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Domain specific question answering is an evolving field that requires specialized solutions to address unique challenges. In this paper, we show that a hybrid approach combining a fine-tuned dense retriever with keyword based sparse search methods significantly enhances performance. Our system leverages a linear combination of relevance signals, including cosine similarity from dense retrieval, BM25 scores, and URL host matching, each with tunable boost parameters. Experimental results indicate that this hybrid method outperforms our single-retriever system, achieving improved accuracy while maintaining robust contextual grounding. These findings suggest that integrating multiple retrieval methodologies with weighted scoring effectively addresses the complexities of domain specific question answering in enterprise settings.

This contribution introduces a neural-network-based approach to discover meaningful transition pathways underlying complex biomolecular transformations in coherence with the committor function. The proposed path-committor-consistent artificial neural network (PCCANN) iteratively refines the transition pathway by aligning it to the gradient of the committor. This method addresses the challenges of sampling in molecular dynamics simulations rare events in high-dimensional spaces, which is often limited computationally. Applied to various benchmark potentials and biological processes such as peptide isomerization and protein-model folding, PCCANN successfully reproduces established dynamics and rate constants, while revealing bifurcations and alternate pathways. By enabling precise estimation of transition states and free-energy barriers, this approach provides a robust framework for enhanced-sampling simulations of rare events in complex biomolecular systems., Comment: 47 pages (including supplementary material with 26 pages), 25 figures (6 figures in the main text and 19 figures in the supplementary material)

Transitioning from quantum computation on physical qubits to quantum computation on encoded, logical qubits can improve the error rate of operations, and will be essential for realizing valuable quantum computational advantages. Using a neutral atom quantum processor with 256 qubits, each an individual Ytterbium atom, we demonstrate the entanglement of 24 logical qubits using the distance-two [[4,2,2]] code, simultaneously detecting errors and correcting for lost qubits. We also implement the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm with up to 28 logical qubits encoded in the [[4,1,2]] code, showing better-than-physical error rates. We demonstrate fault-tolerant quantum computation in our approach, guided by the proposal of Gottesman (2016), by performing repeated loss correction for both structured and random circuits encoded in the [[4,2,2]] code. Finally, since distance-two codes can correct qubit loss, but not other errors, we show repeated loss and error correction using the distance-three [[9,1,3]] Bacon-Shor code. These results begin to clear a path for achieving scientific quantum advantage with a programmable neutral atom quantum processor., Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures

The emergence and growing popularity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significant potential to enhance various aspects of daily life, from improving communication to facilitating learning and problem-solving. Mobile phones, as essential daily companions, represent the most effective and accessible deployment platform for MLLMs, enabling seamless integration into everyday tasks. However, deploying MLLMs on mobile phones presents challenges due to limitations in memory size and computational capability, making it difficult to achieve smooth and real-time processing without extensive optimization. In this paper, we present BlueLM-V-3B, an algorithm and system co-design approach specifically tailored for the efficient deployment of MLLMs on mobile platforms. To be specific, we redesign the dynamic resolution scheme adopted by mainstream MLLMs and implement system optimization for hardware-aware deployment to optimize model inference on mobile phones. BlueLM-V-3B boasts the following key highlights: (1) Small Size: BlueLM-V-3B features a language model with 2.7B parameters and a vision encoder with 400M parameters. (2) Fast Speed: BlueLM-V-3B achieves a generation speed of 24.4 token/s on the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor with 4-bit LLM weight quantization. (3) Strong Performance: BlueLM-V-3B has attained the highest average score of 66.1 on the OpenCompass benchmark among models with $\leq$ 4B parameters and surpassed a series of models with much larger parameter sizes (e.g., MiniCPM-V-2.6, InternVL2-8B)., Comment: 21 pages

Distributed traces contain valuable information but are often massive in volume, posing a core challenge in tracing framework design: balancing the tradeoff between preserving essential trace information and reducing trace volume. To address this tradeoff, previous approaches typically used a '1 or 0' sampling strategy: retaining sampled traces while completely discarding unsampled ones. However, based on an empirical study on real-world production traces, we discover that the '1 or 0' strategy actually fails to effectively balance this tradeoff. To achieve a more balanced outcome, we shift the strategy from the '1 or 0' paradigm to the 'commonality + variability' paradigm. The core of 'commonality + variability' paradigm is to first parse traces into common patterns and variable parameters, then aggregate the patterns and filter the parameters. We propose a cost-efficient tracing framework, Mint, which implements the 'commonality + variability' paradigm on the agent side to enable all requests capturing. Our experiments show that Mint can capture all traces and retain more trace information while optimizing trace storage (reduced to an average of 2.7%) and network overhead (reduced to an average of 4.2%). Moreover, experiments also demonstrate that Mint is lightweight enough for production use., Comment: Accepted by ASPLOS'25

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) poses significant challenges in computer vision. Despite its wide application in robotics, autonomous driving, and smart manufacturing, there is limited literature addressing the specific challenges of running MOT on embedded devices. State-of-the-art MOT trackers designed for high-end GPUs often experience low processing rates (<11fps) when deployed on embedded devices. Existing MOT frameworks for embedded devices proposed strategies such as fusing the detector model with the feature embedding model to reduce inference latency or combining different trackers to improve tracking accuracy, but tend to compromise one for the other. This paper introduces HopTrack, a real-time multi-object tracking system tailored for embedded devices. Our system employs a novel discretized static and dynamic matching approach along with an innovative content-aware dynamic sampling technique to enhance tracking accuracy while meeting the real-time requirement. Compared with the best high-end GPU modified baseline Byte (Embed) and the best existing baseline on embedded devices MobileNet-JDE, HopTrack achieves a processing speed of up to 39.29 fps on NVIDIA AGX Xavier with a multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) of up to 63.12% on the MOT16 benchmark, outperforming both counterparts by 2.15% and 4.82%, respectively. Additionally, the accuracy improvement is coupled with the reduction in energy consumption (20.8%), power (5%), and memory usage (8%), which are crucial resources on embedded devices. HopTrack is also detector agnostic allowing the flexibility of plug-and-play.

Foundation models have recently gained significant attention because of their generalizability and adaptability across multiple tasks and data distributions. Although medical foundation models have emerged, solutions for cardiac imaging, especially echocardiography videos, are still unexplored. In this paper, we introduce EchoFM, a foundation model specifically designed to represent and analyze echocardiography videos. In EchoFM, we propose a self-supervised learning framework that captures both spatial and temporal variability patterns through a spatio-temporal consistent masking strategy and periodic-driven contrastive learning. This framework can effectively capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of echocardiography and learn the representative video features without any labels. We pre-train our model on an extensive dataset comprising over 290,000 echocardiography videos covering 26 scan views across different imaging modes, with up to 20 million frames of images. The pre-trained EchoFM can then be easily adapted and fine-tuned for a variety of downstream tasks, serving as a robust backbone model. Our evaluation was systemically designed for four downstream tasks after the echocardiography examination routine. Experiment results show that EchoFM surpasses state-of-the-art methods, including specialized echocardiography methods, self-supervised pre-training models, and general-purposed pre-trained foundation models, across all downstream tasks.

Foundation models have become a cornerstone in deep learning, with techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offering efficient fine-tuning of large models. Similarly, methods such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which leverage vectorized databases, have further improved model performance by grounding outputs in external information. While these approaches have demonstrated notable success, they often require extensive training or labeled data, which can limit their adaptability in resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges, we introduce Retrieval-based Parameter Ensemble (RPE), a new method that creates a vectorized database of LoRAs, enabling efficient retrieval and application of model adaptations to new tasks. RPE minimizes the need for extensive training and eliminates the requirement for labeled data, making it particularly effective for zero-shot learning. Additionally, RPE is well-suited for privacy-sensitive domains like healthcare, as it modifies model parameters without accessing raw data. When applied to tasks such as medical report generation and image segmentation, RPE not only proved effective but also surpassed supervised fine-tuning methods in certain cases, highlighting its potential to enhance both computational efficiency and privacy in deep learning applications.

With the rapid advancement of Internet technology, the threat of malware to computer systems and network security has intensified. Malware affects individual privacy and security and poses risks to critical infrastructures of enterprises and nations. The increasing quantity and complexity of malware, along with its concealment and diversity, challenge traditional detection techniques. Static detection methods struggle against variants and packed malware, while dynamic methods face high costs and risks that limit their application. Consequently, there is an urgent need for novel and efficient malware detection techniques to improve accuracy and robustness. This study first employs the minhash algorithm to convert binary files of malware into grayscale images, followed by the extraction of global and local texture features using GIST and LBP algorithms. Additionally, the study utilizes IDA Pro to decompile and extract opcode sequences, applying N-gram and tf-idf algorithms for feature vectorization. The fusion of these features enables the model to comprehensively capture the behavioral characteristics of malware. In terms of model construction, a CNN-BiLSTM fusion model is designed to simultaneously process image features and opcode sequences, enhancing classification performance. Experimental validation on multiple public datasets demonstrates that the proposed method significantly outperforms traditional detection techniques in terms of accuracy, recall, and F1 score, particularly in detecting variants and obfuscated malware with greater stability. The research presented in this paper offers new insights into the development of malware detection technologies, validating the effectiveness of feature and model fusion, and holds promising application prospects.

Large recommendation models (LRMs) are fundamental to the multi-billion dollar online advertising industry, processing massive datasets of hundreds of billions of examples before transitioning to continuous online training to adapt to rapidly changing user behavior. The massive scale of data directly impacts both computational costs and the speed at which new methods can be evaluated (R&D velocity). This paper presents actionable principles and high-level frameworks to guide practitioners in optimizing training data requirements. These strategies have been successfully deployed in Google's largest Ads CTR prediction models and are broadly applicable beyond LRMs. We outline the concept of data convergence, describe methods to accelerate this convergence, and finally, detail how to optimally balance training data volume with model size.

In this paper, we establish a noncommutative spherical maximal inequality associated with automorphisms on von Neumann algebras, extending Magyar-Stein-Wainger's discrete spherical maximal inequality to the noncommutative setting., Comment: 16 pages

We perform first-principles electron-phonon calculations to evaluate the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ for ternary superhard metals B$_2$C$_3$N and B$_4$C$_5$N$_3$. These materials are predicted to exhibit a wide distribution of electron-phonon coupling parameters on their multiple Fermi surface sheets, which necessitates solving the anisotropic Eliashberg equations for accurate determination of $T_c$. An ambient-pressure $T_c$ of $\sim 40$ K and $\sim 20$ K is obtained respectively for B$_2$C$_3$N and B$_4$C$_5$N$_3$ from the anisotropic gap equations. The relatively high $T_c$ of these compounds is due in part to their high Debye temperatures associated with superhardness. The materials under study are potentially synthesizable, as their formation energies are comparable to those of other recently synthesized superhard B-C-N compounds. Therefore, studying superhard metals could hold the promise of realizing new higher-$T_c$ superconductors at ambient pressure., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures

The study employed MD simulations to investigate the interactions between a <110> super-edge dislocation, consisting of the four Shockley partials, and interstitial dislocation loops (IDLs) in irradiated L12-Ni3Al. Accounting for symmetry breakage in the L12 lattice, the superlattice planar faults with four distinct fault vectors have been considered for different IDL configurations. The detailed dislocation reactions and structural evolution events were identified as the four partials interacted with various IDL configurations. The slipping characteristics of Shockley partials within the IDLs and the resultant shearing and looping mechanisms were also clarified, revealing distinct energetic transition states determined by the fault vectors after the Shockley partials sweeping the IDL. Furthermore, significant variations in critical resolved shear stress (CRSS) required for the super-edge dislocation to move past the IDL were observed, attributed to various sizes and faulted vectors of enclosed superlattice planar faults in the IDLs. The current study extends the existing dislocation-IDL interaction theory from pristine FCC to L12 lattice, advances the understanding of irradiation hardening effects in L12-Ni3Al, and suggests potential applicability to other L12 systems., Comment: 25pages,10 figures

The interaction between dislocations is fundamental to plastic deformation, work hardening, and defect accumulation. While extensive research has focused on the impact of solutes on individual dislocations, how solutes affect dislocation-dislocation reactions remains largely unexplored. Here, using atomistic simulations of iron as a model bcc system, we demonstrate that hydrogen solutes enable two <111>/2 screw dislocations to react and form a <001> edge dislocation junction, a process that is otherwise unfavorable in hydrogen-free environments. This phenomenon arises from the preferential segregation of hydrogen around the <001> dislocation, which reduces the energy of the reaction product. The resulting <001> dislocation demonstrates remarkable stability and transforms into a <001> vacancy-type dislocation loop under strain. These vacancy-type dislocation loops can accumulate during continuous deformation and dislocation reactions, serving as precursors for the initiation of structural damage, such as cracking and blistering. Our findings highlight the pivotal role of hydrogen in dislocation reactions, uncover a novel defect accumulation mechanism crucial for interpreting recent experimental observations, and represent a significant advance in understanding hydrogen-induced damage in bcc metals.

The proxy design pattern allows Ethereum smart contracts to be simultaneously immutable and upgradeable, in which an original contract is split into a proxy contract containing the data storage and a logic contract containing the implementation logic. This architecture is known to have security issues, namely function collisions and storage collisions between the proxy and logic contracts, and has been exploited in real-world incidents to steal users' millions of dollars worth of digital assets. In response to this concern, several previous works have sought to identify proxy contracts in Ethereum and detect their collisions. However, they all fell short due to their limited coverage, often restricting analysis to only contracts with available source code or past transactions. To bridge this gap, we present Proxion, an automated cross-contract analyzer that identifies all proxy smart contracts and their collisions in Ethereum. What sets Proxion apart is its ability to analyze hidden smart contracts that lack both source code and past transactions. Equipped with various techniques to enhance efficiency and accuracy, Proxion outperforms the state-of-the-art tools, notably identifying millions more proxy contracts and thousands of unreported collisions. We apply Proxion to analyze over 36 million alive contracts from 2015 to 2023, revealing that 54.2% of them are proxy contracts, and about 1.5 million contracts exhibit at least one collision issue.

This paper introduces CompressedMediQ, a novel hybrid quantum-classical machine learning pipeline specifically developed to address the computational challenges associated with high-dimensional multi-class neuroimaging data analysis. Standard neuroimaging datasets, such as large-scale MRI data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and Neuroimaging in Frontotemporal Dementia (NIFD), present significant hurdles due to their vast size and complexity. CompressedMediQ integrates classical high-performance computing (HPC) nodes for advanced MRI pre-processing and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-PCA-based feature extraction and reduction, addressing the limited-qubit availability for quantum data encoding in the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era. This is followed by Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) classification. By utilizing quantum kernel methods, the pipeline optimizes feature mapping and classification, enhancing data separability and outperforming traditional neuroimaging analysis techniques. Experimental results highlight the pipeline's superior accuracy in dementia staging, validating the practical use of quantum machine learning in clinical diagnostics. Despite the limitations of NISQ devices, this proof-of-concept demonstrates the transformative potential of quantum-enhanced learning, paving the way for scalable and precise diagnostic tools in healthcare and signal processing.

We propose Prim2Room, a novel framework for controllable room mesh generation leveraging 2D layout conditions and 3D primitive retrieval to facilitate precise 3D layout specification. Diverging from existing methods that lack control and precision, our approach allows for detailed customization of room-scale environments. To overcome the limitations of previous methods, we introduce an adaptive viewpoint selection algorithm that allows the system to generate the furniture texture and geometry from more favorable views than predefined camera trajectories. Additionally, we employ non-rigid depth registration to ensure alignment between generated objects and their corresponding primitive while allowing for shape variations to maintain diversity. Our method not only enhances the accuracy and aesthetic appeal of generated 3D scenes but also provides a user-friendly platform for detailed room design.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are designed to enhance network performance and protect against web attack traffic for their hosting websites. And the HTTP compression request mechanism primarily aims to reduce unnecessary network transfers. However, we find that the specification failed to consider the security risks introduced when CDNs meet compression requests. In this paper, we present a novel HTTP amplification attack, CDN Compression Format Convert (CDN-Convet) Attacks. It allows attackers to massively exhaust not only the outgoing bandwidth of the origin servers deployed behind CDNs but also the bandwidth of CDN surrogate nodes. We examined the CDN-Convet attacks on 11 popular CDNs to evaluate the feasibility and real-world impacts. Our experimental results show that all these CDNs are affected by the CDN-Convet attacks. We have also disclosed our findings to affected CDN providers and have received constructive feedback., Comment: 10 pages

In this article, we introduce the current status of the new NanoARPES endstation at BL07U of Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), which facilitates the study of the electronic band structure of material systems with limited geometrical sizes., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures

Diffusion models are emerging models that generate images by iteratively denoising random Gaussian noise using deep neural networks. These models typically exhibit high computational and memory demands, necessitating effective post-training quantization for high-performance inference. Recent works propose low-bitwidth (e.g., 8-bit or 4-bit) quantization for diffusion models, however 4-bit integer quantization typically results in low-quality images. We observe that on several widely used hardware platforms, there is little or no difference in compute capability between floating-point and integer arithmetic operations of the same bitwidth (e.g., 8-bit or 4-bit). Therefore, we propose an effective floating-point quantization method for diffusion models that provides better image quality compared to integer quantization methods. We employ a floating-point quantization method that was effective for other processing tasks, specifically computer vision and natural language tasks, and tailor it for diffusion models by integrating weight rounding learning during the mapping of the full-precision values to the quantized values in the quantization process. We comprehensively study integer and floating-point quantization methods in state-of-the-art diffusion models. Our floating-point quantization method not only generates higher-quality images than that of integer quantization methods, but also shows no noticeable degradation compared to full-precision models (32-bit floating-point), when both weights and activations are quantized to 8-bit floating-point values, while has minimal degradation with 4-bit weights and 8-bit activations.

We perform machine learning (ML) simulations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations to search for materials with low lattice thermal conductivity, $\kappa_L$. Several cadmium (Cd) compounds containing elements from the alkali-metal and carbon groups including A$_2$CdX (A = Li, Na, and K; X = Pb, Sn, and Ge) are predicted by our ML models to exhibit very low $\kappa_L$ values ($< 1.0 $ W/mK), rendering these materials suitable for potential thermal management and insulation applications. Further DFT calculations of electronic and transport properties indicate that the figure of merit, $ZT$, for thermoelectric performance can exceed 1.0 in compounds such as K$_2$CdPb, K$_2$CdSn, and K$_2$CdGe, which are thereby also promising thermoelectric materials., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

In this paper, we establish a noncommutative maximal inequality for ergodic averages with respect to the set $\{k^t|k=1,2,3,...\}$ acting on noncommutative $L_p$ spaces for $p>\frac{\sqrt{5}+1}{2}$., Comment: 18 pages

The total cross sections of the process $e^+ e^-\to \Lambda_c^+ \bar{\Lambda}_c^-$ close to the threshold are calculated within the vector meson dominance model. It is found that the theoretical results can describe the current experimental measurements. In particular, the results for the angular distribution parameters about the differential cross section are consistent with the experiments from BESIII Collaboration. In addition, the relative phase $\Delta \Phi$ of the electromagnetic form factors was given, and the spin polarization of $\Lambda_c^+$ is predicted at center-mass energy $4.7 \ \rm GeV$. It is hopeful to provide a new perspective on the characteristics of the charmed baryon $\Lambda_c^+$., Comment: 6 pages,6 figures

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved notable progress in medical image segmentation. To achieve effective SSL, a model needs to be able to efficiently learn from limited labeled data and effectively exploiting knowledge from abundant unlabeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved sample efficiency. To harness the power of foundation models for application in SSL, we propose a cross prompting consistency method with segment anything model (CPC-SAM) for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Our method employs SAM's unique prompt design and innovates a cross-prompting strategy within a dual-branch framework to automatically generate prompts and supervisions across two decoder branches, enabling effectively learning from both scarce labeled and valuable unlabeled data. We further design a novel prompt consistency regularization, to reduce the prompt position sensitivity and to enhance the output invariance under different prompts. We validate our method on two medical image segmentation tasks. The extensive experiments with different labeled-data ratios and modalities demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art SSL methods, with more than 9% Dice improvement on the breast cancer segmentation task., Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2024

One-shot detection of anatomical landmarks is gaining significant attention for its efficiency in using minimal labeled data to produce promising results. However, the success of current methods heavily relies on the employment of extensive unlabeled data to pre-train an effective feature extractor, which limits their applicability in scenarios where a substantial amount of unlabeled data is unavailable. In this paper, we propose the first foundation model-enabled one-shot landmark detection (FM-OSD) framework for accurate landmark detection in medical images by utilizing solely a single template image without any additional unlabeled data. Specifically, we use the frozen image encoder of visual foundation models as the feature extractor, and introduce dual-branch global and local feature decoders to increase the resolution of extracted features in a coarse to fine manner. The introduced feature decoders are efficiently trained with a distance-aware similarity learning loss to incorporate domain knowledge from the single template image. Moreover, a novel bidirectional matching strategy is developed to improve both robustness and accuracy of landmark detection in the case of scattered similarity map obtained by foundation models. We validate our method on two public anatomical landmark detection datasets. By using solely a single template image, our method demonstrates significant superiority over strong state-of-the-art one-shot landmark detection methods., Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2024

The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect measures the misalignment between a planet's orbital plane and its host star's rotation plane. Around 10$\%$ of planets exhibit misalignments in the approximate range $80 - 125^\circ$, with their origin remaining a mystery. On the other hand, large misalignments may be common in eccentric circumbinary systems due to misaligned discs undergoing polar alignment. If the binary subsequently merges, a polar circumbinary disc -- along with any planets that form within it -- may remain inclined near 90$^{\circ}$ to the merged star's rotation. To test this hypothesis, we present $N$-body simulations of the evolution of a polar circumbinary debris disc comprised of test particles around an eccentric binary during a binary merger that is induced by tidal dissipation. After the merger, the disc particles remain on near-polar orbits. Interaction of the binary with the polar-aligned gas disc may be required to bring the binary to the small separations that trigger the merger by tides. Our findings imply that planets forming in discs that are polar-aligned to the orbit of a high-eccentricity binary may, following the merger of the binary, provide a possible origin for the population of near-polar planets around single stars., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

Previous foundation models for retinal images were pre-trained with limited disease categories and knowledge base. Here we introduce RetiZero, a vision-language foundation model that leverages knowledge from over 400 fundus diseases. To RetiZero's pre-training, we compiled 341,896 fundus images paired with text descriptions, sourced from public datasets, ophthalmic literature, and online resources, encompassing a diverse range of diseases across multiple ethnicities and countries. RetiZero exhibits superior performance in several downstream tasks, including zero-shot disease recognition, image-to-image retrieval, and internal- and cross-domain disease identification. In zero-shot scenarios, RetiZero achieves Top5 accuracy scores of 0.8430 for 15 fundus diseases and 0.7561 for 52 fundus diseases. For image retrieval, it achieves Top5 scores of 0.9500 and 0.8860 for the same disease sets, respectively. Clinical evaluations show that RetiZero's Top3 zero-shot performance surpasses the average of 19 ophthalmologists from Singapore, China and the United States. Furthermore, RetiZero significantly enhances clinicians' accuracy in diagnosing fundus disease. These findings underscore the value of integrating the RetiZero foundation model into clinical settings, where a variety of fundus diseases are encountered.

Topologically trivial insulators can be classified into atomic insulators (AIs) and obstructed atomic insulators (OAIs) depending on whether the Wannier charge centers are localized or not at spatial positions occupied by atoms. An OAI can possess unusual properties such as surface states along certain crystalline surfaces, which advantageously appear in materials with much larger bulk energy gap than topological insulators, making them more attractive for potential applications. In this work, we show that a well-known crystal, silicon (Si) is a model OAI, which naturally explains some of Si's unusual properties such as its famous (111) surface states. On this surface, using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), we reveal sharp quasi-1D massive Dirac line dispersions; we also observe, using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS), topological solitons at the interface of the two atomic chains. Remarkably, we show that the different chain domains can be reversibly switched at the nanometer scale, suggesting the application potential in ultra-high density storage devices.

Large-scale diffusion models have achieved remarkable performance in generative tasks. Beyond their initial training applications, these models have proven their ability to function as versatile plug-and-play priors. For instance, 2D diffusion models can serve as loss functions to optimize 3D implicit models. Rectified flow, a novel class of generative models, enforces a linear progression from the source to the target distribution and has demonstrated superior performance across various domains. Compared to diffusion-based methods, rectified flow approaches surpass in terms of generation quality and efficiency, requiring fewer inference steps. In this work, we present theoretical and experimental evidence demonstrating that rectified flow based methods offer similar functionalities to diffusion models - they can also serve as effective priors. Besides the generative capabilities of diffusion priors, motivated by the unique time-symmetry properties of rectified flow models, a variant of our method can additionally perform image inversion. Experimentally, our rectified flow-based priors outperform their diffusion counterparts - the SDS and VSD losses - in text-to-3D generation. Our method also displays competitive performance in image inversion and editing., Comment: Extended with Stochastic Interpolants. Code: https://github.com/yangxiaofeng/rectified_flow_prior

Addressing missing modalities presents a critical challenge in multimodal learning. Current approaches focus on developing models that can handle modality-incomplete inputs during inference, assuming that the full set of modalities are available for all the data during training. This reliance on full-modality data for training limits the use of abundant modality-incomplete samples that are often encountered in practical settings. In this paper, we propose a robust universal model with modality reconstruction and model personalization, which can effectively tackle the missing modality at both training and testing stages. Our method leverages a multimodal masked autoencoder to reconstruct the missing modality and masked patches simultaneously, incorporating an innovative distribution approximation mechanism to fully utilize both modality-complete and modality-incomplete data. The reconstructed modalities then contributes to our designed data-model co-distillation scheme to guide the model learning in the presence of missing modalities. Moreover, we propose a CLIP-driven hyper-network to personalize partial model parameters, enabling the model to adapt to each distinct missing modality scenario. Our method has been extensively validated on two brain tumor segmentation benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our method, which consistently exceeds previous state-of-the-art approaches under the all-stage missing modality settings with different missing ratios. Code will be available.

Owing to their great expressivity and versatility, neural networks have gained attention for simulating large two-dimensional quantum many-body systems. However, their expressivity comes with the cost of a challenging optimization due to the in general rugged and complicated loss landscape. Here, we present a hybrid optimization scheme for neural quantum states (NQS) that involves a data-driven pretraining with numerical or experimental data and a second, Hamiltonian-driven optimization stage. By using both projective measurements from the computational basis as well as expectation values from other measurement configurations such as spin-spin correlations, our pretraining gives access to the sign structure of the state, yielding improved and faster convergence that is robust w.r.t. experimental imperfections and limited datasets. We apply the hybrid scheme to the ground state search for the 2D transverse field Ising model and the 2D dipolar XY model on $6\times 6$ and $10\times 10$ square lattices with a patched transformer wave function, using numerical and experimental data from a programmable Rydberg quantum simulator [Chen et al., Nature 616 (2023)], with snapshots of the quantum system obtained from the different measurement configurations, and show that the information from the second basis highly improves the performance. Our work paves the way for a reliable and efficient optimization of neural quantum states., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures and supplementary material

In two-dimensional van der Waals magnetic materials, the interplay between magnetism and electron correlation can give rise to new ground states and lead to novel transport and optical properties. A fundamental question in these materials is how the electron correlation manifests and interacts with the magnetic orders. In this study, we demonstrate that the recently discovered 2D antiferromagnetic material, CrSBr, is a Mott insulator, through the combined use of resonant and temperature-dependent angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy techiniques, supplemented by dynamical mean-field theory analysis. Intriguingly, we found that as the system transitions from the antiferromagnetic to the paramagnetic phases, its Mott bands undergo a reconfiguration, and a coherent-incoherent crossover, driven by the dissolution of the magnetic order. Our findings reveal a distinctive evolution of band structure associated with magnetic phase transitions, shedding light on the investigation of intricate interplay between correlation and magnetic orders in strongly correlated van der Waals magnetic materials.

Over the years, great efforts have been devoted in introducing a sizable and tunable band gap in graphene for its potential application in next-generation electronic devices. The primary challenge in modulating this gap has been the absence of a direct method for observing changes of the band gap in momentum space. In this study, we employ advanced spatial- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy technique to directly visualize the gap formation in bilayer graphene, modulated by both displacement fields and moir\'e potentials. The application of displacement field via in-situ electrostatic gating introduces a sizable and tunable electronic bandgap, proportional to the field strength up to 100 meV. Meanwhile, the moir\'e potential, induced by aligning the underlying hexagonal boron nitride substrate, extends the bandgap by ~ 20 meV. Theoretical calculations, effectively capture the experimental observations. Our investigation provides a quantitative understanding of how these two mechanisms collaboratively modulate the band gap in bilayer graphene, offering valuable guidance for the design of graphene-based electronic devices., Comment: 16 pages,4 figures

Landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is crucial for identifying high-risk areas and informing prevention strategies. This study investigates the interpretability of statistical, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) models in predicting landslide susceptibility. This is achieved by incorporating various relevant interpretation methods and two types of input factors: a comprehensive set of 19 contributing factors that are statistically relevant to landslides, as well as a dedicated set of 9 triggering factors directly associated with triggering landslides. Given that model performance is a crucial metric in LSM, our investigations into interpretability naturally involve assessing and comparing LSM accuracy across different models considered. In our investigation, the convolutional neural network model achieved the highest accuracy (0.8447 with 19 factors; 0.8048 with 9 factors), while Extreme Gradient Boosting and Support Vector Machine also demonstrated strong predictive capabilities, outperforming conventional statistical models. These findings indicate that DL and sophisticated ML algorithms can effectively capture the complex relationships between input factors and landslide occurrence. However, the interpretability of predictions varied among different models, particularly when using the broader set of 19 contributing factors. Explanation methods like SHAP, LIME, and DeepLIFT also led to variations in interpretation results. Using a comprehensive set of 19 contributing factors improved prediction accuracy but introduced complexities and inconsistency in model interpretations. Focusing on a dedicated set of 9 triggering factors sacrificed some predictive power but enhanced interpretability, as evidenced by more consistent key factors identified across various models and alignment with the findings of field investigation reports....

Deep learning methods, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT), are frequently employed to perform semantic segmentation of high-resolution remotely sensed images. However, CNNs are constrained by their restricted receptive fields, while ViTs face challenges due to their quadratic complexity. Recently, the Mamba model, featuring linear complexity and a global receptive field, has gained extensive attention for vision tasks. In such tasks, images need to be serialized to form sequences compatible with the Mamba model. Numerous research efforts have explored scanning strategies to serialize images, aiming to enhance the Mamba model's understanding of images. However, the effectiveness of these scanning strategies remains uncertain. In this research, we conduct a comprehensive experimental investigation on the impact of mainstream scanning directions and their combinations on semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images. Through extensive experiments on the LoveDA, ISPRS Potsdam, and ISPRS Vaihingen datasets, we demonstrate that no single scanning strategy outperforms others, regardless of their complexity or the number of scanning directions involved. A simple, single scanning direction is deemed sufficient for semantic segmentation of high-resolution remotely sensed images. Relevant directions for future research are also recommended.

Bridging the significant gap between large language model's English and non-English performance presents a great challenge. While some previous studies attempt to mitigate this gap with translated training data, the recently proposed question alignment framework leverages the model's English expertise to improve multilingual performance with minimum usage of expensive, error-prone translation. In this paper, we explore how broadly this method can be applied by examining its effects in reasoning with and without chain-of-thought, as well as with program-of-thought. We also explore applying this framework to extremely large language models in an efficient manner, such as through proxy-tuning. Experiment results on multilingual reasoning benchmarks mGSM, mSVAMP, xCSQA and xNLI demonstrate that we can extend question alignment framework to boost multilingual performance across diverse reasoning scenarios, model families, and sizes. For instance, when applied to the LLaMA2 models, it brings an average accuracy improvements of 12.2% on mGSM even with the 70B model. To understand the mechanism of its success, we analyze representation space, generated response and data scales, and reveal how question translation training strengthens language alignment within LLMs and shapes their working patterns.

Dynamic graph random walk (DGRW) emerges as a practical tool for capturing structural relations within a graph. Effectively executing DGRW on GPU presents certain challenges. First, existing sampling methods demand a pre-processing buffer, causing substantial space complexity. Moreover, the power-law distribution of graph vertex degrees introduces workload imbalance issues, rendering DGRW embarrassed to parallelize. In this paper, we propose FlowWalker, a GPU-based dynamic graph random walk framework. FlowWalker implements an efficient parallel sampling method to fully exploit the GPU parallelism and reduce space complexity. Moreover, it employs a sampler-centric paradigm alongside a dynamic scheduling strategy to handle the huge amounts of walking queries. FlowWalker stands as a memory-efficient framework that requires no auxiliary data structures in GPU global memory. We examine the performance of FlowWalker extensively on ten datasets, and experiment results show that FlowWalker achieves up to 752.2x, 72.1x, and 16.4x speedup compared with existing CPU, GPU, and FPGA random walk frameworks, respectively. Case study shows that FlowWalker diminishes random walk time from 35% to 3% in a pipeline of ByteDance friend recommendation GNN training.

High-resolution remotely sensed images pose a challenge for commonly used semantic segmentation methods such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT). CNN-based methods struggle with handling such high-resolution images due to their limited receptive field, while ViT faces challenges in handling long sequences. Inspired by Mamba, which adopts a State Space Model (SSM) to efficiently capture global semantic information, we propose a semantic segmentation framework for high-resolution remotely sensed images, named Samba. Samba utilizes an encoder-decoder architecture, with Samba blocks serving as the encoder for efficient multi-level semantic information extraction, and UperNet functioning as the decoder. We evaluate Samba on the LoveDA, ISPRS Vaihingen, and ISPRS Potsdam datasets, comparing its performance against top-performing CNN and ViT methods. The results reveal that Samba achieved unparalleled performance on commonly used remote sensing datasets for semantic segmentation. Our proposed Samba demonstrates for the first time the effectiveness of SSM in semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images, setting a new benchmark in performance for Mamba-based techniques in this specific application. The source code and baseline implementations are available at https://github.com/zhuqinfeng1999/Samba.

This study explores the feasibility of adapting CSI-guided imaging across varied environments. Focusing on continuous model learning through continuous updates, we investigate CSI-Imager's adaptability in dynamically changing settings, specifically transitioning from an office to an industrial environment. Unlike traditional approaches that may require retraining for new environments, our experimental study aims to validate the potential of CSI-guided imaging to maintain accurate imaging performance through Continuous Learning (CL). By conducting experiments across different scenarios and settings, this work contributes to understanding the limitations and capabilities of existing CSI-guided imaging systems in adapting to new environmental contexts.