Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xi Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Xi Liu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2024

Coupling Between Local and Global Oscillations in Palladium-Catalysed Methane Oxidation

The interplay between order and disorder is crucial across various fields, especially in understanding oscillatory phenomena. Periodic oscillations are frequently observed in heterogeneous catalysis, yet their underlying mechanisms need deeper exploration. Here, we investigate how periodic oscillations arise during methane oxidation catalysed by palladium nanoparticles (Pd NPs), utilizing a suite of complementary operando techniques across various spatial scales. We found that reaction intensity and collective dynamic modes can be tuned by the reactant gas-flow rate. At lower gas-flow rates, we observed periodic facet reconstruction of Pd NPs correlated with repeated bubbling behaviour at the Pd/PdO interface, without evident global oscillatory responses. Conversely, at higher gas-flow rates, Pd NPs undergo chaotic transformations between metallic and oxidized states, resulting in overall oscillation. Integrating our observations at different gas-flow rates, we attributed the emergence of global oscillation to thermal coupling regulated by gas flow and connected local and global dynamics through a weak synchronization mechanism. This work demonstrates the correlations between open surfaces and interfaces, chaos and regularity, and dissipative processes and coupling behaviour. Our findings offer critical insights into the complexity behind catalytic oscillations and provide guidance for modulating oscillatory behaviours in catalytic processes, with significant implications for both science and industry.

physics.chem-ph↗
arXiv2024

Q-Pensieve: Boosting Sample Efficiency of Multi-Objective RL Through Memory Sharing of Q-Snapshots

Many real-world continuous control problems are in the dilemma of weighing the pros and cons, multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) serves as a generic framework of learning control policies for different preferences over objectives. However, the existing MORL methods either rely on multiple passes of explicit search for finding the Pareto front and therefore are not sample-efficient, or utilizes a shared policy network for coarse knowledge sharing among policies. To boost the sample efficiency of MORL, we propose Q-Pensieve, a policy improvement scheme that stores a collection of Q-snapshots to jointly determine the policy update direction and thereby enables data sharing at the policy level. We show that Q-Pensieve can be naturally integrated with soft policy iteration with convergence guarantee. To substantiate this concept, we propose the technique of Q replay buffer, which stores the learned Q-networks from the past iterations, and arrive at a practical actor-critic implementation. Through extensive experiments and an ablation study, we demonstrate that with much fewer samples, the proposed algorithm can outperform the benchmark MORL methods on a variety of MORL benchmark tasks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2024

Wukong: Towards a Scaling Law for Large-Scale Recommendation

Scaling laws play an instrumental role in the sustainable improvement in model quality. Unfortunately, recommendation models to date do not exhibit such laws similar to those observed in the domain of large language models, due to the inefficiencies of their upscaling mechanisms. This limitation poses significant challenges in adapting these models to increasingly more complex real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose an effective network architecture based purely on stacked factorization machines, and a synergistic upscaling strategy, collectively dubbed Wukong, to establish a scaling law in the domain of recommendation. Wukong's unique design makes it possible to capture diverse, any-order of interactions simply through taller and wider layers. We conducted extensive evaluations on six public datasets, and our results demonstrate that Wukong consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models quality-wise. Further, we assessed Wukong's scalability on an internal, large-scale dataset. The results show that Wukong retains its superiority in quality over state-of-the-art models, while holding the scaling law across two orders of magnitude in model complexity, extending beyond 100 GFLOP/example, where prior arts fall short.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2024

CustomListener: Text-guided Responsive Interaction for User-friendly Listening Head Generation

Listening head generation aims to synthesize a non-verbal responsive listener head by modeling the correlation between the speaker and the listener in dynamic conversion.The applications of listener agent generation in virtual interaction have promoted many works achieving the diverse and fine-grained motion generation. However, they can only manipulate motions through simple emotional labels, but cannot freely control the listener's motions. Since listener agents should have human-like attributes (e.g. identity, personality) which can be freely customized by users, this limits their realism. In this paper, we propose a user-friendly framework called CustomListener to realize the free-form text prior guided listener generation. To achieve speaker-listener coordination, we design a Static to Dynamic Portrait module (SDP), which interacts with speaker information to transform static text into dynamic portrait token with completion rhythm and amplitude information. To achieve coherence between segments, we design a Past Guided Generation Module (PGG) to maintain the consistency of customized listener attributes through the motion prior, and utilize a diffusion-based structure conditioned on the portrait token and the motion prior to realize the controllable generation. To train and evaluate our model, we have constructed two text-annotated listening head datasets based on ViCo and RealTalk, which provide text-video paired labels. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our model.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2024

Regularized lattice Boltzmann method based maximum principle and energy stability preserving finite-difference scheme for the Allen-Cahn equation

The Allen-Cahn equation (ACE) inherently possesses two crucial properties: the maximum principle and the energy dissipation law. Preserving these two properties at the discrete level is also necessary in the numerical methods for the ACE. In this paper, unlike the traditional top-down macroscopic numerical schemes which discretize the ACE directly, we first propose a novel bottom-up mesoscopic regularized lattice Boltzmann method based macroscopic numerical scheme for d (=1, 2, 3)-dimensional ACE, where the DdQ(2d+1) [(2d+1) discrete velocities in d-dimensional space] lattice structure is adopted. In particular, the proposed macroscopic numerical scheme has a second-order accuracy in space, and can also be viewd as an implicit-explicit finite-difference scheme for the ACE, in which the nonlinear term is discretized semi-implicitly, the temporal derivative and dissipation term of the ACE are discretized by using the explicit Euler method and second-order central difference method, respectively. Then we also demonstrate that the proposed scheme can preserve the maximum bound principle and the original energy dissipation law at the discrete level under some conditions. Finally, some numerical experiments are conducted to validate our theoretical analysis.

math.NA↗
arXiv2023

Energy-Dependent Analyses of the Gamma-Ray Emission from HESS J1857+026 with Fermi-LAT

We report the discovery of energy-dependent morphology for the GeV gamma-ray emission from HESS J1857+026 with more than 13 years of {\it Fermi} Large Area Telescope (LAT) data. The GeV gamma-ray emission from this region is composed of two extended components. The hard component with an index of $1.74 \pm 0.07$ in the energy range of 0.5-500 GeV is spatially coincident with HESS J1857+026, and its 68\% containment radius varies from $\sim 0.44^\circ$ below 40 GeV to $\sim 0.30^\circ$ above 140 GeV. The hard GeV gamma-ray spectrum and the energy-dependent morphology of HESS J1857+026 make it favor a PWN origin, which is associated with the energetic pulsar, PSR J1856+0245. The soft component with an index of $2.70 \pm 0.16$ and another extended gamma-ray source detected in this region, 4FGL J1857.9+0313e with an index of $2.55 \pm 0.07$, are spatially coincidence with two molecular clumps in the northeast and southwest of HESS J1857+026, which favors the hadronic process, and the protons could be accelerated by the hypothetical SNR associated with PSR J1856+0245.

astro-ph.HE↗
arXiv2023

A GPU-based Hydrodynamic Simulator with Boid Interactions

We present a hydrodynamic simulation system using the GPU compute shaders of DirectX for simulating virtual agent behaviors and navigation inside a smoothed particle hydrodynamical (SPH) fluid environment with real-time water mesh surface reconstruction. The current SPH literature includes interactions between SPH and heterogeneous meshes but seldom involves interactions between SPH and virtual boid agents. The contribution of the system lies in the combination of the parallel smoothed particle hydrodynamics model with the distributed boid model of virtual agents to enable agents to interact with fluids. The agents based on the boid algorithm influence the motion of SPH fluid particles, and the forces from the SPH algorithm affect the movement of the boids. To enable realistic fluid rendering and simulation in a particle-based system, it is essential to construct a mesh from the particle attributes. Our system also contributes to the surface reconstruction aspect of the pipeline, in which we performed a set of experiments with the parallel marching cubes algorithm per frame for constructing the mesh from the fluid particles in a real-time compute and memory-intensive application, producing a wide range of triangle configurations. We also demonstrate that our system is versatile enough for reinforced robotic agents instead of boid agents to interact with the fluid environment for underwater navigation and remote control engineering purposes.

physics.comp-ph↗
arXiv2023

A consistent and conservative diffuse-domain lattice Boltzmann method for multiphase flows in complex geometries

Modeling and simulation of multiphase flows in complex geomerties are challenging due to the complexity in describing the interface topology changes among different phases and the difficulty in implementing the boundary conditions on the irregular solid surface. In this work, we first developed a diffuse-domain (DD) based phase-field model for multiphase flows in complex geometries. In this model, the irregular fluid region is embedded into a larger and regular domain by introducing a smooth characteristic function. Then, the reduction-consistent and conservative phase-field equation for the multiphase field and the consistent and conservative Navier-Stokes equations for the flow field are reformulated as the diffuse-domain based consistent and conservative (DD-CC) equations where some additional source terms are added to reflect the effects of boundary conditions. In this case, there is no need to directly treat the complex boundary conditions on the irregular solid surface, and additionally, based on a matched asymptotic analysis, it is also shown that the DD-CC equations can converge to the original governing equations as the interface width parameter tends to zero. Furthermore, to solve the DD-CC equations, we proposed a novel and simple lattice Boltzmann (LB) method with a Hermite-moment-based collision matrix which can not only keep consistent and conservation properties, but also improve the numerical stability with a flexible parameter. With the help of the direct Taylor expansion, the macroscopic DD-CC equations can be recovered correctly from the present LB method. Finally, to test the capacity of LB method, several benchmarks and complex problems are considered, and the numerical results show that the present LB method is accurate and efficient for the multiphase flows in complex geomerties.

physics.comp-ph↗
arXiv2023

AutoML for Large Capacity Modeling of Meta's Ranking Systems

Web-scale ranking systems at Meta serving billions of users is complex. Improving ranking models is essential but engineering heavy. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) can release engineers from labor intensive work of tuning ranking models; however, it is unknown if AutoML is efficient enough to meet tight production timeline in real-world and, at the same time, bring additional improvements to the strong baselines. Moreover, to achieve higher ranking performance, there is an ever-increasing demand to scale up ranking models to even larger capacity, which imposes more challenges on the efficiency. The large scale of models and tight production schedule requires AutoML to outperform human baselines by only using a small number of model evaluation trials (around 100). We presents a sampling-based AutoML method, focusing on neural architecture search and hyperparameter optimization, addressing these challenges in Meta-scale production when building large capacity models. Our approach efficiently handles large-scale data demands. It leverages a lightweight predictor-based searcher and reinforcement learning to explore vast search spaces, significantly reducing the number of model evaluations. Through experiments in large capacity modeling for CTR and CVR applications, we show that our method achieves outstanding Return on Investment (ROI) versus human tuned baselines, with up to 0.09% Normalized Entropy (NE) loss reduction or $25\%$ Query per Second (QPS) increase by only sampling one hundred models on average from a curated search space. The proposed AutoML method has already made real-world impact where a discovered Instagram CTR model with up to -0.36% NE gain (over existing production baseline) was selected for large-scale online A/B test and show statistically significant gain. These production results proved AutoML efficacy and accelerated its adoption in ranking systems at Meta.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Rankitect: Ranking Architecture Search Battling World-class Engineers at Meta Scale

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has demonstrated its efficacy in computer vision and potential for ranking systems. However, prior work focused on academic problems, which are evaluated at small scale under well-controlled fixed baselines. In industry system, such as ranking system in Meta, it is unclear whether NAS algorithms from the literature can outperform production baselines because of: (1) scale - Meta ranking systems serve billions of users, (2) strong baselines - the baselines are production models optimized by hundreds to thousands of world-class engineers for years since the rise of deep learning, (3) dynamic baselines - engineers may have established new and stronger baselines during NAS search, and (4) efficiency - the search pipeline must yield results quickly in alignment with the productionization life cycle. In this paper, we present Rankitect, a NAS software framework for ranking systems at Meta. Rankitect seeks to build brand new architectures by composing low level building blocks from scratch. Rankitect implements and improves state-of-the-art (SOTA) NAS methods for comprehensive and fair comparison under the same search space, including sampling-based NAS, one-shot NAS, and Differentiable NAS (DNAS). We evaluate Rankitect by comparing to multiple production ranking models at Meta. We find that Rankitect can discover new models from scratch achieving competitive tradeoff between Normalized Entropy loss and FLOPs. When utilizing search space designed by engineers, Rankitect can generate better models than engineers, achieving positive offline evaluation and online A/B test at Meta scale.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

A thermodynamically consistent and conservative diffuse-interface model for gas-liquid-solid multiphase flows

In this work, a thermodynamically consistent and conservative diffuse-interface model for gas-liquid-solid multiphase flows is proposed. In this model, a novel free energy for the gas-liquid-solid multiphase flows is established according to a ternary phase-field model, and it not only contains the standard bulk and interface free energies for two-phase flows, but also includes some additional terms to reflect the penalty in the solid phase and the wettability on the solid surface. Furthermore, a smooth indicator function of the solid phase is also introduced in the consistent Navier-Stokes equations to achieve a high viscosity in the solid phase and preserve the velocity boundary conditions on the solid surface. Based on the proposed diffuse-interface model, the fluid interface dynamics, the fluid-structure interaction, and the wetting property of the solid surface can be described simply and efficiently. Additionally, the total energy is also proved to be dissipative for the two-phase flows in the stationary geometries. To test the present diffuse-interface model, we develop a consistent and conservative lattice Boltzmann method and conduct some simulations. The numerical results also confirm the energy dissipation and good capability of the proposed diffuse-interface model in the study of two-phase flows in complex geometries and gas-liquid-particle multiphase flows.

physics.flu-dyn↗
arXiv2023

A Cole-Hopf transformation based fourth-order multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model for the coupled Burgers' equations

In this work, a Cole-Hopf transformation based fourth-order multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann (MRT-LB) model for d-dimensional coupled Burgers' equations is developed. We first adopt the Cole-Hopf transformation where an intermediate variable θis introduced to eliminate the nonlinear convection terms in the Burgers' equations on the velocity u=(u_1,u_2,...,u_d). In this case, a diffusion equation on the variable θcan be obtained, and particularly, the velocity u in the coupled Burgers' equations is determined by the variable θand its gradient term \nablaθ. Then we develop a general MRT-LB model with the natural moments for the d-dimensional transformed diffusion equation and present the corresponding macroscopic finite-difference scheme. At the diffusive scaling, the fourth-order modified equation of the developed MRT-LB model is derived through the Maxwell iteration method. With the aid of the free parameters in the MRT-LB model, we find that not only the consistent fourth-order modified equation can be obtained, but also the gradient term $\nablaθ$ can be calculated locally by the non-equilibrium distribution function with a fourth-order accuracy, this indicates that theoretically, the MRT-LB model for $d$-dimensional coupled Burgers' equations can achieve a fourth-order accuracy in space. Finally, some simulations are conducted to test the MRT-LB model, and the numerical results show that the proposed MRT-LB model has a fourth-order convergence rate, which is consistent with our theoretical analysis.

math.NA↗
arXiv2023

AccFlow: Backward Accumulation for Long-Range Optical Flow

Recent deep learning-based optical flow estimators have exhibited impressive performance in generating local flows between consecutive frames. However, the estimation of long-range flows between distant frames, particularly under complex object deformation and large motion occlusion, remains a challenging task. One promising solution is to accumulate local flows explicitly or implicitly to obtain the desired long-range flow. Nevertheless, the accumulation errors and flow misalignment can hinder the effectiveness of this approach. This paper proposes a novel recurrent framework called AccFlow, which recursively backward accumulates local flows using a deformable module called as AccPlus. In addition, an adaptive blending module is designed along with AccPlus to alleviate the occlusion effect by backward accumulation and rectify the accumulation error. Notably, we demonstrate the superiority of backward accumulation over conventional forward accumulation, which to the best of our knowledge has not been explicitly established before. To train and evaluate the proposed AccFlow, we have constructed a large-scale high-quality dataset named CVO, which provides ground-truth optical flow labels between adjacent and distant frames. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of AccFlow in handling long-range optical flow estimation. Codes are available at https://github.com/mulns/AccFlow .

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

The macroscopic finite-difference scheme and modified equations of the general propagation multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model

In this paper, we first present the general propagation multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann (GPMRT-LB) model and obtain the corresponding macroscopic finite-difference (GPMFD) scheme on conservative moments. Then based on the Maxwell iteration method, we conduct the analysis on the truncation errors and modified equations (MEs) of the GPMRT-LB model and GPMFD scheme at both diffusive and acoustic scalings. For the nonlinear anisotropic convection-diffusion equation (NACDE) and Navier-Stokes equations (NSEs), we also derive the first- and second-order MEs of the GPMRT-LB model and GPMFD scheme. In particular, for the one-dimensional convection-diffusion equation (CDE) with the constant velocity and diffusion coefficient, we can develop a fourth-order GPMRT-LB (F-GPMRT-LB) model and the corresponding fourth-order GPMFD (F-GPMFD) scheme at the diffusive scaling. Finally, two benchmark problems, Gauss hill problem and Poiseuille flow in two-dimensional space, are used to test the GPMRT-LB model and GPMFD scheme, and it is found that the numerical results are not only in good agreement with corresponding analytical solutions, but also have a second-order convergence rate in space. Additionally, a numerical study on one-dimensional CDE also demonstrates that the F-GPMRT-LB model and F-GPMFD scheme can achieve a fourth-order accuracy in space, which is consistent with our theoretical analysis.

math.NA↗
arXiv2023

Towards the Better Ranking Consistency: A Multi-task Learning Framework for Early Stage Ads Ranking

Dividing ads ranking system into retrieval, early, and final stages is a common practice in large scale ads recommendation to balance the efficiency and accuracy. The early stage ranking often uses efficient models to generate candidates out of a set of retrieved ads. The candidates are then fed into a more computationally intensive but accurate final stage ranking system to produce the final ads recommendation. As the early and final stage ranking use different features and model architectures because of system constraints, a serious ranking consistency issue arises where the early stage has a low ads recall, i.e., top ads in the final stage are ranked low in the early stage. In order to pass better ads from the early to the final stage ranking, we propose a multi-task learning framework for early stage ranking to capture multiple final stage ranking components (i.e. ads clicks and ads quality events) and their task relations. With our multi-task learning framework, we can not only achieve serving cost saving from the model consolidation, but also improve the ads recall and ranking consistency. In the online A/B testing, our framework achieves significantly higher click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), total value and better ads-quality (e.g. reduced ads cross-out rate) in a large scale industrial ads ranking system.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

A comparative study of two Allen-Cahn models for immiscible $N$-phase flows by using a consistent and conservative lattice Boltzmann method

In this work, we conduct a detailed comparison between two second-order conservative Allen-Cahn (AC) models [\emph{Model A}: Zheng \emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. E 101, 0433202 (2020) and \emph{Model B}: Mirjalili and Mani, (2023)] for the immiscible $N$-phase flows. Mathematically, these two AC equations can be proved to be equivalent under some approximate conditions. However, the effects of these approximations are unclear from the theoretical point of view, and would be considered numerically. To this end, we propose a consistent and conservative lattice Boltzmann method for the AC models for $N$-phase flows, and present some numerical comparisons of accuracy and stability between these two AC models. The results show that both two AC models have good performances in accuracy, but the \emph{Model B} is more stable for the realistic complex $N$-phase flows, although there is an adjustable parameter in the \emph{Model A}.

physics.flu-dyn↗
arXiv2023

AdaTT: Adaptive Task-to-Task Fusion Network for Multitask Learning in Recommendations

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to enhance the performance and efficiency of machine learning models by simultaneously training them on multiple tasks. However, MTL research faces two challenges: 1) effectively modeling the relationships between tasks to enable knowledge sharing, and 2) jointly learning task-specific and shared knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel model called Adaptive Task-to-Task Fusion Network (AdaTT) to address both challenges. AdaTT is a deep fusion network built with task-specific and optional shared fusion units at multiple levels. By leveraging a residual mechanism and a gating mechanism for task-to-task fusion, these units adaptively learn both shared knowledge and task-specific knowledge. To evaluate AdaTT's performance, we conduct experiments on a public benchmark and an industrial recommendation dataset using various task groups. Results demonstrate AdaTT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our end-to-end experiments reveal that the model exhibits better performance compared to alternatives.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Automatic Detection of Out-of-body Frames in Surgical Videos for Privacy Protection Using Self-supervised Learning and Minimal Labels

Endoscopic video recordings are widely used in minimally invasive robot-assisted surgery, but when the endoscope is outside the patient's body, it can capture irrelevant segments that may contain sensitive information. To address this, we propose a framework that accurately detects out-of-body frames in surgical videos by leveraging self-supervision with minimal data labels. We use a massive amount of unlabeled endoscopic images to learn meaningful representations in a self-supervised manner. Our approach, which involves pre-training on an auxiliary task and fine-tuning with limited supervision, outperforms previous methods for detecting out-of-body frames in surgical videos captured from da Vinci X and Xi surgical systems. The average F1 scores range from 96.00 to 98.02. Remarkably, using only 5% of the training labels, our approach still maintains an average F1 score performance above 97, outperforming fully-supervised methods with 95% fewer labels. These results demonstrate the potential of our framework to facilitate the safe handling of surgical video recordings and enhance data privacy protection in minimally invasive surgery.

cs.CV↗