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Cong Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Cong Wang.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources

SelfPromer: Self-Prompt Dehazing Transformers with Depth-Consistency

This work presents an effective depth-consistency self-prompt Transformer for image dehazing. It is motivated by an observation that the estimated depths of an image with haze residuals and its clear counterpart vary. Enforcing the depth consistency of dehazed images with clear ones, therefore, is essential for dehazing. For this purpose, we develop a prompt based on the features of depth differences between the hazy input images and corresponding clear counterparts that can guide dehazing models for better restoration. Specifically, we first apply deep features extracted from the input images to the depth difference features for generating the prompt that contains the haze residual information in the input. Then we propose a prompt embedding module that is designed to perceive the haze residuals, by linearly adding the prompt to the deep features. Further, we develop an effective prompt attention module to pay more attention to haze residuals for better removal. By incorporating the prompt, prompt embedding, and prompt attention into an encoder-decoder network based on VQGAN, we can achieve better perception quality. As the depths of clear images are not available at inference, and the dehazed images with one-time feed-forward execution may still contain a portion of haze residuals, we propose a new continuous self-prompt inference that can iteratively correct the dehazing model towards better haze-free image generation. Extensive experiments show that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches on both synthetic and real-world datasets in terms of perception metrics including NIQE, PI, and PIQE.

cs.CV↗

General-order open-shell coupled-cluster method with partial spin adaptation I: formulations

A general-order open-shell coupled-cluster method based on spatial orbitals is formulated. The method is an extension of the partial-spin adaptation (PSA) scheme from Janssen and Schaefer (Theor. Chim. Acta, 79, 1-42, 1991). By increasing the order of excitation operator and spin adaptation, the full configuration interaction (CI) limit is expected to be achieved. In the meanwhile, the advantages of spin-free approach in closed-shell systems: fourth-order truncation of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) expansion and only $HT$-type connected terms are conserved.

physics.chem-ph↗

How Powerful Potential of Attention on Image Restoration?

Transformers have demonstrated their effectiveness in image restoration tasks. Existing Transformer architectures typically comprise two essential components: multi-head self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN). The former captures long-range pixel dependencies, while the latter enables the model to learn complex patterns and relationships in the data. Previous studies have demonstrated that FFNs are key-value memories \cite{geva2020transformer}, which are vital in modern Transformer architectures. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to explore the potential of attention mechanisms without using FFN and provide novel structures to demonstrate that removing FFN is flexible for image restoration. Specifically, we propose Continuous Scaling Attention (\textbf{CSAttn}), a method that computes attention continuously in three stages without using FFN. To achieve competitive performance, we propose a series of key components within the attention. Our designs provide a closer look at the attention mechanism and reveal that some simple operations can significantly affect the model performance. We apply our \textbf{CSAttn} to several image restoration tasks and show that our model can outperform CNN-based and Transformer-based image restoration approaches.

cs.CV↗

Machine Unlearning: Solutions and Challenges

Machine learning models may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, posing risks of privacy breaches, security vulnerabilities, and performance degradation. To address these issues, machine unlearning has emerged as a critical technique to selectively remove specific training data points' influence on trained models. This paper provides a comprehensive taxonomy and analysis of the solutions in machine unlearning. We categorize existing solutions into exact unlearning approaches that remove data influence thoroughly and approximate unlearning approaches that efficiently minimize data influence. By comprehensively reviewing solutions, we identify and discuss their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we propose future directions to advance machine unlearning and establish it as an essential capability for trustworthy and adaptive machine learning models. This paper provides researchers with a roadmap of open problems, encouraging impactful contributions to address real-world needs for selective data removal.

cs.LG↗

The long-term evolution of the GW170817 remnant

GW170817 represents the first observed binary neutron star merger event by humanity. The observation of GW170817 has identified the correlation between Kilonova, gravitational wave and short GRB. The shocks from GW170817 have the capacity to inject significant thermal and kinetic energies into the interstellar medium and evolve for over a million years. In this letter, we adopt the special relativity fluid dynamics equations to simulate the evolution of the GW170817 remnant over a span of one million years. Our simulations yield the evolution profiles of the velocity, density, mass, radius, luminosity, and energies of the remnant. We estimate that the GW170817 remnant will reach the average maximum luminosity $ 2.56\times 10^{39}$ erg s$^{-1}$at approximately $3.96\times 10^4$ yr. At the end of the cooling stage, the contaminated radius and mass are $48.35$ pc and $2.25\times 10^4 M_{\odot}$, respectively.

astro-ph.HE↗

High-Entropy Enhanced Negative Thermal Expansion Perfomance in Antiperovkites

The negative thermal expansion (NTE) materials, which can act as thermal-expansion compensators to counteract the positive thermal expansion, have great applications merit in precision engineering. However, the exploration of NTE behavior with a wide temperature range has reached its upper ceiling through traditional doping strategies due to composition limitations. The unique sluggish characteristic in phase transition and extended optimization space in recent high entropy systems has great potential to broaden the temperature range in electronic transitions-induced NTE materials. Mn-based anti-perovskites offer an ideal platform for the exploration of high entropy NTE material due to their abundant element selection and controllable NTE performance. In this paper, the high entropy strategy is first introduced to broaden the NTE temperature range by relaxing the abrupt phase transition in Mn-based anti-perovskite nitride. We propose an empirical screening method to synthesize the high-entropy anti-perovskite (HEAP). it is found that magnetic phase separation from anti-ferromagnetic CII to paramagnetic CI surviving in an ultra-wide temperature range of 5K<=T<=350K (Delta_T=345K), revealing a unique sluggish characteristic. Consequently, a remarkable NTE behavior (up to Delta_T=235K, 5K<=T<=240K) with a coefficient of thermal expansion of -4.7x10-6/K, has been obtained in HEAP. It is worth noting that the temperature range is two/three times wider than that of low-entropy systems. The sluggish characteristic has been further experimentally proved to come from disturbed phase transition dynamics due to distortion in atomic spacing and chemical environmental fluctuation observed by the spherical aberration-corrected electron microscope. Our demonstration provides a unique paradigm for broadening the temperature range of NTE materials induced by phase transition through entropy engineering.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

ED2: Environment Dynamics Decomposition World Models for Continuous Control

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) achieves significant sample efficiency in practice in comparison to model-free RL, but its performance is often limited by the existence of model prediction error. To reduce the model error, standard MBRL approaches train a single well-designed network to fit the entire environment dynamics, but this wastes rich information on multiple sub-dynamics which can be modeled separately, allowing us to construct the world model more accurately. In this paper, we propose the Environment Dynamics Decomposition (ED2), a novel world model construction framework that models the environment in a decomposing manner. ED2 contains two key components: sub-dynamics discovery (SD2) and dynamics decomposition prediction (D2P). SD2 discovers the sub-dynamics in an environment automatically and then D2P constructs the decomposed world model following the sub-dynamics. ED2 can be easily combined with existing MBRL algorithms and empirical results show that ED2 significantly reduces the model error, increases the sample efficiency, and achieves higher asymptotic performance when combined with the state-of-the-art MBRL algorithms on various continuous control tasks. Our code is open source and available at https://github.com/ED2-source-code/ED2.

cs.LG↗

Phrase Grounding-based Style Transfer for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection

Single-domain generalized object detection aims to enhance a model's generalizability to multiple unseen target domains using only data from a single source domain during training. This is a practical yet challenging task as it requires the model to address domain shift without incorporating target domain data into training. In this paper, we propose a novel phrase grounding-based style transfer (PGST) approach for the task. Specifically, we first define textual prompts to describe potential objects for each unseen target domain. Then, we leverage the grounded language-image pre-training (GLIP) model to learn the style of these target domains and achieve style transfer from the source to the target domain. The style-transferred source visual features are semantically rich and could be close to imaginary counterparts in the target domain. Finally, we employ these style-transferred visual features to fine-tune GLIP. By introducing imaginary counterparts, the detector could be effectively generalized to unseen target domains using only a single source domain for training. Extensive experimental results on five diverse weather driving benchmarks demonstrate our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, even surpassing some domain adaptive methods that incorporate target domain images into the training process.The source codes and pre-trained models will be made available.

cs.CV↗

Employing Iterative Feature Selection in Fuzzy Rule-Based Binary Classification

The feature selection in a traditional binary classification algorithm is always used in the stage of dataset preprocessing, which makes the obtained features not necessarily the best ones for the classification algorithm, thus affecting the classification performance. For a traditional rule-based binary classification algorithm, classification rules are usually deterministic, which results in the fuzzy information contained in the rules being ignored. To do so, this paper employs iterative feature selection in fuzzy rule-based binary classification. The proposed algorithm combines feature selection based on fuzzy correlation family with rule mining based on biclustering. It first conducts biclustering on the dataset after feature selection. Then it conducts feature selection again for the biclusters according to the feedback of biclusters evaluation. In this way, an iterative feature selection framework is build. During the iteration process, it stops until the obtained bicluster meets the requirements. In addition, the rule membership function is introduced to extract vectorized fuzzy rules from the bicluster and construct weak classifiers. The weak classifiers with good classification performance are selected by Adaptive Boosting and the strong classifier is constructed by "weighted average". Finally, we perform the proposed algorithm on different datasets and compare it with other peers. Experimental results show that it achieves good classification performance and outperforms its peers.

cs.LG↗

Application of performance portability solutions for GPUs and many-core CPUs to track reconstruction kernels

Next generation High-Energy Physics (HEP) experiments are presented with significant computational challenges, both in terms of data volume and processing power. Using compute accelerators, such as GPUs, is one of the promising ways to provide the necessary computational power to meet the challenge. The current programming models for compute accelerators often involve using architecture-specific programming languages promoted by the hardware vendors and hence limit the set of platforms that the code can run on. Developing software with platform restrictions is especially unfeasible for HEP communities as it takes significant effort to convert typical HEP algorithms into ones that are efficient for compute accelerators. Multiple performance portability solutions have recently emerged and provide an alternative path for using compute accelerators, which allow the code to be executed on hardware from different vendors. We apply several portability solutions, such as Kokkos, SYCL, C++17 std::execution::par and Alpaka, on two mini-apps extracted from the mkFit project: p2z and p2r. These apps include basic kernels for a Kalman filter track fit, such as propagation and update of track parameters, for detectors at a fixed z or fixed r position, respectively. The two mini-apps explore different memory layout formats. We report on the development experience with different portability solutions, as well as their performance on GPUs and many-core CPUs, measured as the throughput of the kernels from different GPU and CPU vendors such as NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.

physics.acc-ph↗

Two Necessary and Sufficient Conditions to the Solvability of the Exterior Dirichlet Problem for the Monge-Ampère Equation

The present paper provides two necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions to the exterior Dirichlet problem of the Monge-Ampère equation with prescribed asymptotic behavior at infinity. By an adapted smooth approximation argument, we prove that the problem is solvable if and only if the boundary value is semi-convex with respect to the inner boundary, which is our first proposed new concept. Along the lines of Perron's method for Laplace equation, we obtain the threshold for solvability in the asymptotic behavior at infinity of the solution, and remove the $C^2$ regularity assumptions on the boundary value and on the inner boundary which are required in the proofs of the corresponding existence theorems in the recent literatures.

math.AP↗

Hijacking Attacks against Neural Networks by Analyzing Training Data

Backdoors and adversarial examples are the two primary threats currently faced by deep neural networks (DNNs). Both attacks attempt to hijack the model behaviors with unintended outputs by introducing (small) perturbations to the inputs. Backdoor attacks, despite the high success rates, often require a strong assumption, which is not always easy to achieve in reality. Adversarial example attacks, which put relatively weaker assumptions on attackers, often demand high computational resources, yet do not always yield satisfactory success rates when attacking mainstream black-box models in the real world. These limitations motivate the following research question: can model hijacking be achieved more simply, with a higher attack success rate and more reasonable assumptions? In this paper, we propose CleanSheet, a new model hijacking attack that obtains the high performance of backdoor attacks without requiring the adversary to tamper with the model training process. CleanSheet exploits vulnerabilities in DNNs stemming from the training data. Specifically, our key idea is to treat part of the clean training data of the target model as "poisoned data," and capture the characteristics of these data that are more sensitive to the model (typically called robust features) to construct "triggers." These triggers can be added to any input example to mislead the target model, similar to backdoor attacks. We validate the effectiveness of CleanSheet through extensive experiments on 5 datasets, 79 normally trained models, 68 pruned models, and 39 defensive models. Results show that CleanSheet exhibits performance comparable to state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, achieving an average attack success rate (ASR) of 97.5% on CIFAR-100 and 92.4% on GTSRB, respectively. Furthermore, CleanSheet consistently maintains a high ASR, when confronted with various mainstream backdoor defenses.

cs.CR↗

Frame-level emotional state alignment method for speech emotion recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems aim to recognize human emotional state during human-computer interaction. Most existing SER systems are trained based on utterance-level labels. However, not all frames in an audio have affective states consistent with utterance-level label, which makes it difficult for the model to distinguish the true emotion of the audio and perform poorly. To address this problem, we propose a frame-level emotional state alignment method for SER. First, we fine-tune HuBERT model to obtain a SER system with task-adaptive pretraining (TAPT) method, and extract embeddings from its transformer layers to form frame-level pseudo-emotion labels with clustering. Then, the pseudo labels are used to pretrain HuBERT. Hence, the each frame output of HuBERT has corresponding emotional information. Finally, we fine-tune the above pretrained HuBERT for SER by adding an attention layer on the top of it, which can focus only on those frames that are emotionally more consistent with utterance-level label. The experimental results performed on IEMOCAP indicate that our proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

cs.SD↗

Detection and Mitigation of Position Spoofing Attacks on Cooperative UAV Swarm Formations

Detecting spoofing attacks on the positions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) within a swarm is challenging. Traditional methods relying solely on individually reported positions and pairwise distance measurements are ineffective in identifying the misbehavior of malicious UAVs. This paper presents a novel systematic structure designed to detect and mitigate spoofing attacks in UAV swarms. We formulate the problem of detecting malicious UAVs as a localization feasibility problem, leveraging the reported positions and distance measurements. To address this problem, we develop a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approach, which reformulates the non-convex localization problem into a convex and tractable semidefinite program (SDP). Additionally, we propose two innovative algorithms that leverage the proximity of neighboring UAVs to identify malicious UAVs effectively. Simulations demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approaches compared to existing benchmarks. Our methods exhibit robustness across various swarm networks, showcasing their effectiveness in detecting and mitigating spoofing attacks. {\blue Specifically, the detection success rate is improved by up to 65\%, 55\%, and 51\% against distributed, collusion, and mixed attacks, respectively, compared to the benchmarks.

eess.SY↗

Intellectual Property Protection of Diffusion Models via the Watermark Diffusion Process

Diffusion models have rapidly become a vital part of deep generative architectures, given today's increasing demands. Obtaining large, high-performance diffusion models demands significant resources, highlighting their importance as intellectual property worth protecting. However, existing watermarking techniques for ownership verification are insufficient when applied to diffusion models. Very recent research in watermarking diffusion models either exposes watermarks during task generation, which harms the imperceptibility, or is developed for conditional diffusion models that require prompts to trigger the watermark. This paper introduces WDM, a novel watermarking solution for diffusion models without imprinting the watermark during task generation. It involves training a model to concurrently learn a Watermark Diffusion Process (WDP) for embedding watermarks alongside the standard diffusion process for task generation. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis of WDP training and sampling, relating it to a shifted Gaussian diffusion process via the same reverse noise. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in various trigger and watermark data configurations.

cs.CR↗

Augmenting x-ray single particle imaging reconstruction with self-supervised machine learning

The development of X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs) has opened numerous opportunities to probe atomic structure and ultrafast dynamics of various materials. Single Particle Imaging (SPI) with XFELs enables the investigation of biological particles in their natural physiological states with unparalleled temporal resolution, while circumventing the need for cryogenic conditions or crystallization. However, reconstructing real-space structures from reciprocal-space x-ray diffraction data is highly challenging due to the absence of phase and orientation information, which is further complicated by weak scattering signals and considerable fluctuations in the number of photons per pulse. In this work, we present an end-to-end, self-supervised machine learning approach to recover particle orientations and estimate reciprocal space intensities from diffraction images only. Our method demonstrates great robustness under demanding experimental conditions with significantly enhanced reconstruction capabilities compared with conventional algorithms, and signifies a paradigm shift in SPI as currently practiced at XFELs.

cs.CV↗

DualMatch: Robust Semi-Supervised Learning with Dual-Level Interaction

Semi-supervised learning provides an expressive framework for exploiting unlabeled data when labels are insufficient. Previous semi-supervised learning methods typically match model predictions of different data-augmented views in a single-level interaction manner, which highly relies on the quality of pseudo-labels and results in semi-supervised learning not robust. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL method called DualMatch, in which the class prediction jointly invokes feature embedding in a dual-level interaction manner. DualMatch requires consistent regularizations for data augmentation, specifically, 1) ensuring that different augmented views are regulated with consistent class predictions, and 2) ensuring that different data of one class are regulated with similar feature embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DualMatch. In the standard SSL setting, the proposal achieves 9% error reduction compared with SOTA methods, even in a more challenging class-imbalanced setting, the proposal can still achieve 6% error reduction. Code is available at https://github.com/CWangAI/DualMatch

cs.CV↗

Adaptive Gating in Mixture-of-Experts based Language Models

Large language models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, have demonstrated exceptional language understanding capabilities in various NLP tasks. Sparsely activated mixture-of-experts (MoE) has emerged as a promising solution for scaling models while maintaining a constant number of computational operations. Existing MoE model adopts a fixed gating network where each token is computed by the same number of experts. However, this approach contradicts our intuition that the tokens in each sequence vary in terms of their linguistic complexity and, consequently, require different computational costs. Little is discussed in prior research on the trade-off between computation per token and model performance. This paper introduces adaptive gating in MoE, a flexible training strategy that allows tokens to be processed by a variable number of experts based on expert probability distribution. The proposed framework preserves sparsity while improving training efficiency. Additionally, curriculum learning is leveraged to further reduce training time. Extensive experiments on diverse NLP tasks show that adaptive gating reduces at most 22.5% training time while maintaining inference quality. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the routing decisions and present our insights when adaptive gating is used.

cs.CL↗