Search

Lithium niobate (LN) is a promising material for future complex photonic-electronic circuits, with wide applications in fields like data communications, sensing, optical computation, and quantum optics. There was a great step toward LN photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with the development of dry etching for low-loss LN on insulator (LNOI) waveguides. However, the versatility of the LN waveguide platform for applications like $\chi^3$ nonlinear devices and passive phase sensitive components, has not been fully utilized. The main challenges are the difficulty of making highly confined ultralow-loss waveguides and overcoming the strong material birefringence. Here, we developed a fabrication technology for an ultralow-loss, tightly-confined, dispersion-engineered LN waveguide. We demonstrated an ultra-low propagation loss of 5.8 dB/m in a decimeter-long LN spiral waveguide. We focused on Z-cut LN waveguides with TE mode to avoid the material birefringence. Aiming for $\chi^3$ nonlinear applications, we demonstrated the first all normal-dispersion (ANDi) based coherent octave-spanning supercontinuum frequency comb in integrated LN waveguide. Our ultralow-loss Z-cut LN long waveguide might be useful in on-chip narrow linewidth lasers, optical delay lines, and parametric amplifiers.

Recent LLMs have enabled significant advancements for conversational agents. However, they are also well-known to hallucinate, i.e., they often produce responses that seem plausible but are not factually correct. On the other hand, users tend to over-rely on LLM-based AI agents; they accept the AI's suggestion even when it is wrong. Adding good friction, such as explanations or getting user confirmations, has been proposed as a mitigation in AI-supported decision-making systems. In this paper, we propose an accountability model for LLM-based task-oriented dialogue agents to address user overreliance via friction turns in cases of model uncertainty and errors associated with dialogue state tracking (DST). The accountability model is an augmented LLM with an additional accountability head, which functions as a binary classifier to predict the slots of the dialogue states. We perform our experiments with three backbone LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma) on two established task-oriented datasets (MultiWOZ and Snips). Our empirical findings demonstrate that this approach not only enables reliable estimation of AI agent errors but also guides the LLM decoder in generating more accurate actions. We observe around 3% absolute improvement in joint goal accuracy by incorporating accountability heads in modern LLMs for the MultiWOZ dataset. We also show that this method enables the agent to self-correct its actions, further boosting its performance by 3%. Finally, we discuss the application of accountability modeling to prevent user overreliance by introducing friction.

A Magnetoencephalography (MEG) time-series recording consists of multi-channel signals collected by superconducting sensors, with each signal's intensity reflecting magnetic field changes over time at the sensor location. Automating epileptic MEG spike detection significantly reduces manual assessment time and effort, yielding substantial clinical benefits. Existing research addresses MEG spike detection by encoding neural network inputs with signals from all channel within a time segment, followed by classification. However, these methods overlook simultaneous spiking occurred from nearby sensors. We introduce a simple yet effective paradigm that first clusters MEG channels based on their sensor's spatial position. Next, a novel convolutional input module is designed to integrate the spatial clustering and temporal changes of the signals. This module is fed into a custom MEEG-ResNet3D developed by the authors, which learns to extract relevant features and classify the input as a spike clip or not. Our method achieves an F1 score of 94.73% on a large real-world MEG dataset Sanbo-CMR collected from two centers, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by 1.85%. Moreover, it demonstrates efficacy and stability in the Electroencephalographic (EEG) seizure detection task, yielding an improved weighted F1 score of 1.4% compared to current state-of-the-art techniques evaluated on TUSZ, whch is the largest EEG seizure dataset., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted by BIBM2024

Many applications demand context sensing to offer personalized and timely services. Yet, developing sensing programs can be challenging for developers and using them is privacy-concerning for end-users. In this paper, we propose to use natural language as the unified interface to process personal data and sense user context, which can effectively ease app development and make the data pipeline more transparent. Our work is inspired by large language models (LLMs) and other generative models, while directly applying them does not solve the problem - letting the model directly process the data cannot handle complex sensing requests and letting the model write the data processing program suffers error-prone code generation. We address the problem with 1) a unified data processing framework that makes context-sensing programs simpler and 2) a feedback-guided query optimizer that makes data query more informative. To evaluate the performance of natural language-based context sensing, we create a benchmark that contains 133 context sensing tasks. Extensive evaluation has shown that our approach is able to automatically solve the context-sensing tasks efficiently and precisely. The code is opensourced at https://github.com/MobileLLM/ChainStream., Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures

It is widely acknowledged that the epileptic foci can be pinpointed by source localizing interictal epileptic discharges (IEDs) via Magnetoencephalography (MEG). However, manual detection of IEDs, which appear as spikes in MEG data, is extremely labor intensive and requires considerable professional expertise, limiting the broader adoption of MEG technology. Numerous studies have focused on automatic detection of MEG spikes to overcome this challenge, but these efforts often validate their models on synthetic datasets with balanced positive and negative samples. In contrast, clinical MEG data is highly imbalanced, raising doubts on the real-world efficacy of these models. To address this issue, we introduce LV-CadeNet, a Long View feature Convolution-Attention fusion Encoder-Decoder Network, designed for automatic MEG spike detection in real-world clinical scenarios. Beyond addressing the disparity between training data distribution and clinical test data through semi-supervised learning, our approach also mimics human specialists by constructing long view morphological input data. Moreover, we propose an advanced convolution-attention module to extract temporal and spatial features from the input data. LV-CadeNet significantly improves the accuracy of MEG spike detection, boosting it from 42.31\% to 54.88\% on a novel clinical dataset sourced from Sanbo Brain Hospital Capital Medical University. This dataset, characterized by a highly imbalanced distribution of positive and negative samples, accurately represents real-world clinical scenarios.

The evolution of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication brings significant challenges, such as data integrity and vulnerabilities stemming from centralized management. This paper presents an innovative integration of decentralized blockchain technology with V2X communication through a multi-layered architecture that combines the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) traffic simulator and the BlockSim blockchain simulator. In addition, as the Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) emerges, efficient resource management becomes indispensable for ensuring seamless communication. We also propose a reference multi-connectivity management method named Enhanced MAX-SINR, designed to advance research in blockchain-specific approaches, taking into account retransmission successfull rates. We evaluate blockchain performance in diverse environments such as urban, suburban, and rural areas, demonstrating that enhancing the success rate of retransmitted blockchain-related messages significantly boosts blockchain transaction performance and provides a foundation for developing intelligent SIoV systems.

Recent observations from the Juno spacecraft during its transit over flux tubes of the Galilean moons have identified sharp enhancements of particle fluxes at discrete energies. These banded structures have been suspected to originate from a bounce resonance between particles and standing Alfven waves generated by the moon-magnetospheric interaction. Here, we show that predictions from the above hypothesis are inconsistent with the observations, and propose an alternative interpretation that the banded structures are remote signals of particle absorption at the moons. In this scenario, whether a particle would encounter the moon before reaching Juno depends on the number of bounce cycles it experiences within a fixed section of drift motion determined by moon-spacecraft longitudinal separation. Therefore, the absorption bands are expected to appear at discrete, equally-spaced velocities consistent with the observations. This finding improves our understanding of moon-plasma interactions and provides a potential way to evaluate the Jovian magnetospheric models., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures

There are unique challenges to developing item recommender systems for e-commerce platforms like eBay due to sparse data and diverse user interests. While rich user-item interactions are important, eBay's data sparsity exceeds other e-commerce sites by an order of magnitude. To address this challenge, we propose CoActionGraphRec (CAGR), a text based two-tower deep learning model (Item Tower and User Tower) utilizing co-action graph layers. In order to enhance user and item representations, a graph-based solution tailored to eBay's environment is utilized. For the Item Tower, we represent each item using its co-action items to capture collaborative signals in a co-action graph that is fully leveraged by the graph neural network component. For the User Tower, we build a fully connected graph of each user's behavior sequence, with edges encoding pairwise relationships. Furthermore, an explicit interaction module learns representations capturing behavior interactions. Extensive offline and online A/B test experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and results show improved performance over state-of-the-art methods on key metrics.

Reinforcement learning method is extremely competitive in gait generation techniques for quadrupedal robot, which is mainly due to the fact that stochastic exploration in reinforcement training is beneficial to achieve an autonomous gait. Nevertheless, although incremental reinforcement learning is employed to improve training success and movement smoothness by relying on the continuity inherent during limb movements, challenges remain in adapting gait policy to diverse terrain and external disturbance. Inspired by the association between reinforcement learning and the evolution of animal motion behavior, a self-improvement mechanism for reference gait is introduced in this paper to enable incremental learning of action and self-improvement of reference action together to imitate the evolution of animal motion behavior. Further, a new framework for reinforcement training of quadruped gait is proposed. In this framework, genetic algorithm is specifically adopted to perform global probabilistic search for the initial value of the arbitrary foot trajectory to update the reference trajectory with better fitness. Subsequently, the improved reference gait is used for incremental reinforcement learning of gait. The above process is repeatedly and alternatively executed to finally train the gait policy. The analysis considering terrain, model dimensions, and locomotion condition is presented in detail based on simulation, and the results show that the framework is significantly more adaptive to terrain compared to regular incremental reinforcement learning.

Estimation of a model's confidence on its outputs is critical for Conversational AI systems based on large language models (LLMs), especially for reducing hallucination and preventing over-reliance. In this work, we provide an exhaustive exploration of methods, including approaches proposed for open- and closed-weight LLMs, aimed at quantifying and leveraging model uncertainty to improve the reliability of LLM-generated responses, specifically focusing on dialogue state tracking (DST) in task-oriented dialogue systems (TODS). Regardless of the model type, well-calibrated confidence scores are essential to handle uncertainties, thereby improving model performance. We evaluate four methods for estimating confidence scores based on softmax, raw token scores, verbalized confidences, and a combination of these methods, using the area under the curve (AUC) metric to assess calibration, with higher AUC indicating better calibration. We also enhance these with a self-probing mechanism, proposed for closed models. Furthermore, we assess these methods using an open-weight model fine-tuned for the task of DST, achieving superior joint goal accuracy (JGA). Our findings also suggest that fine-tuning open-weight LLMs can result in enhanced AUC performance, indicating better confidence score calibration., Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE SLT 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in intelligent visualization systems, especially for domain-specific applications. Integrating LLMs into visualization systems presents challenges, and we categorize these challenges into three alignments: domain problems with LLMs, visualization with LLMs, and interaction with LLMs. To achieve these alignments, we propose a framework and outline a workflow to guide the application of fine-tuned LLMs to enhance visual interactions for domain-specific tasks. These alignment challenges are critical in education because of the need for an intelligent visualization system to support beginners' self-regulated learning. Therefore, we apply the framework to education and introduce Tailor-Mind, an interactive visualization system designed to facilitate self-regulated learning for artificial intelligence beginners. Drawing on insights from a preliminary study, we identify self-regulated learning tasks and fine-tuning objectives to guide visualization design and tuning data construction. Our focus on aligning visualization with fine-tuned LLM makes Tailor-Mind more like a personalized tutor. Tailor-Mind also supports interactive recommendations to help beginners better achieve their learning goals. Model performance evaluations and user studies confirm that Tailor-Mind improves the self-regulated learning experience, effectively validating the proposed framework.

The family of local maximum likelihood (LML) detectors, including the global maximum likelihood (GML) detector, and the family of likelihood ascent search (LAS) detectors are akin to each other and possess common properties significant in both theory and practical multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communications. It is proved that a large MIMO channel possesses the LML characteristic, implying and predicting that a local search detector with likelihood ascent, like a wide-sense sequential LAS (WSLAS) detector, can approach the GML detection. By the replica method, the bit error rate (BER) of an LML detector in the large MIMO channel is obtained. The BER indicates that in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, both the LML and GML detectors achieve the AWGN channel performance when the channel load is as high as up to 1.5086 bits/dimension with an equal-energy distribution, and the channel load can be higher with an unequal-energy distribution. The analytical result is verified by simulation in the equal-energy distribution that the sequential LAS (SLAS) detector, a linear-complexity LML detector, can approach the BER of the NP-hard GML detector. The LML and LAS detectors in the two families are successfully applied to symbol detection in massive antenna MIMO communications and demonstrate the performance near the GML detection. This book chapter reviews the LML and LAS detectors in a unified framework. The focus is on their formulation, relationships, properties, and GML performance in BER and spectral efficiency in large MIMO channels., Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures

As the novel topological states, the higher-order topological insulators have attracted great attentions in the past years. However, their realizations in realistic materials, in particular in two dimensional systems, remains the big challenge due to the lack of adequate candidates. Here, based on the first-principle calculation and tight-binding model simulations, we identify the currently \emph{existing} bilayer $\alpha_{5}$-phase borophenes as the two-dimensional second-order topological insulators, protected by the $C_{2}$-rotational symmetry. The formation of interlayer B-B covalent bonds, stabilizing the bilayer borophenes and opening the large direct bulk gaps ($\sim 0.55-0.62$ eV) at Fermi level, plays the key roles. The second-order topology is characterized by the bulk quantized quadrupole momentum. Our results enriches the candidates for the second-order topological insulators, and also provide a way to study topological states in borophenes., Comment: 9 Pages, 7 figures

The conceptualization and categorization of natural objects in the human mind have long intrigued cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, offering crucial insights into human perception and cognition. Recently, the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised the attractive question of whether these models can also develop human-like object representations through exposure to vast amounts of linguistic and multimodal data. In this study, we combined behavioral and neuroimaging analysis methods to uncover how the object concept representations in LLMs correlate with those of humans. By collecting large-scale datasets of 4.7 million triplet judgments from LLM and Multimodal LLM (MLLM), we were able to derive low-dimensional embeddings that capture the underlying similarity structure of 1,854 natural objects. The resulting 66-dimensional embeddings were found to be highly stable and predictive, and exhibited semantic clustering akin to human mental representations. Interestingly, the interpretability of the dimensions underlying these embeddings suggests that LLM and MLLM have developed human-like conceptual representations of natural objects. Further analysis demonstrated strong alignment between the identified model embeddings and neural activity patterns in many functionally defined brain ROIs (e.g., EBA, PPA, RSC and FFA). This provides compelling evidence that the object representations in LLMs, while not identical to those in the human, share fundamental commonalities that reflect key schemas of human conceptual knowledge. This study advances our understanding of machine intelligence and informs the development of more human-like artificial cognitive systems.

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) and their inverse problems using Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) is a rapidly growing approach in the physics and machine learning community. Although several architectures exist for PINNs that work remarkably in practice, our theoretical understanding of their performances is somewhat limited. In this work, we study the behavior of a Bayesian PINN estimator of the solution of a PDE from $n$ independent noisy measurement of the solution. We focus on a class of equations that are linear in their parameters (with unknown coefficients $\theta_\star$). We show that when the partial differential equation admits a classical solution (say $u_\star$), differentiable to order $\beta$, the mean square error of the Bayesian posterior mean is at least of order $n^{-2\beta/(2\beta + d)}$. Furthermore, we establish a convergence rate of the linear coefficients of $\theta_\star$ depending on the order of the underlying differential operator. Last but not least, our theoretical results are validated through extensive simulations., Comment: 35 Pages, 3 figures, and 2 tables

The ability to automatically and robustly self-verify periodicity present in time-series astronomical data is becoming more important as data sets rapidly increase in size. The age of large astronomical surveys has rendered manual inspection of time-series data less practical. Previous efforts in generating a false alarm probability to verify the periodicity of stars have been aimed towards the analysis of a constructed periodogram. However, these methods feature correlations with features that do not pertain to periodicity, such as light curve shape, slow trends and stochastic variability. The common assumption that photometric errors are Gaussian and well determined is also a limitation of analytic methods. We present a novel machine learning based technique which directly analyses the phase folded light curve for its false alarm probability. We show that the results of this method are largely insensitive to the shape of the light curve, and we establish minimum values for the number of data points and the amplitude to noise ratio.

The perception of transparent objects for grasp and manipulation remains a major challenge, because existing robotic grasp methods which heavily rely on depth maps are not suitable for transparent objects due to their unique visual properties. These properties lead to gaps and inaccuracies in the depth maps of the transparent objects captured by depth sensors. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end network for transparent object depth completion that combines the strengths of single-view RGB-D based depth completion and multi-view depth estimation. Moreover, we introduce a depth refinement module based on confidence estimation to fuse predicted depth maps from single-view and multi-view modules, which further refines the restored depth map. The extensive experiments on the ClearPose and TransCG datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and robustness in complex scenarios with significant occlusion compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Generating grasps for a dexterous hand often requires numerous grasping annotations. However, annotating high DoF dexterous hand poses is quite challenging. Especially for functional grasps, requiring the hand to grasp the object in a specific pose to facilitate subsequent manipulations. This prompts us to explore how people achieve manipulations on new objects based on past grasp experiences. We find that when grasping new items, people are adept at discovering and leveraging various similarities between objects, including shape, layout, and grasp type. Considering this, we analyze and collect grasp-related similarity relationships among 51 common tool-like object categories and annotate semantic grasp representation for 1768 objects. These objects are connected through similarities to form a knowledge graph, which helps infer our proposed cross-category functional grasp synthesis. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the grasp-related knowledge indeed contributed to achieving functional grasp transfer across unknown or entirely new categories of objects.

With the proliferation of Audio Language Model (ALM) based deepfake audio, there is an urgent need for generalized detection methods. ALM-based deepfake audio currently exhibits widespread, high deception, and type versatility, posing a significant challenge to current audio deepfake detection (ADD) models trained solely on vocoded data. To effectively detect ALM-based deepfake audio, we focus on the mechanism of the ALM-based audio generation method, the conversion from neural codec to waveform. We initially constructed the Codecfake dataset, an open-source, large-scale collection comprising over 1 million audio samples in both English and Chinese, focus on ALM-based audio detection. As countermeasure, to achieve universal detection of deepfake audio and tackle domain ascent bias issue of original sharpness aware minimization (SAM), we propose the CSAM strategy to learn a domain balanced and generalized minima. In our experiments, we first demonstrate that ADD model training with the Codecfake dataset can effectively detects ALM-based audio. Furthermore, our proposed generalization countermeasure yields the lowest average equal error rate (EER) of 0.616% across all test conditions compared to baseline models. The dataset and associated code are available online.

The receiver design for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) systems can be a tough task due to the use of short channel codes and few pilot symbols. Consequently, error propagation can occur in traditional turbo receivers, leading to performance degradation. Moreover, the processing delay induced by information exchange between different modules may also be undesirable for URLLC. To address the issues, we advocate to perform joint channel estimation, detection, and decoding (JCDD) for MIMO URLLC systems encoded by short low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Specifically, we develop two novel JCDD problem formulations based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion for Gaussian MIMO channels and sparse mmWave MIMO channels, respectively, which integrate the pilots, the bit-to-symbol mapping, the LDPC code constraints, as well as the channel statistical information. Both the challenging large-scale non-convex problems are then solved based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithms, where closed-form solutions are achieved in each ADMM iteration. Furthermore, two JCDD neural networks, called JCDDNet-G and JCDDNet-S, are built by unfolding the derived ADMM algorithms and introducing trainable parameters. It is interesting to find via simulations that the proposed trainable JCDD receivers can outperform the turbo receivers with affordable computational complexities., Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications