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In this article, we investigate the potential of the angular distribution of the $B \rightarrow D^* \ell {\nu}_{\ell}$ process to search for new physics signals. The Belle collaboration has analysed it to constraint $V_{cb}$ and the $B\to D^*$ form factors, under the assumption of the Standard Model. With the newly released lattice QCD data, we can perform a simultaneous fit of the form factors, $V_{cb}$ as well as new physics parameters. We use the Belle data and the lattice data to constrain right-handed new physics. In addition, we also generate unbinned pseudo-dataset and perform a sensitivity study on more general new physics models, using the lattice data., Comment: 37 pages, 14 figures, 10 tables; added references and corrected typos

Although vision models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) show impressive generalization performance, their zero-shot robustness is still limited under Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios without fine-tuning. Instead of undesirably providing human supervision as commonly done, it is possible to take advantage of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that hold powerful visual understanding abilities. However, MLLMs are shown to struggle with vision problems due to the incompatibility of tasks, thus hindering their utilization. In this paper, we propose to effectively leverage MLLMs to conduct Machine Vision Therapy which aims to rectify the noisy predictions from vision models. By fine-tuning with the denoised labels, the learning model performance can be boosted in an unsupervised manner. To solve the incompatibility issue, we propose a novel Denoising In-Context Learning (DICL) strategy to align vision tasks with MLLMs. Concretely, by estimating a transition matrix that captures the probability of one class being confused with another, an instruction containing a correct exemplar and an erroneous one from the most probable noisy class can be constructed. Such an instruction can help any MLLMs with ICL ability to detect and rectify incorrect predictions of vision models. Through extensive experiments on ImageNet, WILDS, DomainBed, and other OOD datasets, we carefully validate the quantitative and qualitative effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/tmllab/Machine_Vision_Therapy., Comment: ICML 2024

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has been an effective way to leverage abundant unlabeled data with extremely scarce labeled data. However, most SSL methods are commonly based on instance-wise consistency between different data transformations. Therefore, the label guidance on labeled data is hard to be propagated to unlabeled data. Consequently, the learning process on labeled data is much faster than on unlabeled data which is likely to fall into a local minima that does not favor unlabeled data, leading to sub-optimal generalization performance. In this paper, we propose FlatMatch which minimizes a cross-sharpness measure to ensure consistent learning performance between the two datasets. Specifically, we increase the empirical risk on labeled data to obtain a worst-case model which is a failure case that needs to be enhanced. Then, by leveraging the richness of unlabeled data, we penalize the prediction difference (i.e., cross-sharpness) between the worst-case model and the original model so that the learning direction is beneficial to generalization on unlabeled data. Therefore, we can calibrate the learning process without being limited to insufficient label information. As a result, the mismatched learning performance can be mitigated, further enabling the effective exploitation of unlabeled data and improving SSL performance. Through comprehensive validation, we show FlatMatch achieves state-of-the-art results in many SSL settings., Comment: NeurIPS 2023

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Generalization aims to learn robust models that generalize well to various environments without fitting to distribution-specific features. Recent studies based on Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) address this problem by minimizing the learning target to find some of the parameters that are critical to the task. However, in OOD problems, such solutions are suboptimal as the learning task contains severe distribution noises, which can mislead the optimization process. Therefore, apart from finding the task-related parameters (i.e., invariant parameters), we propose Exploring Variant parameters for Invariant Learning (EVIL) which also leverages the distribution knowledge to find the parameters that are sensitive to distribution shift (i.e., variant parameters). Once the variant parameters are left out of invariant learning, a robust subnetwork that is resistant to distribution shift can be found. Additionally, the parameters that are relatively stable across distributions can be considered invariant ones to improve invariant learning. By fully exploring both variant and invariant parameters, our EVIL can effectively identify a robust subnetwork to improve OOD generalization. In extensive experiments on integrated testbed: DomainBed, EVIL can effectively and efficiently enhance many popular methods, such as ERM, IRM, SAM, etc., Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures

Robust generalization aims to tackle the most challenging data distributions which are rare in the training set and contain severe noises, i.e., photon-limited corruptions. Common solutions such as distributionally robust optimization (DRO) focus on the worst-case empirical risk to ensure low training error on the uncommon noisy distributions. However, due to the over-parameterized model being optimized on scarce worst-case data, DRO fails to produce a smooth loss landscape, thus struggling on generalizing well to the test set. Therefore, instead of focusing on the worst-case risk minimization, we propose SharpDRO by penalizing the sharpness of the worst-case distribution, which measures the loss changes around the neighbor of learning parameters. Through worst-case sharpness minimization, the proposed method successfully produces a flat loss curve on the corrupted distributions, thus achieving robust generalization. Moreover, by considering whether the distribution annotation is available, we apply SharpDRO to two problem settings and design a worst-case selection process for robust generalization. Theoretically, we show that SharpDRO has a great convergence guarantee. Experimentally, we simulate photon-limited corruptions using CIFAR10/100 and ImageNet30 datasets and show that SharpDRO exhibits a strong generalization ability against severe corruptions and exceeds well-known baseline methods with large performance gains., Comment: CVPR 2023

Conventional theoretical studies on the ground-state laser cooling of a trapped ion have mostly focused on the weak sideband coupling (WSC) regime, where the cooling rate is inverse proportional to the linewidth of the excited state. In a recent work~[New J. Phys. 23, 023018 (2021)], we proposed a theoretical framework to study the ground state cooling of a trapped ion in the strong sideband coupling (SSC) regime, under the assumption of a vanishing carrier transition. Here we extend this analysis to more general situations with nonvanishing carrier transitions, where we show that by properly tuning the coupling lasers a cooling rate proportional to the linewidth can be achieved. Our theoretical predictions closely agree with the corresponding exact solutions in the SSC regime, which provide an important theoretical guidance for sideband cooling experiments., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures

Machine learning models are vulnerable to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) examples, and such a problem has drawn much attention. However, current methods lack a full understanding of different types of OOD data: there are benign OOD data that can be properly adapted to enhance the learning performance, while other malign OOD data would severely degenerate the classification result. To Harness OOD data, this paper proposes a HOOD method that can leverage the content and style from each image instance to identify benign and malign OOD data. Particularly, we design a variational inference framework to causally disentangle content and style features by constructing a structural causal model. Subsequently, we augment the content and style through an intervention process to produce malign and benign OOD data, respectively. The benign OOD data contain novel styles but hold our interested contents, and they can be leveraged to help train a style-invariant model. In contrast, the malign OOD data inherit unknown contents but carry familiar styles, by detecting them can improve model robustness against deceiving anomalies. Thanks to the proposed novel disentanglement and data augmentation techniques, HOOD can effectively deal with OOD examples in unknown and open environments, whose effectiveness is empirically validated in three typical OOD applications including OOD detection, open-set semi-supervised learning, and open-set domain adaptation., Comment: ICLR 2023

A sensitivity study of the unbinned angular analysis of the $B\to D^*(D\pi)\ell \nu_\ell$ decay is presented. In the analysis, it is shown that the Wilson coefficient of the right-handed vector current, $C_{V_R}$, can be measured to precision of 2-4$\%$ using either the full set of normalised angular observables or the forward-backward asymmetry $A_{FB}$ of the charged lepton in 10 $w$ bins. Such angular measurements are independent of the $V_{cb}$ puzzle., Comment: 5 pages and 1 figure; Contribution to the proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies, hosted by the University of Manchester, 10-14 January 2022

We perform a global analysis of the $b\to c\tau\nu$ data using the recent lattice results on the $B_c\to J/\psi$ vector and axial-vector form factors. To explore the effects from the tensor operator of new physics beyond the standard model, we determine the tensor form factors by using the non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD) relations between tensor and (axial-)vector form factors. Based on the lattice+NRQCD form factors, we fit the Wilson coefficients and the new physics couplings in $R_2$, $S_1$ and $U_1$ leptoquark models by including the recently measured $R(\Lambda_c)$ and imposing the relaxed constraint $\mathcal B(B_c\to J/\psi)<30\%$ in light of the recent studies on LEP1 data and $B_c$ lifetime. We give predictions for the experimental observables including $R(J/\psi)$, $P_\tau(J/\psi)$, $F_L(J/\psi)$ and $\mathcal A_{FB}(J/\psi)$ as well as their $q^2$ distribution in new physics scenarios/models. Our results suggest that the longitudinal $\tau$ polarization fraction $P_\tau(J/\psi)$ and the forward-backward asymmetry $\mathcal A_{FB}(J/\psi)$ are useful for testing the $R_2$ leptoquark model., Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures and 6 tables

We introduce a new volatility model for option pricing that combines Markov switching with the Realized GARCH framework. This leads to a novel pricing kernel with a state-dependent variance risk premium and a pricing formula for European options, which is derived with an analytical approximation method. We apply the Markov switching Realized GARCH model to S&P 500 index options from 1990 to 2019 and find that investors' aversion to volatility-specific risk is time-varying. The proposed framework outperforms competing models and reduces (in-sample and out-of-sample) option pricing errors by 15% or more.

We show that the Realized GARCH model yields close-form expression for both the Volatility Index (VIX) and the volatility risk premium (VRP). The Realized GARCH model is driven by two shocks, a return shock and a volatility shock, and these are natural state variables in the stochastic discount factor (SDF). The volatility shock endows the exponentially affine SDF with a compensation for volatility risk. This leads to dissimilar dynamic properties under the physical and risk-neutral measures that can explain time-variation in the VRP. In an empirical application with the S&P 500 returns, the VIX, and the VRP, we find that the Realized GARCH model significantly outperforms conventional GARCH models.