ICDM 2023, 10 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables

The fluxonium qubits have emerged as a promising platform for gate-based quantum information processing. However, their extraordinary protection against charge fluctuations comes at a cost: when coupled capacitively, the qubit-qubit interactions are restricted to XX-interactions. Consequently, effective XX- or XZ-interactions are only constructed either by temporarily populating higher-energy states, or by exploiting perturbative effects under microwave driving. Instead, we propose and demonstrate an inductive coupling scheme, which offers a wide selection of native qubit-qubit interactions for fluxonium. In particular, we leverage a built-in, flux-controlled ZZ-interaction to perform qubit entanglement. To combat the increased flux-noise-induced dephasing away from the flux-insensitive position, we use a continuous version of the dynamical decoupling scheme to perform noise filtering. Combining these, we demonstrate a 20 ns controlled-Z (CZ) gate with a mean fidelity of 99.53%. More than confirming the efficacy of our gate scheme, this high-fidelity result also reveals a promising but rarely explored parameter space uniquely suitable for gate operations between fluxonium qubits.

Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to predict students' responses to practices based on their historical question-answering behaviors. However, most current KT methods focus on improving overall AUC, leaving ample room for optimization in modeling sequences of excessive or insufficient lengths. As sequences get longer, computational costs will increase exponentially. Therefore, KT methods usually truncate sequences to an acceptable length, which makes it difficult for models on online service systems to capture complete historical practice behaviors of students with too long sequences. Conversely, modeling students with short practice sequences using most KT methods may result in overfitting due to limited observation samples. To address the above limitations, we propose a model called Sequence-Flexible Knowledge Tracing (SFKT)., Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2023, 10 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables

As the core of the Knowledge Tracking (KT) task, assessing students' dynamic mastery of knowledge concepts is crucial for both offline teaching and online educational applications. Since students' mastery of knowledge concepts is often unlabeled, existing KT methods rely on the implicit paradigm of historical practice to mastery of knowledge concepts to students' responses to practices to address the challenge of unlabeled concept mastery. However, purely predicting student responses without imposing specific constraints on hidden concept mastery values does not guarantee the accuracy of these intermediate values as concept mastery values. To address this issue, we propose a principled approach called Counterfactual Monotonic Knowledge Tracing (CMKT), which builds on the implicit paradigm described above by using a counterfactual assumption to constrain the evolution of students' mastery of knowledge concepts., Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2023, 10 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables

Although there is a huge literature on feature selection for the Cox model, none of the existing approaches can control the false discovery rate (FDR) unless the sample size tends to infinity. In addition, there is no formal power analysis of the knockoffs framework for survival data in the literature. To address those issues, in this paper, we propose a novel controlled feature selection approach using knockoffs for the Cox model. We establish that the proposed method enjoys the FDR control in finite samples regardless of the number of covariates. Moreover, under mild regularity conditions, we also show that the power of our method is asymptotically one as sample size tends to infinity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formal theoretical result on the power for the knockoffs procedure in the survival setting. Simulation studies confirm that our method has appealing finite-sample performance with desired FDR control and high power. We further demonstrate the performance of our method through a real data example., Comment: 22 pages including the Supporting Information

The rapid developments of mobile robotics and autonomous navigation over the years are largely empowered by public datasets for testing and upgrading, such as sensor odometry and SLAM tasks. Impressive demos and benchmark scores have arisen, which may suggest the maturity of existing navigation techniques. However, these results are primarily based on moderate structured scenario testing. When transitioning to challenging unstructured environments, especially in GNSS-denied, texture-monotonous, and dense-vegetated natural fields, their performance can hardly sustain at a high level and requires further validation and improvement. To bridge this gap, we build a novel robot navigation dataset in a luxuriant botanic garden of more than 48000m2. Comprehensive sensors are used, including Gray and RGB stereo cameras, spinning and MEMS 3D LiDARs, and low-cost and industrial-grade IMUs, all of which are well calibrated and hardware-synchronized. An all-terrain wheeled robot is employed for data collection, traversing through thick woods, riversides, narrow trails, bridges, and grasslands, which are scarce in previous resources. This yields 33 short and long sequences, forming 17.1km trajectories in total. Excitedly, both highly-accurate ego-motions and 3D map ground truth are provided, along with fine-annotated vision semantics. We firmly believe that our dataset can advance robot navigation and sensor fusion research to a higher level., Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

The Stone-Wales defect is a well-known and significant defective structure in carbon materials, impacting their mechanical, chemical, and electronic properties. Recently, a novel metal-carbon nanomaterial named Volleyballene has been discovered, characterized by a C-C bond bridging two carbon pentagons. Using first-principles calculations, a stable Stone-Wales-defective counterpart of Volleyballene, exhibiting $T_h$ symmetry, has been proposed by rotating the C-C bond by 90${\deg}$. Although its binding energy per atom is slightly higher than Volleyballene (${\Delta}E_b$ = 0.009 eV/atom), implying marginally lower structural stability, it can maintain its bond structure until the effective temperature reaches about 1538.56 K, indicating greater thermodynamic stability. Additionally, its highest vibration frequency is 1346.2 cm$^{-1}$, indicating strong chemical bond strength. A theoretical analysis of the Sc$_{20}$C$_{60}$+Sc$_{20}$C$_{60}$ binary systems highlights that the stable building block may be applied in potential nano-assembly., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

Background: The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 inactivated vaccine administration on the outcomes of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) cycles in infertile couples in China. Methods: We collected data from the CYART prospective cohort, which included couples undergoing IVF treatment from January 2021 to September 2022 at Sichuan Jinxin Xinan Women & Children's Hospital. Based on whether they received vaccination before ovarian stimulation, the couples were divided into the vaccination group and the non-vaccination group. We compared the laboratory parameters and pregnancy outcomes between the two groups. Findings: After performing propensity score matching (PSM), the analysis demonstrated similar clinical pregnancy rates, biochemical pregnancy and ongoing pregnancy rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated women. No significant disparities were found in terms of embryo development and laboratory parameters among the groups. Moreover, male vaccination had no impact on patient performance or pregnancy outcomes in assisted reproductive technology treatments. Additionally, there were no significant differences observed in the effects of vaccination on embryo development and pregnancy outcomes among couples undergoing ART. Interpretation: The findings suggest that COVID-19 vaccination did not have a significant effect on patients undergoing IVF/ICSI with fresh embryo transfer. Therefore, it is recommended that couples should receive COVID-19 vaccination as scheduled to help mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic., Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures and 5 tables