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This paper presents a nested tracking framework for analyzing cycles in 2D force networks within granular materials. These materials are composed of interacting particles, whose interactions are described by a force network. Understanding the cycles within these networks at various scales and their evolution under external loads is crucial, as they significantly contribute to the mechanical and kinematic properties of the system. Our approach involves computing a cycle hierarchy by partitioning the 2D domain into segments bounded by cycles in the force network. We can adapt concepts from nested tracking graphs originally developed for merge trees by leveraging the duality between this partitioning and the cycles. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two force networks derived from experiments with photoelastic disks., Comment: TopoInVis 2024, 11 pages

Despite significant research efforts and advancements, cancer remains a leading cause of mortality. Early cancer prediction has become a crucial focus in cancer research to streamline patient care and improve treatment outcomes. Manual tumor detection by histopathologists can be time consuming, prompting the need for computerized methods to expedite treatment planning. Traditional approaches to tumor detection rely on supervised learning, necessitates a large amount of annotated data for model training. However, acquiring such extensive labeled data can be laborious and time\-intensive. This research examines the three learning environments: supervised learning (SL), semi\-supervised learning (Semi\-SL), and self\-supervised learning (Self\-SL): to predict kidney, lung, and breast cancer. Three pre\-trained deep learning models (Residual Network\-50, Visual Geometry Group\-16, and EfficientNetB0) are evaluated based on these learning settings using seven carefully curated training sets. To create the first training set (TS1), SL is applied to all annotated image samples. Five training sets (TS2\-TS6) with different ratios of labeled and unlabeled cancer images are used to evaluateSemi\-SL. Unlabeled cancer images from the final training set (TS7) are utilized for Self\-SL assessment. Among different learning environments, outcomes from the Semi\-SL setting show a strong degree of agreement with the outcomes achieved in the SL setting. The uniform pattern of observations from the pre\-trained models across all three datasets validates the methodology and techniques of the research. Based on modest number of labeled samples and minimal computing cost, our study suggests that the Semi\-SL option can be a highly viable replacement for the SL option under label annotation constraint scenarios., Comment: Submitted to the journal

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a ubiquitous diagnostic test. Conventional task-specific ECG analysis models require large numbers of expensive ECG annotations or associated labels to train. Transfer learning techniques have been shown to improve generalization and reduce reliance on labeled data. We present ECG-FM, an open foundation model for ECG analysis, and conduct a comprehensive study performed on a dataset of 1.66 million ECGs sourced from both publicly available and private institutional sources. ECG-FM adopts a transformer-based architecture and is pretrained on 2.5 million samples using ECG-specific augmentations and contrastive learning, as well as a continuous signal masking objective. Our transparent evaluation includes a diverse range of downstream tasks, where we predict ECG interpretation labels, reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, and abnormal cardiac troponin. Affirming ECG-FM's effectiveness as a foundation model, we demonstrate how its command of contextual information results in strong performance, rich pretrained embeddings, and reliable interpretability. Due to a lack of open-weight practices, we highlight how ECG analysis is lagging behind other medical machine learning subfields in terms of foundation model adoption. Our code is available at https://github.com/bowang-lab/ECG-FM/., Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, 10 tables

This paper presents the design and comprehensive measurements of a compact high-gain 32 element planar antenna array covering the n257 (26.5-29.5 GHz) millimeter wave (mmWave) band. First an 8-element quasi-uniform linear array is designed using a series-fed topology with fan shaped beams for point-to-multipoint connectivity followed by a compact corporate series feed network to design high-gain directive array for point-to-point connectivity. The radiation patterns of both antenna arrays in the azimuth and elevation planes are measured across a 180 degrees span using an over-the-air (OTA) compact antenna test range (CATR) system with a single rotary positioner. Moreover the procedure for quantifying and measuring the gain of mmWave antenna arrays is demonstrated in detail. The peak measured gain of the planar array is 18.45 dBi at 28.5 GHz while the half-power beamwidth of the planar array in the elevation and azimuth planes varies between 11 to 13 degrees, and 23-27 degrees respectively within the 26.5-29.5 GHz range. The measurement results match well with the simulations. The designed antenna array is suitable for various emerging 5G and beyond mmWave applications such as fixed wireless access, mmWave near-field focusing, high-resolution radar systems, and the characterization of mmWave path loss and channel sounding in diverse indoor environments and smart factories., Comment: 11 Pages, 15 Figues, Orignalsubmission

In this work, we propose a set of physics-informed geometric operators (GOs) to enrich the geometric data provided for training surrogate/discriminative models, dimension reduction, and generative models, typically employed for performance prediction, dimension reduction, and creating data-driven parameterisations, respectively. However, as both the input and output streams of these models consist of low-level shape representations, they often fail to capture shape characteristics essential for performance analyses. Therefore, the proposed GOs exploit the differential and integral properties of shapes--accessed through Fourier descriptors, curvature integrals, geometric moments, and their invariants--to infuse high-level intrinsic geometric information and physics into the feature vector used for training, even when employing simple model architectures or low-level parametric descriptions. We showed that for surrogate modelling, along with the inclusion of the notion of physics, GOs enact regularisation to reduce over-fitting and enhance generalisation to new, unseen designs. Furthermore, through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that for dimension reduction and generative models, incorporating the proposed GOs enriches the training data with compact global and local geometric features. This significantly enhances the quality of the resulting latent space, thereby facilitating the generation of valid and diverse designs. Lastly, we also show that GOs can enable learning parametric sensitivities to a great extent. Consequently, these enhancements accelerate the convergence rate of shape optimisers towards optimal solutions.

Virtual transitions in a Casimir-like configuration are utilized to probe quantum aspects of the recently proposed four-dimensional Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet (4D EGB) gravity. This study employs a quantum optics-based approach, wherein an Unruh-DeWitt detector (modeled as a two-level atom) follows a radial timelike geodesic, falling freely into an uncharged, nonrotating black hole described by 4D EGB gravity, becoming thermalized in the usual Unruh manner. The black hole, asymptotically Minkowskian, is enclosed by a Casimir boundary proximate to its horizon, serving as a source for accelerated field modes that interact with the infalling detector. Observations are conducted by an asymptotic infinity observer, assuming a Boulware field state. Our numerical analysis reveals that, unlike in Einstein gravity, black holes in 4D EGB gravity can either enhance or suppress the intensity of acceleration radiation, contingent upon the Gauss-Bonnet coupling parameter $\alpha$. Specifically, we observe radiation enhancement for negative $\alpha$ and suppression for positive $\alpha$. These findings offer substantial insights into quantifying the influence of higher-curvature contributions on the behavior of quantum fields in black hole geometries within a 4D spacetime., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures

Modern vision transformers leverage visually inspired local interaction between pixels through attention computed within window or grid regions, in contrast to the global attention employed in the original ViT. Regional attention restricts pixel interactions within specific regions, while sparse attention disperses them across sparse grids. These differing approaches pose a challenge between maintaining hierarchical relationships vs. capturing a global context. In this study, drawing inspiration from atrous convolution, we propose Atrous Attention, a blend of regional and sparse attention that dynamically integrates both local and global information while preserving hierarchical structures. Based on this, we introduce a versatile, hybrid vision transformer backbone called ACC-ViT, tailored for standard vision tasks. Our compact model achieves approximately 84% accuracy on ImageNet-1K with fewer than 28.5 million parameters, outperforming the state-of-the-art MaxViT by 0.42% while requiring 8.4% fewer parameters., Comment: Accepted as a Workshop Paper at T4V@CVPR2024. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2403.04200

Glavan and Lin [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 081301 (2020)] have recently proposed a consistent model of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet modified gravity in four spacetime dimensions. This model predicts significant contributions of the Gauss-Bonnet coupling parameter $\alpha$ to gravitational dynamics, while circumventing the Lovelock theorem and avoiding Ostrogradsky instability. As a powerful competitor to general relativity, the model has been examined on various phenomenological grounds. Here, we employ a technique from thermodynamic geometry to analyze the thermodynamic phase structure of a charged black hole with a quantum gravity-inspired entropy relation in this novel modified gravity scenario. Based on the sign and magnitude of thermodynamic curvature, we demonstrate that while the theory does not significantly impact larger black holes, it may lead to multiple phase transitions and accelerate the formation of black hole remnants at short-distance scales compared to general relativity. Our analysis focuses solely on the non-extremal geometry case where $M>\sqrt{Q^2+\alpha}$, with $M$ and $Q$ representing the mass and charge of the black hole, respectively. We believe that these results may offer insights for testing the phenomenological consistency of the theory as a potential alternative to the standard Einstein paradigm., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures

Interpretability and explainability are among the most important challenges of modern artificial intelligence, being mentioned even in various legislative sources. In this article, we develop a method for extracting immediately human interpretable classifiers from tabular data. The classifiers are given in the form of short Boolean formulas built with propositions that can either be directly extracted from categorical attributes or dynamically computed from numeric ones. Our method is implemented using Answer Set Programming. We investigate seven datasets and compare our results to ones obtainable by state-of-the-art classifiers for tabular data, namely, XGBoost and random forests. Over all datasets, the accuracies obtainable by our method are similar to the reference methods. The advantage of our classifiers in all cases is that they are very short and immediately human intelligible as opposed to the black-box nature of the reference methods.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, profiling the electrical activities of the heart, are used for a plethora of diagnostic applications. However, ECG systems require multiple leads or channels of signals to capture the complete view of the cardiac system, which limits their application in smartwatches and wearables. In this work, we propose a modally reduced representation learning method for ECG signals that is capable of generating channel-agnostic, unified representations for ECG signals. Through joint optimization of reconstruction and alignment, we ensure that the embeddings of the different channels contain an amalgamation of the overall information across channels while also retaining their specific information. On an independent test dataset, we generated highly correlated channel embeddings from different ECG channels, leading to a moderate approximation of the 12-lead signals from a single-channel embedding. Our generated embeddings can work as competent features for ECG signals for downstream tasks., Comment: Accepted as a Workshop Paper at TS4H@ICLR2024

This work presents Unbundle-Rewrite-Rebundle (URR), a system for detecting privacy-harming portions of bundled JavaScript code and rewriting that code at runtime to remove the privacy-harming behavior without breaking the surrounding code or overall application. URR is a novel solution to the problem of JavaScript bundles, where websites pre-compile multiple code units into a single file, making it impossible for content filters and ad-blockers to differentiate between desired and unwanted resources. Where traditional content filtering tools rely on URLs, URR analyzes the code at the AST level, and replaces harmful AST sub-trees with privacy-and-functionality maintaining alternatives. We present an open-sourced implementation of URR as a Firefox extension and evaluate it against JavaScript bundles generated by the most popular bundling system (Webpack) deployed on the Tranco 10k. We evaluate URR by precision (1.00), recall (0.95), and speed (0.43s per script) when detecting and rewriting three representative privacy-harming libraries often included in JavaScript bundles, and find URR to be an effective approach to a large-and-growing blind spot unaddressed by current privacy tools., Comment: In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '24)

Conditional independence (CI) constraints are critical for defining and evaluating fairness in machine learning, as well as for learning unconfounded or causal representations. Traditional methods for ensuring fairness either blindly learn invariant features with respect to a protected variable (e.g., race when classifying sex from face images) or enforce CI relative to the protected attribute only on the model output (e.g., the sex label). Neither of these methods are effective in enforcing CI in high-dimensional feature spaces. In this paper, we focus on a nascent approach characterizing the CI constraint in terms of two Jensen-Shannon divergence terms, and we extend it to high-dimensional feature spaces using a novel dynamic sampling strategy. In doing so, we introduce a new training paradigm that can be applied to any encoder architecture. We are able to enforce conditional independence of the diffusion autoencoder latent representation with respect to any protected attribute under the equalized odds constraint and show that this approach enables causal image generation with controllable latent spaces. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve high accuracy on downstream tasks while upholding equality of odds., Comment: To appear at the 2024 IEEE CVPR Workshop on Fair, Data-Efficient, and Trusted Computer Vision

We study in this paper optimal mass transport over a strongly connected, directed graph on a given discrete time interval. Differently from previous literature, we do not assume full knowledge of the initial and final goods distribution over the network nodes. In spite of the meager information, we show that it is possible to characterize the most likely flow in two important cases: The first one is when the initial and/or final distribution is only known on proper subsets of the nodes. The second case is when only some moments of the marginal distributions are known. As an important by-product, we determine the most likely initial and final marginals on the whole state space.

Model-based deep learning methods such as loop unrolling (LU) and deep equilibrium model}(DEQ) extensions offer outstanding performance in solving inverse problems (IP). These methods unroll the optimization iterations into a sequence of neural networks that in effect learn a regularization function from data. While these architectures are currently state-of-the-art in numerous applications, their success heavily relies on the accuracy of the forward model. This assumption can be limiting in many physical applications due to model simplifications or uncertainties in the apparatus. To address forward model mismatch, we introduce an untrained forward model residual block within the model-based architecture to match the data consistency in the measurement domain for each instance. We propose two variants in well-known model-based architectures (LU and DEQ) and prove convergence under mild conditions. Our approach offers a unified solution that is less parameter-sensitive, requires no additional data, and enables simultaneous fitting of the forward model and reconstruction in a single pass, benefiting both linear and nonlinear inverse problems. The experiments show significant quality improvement in removing artifacts and preserving details across three distinct applications, encompassing both linear and nonlinear inverse problems. Moreover, we highlight reconstruction effectiveness in intermediate steps and showcase robustness to random initialization of the residual block and a higher number of iterations during evaluation. Code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/InvProbs/A-adaptive-model-based-methods}., Comment: Published in Transactions in Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

We introduce and study flipped non-associative polynomial rings. In particular, we show that all Cayley-Dickson algebras naturally appear as quotients of a certain type of such rings; this extends the classical construction of the complex numbers (and quaternions) as a quotient of a (skew) polynomial ring to the octonions, and beyond. We also extend some classical results on algebraic properties of Cayley-Dickson algebras by McCrimmon to a class of flipped non-associative polynomial rings., Comment: 17 pages; corrected an error; fixed some typos

Transformers have elevated to the state-of-the-art vision architectures through innovations in attention mechanism inspired from visual perception. At present two classes of attentions prevail in vision transformers, regional and sparse attention. The former bounds the pixel interactions within a region; the latter spreads them across sparse grids. The opposing natures of them have resulted in a dilemma between either preserving hierarchical relation or attaining a global context. In this work, taking inspiration from atrous convolution, we introduce Atrous Attention, a fusion of regional and sparse attention, which can adaptively consolidate both local and global information, while maintaining hierarchical relations. As a further tribute to atrous convolution, we redesign the ubiquitous inverted residual convolution blocks with atrous convolution. Finally, we propose a generalized, hybrid vision transformer backbone, named ACC-ViT, following conventional practices for standard vision tasks. Our tiny version model achieves $\sim 84 \%$ accuracy on ImageNet-1K, with less than $28.5$ million parameters, which is $0.42\%$ improvement over state-of-the-art MaxViT while having $8.4\%$ less parameters. In addition, we have investigated the efficacy of ACC-ViT backbone under different evaluation settings, such as finetuning, linear probing, and zero-shot learning on tasks involving medical image analysis, object detection, and language-image contrastive learning. ACC-ViT is therefore a strong vision backbone, which is also competitive in mobile-scale versions, ideal for niche applications with small datasets.

In this work, we perform a systematic comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of generative and non-generative models in constructing design spaces for novel and efficient design exploration and shape optimization. We apply these models in the case of airfoil/hydrofoil design and conduct the comparison on the resulting design spaces. A conventional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and a state-of-the-art generative model, the Performance-Augmented Diverse Generative Adversarial Network (PaDGAN), are juxtaposed with a linear non-generative model based on the coupling of the Karhunen-Lo\`eve Expansion and a physics-informed Shape Signature Vector (SSV-KLE). The comparison demonstrates that, with an appropriate shape encoding and a physics-augmented design space, non-generative models have the potential to cost-effectively generate high-performing valid designs with enhanced coverage of the design space. In this work, both approaches are applied to two large foil profile datasets comprising real-world and artificial designs generated through either a profile-generating parametric model or deep-learning approach. These datasets are further enriched with integral properties of their members' shapes as well as physics-informed parameters. Our results illustrate that the design spaces constructed by the non-generative model outperform the generative model in terms of design validity, generating robust latent spaces with none or significantly fewer invalid designs when compared to generative models. We aspire that these findings will aid the engineering design community in making informed decisions when constructing designs spaces for shape optimization, as we have show that under certain conditions computationally inexpensive approaches can closely match or even outperform state-of-the art generative models.

We introduce a method for computing immediately human interpretable yet accurate classifiers from tabular data. The classifiers obtained are short Boolean formulas, computed via first discretizing the original data and then using feature selection coupled with a very fast algorithm for producing the best possible Boolean classifier for the setting. We demonstrate the approach via 12 experiments, obtaining results with accuracies comparable to ones obtained via random forests, XGBoost, and existing results for the same datasets in the literature. In most cases, the accuracy of our method is in fact similar to that of the reference methods, even though the main objective of our study is the immediate interpretability of our classifiers. We also prove a new result on the probability that the classifier we obtain from real-life data corresponds to the ideally best classifier with respect to the background distribution the data comes from., Comment: Preprint of a paper in DAO-XAI 2024 (Data meets Applied Ontologies in Explainable AI)

The detection of automated accounts, also known as "social bots", has been an increasingly important concern for online social networks (OSNs). While several methods have been proposed for detecting social bots, significant research gaps remain. First, current models exhibit limitations in detecting sophisticated bots that aim to mimic genuine OSN users. Second, these methods often rely on simplistic profile features, which are susceptible to manipulation. In addition to their vulnerability to adversarial manipulations, these models lack generalizability, resulting in subpar performance when trained on one dataset and tested on another. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for social Bot detection with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning (BotSSCL). Our framework leverages contrastive learning to distinguish between social bots and humans in the embedding space to improve linear separability. The high-level representations derived by BotSSCL enhance its resilience to variations in data distribution and ensure generalizability. We evaluate BotSSCL's robustness against adversarial attempts to manipulate bot accounts to evade detection. Experiments on two datasets featuring sophisticated bots demonstrate that BotSSCL outperforms other supervised, unsupervised, and self-supervised baseline methods. We achieve approx. 6% and approx. 8% higher (F1) performance than SOTA on both datasets. In addition, BotSSCL also achieves 67% F1 when trained on one dataset and tested with another, demonstrating its generalizability. Lastly, BotSSCL increases adversarial complexity and only allows 4% success to the adversary in evading detection.

The future wireless communication applications demand seamless connectivity, higher throughput, and low latency, for which the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band is considered a potential technology. Nevertheless, line-of-sight (LoS) is often mandatory for mmWave band communication, and it renders these waves sensitive to sudden changes in the environment. Therefore, it is necessary to maintain the LoS link for a reliable connection. One such technique to maintain LoS is using proactive handover (HO). However, proactive HO is challenging, requiring continuous information about the surrounding wireless network to anticipate potential blockage. This paper presents a proactive blockage prediction mechanism where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is used as the base station for HO. The proposed scheme uses computer vision (CV) to obtain potential blocking objects, user speed, and location. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, the system is evaluated using a publicly available dataset for blockage prediction. The study integrates scenarios from Vision-based Wireless (ViWi) and UAV channel modeling, generating wireless data samples relevant to UAVs. The antenna modeling on the UAV end incorporates a polarization-matched scenario to optimize signal reception. The results demonstrate that UAV-assisted Handover not only ensures seamless connectivity but also enhances overall network performance by 20%. This research contributes to the advancement of proactive blockage mitigation strategies in wireless networks, showcasing the potential of UAVs as dynamic and adaptable base stations.

VLMs (Vision-Language Models) extend the capabilities of LLMs (Large Language Models) to accept multimodal inputs. Since it has been verified that LLMs can be induced to generate harmful or inaccurate content through specific test cases (termed as Red Teaming), how VLMs perform in similar scenarios, especially with their combination of textual and visual inputs, remains a question. To explore this problem, we present a novel red teaming dataset RTVLM, which encompasses 10 subtasks (e.g., image misleading, multi-modal jail-breaking, face fairness, etc) under 4 primary aspects (faithfulness, privacy, safety, fairness). Our RTVLM is the first red-teaming dataset to benchmark current VLMs in terms of these 4 different aspects. Detailed analysis shows that 10 prominent open-sourced VLMs struggle with the red teaming in different degrees and have up to 31% performance gap with GPT-4V. Additionally, we simply apply red teaming alignment to LLaVA-v1.5 with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) using RTVLM, and this bolsters the models' performance with 10% in RTVLM test set, 13% in MM-Hal, and without noticeable decline in MM-Bench, overpassing other LLaVA-based models with regular alignment data. This reveals that current open-sourced VLMs still lack red teaming alignment. Our code and datasets will be open-source., Comment: Working in progress