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Ke Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Ke Zhu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Design-based theory for Lasso adjustment in randomized block experiments and rerandomized experiments

Blocking, a special case of rerandomization, is routinely implemented in the design stage of randomized experiments to balance the baseline covariates. This study proposes a regression adjustment method based on the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) to efficiently estimate the average treatment effect in randomized block experiments with high-dimensional covariates. We derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator and outline the conditions under which this estimator is more efficient than the unadjusted one. We provide a conservative variance estimator to facilitate valid inferences. Our framework allows one treated or control unit in some blocks and heterogeneous propensity scores across blocks, thus including paired experiments and finely stratified experiments as special cases. We further accommodate rerandomized experiments and a combination of blocking and rerandomization. Moreover, our analysis allows both the number of blocks and block sizes to tend to infinity, as well as heterogeneous treatment effects across blocks without assuming a true outcome data-generating model. Simulation studies and two real-data analyses demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.

stat.ME↗

Inference for the panel ARMA-GARCH model when both $N$ and $T$ are large

We propose a panel ARMA-GARCH model to capture the dynamics of large panel data with $N$ individuals over $T$ time periods. For this model, we provide a two-step estimation procedure to estimate the ARMA parameters and GARCH parameters stepwisely. Under some regular conditions, we show that all of the proposed estimators are asymptotically normal with the convergence rate $(NT)^{-1/2}$, and they have the asymptotic biases when both $N$ and $T$ diverge to infinity at the same rate. Particularly, we find that the asymptotic biases result from the fixed effect, estimation effect, and unobservable initial values. To correct the biases, we further propose the bias-corrected version of estimators by using either the analytical asymptotics or jackknife method. Our asymptotic results are based on a new central limit theorem for the linear-quadratic form in the martingale difference sequence, when the weight matrix is uniformly bounded in row and column. Simulations and one real example are given to demonstrate the usefulness of our panel ARMA-GARCH model.

stat.ME↗

Estimation for conditional moment models based on martingale difference divergence

We provide a new estimation method for conditional moment models via the martingale difference divergence (MDD).Our MDD-based estimation method is formed in the framework of a continuum of unconditional moment restrictions. Unlike the existing estimation methods in this framework, the MDD-based estimation method adopts a non-integrable weighting function, which could grab more information from unconditional moment restrictions than the integrable weighting function to enhance the estimation efficiency. Due to the nature of shift-invariance in MDD, our MDD-based estimation method can not identify the intercept parameters. To overcome this identification issue, we further provide a two-step estimation procedure for the model with intercept parameters. Under regularity conditions, we establish the asymptotics of the proposed estimators, which are not only easy-to-implement with analytic asymptotic variances, but also applicable to time series data with an unspecified form of conditional heteroskedasticity. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of the proposed estimators by simulations and two real examples.

econ.EM↗

Recent advances on the spherical metal oxides for sustainable degradation of antibiotics

Due to the permanent harm to human health and ecosystem balance, antibiotic pollution in water has become an important direction of current environmental governance. Spherical metal oxides (SMOs) have been frequently utilized as effective heterogeneous photocatalysts for the efficient degradation of antibiotics due to the unique properties (e.g., strong light absorption ability, high separation efficiency of photo-generated electron hole pairs, and good catalytic activity). This review will firstly focus on summarizing the rational design and synthesis of SMOs with various tuned microstructures such as hollow, porous shell, yolk shell, core shell, and nanoflowers. These structures can expose more active sites, achieve a higher utilization rate of light, enhance the mass transfer efficiency and improve the effective diffusion of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Secondly, this review will mainly analyze the intrinsic relationship between the structure of SMOs and its photocatalytic property, the ability to generate ROS, and the degradation pathway for antibiotics. Moreover, the photocatalytic mechanisms and recent progress of different SMOs catalysts for degrading typical antibiotics are compared in detail. Finally, challenges and prospects of future direction in the development of SMOs for antibiotic degradation are reviewed. It is expected to provide a rational design of SMOs catalysts for efficient photocatalytic degradation of environmental pollutants.

physics.bio-ph↗

Acceleration of Fe$^{3+}$/Fe$^{2+}$ cycle in garland-like MIL-101(Fe)/MoS$_2$ nanosheets to promote peroxymonosulfate activation for sulfamethoxazole degradation

Iron-based molybdenum disulfide (Fe-MoS$_2$) has emerged as a Fenton-like catalyst for the highly efficient degradation of antibiotics, but the structure-activity relationship remains elusive. Herein, garland-like MIL-101(Fe)/MoS$_2$ nanosheets (MMS) with dual metal active sites (Fe and Mo) and rich sulfur vacancies were fabricated to directly activate peroxymonosulfate (PMS) for fast degradation of different organic pollutants (phenols, dyes and drugs), even in real water bodies. The MMS exhibited extremely fast catalytic rate constant of 0.289 min$^{-1}$ in the degradation of sulfamethoxazole (SMX), which was about 36 and 29 times that of single MoS$_2$ (0.008 min$^{-1}$) and MIL-101(Fe) (0.01 min$^{-1}$). Moreover, MMS with good stability and reusability could reach 92% degradation of SMX after 5 cycles. Quenching experiments and electron spin resonance (ESR) tests revealed that hydroxyl radicals (.OH) and singlet oxygen ($^1$O$_2$) were the dominant reactive oxygen species (ROS) for SMX degradation. The integration of experimental works, characterization techniques and density functional theory (DFT) calculations unraveled that the formation of sulfur vacancies in MMS catalyst could expose more Mo sites, improve the charge density and boost the electron transfer, which was conducive to accelerating the Fe$^{3+}$/Fe$^{2+}$ cycle for enhancing the activation of PMS. Finally, the C-N, N-O, S-N, C-O and C-S bonds of SMX were easily attacked by ROS to generate the nontoxic intermediates in the MMS/PMS/SMX system. This study offers a new approach to designing high-performance Fe-MoS$_2$ catalysts for the removal of organic pollutants.

physics.chem-ph↗

Visible light-assisted peroxymonosulfate activation by high-purity FeS$_2$ nanoplates for dye pollutant control

With the rapid industrial development, many dye pollutants have entered the water, along with heavy metals like As, leading to complex pollution that threatens the ecological environment and human health. Therefore, designing an effective strategy for treating complex dye wastewater is urgent. Herein, we have constructed high-purity pyrite FeS$_2$ nanoplates as bifunctional catalysts for the simultaneous removal of dyes and arsenite (As(III)).

physics.app-ph↗

Enhanced electron transfer using NiCo2O4@C hollow nanocages with an electron-shuttle effect for efficient tetracycline degradation

Spinel oxides are recognized as promising Fenton-like catalysts for the degradation of antibiotics. However, the catalytic performance is restrained by the poor electron transfer rate (ETR). Herein, hollow NiCo2O4@C nanocages are rationally designed and prepared to accelerate ETR in peroxymonosulfate (PMS) activation for tetracycline (TC) degradation.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Facile synthesis of fine-grained CoFe$_2$O$_4$ anchored on porous carbon for simultaneous removal of tetracycline and arsenite

The coexistence of tetracycline (TC) and arsenite (As(III)) in livestock wastewater threatens public health, and the heterogeneous Fenton-like system is a practical approach for the simultaneous removal of TC and As(III). In this work, fine CoFe$_2$O$_4$ nanoparticles are facilely anchored on heretically porous carbon (CoFe$_2$O$_4$@PC) via a microwave-assisted calcination method and used for eliminating TC and As(III) via peroxymonosulfate (PMS) activation.

physics.app-ph↗

DiffuLT: How to Make Diffusion Model Useful for Long-tail Recognition

This paper proposes a new pipeline for long-tail (LT) recognition. Instead of re-weighting or re-sampling, we utilize the long-tailed dataset itself to generate a balanced proxy that can be optimized through cross-entropy (CE). Specifically, a randomly initialized diffusion model, trained exclusively on the long-tailed dataset, is employed to synthesize new samples for underrepresented classes. Then, we utilize the inherent information in the original dataset to filter out harmful samples and keep the useful ones. Our strategy, Diffusion model for Long-Tail recognition (DiffuLT), represents a pioneering utilization of generative models in long-tail recognition. DiffuLT achieves state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT, surpassing the best competitors with non-trivial margins. Abundant ablations make our pipeline interpretable, too. The whole generation pipeline is done without any external data or pre-trained model weights, making it highly generalizable to real-world long-tailed settings.

cs.CV↗

Low-rank Attention Side-Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

In finetuning a large pretrained model to downstream tasks, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods can effectively finetune pretrained models with few trainable parameters, but suffer from high GPU memory consumption and slow training speed. Because learnable parameters from these methods are entangled with the pretrained model, gradients related to the frozen pretrained model's parameters have to be computed and stored during finetuning. We propose Low-rank Attention Side-Tuning (LAST), which disentangles the trainable module from the pretrained model by freezing not only parameters but also outputs of the pretrained network. LAST trains a side-network composed of only low-rank self-attention modules. By viewing the pretrained model as a frozen feature extractor, the side-network takes intermediate output from the pretrained model and focus on learning task-specific knowledge. We also show that LAST can be highly parallel across multiple optimization objectives, making it very efficient in downstream task adaptation, for example, in finding optimal hyperparameters. LAST outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on VTAB-1K and other visual adaptation tasks with roughly only 30\% of GPU memory footprint and 60\% of training time compared to existing PEFT methods, but achieves significantly higher accuracy.

cs.CV↗

DTL: Disentangled Transfer Learning for Visual Recognition

When pre-trained models become rapidly larger, the cost of fine-tuning on downstream tasks steadily increases, too. To economically fine-tune these models, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) is proposed, which only tunes a tiny subset of trainable parameters to efficiently learn quality representations. However, current PETL methods are facing the dilemma that during training the GPU memory footprint is not effectively reduced as trainable parameters. PETL will likely fail, too, if the full fine-tuning encounters the out-of-GPU-memory issue. This phenomenon happens because trainable parameters from these methods are generally entangled with the backbone, such that a lot of intermediate states have to be stored in GPU memory for gradient propagation. To alleviate this problem, we introduce Disentangled Transfer Learning (DTL), which disentangles the trainable parameters from the backbone using a lightweight Compact Side Network (CSN). By progressively extracting task-specific information with a few low-rank linear mappings and appropriately adding the information back to the backbone, CSN effectively realizes knowledge transfer in various downstream tasks. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our method. The proposed method not only reduces a large amount of GPU memory usage and trainable parameters, but also outperforms existing PETL methods by a significant margin in accuracy, achieving new state-of-the-art on several standard benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/heekhero/DTL.

cs.CV↗

Rectify the Regression Bias in Long-Tailed Object Detection

Long-tailed object detection faces great challenges because of its extremely imbalanced class distribution. Recent methods mainly focus on the classification bias and its loss function design, while ignoring the subtle influence of the regression branch. This paper shows that the regression bias exists and does adversely and seriously impact the detection accuracy. While existing methods fail to handle the regression bias, the class-specific regression head for rare classes is hypothesized to be the main cause of it in this paper. As a result, three kinds of viable solutions to cater for the rare categories are proposed, including adding a class-agnostic branch, clustering heads and merging heads. The proposed methods brings in consistent and significant improvements over existing long-tailed detection methods, especially in rare and common classes. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the large vocabulary LVIS dataset with different backbones and architectures. It generalizes well to more difficult evaluation metrics, relatively balanced datasets, and the mask branch. This is the first attempt to reveal and explore rectifying of the regression bias in long-tailed object detection.

cs.CV↗

Coarse Is Better? A New Pipeline Towards Self-Supervised Learning with Uncurated Images

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods often work on curated datasets where the object-centric assumption holds. This assumption breaks down in uncurated images. Existing scene image SSL methods try to find the two views from original scene images that are well matched or dense, which is both complex and computationally heavy. This paper proposes a conceptually different pipeline: first find regions that are coarse objects (with adequate objectness), crop them out as pseudo object-centric images, then any SSL method can be directly applied as in a real object-centric dataset. That is, coarse crops benefits scene images SSL. A novel cropping strategy that produces coarse object box is proposed. The new pipeline and cropping strategy successfully learn quality features from uncurated datasets without ImageNet. Experiments show that our pipeline outperforms existing SSL methods (MoCo-v2, DenseCL and MAE) on classification, detection and segmentation tasks. We further conduct extensively ablations to verify that: 1) the pipeline do not rely on pretrained models; 2) the cropping strategy is better than existing object discovery methods; 3) our method is not sensitive to hyperparameters and data augmentations.

cs.CV↗

Multi-Label Self-Supervised Learning with Scene Images

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods targeting scene images have seen a rapid growth recently, and they mostly rely on either a dedicated dense matching mechanism or a costly unsupervised object discovery module. This paper shows that instead of hinging on these strenuous operations, quality image representations can be learned by treating scene/multi-label image SSL simply as a multi-label classification problem, which greatly simplifies the learning framework. Specifically, multiple binary pseudo-labels are assigned for each input image by comparing its embeddings with those in two dictionaries, and the network is optimized using the binary cross entropy loss. The proposed method is named Multi-Label Self-supervised learning (MLS). Visualizations qualitatively show that clearly the pseudo-labels by MLS can automatically find semantically similar pseudo-positive pairs across different images to facilitate contrastive learning. MLS learns high quality representations on MS-COCO and achieves state-of-the-art results on classification, detection and segmentation benchmarks. At the same time, MLS is much simpler than existing methods, making it easier to deploy and for further exploration.

cs.CV↗

Quantized Feature Distillation for Network Quantization

Neural network quantization aims to accelerate and trim full-precision neural network models by using low bit approximations. Methods adopting the quantization aware training (QAT) paradigm have recently seen a rapid growth, but are often conceptually complicated. This paper proposes a novel and highly effective QAT method, quantized feature distillation (QFD). QFD first trains a quantized (or binarized) representation as the teacher, then quantize the network using knowledge distillation (KD). Quantitative results show that QFD is more flexible and effective (i.e., quantization friendly) than previous quantization methods. QFD surpasses existing methods by a noticeable margin on not only image classification but also object detection, albeit being much simpler. Furthermore, QFD quantizes ViT and Swin-Transformer on MS-COCO detection and segmentation, which verifies its potential in real world deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that vision transformers have been quantized in object detection and image segmentation tasks.

cs.CV↗

Matrix GARCH Model: Inference and Application

Matrix-variate time series data are largely available in applications. However, no attempt has been made to study their conditional heteroskedasticity that is often observed in economic and financial data. To address this gap, we propose a novel matrix generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model to capture the dynamics of conditional row and column covariance matrices of matrix time series. The key innovation of the matrix GARCH model is the use of a univariate GARCH specification for the trace of conditional row or column covariance matrix, which allows for the identification of conditional row and column covariance matrices. Moreover, we introduce a quasi maximum likelihood estimator (QMLE) for model estimation and develop a portmanteau test for model diagnostic checking. Simulation studies are conducted to assess the finite-sample performance of the QMLE and portmanteau test. To handle large dimensional matrix time series, we also propose a matrix factor GARCH model. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of the matrix GARCH and matrix factor GARCH models over existing multivariate GARCH-type models in volatility forecasting and portfolio allocations using three applications on credit default swap prices, global stock sector indices, and future prices.

stat.ME↗

Quantiled conditional variance, skewness, and kurtosis by Cornish-Fisher expansion

The conditional variance, skewness, and kurtosis play a central role in time series analysis. These three conditional moments (CMs) are often studied by some parametric models but with two big issues: the risk of model mis-specification and the instability of model estimation. To avoid the above two issues, this paper proposes a novel method to estimate these three CMs by the so-called quantiled CMs (QCMs). The QCM method first adopts the idea of Cornish-Fisher expansion to construct a linear regression model, based on $n$ different estimated conditional quantiles. Next, it computes the QCMs simply and simultaneously by using the ordinary least squares estimator of this regression model, without any prior estimation of the conditional mean. Under certain conditions, the QCMs are shown to be consistent with the convergence rate $n^{-1/2}$. Simulation studies indicate that the QCMs perform well under different scenarios of Cornish-Fisher expansion errors and quantile estimation errors. In the application, the study of QCMs for three exchange rates demonstrates the effectiveness of financial rescue plans during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, and suggests that the existing ``news impact curve'' functions for the conditional skewness and kurtosis may not be suitable.

stat.ME↗

Instance-based Max-margin for Practical Few-shot Recognition

In order to mimic the human few-shot learning (FSL) ability better and to make FSL closer to real-world applications, this paper proposes a practical FSL (pFSL) setting. pFSL is based on unsupervised pretrained models (analogous to human prior knowledge) and recognizes many novel classes simultaneously. Compared to traditional FSL, pFSL is simpler in its formulation, easier to evaluate, more challenging and more practical. To cope with the rarity of training examples, this paper proposes IbM2, an instance-based max-margin method not only for the new pFSL setting, but also works well in traditional FSL scenarios. Based on the Gaussian Annulus Theorem, IbM2 converts random noise applied to the instances into a mechanism to achieve maximum margin in the many-way pFSL (or traditional FSL) recognition task. Experiments with various self-supervised pretraining methods and diverse many- or few-way FSL tasks show that IbM2 almost always leads to improvements compared to its respective baseline methods, and in most cases the improvements are significant. With both the new pFSL setting and novel IbM2 method, this paper shows that practical few-shot learning is both viable and promising.

cs.CV↗