Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Chao Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Chao Liu.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

A Modular Bio-inspired Robotic Hand with High Sensitivity

While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to handle various daily manipulation and grasping tasks. Dexterity usually requires more actuators but also leads to a more sophisticated mechanism design and is more expensive to fabricate and maintain. Soft materials are able to provide compliance and safety when interacting with the physical world but are hard to model. This work presents a hybrid bio-inspired robotic hand that combines soft matters and rigid elements. Sensing is integrated into the rigid bodies resulting in a simple way for pose estimation with high sensitivity. The proposed hand is in a modular structure allowing for rapid fabrication and programming. The fabrication process is carefully designed so that a full hand can be made with low-cost materials and assembled in an efficient manner. We demonstrate the dexterity of the hand by successfully performing human grasp types.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Motion Planning for Variable Topology Trusses: Reconfiguration and Locomotion

Truss robots are highly redundant parallel robotic systems that can be applied in a variety of scenarios. The variable topology truss (VTT) is a class of modular truss robots. As self-reconfigurable modular robots, a VTT is composed of many edge modules that can be rearranged into various structures depending on the task. These robots change their shape by not only controlling joint positions as with fixed morphology robots, but also reconfiguring the connectivity between truss members in order to change their topology. The motion planning problem for VTT robots is difficult due to their varying morphology, high dimensionality, the high likelihood for self-collision, and complex motion constraints. In this paper, a new motion planning framework to dramatically alter the structure of a VTT is presented. It can also be used to solve locomotion tasks that are much more efficient compared with previous work. Several test scenarios are used to show its effectiveness. Supplementary materials are available at https://www.modlabupenn.org/vtt-motion-planning/.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Soft Merging: A Flexible and Robust Soft Model Merging Approach for Enhanced Neural Network Performance

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), a widely used optimization algorithm in deep learning, is often limited to converging to local optima due to the non-convex nature of the problem. Leveraging these local optima to improve model performance remains a challenging task. Given the inherent complexity of neural networks, the simple arithmetic averaging of the obtained local optima models in undesirable results. This paper proposes a {\em soft merging} method that facilitates rapid merging of multiple models, simplifies the merging of specific parts of neural networks, and enhances robustness against malicious models with extreme values. This is achieved by learning gate parameters through a surrogate of the $l_0$ norm using hard concrete distribution without modifying the model weights of the given local optima models. This merging process not only enhances the model performance by converging to a better local optimum, but also minimizes computational costs, offering an efficient and explicit learning process integrated with stochastic gradient descent. Thorough experiments underscore the effectiveness and superior performance of the merged neural networks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

The development of HISPEC for Keck and MODHIS for TMT: science cases and predicted sensitivities

HISPEC is a new, high-resolution near-infrared spectrograph being designed for the W.M. Keck II telescope. By offering single-shot, R=100,000 between 0.98 - 2.5 um, HISPEC will enable spectroscopy of transiting and non-transiting exoplanets in close orbits, direct high-contrast detection and spectroscopy of spatially separated substellar companions, and exoplanet dynamical mass and orbit measurements using precision radial velocity monitoring calibrated with a suite of state-of-the-art absolute and relative wavelength references. MODHIS is the counterpart to HISPEC for the Thirty Meter Telescope and is being developed in parallel with similar scientific goals. In this proceeding, we provide a brief overview of the current design of both instruments, and the requirements for the two spectrographs as guided by the scientific goals for each. We then outline the current science case for HISPEC and MODHIS, with focuses on the science enabled for exoplanet discovery and characterization. We also provide updated sensitivity curves for both instruments, in terms of both signal-to-noise ratio and predicted radial velocity precision.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2023

Towards Cooperative Flight Control Using Visual-Attention

The cooperation of a human pilot with an autonomous agent during flight control realizes parallel autonomy. We propose an air-guardian system that facilitates cooperation between a pilot with eye tracking and a parallel end-to-end neural control system. Our vision-based air-guardian system combines a causal continuous-depth neural network model with a cooperation layer to enable parallel autonomy between a pilot and a control system based on perceived differences in their attention profiles. The attention profiles for neural networks are obtained by computing the networks' saliency maps (feature importance) through the VisualBackProp algorithm, while the attention profiles for humans are either obtained by eye tracking of human pilots or saliency maps of networks trained to imitate human pilots. When the attention profile of the pilot and guardian agents align, the pilot makes control decisions. Otherwise, the air-guardian makes interventions and takes over the control of the aircraft. We show that our attention-based air-guardian system can balance the trade-off between its level of involvement in the flight and the pilot's expertise and attention. The guardian system is particularly effective in situations where the pilot was distracted due to information overload. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for navigating flight scenarios in simulation with a fixed-wing aircraft and on hardware with a quadrotor platform.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Evaluating Direct RF Sampling Performance for RFSoC-based Radio-frequency Astronomy Receivers

As the maximum RF input and output frequencies of the integrated data converters in RFSoC increase, it becomes practical to digitize and synthesize RF signals in the majority of C band directly without analogue up and down mixing circuits. The elimination of the mixer circuits can significantly simplify the architecture of the receivers or readouts for radio astronomy telescopes. For the systems with large bandwidth or high channel counts, direct sampling can dramatically reduce the size and cost of overall system. This paper with focus on summarising part of the preliminary characterization results for direct sampling with RFSoC data converters in higher order Nyquist zones.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2023

Higher Order Nyquist Zone Sampling with RFSoC Data Converters for Astronomical and High Energy Physics Readout Systems

From generation to generation, the maximum RF frequency and sampling rate of the integrated data converters in RF system-on-chip (RFSoC) family devices from Xilinx increases significantly. With the integrated digital mixers and up and down conversion blocks in the datapaths of the data converters, those RFSoC devices offer the capability for implementing a full readout system of ground and space-based telescopes and detectors across the electromagnetic spectrum within the devices with minimum or no analog mixing circuit. In this paper, we present the characterization results for the the data converters sampling at higher orders of Nyquist zones to extend the frequency range covered for our targeted readout systems of microwave-frequency resonator-based cryogenic detector and multiplexer systems and other astronomical and high-energy physics instrumentation applications, such as, axion search and dark matter detection. The initial evaluation of the data converters operating higher order Nyquist zones covers two-tones and comb of tones tests to address the concerns in the RF inter-modulation distortion, which is the key performance index for our targeted applications. The characterization of the data converters is performed in the bandwidth of 4-6 GHz and results meet our requirements. The settings and operating strategies of the data converters for our targeted applications will be summarised.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2023

PSF-based Analysis for Detecting Unresolved Wide Binaries

Wide binaries play a crucial role in analyzing the birth environment of stars and the dynamical evolution of clusters. When wide binaries are located at greater distances, their companions may overlap in the observed images, becoming indistinguishable and resulting in unresolved wide binaries, which are difficult to detect using traditional methods. Utilizing deep learning, we present a method to identify unresolved wide binaries by analyzing the point-spread function (PSF) morphology of telescopes. Our trained model demonstrates exceptional performance in differentiating between single stars and unresolved binaries with separations ranging from 0.1 to 2 physical pixels, where the PSF FWHM is ~2 pixels, achieving an accuracy of 97.2% for simulated data from the Chinese Space Station Telescope. We subsequently tested our method on photometric data of NGC 6121 observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The trained model attained an accuracy of 96.5% and identified 18 wide binary candidates with separations between 7 and 140 au. The majority of these wide binary candidates are situated outside the core radius of NGC 6121, suggesting that they are likely first-generation stars, which is in general agreement with the results of Monte Carlo simulations. Our PSF-based method shows great promise in detecting unresolved wide binaries and is well suited for observations from space-based telescopes with stable PSF. In the future, we aim to apply our PSF-based method to next-generation surveys such as the China Space Station Optical Survey, where a larger-field-of-view telescope will be capable of identifying a greater number of such wide binaries.

astro-ph.SR↗
arXiv2023

Machine learning for ultra high throughput screening of organic solar cells: Solving the needle in the hay stack problem

Over the last two decades the organic solar cell community has synthesised tens of thousands of novel polymers and small molecules in the search for an optimum light harvesting material. These materials were often crudely evaluated simply by measuring the current voltage curves in the light to obtain power conversion efficiencies (PCEs). Materials with low PCEs were quickly disregarded in the search for higher efficiencies. More complex measurements such as frequency/time domain characterisation that could explain why the material performed as it did were often not performed as they were too time consuming/complex. This limited feedback forced the field to advance using a more or less random walk of material development and has significantly slowed progress. Herein, we present a simple technique based on machine learning that can quickly and accurately extract recombination time constants and charge carrier mobilities as a function of light intensity simply from light/dark JV curves alone. This technique reduces the time to fully analyse a working cell from weeks to seconds and opens up the possibility of not only fully characterising new devices as they are fabricated, but also data mining historical data sets for promising materials the community has over looked.

physics.app-ph↗
arXiv2023

Online Overexposed Pixels Hallucination in Videos with Adaptive Reference Frame Selection

Low dynamic range (LDR) cameras cannot deal with wide dynamic range inputs, frequently leading to local overexposure issues. We present a learning-based system to reduce these artifacts without resorting to complex acquisition mechanisms like alternating exposures or costly processing that are typical of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. We propose a transformer-based deep neural network (DNN) to infer the missing HDR details. In an ablation study, we show the importance of using a multiscale DNN and train it with the proper cost function to achieve state-of-the-art quality. To aid the reconstruction of the overexposed areas, our DNN takes a reference frame from the past as an additional input. This leverages the commonly occurring temporal instabilities of autoexposure to our advantage: since well-exposed details in the current frame may be overexposed in the future, we use reinforcement learning to train a reference frame selection DNN that decides whether to adopt the current frame as a future reference. Without resorting to alternating exposures, we obtain therefore a causal, HDR hallucination algorithm with potential application in common video acquisition settings. Our demo video can be found at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-r12BKImLOYCLUoPzdebnMyNjJ4Rk360/view

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Modeling Heat Capacity of Supercritical Fluids: A Phonon Theory Approach

Recent research shows that liquids and dense supercritical fluids support high frequency shear waves. Here, we proposed a general heat capacity model of supercritical fluids using the latest theoretical findings (the liquid phonon theory). In this theory, heat capacity cv of supercritical fluids is only related to the infinite-frequency shear modulus, Debye relaxation time and minimal length of the longitudinal mode in supercritical fluids rather than the system-specific structure and interactions. The present model quantitatively explains the heat capacities in the liquid-like region and the gas-like region above the critical point. At the same time, the heat capacities of 6 supercritical fluids (including monatomic fluids Ar, Ne and molecular fluids N2, CO, CO2, CH4) over a wide range of temperatures and pressures were calculated using the present model, yielding a high accuracy with no free-fitting parameters. This model has two advantages: (1) The contribution of intramolecular vibrations was considered, which makes the model applicable to molecular fluids and high temperature region; (2) This method starts from the quasi-harmonic Debye model. Thus, it does not require any adjustable parameters and thermal expansion coefficients. Furthermore, the present cv model of the rigid liquid-like supercritical region in this paper can be extended to liquid phase of molecular fluids.

cond-mat.other↗
arXiv2023

FOLT: Fast Multiple Object Tracking from UAV-captured Videos Based on Optical Flow

Multiple object tracking (MOT) has been successfully investigated in computer vision. However, MOT for the videos captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is still challenging due to small object size, blurred object appearance, and very large and/or irregular motion in both ground objects and UAV platforms. In this paper, we propose FOLT to mitigate these problems and reach fast and accurate MOT in UAV view. Aiming at speed-accuracy trade-off, FOLT adopts a modern detector and light-weight optical flow extractor to extract object detection features and motion features at a minimum cost. Given the extracted flow, the flow-guided feature augmentation is designed to augment the object detection feature based on its optical flow, which improves the detection of small objects. Then the flow-guided motion prediction is also proposed to predict the object's position in the next frame, which improves the tracking performance of objects with very large displacements between adjacent frames. Finally, the tracker matches the detected objects and predicted objects using a spatially matching scheme to generate tracks for every object. Experiments on Visdrone and UAVDT datasets show that our proposed model can successfully track small objects with large and irregular motion and outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in UAV-MOT tasks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

The first comprehensive Milky Way stellar mock catalogue for the Chinese Space Station Telescope Survey Camera

The Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST) is a cutting-edge two-meter astronomical space telescope currently under construction. Its primary Survey Camera (SC) is designed to conduct large-area imaging sky surveys using a sophisticated seven-band photometric system. The resulting data will provide unprecedented data for studying the structure and stellar populations of the Milky Way. To support the CSST development and scientific projects related to its survey data, we generate the first comprehensive Milky Way stellar mock catalogue for the CSST SC photometric system using the TRILEGAL stellar population synthesis tool. The catalogue includes approximately 12.6 billion stars, covering a wide range of stellar parameters, photometry, astrometry, and kinematics, with magnitude reaching down to $g\,=\,27.5$ mag in the AB magnitude system. The catalogue represents our benchmark understanding of the stellar populations in the Milky Way, enabling a direct comparison with the future CSST survey data. Particularly, it sheds light on faint stars that are hidden from current sky surveys. Our crowding limit analysis based on this catalogue provides compelling evidence for the extension of the CSST Optical Survey (OS) to cover low Galactic latitude regions. The strategic extension of the CSST-OS coverage, combined with this comprehensive mock catalogue, will enable transformative science with the CSST.

astro-ph.GA↗
arXiv2023

Blowups and longtime developments with near-boundary mass accretions of irregularly-shaped Euler--Poisson dominated molecular clouds in astrophysics

Motivated by the astrophysical problems of star formations from molecular clouds,we make the first step on the possible long time behaviors of certain irregularly-shaped molecular clouds. We emphasis the main difficulty of the blowups of the irregular-shaped fluids with vacuum (molecular clouds) comes from the initial irregular configurations of its density (multiple centers of gravity). This inevitably causes far more complicated movements during the evolution than the one with spherical symmetry. The spherical symmetric case has been well studied. However, for the non-spherical symmetric case with the gravity, it is very rare in the references due to a very complicate nonlinear interaction between the gravity and the fluids. This article concludes, under the admissible data (i.e., large scale, irregularly-shaped, expanding and rotational molecular clouds), the developments of the solution (molecular clouds) are either global (the first class) with near-boundary mass accretions (leads to star formations), or blowup at finite time. In addition, certain singularities can be removed from the boundary if the data is strongly admissible. This paper partially answers Makino's conjecture [37] in 1992 on the finite time blowup of any tame solution without symmetries for some data and the model of the molecular clouds and the local wellposedness have been established in the companion article [30].

math.AP↗
arXiv2023

The Eighteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Targeting and First Spectra from SDSS-V

The eighteenth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS) is the first one for SDSS-V, the fifth generation of the survey. SDSS-V comprises three primary scientific programs, or "Mappers": Milky Way Mapper (MWM), Black Hole Mapper (BHM), and Local Volume Mapper (LVM). This data release contains extensive targeting information for the two multi-object spectroscopy programs (MWM and BHM), including input catalogs and selection functions for their numerous scientific objectives. We describe the production of the targeting databases and their calibration- and scientifically-focused components. DR18 also includes ~25,000 new SDSS spectra and supplemental information for X-ray sources identified by eROSITA in its eFEDS field. We present updates to some of the SDSS software pipelines and preview changes anticipated for DR19. We also describe three value-added catalogs (VACs) based on SDSS-IV data that have been published since DR17, and one VAC based on the SDSS-V data in the eFEDS field.

astro-ph.GA↗
arXiv2023

Fully nonlinear gravitational instabilities for expanding Newtonian universes with inhomogeneous pressure and entropy: Beyond the Tolman's solution

Nonlinear gravitational instability is a crucial way to comprehend the clustering of matter and the formation of nonlinear structures in both the Universe and stellar systems. However, with the exception of a few exact particular solutions for pressureless matter, there are only some approximations and numerical and phenomenological approaches to study the nonlinear gravitational instability instead of mathematically rigorous analysis. We construct a family of particular solutions of the Euler-Poisson system that exhibits the nonlinear gravitational instability of matter with inhomogeneous pressure and entropy (i.e., the cold center and hot rim) in the expanding Newtonian universe. Despite the density perturbations being homogeneous, the pressure is not, resulting in significant nonlinear effects. By making use of our prior work on nonlinear analysis of a class of differential equations \cite{Liu2022b}, we estimate that the growth rate of the density contrast is approximately $\sim \exp(t^{\frac{2}{3}})$, much faster than the growth rate anticipated by classical linear Jeans instability ($\sim t^{\frac{2}{3}}$). Our main motivation for constructing this family of solutions is to provide a family of reference solutions for conducting a fully nonlinear analysis of inhomogeneous perturbations of density contrast. We will present the general results in a mathematical article \cite{Liu2023b} separately. Additionally, we emphasize that our model does not feature any shell-crossing singularities before mass accretion singularities since we are specifically interested in analyzing the mathematical mechanics of a pure mass accretion model, which poses limitations on the applicability of our model for understanding the realistic nonlinear structure formation.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

Fully nonlinear gravitational instabilities for expanding spherical symmetric Newtonian universes with inhomogeneous density and pressure

Nobel Prize laureate P.J.E. Peebles [24] has emphasized the importance and difficulties of studying the large scale clustering of matter in cosmology. Nonlinear gravitational instability plays a central role in understanding the clustering of matter and the formation of nonlinear structures in the universe and stellar systems. However, there is no rigorous result on the nonlinear analysis of this instability except for some particular exact solutions without pressure, and numerical and phenomenological approaches. Both Rendall [26] and Mukhanov [21] have highlighted the challenge posed by nonlinear gravitational instability with effective pressure. This has been a longstanding open problem in astrophysics for over a century since the occurrence of linearized Jeans instabilities in Newtonian universes in 1902. This article contributes to a fully nonlinear analysis of the gravitational instability for the Euler-Possion system which models expanding Newtonian universes with inhomogeneous density and pressure. The exponential or finite-time increasing blowups of the density contrast $\varrho$ can be determined, which may account for the considerably faster growth rate of nonlinear structures observed in astrophysics than that suggested by the classical Jeans instability. We believe this is the first rigorous result for the nonlinear Jeans instability with effective pressure and the method is concise and robust.

math-ph↗
arXiv2023

Improving ChatGPT Prompt for Code Generation

Automated code generation can be a powerful technique for software development, significantly reducing developers' efforts and time required to create new code by generating it automatically based on requirements. Recently, OpenAI's language model ChatGPT has emerged as a powerful tool for generating human-like responses to a wide range of textual inputs (i.e., prompts), including those related to code generation. However, the effectiveness of ChatGPT for code generation is not well understood, and the generation performance could be heavily influenced by the choice of prompt. To answer these questions, we conducted experiments using the CodeXGlue dataset to evaluate ChatGPT's capabilities for two code generation tasks, including text-to-code and code-to-code generation. We designed prompts by leveraging the chain-of-thought strategy with multi-step optimizations. Our results showed that by carefully designing prompts to guide ChatGPT, the generation performance can be improved substantially. We also analyzed the factors that influenced the prompt design and provided insights that could guide future research.

cs.SE↗