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Tao Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Zhang.

At least 415 records · Page 23Linked to original sources

From Plastic Waste to Treasure: Selective Upcycling through Catalytic Technologies

The huge amount of plastic wastes has become a pressing global environmental problem, leading to severe environmental pollution and resource depletion through conventional downcycling technologies like incineration and landfilling. In contrast, selective upcycling of various plastics offers a promising solution for converting waste plastics into valuable products. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements in innovative catalytic technologies, including thermocatalysis, electrocatalysis, and photocatalysis. Special emphasis is placed on elucidating the reaction mechanisms, activating designated chemical bonds for high selectivity, and elaborating the above techniques in terms of reaction conditions and products. Finally, the application prospects and future development trends in plastic catalysis are discussed, providing valuable insights for realizing a sustainable circular plastic economy.

physics.chem-ph↗

Coupling Diffusion and Finite Deformation in Phase Transformation Materials

We present a multiscale theoretical framework to investigate the interplay between diffusion and finite lattice deformation in phase transformation materials. In this framework, we use the Cauchy-Born Rule and the Principle of Virtual Power to derive a thermodynamically consistent theory coupling the diffusion of a guest species (Cahn-Hilliard type) with the finite deformation of host lattices (nonlinear gradient elasticity). We adapt this theory to intercalation materials--specifically Li$_{1-2}$Mn$_2$O$_4$--to investigate the delicate interplay between Li-diffusion and the cubic-to-tetragonal deformation of lattices. Our computations reveal fundamental insights into the microstructural evolution pathways under dynamic discharge conditions, and provide quantitative insights into the nucleation and growth of twinned microstructures during intercalation. Additionally, our results identify regions of stress concentrations (e.g., at phase boundaries, particle surfaces) that arise from lattice misfit and accumulate in the electrode with repeated cycling. These findings suggest a potential mechanism for structural decay in Li$_2$Mn$_2$O$_4$. More generally, we establish a theoretical framework that can be used to investigate microstructural evolution pathways, across multiple length scales, in first-order phase transformation materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Drinfeld Modular Curves Subordinate to Conjugacy Classes of Nilpotent Upper-Triangular Matrices

We introduce normalized Drinfeld modular curves that parameterize rank $m$ Drinfeld modules compatible with a $T$-torsion structure arising from a given conjugacy class of nilpotent upper-triangular $n\times n$ matrices with rank $\geqslant n-m$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. This creates a deep link connecting the classification of nilpotent upper-triangular matrices and the decomposition of Drinfeld modular curves. The conjugacy classes of nilpotent upper-triangular matrices one-to-one corresponds to certain $T$-torsion flags, and form a tree structure. As a result, the associated Drinfeld modular curves are organized in the same tree. This generalizes the tower structure introduced by Bassa, Beelen, Garcia, Stichtenoth, and others. Additionally,we prove the geometric irreducibility of $(3,2)$-type normalized Drinfeld modular curves, and characterize their associated function fields.

math.NT↗

1st Place Solution for the 5th LSVOS Challenge: Video Instance Segmentation

Video instance segmentation is a challenging task that serves as the cornerstone of numerous downstream applications, including video editing and autonomous driving. In this report, we present further improvements to the SOTA VIS method, DVIS. First, we introduce a denoising training strategy for the trainable tracker, allowing it to achieve more stable and accurate object tracking in complex and long videos. Additionally, we explore the role of visual foundation models in video instance segmentation. By utilizing a frozen VIT-L model pre-trained by DINO v2, DVIS demonstrates remarkable performance improvements. With these enhancements, our method achieves 57.9 AP and 56.0 AP in the development and test phases, respectively, and ultimately ranked 1st in the VIS track of the 5th LSVOS Challenge. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS.

cs.CV↗

Mean field elastic moduli of a three-dimensional cell-based vertex model

The mechanics of a foam typically depends on the bubble geometry, topology, and the material at hand, be it metallic or polymeric, for example. While the foam energy functional for each bubble is typically minimization of surface area for a given volume, biology provides us with a wealth of additional energy functionals, should one consider biological cells as a foam-like material. Here, we focus on a mean field approach to obtain the elastic moduli, within linear response, for an ordered, three-dimensional vertex model using the space-filling shape of a truncated octahedron and whose energy functional is characterized by a restoring surface area spring and a restoring volume spring. The tuning of the three-dimensional shape index exhibits a rigidity transition via a compatible-incompatible transition. Specifically, for smaller shape indices, both the target surface area and volume cannot be achieved, while beyond some critical value of the three-dimensional shape index, they can be, resulting in a zero-energy state. As the elastic moduli depend on curvatures of the energy when the system, we obtain these as well. In addition to analytically determining the location of the transition in mean field, we find that the rigidity transition and the elastic moduli depend on the parameterization of the cell shape with this effect being more pronounced in three dimensions given the array of shapes that a polyhedron can take on (as compared to a polygon). We also uncover nontrivial dependence on the deformation protocol in which some deformations result in affine motion of the vertices, while others result in nonaffine motion. Such dependencies on the shape parameterization and deformation protocol give rise to a nontrivial shape landscape and, therefore, nontrivial mechanical response even in the absence of topology changes.

cond-mat.soft↗

Extending structures for alternative bialgebras

We introduce the concept of braided alternative bialgebra. The theory of cocycle bicrossproducts for alternative bialgebras is developed. As an application, the extending problem for alternative bialgebra is solved by using some non-abelian cohomology theory.

math.RA↗

Federated Learning with Server Learning: Enhancing Performance for Non-IID Data

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a means of distributed learning using local data stored at clients with a coordinating server. Recent studies showed that FL can suffer from poor performance and slower convergence when training data at clients are not independent and identically distributed. Here we consider a new complementary approach to mitigating this performance degradation by allowing the server to perform auxiliary learning from a small dataset. Our analysis and experiments show that this new approach can achieve significant improvements in both model accuracy and convergence time even when the server dataset is small and its distribution differs from that of the aggregated data from all clients.

cs.LG↗

Absorption of Carbon Dioxide in Kerogen Nanopores: A Mechanism Study using the Molecular Dynamics Monte Carlo Method

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has been applied successfully in recent decades to reduce carbon emissions and alleviate global warming. In this regard, shale reservoirs present tremendous potential for carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration as they have a large number of nanopores. Molecular dynamics (MD) and MD-Monte Carlo (MDMC) methods were employed in this work to study the absorption behavior of CO2 in shale organic porous media. The MDMC method is used to analyze the spatial states of CO2, and the results are in good agreement with MD results, and it also performs well in the acceleration compared to the classical MD. With regard to the kerogen matrix, its properties, such as the pore size distribution (PSD), pore volume, and surface area, are determined to describe its different compression states and the effects of CO2 absorption on it. The potential energy distribution and potential of mean force are analyzed to verify the spatial distribution of CO2 molecules. The heterogeneity of the pore structure resulted in heterogeneous distributions of CO2 molecules in kerogen porous media. Moreover, strong compression of the matrix reduces the number of large pores, and the PSD is mainly between 0 and 15 Angstrom. Despite the high interaction force of the kerogen matrix, the high-potential-energy region induced by the kerogen skeleton also contributes to the formation of low-energy regions that encourage the entry of CO2. An increase in temperature facilitates the absorption process, allowing CO2 molecules to enter the isolated pores with stronger thermal motion, thereby increasing the storage capacity for CO2. However, the development of geothermal energy may not be suitable for CO2 sequestration.

physics.chem-ph↗

TableGPT: Towards Unifying Tables, Nature Language and Commands into One GPT

Tables are prevalent in real-world databases, requiring significant time and effort for humans to analyze and manipulate. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to interact with tables using natural language input, bringing this capability closer to reality. In this paper, we present TableGPT, a unified fine-tuned framework that enables LLMs to understand and operate on tables using external functional commands. It introduces the capability to seamlessly interact with tables, enabling a wide range of functionalities such as question answering, data manipulation (e.g., insert, delete, query, and modify operations), data visualization, analysis report generation, and automated prediction. TableGPT aims to provide convenience and accessibility to users by empowering them to effortlessly leverage tabular data. At the core of TableGPT lies the novel concept of global tabular representations, which empowers LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire table beyond meta-information. By jointly training LLMs on both table and text modalities, TableGPT achieves a deep understanding of tabular data and the ability to perform complex operations on tables through chain-of-command instructions. Importantly, TableGPT offers the advantage of being a self-contained system rather than relying on external API interfaces. Moreover, it supports efficient data process flow, query rejection (when appropriate) and private deployment, enabling faster domain data fine-tuning and ensuring data privacy, which enhances the framework's adaptability to specific use cases.

cs.AI↗

Flashlight Search Medial Axis: A Pixel-Free Pore-Network Extraction Algorithm

Pore-network models (PNMs) have become an important tool in the study of fluid flow in porous media over the last few decades, and the accuracy of their results highly depends on the extraction of pore networks. Traditional methods of pore-network extraction are based on pixels and require images with high quality. Here, a pixel-free method called the flashlight search medial axis (FSMA) algorithm is proposed for pore-network extraction in a continuous space. The search domain in a two-dimensional space is a line, whereas a surface domain is searched in a three-dimensional scenario. Thus, the FSMA algorithm follows the dimensionality reduction idea; the medial axis can be identified using only a few points instead of calculating every point in the void space. In this way, computational complexity of this method is greatly reduced compared to that of traditional pixel-based extraction methods, thus enabling large-scale pore-network extraction. Based on cases featuring two- and three-dimensional porous media, the FSMA algorithm performs well regardless of the topological structure of the pore network or the positions of the pore and throat centers. This algorithm can also be used to examine both closed- and open-boundary cases. Finally, the FSMA algorithm can search dead-end pores, which is of great significance in the study of multiphase flow in porous media.

cs.CV↗

ReIDTrack: Multi-Object Track and Segmentation Without Motion

In recent years, dominant Multi-object tracking (MOT) and segmentation (MOTS) methods mainly follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm. Transformer-based end-to-end (E2E) solutions bring some ideas to MOT and MOTS, but they cannot achieve a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in major MOT and MOTS benchmarks. Detection and association are two main modules of the tracking-by-detection paradigm. Association techniques mainly depend on the combination of motion and appearance information. As deep learning has been recently developed, the performance of the detection and appearance model is rapidly improved. These trends made us consider whether we can achieve SOTA based on only high-performance detection and appearance model. Our paper mainly focuses on exploring this direction based on CBNetV2 with Swin-B as a detection model and MoCo-v2 as a self-supervised appearance model. Motion information and IoU mapping were removed during the association. Our method wins 1st place on the MOTS track and wins 2nd on the MOT track in the CVPR2023 WAD workshop. We hope our simple and effective method can give some insights to the MOT and MOTS research community. Source code will be released under this git repository

cs.CV↗

Efficient Exploration Using Extra Safety Budget in Constrained Policy Optimization

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results on most robotic control tasks. Safety of learning-based controllers is an essential notion of ensuring the effectiveness of the controllers. Current methods adopt whole consistency constraints during the training, thus resulting in inefficient exploration in the early stage. In this paper, we propose an algorithm named Constrained Policy Optimization with Extra Safety Budget (ESB-CPO) to strike a balance between the exploration efficiency and the constraints satisfaction. In the early stage, our method loosens the practical constraints of unsafe transitions (adding extra safety budget) with the aid of a new metric we propose. With the training process, the constraints in our optimization problem become tighter. Meanwhile, theoretical analysis and practical experiments demonstrate that our method gradually meets the cost limit's demand in the final training stage. When evaluated on Safety-Gym and Bullet-Safety-Gym benchmarks, our method has shown its advantages over baseline algorithms in terms of safety and optimality. Remarkably, our method gains remarkable performance improvement under the same cost limit compared with baselines.

cs.RO↗

Colossal magnetoresistance in Ti lightly-doped Cr2Se3 single crystals with layered structure

Stoichiometric Cr2Se3 single crystals are particular layer-structured antiferromagnets which possess noncolinear spin configuration, weak ferromagnetic moments, moderate magnetoresistance (MR ~ 14.3%), and bad metallic conductivity below the antiferromagnetic phase transition temperature. Here, we report an interesting >16000% colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) effect in Ti (1.5 atomic percent) lightly-doped Cr2Se3 single crystals. Such a CMR is approximately 1143 times larger than that of the stoichiometric Cr2Se3 crystals and is rarely observed in layered antiferromagnets and is attributed to the frustrated spin configuration. Moreover, the Ti doping not only dramatically changes the electronic conductivity of the Cr2Se3 crystal from a bad metal to a semiconductor with a gap of ~ 15 meV, but also induces a change of the magnetic anisotropy of the Cr2Se3 crystal from strong out-of-plane to weak in plane. Further, magnetotransport measurements reveal that the low-field MR scales with the square of the reduced magnetization, which is a signature of CMR materials. The layered Ti:Cr2Se3 with CMR effect could be used as 2D heterostructure building blocks to provide colossal negative MR in spintronic devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Search for light dark matter from atmosphere in PandaX-4T

We report a search for light dark matter produced through the cascading decay of $η$ mesons, which are created as a result of inelastic collisions between cosmic rays and Earth's atmosphere. We introduce a new and general framework, publicly accessible, designed to address boosted dark matter specifically, with which a full and dedicated simulation including both elastic and quasi-elastic processes of Earth attenuation effect on the dark matter particles arriving at the detector is performed. In the PandaX-4T commissioning data of 0.63 tonne$\cdot$year exposure, no significant excess over background is observed. The first constraints on the interaction between light dark matter generated in the atmosphere and nucleus through a light scalar mediator are obtained. The lowest excluded cross-section is set at $5.9 \times 10^{-37}{\rm cm^2}$ for dark matter mass of $0.1$ MeV$/c^2$ and mediator mass of 300 MeV$/c^2$. The lowest upper limit of $η$ to dark matter decay branching ratio is $1.6 \times 10^{-7}$.

hep-ex↗

Adversarial Attack with Raindrops

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are usually designed artificially to fool DNNs, but rarely exist in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we study the adversarial examples caused by raindrops, to demonstrate that there exist plenty of natural phenomena being able to work as adversarial attackers to DNNs. Moreover, we present a new approach to generate adversarial raindrops, denoted as AdvRD, using the generative adversarial network (GAN) technique to simulate natural raindrops. The images crafted by our AdvRD look very similar to the real-world raindrop images, statistically close to the distribution of true raindrop images, and more importantly, can perform strong adversarial attack to the state-of-the-art DNN models. On the other side, we show that the adversarial training using our AdvRD images can significantly improve the robustness of DNNs to the real-world raindrop attacks. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the images crafted by AdvRD are visually and statistically close to the natural raindrop images, can work as strong attackers to DNN models, and also help improve the robustness of DNNs to raindrop attacks.

cs.CV↗

DVIS: Decoupled Video Instance Segmentation Framework

Video instance segmentation (VIS) is a critical task with diverse applications, including autonomous driving and video editing. Existing methods often underperform on complex and long videos in real world, primarily due to two factors. Firstly, offline methods are limited by the tightly-coupled modeling paradigm, which treats all frames equally and disregards the interdependencies between adjacent frames. Consequently, this leads to the introduction of excessive noise during long-term temporal alignment. Secondly, online methods suffer from inadequate utilization of temporal information. To tackle these challenges, we propose a decoupling strategy for VIS by dividing it into three independent sub-tasks: segmentation, tracking, and refinement. The efficacy of the decoupling strategy relies on two crucial elements: 1) attaining precise long-term alignment outcomes via frame-by-frame association during tracking, and 2) the effective utilization of temporal information predicated on the aforementioned accurate alignment outcomes during refinement. We introduce a novel referring tracker and temporal refiner to construct the \textbf{D}ecoupled \textbf{VIS} framework (\textbf{DVIS}). DVIS achieves new SOTA performance in both VIS and VPS, surpassing the current SOTA methods by 7.3 AP and 9.6 VPQ on the OVIS and VIPSeg datasets, which are the most challenging and realistic benchmarks. Moreover, thanks to the decoupling strategy, the referring tracker and temporal refiner are super light-weight (only 1.69\% of the segmenter FLOPs), allowing for efficient training and inference on a single GPU with 11G memory. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS}{https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS}.

cs.CV↗

Emotion recognition based on multi-modal electrophysiology multi-head attention Contrastive Learning

Emotion recognition is an important research direction in artificial intelligence, helping machines understand and adapt to human emotional states. Multimodal electrophysiological(ME) signals, such as EEG, GSR, respiration(Resp), and temperature(Temp), are effective biomarkers for reflecting changes in human emotions. However, using electrophysiological signals for emotion recognition faces challenges such as data scarcity, inconsistent labeling, and difficulty in cross-individual generalization. To address these issues, we propose ME-MHACL, a self-supervised contrastive learning-based multimodal emotion recognition method that can learn meaningful feature representations from unlabeled electrophysiological signals and use multi-head attention mechanisms for feature fusion to improve recognition performance. Our method includes two stages: first, we use the Meiosis method to group sample and augment unlabeled electrophysiological signals and design a self-supervised contrastive learning task; second, we apply the trained feature extractor to labeled electrophysiological signals and use multi-head attention mechanisms for feature fusion. We conducted experiments on two public datasets, DEAP and MAHNOB-HCI, and our method outperformed existing benchmark methods in emotion recognition tasks and had good cross-individual generalization ability.

cs.MM↗