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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a progressive inflammatory and neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system affecting over 2.5 million people globally. In-clinic six-minute walk test (6MWT) is a widely used objective measure to evaluate the progression of MS. Yet, it has limitations such as the need for a clinical visit and a proper walkway. The widespread use of wearable devices capable of depicting patients activity profiles has the potential to assess the level of MS-induced disability in free-living conditions. In this work, we extracted 96 activity features in different temporal granularities (from minute-level to day-level) and explored their utility in estimating 6MWT scores in a European (Italy, Spain, and Denmark) MS cohort of 337 participants over an average of 10-month duration. We combined these features with participant demographics using three regression models including elastic net, gradient boosted trees and random forest. In addition, we quantified the individual feature contribution using feature importance in these regression models, linear mixed-effects models, generalized estimating equations, and correlation-based feature selection (CFS). The results showed promising estimation performance with R2 of 0.30, which was derived using random forest after CFS. This model was able to distinguish the participants with low disability from those with high disability. Furthermore, we observed that the minute-level (no longer than 8 minutes) step count, particularly those capturing the upper end of the step count distribution, had a stronger association with 6MWT. The use of a walking aid was indicative of ambulatory function measured through 6MWT. This study provides a basis for future investigation into the clinical relevance and utility of wearables in assessing MS progression in free-living conditions.

Non-equilibrium physics including many-body localization (MBL) has attracted increasing attentions, but theoretical approaches of reliably studying non-equilibrium properties remain quite limited. In this Letter, we propose a systematic approach to probe MBL phases via the excited-state variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) and demonstrate convincing results of MBL on a quantum hardware, which we believe paves a promising way for future simulations of non-equilibrium systems beyond the reach of classical computations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Moreover, the MBL probing protocol based on excited-state VQE is NISQ-friendly, as it can successfully differentiate the MBL phase from thermal phases with relatively-shallow quantum circuits, and it is also robust against the effect of quantum noises., Comment: 5 pages + references + supplemental, 7 figures

Charge modulations have been widely observed in cuprates, suggesting their centrality for understanding the high-$T_c$ superconductivity in these materials. However, the dimensionality of these modulations remains controversial, including whether their wavevector is unidirectional or bidirectional, and also whether they extend seamlessly from the surface of the material into the bulk. Material disorder presents severe challenges to understanding the charge modulations through bulk scattering techniques. We use a local technique, scanning tunneling microscopy, to image the static charge modulations on Bi$_{2-z}$Pb$_z$Sr$_{2-y}$La$_y$CuO$_{6+x}$. By comparing the phase correlation length $\xi_{\mathrm{CDW}}$ with the orientation correlation length $\xi_{\mathrm{orient}}$, we show that the charge modulations are more consistent with an underlying unidirectional wave vector. Using cluster techniques, we show that these locally 1D charge modulations are actually a bulk effect resulting from 3D criticality throughout the entire superconducting doping range.

Learning multi-view data is an emerging problem in machine learning research, and nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a popular dimensionality-reduction method for integrating information from multiple views. These views often provide not only consensus but also complementary information. However, most multi-view NMF algorithms assign equal weight to each view or tune the weight via line search empirically, which can be infeasible without any prior knowledge of the views or computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a weighted multi-view NMF (WM-NMF) algorithm. In particular, we aim to address the critical technical gap, which is to learn both view-specific weight and observation-specific reconstruction weight to quantify each view's information content. The introduced weighting scheme can alleviate unnecessary views' adverse effects and enlarge the positive effects of the important views by assigning smaller and larger weights, respectively. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm in terms of achieving better clustering performance and dealing with the noisy data compared to the existing algorithms.

This paper considers the problem of resilient distributed optimization and stochastic machine learning in a server-based architecture. The system comprises a server and multiple agents, where each agent has a local cost function. The agents collaborate with the server to find a minimum of their aggregate cost functions. We consider the case when some of the agents may be asynchronous and/or Byzantine faulty. In this case, the classical algorithm of distributed gradient descent (DGD) is rendered ineffective. Our goal is to design techniques improving the efficacy of DGD with asynchrony and Byzantine failures. To do so, we start by proposing a way to model the agents' cost functions by the generic notion of $(f, \,r; \epsilon)$-redundancy where $f$ and $r$ are the parameters of Byzantine failures and asynchrony, respectively, and $\epsilon$ characterizes the closeness between agents' cost functions. This allows us to quantify the level of redundancy present amongst the agents' cost functions, for any given distributed optimization problem. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, the merits of our proposed redundancy model in improving the robustness of DGD against asynchronous and Byzantine agents, and their extensions to distributed stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD) for robust distributed machine learning with asynchronous and Byzantine agents., Comment: 66 pages, 1 figure, and 1 table. Supersede our previous report arXiv:2106.03998 in asynchronous distributed optimization by containing the most of its results

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) aims to enhance the model generalization by sharing representations between related tasks for better performance. Typical MTL methods are jointly trained with the complete multitude of ground-truths for all tasks simultaneously. However, one single dataset may not contain the annotations for each task of interest. To address this issue, we propose the Semi-supervised Multi-Task Learning (SemiMTL) method to leverage the available supervisory signals from different datasets, particularly for semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks. To this end, we design an adversarial learning scheme in our semi-supervised training by leveraging unlabeled data to optimize all the task branches simultaneously and accomplish all tasks across datasets with partial annotations. We further present a domain-aware discriminator structure with various alignment formulations to mitigate the domain discrepancy issue among datasets. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method to learn across different datasets on challenging street view and remote sensing benchmarks., Comment: Accepted at WACV 2022

In this contribution, we investigate the effectiveness of deep fusion of text and audio features for categorical and dimensional speech emotion recognition (SER). We propose a novel, multistage fusion method where the two information streams are integrated in several layers of a deep neural network (DNN), and contrast it with a single-stage one where the streams are merged in a single point. Both methods depend on extracting summary linguistic embeddings from a pre-trained BERT model, and conditioning one or more intermediate representations of a convolutional model operating on log-Mel spectrograms. Experiments on the MSP-Podcast and IEMOCAP datasets demonstrate that the two fusion methods clearly outperform a shallow (late) fusion baseline and their unimodal constituents, both in terms of quantitative performance and qualitative behaviour. Overall, our multistage fusion shows better quantitative performance, surpassing alternatives on most of our evaluations. This illustrates the potential of multistage fusion in better assimilating text and audio information.

Iterative Learning Control (ILC) is useful in spacecraft application for repeated high precision scanning maneuvers. Repetitive Control (RC) produces effective active vibration isolation based on frequency response. This paper considers ILC designed from frequency response, comparing two methods recently developed. One adapts for ILC the FIR filter design in RC that mimics the systems steady state frequency response inverse, creating a filter designed for all frequencies from zero to Nyquist. Adjustment of gains must near the beginning of the matrix need to be made because FIR gains are truncated there. The other approach uses a circulant matrix obtained from the Toeplitz matrix of Markov parameters. It is shown to give steady state frequency response for the discrete frequencies that can be seen in the number of time steps in the ILC tracking problem. The main aim is to compare their performance and ease of use. A second aim is to learn from successful ILC designs to enhances stability robustness of the two methods. Finally, the use of an ILC frequency cutoff is studied as an alternative method to eliminate instability of the control action in the converged zero tracking error solution of many ILC problems., Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures

Feedback control systems do not do what you ask. The concept of bandwidth is defined to tell what components of a command are reasonably well handled. Iterative Learning Control (ILC) seeks to converge to zero error following any given finite time desired trajectory as iterations progress. The approach can be used to achieve high precision tracking in spacecraft sensors performing repeated highly accurate sensor scanning. ILC asks for zero error for a finite time tracking maneuver, containing initial transients each iteration. The purpose of this paper is to create a method of designing ILC compensators based on steady state frequency response, and have the ILC converge to zero error in spite of transients and bandwidth. In this work the inverse of the circulant matrix of Markov parameters is used as a learning gain matrix. One can show that this matrix gives the steady state frequency response of the system at the finite number of frequencies observable in the finite data sequence of an iteration or run. Methods are used to adjust the steady state frequency response gains to address the transient part of the error signal. Numerical simulations compare the design approach to common time domain ILC design approaches, and one observes much faster convergence., Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures