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Xuan Li

Publications and source records attributed to Xuan Li.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Adversarial Mixing Policy for Relaxing Locally Linear Constraints in Mixup

Mixup is a recent regularizer for current deep classification networks. Through training a neural network on convex combinations of pairs of examples and their labels, it imposes locally linear constraints on the model's input space. However, such strict linear constraints often lead to under-fitting which degrades the effects of regularization. Noticeably, this issue is getting more serious when the resource is extremely limited. To address these issues, we propose the Adversarial Mixing Policy (AMP), organized in a min-max-rand formulation, to relax the Locally Linear Constraints in Mixup. Specifically, AMP adds a small adversarial perturbation to the mixing coefficients rather than the examples. Thus, slight non-linearity is injected in-between the synthetic examples and synthetic labels. By training on these data, the deep networks are further regularized, and thus achieve a lower predictive error rate. Experiments on five text classification benchmarks and five backbone models have empirically shown that our methods reduce the error rate over Mixup variants in a significant margin (up to 31.3%), especially in low-resource conditions (up to 17.5%).

cs.CL↗

CE-Dedup: Cost-Effective Convolutional Neural Nets Training based on Image Deduplication

Attributed to the ever-increasing large image datasets, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become popular for vision-based tasks. It is generally admirable to have larger-sized datasets for higher network training accuracies. However, the impact of dataset quality has not to be involved. It is reasonable to assume the near-duplicate images exist in the datasets. For instance, the Street View House Numbers (SVHN) dataset having cropped house plate digits from 0 to 9 are likely to have repetitive digits from the same/similar house plates. Redundant images may take up a certain portion of the dataset without consciousness. While contributing little to no accuracy improvement for the CNNs training, these duplicated images unnecessarily pose extra resource and computation consumption. To this end, this paper proposes a framework to assess the impact of the near-duplicate images on CNN training performance, called CE-Dedup. Specifically, CE-Dedup associates a hashing-based image deduplication approach with downstream CNNs-based image classification tasks. CE-Dedup balances the tradeoff between a large deduplication ratio and a stable accuracy by adjusting the deduplication threshold. The effectiveness of CE-Dedup is validated through extensive experiments on well-known CNN benchmarks. On one hand, while maintaining the same validation accuracy, CE-Dedup can reduce the dataset size by 23%. On the other hand, when allowing a small validation accuracy drop (by 5%), CE-Dedup can trim the dataset size by 75%.

cs.CV↗

Heavy Flavor and Jet Studies for the Future Electron-Ion Collider to Explore the Hadronization Process

Heavy flavor production at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will allow us to precisely determine the quark/gluon fragmentation processes in vacuum and the nuclear medium especially within the poorly constrained kinematic region. Heavy flavor hadron and jet reconstruction with the recent EIC detector design have been studies in simulation. Results of corresponding physics projections such as the flavor dependent hadron nuclear modification factor $R_{eA}$ in electron+nucleus collisions will be shown. The statistical precision obtained by these proposed heavy flavor measurements for the future EIC provides a strong discriminating power in separating different theoretical predictions.

nucl-ex↗

Simpler, Faster, Stronger: Breaking The log-K Curse On Contrastive Learners With FlatNCE

InfoNCE-based contrastive representation learners, such as SimCLR, have been tremendously successful in recent years. However, these contrastive schemes are notoriously resource demanding, as their effectiveness breaks down with small-batch training (i.e., the log-K curse, whereas K is the batch-size). In this work, we reveal mathematically why contrastive learners fail in the small-batch-size regime, and present a novel simple, non-trivial contrastive objective named FlatNCE, which fixes this issue. Unlike InfoNCE, our FlatNCE no longer explicitly appeals to a discriminative classification goal for contrastive learning. Theoretically, we show FlatNCE is the mathematical dual formulation of InfoNCE, thus bridging the classical literature on energy modeling; and empirically, we demonstrate that, with minimal modification of code, FlatNCE enables immediate performance boost independent of the subject-matter engineering efforts. The significance of this work is furthered by the powerful generalization of contrastive learning techniques, and the introduction of new tools to monitor and diagnose contrastive training. We substantiate our claims with empirical evidence on CIFAR10, ImageNet, and other datasets, where FlatNCE consistently outperforms InfoNCE.

stat.ML↗

Lagrangian-Eulerian Multi-Density Topology Optimization with the Material Point Method

In this paper, a hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian topology optimization (LETO) method is proposed to solve the elastic force equilibrium with the Material Point Method (MPM). LETO transfers density information from freely movable Lagrangian carrier particles to a fixed set of Eulerian quadrature points. This transfer is based on a smooth radial kernel involved in the compliance objective to avoid the artificial checkerboard pattern. The quadrature points act as MPM particles embedded in a lower-resolution grid and enable a sub-cell multi-density resolution of intricate structures with a reduced computational cost. A quadrature-level connectivity graph-based method is adopted to avoid the artificial checkerboard issues commonly existing in multi-resolution topology optimization methods. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.

physics.comp-ph↗

Self-Amplification of Coherent Energy Modulation in Seeded Free-Electron Lasers

The spectroscopic techniques for time-resolved fine analysis of matter require coherent X-ray radiation with femtosecond duration and high average brightness. Seeded free-electron lasers (FELs), which use the frequency up-conversion of an external seed laser to improve temporal coherence, are ideal for providing fully coherent soft X-ray pulses. However, it is difficult to operate seeded FELs at a high repetition rate due to the limitations of present state-of-the-art laser systems. Here, we report the novel self-modulation method for enhancing laser-induced energy modulation, thereby significantly reducing the requirement of an external laser system. Driven by this scheme, we experimentally realize high harmonic generation in a seeded FEL using an unprecedentedly small energy modulation. An electron beam with a laser-induced energy modulation as small as 1.8 times the slice energy spread is used for lasing at the 7th harmonic of a 266-nm seed laser in a single-stage high-gain harmonic generation (HGHG) setup and the 30th harmonic of the seed laser in a two-stage HGHG setup. The results mark a major step towards a high-repetition-rate, fully coherent X-ray FEL.

physics.acc-ph↗

Soft Hybrid Aerial Vehicle via Bistable Mechanism

Unmanned aerial vehicles have been demonstrated successfully in a variety of tasks, including surveying and sampling tasks over large areas. These vehicles can take many forms. Quadrotors' agility and ability to hover makes them well suited for navigating potentially tight spaces, while fixed wing aircraft are capable of efficient flight over long distances. Hybrid aerial vehicles (HAVs) attempt to achieve both of these benefits by exhibiting multiple modes; however, morphing HAVs typically require extra actuators which add mass, reducing both agility and efficiency. We propose a morphing HAV with folding wings that exhibits both a quadrotor and a fixed wing mode without requiring any extra actuation. This is achieved by leveraging the motion of a bistable mechanism at the center of the aircraft to drive folding of the wing using only the existing motors and the inertia of the system. We optimize both the bistable mechanism and the folding wing using a topology optimization approach. The resulting mechanisms were fabricated on a 3D printer and attached to an existing quadrotor frame. Our prototype successfully transitions between both modes and our experiments demonstrate that the behavior of the fabricated prototype is consistent with that of the simulation.

cs.RO↗

DialogueTRM: Exploring the Intra- and Inter-Modal Emotional Behaviors in the Conversation

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is essential for building empathetic human-machine systems. Existing studies on ERC primarily focus on summarizing the context information in a conversation, however, ignoring the differentiated emotional behaviors within and across different modalities. Designing appropriate strategies that fit the differentiated multi-modal emotional behaviors can produce more accurate emotional predictions. Thus, we propose the DialogueTransformer to explore the differentiated emotional behaviors from the intra- and inter-modal perspectives. For intra-modal, we construct a novel Hierarchical Transformer that can easily switch between sequential and feed-forward structures according to the differentiated context preference within each modality. For inter-modal, we constitute a novel Multi-Grained Interactive Fusion that applies both neuron- and vector-grained feature interactions to learn the differentiated contributions across all modalities. Experimental results show that DialogueTRM outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin on three benchmark datasets.

cs.CL↗

Parallel convolution processing using an integrated photonic tensor core

With the proliferation of ultra-high-speed mobile networks and internet-connected devices, along with the rise of artificial intelligence, the world is generating exponentially increasing amounts of data - data that needs to be processed in a fast, efficient and smart way. These developments are pushing the limits of existing computing paradigms, and highly parallelized, fast and scalable hardware concepts are becoming progressively more important. Here, we demonstrate a computational specific integrated photonic tensor core - the optical analog of an ASIC-capable of operating at Tera-Multiply-Accumulate per second (TMAC/s) speeds. The photonic core achieves parallelized photonic in-memory computing using phase-change memory arrays and photonic chip-based optical frequency combs (soliton microcombs). The computation is reduced to measuring the optical transmission of reconfigurable and non-resonant passive components and can operate at a bandwidth exceeding 14 GHz, limited only by the speed of the modulators and photodetectors. Given recent advances in hybrid integration of soliton microcombs at microwave line rates, ultra-low loss silicon nitride waveguides, and high speed on-chip detectors and modulators, our approach provides a path towards full CMOS wafer-scale integration of the photonic tensor core. While we focus on convolution processing, more generally our results indicate the major potential of integrated photonics for parallel, fast, and efficient computational hardware in demanding AI applications such as autonomous driving, live video processing, and next generation cloud computing services.

physics.optics↗

A General Framework for Charger Scheduling Optimization Problems

This paper presents a general framework to tackle a diverse range of NP-hard charger scheduling problems, optimizing the trajectory of mobile chargers to prolong the life of Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Network (WRSN), a system consisting of sensors with rechargeable batteries and mobile chargers. Existing solutions to charger scheduling problems require problem-specific design and a trade-off between the solution quality and computing time. Instead, we observe that instances of the same type of charger scheduling problem are solved repeatedly with similar combinatorial structure but different data. We consider searching an optimal charger scheduling as a trial and error process, and the objective function of a charging optimization problem as reward, a scalar feedback signal for each search. We propose a deep reinforcement learning-based charger scheduling optimization framework. The biggest advantage of the framework is that a diverse range of domain-specific charger scheduling strategy can be learned automatically from previous experiences. A framework also simplifies the complexity of algorithm design for individual charger scheduling optimization problem. We pick three representative charger scheduling optimization problems, design algorithms based on the proposed deep reinforcement learning framework, implement them, and compare them with existing ones. Extensive simulation results show that our algorithms based on the proposed framework outperform all existing ones.

cs.NI↗

A Proposed Forward Silicon Tracker for the Future Electron-Ion Collider and Associated Physics Studies

The future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will explore several fundamental questions in a broad Bjorken-x ($x_{BJ}$) and $Q^{2}$ phase space. Heavy flavor and jet products are ideal probes to precisely study the tomography of nucleon/nuclei structure, help solve the proton spin puzzle and understand the hadronizaton processes in vacuum or in the QCD medium. Due to the asymmetric collisions at the EIC, most of the final state hadrons are produced in the nucleon/nuclei beam going (forward) direction. A silicon vertex/tracking is critical to precisely measure these forward hadrons at the EIC. Details of different conceptual designs of the proposed Forward Silicon Tracker (FST) and the relevant detector performance are presented in this technical note. The associated heavy flavor and jet studies with the evaluated FST performance are discussed as well.

nucl-ex↗

Heavy flavor and jet studies for the future Electron-Ion Collider

The proposed high luminosity high energy Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will explore the proton/nuclear structure in a wide Bjorken-x ($x_{BJ}$) and $Q^{2}$ phase space. Heavy flavor products are generated in initial collisions and have their hadronization influenced by the nuclear medium. Heavy flavor hadron and jet measurements at the future EIC will allow us to better constrain the nPDFs especially in the poorly constrained high $x_{BJ}$ region, precisely determine the quark/gluon fragmentation processes and directly study the quark/gluon energy loss within the nuclear medium. These measurements can constrain the cold nuclear medium effects for previous and ongoing heavy ion measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Silicon vertex/tracking detectors are essential to realize the heavy flavor and jet measurements at the EIC. Feasibility studies in simulation for proposed heavy flavor and jet observable with evaluated detector performance at the future EIC will be discussed.

hep-ex↗

Cross-ethnicity Face Anti-spoofing Recognition Challenge: A Review

Face anti-spoofing is critical to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. The biometrics community has %possessed achieved impressive progress recently due the excellent performance of deep neural networks and the availability of large datasets. Although ethnic bias has been verified to severely affect the performance of face recognition systems, it still remains an open research problem in face anti-spoofing. Recently, a multi-ethnic face anti-spoofing dataset, CASIA-SURF CeFA, has been released with the goal of measuring the ethnic bias. It is the largest up to date cross-ethnicity face anti-spoofing dataset covering $3$ ethnicities, $3$ modalities, $1,607$ subjects, 2D plus 3D attack types, and the first dataset including explicit ethnic labels among the recently released datasets for face anti-spoofing. We organized the Chalearn Face Anti-spoofing Attack Detection Challenge which consists of single-modal (e.g., RGB) and multi-modal (e.g., RGB, Depth, Infrared (IR)) tracks around this novel resource to boost research aiming to alleviate the ethnic bias. Both tracks have attracted $340$ teams in the development stage, and finally 11 and 8 teams have submitted their codes in the single-modal and multi-modal face anti-spoofing recognition challenges, respectively. All the results were verified and re-ran by the organizing team, and the results were used for the final ranking. This paper presents an overview of the challenge, including its design, evaluation protocol and a summary of results. We analyze the top ranked solutions and draw conclusions derived from the competition. In addition we outline future work directions.

cs.CV↗

Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks

Scene text image contains two levels of contents: visual texture and semantic information. Although the previous scene text recognition methods have made great progress over the past few years, the research on mining semantic information to assist text recognition attracts less attention, only RNN-like structures are explored to implicitly model semantic information. However, we observe that RNN based methods have some obvious shortcomings, such as time-dependent decoding manner and one-way serial transmission of semantic context, which greatly limit the help of semantic information and the computation efficiency. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable framework named semantic reasoning network (SRN) for accurate scene text recognition, where a global semantic reasoning module (GSRM) is introduced to capture global semantic context through multi-way parallel transmission. The state-of-the-art results on 7 public benchmarks, including regular text, irregular text and non-Latin long text, verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. In addition, the speed of SRN has significant advantages over the RNN based methods, demonstrating its value in practical use.

cs.CV↗

Out-of-Distribution Detection for Skin Lesion Images with Deep Isolation Forest

In this paper, we study the problem of out-of-distribution detection in skin disease images. Publicly available medical datasets normally have a limited number of lesion classes (e.g. HAM10000 has 8 lesion classes). However, there exists a few thousands of clinically identified diseases. Hence, it is important if lesions not in the training data can be differentiated. Toward this goal, we propose DeepIF, a non-parametric Isolation Forest based approach combined with deep convolutional networks. We conduct comprehensive experiments to compare our DeepIF with three baseline models. Results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our proposed approach on the task of detecting abnormal skin lesions.

cs.CV↗

CASIA-SURF CeFA: A Benchmark for Multi-modal Cross-ethnicity Face Anti-spoofing

Ethnic bias has proven to negatively affect the performance of face recognition systems, and it remains an open research problem in face anti-spoofing. In order to study the ethnic bias for face anti-spoofing, we introduce the largest up to date CASIA-SURF Cross-ethnicity Face Anti-spoofing (CeFA) dataset (briefly named CeFA), covering $3$ ethnicities, $3$ modalities, $1,607$ subjects, and 2D plus 3D attack types. Four protocols are introduced to measure the affect under varied evaluation conditions, such as cross-ethnicity, unknown spoofs or both of them. To the best of our knowledge, CeFA is the first dataset including explicit ethnic labels in current published/released datasets for face anti-spoofing. Then, we propose a novel multi-modal fusion method as a strong baseline to alleviate these bias, namely, the static-dynamic fusion mechanism applied in each modality (i.e., RGB, Depth and infrared image). Later, a partially shared fusion strategy is proposed to learn complementary information from multiple modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the CASIA-SURF, OULU-NPU, SiW and the CeFA dataset.

cs.CV↗

Hierarchical Context Enhanced Multi-Domain Dialogue System for Multi-domain Task Completion

Task 1 of the DSTC8-track1 challenge aims to develop an end-to-end multi-domain dialogue system to accomplish complex users' goals under tourist information desk settings. This paper describes our submitted solution, Hierarchical Context Enhanced Dialogue System (HCEDS), for this task. The main motivation of our system is to comprehensively explore the potential of hierarchical context for sufficiently understanding complex dialogues. More specifically, we apply BERT to capture token-level information and employ the attention mechanism to capture sentence-level information. The results listed in the leaderboard show that our system achieves first place in automatic evaluation and the second place in human evaluation.

cs.AI↗

A New Heavy Flavor Program for the Future Electron-Ion Collider

The proposed high-energy and high-luminosity Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will provide one of the cleanest environments to precisely determine the nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) in a wide $x$-$Q^{2}$ range. Heavy flavor production at the EIC provides access to nPDFs in the poorly constrained high Bjorken-$x$ region, allows us to study the quark and gluon fragmentation processes, and constrains parton energy loss in cold nuclear matter. Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a new physics program to study heavy flavor production, flavor tagged jets, and heavy flavor hadron-jet correlations in the nucleon/nucleus going direction at the future EIC. The proposed measurements will provide a unique way to explore the flavor dependent fragmentation functions and energy loss in a heavy nucleus. They will constrain the initial-state effects that are critical for the interpretation of previous and ongoing heavy ion measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider. We show an initial conceptual design of the proposed Forward Silicon Tracking (FST) detector at the EIC, which is essential to carry out the heavy flavor measurements. We further present initial feasibility studies/simulations of heavy flavor hadron reconstruction using the proposed FST.

nucl-ex↗