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Feng Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Liu.

At least 451 records · Page 25Linked to original sources

Optimal Sizing of Isolated Renewable Power Systems with Ammonia Synthesis: Model and Solution Approach

Isolated renewable power to ammonia (IRePtA) has been recognized as a promising way to decarbonize the chemical industry. Optimal sizing of the renewable power system is significant to improve the techno-economic of IRePtA since the investment of power sources exceeds 80\% of the total investment. However, multi-timescale electricity, hydrogen, and ammonia storages, minimum power supply for system safety, and the multi-year uncertainty of renewable generation lead to difficulties in planning. To address the issues above, an IGDT-MILFP model is proposed. First, the levelized cost of ammonia (LCOA) is directly formulated as the objective, rendering a mixed integer linear fractional programming (MILFP) problem. Information gap decision theory (IGDT) is utilized to handle the multi-year uncertainty of renewable generation. Second, a combined Charnes-Cooper (C&C) transformation and Branch-and-Bound (B&B) method is proposed to efficiently solve the large-scale IGDT-MILFP model, giving robust and opportunistic planning results. Then, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling-based posteriori analysis is leveraged to quantify the long-run performance. Finally, a real-life system in Inner Mongolia, China, is studied. The results indicate that the proposed methods could reduce the computational burden by orders of magnitude for solving a large-scale MILFP problem. Moreover, the proposed IGDT-MILFP model is necessary and accurate to obtain an optimal capacity allocation with the lowest expected LCOA (3610 RMB/t) in long-run simulations.

eess.SY↗

Out-of-distribution Detection with Implicit Outlier Transformation

Outlier exposure (OE) is powerful in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, enhancing detection capability via model fine-tuning with surrogate OOD data. However, surrogate data typically deviate from test OOD data. Thus, the performance of OE, when facing unseen OOD data, can be weakened. To address this issue, we propose a novel OE-based approach that makes the model perform well for unseen OOD situations, even for unseen OOD cases. It leads to a min-max learning scheme -- searching to synthesize OOD data that leads to worst judgments and learning from such OOD data for uniform performance in OOD detection. In our realization, these worst OOD data are synthesized by transforming original surrogate ones. Specifically, the associated transform functions are learned implicitly based on our novel insight that model perturbation leads to data transformation. Our methodology offers an efficient way of synthesizing OOD data, which can further benefit the detection model, besides the surrogate OOD data. We conduct extensive experiments under various OOD detection setups, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method against its advanced counterparts.

cs.LG↗

Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection by Channel-wise Feature Denoising

Due to the diversity of attack materials, fingerprint recognition systems (AFRSs) are vulnerable to malicious attacks. It is thus important to propose effective fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) methods for the safety and reliability of AFRSs. However, current PAD methods often exhibit poor robustness under new attack types settings. This paper thus proposes a novel channel-wise feature denoising fingerprint PAD (CFD-PAD) method by handling the redundant noise information ignored in previous studies. The proposed method learns important features of fingerprint images by weighing the importance of each channel and identifying discriminative channels and "noise" channels. Then, the propagation of "noise" channels is suppressed in the feature map to reduce interference. Specifically, a PA-Adaptation loss is designed to constrain the feature distribution to make the feature distribution of live fingerprints more aggregate and that of spoof fingerprints more disperse. Experimental results evaluated on the LivDet 2017 dataset showed that the proposed CFD-PAD can achieve a 2.53% average classification error (ACE) and a 93.83% true detection rate when the false detection rate equals 1.0% (TDR@FDR=1%). Also, the proposed method markedly outperforms the best single-model-based methods in terms of ACE (2.53% vs. 4.56%) and TDR@FDR=1%(93.83% vs. 73.32%), which demonstrates its effectiveness. Although we have achieved a comparable result with the state-of-the-art multiple-model-based methods, there still is an increase in TDR@FDR=1% from 91.19% to 93.83%. In addition, the proposed model is simpler, lighter and more efficient and has achieved a 74.76% reduction in computation time compared with the state-of-the-art multiple-model-based method. The source code is available at https://github.com/kongzhecn/cfd-pad.

cs.CV↗

Mingling or Misalignment? Temporal Shift for Speech Emotion Recognition with Pre-trained Representations

Fueled by recent advances of self-supervised models, pre-trained speech representations proved effective for the downstream speech emotion recognition (SER) task. Most prior works mainly focus on exploiting pre-trained representations and just adopt a linear head on top of the pre-trained model, neglecting the design of the downstream network. In this paper, we propose a temporal shift module to mingle channel-wise information without introducing any parameter or FLOP. With the temporal shift module, three designed baseline building blocks evolve into corresponding shift variants, i.e. ShiftCNN, ShiftLSTM, and Shiftformer. Moreover, to balance the trade-off between mingling and misalignment, we propose two technical strategies, placement of shift and proportion of shift. The family of temporal shift models all outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark IEMOCAP dataset under both finetuning and feature extraction settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ECNU-Cross-Innovation-Lab/ShiftSER.

cs.SD↗

Is Out-of-Distribution Detection Learnable?

Supervised learning aims to train a classifier under the assumption that training and test data are from the same distribution. To ease the above assumption, researchers have studied a more realistic setting: out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, where test data may come from classes that are unknown during training (i.e., OOD data). Due to the unavailability and diversity of OOD data, good generalization ability is crucial for effective OOD detection algorithms. To study the generalization of OOD detection, in this paper, we investigate the probably approximately correct (PAC) learning theory of OOD detection, which is proposed by researchers as an open problem. First, we find a necessary condition for the learnability of OOD detection. Then, using this condition, we prove several impossibility theorems for the learnability of OOD detection under some scenarios. Although the impossibility theorems are frustrating, we find that some conditions of these impossibility theorems may not hold in some practical scenarios. Based on this observation, we next give several necessary and sufficient conditions to characterize the learnability of OOD detection in some practical scenarios. Lastly, we also offer theoretical supports for several representative OOD detection works based on our OOD theory.

cs.LG↗

KRADA: Known-region-aware Domain Alignment for Open-set Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation

In semantic segmentation, we aim to train a pixel-level classifier to assign category labels to all pixels in an image, where labeled training images and unlabeled test images are from the same distribution and share the same label set. However, in an open world, the unlabeled test images probably contain unknown categories and have different distributions from the labeled images. Hence, in this paper, we consider a new, more realistic, and more challenging problem setting where the pixel-level classifier has to be trained with labeled images and unlabeled open-world images -- we name it open-set domain adaptation segmentation (OSDAS). In OSDAS, the trained classifier is expected to identify unknown-class pixels and classify known-class pixels well. To solve OSDAS, we first investigate which distribution that unknown-class pixels obey. Then, motivated by the goodness-of-fit test, we use statistical measurements to show how a pixel fits the distribution of an unknown class and select highly-fitted pixels to form the unknown region in each test image. Eventually, we propose an end-to-end learning framework, known-region-aware domain alignment (KRADA), to distinguish unknown classes while aligning the distributions of known classes in labeled and unlabeled open-world images. The effectiveness of KRADA has been verified on two synthetic tasks and one COVID-19 segmentation task.

eess.IV↗

Predicting structure-dependent Hubbard U parameters for assessing hybrid functional-level exchange via machine learning

DFT+U is a widely used treatment in the density functional theory (DFT) to deal with correlated materials that contain open-shell elements, whereby the quantitative and sometimes even qualitative failures of local and semilocal approximations can be corrected without much computational overhead. However, finding appropriate U parameters for a given system is non-trivial and usually requires computationally intensive and cumbersome first-principles calculations. In this Letter, we address this issue by building a machine learning (ML) model to predict material-specific U parameters only from the structural information. An ML model is trained for the Mn-O chemical system by calibrating their DFT+U electronic structures with the hybrid functional results of more than Mn-O 3000 structures. The model allows us to determine a reliable U value (MAE=0.128 eV, R2=0.97) for any given structure at nearly no computational cost; yet the obtained U value is as good as that obtained from the conventional first-principles methods. Further analysis reveals that the U value is primarily determined by the local chemical structure, especially the bond lengths, and this property is well captured by the ML model developed in this work. This concept of the ML U model is universally applicable and can considerably ease the usage of the DFT+U method by providing structure-specific, readily accessible U values.

physics.comp-ph↗

Multi-timescale Trading Strategy for Renewable Power to Ammonia Virtual Power Plant in the Electricity, Hydrogen, and Ammonia Markets

Renewable power to ammonia (RePtA) is a prominent zero-carbon pathway for decarbonization. Due to the imbalance between renewables and production energy demand, the RePtA system relies on the electricity exchange with the power grid. Participating in the electricity market as a virtual power plant (VPP) may help to reduce energy costs. However, the power profile of local photovoltaics and wind turbines is similar to those in the market, resulting in rising energy costs under the conventional strategy. Hence, we develop a multi-timescale trading strategy for the RePtA VPP in the electricity, hydrogen, and ammonia markets. By utilizing the hydrogen and ammonia buffer systems, the RePtA VPP can optimally coordinate production planning. Moreover, we find it possible to describe the trading of electricity, ammonia, and hydrogen in a unified framework. The two-stage robust optimization model of the electricity market is extended to multiple markets and solved by the column and constraint generation (CC\&G) algorithm. The case is derived from an actual project in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates the economic advantages of an RePtA VPP joining multiple markets over conventional strategy and reveals the necessity of the hydrogen and ammonia buffer and reactor's flexibility.

eess.SY↗

Cluster and Aggregate: Face Recognition with Large Probe Set

Feature fusion plays a crucial role in unconstrained face recognition where inputs (probes) comprise of a set of $N$ low quality images whose individual qualities vary. Advances in attention and recurrent modules have led to feature fusion that can model the relationship among the images in the input set. However, attention mechanisms cannot scale to large $N$ due to their quadratic complexity and recurrent modules suffer from input order sensitivity. We propose a two-stage feature fusion paradigm, Cluster and Aggregate, that can both scale to large $N$ and maintain the ability to perform sequential inference with order invariance. Specifically, Cluster stage is a linear assignment of $N$ inputs to $M$ global cluster centers, and Aggregation stage is a fusion over $M$ clustered features. The clustered features play an integral role when the inputs are sequential as they can serve as a summarization of past features. By leveraging the order-invariance of incremental averaging operation, we design an update rule that achieves batch-order invariance, which guarantees that the contributions of early image in the sequence do not diminish as time steps increase. Experiments on IJB-B and IJB-S benchmark datasets show the superiority of the proposed two-stage paradigm in unconstrained face recognition. Code and pretrained models are available in https://github.com/mk-minchul/caface

cs.CV↗

Collective Excitation in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions -- In Memory of Professor Lianshou Liu

We celebrate the legacies of our friend and mentor Professor Lianshou Liu who was one of the pioneers for the phenomenology of multi-particle interactions and initiated the physics of relativistic heavy-ion collisions in China. In this article, we discuss some of the recent exciting experimental observations on the collective phenomena including collectivity, chirality, criticality, strangeness production, and thermal equilibrium in high-energy nuclear collisions. Future directions, especially the physics at high baryon density, will be discussed with a focus on the first-order phase boundary and hyperon-nucleon interactions.

nucl-ex↗

Learning Implicit Functions for Dense 3D Shape Correspondence of Generic Objects

The objective of this paper is to learn dense 3D shape correspondence for topology-varying generic objects in an unsupervised manner. Conventional implicit functions estimate the occupancy of a 3D point given a shape latent code. Instead, our novel implicit function produces a probabilistic embedding to represent each 3D point in a part embedding space. Assuming the corresponding points are similar in the embedding space, we implement dense correspondence through an inverse function mapping from the part embedding vector to a corresponded 3D point. Both functions are jointly learned with several effective and uncertainty-aware loss functions to realize our assumption, together with the encoder generating the shape latent code. During inference, if a user selects an arbitrary point on the source shape, our algorithm can automatically generate a confidence score indicating whether there is a correspondence on the target shape, as well as the corresponding semantic point if there is one. Such a mechanism inherently benefits man-made objects with different part constitutions. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through unsupervised 3D semantic correspondence and shape segmentation.

cs.CV↗

Realization of ideal flat band by rotated d-orbitals in Kagome metals

Recently there has been intense interest in Kagome metals, which are expected to host flat bands (FBs). However, the observed FBs are non-ideal as they are not flat over the whole 2D Brillouin zone and overlap strongly with other bands. Most critically, the theoretical conditions for the existence of ideal FB in Kagome metals, beyond the simplest Kagome lattice model, are unknown. Here, based on tight-binding model analyses of the interplay between d-orbital symmetry and underlying Kagome lattice symmetry, we establish such conditions. We show that for a pure transition-metal (TM) Kagome lattice, only dz2 orbital gives rise to a FB; while dxy, dx2-y2, dxz, and dyz orbitals do not. The condition for the latter four orbitals to produce a FB is to rotate them so that they will conform with the underlying Kagome lattice symmetry. Interestingly, the lattice having rotated dxy (dxz) and dx2-y2 (dyz) orbitals leads to a FB of opposite chirality sitting above and below the Dirac bands, respectively. For intercalated TM Kagome lattices, the Kagome-hexagonal intercalation exhibits always a FB, while the case for the Kagome-trigonal intercalation is conditional. Another condition to isolate the FB arising from individual d-orbitals is to increase the crystal field splitting, such as in Kagome metals of layered metalorganic frameworks.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Continuous Semi-Supervised Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization can be used to automatically detect topics within a corpus in an unsupervised fashion. The technique amounts to an approximation of a nonnegative matrix as the product of two nonnegative matrices of lower rank. In this paper, we show this factorization can be combined with regression on a continuous response variable. In practice, the method performs better than regression done after topics are identified and retrains interpretability.

cs.CL↗

Optimal Sizing and Pricing of Renewable Power to Ammonia Systems Considering the Limited Flexibility of Ammonia Synthesis

Converting renewable energy into ammonia has been recognized as a promising way to realize ``green hydrogen substitution" in the chemical industry. However, renewable power to ammonia (RePtA) requires an essential investment in facilities to provide a buffer against the strong volatility of renewable energy and the limited flexibility of ammonia synthesis, which involves the three main stakeholders, namely, power, hydrogen, and ammonia. Therefore, the sizing and pricing of RePtA play a core role in balancing the interest demands of investors. This paper proposes an optimal sizing and pricing method for RePtA system planning. First, power to ammonia (P2A) is modeled as a flexible load, especially considering the limited flexibility of ammonia synthesis, which has been verified using real dynamic regulation data. Second, the multi-investor economic (MIE) model is established considering both external and internal trading modes. Then, a two-stage decomposed sizing and pricing method is proposed to solve the problem caused by the strong coupling of planning, operation, and trading, and information gap decision theory (IGDT) method is utilized to handle the uncertainty of renewable generation. Finally, real data from a real-life system in Inner Mongolia are utilized to verify the proposed approach. The results show that the system proposed has a yield of 8.15%.

eess.SY↗

Integrally Migrating Pre-trained Transformer Encoder-decoders for Visual Object Detection

Modern object detectors have taken the advantages of backbone networks pre-trained on large scale datasets. Except for the backbone networks, however, other components such as the detector head and the feature pyramid network (FPN) remain trained from scratch, which hinders fully tapping the potential of representation models. In this study, we propose to integrally migrate pre-trained transformer encoder-decoders (imTED) to a detector, constructing a feature extraction path which is ``fully pre-trained" so that detectors' generalization capacity is maximized. The essential differences between imTED with the baseline detector are twofold: (1) migrating the pre-trained transformer decoder to the detector head while removing the randomly initialized FPN from the feature extraction path; and (2) defining a multi-scale feature modulator (MFM) to enhance scale adaptability. Such designs not only reduce randomly initialized parameters significantly but also unify detector training with representation learning intendedly. Experiments on the MS COCO object detection dataset show that imTED consistently outperforms its counterparts by $\sim$2.4 AP. Without bells and whistles, imTED improves the state-of-the-art of few-shot object detection by up to 7.6 AP. Code is available at https://github.com/LiewFeng/imTED.

cs.CV↗

3D-EPI Blip-Up/Down Acquisition (BUDA) with CAIPI and Joint Hankel Structured Low-Rank Reconstruction for Rapid Distortion-Free High-Resolution T2* Mapping

Purpose: This work aims to develop a novel distortion-free 3D-EPI acquisition and image reconstruction technique for fast and robust, high-resolution, whole-brain imaging as well as quantitative T2* mapping. Methods: 3D-Blip-Up and -Down Acquisition (3D-BUDA) sequence is designed for both single- and multi-echo 3D GRE-EPI imaging using multiple shots with blip-up and -down readouts to encode B0 field map information. Complementary k-space coverage is achieved using controlled aliasing in parallel imaging (CAIPI) sampling across the shots. For image reconstruction, an iterative hard-thresholding algorithm is employed to minimize the cost function that combines field map information informed parallel imaging with the structured low-rank constraint for multi-shot 3D-BUDA data. Extending 3D-BUDA to multi-echo imaging permits T2* mapping. For this, we propose constructing a joint Hankel matrix along both echo and shot dimensions to improve the reconstruction. Results: Experimental results on in vivo multi-echo data demonstrate that, by performing joint reconstruction along with both echo and shot dimensions, reconstruction accuracy is improved compared to standard 3D-BUDA reconstruction. CAIPI sampling is further shown to enhance the image quality. For T2* mapping, T2* values from 3D-Joint-CAIPI-BUDA and reference multi-echo GRE are within limits of agreement as quantified by Bland-Altman analysis. Conclusions: The proposed technique enables rapid 3D distortion-free high-resolution imaging and T2* mapping. Specifically, 3D-BUDA enables 1-mm isotropic whole-brain imaging in 22 s at 3 T and 9 s on a 7 T scanner. The combination of multi-echo 3D-BUDA with CAIPI acquisition and joint reconstruction enables distortion-free whole-brain T2* mapping in 47 s at 1.1x1.1x1.0 mm3 resolution.

eess.IV↗

View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes based on Deep 3D Mask Volume

Image view synthesis has seen great success in reconstructing photorealistic visuals, thanks to deep learning and various novel representations. The next key step in immersive virtual experiences is view synthesis of dynamic scenes. However, several challenges exist due to the lack of high-quality training datasets, and the additional time dimension for videos of dynamic scenes. To address this issue, we introduce a multi-view video dataset, captured with a custom 10-camera rig in 120FPS. The dataset contains 96 high-quality scenes showing various visual effects and human interactions in outdoor scenes. We develop a new algorithm, Deep 3D Mask Volume, which enables temporally-stable view extrapolation from binocular videos of dynamic scenes, captured by static cameras. Our algorithm addresses the temporal inconsistency of disocclusions by identifying the error-prone areas with a 3D mask volume, and replaces them with static background observed throughout the video. Our method enables manipulation in 3D space as opposed to simple 2D masks, We demonstrate better temporal stability than frame-by-frame static view synthesis methods, or those that use 2D masks. The resulting view synthesis videos show minimal flickering artifacts and allow for larger translational movements.

cs.CV↗

Online Optimization in Power Systems with High Penetration of Renewable Generation: Advances and Prospects

Traditionally, offline optimization of power systems is acceptable due to the largely predictable loads and reliable generation. The increasing penetration of fluctuating renewable generation and Internet-of-Things devices allowing for fine-grained controllability of loads have led to the diminishing applicability of offline optimization in the power systems domain, and have redirected attention to online optimization methods. However, online optimization is a broad topic that can be applied in and motivated by different settings, operated on different time scales, and built on different theoretical foundations. This paper reviews the various types of online optimization techniques used in the power systems domain and aims to make clear the distinction between the most common techniques used. In particular, we introduce and compare four distinct techniques used covering the breadth of online optimization techniques used in the power systems domain, i.e., optimization-guided dynamic control, feedback optimization for single-period problems, Lyapunov-based optimization, and online convex optimization techniques for multi-period problems. Lastly, we recommend some potential future directions for online optimization in the power systems domain.

math.OC↗