arXiv subjects

Fan Xia

Publications and source records attributed to Fan Xia.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Optically Coherent Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in HPHT Treated Diamonds

As a point defect with unique spin and optical properties, nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has attracted much attention in the fields of quantum sensing, quantum simulation, and quantum networks. The optical properties of an NV center are crucial for all these quantum applications. However, NV centers fabricated by destructive methods such as electron irradiation or ion implantation usually exhibit poor optical coherence. In this work, we demonstrate a non-destructive method to fabricate optically coherent NV centers. High-purity single crystal diamonds are annealed under high pressure and high temperature (1700 $^{\circ}$C, 5.5 GPa), and individually resolvable NV centers with narrow PLE linewidth (<100 MHz) are produced. The high-pressure condition prevents the conversion of diamond to graphite during high-temperature annealing, significantly expanding the parameter space for creating high-performance artificial defects for quantum information science. These findings deepen our understanding of NV center formation in diamond and have implications for the optimization of color centers in solids, including silicon carbide and hexagonal boron nitride.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Revisiting Video Quality Assessment from the Perspective of Generalization

The increasing popularity of short video platforms such as YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Kwai has led to a surge in User-Generated Content (UGC), which presents significant challenges for the generalization performance of Video Quality Assessment (VQA) tasks. These challenges not only affect performance on test sets but also impact the ability to generalize across different datasets. While prior research has primarily focused on enhancing feature extractors, sampling methods, and network branches, it has largely overlooked the generalization capabilities of VQA tasks. In this work, we reevaluate the VQA task from a generalization standpoint. We begin by analyzing the weight loss landscape of VQA models, identifying a strong correlation between this landscape and the generalization gaps. We then investigate various techniques to regularize the weight loss landscape. Our results reveal that adversarial weight perturbations can effectively smooth this landscape, significantly improving the generalization performance, with cross-dataset generalization and fine-tuning performance enhanced by up to 1.8% and 3%, respectively. Through extensive experiments across various VQA methods and datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, by leveraging our insights, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in Image Quality Assessment (IQA) tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/XinliYue/VQA-Generalization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Advancing Video Quality Assessment for AIGC

In recent years, AI generative models have made remarkable progress across various domains, including text generation, image generation, and video generation. However, assessing the quality of text-to-video generation is still in its infancy, and existing evaluation frameworks fall short when compared to those for natural videos. Current video quality assessment (VQA) methods primarily focus on evaluating the overall quality of natural videos and fail to adequately account for the substantial quality discrepancies between frames in generated videos. To address this issue, we propose a novel loss function that combines mean absolute error with cross-entropy loss to mitigate inter-frame quality inconsistencies. Additionally, we introduce the innovative S2CNet technique to retain critical content, while leveraging adversarial training to enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing VQA techniques on the AIGC Video dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 3.1% in terms of PLCC.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Adapted Swin Transformer-based Real-Time Plasma Shape Detection and Control in HL-3

In the field of magnetic confinement plasma control, the accurate feedback of plasma position and shape primarily relies on calculations derived from magnetic measurements through equilibrium reconstruction or matrix mapping method. However, under harsh conditions like high-energy neutron radiation and elevated temperatures, the installation of magnetic probes within the device becomes challenging. Relying solely on external magnetic probes can compromise the precision of EFIT in determining the plasma shape. To tackle this issue, we introduce a real-time, non-magnetic measurement method on the HL-3 tokamak, which diagnoses the plasma position and shape via imaging. Particularly, we put forward an adapted Swin Transformer model, the Poolformer Swin Transformer (PST), to accurately and fastly interpret the plasma shape from the Charge-Coupled Device Camera (CCD) images. By adopting multi-task learning and knowledge distillation techniques, the model is capable of robustly detecting six shape parameters under disruptive conditions such as a divertor shape and gas injection, circumventing global brightness changes and cumbersome manual labeling. Specifically, the well-trained PST model capably infers R and Z within the mean average error below 1.1 cm and 1.8 cm, respectively, while requiring less than 2 ms for end-to-end feedback, an 80 improvement over the smallest Swin Transformer model, laying the foundation for real-time control. Finally, we deploy the PST model in the Plasma Control System (PCS) using TensorRT, and achieve 500 ms stable PID feedback control based on the PST-computed horizontal displacement information. In conclusion, this research opens up new avenues for the practical application of image-computing plasma shape diagnostic methods in the realm of real-time feedback control.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

A Diagnostic Tool for Functional Causal Discovery

Causal discovery methods aim to determine the causal direction between variables using observational data. Functional causal discovery methods, such as those based on the Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model (LiNGAM), rely on structural and distributional assumptions to infer the causal direction. However, approaches for assessing causal discovery methods' performance as a function of sample size or the impact of assumption violations, inevitable in real-world scenarios, are lacking. To address this need, we propose Causal Direction Detection Rate (CDDR) diagnostic that evaluates whether and to what extent the interaction between assumption violations and sample size affects the ability to identify the hypothesized causal direction. Given a bivariate dataset of size N on a pair of variables, X and Y, CDDR diagnostic is the plotted comparison of the probability of each causal discovery outcome (e.g. X causes Y, Y causes X, or inconclusive) as a function of sample size less than N. We fully develop CDDR diagnostic in a bivariate case and demonstrate its use for two methods, LiNGAM and our new test-based causal discovery approach. We find CDDR diagnostic for the test-based approach to be more informative since it uses a richer set of causal discovery outcomes. Under certain assumptions, we prove that the probability estimates of detecting each possible causal discovery outcome are consistent and asymptotically normal. Through simulations, we study CDDR diagnostic's behavior when linearity and non-Gaussianity assumptions are violated. Additionally, we illustrate CDDR diagnostic on four real datasets, including three for which the causal direction is known.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2024

Identifying L-H transition in HL-2A through deep learning

During the operation of tokamak devices, addressing the thermal load issues caused by Edge Localized Modes (ELMs) eruption is crucial. Ideally, mitigation and suppression measures for ELMs should be promptly initiated as soon as the first low-to-high confinement (L-H) transition occurs, which necessitates the real-time monitoring and accurate identification of the L-H transition process. Motivated by this, and by recent deep learning boom, we propose a deep learning-based L-H transition identification algorithm on HL-2A tokamak. In this work, we have constructed a neural network comprising layers of Residual Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Unlike previous work based on recognition for ELMs by slice, this method implements recognition on L-H transition process before the first ELMs crash. Therefore the mitigation techniques can be triggered in time to suppress the initial ELMs bursts. In order to further explain the effectiveness of the algorithm, we developed a series of evaluation indicators by shots, and the results show that this algorithm can provide necessary reference for the mitigation and suppression system.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

A hierarchical decomposition for explaining ML performance discrepancies

Machine learning (ML) algorithms can often differ in performance across domains. Understanding $\textit{why}$ their performance differs is crucial for determining what types of interventions (e.g., algorithmic or operational) are most effective at closing the performance gaps. Existing methods focus on $\textit{aggregate decompositions}$ of the total performance gap into the impact of a shift in the distribution of features $p(X)$ versus the impact of a shift in the conditional distribution of the outcome $p(Y|X)$; however, such coarse explanations offer only a few options for how one can close the performance gap. $\textit{Detailed variable-level decompositions}$ that quantify the importance of each variable to each term in the aggregate decomposition can provide a much deeper understanding and suggest much more targeted interventions. However, existing methods assume knowledge of the full causal graph or make strong parametric assumptions. We introduce a nonparametric hierarchical framework that provides both aggregate and detailed decompositions for explaining why the performance of an ML algorithm differs across domains, without requiring causal knowledge. We derive debiased, computationally-efficient estimators, and statistical inference procedures for asymptotically valid confidence intervals.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

A Brief Tutorial on Sample Size Calculations for Fairness Audits

In fairness audits, a standard objective is to detect whether a given algorithm performs substantially differently between subgroups. Properly powering the statistical analysis of such audits is crucial for obtaining informative fairness assessments, as it ensures a high probability of detecting unfairness when it exists. However, limited guidance is available on the amount of data necessary for a fairness audit, lacking directly applicable results concerning commonly used fairness metrics. Additionally, the consideration of unequal subgroup sample sizes is also missing. In this tutorial, we address these issues by providing guidance on how to determine the required subgroup sample sizes to maximize the statistical power of hypothesis tests for detecting unfairness. Our findings are applicable to audits of binary classification models and multiple fairness metrics derived as summaries of the confusion matrix. Furthermore, we discuss other aspects of audit study designs that can increase the reliability of audit results.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2023

Designing monitoring strategies for deployed machine learning algorithms: navigating performativity through a causal lens

After a machine learning (ML)-based system is deployed, monitoring its performance is important to ensure the safety and effectiveness of the algorithm over time. When an ML algorithm interacts with its environment, the algorithm can affect the data-generating mechanism and be a major source of bias when evaluating its standalone performance, an issue known as performativity. Although prior work has shown how to validate models in the presence of performativity using causal inference techniques, there has been little work on how to monitor models in the presence of performativity. Unlike the setting of model validation, there is much less agreement on which performance metrics to monitor. Different monitoring criteria impact how interpretable the resulting test statistic is, what assumptions are needed for identifiability, and the speed of detection. When this choice is further coupled with the decision to use observational versus interventional data, ML deployment teams are faced with a multitude of monitoring options. The aim of this work is to highlight the relatively under-appreciated complexity of designing a monitoring strategy and how causal reasoning can provide a systematic framework for choosing between these options. As a motivating example, we consider an ML-based risk prediction algorithm for predicting unplanned readmissions. Bringing together tools from causal inference and statistical process control, we consider six monitoring procedures (three candidate monitoring criteria and two data sources) and investigate their operating characteristics in simulation studies. Results from this case study emphasize the seemingly simple (and obvious) fact that not all monitoring systems are created equal, which has real-world impacts on the design and documentation of ML monitoring systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

MERTech: Instrument Playing Technique Detection Using Self-Supervised Pretrained Model With Multi-Task Finetuning

Instrument playing techniques (IPTs) constitute a pivotal component of musical expression. However, the development of automatic IPT detection methods suffers from limited labeled data and inherent class imbalance issues. In this paper, we propose to apply a self-supervised learning model pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled music data and finetune it on IPT detection tasks. This approach addresses data scarcity and class imbalance challenges. Recognizing the significance of pitch in capturing the nuances of IPTs and the importance of onset in locating IPT events, we investigate multi-task finetuning with pitch and onset detection as auxiliary tasks. Additionally, we apply a post-processing approach for event-level prediction, where an IPT activation initiates an event only if the onset output confirms an onset in that frame. Our method outperforms prior approaches in both frame-level and event-level metrics across multiple IPT benchmark datasets. Further experiments demonstrate the efficacy of multi-task finetuning on each IPT class.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

Source-free Active Domain Adaptation for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading Based on Ultra-wide-field Fundus Image

Domain adaptation (DA) has been widely applied in the diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading of unannotated ultra-wide-field (UWF) fundus images, which can transfer annotated knowledge from labeled color fundus images. However, suffering from huge domain gaps and complex real-world scenarios, the DR grading performance of most mainstream DA is far from that of clinical diagnosis. To tackle this, we propose a novel source-free active domain adaptation (SFADA) in this paper. Specifically, we focus on DR grading problem itself and propose to generate features of color fundus images with continuously evolving relationships of DRs, actively select a few valuable UWF fundus images for labeling with local representation matching, and adapt model on UWF fundus images with DR lesion prototypes. Notably, the SFADA also takes data privacy and computational efficiency into consideration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SFADA achieves state-of-the-art DR grading performance, increasing accuracy by 20.9% and quadratic weighted kappa by 18.63% compared with baseline and reaching 85.36% and 92.38% respectively. These investigations show that the potential of our approach for real clinical practice is promising.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Reconstructing human activities via coupling mobile phone data with location-based social networks

In the era of big data, the ubiquity of location-aware portable devices provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand inhabitants' behavior and their interactions with the built environments. Among the widely used data resources, mobile phone data is the one passively collected and has the largest coverage in the population. However, mobile operators cannot pinpoint one user within meters, leading to the difficulties in activity inference. To that end, we propose a data analysis framework to identify user's activity via coupling the mobile phone data with location-based social networks (LBSN) data. The two datasets are integrated into a Bayesian inference module, considering people's circadian rhythms in both time and space. Specifically, the framework considers the pattern of arrival time to each type of facility and the spatial distribution of facilities. The former can be observed from the LBSN Data and the latter is provided by the points of interest (POIs) dataset. Taking Shanghai as an example, we reconstruct the activity chains of 1,000,000 active mobile phone users and analyze the temporal and spatial characteristics of each activity type. We assess the results with some official surveys and a real-world check-in dataset collected in Shanghai, indicating that the proposed method can capture and analyze human activities effectively. Next, we cluster users' inferred activity chains with a topic model to understand the behavior of different groups of users. This data analysis framework provides an example of reconstructing and understanding the activity of the population at an urban scale with big data fusion.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Frame-Level Multi-Label Playing Technique Detection Using Multi-Scale Network and Self-Attention Mechanism

Instrument playing technique (IPT) is a key element of musical presentation. However, most of the existing works for IPT detection only concern monophonic music signals, yet little has been done to detect IPTs in polyphonic instrumental solo pieces with overlapping IPTs or mixed IPTs. In this paper, we formulate it as a frame-level multi-label classification problem and apply it to Guzheng, a Chinese plucked string instrument. We create a new dataset, Guzheng\_Tech99, containing Guzheng recordings and onset, offset, pitch, IPT annotations of each note. Because different IPTs vary a lot in their lengths, we propose a new method to solve this problem using multi-scale network and self-attention. The multi-scale network extracts features from different scales, and the self-attention mechanism applied to the feature maps at the coarsest scale further enhances the long-range feature extraction. Our approach outperforms existing works by a large margin, indicating its effectiveness in IPT detection.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2022

Playing Technique Detection by Fusing Note Onset Information in Guzheng Performance

The Guzheng is a kind of traditional Chinese instruments with diverse playing techniques. Instrument playing techniques (IPT) play an important role in musical performance. However, most of the existing works for IPT detection show low efficiency for variable-length audio and provide no assurance in the generalization as they rely on a single sound bank for training and testing. In this study, we propose an end-to-end Guzheng playing technique detection system using Fully Convolutional Networks that can be applied to variable-length audio. Because each Guzheng playing technique is applied to a note, a dedicated onset detector is trained to divide an audio into several notes and its predictions are fused with frame-wise IPT predictions. During fusion, we add the IPT predictions frame by frame inside each note and get the IPT with the highest probability within each note as the final output of that note. We create a new dataset named GZ_IsoTech from multiple sound banks and real-world recordings for Guzheng performance analysis. Our approach achieves 87.97% in frame-level accuracy and 80.76% in note-level F1-score, outperforming existing works by a large margin, which indicates the effectiveness of our proposed method in IPT detection.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2022

A clinically relevant online patient QA solution with daily CT scans and EPID-based in vivo dosimetry: A feasible study on rectal cancer

Adaptive radiation therapy (ART) could protect organs at risk (OARs) while maintain high dose coverage to targets. However, there still lack efficient online patient QA methods. We aim to develop a clinically relevant online patient quality assurance (QA) solution for ART using daily CT scans and electronic portal imaging device (EPID)-based in vivo dosimetry. Ten patients with rectal cancer at our center were included. Patients' daily CT scans and portal images were collected to generate reconstructed 3D dose distributions. Contours of targets and OARs were recontoured on these daily CT scans by a clinician or an auto-segmentation algorithm, then dose-volume indices were calculated, and the percent deviation of these indices to their original plans were determined. This deviation was regarded as the metric for clinically relevant patient QA. The tolerance level was obtained using a 95% interval of the QA metric distribution. These deviations could be further divided into anatomically relevant or delivery relevant indicators for error source analysis. Finally, our QA solution was validated on an additional six clinical patients. In rectal cancer, the lower and upper tolerance of the QA metric for PTV {\Delta}D95 (%) were [-3.11%, 2.35%], and for PTV {\Delta}D2 (%) were [-0.78%, 3.23%]. In validation, the 68% for PTV {\Delta}D95 (%) and the 79% for PTV {\Delta}D2 ({%)of the 28 fractions are within tolerances of the QA metrics. By using four or more out-of-tolerance QA metrics as an action level, there were 5 fractions (18%) have four or more out-of-tolerance QA metrics in validation patient dataset. The online patient QA solution using daily CT scans and EPID-based in vivo dosimetry is clinically feasible. Source of error analysis has the potential for distinguishing sources of error and guiding ART for future treatments.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2022

First implementation of full-workflow automation in radiotherapy: the All-in-One solution on rectal cancer

The aim of this work is to describe the technical characteristics of an AI-powered radiotherapy workflow that enables full-process automation (All-in-One), evaluate its performance implemented for on-couch initial treatment of rectal cancer, and provide insight into the behavior of full-workflow automation in the specialty of radiotherapy. The All-in-One workflow was developed based on a CT-integrated linear accelerator. It incorporates routine radiotherapy procedures from simulation, autosegmentation, autoplanning, image guidance, beam delivery, and in vivo quality assurance (QA) into one scheme, with critical decision points involved, while the patient is on the treatment couch during the whole process. For the enrolled ten patients with rectal cancer, minor modifications of the autosegmented target volumes were required, and the Dice similarity coefficient and 95% Hausdorff distance before and after modifications were 0.892{\pm}0.061 and 18.2{\pm}13.0 mm, respectively. The autosegmented normal tissues and automatic plans were clinically acceptable without any modifications or reoptimization. The pretreatment IGRT corrections were within 2 mm in all directions, and the EPID-based in vivo QA showed a {\gamma} passing rate better than 97{\%} (3{\%}/3 mm/10{\%} threshold). The duration of the whole process was 23.2{\pm}3.5 minutes, depending mostly on the time required for manual modification and plan evaluation. The All-in-One workflow enables full automation of the entire radiotherapy process by seamlessly integrating multiple routine procedures. The one-stop solution shortens the time scale it takes to ready the first treatment from days to minutes, significantly improving the patient experience and the efficiency of the workflow, and shows potential to facilitate the clinical application of online adaptive replanning.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2021

Analysis of stepped wedge cluster randomized trials in the presence of a time-varying treatment effect

Stepped wedge cluster randomized controlled trials are typically analyzed using models that assume the full effect of the treatment is achieved instantaneously. We provide an analytical framework for scenarios in which the treatment effect varies as a function of exposure time (time since the start of treatment) and define the "effect curve" as the magnitude of the treatment effect on the linear predictor scale as a function of exposure time. The "time-averaged treatment effect", (TATE) and "long-term treatment effect" (LTE) are summaries of this curve. We analytically derive the expectation of the estimator resulting from a model that assumes an immediate treatment effect and show that it can be expressed as a weighted sum of the time-specific treatment effects corresponding to the observed exposure times. Surprisingly, although the weights sum to one, some of the weights can be negative. This implies that the estimator may be severely misleading and can even converge to a value of the opposite sign of the true TATE or LTE. We describe several models that can be used to simultaneously estimate the entire effect curve, the TATE, and the LTE, some of which make assumptions about the shape of the effect curve. We evaluate these models in a simulation study to examine the operating characteristics of the resulting estimators and apply them to two real datasets.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2021

PG$^2$Net: Personalized and Group Preferences Guided Network for Next Place Prediction

Predicting the next place to visit is a key in human mobility behavior modeling, which plays a significant role in various fields, such as epidemic control, urban planning, traffic management, and travel recommendation. To achieve this, one typical solution is designing modules based on RNN to capture their preferences to various locations. Although these RNN-based methods can effectively learn individual's hidden personalized preferences to her visited places, the interactions among users can only be weakly learned through the representations of locations. Targeting this, we propose an end-to-end framework named personalized and group preference guided network (PG$^2$Net), considering the users' preferences to various places at both individual and collective levels. Specifically, PG$^2$Net concatenates Bi-LSTM and attention mechanism to capture each user's long-term mobility tendency. To learn population's group preferences, we utilize spatial and temporal information of the visitations to construct a spatio-temporal dependency module. We adopt a graph embedding method to map users' trajectory into a hidden space, capturing their sequential relation. In addition, we devise an auxiliary loss to learn the vectorial representation of her next location. Experiment results on two Foursquare check-in datasets and one mobile phone dataset indicate the advantages of our model compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Source codes are available at https://github.com/urbanmobility/PG2Net.

cs.LG↗