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Accurate reconstruction of plant models for phenotyping analysis is critical for optimising sustainable agricultural practices in precision agriculture. Traditional laboratory-based phenotyping, while valuable, falls short of understanding how plants grow under uncontrolled conditions. Robotic technologies offer a promising avenue for large-scale, direct phenotyping in real-world environments. This study explores the deployment of emerging robotics and digital technology in plant phenotyping to improve performance and efficiency. Three critical functional modules: environmental understanding, robotic motion planning, and in-situ phenotyping, are introduced to automate the entire process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in agricultural environments. The pheno-robot system autonomously collects high-quality data by navigating around plants. In addition, the in-situ modelling model reconstructs high-quality plant models from the data collected by the robot. The developed robotic system shows high efficiency and robustness, demonstrating its potential to advance plant science in real-world agricultural environments.

Zinc electrolysis is one of the key processes in zinc smelting, and maintaining stable operation of zinc electrolysis is an important factor in ensuring production efficiency and product quality. However, poor contact between the zinc electrolysis cathode and the anode is a common problem that leads to reduced production efficiency and damage to the electrolysis cell. Therefore, online monitoring of the contact status of the plates is crucial for ensuring production quality and efficiency. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end network, the Frequency-masked Multimodal Autoencoder (FM-AE). This method takes the cell voltage signal and infrared image information as input, and through automatic encoding, fuses the two features together and predicts the poor contact status of the plates through a cascaded detector. Experimental results show that the proposed method maintains high accuracy (86.2%) while having good robustness and generalization ability, effectively detecting poor contact status of the zinc electrolysis cell, providing strong support for production practice., Comment: 2023 The 34th Chinese Process Control Conference (CPCC 2023)

A recent GPU implementation of the Restarted Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient Method for Linear Programming was proposed in Lu and Yang (2023). Its computational results demonstrate the significant computational advantages of the GPU-based first-order algorithm on certain large-scale problems. The average performance also achieves a level close to commercial solvers for the first time in history. However, due to limitations in experimental hardware and the disadvantage of implementing the algorithm in Julia compared to C language, neither the commercial solver nor cuPDLP reached their maximum efficiency. Therefore, in this report, we have re-implemented and optimized cuPDLP in C language. Utilizing state-of-the-art CPU and GPU hardware, we extensively compare cuPDLP with the best commercial solvers. The experiments further highlight its substantial computational advantages and potential for solving large-scale linear programming problems. We also discuss the profound impact this breakthrough may have on mathematical programming research and the entire operations research community., Comment: fix typos, update numerical results

We propose and demonstrate a general method to calibrate the frequency-dependent response of self-compensating noble-gas-alkali-metal comagnetometers to arbitrary spin perturbations. This includes magnetic and nonmagnetic perturbations like rotations and exotic spin interactions. The method is based on a fit of the magnetic field response to an analytical model. The frequency-dependent response of the comagnetometer to arbitrary spin perturbations can be inferred using the fit parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by comparing the inferred rotation response to an experimental measurement of the rotation response. Our results show that experiments relying on zero-frequency calibration of the comagnetometer response can over- or under-estimate the comagnetometer sensitivity by orders of magnitude over a wide frequency range. Moreover, this discrepancy accumulates over time as operational parameters tend to drift during comagnetometer operation. The demonstrated calibration protocol enables accurate prediction and control of comagnetometer sensitivity to, for example, ultralight bosonic dark-matter fields coupling to electron or nuclear spins as well as accurate monitoring and control of the relevant system parameters.

In this paper, we consider the logarithmic elliptic equations with critical exponent \begin{equation} \begin{cases} -\Delta u=\lambda u+ |u|^{2^*-2}u+\theta u\log u^2, \\ u \in H_0^1(\Omega), \quad \Omega \subset \R^N. \end{cases} \end{equation} Here, the parameters $N\geq 6$, $\lambda\in \R$, $\theta>0$ and $ 2^*=\frac{2N}{N-2} $ is the Sobolev critical exponent. We prove the existence of sign-changing solution with exactly two nodal domain for an arbitrary smooth bounded domain $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^{N}$. When $\Omega=B_R(0)$ is a ball, we also construct infinitely many radial sign-changing solutions with alternating signs and prescribed nodal characteristic.

Linear programming has been practically solved mainly by simplex and interior point methods. Compared with the weakly polynomial complexity obtained by the interior point methods, the existence of strongly polynomial bounds for the length of the pivot path generated by the simplex methods remains a mystery. In this paper, we propose two novel pivot experts that leverage both global and local information of the linear programming instances for the primal simplex method and show their excellent performance numerically. The experts can be regarded as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of classical pivot rules, although they are hard to directly implement. To tackle this challenge, we employ a graph convolutional neural network model, trained via imitation learning, to mimic the behavior of the pivot expert. Our pivot rule, learned empirically, displays a significant advantage over conventional methods in various linear programming problems, as demonstrated through a series of rigorous experiments.

In this paper, we study the existence and nonexistence of positive solutions for a coupled elliptic system with critical exponent and logarithmic terms. The presence of the the logarithmic terms brings major challenges and makes it difficult to use the previous results established in the work of Chen and Zou without new ideas and innovative techniques., Comment: The authors welcome any comments

The development of SQUID current sensors with a thermally actuated input current limiter (TCL) integrated into the input circuit of the sensor is presented. The TCL is based on an unshunted Josephson Junction (JJ) series array, around which meanders a galvanically isolated, but tightly, thermally coupled, resistive heater element. By applying a current to the heater, the JJ critical currents can be reduced or completely suppressed, while the other on-chip SQUID circuit elements remain unaffected. The functional parameters of the TCL are determined by direct transport measurements and by static and dynamic flux coupling tests via the input circuit. In liquid Helium, a heater power, which reliably suppresses the critical current of the JJ array to zero, of $\sim$1.5 mW was needed, with the TCL normal state resistance being at 500 $\Omega$. In this configuration, typical TCL switching times below 10 $\mu$s were observed in the direct transport measurements. The TCL can be used to temporarily or even permanently disable malfunctioning channels in multichannel SQUID magnetometer systems, when feedback into their otherwise superconducting input circuits is not possible. In doing so, significant signal distortions in neighbouring channels from screening currents in these input circuits are avoided. Furthermore, by completely suppressing and restoring the TCL critical current, dc offset currents in the superconducting input circuits can be prevented. This is relevant, for instance, in SQUID-based spin precession experiments on hyperpolarized noble gases, in which even dc currents of a few $\mu$A in the input circuit can lead to significant magnetic field distortions in the adjacent sample region contributing to the transverse spin-spin relaxation rate $1/T_{2}$, Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, ASC 2022, submitted to Superconducting Science and Technology

Self-compensated comagnetometers, employing overlapping samples of spin-polarized alkali and noble gases (for example K-$^3$He) are promising sensors for exotic beyond-the-standard-model fields and high-precision metrology such as rotation sensing. When the comagnetometer operates in the so-called self-compensated regime, the effective field, originating from contact interactions between the alkali valence electrons and the noble-gas nuclei, is compensated with an applied magnetic field. When the comagnetometer begins operation in a given magnetic field, spin-exchange optical pumping establishes equilibrium between the alkali electron-spin polarization and the nuclear-spin polarization. Subsequently, when the magnetic field is tuned to the compensation point, the spin polarization is brought out of the equilibrium conditions. This causes a practical issue for long measurement times. We report on a novel method for closed-loop control of the compensation field. This method allows optimization of the operating parameters, especially magnetic field gradients, in spite of the inherently slow (hours to days) dynamics of the system. With the optimization, higher stable nuclear polarization, longer relaxation times and stronger electron-nuclear coupling are achieved which is useful for nuclear-spin-based quantum memory, spin amplifiers and gyroscopes. The optimized sensor demonstrates a sensitivity comparable to the best previous comagnetometer but with four times lower noble gas density. This paves the way for applications in both fundamental and applied science.

SOLNP+ is a derivative-free solver for constrained nonlinear optimization. It starts from SOLNP proposed in 1989 by Ye Ye with the main idea that uses finite difference to approximate the gradient. We incorporate the techniques of implicit filtering, new restart mechanism and modern quadratic programming solver into this new version with an ANSI C implementation. The algorithm exhibits a great advantage in running time and robustness under noise compared with the last version by MATLAB. SOLNP+ is free to download at https://github.com/COPT-Public/SOLNP_plus.

The ADMM-based interior point (ABIP, Lin et al. 2021) method is a hybrid algorithm that effectively combines interior point method (IPM) and first-order methods to achieve a performance boost in large-scale linear optimization. Different from traditional IPM that relies on computationally intensive Newton steps, the ABIP method applies the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to approximately solve the barrier penalized problem. However, similar to other first-order methods, this technique remains sensitive to condition number and inverse precision. In this paper, we provide an enhanced ABIP method with multiple improvements. Firstly, we develop an ABIP method to solve the general linear conic optimization and establish the associated iteration complexity. Secondly, inspired by some existing methods, we develop different implementation strategies for ABIP method, which substantially improve its performance in linear optimization. Finally, we conduct extensive numerical experiments in both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the empirical advantage of our developments. In particular, the enhanced ABIP method achieves a 5.8x reduction in the geometric mean of run time on $105$ selected LP instances from Netlib, and it exhibits advantages in certain structured problems such as SVM and PageRank. However, the enhanced ABIP method still falls behind commercial solvers in many benchmarks, especially when high accuracy is desired. We posit that it can serve as a complementary tool alongside well-established solvers.

In the present paper, we consider the coupled Schr\"{o}dinger systems with critical exponent: \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} -\Delta u_i+\lambda_{i}u_i=\sum\limits_{j=1}^{d} \beta_{ij}|u_j|^{3}|u_i|u_i \quad ~\text{ in } \Omega,\\ u_i \in H_0^1(\Omega) ,\quad i= 1,2,...,d. \end{cases} \end{equation*} Here, $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^{3}$ is a smooth bounded domain, $d \geq 2$, $\beta_{ii}>0$ for every $i$, and $\beta_{ij}=\beta_{ji}$ for $i \neq j$. We study a Br\'{e}zis-Nirenberg type problem: $-\lambda_{1}(\Omega)<\lambda_{1},\cdots,\lambda_{d}<-\lambda^*(\Omega)$, where $\lambda_{1}(\Omega)$ is the first eigenvalue of $-\Delta$ with Dirichlet boundary conditions and $\lambda^*(\Omega)\in (0, \lambda_1(\Omega))$. We acquire the existence of least energy positive solutions to this system for weakly cooperative case ($\beta_{ij}>0$ small) and for purely competitive case ($\beta_{ij}\leq 0$) by variational arguments. The proof is performed by mathematical induction on the number of equations, and requires more refined energy estimates for this system. Besides, we present a new nonexistence result, revealing some different phenomena comparing with the higher-dimensional case $N\geq 5$. It seems that this is the first paper to give a rather complete picture for the existence of least energy positive solutions to critical Schr\"{o}dinger system in dimension three.

We argue that information from countries who had earlier COVID-19 surges can be used to inform another country's current model, then generating what we call back-to-the-future (BTF) projections. We show that these projections can be used to accurately predict future COVID-19 surges prior to an inflection point of the daily infection curve. We show, across 12 different countries from all populated continents around the world, that our method can often predict future surges in scenarios where the traditional approaches would always predict no future surges. However, as expected, BTF projections cannot accurately predict a surge due to the emergence of a new variant. To generate BTF projections, we make use of a matching scheme for asynchronous time series combined with a response coaching SIR model., Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures

Measuring the size of permanent electric dipole moments (EDM) of a particle or system provides a powerful tool to test Beyond-the-Standard-Model physics. The diamagnetic $^{129}$Xe atom is one of the promising candidates for EDM experiments due to its obtainable high nuclear polarization and its long spin-coherence time in a homogeneous magnetic field. By measuring the spin precession frequencies of polarized $^{129}$Xe and $^{3}$He, a new upper limit on the $^{129}$Xe atomic EDM $d_\mathrm{A}(^{129}\mathrm{Xe})$ was reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 143003 (2019). This writeup proposes a new evaluation method based on global phase fitting (GPF) for analyzing the continuous phase development of the $^{3}$He-$^{129}$Xe comagnetometer signal. The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound on the $^{129}$Xe EDM for the GPF method is theoretically derived and shows the benefit of achieving high statistical sensitivity without bringing new systematic uncertainties. The robustness of the GPF method is verified with Monte-Carlo studies. By optimizing the analysis parameters and adding few more data that could not be analyzed with the former method, a result of \[ { d_\mathrm{A} (^{129}\mathrm{Xe})=(1.1 \pm 3.6_\mathrm{(stat)} \pm 2.0_\mathrm{(syst)})\times 10 ^{-28} e~\mathrm{cm}}, \] is obtained and is used to derive the upper limit of $^{129}$Xe permanent EDM at 95\% C.L. \[ {|d_\text{A}(^{129}\text{Xe})| < 8.3 \times 10^{-28}~e~\mathrm{cm}}. \] This limit is a factor of 1.7 smaller as compared to the previous result., Comment: This writeup aims for providing supplemental information for interested readers of the paper published at arXiv:2008.07975. This writeup is a translated excerpt of the author's doctoral thesis in Chinese entitled "Research on realization and application of \textmu T-level magnetic fields of high homogeneity inside magnetically shielded rooms", which is not available yet

When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability. Excludability is a joint property of agents' preferences and their information. We develop two classes of preferences and information that jointly satisfy excludability: (i) for a one-dimensional state, preferences with single-crossing differences and a new informational condition, directionally unbounded beliefs; and (ii) for a multi-dimensional state, intermediate preferences and subexponential location-shift information. These applications exemplify that with multiple states "unbounded beliefs" is not only unnecessary for learning, but incompatible with familiar informational structures like normal information. Unbounded beliefs demands that a single agent can identify the correct action. Excludability, on the other hand, only requires that a single agent must be able to displace any wrong action, even if she cannot take the correct action., Comment: This is a revision of the September 2023 version

Principal components analysis has been used to reduce the dimensionality of datasets for a long time. In this paper, we will demonstrate that in mode detection the components of smallest variance, the pettiest components, are more important. We prove that for a multivariate normal or Laplace distribution, we obtain boxes of optimal volume by implementing "pettiest component analysis", in the sense that their volume is minimal over all possible boxes with the same number of dimensions and fixed probability. This reduction in volume produces an information gain that is measured using active information. We illustrate our results with a simulation and a search for modal patterns of digitized images of hand-written numbers using the famous MNIST database; in both cases pettiest components work better than their competitors. In fact, we show that modes obtained with pettiest components generate better written digits for MNIST than principal components., Comment: 13 pages, 4 tables, 12 figures

A three-step model for calculating the magnetic field generated by coils inside cuboid-shaped shields like magnetically shielded rooms (MSRs) is presented. The shield is modelled as two parallel plates of infinite width and one tube of infinite height. We propose an improved mirror method which considers the effect of the parallel plates of finite thickness. A reaction factor is introduced to describe the influence of the vertical tube, which is obtained from finite element method (FEM) simulations. By applying the improved mirror method and then multiplying the result with the reaction factor, the magnetic flux density within the shielded volume can be determined in a fast computation. The three-step model is verified both with FEM and measurements of the field of a Helmholtz coil inside an MSR with a superconducting quantum interference device. The model allows a fast optimization of shield-coupled coil spacings compared to repetitive time-consuming FEM calculations. As an example, we optimize the distance between two parallel square coils attached to the MSR walls. Measurements of a coil prototype of 2.75~m in side length show a magnetic field change of 18~pT over the central 5~cm at the field strength of 2.7~\textmu T. This obtained relative field change of 6~ppm is a factor of 5.4 smaller than our previously used Helmholtz coil.

This paper analyzes challenges in cloze-style reading comprehension on multiparty dialogue and suggests two new tasks for more comprehensive predictions of personal entities in daily conversations. We first demonstrate that there are substantial limitations to the evaluation methods of previous work, namely that randomized assignment of samples to training and test data substantially decreases the complexity of cloze-style reading comprehension. According to our analysis, replacing the random data split with a chronological data split reduces test accuracy on previous single-variable passage completion task from 72\% to 34\%, that leaves much more room to improve. Our proposed tasks extend the previous single-variable passage completion task by replacing more character mentions with variables. Several deep learning models are developed to validate these three tasks. A thorough error analysis is provided to understand the challenges and guide the future direction of this research.