arXiv subjects

Liping Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Liping Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

GradStop: Exploring Training Dynamics in Unsupervised Outlier Detection through Gradient

Unsupervised Outlier Detection (UOD) is a critical task in data mining and machine learning, aiming to identify instances that significantly deviate from the majority. Without any label, deep UOD methods struggle with the misalignment between the model's direct optimization goal and the final performance goal of Outlier Detection (OD) task. Through the perspective of training dynamics, this paper proposes an early stopping algorithm to optimize the training of deep UOD models, ensuring they perform optimally in OD rather than overfitting the entire contaminated dataset. Inspired by UOD mechanism and inlier priority phenomenon, where intuitively models fit inliers more quickly than outliers, we propose GradStop, a sampling-based label-free algorithm to estimate model's real-time performance during training. First, a sampling method generates two sets: one likely containing more outliers and the other more inliers, then a metric based on gradient cohesion is applied to probe into current training dynamics, which reflects model's performance on OD task. Experimental results on 4 deep UOD algorithms and 47 real-world datasets and theoretical proofs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed early stopping algorithm in enhancing the performance of deep UOD models. Auto Encoder (AE) enhanced by GradStop achieves better performance than itself, other SOTA UOD methods, and even ensemble AEs. Our method provides a robust and effective solution to the problem of performance degradation during training, enabling deep UOD models to achieve better potential in anomaly detection tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Maximizing Infrared Transmission Contrast Upon Phase Transition of Thermally Grown Vanadium Dioxide Thin Films by Rapid Thermal Processing

Pristine vanadium dioxide (VO2), an insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) material, is grown via furnace oxidation followed by rapid thermal annealing with forming gas (5%H2/95%N2) which reduces surface over-oxides such as V2O5 formed during the oxidation. The evolutional IMT behaviors of the thermochromic film and vanadium oxide states over different reduction time are systematically studied with temperature-dependent infrared spectrometry, electrical resistivity, and X-ray diffraction measurements. After optimally reducing surface over-oxides to VO2, infrared transmission contrast upon phase transition is enhanced to 46% (at 9 um wavelength) compared to 23% from fully oxidation without any reduction. Moreover, pristine VO2 thin film obtained from thermal oxidation and optimal reduction processes exhibits sharp phase transition and narrow thermal hysteresis within 2~4°C in both infrared transmission and electrical resistivity, which are comparable to the VO2 of best quality prepared by other sophisticated fabrication techniques. The thermally grown method presented here would facilitate the scalable fabrication of high-quality VO2 thin films and tunable radiative coatings for high-performance thermal control applications.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

Lowering Insulator-to-Metal Transition Temperature of Vanadium Dioxide Thin Films via Co-Sputtering, Furnace Oxidation and Thermal Annealing

Thermochromic vanadium dioxide thin films have attracted much attention recently for constructing variable-emittance coatings upon its insulator-metal phase transition for dynamic thermal control. However, fabrication of high-quality vanadium dioxide thin films in a cost-effective way is still a challenge. In addition, the phase transition temperature of vanadium dioxide is around 68°C, which is higher than most of terrestrial and extraterrestrial applications. In this study, we report the fabrication and characterization of tungsten-doped vanadium dioxide thin films with lowered phase transition temperatures via co-sputtering, furnace oxidation and thermal annealing processes for wider application needs. The doping is achieved by co-sputtering of tungsten and vanadium targets while the doping level is varied by carefully controlling the sputtering power for tungsten. Doped thin film samples of 30-nm thick with different tungsten atomic concentrations are prepared by co-sputtering onto undoped silicon wafers. Optimal oxidation time of 4 hours is determined to reach full oxidation in an oxygen-rich furnace environment at 300°C. Systematic thermal annealing study is carried out to find the optimal annealing temperature and time. By using an optical cryostat coupled to an infrared spectrometer, the temperature-dependent infrared transmittance of fully annealed tungsten-doped vanadium dioxide thin films are measured in a wide temperature range from -60°C to 100°C. The phase transition temperature is found to decrease at 24.5°C per at.% of tungsten doping, and the thermal hysteresis between heating and cooling shrinks at 5.5°C per at.% from the fabricated vanadium dioxide thin films with tungsten doping up to 4.1 at.%.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

Decentralized Conjugate Gradient and Memoryless BFGS Methods

This paper proposes a new decentralized conjugate gradient (NDCG) method and a decentralized memoryless BFGS (DMBFGS) method for the nonconvex and strongly convex decentralized optimization problem, respectively, of minimizing a finite sum of continuously differentiable functions over a fixed-connected undirected network. Gradient tracking techniques are applied in these two methods to enhance their convergence properties and the numerical stability. In particular, we show global convergence of NDCG with constant stepsize for general nonconvex smooth decentralized optimization. Our new DMBFGS method uses a scaled memoryless BFGS technique and only requires gradient information to approximate second-order information of the component functions in the objective. We also establish global convergence and linear convergence rate of DMBFGS with constant stepsize for strongly convex smooth decentralized optimization. Our numerical results show that NDCG and DMBFGS are very efficient in terms of both iteration and communication cost compared with other state-of-the-art methods for solving smooth decentralized optimization.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Multiple Temporal Network Kernel Density Estimation

Kernel density estimation (KDE) has become a popular method for visual analysis in various fields, such as financial risk forecasting, crime clustering, and traffic monitoring. KDE can identify high-density areas from discrete datasets. However, most existing works only consider planar distance and spatial data. In this paper, we introduce a new model, called TN-KDE, that applies KDE-based techniques to road networks with temporal data. Specifically, we introduce a novel solution, Range Forest Solution (RFS), which can efficiently compute KDE values on spatiotemporal road networks. To support the insertion operation, we present a dynamic version, called Dynamic Range Forest Solution (DRFS). We also propose an optimization called Lixel Sharing (LS) to share similar KDE values between two adjacent lixels. Furthermore, our solutions support many non-polynomial kernel functions and still report exact values. Experimental results show that our solutions achieve up to 6 times faster than the state-of-the-art method.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Interpretable Multi-Source Data Fusion Through Latent Variable Gaussian Process

With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, various domains of science and engineering communities have leveraged data-driven surrogates to model complex systems through fusing numerous sources of information (data) from published papers, patents, open repositories, or other resources. However, not much attention has been paid to the differences in quality and comprehensiveness of the known and unknown underlying physical parameters of the information sources, which could have downstream implications during system optimization. Additionally, existing methods cannot fuse multi-source data into a single predictive model. Towards resolving this issue, a multi-source data fusion framework based on Latent Variable Gaussian Process (LVGP) is proposed. The individual data sources are tagged as a characteristic categorical variable that are mapped into a physically interpretable latent space, allowing the development of source-aware data fusion modeling. Additionally, a dissimilarity metric based on the latent variables of LVGP is introduced to study and understand the differences in the sources of data. The proposed approach is demonstrated on and analyzed through two mathematical and two materials science case studies. From the case studies, it is observed that compared to using single-source and source unaware machine learning models, the proposed multi-source data fusion framework can provide better predictions for sparse-data problems.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

A Decentralized Primal-Dual Method with Quasi-Newton Tracking

This paper considers the decentralized optimization problem of minimizing a finite sum of strongly convex and twice continuously differentiable functions over a fixed-connected undirected network. A fully decentralized primal-dual method(DPDM) and its generalization(GDPDM), which allows for multiple primal steps per iteration, are proposed. In our methods, both primal and dual updates use second-order information obtained by quasi-Newton techniques which only involve matrix-vector multiplication. Specifically, the primal update applies a Jacobi relaxation step using the BFGS approximation for both computation and communication efficiency. The dual update employs a new second-order correction step. We show that the decentralized local primal updating direction on each node asymptotically approaches the centralized quasi-Newton direction. Under proper choice of parameters, GDPDM including DPDM has global linear convergence for solving strongly convex decentralized optimization problems. Our numerical results show both GDPDM and DPDM are very efficient compared with other state-of-the-art methods for solving decentralized optimization.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

An Uncertainty-aware Deep Learning Framework-based Robust Design Optimization of Metamaterial Units

Mechanical metamaterials represent an innovative class of artificial structures, distinguished by their extraordinary mechanical characteristics, which are beyond the scope of traditional natural materials. The use of deep generative models has become increasingly popular in the design of metamaterial units. The effectiveness of using deep generative models lies in their capacity to compress complex input data into a simplified, lower-dimensional latent space, while also enabling the creation of novel optimal designs through sampling within this space. However, the design process does not take into account the effect of model uncertainty due to data sparsity or the effect of input data uncertainty due to inherent randomness in the data. This might lead to the generation of undesirable structures with high sensitivity to the uncertainties in the system. To address this issue, a novel uncertainty-aware deep learning framework-based robust design approach is proposed for the design of metamaterial units with optimal target properties. The proposed approach utilizes the probabilistic nature of the deep learning framework and quantifies both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties associated with surrogate-based design optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed design approach is capable of designing high-performance metamaterial units with high reliability. To showcase the effectiveness of the proposed design approach, a single-objective design optimization problem and a multi-objective design optimization problem are presented. The optimal robust designs obtained are validated by comparing them to the designs obtained from the topology optimization method as well as the designs obtained from a deterministic deep learning framework-based design optimization where none of the uncertainties in the system are explicitly considered.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Heterogenous Multi-Source Data Fusion Through Input Mapping and Latent Variable Gaussian Process

Artificial intelligence and machine learning frameworks have served as computationally efficient mapping between inputs and outputs for engineering problems. These mappings have enabled optimization and analysis routines that have warranted superior designs, ingenious material systems and optimized manufacturing processes. A common occurrence in such modeling endeavors is the existence of multiple source of data, each differentiated by fidelity, operating conditions, experimental conditions, and more. Data fusion frameworks have opened the possibility of combining such differentiated sources into single unified models, enabling improved accuracy and knowledge transfer. However, these frameworks encounter limitations when the different sources are heterogeneous in nature, i.e., not sharing the same input parameter space. These heterogeneous input scenarios can occur when the domains differentiated by complexity, scale, and fidelity require different parametrizations. Towards addressing this void, a heterogeneous multi-source data fusion framework is proposed based on input mapping calibration (IMC) and latent variable Gaussian process (LVGP). In the first stage, the IMC algorithm is utilized to transform the heterogeneous input parameter spaces into a unified reference parameter space. In the second stage, a multi-source data fusion model enabled by LVGP is leveraged to build a single source-aware surrogate model on the transformed reference space. The proposed framework is demonstrated and analyzed on three engineering case studies (design of cantilever beam, design of ellipsoidal void and modeling properties of Ti6Al4V alloy). The results indicate that the proposed framework provides improved predictive accuracy over a single source model and transformed but source unaware model.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

EntropyStop: Unsupervised Deep Outlier Detection with Loss Entropy

Unsupervised Outlier Detection (UOD) is an important data mining task. With the advance of deep learning, deep Outlier Detection (OD) has received broad interest. Most deep UOD models are trained exclusively on clean datasets to learn the distribution of the normal data, which requires huge manual efforts to clean the real-world data if possible. Instead of relying on clean datasets, some approaches directly train and detect on unlabeled contaminated datasets, leading to the need for methods that are robust to such conditions. Ensemble methods emerged as a superior solution to enhance model robustness against contaminated training sets. However, the training time is greatly increased by the ensemble. In this study, we investigate the impact of outliers on the training phase, aiming to halt training on unlabeled contaminated datasets before performance degradation. Initially, we noted that blending normal and anomalous data causes AUC fluctuations, a label-dependent measure of detection accuracy. To circumvent the need for labels, we propose a zero-label entropy metric named Loss Entropy for loss distribution, enabling us to infer optimal stopping points for training without labels. Meanwhile, we theoretically demonstrate negative correlation between entropy metric and the label-based AUC. Based on this, we develop an automated early-stopping algorithm, EntropyStop, which halts training when loss entropy suggests the maximum model detection capability. We conduct extensive experiments on ADBench (including 47 real datasets), and the overall results indicate that AutoEncoder (AE) enhanced by our approach not only achieves better performance than ensemble AEs but also requires under 2\% of training time. Lastly, our proposed metric and early-stopping approach are evaluated on other deep OD models, exhibiting their broad potential applicability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Enhanced Hydrogen Evolution Catalysis of Pentlandite due to the Increases in Coordination Number and Sulfur Vacancy during Cubic-Hexagonal Phase Transition

The search for new phases is an important direction in materials science. The phase transition of sulfides results in significant changes in catalytic performance, such as MoS2 and WS2. Cubic pentlandite [cPn, (Fe, Ni)9S8] can be a functional material in batteries, solar cells, and catalytic fields. However, no report about the material properties of other phases of pentlandite exists. In this study, the unit-cell parameters of a new phase of pentlandite, sulfur-vacancy enriched hexagonal pentlandite (hPn), and the phase boundary between cPn and hPn were determined for the first time. Compared to cPn, the hPn shows a high coordination number, more sulfur vacancies, and high conductivity, which result in significantly higher hydrogen evolution performance of hPn than that of cPn and make the non-nano rock catalyst hPn superior to other most known nanosulfide catalysts. The increase of sulfur vacancies during phase transition provides a new approach to designing functional materials.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Methods for Acquiring and Incorporating Knowledge into Stock Price Prediction: A Survey

Predicting stock prices presents a challenging research problem due to the inherent volatility and non-linear nature of the stock market. In recent years, knowledge-enhanced stock price prediction methods have shown groundbreaking results by utilizing external knowledge to understand the stock market. Despite the importance of these methods, there is a scarcity of scholarly works that systematically synthesize previous studies from the perspective of external knowledge types. Specifically, the external knowledge can be modeled in different data structures, which we group into non-graph-based formats and graph-based formats: 1) non-graph-based knowledge captures contextual information and multimedia descriptions specifically associated with an individual stock; 2) graph-based knowledge captures interconnected and interdependent information in the stock market. This survey paper aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive description of methods for acquiring external knowledge from various unstructured data sources and then incorporating it into stock price prediction models. We also explore fusion methods for combining external knowledge with historical price features. Moreover, this paper includes a compilation of relevant datasets and delves into potential future research directions in this domain.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2023

Enhancing Cell Proliferation and Migration by MIR-Carbonyl Vibrational Coupling: Insights from Transcriptome Profiling

Cell proliferation and migration highly relate to normal tissue self-healing, therefore it is highly significant for artificial controlling. Recently, vibrational strong coupling between biomolecules and Mid-infrared (MIR) light photons has been successfully used to modify in vitro bioreactions, neuronal signaling and even animal behavior. However, the synergistic effects from molecules to cells remains unclear, and the regulation of MIR on cells needs to be explained from the molecular level. Herein, the proliferation rate and migration capacity of fibroblasts were increased by 156% and 162.5%, respectively, by vibratory coupling of 5.6 micrometers photons with carbonyl groups in biomolecules. Through transcriptome sequencing analysis, the regulatory mechanism of infrared light in 5.6 micrometers was explained from the level of signal pathway and cell components. 5.6 micrometers optical high power lasers can regulate cell function through vibrational strong coupling while minimizing photothermal damage. This work not only sheds light on the non-thermal effect on MIR light-based on wound healing, but also provides new evidence to future frequency medicine.

q-bio.GN↗

arXiv2023

Regulating the Hydrophobic Domain in Peptide-Catecholamine Coassembled Nanostructures for Fluorescence Enhancement

Hydrophobic domains provide specific microenvironment for essential functional activities in life. Herein, we studied how the coassembling of peptides with catecholamines regulate the hydrophobic domain-containing nanostructures for fluorescence enhancement. By peptide encoding and coassembling with catecholamines of different hydrophilicities, a series of hierarchical assembling systems were constructed. In combination with molecular dynamics simulation, we experimentally discovered the hydrophobic domain of chromophore microenvironment regulates the fluorescence of coassembled nanostructures. Our results shed light on the rational design of fluorescent bio-coassembled nanoprobes for biomedical applications.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2023

Unleashing the Potential of Unsupervised Deep Outlier Detection through Automated Training Stopping

Outlier detection (OD) has received continuous research interests due to its wide applications. With the development of deep learning, increasingly deep OD algorithms are proposed. Despite the availability of numerous deep OD models, existing research has reported that the performance of deep models is extremely sensitive to the configuration of hyperparameters (HPs). However, the selection of HPs for deep OD models remains a notoriously difficult task due to the lack of any labels and long list of HPs. In our study. we shed light on an essential factor, training time, that can introduce significant variation in the performance of deep model. Even the performance is stable across other HPs, training time itself can cause a serious HP sensitivity issue. Motivated by this finding, we are dedicated to formulating a strategy to terminate model training at the optimal iteration. Specifically, we propose a novel metric called loss entropy to internally evaluate the model performance during training while an automated training stopping algorithm is devised. To our knowledge, our approach is the first to enable reliable identification of the optimal training iteration during training without requiring any labels. Our experiments on tabular, image datasets show that our approach can be applied to diverse deep models and datasets. It not only enhances the robustness of deep models to their HPs, but also improves the performance and reduces plenty of training time compared to naive training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Application of probabilistic modeling and automated machine learning framework for high-dimensional stress field

Modern computational methods, involving highly sophisticated mathematical formulations, enable several tasks like modeling complex physical phenomenon, predicting key properties and design optimization. The higher fidelity in these computer models makes it computationally intensive to query them hundreds of times for optimization and one usually relies on a simplified model albeit at the cost of losing predictive accuracy and precision. Towards this, data-driven surrogate modeling methods have shown a lot of promise in emulating the behavior of the expensive computer models. However, a major bottleneck in such methods is the inability to deal with high input dimensionality and the need for relatively large datasets. With such problems, the input and output quantity of interest are tensors of high dimensionality. Commonly used surrogate modeling methods for such problems, suffer from requirements like high number of computational evaluations that precludes one from performing other numerical tasks like uncertainty quantification and statistical analysis. In this work, we propose an end-to-end approach that maps a high-dimensional image like input to an output of high dimensionality or its key statistics. Our approach uses two main framework that perform three steps: a) reduce the input and output from a high-dimensional space to a reduced or low-dimensional space, b) model the input-output relationship in the low-dimensional space, and c) enable the incorporation of domain-specific physical constraints as masks. In order to accomplish the task of reducing input dimensionality we leverage principal component analysis, that is coupled with two surrogate modeling methods namely: a) Bayesian hybrid modeling, and b) DeepHyper's deep neural networks. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach on a problem of a linear elastic stress field data.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2023

An Improved Spectral Conjugate Gradient Algorithm Based on A Modified Wolfe Line Search

In this paper, we combine the $m$th-order Taylor expansion of the objective function with cubic Hermite interpolation conditions. Then, we derive a series of modified secant equations with higher accuracy in approximation of the Hessian matrix of the objective function. A modified Wolfe line search is also developed. It overcomes the weakness of the typical constraint which is imposed on modified secant equations and to keep the curvature condition met. Therefore, based on the modified secant equation and Wolfe line search, an improved spectral conjugate gradient algorithm is proposed. Under some mild assumptions, the algorithm is showed to be globally convergent for general nonconvex functions. Numerical results are also reported for verifying the effectiveness.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

Unsupervised Graph Outlier Detection: Problem Revisit, New Insight, and Superior Method

A large number of studies on Graph Outlier Detection (GOD) have emerged in recent years due to its wide applications, in which Unsupervised Node Outlier Detection (UNOD) on attributed networks is an important area. UNOD focuses on detecting two kinds of typical outliers in graphs: the structural outlier and the contextual outlier. Most existing works conduct experiments based on datasets with injected outliers. However, we find that the most widely-used outlier injection approach has a serious data leakage issue. By only utilizing such data leakage, a simple approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance in detecting outliers. In addition, we observe that existing algorithms have a performance drop with the mitigated data leakage issue. The other major issue is on balanced detection performance between the two types of outliers, which has not been considered by existing studies. In this paper, we analyze the cause of the data leakage issue in depth since the injection approach is a building block to advance UNOD. Moreover, we devise a novel variance-based model to detect structural outliers, which outperforms existing algorithms significantly and is more robust at kinds of injection settings. On top of this, we propose a new framework, Variance based Graph Outlier Detection (VGOD), which combines our variance-based model and attribute reconstruction model to detect outliers in a balanced way. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of VGOD. The results on 5 real-world datasets validate that VGOD achieves not only the best performance in detecting outliers but also a balanced detection performance between structural and contextual outliers.

cs.LG↗