Search

The intense magnetic fields present in neutron stars are closely linked to their observed temperature and spectral characteristics, timing properties, including spin period and its derivatives. Therefore, a comprehensive theoretical analysis of magnetic field evolution is essential for understanding how the strength of the magnetic field change over time. The decay rate of magnetic field in isolated, non-accreting neutron stars can be assessed by evaluating the second derivative of the spin frequency. Another method to estimate this rate involves monitoring an increase in thermal emission beyond what is expected from standard cooling processes, assuming no additional heating mechanisms are present. Our findings indicate that for X-ray emitting isolated neutron stars, the evolution rate of spin period derivative aligns with the dissipation rate of magnetic energy from the dipolar field, provided that a substantial portion of the released energy is emitted as X-rays. The time scale of magnetic field decay is found to be much shorter than typical age of radio pulsars., Comment: 6 pages including 1 figure and 1 table

Federated Learning (FL) offers a decentralized paradigm for collaborative model training without direct data sharing, yet it poses unique challenges for Domain Generalization (DG), including strict privacy constraints, non-i.i.d. local data, and limited domain diversity. We introduce FedAlign, a lightweight, privacy-preserving framework designed to enhance DG in federated settings by simultaneously increasing feature diversity and promoting domain invariance. First, a cross-client feature extension module broadens local domain representations through domain-invariant feature perturbation and selective cross-client feature transfer, allowing each client to safely access a richer domain space. Second, a dual-stage alignment module refines global feature learning by aligning both feature embeddings and predictions across clients, thereby distilling robust, domain-invariant features. By integrating these modules, our method achieves superior generalization to unseen domains while maintaining data privacy and operating with minimal computational and communication overhead., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Background: RETFound, a self-supervised, retina-specific foundation model (FM), showed potential in downstream applications. However, its comparative performance with traditional deep learning (DL) models remains incompletely understood. This study aimed to evaluate RETFound against three ImageNet-pretrained supervised DL models (ResNet50, ViT-base, SwinV2) in detecting ocular and systemic diseases. Methods: We fine-tuned/trained RETFound and three DL models on full datasets, 50%, 20%, and fixed sample sizes (400, 200, 100 images, with half comprising disease cases; for each DR severity class, 100 and 50 cases were used. Fine-tuned models were tested internally using the SEED (53,090 images) and APTOS-2019 (3,672 images) datasets and externally validated on population-based (BES, CIEMS, SP2, UKBB) and open-source datasets (ODIR-5k, PAPILA, GAMMA, IDRiD, MESSIDOR-2). Model performance was compared using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and Z-tests with Bonferroni correction (P<0.05/3). Interpretation: Traditional DL models are mostly comparable to RETFound for ocular disease detection with large datasets. However, RETFound is superior in systemic disease detection with smaller datasets. These findings offer valuable insights into the respective merits and limitation of traditional models and FMs.

Approximating the ground state of many-body systems is a key computational bottleneck underlying important applications in physics and chemistry. It has long been viewed as a promising application for quantum computers. The most widely known quantum algorithm for ground state approximation, quantum phase estimation, is out of reach of current quantum processors due to its high circuit-depths. Quantum diagonalization algorithms based on subspaces represent alternatives to phase estimation, which are feasible for pre-fault-tolerant and early-fault-tolerant quantum computers. Here, we introduce a quantum diagonalization algorithm which combines two key ideas on quantum subspaces: a classical diagonalization based on quantum samples, and subspaces constructed with quantum Krylov states. We prove that our algorithm converges in polynomial time under the working assumptions of Krylov quantum diagonalization and sparseness of the ground state. We then show numerical investigations of lattice Hamiltonians, which indicate that our method can outperform existing Krylov quantum diagonalization in the presence of shot noise, making our approach well-suited for near-term quantum devices. Finally, we carry out the largest ground-state quantum simulation of the single-impurity Anderson model on a system with $41$ bath sites, using $85$ qubits and up to $6 \cdot 10^3$ two-qubit gates on a Heron quantum processor, showing excellent agreement with density matrix renormalization group calculations., Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures

Metallic amorphous ferrimagnets derived from alloying 3d transition metals with 4f electron rare earths host fascinating effects of compensation between the 3d and 4f magnetic sublattices. Here, a detailed study of anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR), planar Hall effect (PHE) and anomalous Hall effect (AHE) are reported on a series of CoHo thin films over a wide field temperature phase space. Close to magnetic compensation temperature, the AHE loops show a double sign reversal and signatures of spin flop transition at higher fields. The AMR and PHE also display strong deviations from the classical angular dependence seen in soft ferromagnets like permalloy as the angle between in-plane current and magnetic field is scanned from 0 to 360 degrees. It is argued that the non zero orbital angular momentum of Ho ions in the lattice and stabilization of bubble domains below magnetic saturation may be responsible for such features. Direct imaging of magnetic textures with X ray photoelectron microscopy shows formation of stripe domain patterns in the regime of sublattice compensation. Such stripes are likely to transform into magnetic bubbles before full saturation is reached in a large magnetic field.

In large-scale software development, understanding the functionality and intent behind complex codebases is critical for effective development and maintenance. While code summarization has been widely studied, existing methods primarily focus on smaller code units, such as functions, and struggle with larger code artifacts like files and packages. Additionally, current summarization models tend to emphasize low-level implementation details, often overlooking the domain and business context that are crucial for real-world applications. This paper proposes a two-step hierarchical approach for repository-level code summarization, tailored to business applications. First, smaller code units such as functions and variables are identified using syntax analysis and summarized with local LLMs. These summaries are then aggregated to generate higher-level file and package summaries. To ensure the summaries are grounded in business context, we design custom prompts that capture the intended purpose of code artifacts based on the domain and problem context of the business application. We evaluate our approach on a business support system (BSS) for the telecommunications domain, showing that syntax analysis-based hierarchical summarization improves coverage, while business-context grounding enhances the relevance of the generated summaries., Comment: To appear at LLM4Code@ICSE 2025

Accurate, interpretable, and real-time modeling of multi-body dynamical systems is essential for predicting behaviors and inferring physical properties in natural and engineered environments. Traditional physics-based models face scalability challenges and are computationally demanding, while data-driven approaches like Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often lack physical consistency, interpretability, and generalization. In this paper, we propose Dynami-CAL GraphNet, a Physics-Informed Graph Neural Network that integrates the learning capabilities of GNNs with physics-based inductive biases to address these limitations. Dynami-CAL GraphNet enforces pairwise conservation of linear and angular momentum for interacting nodes using edge-local reference frames that are equivariant to rotational symmetries, invariant to translations, and equivariant to node permutations. This design ensures physically consistent predictions of node dynamics while offering interpretable, edge-wise linear and angular impulses resulting from pairwise interactions. Evaluated on a 3D granular system with inelastic collisions, Dynami-CAL GraphNet demonstrates stable error accumulation over extended rollouts, effective extrapolations to unseen configurations, and robust handling of heterogeneous interactions and external forces. Dynami-CAL GraphNet offers significant advantages in fields requiring accurate, interpretable, and real-time modeling of complex multi-body dynamical systems, such as robotics, aerospace engineering, and materials science. By providing physically consistent and scalable predictions that adhere to fundamental conservation laws, it enables the inference of forces and moments while efficiently handling heterogeneous interactions and external forces.

With the popularity of foundational models, parameter efficient fine tuning has become the defacto approach to leverage pretrained models to perform downstream tasks. Taking inspiration from recent advances in large language models, Visual Prompt Tuning, and similar techniques, learn an additional prompt to efficiently finetune a pretrained vision foundational model. However, we observe that such prompting is insufficient for fine-grained visual classification tasks such as medical image classification, where there is large inter-class variance, and small intra-class variance. Hence, in this paper we propose to leverage advanced segmentation capabilities of Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) as a visual prompting cue to help visual encoder in the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) by guiding the attention in CLIP visual encoder to relevant regions in the image. This helps the model to focus on highly discriminative regions, without getting distracted from visually similar background features, an essential requirement in a fewshot, finegrained classification setting. We evaluate our method on diverse medical datasets including X-rays, CT scans, and MRI images, and report an accuracy of (71%, 81%, 86%, 58%) from the proposed approach on (COVID, lung-disease, brain-tumor, breast-cancer) datasets against (66%, 70%, 68%, 29%) from a pretrained CLIP model after fewshot training. The proposed approach also allows to obtain interpretable explanation for the classification performance through the localization obtained using segmentation.

We consider the problem of estimating the state transition matrix of a linear time-invariant (LTI) system, given access to multiple independent trajectories sampled from the system. Several recent papers have conducted a non-asymptotic analysis of this problem, relying crucially on the assumption that the process noise is either Gaussian or sub-Gaussian, i.e., "light-tailed". In sharp contrast, we work under a significantly weaker noise model, assuming nothing more than the existence of the fourth moment of the noise distribution. For this setting, we provide the first set of results demonstrating that one can obtain sample-complexity bounds for linear system identification that are nearly of the same order as under sub-Gaussian noise. To achieve such results, we develop a novel robust system identification algorithm that relies on constructing multiple weakly-concentrated estimators, and then boosting their performance using suitable tools from high-dimensional robust statistics. Interestingly, our analysis reveals how the kurtosis of the noise distribution, a measure of heavy-tailedness, affects the number of trajectories needed to achieve desired estimation error bounds. Finally, we show that our algorithm and analysis technique can be easily extended to account for scenarios where an adversary can arbitrarily corrupt a small fraction of the collected trajectory data. Our work takes the first steps towards building a robust statistical learning theory for control under non-ideal assumptions on the data-generating process.

Motivated by phenomenology of myriad recently-identified topologically non-trivial phases of matter, we introduce effective field theories (EFTs) for the quantum skyrmion Hall effect (QSkHE). We employ a single, unifying generalisation for this purpose: in essence, a lowest Landau level projection defining a non-commutative, fuzzy sphere with position coordinates proportional to SU(2) generators of matrix representation size $N\times N$, may host an intrinsically 2+1 dimensional, topologically non-trivial many-body state for small $N$ as well as large $N$. That is, isospin degrees of freedom associated with a matrix Lie algebra with $N \times N$ generators potentially encode some finite number of spatial dimensions for $N\ge 2$, a regime in which isospin has previously been treated as a label. This statement extends to more general $p$-branes subjected to severe fuzzification as well as membranes. As a consequence of this generalisation, systems with $d$ Cartesian spatial coordinates and isospin degrees of freedom encoding an additional $\delta$ fuzzy coset space coordinates can realise topologically non-trivial states of intrinsic dimensionality up to $d$+$\delta$+1. We therefore identify gauge theories with extra fuzzy dimensions generalised to retain dependence upon gauge fields over fuzzy coset spaces even for severe fuzzification (small $N$), as EFTs for the QSkHE. We furthermore generalise these EFTs to space manifolds with local product structure exploiting the dimensional hierarchy of (fuzzy) spheres. For this purpose, we introduce methods of anisotropic fuzzification and propose formulating topological invariants on fuzzy coset spaces as artifacts of projecting matrix Lie algebras to occupied subspaces. Importantly, we focus on phenomenology indicating the 2+1 D SU(2) gauge theory should be generalised using this machinery, and serves as a minimal EFT of the QSkHE., Comment: 25 pages and 11 figures; Companion papers are Ay et al. (arXiv:2412.19568), Banerjee et al. (arXiv:2412.19566)

ObitoNet employs a Cross Attention mechanism to integrate multimodal inputs, where Vision Transformers (ViT) extract semantic features from images and a point cloud tokenizer processes geometric information using Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) and K Nearest Neighbors (KNN) for spatial structure capture. The learned multimodal features are fed into a transformer-based decoder for high-resolution point cloud reconstruction. This approach leverages the complementary strengths of both modalities rich image features and precise geometric details ensuring robust point cloud generation even in challenging conditions such as sparse or noisy data.

We build upon time-series classification by leveraging the capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs). We find that VLMs produce competitive results after two or less epochs of fine-tuning. We develop a novel approach that incorporates graphical data representations as images in conjunction with numerical data. This approach is rooted in the hypothesis that graphical representations can provide additional contextual information that numerical data alone may not capture. Additionally, providing a graphical representation can circumvent issues such as limited context length faced by LLMs. To further advance this work, we implemented a scalable end-to-end pipeline for training on different scenarios, allowing us to isolate the most effective strategies for transferring learning capabilities from LLMs to Time Series Classification (TSC) tasks. Our approach works with univariate and multivariate time-series data. In addition, we conduct extensive and practical experiments to show how this approach works for time-series classification and generative labels.

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have sparked growing interest in developing LM agents. While fully autonomous agents could excel in many scenarios, numerous use cases inherently require them to collaborate with humans due to humans' latent preferences, domain expertise, or need for control. To facilitate the study of human-agent collaboration, we present Collaborative Gym (Co-Gym), a general framework enabling asynchronous, tripartite interaction among agents, humans, and task environments. We instantiate Co-Gym with three representative tasks in both simulated and real-world conditions, and propose an evaluation framework that assesses both the collaboration outcomes and processes. Our findings reveal that collaborative agents consistently outperform their fully autonomous counterparts in task performance within those delivered cases, achieving win rates of 86% in Travel Planning, 74% in Tabular Analysis, and 66% in Related Work when evaluated by real users. However, our study also highlights significant challenges in developing collaborative agents, requiring advancements in core aspects of intelligence -- communication capabilities, situational awareness, and balancing autonomy and human control., Comment: Preprint. Work in progress

This summary of the second Terrestrial Very-Long-Baseline Atom Interferometry (TVLBAI) Workshop provides a comprehensive overview of our meeting held in London in April 2024, building on the initial discussions during the inaugural workshop held at CERN in March 2023. Like the summary of the first workshop, this document records a critical milestone for the international atom interferometry community. It documents our concerted efforts to evaluate progress, address emerging challenges, and refine strategic directions for future large-scale atom interferometry projects. Our commitment to collaboration is manifested by the integration of diverse expertise and the coordination of international resources, all aimed at advancing the frontiers of atom interferometry physics and technology, as set out in a Memorandum of Understanding signed by over 50 institutions., Comment: Summary of the second Terrestrial Very-Long-Baseline Atom Interferometry Workshop held at Imperial College London: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1369392/

Magnetic reconnection, a fundamental plasma process, is pivotal in understanding energy conversion and particle acceleration in astrophysical systems. While extensively studied in two-dimensional (2D) configurations, the dynamics of reconnection in three-dimensional (3D) systems remain under-explored. In this work, we extend the classical tearing mode instability to 3D by introducing a modulation along the otherwise uniform direction in a 2D equilibrium, given by $g(y)$, mimicking a flux tube-like configuration. We perform linear stability analysis (both analytically and numerically) and direct numerical simulations to investigate the effects of three-dimensionality. Our findings reveal that the 3D tearing instability exhibits reduced growth rates compared to 2D by a factor of $\int g(y)^{1/2} dy~/\int dy$, with the dispersion relation maintaining similar scaling characteristics. We show that the modulation introduces spatially varying resistive layer properties, which influence the reconnection dynamics. Remarkably, we find that Sweet-Parker scaling for the reconnection rate persists even in the absence of a guide field., Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, comments are welcome

Gaussian Splatting has changed the game for real-time photo-realistic rendering. One of the most popular applications of Gaussian Splatting is to create animatable avatars, known as Gaussian Avatars. Recent works have pushed the boundaries of quality and rendering efficiency but suffer from two main limitations. Either they require expensive multi-camera rigs to produce avatars with free-view rendering, or they can be trained with a single camera but only rendered at high quality from this fixed viewpoint. An ideal model would be trained using a short monocular video or image from available hardware, such as a webcam, and rendered from any view. To this end, we propose GASP: Gaussian Avatars with Synthetic Priors. To overcome the limitations of existing datasets, we exploit the pixel-perfect nature of synthetic data to train a Gaussian Avatar prior. By fitting this prior model to a single photo or video and fine-tuning it, we get a high-quality Gaussian Avatar, which supports 360$^\circ$ rendering. Our prior is only required for fitting, not inference, enabling real-time application. Through our method, we obtain high-quality, animatable Avatars from limited data which can be animated and rendered at 70fps on commercial hardware. See our project page (https://microsoft.github.io/GASP/) for results., Comment: Project page: https://microsoft.github.io/GASP/

As command-line interfaces remain integral to high-performance computing environments, the risk of exploitation through stealthy and complex command-line abuse grows. Conventional security solutions struggle to detect these anomalies due to their context-specific nature, lack of labeled data, and the prevalence of sophisticated attacks like Living-off-the-Land (LOL). To address this gap, we introduce the Scalable Command-Line Anomaly Detection Engine (SCADE), a framework that combines global statistical models with local context-specific analysis for unsupervised anomaly detection. SCADE leverages novel statistical methods, including BM25 and Log Entropy, alongside dynamic thresholding to adaptively detect rare, malicious command-line patterns in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments. Experimental results show that SCADE achieves above 98% SNR in identifying anomalous behavior while minimizing false positives. Designed for scalability and precision, SCADE provides an innovative, metadata-enriched approach to anomaly detection, offering a robust solution for cybersecurity in high-computation environments. This work presents SCADE's architecture, detection methodology, and its potential for enhancing anomaly detection in enterprise systems. We argue that SCADE represents a significant advancement in unsupervised anomaly detection, offering a robust, adaptive framework for security analysts and researchers seeking to enhance detection accuracy in high-computation environments., Comment: Updated title and abstract for broader scope. Submitted to ACM CODASPY (The 15th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy) Conference

We present a novel representation learning method for downstream tasks such as anomaly detection and unsupervised transient classification in high-energy datasets. This approach enabled the discovery of a new fast X-ray transient (FXT) in the Chandra archive, XRT 200515, a needle-in-the-haystack event and the first Chandra FXT of its kind. Recent serendipitous breakthroughs in X-ray astronomy, including FXTs from binary neutron star mergers and an extragalactic planetary transit candidate, highlight the need for systematic transient searches in X-ray archives. We introduce new event file representations, E-t Maps and E-t-dt Cubes, designed to capture both temporal and spectral information, effectively addressing the challenges posed by variable-length event file time series in machine learning applications. Our pipeline extracts low-dimensional, informative features from these representations using principal component analysis or sparse autoencoders, followed by clustering in the embedding space with DBSCAN. New transients are identified within transient-dominant clusters or through nearest-neighbor searches around known transients, producing a catalog of 3,539 candidates (3,427 flares and 112 dips). XRT 200515 exhibits unique temporal and spectral variability, including an intense, hard <10 s initial burst followed by spectral softening in an ~800 s oscillating tail. We interpret XRT 200515 as either the first giant magnetar flare observed at low X-ray energies or the first extragalactic Type I X-ray burst from a faint LMXB in the LMC. Our method extends to datasets from other observatories such as XMM-Newton, Swift-XRT, eROSITA, Einstein Probe, and upcoming missions like AXIS., Comment: 25 pages, submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, presented at the 2023 Conference on Machine Learning in Astronomical Surveys (ML-IAP/CCA-2023)

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has led to increasingly sophisticated deep learning models, which frequently operate as opaque 'black boxes' with limited transparency in their decision-making processes. This lack of interpretability presents considerable challenges, especially in high-stakes applications where understanding the rationale behind a model's outputs is as essential as the outputs themselves. This study addresses the pressing need for interpretability in AI systems, emphasizing its role in fostering trust, ensuring accountability, and promoting responsible deployment in mission-critical fields. To address the interpretability challenge in deep learning, we introduce DLBacktrace, an innovative technique developed by the AryaXAI team to illuminate model decisions across a wide array of domains, including simple Multi Layer Perceptron (MLPs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Computer Vision Models, and more. We provide a comprehensive overview of the DLBacktrace algorithm and present benchmarking results, comparing its performance against established interpretability methods, such as SHAP, LIME, GradCAM, Integrated Gradients, SmoothGrad, and Attention Rollout, using diverse task-based metrics. The proposed DLBacktrace technique is compatible with various model architectures built in PyTorch and TensorFlow, supporting models like Llama 3.2, other NLP architectures such as BERT and LSTMs, computer vision models like ResNet and U-Net, as well as custom deep neural network (DNN) models for tabular data. This flexibility underscores DLBacktrace's adaptability and effectiveness in enhancing model transparency across a broad spectrum of applications. The library is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/AryaXAI/DLBacktrace .

We introduce the Latent Entropy (L-entropy) as a novel measure to characterize the genuine multipartite entanglement in quantum systems. Our measure leverages the upper bound of reflected entropy, achieving maximal values for $n$-party 2-uniform states ($n\geq 4$) and GHZ state for 3-party quantum systems. We demonstrate that the measure functions as a multipartite pure state entanglement monotone and briefly address its extension to mixed multipartite states. We then analyze its interesting characteristics in spin chain models and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Subsequently, we explore its implications to holography by deriving a Page-like curve for the L-entropy in the CFT dual to a multi-boundary wormhole model. Furthermore, we examine the behavior of L-entropy in Haar random states, deriving analytical expressions and validating them against numerical results. In particular, we show that for $n \geq 5$, random states approximate 2-uniform states with maximal multipartite entanglement. Furthermore, we propose a potential connection between random states and multi-boundary wormhole geometries. Extending to finite-temperature systems, we introduce the Multipartite Thermal Pure Quantum (MTPQ) state, a multipartite generalization of the thermal pure quantum state, and explore its entanglement properties. By incorporating state dependent construction of MTPQ state, we resolve the factorization issue in the random average of the MTPQ state, ensuring consistency with the correlation functions in the holographic dual multiboundary wormhole. Finally, we apply this construction to the multi-copy SYK model and examine its multipartite entanglement structure., Comment: 58 pages, 34 figures

Word embeddings have been shown to produce remarkable results in tackling a vast majority of NLP related tasks. Unfortunately, word embeddings also capture the stereotypical biases that are prevalent in society, affecting the predictive performance of the embeddings when used in downstream tasks. While various techniques have been proposed \cite{bolukbasi2016man, zhao2018learning} and criticized\cite{gonen2019lipstick} for static embeddings, very little work has focused on mitigating bias in contextual embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel objective function for MLM(Masked-Language Modeling) which largely mitigates the gender bias in contextual embeddings and also preserves the performance for downstream tasks. Since previous works on measuring bias in contextual embeddings lack in normative reasoning, we also propose novel evaluation metrics that are straight-forward and aligned with our motivations in debiasing. We also propose new methods for debiasing static embeddings and provide empirical proof via extensive analysis and experiments, as to why the main source of bias in static embeddings stems from the presence of stereotypical names rather than gendered words themselves. All experiments and embeddings studied are in English, unless otherwise specified.\citep{bender2011achieving}.

With the rapid advancement of neural language models, the deployment of over-parameterized models has surged, increasing the need for interpretable explanations comprehensible to human inspectors. Existing post-hoc interpretability methods, which often focus on unigram features of single input textual instances, fail to capture the models' decision-making process fully. Additionally, many methods do not differentiate between decisions based on spurious correlations and those based on a holistic understanding of the input. Our paper introduces DISCO, a novel method for discovering global, rule-based explanations by identifying causal n-gram associations with model predictions. This method employs a scalable sequence mining technique to extract relevant text spans from training data, associate them with model predictions, and conduct causality checks to distill robust rules that elucidate model behavior. These rules expose potential overfitting and provide insights into misleading feature combinations. We validate DISCO through extensive testing, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods in offering comprehensive insights into complex model behaviors. Our approach successfully identifies all shortcuts manually introduced into the training data (100% detection rate on the MultiRC dataset), resulting in an 18.8% regression in model performance -- a capability unmatched by any other method. Furthermore, DISCO supports interactive explanations, enabling human inspectors to distinguish spurious causes in the rule-based output. This alleviates the burden of abundant instance-wise explanations and helps assess the model's risk when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) data.

Wind energy's role in the global electric grid is set to expand significantly. New York State alone anticipates offshore wind farms (WFs) contributing 9GW by 2035. Integration of energy storage emerges as crucial for this advancement. In this study, we focus on a WF paired with a captive battery energy storage system (BESS). We aim to ascertain the capacity credit for a BESS with specified energy and power ratings. Unlike prior methods rooted in reliability theory, we define a power alignment function, which leads to a straightforward definition of capacity and incremental capacity for the BESS. We develop a solution method based on a linear programming formulation. Our analysis utilizes wind data, collected by NYSERDA off Long Island's coast and load demand data from NYISO. Additionally, we present theoretical insights into BESS sizing and a key time-series property influencing BESS capacity, aiding in simulating wind and demand for estimating BESS energy requirements.

The spatio-temporal nature of live-cell microscopy data poses challenges in the analysis of cell states which is fundamental in bioimaging. Deep-learning based segmentation or tracking methods rely on large amount of high quality annotations to work effectively. In this work, we explore an alternative solution: using feature maps obtained from self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) on time arrow prediction (TAP) for the downstream supervised task of cell event recognition. We demonstrate through extensive experiments and analysis that this approach can achieve better performance with limited annotation compared to models trained from end to end using fully supervised approach. Our analysis also provides insight into applications of the SSRL using TAP in live-cell microscopy.

The strongly polarizing political discourse in the U. S. implies that a small minority of the population, determining the outcome of the presidential elections in a few so called battleground-states, also determines the outcome of the overall election. Given the almost equal distributions of the electoral college members in the so-called blue and red states, the members elected from these battleground states would determine the election results. We build a kinetic exchange opinion model that takes into account the dynamical nature of the opinions of the individuals in the battleground states and the already determined core voters of the non-battleground states. In a fully connected graph, we consider the interaction among the population in the battleground states while the agents in the non-battleground states are assumed to have fixed opinions. We provide the analytical results and numerical simulations using realistic parameters from the opinion poll of the previous election's data. Counter-intuitively, a more noisy environment predicts a higher chance of the Democrats' win., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Knowledge Graphs have emerged as a compelling abstraction for capturing key relationship among the entities of interest to enterprises and for integrating data from heterogeneous sources. JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) is leading this trend by leveraging knowledge graphs across the organization for multiple mission critical applications such as risk assessment, fraud detection, investment advice, etc. A core problem in leveraging a knowledge graph is to link mentions (e.g., company names) that are encountered in textual sources to entities in the knowledge graph. Although several techniques exist for entity linking, they are tuned for entities that exist in Wikipedia, and fail to generalize for the entities that are of interest to an enterprise. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end neural entity linking model (JEL) that uses minimal context information and a margin loss to generate entity embeddings, and a Wide & Deep Learning model to match character and semantic information respectively. We show that JEL achieves the state-of-the-art performance to link mentions of company names in financial news with entities in our knowledge graph. We report on our efforts to deploy this model in the company-wide system to generate alerts in response to financial news. The methodology used for JEL is directly applicable and usable by other enterprises who need entity linking solutions for data that are unique to their respective situations., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, IAAI-21

Knowledge graphs have gained popularity for their ability to organize and analyze complex data effectively. When combined with graph embedding techniques, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), knowledge graphs become a potent tool in providing valuable insights. This study explores the application of graph embedding in identifying competitors from a financial knowledge graph. Existing state-of-the-art(SOTA) models face challenges due to the unique attributes of our knowledge graph, including directed and undirected relationships, attributed nodes, and minimal annotated competitor connections. To address these challenges, we propose a novel graph embedding model, JPEC(JPMorgan Proximity Embedding for Competitor Detection), which utilizes graph neural network to learn from both first-order and second-order node proximity together with vital features for competitor retrieval. JPEC had outperformed most existing models in extensive experiments, showcasing its effectiveness in competitor retrieval., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted by SIGIR'24

This work introduces Hierarchical Preference Optimization (HPO), a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) that addresses non-stationarity and infeasible subgoal generation issues when solving complex robotic control tasks. HPO leverages maximum entropy reinforcement learning combined with token-level Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), eliminating the need for pre-trained reference policies that are typically unavailable in challenging robotic scenarios. Mathematically, we formulate HRL as a bi-level optimization problem and transform it into a primitive-regularized DPO formulation, ensuring feasible subgoal generation and avoiding degenerate solutions. Extensive experiments on challenging robotic navigation and manipulation tasks demonstrate impressive performance of HPO, where it shows an improvement of up to 35% over the baselines. Furthermore, ablation studies validate our design choices, and quantitative analyses confirm the ability of HPO to mitigate non-stationarity and infeasible subgoal generation issues in HRL.

Research into community content moderation often assumes that moderation teams govern with a single, unified voice. However, recent work has found that moderators disagree with one another at modest, but concerning rates. The problem is not the root disagreements themselves. Subjectivity in moderation is unavoidable, and there are clear benefits to including diverse perspectives within a moderation team. Instead, the crux of the issue is that, due to resource constraints, moderation decisions end up being made by individual decision-makers. The result is decision-making that is inconsistent, which is frustrating for community members. To address this, we develop Venire, an ML-backed system for panel review on Reddit. Venire uses a machine learning model trained on log data to identify the cases where moderators are most likely to disagree. Venire fast-tracks these cases for multi-person review. Ideally, Venire allows moderators to surface and resolve disagreements that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. We conduct three studies through which we design and evaluate Venire: a set of formative interviews with moderators, technical evaluations on two datasets, and a think-aloud study in which moderators used Venire to make decisions on real moderation cases. Quantitatively, we demonstrate that Venire is able to improve decision consistency and surface latent disagreements. Qualitatively, we find that Venire helps moderators resolve difficult moderation cases more confidently. Venire represents a novel paradigm for human-AI content moderation, and shifts the conversation from replacing human decision-making to supporting it.

To prevent unauthorized use of text in images, Scene Text Removal (STR) has become a crucial task. It focuses on automatically removing text and replacing it with a natural, text-less background while preserving significant details such as texture, color, and contrast. Despite its importance in privacy protection, STR faces several challenges, including boundary artifacts, inconsistent texture and color, and preserving correct shadows. Most STR approaches estimate a text region mask to train a model, solving for image translation or inpainting to generate a text-free image. Thus, the quality of the generated image depends on the accuracy of the inpainting mask and the generator's capability. In this work, we leverage the superior capabilities of diffusion models in generating high-quality, consistent images to address the STR problem. We introduce a ControlNet diffusion model, treating STR as an inpainting task. To enhance the model's robustness, we develop a mask pretraining pipeline to condition our diffusion model. This involves training a masked autoencoder (MAE) using a combination of box masks and coarse stroke masks, and fine-tuning it using masks derived from our novel segmentation-based mask refinement framework. This framework iteratively refines an initial mask and segments it using the SLIC and Hierarchical Feature Selection (HFS) algorithms to produce an accurate final text mask. This improves mask prediction and utilizes rich textural information in natural scene images to provide accurate inpainting masks. Experiments on the SCUT-EnsText and SCUT-Syn datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques., Comment: 11 Pages, 6 Figures, 3 Tables

Large Language Models (LLMs) for public use require continuous pre-training to remain up-to-date with the latest data. The models also need to be fine-tuned with specific instructions to maintain their ability to follow instructions accurately. Typically, LLMs are released in two versions: the Base LLM, pre-trained on diverse data, and the instruction-refined LLM, additionally trained with specific instructions for better instruction following. The question arises as to which model should undergo continuous pre-training to maintain its instruction-following abilities while also staying current with the latest data. In this study, we delve into the intricate relationship between continuous pre-training and instruction fine-tuning of the LLMs and investigate the impact of continuous pre-training on the instruction following abilities of both the base and its instruction finetuned model. Further, the instruction fine-tuning process is computationally intense and requires a substantial number of hand-annotated examples for the model to learn effectively. This study aims to find the most compute-efficient strategy to gain up-to-date knowledge and instruction-following capabilities without requiring any instruction data and fine-tuning. We empirically prove our findings on the LLaMa 3, 3.1 and Qwen 2, 2.5 family of base and instruction models, providing a comprehensive exploration of our hypotheses across varying sizes of pre-training data corpus and different LLMs settings.

The Hellinger distance between quantum states is a significant measure in quantum information theory, known for its Riemannian and monotonic properties. It is also easier to compute than the Bures distance, another measure that shares these properties. In this work, we derive the mean and variance of the Hellinger distance between pairs of density matrices, where one or both matrices are random. Along the way, we also obtain exact results for the mean affinity and mean square affinity. The first two cumulants of the Hellinger distance allow us to propose an approximation for the corresponding probability density function based on the gamma distribution. Our analytical results are corroborated through Monte Carlo simulations, showing excellent agreement., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Federated learning (FL) leverages client-server communications to train global models on decentralized data. However, communication noise or errors can impair model accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a novel FL algorithm that enhances robustness against communication noise while also reducing communication load. We derive the proposed algorithm through solving the weighted least-squares (WLS) regression problem as an illustrative example. We first frame WLS regression as a distributed convex optimization problem over a federated network employing random scheduling for improved communication efficiency. We then apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to iteratively solve this problem. To counteract the detrimental effects of cumulative communication noise, we introduce a key modification by eliminating the dual variable and implementing a new local model update at each participating client. This subtle yet effective change results in using a single noisy global model update at each client instead of two, improving robustness against additive communication noise. Furthermore, we incorporate another modification enabling clients to continue local updates even when not selected by the server, leading to substantial performance improvements. Our theoretical analysis confirms the convergence of our algorithm in both mean and the mean-square senses, even when the server communicates with a random subset of clients over noisy links at each iteration. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and corroborate our theoretical findings., Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, Submitted to IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing

We introduce Michelangelo: a minimal, synthetic, and unleaked long-context reasoning evaluation for large language models which is also easy to automatically score. This evaluation is derived via a novel, unifying framework for evaluations over arbitrarily long contexts which measure the model's ability to do more than retrieve a single piece of information from its context. The central idea of the Latent Structure Queries framework (LSQ) is to construct tasks which require a model to ``chisel away'' the irrelevant information in the context, revealing a latent structure in the context. To verify a model's understanding of this latent structure, we query the model for details of the structure. Using LSQ, we produce three diagnostic long-context evaluations across code and natural-language domains intended to provide a stronger signal of long-context language model capabilities. We perform evaluations on several state-of-the-art models and demonstrate both that a) the proposed evaluations are high-signal and b) that there is significant room for improvement in synthesizing long-context information.

Numerous methods have been proposed to adapt a pre-trained foundational CLIP model for few-shot classification. As CLIP is trained on a large corpus, it generalises well through adaptation to few-shot classification. In this work, we analyse the intra-modal overlap in image space in terms of embedding representation. Our analysis shows that, due to contrastive learning, embeddings from CLIP model exhibit high cosine similarity distribution overlap in the image space between paired and unpaired examples affecting the performance of few-shot training-free classification methods which rely on similarity in the image space for their predictions. To tackle intra-modal overlap we propose to train a lightweight adapter on a generic set of samples from the Google Open Images dataset demonstrating that this improves accuracy for few-shot training-free classification. We validate our contribution through extensive empirical analysis and demonstrate that reducing the intra-modal overlap leads to a) improved performance on a number of standard datasets, b) increased robustness to distribution shift and c) higher feature variance rendering the features more discriminative for downstream tasks., Comment: BMVC 2024, Oral

As large language models achieve increasingly impressive results, questions arise about whether such performance is from generalizability or mere data memorization. Thus, numerous data contamination detection methods have been proposed. However, these approaches are often validated with traditional benchmarks and early-stage LLMs, leaving uncertainty about their effectiveness when evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs on the contamination of more challenging benchmarks. To address this gap and provide a dual investigation of SOTA LLM contamination status and detection method robustness, we evaluate five contamination detection approaches with four state-of-the-art LLMs across eight challenging datasets often used in modern LLM evaluation. Our analysis reveals that (1) Current methods have non-trivial limitations in their assumptions and practical applications; (2) Notable difficulties exist in detecting contamination introduced during instruction fine-tuning with answer augmentation; and (3) Limited consistencies between SOTA contamination detection techniques. These findings highlight the complexity of contamination detection in advanced LLMs and the urgent need for further research on robust and generalizable contamination evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/vsamuel2003/data-contamination., Comment: Accepted to COLING 2025 12 pages, 1 figure

Spatial audio formats like Ambisonics are playback device layout-agnostic and well-suited for applications such as teleconferencing and virtual reality. Conventional Ambisonic encoding methods often rely on spherical microphone arrays for efficient sound field capture, which limits their flexibility in practical scenarios. We propose a deep learning (DL)-based approach, leveraging a two-stage network architecture for encoding circular microphone array signals into second-order Ambisonics (SOA) in multi-speaker environments. In addition, we introduce: (i) a novel loss function based on spatial power maps to regularize inter-channel correlations of the Ambisonic signals, and (ii) a channel permutation technique to resolve the ambiguity of encoding vertical information using a horizontal circular array. Evaluation on simulated speech and noise datasets shows that our approach consistently outperforms traditional signal processing (SP) and DL-based methods, providing significantly better timbral and spatial quality and higher source localization accuracy. Binaural audio demos with visualizations are available at https://bridgoon97.github.io/NeuralAmbisonicEncoding/., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2025

Hybrid double-network hydrogels are a class of material that comprise transiently and permanently crosslinked polymer networks and exhibit an enhanced toughness that is believed to be governed by the yielding of the transient polymer network. The precise role of the two polymer networks in this yielding transition and their interplay remains an open question that we address here through constructing a series of hydrogel designs in which the interaction within and between the two polymer networks are systematically inhibited or enhanced. We characterise each of the hydrogel designs using large amplitude oscillatory shear rheology (LAOS). Inspecting yielding through elastic stress across hydrogel designs, we elucidate that the hybrid double-network hydrogel exhibits a two-step yielding behaviour that originates from to the presence of transient crosslinks. Examining the rheological response within each oscillatory cycle and across the hydrogel designs, we show that the micro-structural changes in the transient network are crucial in the second stage of this yielding. We surmise that the first step of yielding is determined by the intermolecular interactions between the two polymer networks by systematically altering the strength of the interactions. These interactions also influence the second step of yielding, which we show is governed by the transient intermolecular interactions within the polymer networks. Our study therefore reveals that the interactions between the polymer networks are as crucial as within the polymer networks and therefore provides insights into how the yielding mechanisms in soft composite materials can be identified, adjusted, and controlled.