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Gas-fired units (GFUs) with rapid regulation capabilities are considered an effective tool to mitigate fluctuations in the generation of renewable energy sources and have coupled electricity power systems (EPSs) and natural gas systems (NGSs) more tightly. However, this tight coupling leads to uncertainty propagation, a challenge for the real-time dispatch of such integrated electric and gas systems (IEGSs). Moreover, pipeline leakage failures in the NGS may threaten the electricity supply reliability of the EPS through GFUs. To address these problems, this paper first establishes an operational model considering gas pipeline dynamic characteristics under uncertain leakage failures for the NGS and then presents a stochastic IEGS real-time economic dispatch (RTED) model considering both uncertainty propagation and pipeline leakage uncertainty. To quickly solve this complicated large-scale stochastic optimization problem, a novel notion of the coupling boundary dynamic adjustment region considering pipeline leakage failure (LCBDAR) is proposed to characterize the dynamic characteristics of the NGS boundary connecting GFUs. Based on the LCBDAR, a noniterative decentralized solution is proposed to decompose the original stochastic RTED model into two subproblems that are solved separately by the EPS and NGS operators, thus preserving their data privacy. In particular, only one-time data interaction from the NGS to the EPS is required. Case studies on several IEGSs at different scales demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In additive manufacturing (AM), particularly for laser-based metal AM, process optimization is crucial to the quality of products and the efficiency of production. The identification of optimal process parameters out of a vast parameter space, however, is a daunting task. Despite advances in simulations, the process optimization for specific materials and geometries is developed through a time-consuming trial-and-error approach, which often lacks the versatility to address multiple optimization objectives. Machine learning (ML) provides a powerful tool to accelerate the optimization process, but most current studies focus on simple single-track prints, which hardly translate to manufacturing 3D components for engineering applications. In this study, we develop an Accurate Inverse process optimization framework in laser Directed Energy Deposition (AIDED), based on machine learning models and a genetic algorithm, to aid process optimization in laser DED processes. Using the AIDED, we demonstrate the following: (i) Accurately predict single-track (R2 score 0.995), multi-track (R2 score 0.969), and multi-layer (1.07% and 10.75% error in width and height, respectively) cross-sectional melt pool geometries directly from process parameters; (ii) Determine appropriate hatch spacing and layer thickness for fabricating fully dense (density > 99.9%) multi-track and multi-layer prints; (iii) Inversely identify optimal process parameters directly from customizable application objectives within 1-3 hours. We also validate the effectiveness of the AIDED experimentally by achieving two exemplary targets: fast print speed and fine print resolution. Furthermore, we show the high transferability of the framework from stainless steel to pure nickel. With AIDED, we pave a new way for ''aiding'' the process optimization in the laser-based AM processes that is applicable to a wide range of materials.

Highly crystalline and easily feasible topological insulator-superconductor (TI-SC) heterostructures are crucial for the development of practical topological qubit devices. The optimal superconducting layer for TI-SC heterostructures should be highly resilient against external contaminations and structurally compatible with TIs. In this study, we provide a solution to this challenge by showcasing the growth of a highly crystalline TI-SC heterostructure using refractory TiN (111) as the superconducting layer. This approach can eliminate the need for in-situ cleaving or growth. More importantly, the TiN surface shows high resilience against contaminations during air exposure, as demonstrated by the successful recyclable growth of Bi2Se3. Our findings indicate that TI-SC heterostructures based on nitride films are compatible with device fabrication techniques, paving a path to the realization of practical topological qubit devices in the future., Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces

Compared to the widely investigated crystalline polymorphs of gallium oxide (Ga2O3), knowledge about its amorphous state is still limited. With the help of a machine-learning interatomic potential, we conducted large-scale atomistic simulations to investigate the glass transition and mechanical behavior of amorphous Ga2O3 (a-Ga2O3). During the quenching simulations, amorphization of gallium oxide melt is observed at ultrahigh cooling rates, including a distinct glass transition. The final densities at room temperature have up to 4% variance compared to experiments. The glass transition temperature is evaluated to range from 1234 K to 1348 K at different cooling rates. Structural analysis of the amorphous structure shows evident similarities in structural properties between a-Ga2O3 and amorphous alumina (a-Al2O3), such as radial distribution function, coordination distribution, and bond angle distribution. An amorphous gallium oxide structure that contains approximately one million atoms is prepared for the tension simulation. A highly plastic behavior is observed at room temperature in the tension simulations, comparable to amorphous alumina. With quantitative characterization methods, we show that a-Ga2O3 can possibly has a higher nucleation rate of localized plastic strain events compared to a-Al2O3, which can increase the material's resistance to shear banding formation during deformation., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, under review

In this paper, a theoretical method for the efficient creation and detection of deeply bound molecules in three-state $\Lambda$-type and five-state M-type molecular systems is proposed. The method is based on the three-state coincident pulses technique and the generalized five-state coincident pulses technique. For the three-state system, the technique can efficiently transfer the populations from the Feshbach state to the deeply-bound state via a train of $N$ pairs of resonant and coincident pump and Stokes pulses, with negligible transient populations of excited states. For the five-state system, it is found that this M-type system can be generalized into a $\Lambda$-type structure with the simplest resonant coupling under the assumption of large one-photon detuning together with a requirement of the relation among the four incident pulses. Thereafter, this generalized model permits us to employ the reduced three-state propagator to design four coincident pulses to achieve the desired population transfer. For the numerical study, $^{87}$Rb$_2$ is considered and, it is shown that the weakly-bound Feshbach molecules can be efficiently transferred to their deeply-bound states without strong laser pulses, and the populations of all intermediate states can be well suppressed., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2310.14499

This paper introduces well-balanced path-conservative discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for two-layer shallow water equations, ensuring exactness for both still water and moving water equilibrium steady states. The approach involves approximating the equilibrium variables within the DG piecewise polynomial space, while expressing the DG scheme in the form of path-conservative schemes. To robustly handle the nonconservative products governing momentum exchange between the layers, we incorporate the theory of Dal Maso, LeFloch, and Murat (DLM) within the DG method. Additionally, linear segment paths connecting the equilibrium functions are chosen to guarantee the well-balanced property of the resulting scheme. The simple ``lake-at-rest" steady state is naturally satisfied without any modification, while a specialized treatment of the numerical flux is crucial for preserving the moving water steady state. Extensive numerical examples in one and two dimensions validate the exact equilibrium preservation of the steady state solutions and demonstrate its high-order accuracy. The performance of the method and high-resolution results further underscore its potential as a robust approach for nonconservative hyperbolic balance laws.

3D Gaussian splatting has achieved very impressive performance in real-time novel view synthesis. However, it often suffers from over-reconstruction during Gaussian densification where high-variance image regions are covered by a few large Gaussians only, leading to blur and artifacts in the rendered images. We design a progressive frequency regularization (FreGS) technique to tackle the over-reconstruction issue within the frequency space. Specifically, FreGS performs coarse-to-fine Gaussian densification by exploiting low-to-high frequency components that can be easily extracted with low-pass and high-pass filters in the Fourier space. By minimizing the discrepancy between the frequency spectrum of the rendered image and the corresponding ground truth, it achieves high-quality Gaussian densification and alleviates the over-reconstruction of Gaussian splatting effectively. Experiments over multiple widely adopted benchmarks (e.g., Mip-NeRF360, Tanks-and-Temples and Deep Blending) show that FreGS achieves superior novel view synthesis and outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024. Project website: https://rogeraigc.github.io/FreGS-Page/

The keyhole phenomenon is widely observed in laser materials processing, including laser welding, remelting, cladding, drilling, and additive manufacturing. Keyhole-induced defects, primarily pores, dramatically affect the performance of final products, impeding the broad use of these laser-based technologies. The formation of these pores is typically associated with the dynamic behavior of the keyhole. So far, the accurate characterization and prediction of keyhole features, particularly keyhole depth, as a function of time has been a challenging task. In situ characterization of keyhole dynamic behavior using a synchrotron X-ray is complicated and expensive. Current simulations are hindered by their poor accuracies in predicting keyhole depths due to the lack of real-time laser absorptance data. Here, we develop a machine learning-aided simulation method that allows us to accurately predict keyhole depth over a wide range of processing parameters. Based on titanium and aluminum alloys, two commonly used engineering materials as examples, we achieve an accuracy with an error margin of 10 %, surpassing those simulated using other existing models (with an error margin in a range of 50-200 %). Our machine learning-aided simulation method is affordable and readily deployable for a large variety of materials, opening new doors to eliminate or reduce defects for a wide range of laser materials processing techniques.

In this paper, we develop a general framework for the design of the arbitrary high-order well-balanced discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for hyperbolic balance laws, including the compressible Euler equations with gravitation and the shallow water equations with horizontal temperature gradients (referred to as the Ripa model). Not only the hydrostatic equilibrium including the more complicated isobaric steady state in Ripa system, but our scheme is also well-balanced for the exact preservation of the moving equilibrium state. The strategy adopted is to approximate the equilibrium variables in the DG piecewise polynomial space, rather than the conservative variables, which is pivotal in the well-balanced property. Our approach provides flexibility in combination with any consistent numerical flux, and it is free of the reference equilibrium state recovery and the special source term treatment. This approach enables the construction of a well-balanced method for non-hydrostatic equilibria in Euler systems. Extensive numerical examples such as moving or isobaric equilibria validate the high order accuracy and exact equilibrium preservation for various flows given by hyperbolic balance laws. With a relatively coarse mesh, it is also possible to capture small perturbations at or close to steady flow without numerical oscillations.

Generating multi-camera street-view videos is critical for augmenting autonomous driving datasets, addressing the urgent demand for extensive and varied data. Due to the limitations in diversity and challenges in handling lighting conditions, traditional rendering-based methods are increasingly being supplanted by diffusion-based methods. However, a significant challenge in diffusion-based methods is ensuring that the generated sensor data preserve both intra-world consistency and inter-sensor coherence. To address these challenges, we combine an additional explicit world volume and propose the World Volume-aware Multi-camera Driving Scene Generator (WoVoGen). This system is specifically designed to leverage 4D world volume as a foundational element for video generation. Our model operates in two distinct phases: (i) envisioning the future 4D temporal world volume based on vehicle control sequences, and (ii) generating multi-camera videos, informed by this envisioned 4D temporal world volume and sensor interconnectivity. The incorporation of the 4D world volume empowers WoVoGen not only to generate high-quality street-view videos in response to vehicle control inputs but also to facilitate scene editing tasks., Comment: ECCV 2024

In this paper, an exact analytical solution is presented for achieving coherent population transfer and creating arbitrary coherent superposition states in a five-state chainwise system by a train of coincident pulses. We show that the solution of a five-state chainwise system can be reduced to an equivalent three-state $\Lambda$-type one with the simplest resonant coupling under the assumption of adiabatic elimination (AE) together with a requirement of the relation among the four incident pulses. In this method, all of four incident pulses at each step all have the same time dependence, but with specific magnitudes. The results show that, by using a train of appropriately coincident incident pulses, this technique enables complete population transfer, as well as the creation of arbitrary desired coherent superposition between initial and final states, while the population in all intermediate states is effectively suppressed. The complete physical explanation of the underlying mechanism is presented. The results are of potential interest in applications where high-fidelity multi-state quantum control is essential, e.g., quantum information, atom optics, formation of ultracold molecules, cavity QED, nuclear coherent population transfer, light transfer in waveguide arrays, etc.

Based on the quantum mechanical "Shortcut-to-Adiabatic passage" (STAP), a novel design for the efficient and robust multiple beam splitter is presented in this paper. This multiple beam splitter consists of one input and $N$ output waveguide channels, which are connected via a mediator waveguide (WG). To implement "STAP" but without additional couplings, this $(N+2)$-WG system is first reduced to a controllable $3$-WGs counterpart by "Morris-Shore" (MS) transformation. Consequently, the reduced system can be directly compatible with all possible "STAP" methods. The results show that this novel design can achieve arbitrary ratio of multiple beam splitting and can significantly shorten the length of the device, which expands the application of "STAP" in classical system and provides a direct visualization in space of typical ultra-fast phenomena in time. More uniquely, this new design exhibits a one-way energy transport behavior. These may have profound impacts on exploring quantum technologies for promoting advanced optical devices.

Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) and its variants, such as multi-state chainwise-STIRAP allow efficiently transferring the populations in multi-state system and have been widely used to prepare ultracold deeply-bound molecules. However, their transfer efficiencies are generally imperfect. The main obstacle is the presence of losses and the requirement to make the dynamics adiabatic. To this end, in the present paper a theoretical method for the efficient and robust creation and detection of deeply-bound molecules is proposed. The simple three- and five-level systems with states chainwise coupled by optical fields are considered. In the regime of large detuning, the major molecular losses are pre-suppressed by reducing the dynamics of the three- and five-level molecular systems to those of effective two- and three-level counterparts, respectively. Consequently, two-level counterpart can be directly compatible with two kinds of "Invariant-based Inverse Engineering" (IIE) recipes, the results show that both protocols give comparable performance and have good experimental feasibility. For the five-level case, by considering a relation among the four incident pulses, we show that the M-type structure can be generalized into an effective $Lambda$-type one with the simplest resonant coupling. Therefore, this generalized model can also be directly compatible with "IIE" recipe. Numerical calculations show that the weakly-bound molecules can be efficiently transferred to their deeply-bound states without strong laser intensity, and the stability against parameter variations is well preserved. Finally, the detection of ultracold deeply-bound molecules is discussed, the results show that all the protocols allow efficient detection of molecules.

Chainwise stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (C-STIRAP) in M-type molecular system is a good alternative in creating ultracold deeply-bound molecules when the typical STIRAP in {\Lambda}-type system does not work due to weak Frank-Condon factors between states. However, its creation efficiency under the smooth evolution is generally low. During the process, the population in the intermediate states may decay out quickly and the strong laser pulses may induce multi-photon processes. In this paper, we find that shortcut-to-adiabatic (STA) passage fits very well in improving the performance of the C-STIRAP. Currently, related discussions on the so-called chainwise stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage (C-STIRSAP) are rare. Here, we investigate this topic under the adiabatic elimination. Given a relation among the four incident pulses, it is quite interesting that the M-type system can be generalized into an effective {\Lambda}-type structure with the simplest resonant coupling. Consequently, all possible methods of STA for three-state system can be borrowed. We take the counter-diabatic driving and "chosen path" method as instances to demonstrate our treatment on the molecular system. Although the "chosen path" method does not work well in real three-state system if there is strong decay in the excited state, our C-STIRSAP protocol under both the two methods can create ultracold deeply-bound molecules with high efficiency in the M-type system. The evolution time is shortened without strong laser pulses and the robustness of STA is well preserved. Finally, the detection of ultracold deeply-bound molecules is discussed.

We propose BOSS, an approach that automatically learns to solve new long-horizon, complex, and meaningful tasks by growing a learned skill library with minimal supervision. Prior work in reinforcement learning require expert supervision, in the form of demonstrations or rich reward functions, to learn long-horizon tasks. Instead, our approach BOSS (BOotStrapping your own Skills) learns to accomplish new tasks by performing "skill bootstrapping," where an agent with a set of primitive skills interacts with the environment to practice new skills without receiving reward feedback for tasks outside of the initial skill set. This bootstrapping phase is guided by large language models (LLMs) that inform the agent of meaningful skills to chain together. Through this process, BOSS builds a wide range of complex and useful behaviors from a basic set of primitive skills. We demonstrate through experiments in realistic household environments that agents trained with our LLM-guided bootstrapping procedure outperform those trained with naive bootstrapping as well as prior unsupervised skill acquisition methods on zero-shot execution of unseen, long-horizon tasks in new environments. Website at clvrai.com/boss., Comment: CoRL 2023 (Oral); 24 pages, 11 figures

Pose-free neural radiance fields (NeRF) aim to train NeRF with unposed multi-view images and it has achieved very impressive success in recent years. Most existing works share the pipeline of training a coarse pose estimator with rendered images at first, followed by a joint optimization of estimated poses and neural radiance field. However, as the pose estimator is trained with only rendered images, the pose estimation is usually biased or inaccurate for real images due to the domain gap between real images and rendered images, leading to poor robustness for the pose estimation of real images and further local minima in joint optimization. We design IR-NeRF, an innovative pose-free NeRF that introduces implicit pose regularization to refine pose estimator with unposed real images and improve the robustness of the pose estimation for real images. With a collection of 2D images of a specific scene, IR-NeRF constructs a scene codebook that stores scene features and captures the scene-specific pose distribution implicitly as priors. Thus, the robustness of pose estimation can be promoted with the scene priors according to the rationale that a 2D real image can be well reconstructed from the scene codebook only when its estimated pose lies within the pose distribution. Extensive experiments show that IR-NeRF achieves superior novel view synthesis and outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently across multiple synthetic and real datasets., Comment: Accepted by ICCV2023

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has shown impressive performance in novel view synthesis via implicit scene representation. However, it usually suffers from poor scalability as requiring densely sampled images for each new scene. Several studies have attempted to mitigate this problem by integrating Multi-View Stereo (MVS) technique into NeRF while they still entail a cumbersome fine-tuning process for new scenes. Notably, the rendering quality will drop severely without this fine-tuning process and the errors mainly appear around the high-frequency features. In the light of this observation, we design WaveNeRF, which integrates wavelet frequency decomposition into MVS and NeRF to achieve generalizable yet high-quality synthesis without any per-scene optimization. To preserve high-frequency information when generating 3D feature volumes, WaveNeRF builds Multi-View Stereo in the Wavelet domain by integrating the discrete wavelet transform into the classical cascade MVS, which disentangles high-frequency information explicitly. With that, disentangled frequency features can be injected into classic NeRF via a novel hybrid neural renderer to yield faithful high-frequency details, and an intuitive frequency-guided sampling strategy can be designed to suppress artifacts around high-frequency regions. Extensive experiments over three widely studied benchmarks show that WaveNeRF achieves superior generalizable radiance field modeling when only given three images as input., Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023. Project website: https://mxuai.github.io/WaveNeRF/

Pre-training robot policies with a rich set of skills can substantially accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Prior works have defined pre-training tasks via natural language instructions, but doing so requires tedious human annotation of hundreds of thousands of instructions. Thus, we propose SPRINT, a scalable offline policy pre-training approach which substantially reduces the human effort needed for pre-training a diverse set of skills. Our method uses two core ideas to automatically expand a base set of pre-training tasks: instruction relabeling via large language models and cross-trajectory skill chaining through offline reinforcement learning. As a result, SPRINT pre-training equips robots with a much richer repertoire of skills. Experimental results in a household simulator and on a real robot kitchen manipulation task show that SPRINT leads to substantially faster learning of new long-horizon tasks than previous pre-training approaches. Website at https://clvrai.com/sprint., Comment: 29 pages, 18 figures. Published at ICRA 2024

Open-vocabulary segmentation of 3D scenes is a fundamental function of human perception and thus a crucial objective in computer vision research. However, this task is heavily impeded by the lack of large-scale and diverse 3D open-vocabulary segmentation datasets for training robust and generalizable models. Distilling knowledge from pre-trained 2D open-vocabulary segmentation models helps but it compromises the open-vocabulary feature as the 2D models are mostly finetuned with close-vocabulary datasets. We tackle the challenges in 3D open-vocabulary segmentation by exploiting pre-trained foundation models CLIP and DINO in a weakly supervised manner. Specifically, given only the open-vocabulary text descriptions of the objects in a scene, we distill the open-vocabulary multimodal knowledge and object reasoning capability of CLIP and DINO into a neural radiance field (NeRF), which effectively lifts 2D features into view-consistent 3D segmentation. A notable aspect of our approach is that it does not require any manual segmentation annotations for either the foundation models or the distillation process. Extensive experiments show that our method even outperforms fully supervised models trained with segmentation annotations in certain scenes, suggesting that 3D open-vocabulary segmentation can be effectively learned from 2D images and text-image pairs. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Kunhao-Liu/3D-OVS}., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023

Materials-by-design has been historically challenging due to complex process-microstructure-property relations. Conventional analytical or simulation-based approaches suffer from low accuracy or long computational time and poor transferability, further limiting their applications in solving the inverse material design problem. Here, we establish a deep learning and genetic algorithm framework that integrates forward prediction and inverse exploration. This framework provides an end-to-end solution to achieve application-specific mechanical properties by microstructure optimization. In this study, we select the widely used Ti-6Al-4V to demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework by tailoring its microstructure and achieving various yield strength and elastic modulus across a large design space, while minimizing the stress concentration factor. Compared with conventional methods, our framework is efficient, versatile, and readily transferrable to other materials and properties. Paired with additive manufacturing's potential in controlling local microstructural features, our method has far-reaching potential for accelerating the development of application-specific, high-performing materials., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures