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Na Li

Publications and source records attributed to Na Li.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Distributed Information-based Source Seeking

In this paper, we design an information-based multi-robot source seeking algorithm where a group of mobile sensors localizes and moves close to a single source using only local range-based measurements. In the algorithm, the mobile sensors perform source identification/localization to estimate the source location; meanwhile, they move to new locations to maximize the Fisher information about the source contained in the sensor measurements. In doing so, they improve the source location estimate and move closer to the source. Our algorithm is superior in convergence speed compared with traditional field climbing algorithms, is flexible in the measurement model and the choice of information metric, and is robust to measurement model errors. Moreover, we provide a fully distributed version of our algorithm, where each sensor decides its own actions and only shares information with its neighbors through a sparse communication network. We perform intensive simulation experiments to test our algorithms on large-scale systems and physical experiments on small ground vehicles with light sensors, demonstrating success in seeking a light source.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Anisotropic in-plane heat transport of Kitaev magnet Na$_2$Co$_2$TeO$_6$

We report a study on low-temperature heat transport of Kitaev magnet Na$_2$Co$_2$TeO$_6$, with the heat current and magnetic fields along the honeycomb spin layer (the $ab$ plane). The zero-field thermal conductivity of $κ^a_{xx}$ and $κ^{a*}_{xx}$ display similar temperature dependence and small difference in their magnitudes; whereas, their magnetic field (parallel to the heat current) dependence are quite different and are related to the field-induced magnetic transitions. The $κ^a_{xx}(B)$ data for $B \parallel a$ at very low temperatures have an anomaly at 10.25--10.5 T, which reveals an unexplored magnetic transition. The planar thermal Hall conductivity $κ^a_{xy}$ and $κ^{a*}_{xy}$ show very weak signals at low fields and rather large values with sign change at high fields. This may point to a possible magnetic structure transition or the change of the magnon band topology that induces a radical change of magnon Berry curvature distribution before entering the spin polarized state. These results put clear constraints on the high-field phase and the theoretical models for Na$_2$Co$_2$TeO$_6$.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2023

Non-asymptotic System Identification for Linear Systems with Nonlinear Policies

This paper considers a single-trajectory system identification problem for linear systems under general nonlinear and/or time-varying policies with i.i.d. random excitation noises. The problem is motivated by safe learning-based control for constrained linear systems, where the safe policies during the learning process are usually nonlinear and time-varying for satisfying the state and input constraints. In this paper, we provide a non-asymptotic error bound for least square estimation when the data trajectory is generated by any nonlinear and/or time-varying policies as long as the generated state and action trajectories are bounded. This significantly generalizes the existing non-asymptotic guarantees for linear system identification, which usually consider i.i.d. random inputs or linear policies. Interestingly, our error bound is consistent with that for linear policies with respect to the dependence on the trajectory length, system dimensions, and excitation levels. Lastly, we demonstrate the applications of our results by safe learning with robust model predictive control and provide numerical analysis.

math.OC↗
arXiv2023

Logical Magic State Preparation with Fidelity Beyond the Distillation Threshold on a Superconducting Quantum Processor

Fault-tolerant quantum computing based on surface code has emerged as an attractive candidate for practical large-scale quantum computers to achieve robust noise resistance. To achieve universality, magic states preparation is a commonly approach for introducing non-Clifford gates. Here, we present a hardware-efficient and scalable protocol for arbitrary logical state preparation for the rotated surface code, and further experimentally implement it on the \textit{Zuchongzhi} 2.1 superconducting quantum processor. An average of \hhl{$0.8983 \pm 0.0002$} logical fidelity at different logical states with distance-three is achieved, \hhl{taking into account both state preparation and measurement errors.} In particular, \hhl{the magic states $|A^{π/4}\rangle_L$, $|H\rangle_L$, and $|T\rangle_L$ are prepared non-destructively with logical fidelities of $0.8771 \pm 0.0009 $, $0.9090 \pm 0.0009 $, and $0.8890 \pm 0.0010$, respectively, which are higher than the state distillation protocol threshold, 0.859 (for H-type magic state) and 0.827 (for T -type magic state).} Our work provides a viable and efficient avenue for generating high-fidelity raw logical magic states, which is essential for realizing non-Clifford logical gates in the surface code.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2023

Ultra-Fine Entity Typing with Prior Knowledge about Labels: A Simple Clustering Based Strategy

Ultra-fine entity typing (UFET) is the task of inferring the semantic types, from a large set of fine-grained candidates, that apply to a given entity mention. This task is especially challenging because we only have a small number of training examples for many of the types, even with distant supervision strategies. State-of-the-art models, therefore, have to rely on prior knowledge about the type labels in some way. In this paper, we show that the performance of existing methods can be improved using a simple technique: we use pre-trained label embeddings to cluster the labels into semantic domains and then treat these domains as additional types. We show that this strategy consistently leads to improved results, as long as high-quality label embeddings are used. We furthermore use the label clusters as part of a simple post-processing technique, which results in further performance gains. Both strategies treat the UFET model as a black box and can thus straightforwardly be used to improve a wide range of existing models.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Reward Delays

This paper considers multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where the rewards are received after delays and the delay time varies across agents and across time steps. Based on the V-learning framework, this paper proposes MARL algorithms that efficiently deal with reward delays. When the delays are finite, our algorithm reaches a coarse correlated equilibrium (CCE) with rate $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\frac{H^3\sqrt{S\mathcal{T}_K}}{K}+\frac{H^3\sqrt{SA}}{\sqrt{K}})$ where $K$ is the number of episodes, $H$ is the planning horizon, $S$ is the size of the state space, $A$ is the size of the largest action space, and $\mathcal{T}_K$ is the measure of total delay formally defined in the paper. Moreover, our algorithm is extended to cases with infinite delays through a reward skipping scheme. It achieves convergence rate similar to the finite delay case.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2023

Distilling Semantic Concept Embeddings from Contrastively Fine-Tuned Language Models

Learning vectors that capture the meaning of concepts remains a fundamental challenge. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, pre-trained language models have thus far only enabled modest improvements to the quality of such concept embeddings. Current strategies for using language models typically represent a concept by averaging the contextualised representations of its mentions in some corpus. This is potentially sub-optimal for at least two reasons. First, contextualised word vectors have an unusual geometry, which hampers downstream tasks. Second, concept embeddings should capture the semantic properties of concepts, whereas contextualised word vectors are also affected by other factors. To address these issues, we propose two contrastive learning strategies, based on the view that whenever two sentences reveal similar properties, the corresponding contextualised vectors should also be similar. One strategy is fully unsupervised, estimating the properties which are expressed in a sentence from the neighbourhood structure of the contextualised word embeddings. The second strategy instead relies on a distant supervision signal from ConceptNet. Our experimental results show that the resulting vectors substantially outperform existing concept embeddings in predicting the semantic properties of concepts, with the ConceptNet-based strategy achieving the best results. These findings are furthermore confirmed in a clustering task and in the downstream task of ontology completion.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Escaping saddle points in zeroth-order optimization: the power of two-point estimators

Two-point zeroth order methods are important in many applications of zeroth-order optimization, such as robotics, wind farms, power systems, online optimization, and adversarial robustness to black-box attacks in deep neural networks, where the problem may be high-dimensional and/or time-varying. Most problems in these applications are nonconvex and contain saddle points. While existing works have shown that zeroth-order methods utilizing $Ω(d)$ function valuations per iteration (with $d$ denoting the problem dimension) can escape saddle points efficiently, it remains an open question if zeroth-order methods based on two-point estimators can escape saddle points. In this paper, we show that by adding an appropriate isotropic perturbation at each iteration, a zeroth-order algorithm based on $2m$ (for any $1 \leq m \leq d$) function evaluations per iteration can not only find $ε$-second order stationary points polynomially fast, but do so using only $\tilde{O}\left(\frac{d}{mε^{2}\barψ}\right)$ function evaluations, where $\barψ \geq \tildeΩ\left(\sqrtε\right)$ is a parameter capturing the extent to which the function of interest exhibits the strict saddle property.

math.OC↗
arXiv2023

On the Optimal Control of Network LQR with Spatially-Exponential Decaying Structure

This paper studies network LQR problems with system matrices being spatially-exponential decaying (SED) between nodes in the network. The major objective is to study whether the optimal controller also enjoys a SED structure, which is an appealing property for ensuring the optimality of decentralized control over the network. We start with studying the open-loop asymptotically stable system and show that the optimal LQR state feedback gain $K$ is `quasi'-SED in this setting, i.e. $\|[K]_{ij}\|\sim O\left(e^{-\frac{c}{\mathrm{poly}\ln(N)}}\mathrm{dist}(i,j)\right)$. The decaying rate $c$ depends on the decaying rate and norms of system matrices and the open-loop exponential stability constants. Then the result is further generalized to unstable systems under a SED stabilizability assumption. Building upon the `quasi'-SED result on $K$, we give an upper-bound on the performance of $κ$-truncated local controllers, suggesting that distributed controllers can achieve near-optimal performance for SED systems. We develop these results via studying the structure of another type of controller, disturbance response control, which has been studied and used in recent online control literature; thus as a side result, we also prove the `quasi'-SED property of the optimal disturbance response control, which serves as a contribution on its own merit.

math.OC↗
arXiv2023

A Hybrid Deep Feature-Based Deformable Image Registration Method for Pathology Images

Pathologists need to combine information from differently stained pathology slices for accurate diagnosis. Deformable image registration is a necessary technique for fusing multi-modal pathology slices. This paper proposes a hybrid deep feature-based deformable image registration framework for stained pathology samples. We first extract dense feature points via the detector-based and detector-free deep learning feature networks and perform points matching. Then, to further reduce false matches, an outlier detection method combining the isolation forest statistical model and the local affine correction model is proposed. Finally, the interpolation method generates the deformable vector field for pathology image registration based on the above matching points. We evaluate our method on the dataset of the Non-rigid Histology Image Registration (ANHIR) challenge, which is co-organized with the IEEE ISBI 2019 conference. Our technique outperforms the traditional approaches by 17% with the Average-Average registration target error (rTRE) reaching 0.0034. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance and ranked 1st in evaluating the test dataset. The proposed hybrid deep feature-based registration method can potentially become a reliable method for pathology image registration.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2023

On the Relationship of Optimal State Feedback and Disturbance Response Controllers

This paper studies the relationship between state feedback policies and disturbance response policies for the standard Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). For open-loop stable plants, we establish a simple relationship between the optimal state feedback controller $u_t=K_\star x_t$ and the optimal disturbance response controller $u_t=L^{(H)}_{\star;1}w_{t-1}+\cdots+L^{(H)}_{\star;H}w_{t-H}$ with $H$-order. Here $x_t, w_t, u_t$ stands for the state, disturbance, control action of the system, respectively. Our result shows that $L_{\star,1}^{(H)}$ is a good approximation of $K_\star$ and the approximation error $\|K_\star - L_{\star,1}^{(H)}\|$ decays exponentially with $H$. We further extend this result to LQR for open-loop unstable systems, when a pre-stabilizing controller $K_0$ is available.

math.OC↗
arXiv2023

Markov Games with Decoupled Dynamics: Price of Anarchy and Sample Complexity

This paper studies the finite-time horizon Markov games where the agents' dynamics are decoupled but the rewards can possibly be coupled across agents. The policy class is restricted to local policies where agents make decisions using their local state. We first introduce the notion of smooth Markov games which extends the smoothness argument for normal form games to our setting, and leverage the smoothness property to bound the price of anarchy of the Markov game. For a specific type of Markov game called the Markov potential game, we also develop a distributed learning algorithm, multi-agent soft policy iteration (MA-SPI), which provably converges to a Nash equilibrium. Sample complexity of the algorithm is also provided. Lastly, our results are validated using a dynamic covering game.

cs.GT↗
arXiv2023

The Production of Charm Pentaquark from B meson within SU(3) Analysis

We study the masses and production modes of pentaquark with the quark constituent $c\bar qqqq$, by the tridiquark-diquark model and systematical light flavor quark symmetry SU(3) analysis. The mass splittings show that the S-wave singly charm pentaquark $c\bar udds$, $c\bar dusu$, $c\bar sudu$, and $c\bar sudd$ are below their strong decay thresholds, while $c\bar u ds s, c \bar d uss$ with parity $\frac{1}{2}^-$ are near their strong decay thresholds, which imply the possibility of stable states. Furthermore, we discuss the production of the concerned 15 states from $B$ meson, the analysis within SU(3) symmetry yields the golden channels of production process, $\overline B^0_s\!\!\to F_{-1/2}^+ \overline p,\ B^-\!\!\to F_{-3/2}^- \overline Λ^0$, which expected to be work worthily in b-factory.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2023

Multi-armed Bandit Learning on a Graph

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) problem is a simple yet powerful framework that has been extensively studied in the context of decision-making under uncertainty. In many real-world applications, such as robotic applications, selecting an arm corresponds to a physical action that constrains the choices of the next available arms (actions). Motivated by this, we study an extension of MAB called the graph bandit, where an agent travels over a graph to maximize the reward collected from different nodes. The graph defines the agent's freedom in selecting the next available nodes at each step. We assume the graph structure is fully available, but the reward distributions are unknown. Built upon an offline graph-based planning algorithm and the principle of optimism, we design a learning algorithm, G-UCB, that balances long-term exploration-exploitation using the principle of optimism. We show that our proposed algorithm achieves $O(\sqrt{|S|T\log(T)}+D|S|\log T)$ learning regret, where $|S|$ is the number of nodes and $D$ is the diameter of the graph, which matches the theoretical lower bound $Ω(\sqrt{|S|T})$ up to logarithmic factors. To our knowledge, this result is among the first tight regret bounds in non-episodic, un-discounted learning problems with known deterministic transitions. Numerical experiments confirm that our algorithm outperforms several benchmarks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Decentralized Riemannian natural gradient methods with Kronecker-product approximations

With a computationally efficient approximation of the second-order information, natural gradient methods have been successful in solving large-scale structured optimization problems. We study the natural gradient methods for the large-scale decentralized optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds, where the local objective function defined by the local dataset is of a log-probability type. By utilizing the structure of the Riemannian Fisher information matrix (RFIM), we present an efficient decentralized Riemannian natural gradient descent (DRNGD) method. To overcome the communication issue of the high-dimension RFIM, we consider a class of structured problems for which the RFIM can be approximated by a Kronecker product of two low-dimension matrices. By performing the communications over the Kronecker factors, a high-quality approximation of the RFIM can be obtained in a low cost. We prove that DRNGD converges to a stationary point with the best-known rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/K)$. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art ones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Riemannian second-order method for solving decentralized manifold optimization problems.

math.OC↗
arXiv2023

Gaussian Max-Value Entropy Search for Multi-Agent Bayesian Optimization

We study the multi-agent Bayesian optimization (BO) problem, where multiple agents maximize a black-box function via iterative queries. We focus on Entropy Search (ES), a sample-efficient BO algorithm that selects queries to maximize the mutual information about the maximum of the black-box function. One of the main challenges of ES is that calculating the mutual information requires computationally-costly approximation techniques. For multi-agent BO problems, the computational cost of ES is exponential in the number of agents. To address this challenge, we propose the Gaussian Max-value Entropy Search, a multi-agent BO algorithm with favorable sample and computational efficiency. The key to our idea is to use a normal distribution to approximate the function maximum and calculate its mutual information accordingly. The resulting approximation allows queries to be cast as the solution of a closed-form optimization problem which, in turn, can be solved via a modified gradient ascent algorithm and scaled to a large number of agents. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Gaussian max-value Entropy Search through numerical experiments on standard test functions and real-robot experiments on the source-seeking problem. Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the multi-agent BO baselines in the numerical experiments and can stably seek the source with a limited number of noisy observations on real robots.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Latent Variable Representation for Reinforcement Learning

Deep latent variable models have achieved significant empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressiveness in modeling complex transition dynamics. On the other hand, it remains unclear theoretically and empirically how latent variable models may facilitate learning, planning, and exploration to improve the sample efficiency of RL. In this paper, we provide a representation view of the latent variable models for state-action value functions, which allows both tractable variational learning algorithm and effective implementation of the optimism/pessimism principle in the face of uncertainty for exploration. In particular, we propose a computationally efficient planning algorithm with UCB exploration by incorporating kernel embeddings of latent variable models. Theoretically, we establish the sample complexity of the proposed approach in the online and offline settings. Empirically, we demonstrate superior performance over current state-of-the-art algorithms across various benchmarks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Learning to Optimize with Stochastic Dominance Constraints

In real-world decision-making, uncertainty is important yet difficult to handle. Stochastic dominance provides a theoretically sound approach for comparing uncertain quantities, but optimization with stochastic dominance constraints is often computationally expensive, which limits practical applicability. In this paper, we develop a simple yet efficient approach for the problem, the Light Stochastic Dominance Solver (light-SD), that leverages useful properties of the Lagrangian. We recast the inner optimization in the Lagrangian as a learning problem for surrogate approximation, which bypasses apparent intractability and leads to tractable updates or even closed-form solutions for gradient calculations. We prove convergence of the algorithm and test it empirically. The proposed light-SD demonstrates superior performance on several representative problems ranging from finance to supply chain management.

stat.ML↗