Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Li Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Li Chen.

At least 343 records · Page 19Linked to original sources

Electrostatic environment and Majorana bound states in full-shell topological insulator nanowires

The combination of a superconductor (SC) and a topological insulator (TI) nanowire was proposed as a potential candidate for realizing Majorana zero modes (MZMs). In this study, we adopt the Schrödinger-Poisson formalism to incorporate the electrostatic environment inside the nanowire and systematically explore its topological properties. Our calculations reveal that the proximity to the SC induces a band bending effect, leading to a non-uniform potential across the TI nanowire. As a consequence, there is an upward shift of the Fermi level within the conduction band. This gives rise to the coexistence of surface and bulk states, localized in an accumulation layer adjacent to the TI-SC interface. When magnetic flux is applied, these occupied states have different flux-penetration areas, suppressing the superconducting gap. However, this impact can be mitigated by increasing the radius of the nanowire. Finally, We demonstrate that MZMs can be achieved across a wide range of parameters centered around one applied flux quantum, $ϕ_0 = h/2e$. Within this regime, MZMs can be realized even in the presence of conduction bands, which are not affected by the band bending effect. These findings provide valuable insights into the practical realization of MZMs in TI nanowire-based devices, especially in the presence of a complicated electrostatic environment.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Decision Fusion Network with Perception Fine-tuning for Defect Classification

Surface defect inspection is an important task in industrial inspection. Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated promising performance in this domain. Nevertheless, these methods still suffer from misjudgment when encountering challenges such as low-contrast defects and complex backgrounds. To overcome these issues, we present a decision fusion network (DFNet) that incorporates the semantic decision with the feature decision to strengthen the decision ability of the network. In particular, we introduce a decision fusion module (DFM) that extracts a semantic vector from the semantic decision branch and a feature vector for the feature decision branch and fuses them to make the final classification decision. In addition, we propose a perception fine-tuning module (PFM) that fine-tunes the foreground and background during the segmentation stage. PFM generates the semantic and feature outputs that are sent to the classification decision stage. Furthermore, we present an inner-outer separation weight matrix to address the impact of label edge uncertainty during segmentation supervision. Our experimental results on the publicly available datasets including KolektorSDD2 (96.1% AP) and Magnetic-tile-defect-datasets (94.6% mAP) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.CV↗

SCVCNet: Sliding cross-vector convolution network for cross-task and inter-individual-set EEG-based cognitive workload recognition

This paper presents a generic approach for applying the cognitive workload recognizer by exploiting common electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns across different human-machine tasks and individual sets. We propose a neural network called SCVCNet, which eliminates task- and individual-set-related interferences in EEGs by analyzing finer-grained frequency structures in the power spectral densities. The SCVCNet utilizes a sliding cross-vector convolution (SCVC) operation, where paired input layers representing the theta and alpha power are employed. By extracting the weights from a kernel matrix's central row and column, we compute the weighted sum of the two vectors around a specified scalp location. Next, we introduce an inter-frequency-point feature integration module to fuse the SCVC feature maps. Finally, we combined the two modules with the output-channel pooling and classification layers to construct the model. To train the SCVCNet, we employ the regularized least-square method with ridge regression and the extreme learning machine theory. We validate its performance using three databases, each consisting of distinct tasks performed by independent participant groups. The average accuracy (0.6813 and 0.6229) and F1 score (0.6743 and 0.6076) achieved in two different validation paradigms show partially higher performance than the previous works. All features and algorithms are available on website:https://github.com/7ohnKeats/SCVCNet.

eess.SP↗

An Empirical Study of NetOps Capability of Pre-Trained Large Language Models

Nowadays, the versatile capabilities of Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted much attention from the industry. However, some vertical domains are more interested in the in-domain capabilities of LLMs. For the Networks domain, we present NetEval, an evaluation set for measuring the comprehensive capabilities of LLMs in Network Operations (NetOps). NetEval is designed for evaluating the commonsense knowledge and inference ability in NetOps in a multi-lingual context. NetEval consists of 5,732 questions about NetOps, covering five different sub-domains of NetOps. With NetEval, we systematically evaluate the NetOps capability of 26 publicly available LLMs. The results show that only GPT-4 can achieve a performance competitive to humans. However, some open models like LLaMA 2 demonstrate significant potential.

cs.CL↗

MMST-ViT: Climate Change-aware Crop Yield Prediction via Multi-Modal Spatial-Temporal Vision Transformer

Precise crop yield prediction provides valuable information for agricultural planning and decision-making processes. However, timely predicting crop yields remains challenging as crop growth is sensitive to growing season weather variation and climate change. In this work, we develop a deep learning-based solution, namely Multi-Modal Spatial-Temporal Vision Transformer (MMST-ViT), for predicting crop yields at the county level across the United States, by considering the effects of short-term meteorological variations during the growing season and the long-term climate change on crops. Specifically, our MMST-ViT consists of a Multi-Modal Transformer, a Spatial Transformer, and a Temporal Transformer. The Multi-Modal Transformer leverages both visual remote sensing data and short-term meteorological data for modeling the effect of growing season weather variations on crop growth. The Spatial Transformer learns the high-resolution spatial dependency among counties for accurate agricultural tracking. The Temporal Transformer captures the long-range temporal dependency for learning the impact of long-term climate change on crops. Meanwhile, we also devise a novel multi-modal contrastive learning technique to pre-train our model without extensive human supervision. Hence, our MMST-ViT captures the impacts of both short-term weather variations and long-term climate change on crops by leveraging both satellite images and meteorological data. We have conducted extensive experiments on over 200 counties in the United States, with the experimental results exhibiting that our MMST-ViT outperforms its counterparts under three performance metrics of interest.

cs.CV↗

Discovery and inference of a causal network with hidden confounding

This article proposes a novel causal discovery and inference method called GrIVET for a Gaussian directed acyclic graph with unmeasured confounders. GrIVET consists of an order-based causal discovery method and a likelihood-based inferential procedure. For causal discovery, we generalize the existing peeling algorithm to estimate the ancestral relations and candidate instruments in the presence of hidden confounders. Based on this, we propose a new procedure for instrumental variable estimation of each direct effect by separating it from any mediation effects. For inference, we develop a new likelihood ratio test of multiple causal effects that is able to account for the unmeasured confounders. Theoretically, we prove that the proposed method has desirable guarantees, including robustness to invalid instruments and uncertain interventions, estimation consistency, low-order polynomial time complexity, and validity of asymptotic inference. Numerically, GrIVET performs well and compares favorably against state-of-the-art competitors. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the proposed method through an application inferring regulatory pathways from Alzheimer's disease gene expression data.

stat.ME↗

Nanoscale Cathodoluminescence Spectroscopy Probing the Nitride Quantum Wells in an Electron Microcope

To gain a deeper understanding of the luminescence of multiquantum wells and the factors affecting it on a microscopic level, cathodoluminescence combined with scanning transmission electron microscopy and spectroscopy was used to reveal the luminescence of In0.15Ga0.85N five-period multiquantum wells. The composition-wave-energy relationship was established in combination with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy , and the bandgaps of In0.15Ga0.85N and GaN in multiple quantum wells were extracted by electron energy loss spectroscopy to understand the features of cathodoluminescence luminescence spectra. The luminescence differences between different periods of multiquantum wells and the effects on the luminescence of multiple quantum wells owing to defects such as composition fluctuation and dislocations were revealed. Our study establishing the direct correspondence between the atomic structure of InxGa1-xN multiquantum wells and photoelectric properties, provides useful information for nitride applications.

physics.app-ph↗

PhotoVerse: Tuning-Free Image Customization with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Personalized text-to-image generation has emerged as a powerful and sought-after tool, empowering users to create customized images based on their specific concepts and prompts. However, existing approaches to personalization encounter multiple challenges, including long tuning times, large storage requirements, the necessity for multiple input images per identity, and limitations in preserving identity and editability. To address these obstacles, we present PhotoVerse, an innovative methodology that incorporates a dual-branch conditioning mechanism in both text and image domains, providing effective control over the image generation process. Furthermore, we introduce facial identity loss as a novel component to enhance the preservation of identity during training. Remarkably, our proposed PhotoVerse eliminates the need for test time tuning and relies solely on a single facial photo of the target identity, significantly reducing the resource cost associated with image generation. After a single training phase, our approach enables generating high-quality images within only a few seconds. Moreover, our method can produce diverse images that encompass various scenes and styles. The extensive evaluation demonstrates the superior performance of our approach, which achieves the dual objectives of preserving identity and facilitating editability. Project page: https://photoverse2d.github.io/

cs.CV↗

The role of tidal interactions in the formation of slowly rotating early-type stars in young star clusters

The split main sequences found in the colour-magnitude diagrams of star clusters younger than ~600 Myr are suggested to be caused by the dichotomy of stellar rotation rates of upper main-sequence stars. Tidal interactions have been suggested as a possible explanation of the dichotomy of the stellar rotation rates. This hypothesis proposes that the slow rotation rates of stars along the split main sequences are caused by tidal interactions in binaries. To test this scenario, we measured the variations in the radial velocities of slowly rotating stars along the split main sequence of the young Galactic cluster NGC 2422 (~90 Myr) using spectra obtained at multiple epochs with the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope. Our results show that most slowly rotating stars are not radial-velocity variables. Using the theory of dynamical tides, we find that the binary separations necessary to fully or partially synchronise our spectroscopic targets, on time-scales shorter than the cluster age, predict much larger radial velocity variations across multiple-epoch observations, or a much larger radial velocity dispersion at a single epoch, than the observed values. This indicates that tidal interactions are not the dominant mechanism to form slowly rotating stars along the split main sequences. As the observations of the rotation velocity distribution among B- and A-type stars in binaries of larger separations hint at a much stronger effect of braking with age, we discuss the consequences of relaxing the constraints of the dynamical tides theory.

astro-ph.SR↗

Graph-based Topology Reasoning for Driving Scenes

Understanding the road genome is essential to realize autonomous driving. This highly intelligent problem contains two aspects - the connection relationship of lanes, and the assignment relationship between lanes and traffic elements, where a comprehensive topology reasoning method is vacant. On one hand, previous map learning techniques struggle in deriving lane connectivity with segmentation or laneline paradigms; or prior lane topology-oriented approaches focus on centerline detection and neglect the interaction modeling. On the other hand, the traffic element to lane assignment problem is limited in the image domain, leaving how to construct the correspondence from two views an unexplored challenge. To address these issues, we present TopoNet, the first end-to-end framework capable of abstracting traffic knowledge beyond conventional perception tasks. To capture the driving scene topology, we introduce three key designs: (1) an embedding module to incorporate semantic knowledge from 2D elements into a unified feature space; (2) a curated scene graph neural network to model relationships and enable feature interaction inside the network; (3) instead of transmitting messages arbitrarily, a scene knowledge graph is devised to differentiate prior knowledge from various types of the road genome. We evaluate TopoNet on the challenging scene understanding benchmark, OpenLane-V2, where our approach outperforms all previous works by a great margin on all perceptual and topological metrics. The code is released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/TopoNet

cs.CV↗

DriveAdapter: Breaking the Coupling Barrier of Perception and Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to build a fully differentiable system that takes raw sensor data as inputs and directly outputs the planned trajectory or control signals of the ego vehicle. State-of-the-art methods usually follow the `Teacher-Student' paradigm. The Teacher model uses privileged information (ground-truth states of surrounding agents and map elements) to learn the driving strategy. The student model only has access to raw sensor data and conducts behavior cloning on the data collected by the teacher model. By eliminating the noise of the perception part during planning learning, state-of-the-art works could achieve better performance with significantly less data compared to those coupled ones. However, under the current Teacher-Student paradigm, the student model still needs to learn a planning head from scratch, which could be challenging due to the redundant and noisy nature of raw sensor inputs and the casual confusion issue of behavior cloning. In this work, we aim to explore the possibility of directly adopting the strong teacher model to conduct planning while letting the student model focus more on the perception part. We find that even equipped with a SOTA perception model, directly letting the student model learn the required inputs of the teacher model leads to poor driving performance, which comes from the large distribution gap between predicted privileged inputs and the ground-truth. To this end, we propose DriveAdapter, which employs adapters with the feature alignment objective function between the student (perception) and teacher (planning) modules. Additionally, since the pure learning-based teacher model itself is imperfect and occasionally breaks safety rules, we propose a method of action-guided feature learning with a mask for those imperfect teacher features to further inject the priors of hand-crafted rules into the learning process.

cs.RO↗

Dynamic landslide susceptibility mapping over recent three decades to uncover variations in landslide causes in subtropical urban mountainous areas

Landslide susceptibility assessment (LSA) is of paramount importance in mitigating landslide risks. Recently, there has been a surge in the utilization of data-driven methods for predicting landslide susceptibility due to the growing availability of aerial and satellite data. Nonetheless, the rapid oscillations within the landslide-inducing environment (LIE), primarily due to significant changes in external triggers such as rainfall, pose difficulties for contemporary data-driven LSA methodologies to accommodate LIEs over diverse timespans. This study presents dynamic landslide susceptibility mapping that simply employs multiple predictive models for annual LSA. In practice, this will inevitably encounter small sample problems due to the limited number of landslide samples in certain years. Another concern arises owing to the majority of the existing LSA approaches train black-box models to fit distinct datasets, yet often failing in generalization and providing comprehensive explanations concerning the interactions between input features and predictions. Accordingly, we proposed to meta-learn representations with fast adaptation ability using a few samples and gradient updates; and apply SHAP for each model interpretation and landslide feature permutation. Additionally, we applied MT-InSAR for LSA result enhancement and validation. The chosen study area is Lantau Island, Hong Kong, where we conducted a comprehensive dynamic LSA spanning from 1992 to 2019. The model interpretation results demonstrate that the primary factors responsible for triggering landslides in Lantau Island are terrain slope and extreme rainfall. The results also indicate that the variation in landslide causes can be primarily attributed to extreme rainfall events, which result from global climate change, and the implementation of the Landslip Prevention and Mitigation Programme (LPMitP) by the Hong Kong government.

cs.LG↗

Convergence towards the population cross-diffusion system from stochastic many-particle system

In this paper, we derive rigorously a non-local cross-diffusion system from an interacting stochastic many-particle system in the whole space. The convergence is proved in the sense of probability by introducing an intermediate particle system with a mollified interaction potential, where the mollification is of algebraic scaling. The main idea of the proof is to study the time evolution of a stopped process and obtain a Gronwall type estimate by using Taylor's expansion around the limiting stochastic process.

math.PR↗

From frustration-free parent Hamiltonians to off-diagonal long-range order: Moore-Read and related states in second quantization

We construct a recursive second-quantized formula for Moore-Read Pfaffian states. We demonstrate the utility of such second-quantized presentations by directly proving the existence of frustration-free parent Hamiltonians, without appealing to polynomial clustering properties. Furthermore, we show how this formalism is connected to the existence of a non-local order parameter for Moore-Read states and give a proof that the latter exhibit off-diagonal long-range order (ODLRO) in these quantities. We also develop a similar second-quantized presentation for the fermionic antiand PH-Pfaffian states, as well as f- and higher wave paired composite fermion states, and discuss ODLRO in most cases.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Augmented Negative Sampling for Collaborative Filtering

Negative sampling is essential for implicit-feedback-based collaborative filtering, which is used to constitute negative signals from massive unlabeled data to guide supervised learning. The state-of-the-art idea is to utilize hard negative samples that carry more useful information to form a better decision boundary. To balance efficiency and effectiveness, the vast majority of existing methods follow the two-pass approach, in which the first pass samples a fixed number of unobserved items by a simple static distribution and then the second pass selects the final negative items using a more sophisticated negative sampling strategy. However, selecting negative samples from the original items is inherently restricted, and thus may not be able to contrast positive samples well. In this paper, we confirm this observation via experiments and introduce two limitations of existing solutions: ambiguous trap and information discrimination. Our response to such limitations is to introduce augmented negative samples. This direction renders a substantial technical challenge because constructing unconstrained negative samples may introduce excessive noise that distorts the decision boundary. To this end, we introduce a novel generic augmented negative sampling paradigm and provide a concrete instantiation. First, we disentangle hard and easy factors of negative items. Next, we generate new candidate negative samples by augmenting only the easy factors in a regulated manner: the direction and magnitude of the augmentation are carefully calibrated. Finally, we design an advanced negative sampling strategy to identify the final augmented negative samples, which considers not only the score function used in existing methods but also a new metric called augmentation gain. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.IR↗

Weakly Semi-Supervised Detection in Lung Ultrasound Videos

Frame-by-frame annotation of bounding boxes by clinical experts is often required to train fully supervised object detection models on medical video data. We propose a method for improving object detection in medical videos through weak supervision from video-level labels. More concretely, we aggregate individual detection predictions into video-level predictions and extend a teacher-student training strategy to provide additional supervision via a video-level loss. We also introduce improvements to the underlying teacher-student framework, including methods to improve the quality of pseudo-labels based on weak supervision and adaptive schemes to optimize knowledge transfer between the student and teacher networks. We apply this approach to the clinically important task of detecting lung consolidations (seen in respiratory infections such as COVID-19 pneumonia) in medical ultrasound videos. Experiments reveal that our framework improves detection accuracy and robustness compared to baseline semi-supervised models, and improves efficiency in data and annotation usage.

eess.IV↗

AvatarVerse: High-quality & Stable 3D Avatar Creation from Text and Pose

Creating expressive, diverse and high-quality 3D avatars from highly customized text descriptions and pose guidance is a challenging task, due to the intricacy of modeling and texturing in 3D that ensure details and various styles (realistic, fictional, etc). We present AvatarVerse, a stable pipeline for generating expressive high-quality 3D avatars from nothing but text descriptions and pose guidance. In specific, we introduce a 2D diffusion model conditioned on DensePose signal to establish 3D pose control of avatars through 2D images, which enhances view consistency from partially observed scenarios. It addresses the infamous Janus Problem and significantly stablizes the generation process. Moreover, we propose a progressive high-resolution 3D synthesis strategy, which obtains substantial improvement over the quality of the created 3D avatars. To this end, the proposed AvatarVerse pipeline achieves zero-shot 3D modeling of 3D avatars that are not only more expressive, but also in higher quality and fidelity than previous works. Rigorous qualitative evaluations and user studies showcase AvatarVerse's superiority in synthesizing high-fidelity 3D avatars, leading to a new standard in high-quality and stable 3D avatar creation. Our project page is: https://avatarverse3d.github.io

cs.CV↗

HDGT: Heterogeneous Driving Graph Transformer for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction via Scene Encoding

Encoding a driving scene into vector representations has been an essential task for autonomous driving that can benefit downstream tasks e.g. trajectory prediction. The driving scene often involves heterogeneous elements such as the different types of objects (agents, lanes, traffic signs) and the semantic relations between objects are rich and diverse. Meanwhile, there also exist relativity across elements, which means that the spatial relation is a relative concept and need be encoded in a ego-centric manner instead of in a global coordinate system. Based on these observations, we propose Heterogeneous Driving Graph Transformer (HDGT), a backbone modelling the driving scene as a heterogeneous graph with different types of nodes and edges. For heterogeneous graph construction, we connect different types of nodes according to diverse semantic relations. For spatial relation encoding, the coordinates of the node as well as its in-edges are in the local node-centric coordinate system. For the aggregation module in the graph neural network (GNN), we adopt the transformer structure in a hierarchical way to fit the heterogeneous nature of inputs. Experimental results show that HDGT achieves state-of-the-art performance for the task of trajectory prediction, on INTERACTION Prediction Challenge and Waymo Open Motion Challenge.

cs.AI↗