arXiv subjects

Rui Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Rui Zhang.

At least 793 records · Page 44Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Autonomous waves and global motion modes in living active solids

Elastic active matter or active solid consists of self-propelled units embedded in an elastic matrix. Active solid resists deformation; the shape-preserving property and the intrinsic non-equilibrium nature make active solids a superior component for self-driven devices. Nonetheless, the mechanical properties and emergent behavior of active solids are poorly understood. Using a biofilm-based bacterial active solid, here we discovered self-sustained elastic waves with unique wave properties not seen in passive solids, such as power-law scaling of wave speed with activity. Under isotropic confinement, the active solid develops two topologically distinct global motion modes that can be selectively excited, with a surprising step-like frequency jump at mode transition. Our findings reveal novel spatiotemporal order in elastic active matter and may guide the development of solid-state adaptive or living materials.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2022

A sufficient and necessary condition of generalized polynomial Liénard systems with global centers

The aim of this paper is to give a sufficient and necessary condition of the generalized polynomial Liénard system with a global center (including linear typer and nilpotent type). Recently, Llibre and Valls [J. Differential Equations, 330 (2022), 66-80] gave a sufficient and necessary condition of the generalized polynomial Liénard system with a linear type global center. It is easy to see that our sufficient and necessary condition is more easy by comparison. In particular, we provide the explicit expressions of all the generalized polynomial Liénard differential systems of degree 5 having a global center at the origin and the explicit expression of a generalized polynomial Liénard differential system of indefinite degree having a global center at the origin.

math.DS↗

arXiv2022

Modular Extremely Large-Scale Array Communication: Near-Field Modelling and Performance Analysis

This paper investigates wireless communications based on a new antenna array architecture, termed modular extremely large-scale array (XL-array), where an extremely large number of antenna elements are regularly arranged on a common platform in a modular manner. Each module consists of a flexible/moderate number of antenna elements, and different modules are separated with an inter-module spacing that is typically much larger than the inter-element spacing/signal wavelength for ease of deployment. By properly modelling the variations of signal phase, amplitude and projected aperture across different array modules/elements, we develop the new channel model and analyze the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance of the modular XL-array based communications. Under the practical non-uniform spherical wave (NUSW) model, the closed-form expression of the maximum achievable SNR is derived in terms of key geometric parameters, including the total planar array size, module separation distances along each dimension, as well as the user's location in the three-dimensional (3D) space. Besides, the asymptotic SNR scaling laws are revealed as the number of modules along different dimensions goes to infinity. Moreover, we show that our developed near-field modelling and performance analysis include the existing ones for the collocated XL-array, the far-field uniform plane wave (UPW) model, as well as the one-dimensional (1D) modular extremely large-scale uniform linear array (XL-ULA) as special cases. Extensive simulation results are provided to validate our obtained results.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Video Crowd Localization with Multi-focus Gaussian Neighborhood Attention and a Large-Scale Benchmark

Video crowd localization is a crucial yet challenging task, which aims to estimate exact locations of human heads in the given crowded videos. To model spatial-temporal dependencies of human mobility, we propose a multi-focus Gaussian neighborhood attention (GNA), which can effectively exploit long-range correspondences while maintaining the spatial topological structure of the input videos. In particular, our GNA can also capture the scale variation of human heads well using the equipped multi-focus mechanism. Based on the multi-focus GNA, we develop a unified neural network called GNANet to accurately locate head centers in video clips by fully aggregating spatial-temporal information via a scene modeling module and a context cross-attention module. Moreover, to facilitate future researches in this field, we introduce a large-scale crowd video benchmark named VSCrowd, which consists of 60K+ frames captured in various surveillance scenarios and 2M+ head annotations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three datasets including our SenseCrowd, and the experiment results show that the proposed method is capable to achieve state-of-the-art performance for both video crowd localization and counting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Improving Transferability for Domain Adaptive Detection Transformers

DETR-style detectors stand out amongst in-domain scenarios, but their properties in domain shift settings are under-explored. This paper aims to build a simple but effective baseline with a DETR-style detector on domain shift settings based on two findings. For one, mitigating the domain shift on the backbone and the decoder output features excels in getting favorable results. For another, advanced domain alignment methods in both parts further enhance the performance. Thus, we propose the Object-Aware Alignment (OAA) module and the Optimal Transport based Alignment (OTA) module to achieve comprehensive domain alignment on the outputs of the backbone and the detector. The OAA module aligns the foreground regions identified by pseudo-labels in the backbone outputs, leading to domain-invariant based features. The OTA module utilizes sliced Wasserstein distance to maximize the retention of location information while minimizing the domain gap in the decoder outputs. We implement the findings and the alignment modules into our adaptation method, and it benchmarks the DETR-style detector on the domain shift settings. Experiments on various domain adaptive scenarios validate the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Code Comment Inconsistency Detection with BERT and Longformer

Comments, or natural language descriptions of source code, are standard practice among software developers. By communicating important aspects of the code such as functionality and usage, comments help with software project maintenance. However, when the code is modified without an accompanying correction to the comment, an inconsistency between the comment and code can arise, which opens up the possibility for developer confusion and bugs. In this paper, we propose two models based on BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and Longformer (Beltagy et al., 2020) to detect such inconsistencies in a natural language inference (NLI) context. Through an evaluation on a previously established corpus of comment-method pairs both during and after code changes, we demonstrate that our models outperform multiple baselines and yield comparable results to the state-of-the-art models that exclude linguistic and lexical features. We further discuss ideas for future research in using pretrained language models for both inconsistency detection and automatic comment updating.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Instantaneous indirect measurement principle in quantum mechanics

In quantum systems, the measurement of operators and the measurement of the quantum states of the system are very challenging tasks. In this Letter, we propose a method to obtain the average value of one operator in a certain state by measuring the instantaneous change of the average value of another operator with the assistance of a known reference state. We refer to this measurement method as the instantaneous indirect measurement method. By studying the application of this method to some typical models, we find that this measurement can be applied to the measurement of an arbitrary state of a quantum system. Furthermore, for the system to be measured, we find that such measurement neither significantly affects the wave function of the system nor causes wave function collapse of the system. Also, our study shows that when two independent systems are coupled, the information mapping between them is done instantaneously. Finally, we discuss applying this measurement method to the measurement of quantum Fisher information, which quantizes the limited accuracy of estimating a parameter from a quantum state.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

FRIB: Low-poisoning Rate Invisible Backdoor Attack based on Feature Repair

During the generation of invisible backdoor attack poisoned data, the feature space transformation operation tends to cause the loss of some poisoned features and weakens the mapping relationship between source images with triggers and target labels, resulting in the need for a higher poisoning rate to achieve the corresponding backdoor attack success rate. To solve the above problems, we propose the idea of feature repair for the first time and introduce the blind watermark technique to repair the poisoned features lost during the generation of poisoned data. Under the premise of ensuring consistent labeling, we propose a low-poisoning rate invisible backdoor attack based on feature repair, named FRIB. Benefiting from the above design concept, the new method enhances the mapping relationship between the source images with triggers and the target labels, and increases the degree of misleading DNNs, thus achieving a high backdoor attack success rate with a very low poisoning rate. Ultimately, the detailed experimental results show that the goal of achieving a high success rate of backdoor attacks with a very low poisoning rate is achieved on all MNIST, CIFAR10, GTSRB, and ImageNet datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

LEO Satellite Access Network (LEO-SAN) Towards 6G: Challenges and Approaches

With the rapid development of satellite communication technologies, the space-based access network has been envisioned as a promising complementary part of the future 6G network. Aside from terrestrial base stations, satellite nodes, especially the low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites, can also serve as base stations for Internet access, and constitute the LEO-satellite-based access network (LEO-SAN). LEO-SAN is expected to provide seamless massive access and extended coverage with high signal quality. However, its practical implementation still faces significant technical challenges, e.g., high mobility and limited budget for communication payloads of LEO satellite nodes. This paper aims at revealing the main technical issues that have not been fully addressed by the existing LEO-SAN designs, from three aspects namely random access, beam management and Doppler-resistant transmission technologies. More specifically, the critical issues of random access in LEO-SAN are discussed regarding low flexibility, long transmission delay, and inefficient handshakes. Then the beam management for LEO-SAN is investigated in complex propagation environments under the constraints of high mobility and limited payload budget. Furthermore, the influence of Doppler shifts on LEO-SAN is explored. Correspondingly, promising technologies to address these challenges are also discussed, respectively. Finally, the future research directions are envisioned.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

AutoDES: AutoML Pipeline Generation of Classification with Dynamic Ensemble Strategy Selection

Automating machine learning has achieved remarkable technological developments in recent years, and building an automated machine learning pipeline is now an essential task. The model ensemble is the technique of combining multiple models to get a better and more robust model. However, existing automated machine learning tends to be simplistic in handling the model ensemble, where the ensemble strategy is fixed, such as stacked generalization. There have been many techniques on different ensemble methods, especially ensemble selection, and the fixed ensemble strategy limits the upper limit of the model's performance. In this article, we present a novel framework for automated machine learning. Our framework incorporates advances in dynamic ensemble selection, and to our best knowledge, our approach is the first in the field of AutoML to search and optimize ensemble strategies. In the comparison experiments, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art automated machine learning frameworks with the same CPU time in 42 classification datasets from the OpenML platform. Ablation experiments on our framework validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Deep Random Vortex Method for Simulation and Inference of Navier-Stokes Equations

Navier-Stokes equations are significant partial differential equations that describe the motion of fluids such as liquids and air. Due to the importance of Navier-Stokes equations, the development on efficient numerical schemes is important for both science and engineer. Recently, with the development of AI techniques, several approaches have been designed to integrate deep neural networks in simulating and inferring the fluid dynamics governed by incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, which can accelerate the simulation or inferring process in a mesh-free and differentiable way. In this paper, we point out that the capability of existing deep Navier-Stokes informed methods is limited to handle non-smooth or fractional equations, which are two critical situations in reality. To this end, we propose the \emph{Deep Random Vortex Method} (DRVM), which combines the neural network with a random vortex dynamics system equivalent to the Navier-Stokes equation. Specifically, the random vortex dynamics motivates a Monte Carlo based loss function for training the neural network, which avoids the calculation of derivatives through auto-differentiation. Therefore, DRVM not only can efficiently solve Navier-Stokes equations involving rough path, non-differentiable initial conditions and fractional operators, but also inherits the mesh-free and differentiable benefits of the deep-learning-based solver. We conduct experiments on the Cauchy problem, parametric solver learning, and the inverse problem of both 2-d and 3-d incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The proposed method achieves accurate results for simulation and inference of Navier-Stokes equations. Especially for the cases that include singular initial conditions, DRVM significantly outperforms existing PINN method.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2022

SepLUT: Separable Image-adaptive Lookup Tables for Real-time Image Enhancement

Image-adaptive lookup tables (LUTs) have achieved great success in real-time image enhancement tasks due to their high efficiency for modeling color transforms. However, they embed the complete transform, including the color component-independent and the component-correlated parts, into only a single type of LUTs, either 1D or 3D, in a coupled manner. This scheme raises a dilemma of improving model expressiveness or efficiency due to two factors. On the one hand, the 1D LUTs provide high computational efficiency but lack the critical capability of color components interaction. On the other, the 3D LUTs present enhanced component-correlated transform capability but suffer from heavy memory footprint, high training difficulty, and limited cell utilization. Inspired by the conventional divide-and-conquer practice in the image signal processor, we present SepLUT (separable image-adaptive lookup table) to tackle the above limitations. Specifically, we separate a single color transform into a cascade of component-independent and component-correlated sub-transforms instantiated as 1D and 3D LUTs, respectively. In this way, the capabilities of two sub-transforms can facilitate each other, where the 3D LUT complements the ability to mix up color components, and the 1D LUT redistributes the input colors to increase the cell utilization of the 3D LUT and thus enable the use of a more lightweight 3D LUT. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method presents enhanced performance on photo retouching benchmark datasets than the current state-of-the-art and achieves real-time processing on both GPUs and CPUs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Deep Manifold Learning with Graph Mining

Admittedly, Graph Convolution Network (GCN) has achieved excellent results on graph datasets such as social networks, citation networks, etc. However, softmax used as the decision layer in these frameworks is generally optimized with thousands of iterations via gradient descent. Furthermore, due to ignoring the inner distribution of the graph nodes, the decision layer might lead to an unsatisfactory performance in semi-supervised learning with less label support. To address the referred issues, we propose a novel graph deep model with a non-gradient decision layer for graph mining. Firstly, manifold learning is unified with label local-structure preservation to capture the topological information of the nodes. Moreover, owing to the non-gradient property, closed-form solutions is achieved to be employed as the decision layer for GCN. Particularly, a joint optimization method is designed for this graph model, which extremely accelerates the convergence of the model. Finally, extensive experiments show that the proposed model has achieved state-of-the-art performance compared to the current models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Simultaneous Transmit Diversity and Passive Beamforming with Large-Scale Intelligent Reflecting Surface: Far-Field or Near-Field?

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a cost-effective solution to enhance wireless communication performance via passive signal reflection. Existing works on IRS have mainly focused on investigating IRS's passive beamforming/reflection design to boost the communication rate for users assuming that their channel state information (CSI) is fully or partially known. However, how to exploit IRS to improve the wireless transmission reliability without any CSI, which is typical in high-mobility/delay-sensitive communication scenarios, remains largely open. In this paper, we study a new IRS-aided communication system with the IRS integrated to its aided access point (AP) to achieve both functions of transmit diversity and passive beamforming simultaneously. Specifically, we first show an interesting result that the IRS's passive beamforming gain in any direction is invariant to the common phase-shift applied to all of its reflecting elements. Accordingly, we design the common phase-shift of IRS elements to achieve transmit diversity at the AP side without the need of any CSI of the users. In addition, we propose a practical method for the users to estimate the CSI at the receiver side for information decoding. Meanwhile, we show that the conventional passive beamforming gain of IRS can be retained for the other users with their CSI known at the AP. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic performance of both IRS-aided transmit diversity and passive beamforming in closed-form, by considering the large-scale IRS with an infinite number of elements. Numerical results validate our analysis and show the performance gains of the proposed IRS-aided simultaneous transmit diversity and passive beamforming scheme over other benchmark schemes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

BARS: Towards Open Benchmarking for Recommender Systems

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid development of personalized recommendation techniques. Despite significant progress made in both research and practice of recommender systems, to date, there is a lack of a widely-recognized benchmarking standard in this field. Many existing studies perform model evaluations and comparisons in an ad-hoc manner, for example, by employing their own private data splits or using different experimental settings. Such conventions not only increase the difficulty in reproducing existing studies, but also lead to inconsistent experimental results among them. This largely limits the credibility and practical value of research results in this field. To tackle these issues, we present an initiative project (namely BARS) aiming for open benchmarking for recommender systems. In comparison to some earlier attempts towards this goal, we take a further step by setting up a standardized benchmarking pipeline for reproducible research, which integrates all the details about datasets, source code, hyper-parameter settings, running logs, and evaluation results. The benchmark is designed with comprehensiveness and sustainability in mind. It covers both matching and ranking tasks, and also enables researchers to easily follow and contribute to the research in this field. This project will not only reduce the redundant efforts of researchers to re-implement or re-run existing baselines, but also drive more solid and reproducible research on recommender systems. We would like to call upon everyone to use the BARS benchmark for future evaluation, and contribute to the project through the portal at: https://openbenchmark.github.io/BARS.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Outpainting by Queries

Image outpainting, which is well studied with Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based framework, has recently drawn more attention in computer vision. However, CNNs rely on inherent inductive biases to achieve effective sample learning, which may degrade the performance ceiling. In this paper, motivated by the flexible self-attention mechanism with minimal inductive biases in transformer architecture, we reframe the generalised image outpainting problem as a patch-wise sequence-to-sequence autoregression problem, enabling query-based image outpainting. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid vision-transformer-based encoder-decoder framework, named \textbf{Query} \textbf{O}utpainting \textbf{TR}ansformer (\textbf{QueryOTR}), for extrapolating visual context all-side around a given image. Patch-wise mode's global modeling capacity allows us to extrapolate images from the attention mechanism's query standpoint. A novel Query Expansion Module (QEM) is designed to integrate information from the predicted queries based on the encoder's output, hence accelerating the convergence of the pure transformer even with a relatively small dataset. To further enhance connectivity between each patch, the proposed Patch Smoothing Module (PSM) re-allocates and averages the overlapped regions, thus providing seamless predicted images. We experimentally show that QueryOTR could generate visually appealing results smoothly and realistically against the state-of-the-art image outpainting approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Quantum phase transition in XXZ central spin model

We investigate the quantum phase transition (QPT) in the XXZ central spin model, which can be described as a spin-1/2 particle coupled to N bath spins. In general, the QPT is supposed to occur only in the thermodynamical limit. In contrast, we present that the central spin model exhibits a normal-to-superradiant phase transition in the limit where the ratio of the transition frequency of the central spin to that of the bath spins and the number of the bath spins tend to infinity. We give the low-energy effective Hamiltonian analytically in the normal phase and the superradiant phase, and we find that the longitudinal interaction can significantly influence the excitation number and the coherence of the ground state. These two quantities are remarkably enhanced for the negative longitudinal interaction while suppressed for the positive longitudinal interaction. We also use the quantum Fisher information (QFI) to characterize the QPT and illustrate a measurement scheme that can be applied in practice. This work builds a novel connection between the qubit-spin systems and the qubit-field systems, which provides a possibility for the realization of criticality-enhanced quantum sensing in central spin systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Active-Passive IRS aided Wireless Communication: New Hybrid Architecture and Elements Allocation Optimization

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance the wireless communication network coverage and capacity by dynamically controlling the radio signal propagation environment. In contrast to the existing works that considered active or passive IRS only, we propose in this paper a new hybrid active-passive IRS architecture that consists of both active and passive reflecting elements, thus achieving their combined advantages flexibly. Under a practical channel setup with Rician fading where only the statistical channel state information (CSI) is available, we study the hybrid IRS design in a multi-user communication system. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the achievable ergodic capacity of the worst-case user by designing the hybrid IRS beamforming and active/passive elements allocation based on the statistical CSI, subject to various practical constraints on the active-element amplification factor and amplification power consumption, as well as the total active and passive elements deployment budget. To solve this challenging problem, we first approximate the ergodic capacity in a simpler form and then propose an efficient algorithm to solve the problem optimally. Moreover, we show that for the special case with all channels to be line-of-sight (LoS), only active elements need to be deployed when the total deployment budget is sufficiently small, while both active and passive elements should be deployed with a decreasing number ratio when the budget increases and exceeds a certain threshold. Finally, numerical results are presented which demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed hybrid IRS architecture and its optimal design over the conventional schemes with active/passive IRS only under various practical system setups.

cs.IT↗