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Yang Lu

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Lu.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources
arXiv2020

The TianQin project: current progress on science and technology

TianQin is a planned space-based gravitational wave (GW) observatory consisting of three earth orbiting satellites with an orbital radius of about $10^5~{\rm km}$. The satellites will form a equilateral triangle constellation the plane of which is nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic plane. TianQin aims to detect GWs between $10^{-4}~{\rm Hz}$ and $1~{\rm Hz}$ that can be generated by a wide variety of important astrophysical and cosmological sources, including the inspiral of Galactic ultra-compact binaries, the inspiral of stellar-mass black hole binaries, extreme mass ratio inspirals, the merger of massive black hole binaries, and possibly the energetic processes in the very early universe or exotic sources such as cosmic strings. In order to start science operations around 2035, a roadmap called the 0123 plan is being used to bring the key technologies of TianQin to maturity, supported by the construction of a series of research facilities on the ground. Two major projects of the 0123 plan are being carried out. In this process, the team has created a new generation $17~{\rm cm}$ single-body hollow corner-cube retro-reflector which has been launched with the QueQiao satellite on 21 May 2018; a new laser ranging station equipped with a $1.2~{\rm m}$ telescope has been constructed and the station has successfully ranged to all the five retro-reflectors on the Moon; and the TianQin-1 experimental satellite has been launched on 20 December 2019 and the first round result shows that the satellite has exceeded all of its mission requirements.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2020

On the Encounter Desorption of Hydrogen Atoms on Ice Mantle

At low temperatures (10 K), hydrogen atoms can diffuse quickly on grain ice mantles and frequently encounter hydrogen molecules, which cover a notable fraction of grain surface. The desorption energy of H atoms on H2 substrates is much less than that on water ice. The H atom encounter desorption mechanism is adopted to study the enhanced desorption of H atoms on H2 substrates. Using a small reaction network, we show that the steady-state surface H abundances predicted by the rate equation model that includes H atom encounter desorption agree reasonably well with the results from the more rigorous microscopic Monte Carlo method. For a full gas-grain model, H atom encounter desorption can reduce surface H abundances. Therefore, if a model adopts the encounter desorption of H atoms, it becomes more difficult for hydrogenation products such as methanol to form, but it is easier for C, O and N atoms to bond with each other on grain surfaces.

astro-ph.SR↗
arXiv2020

Computational Complexity Characterization of Protecting Elections from Bribery

The bribery problem in election has received considerable attention in the literature, upon which various algorithmic and complexity results have been obtained. It is thus natural to ask whether we can protect an election from potential bribery. We assume that the protector can protect a voter with some cost (e.g., by isolating the voter from potential bribers). A protected voter cannot be bribed. Under this setting, we consider the following bi-level decision problem: Is it possible for the protector to protect a proper subset of voters such that no briber with a fixed budget on bribery can alter the election result? The goal of this paper is to give a full picture on the complexity of protection problems. We give an extensive study on the protection problem and provide algorithmic and complexity results. Comparing our results with that on the bribery problems, we observe that the protection problem is in general significantly harder. Indeed, it becomes $\sum_{p}^2$-complete even for very restricted special cases, while most bribery problems lie in NP. However, it is not necessarily the case that the protection problem is always harder. Some of the protection problems can still be solved in polynomial time, while some of them remain as hard as the bribery problem under the same setting.

cs.CC↗
arXiv2019

On privacy preserving data release of linear dynamic networks

Distributed data sharing in dynamic networks is ubiquitous. It raises the concern that the private information of dynamic networks could be leaked when data receivers are malicious or communication channels are insecure. In this paper, we propose to intentionally perturb the inputs and outputs of a linear dynamic system to protect the privacy of target initial states and inputs from released outputs. We formulate the problem of perturbation design as an optimization problem which minimizes the cost caused by the added perturbations while maintaining system controllability and ensuring the privacy. We analyze the computational complexity of the formulated optimization problem. To minimize the $\ell_0$ and $\ell_2$ norms of the added perturbations, we derive their convex relaxations which can be efficiently solved. The efficacy of the proposed techniques is verified by a case study on a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system.

math.OC↗
arXiv2019

From Data Disclosure to Privacy Nudges: A Privacy-aware and User-centric Personal Data Management Framework

Although there are privacy-enhancing tools designed to protect users' online privacy, it is surprising to see a lack of user-centric solutions allowing privacy control based on the joint assessment of privacy risks and benefits, due to data disclosure to multiple platforms. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to fill the gap: aiming at the user-centric privacy protection, we show the framework can not only assess privacy risks in using online services but also the added values earned from data disclosure. Through following a human-in-the-loop approach, it is expected the framework provides a personalized solution via preference learning, continuous privacy assessment, behavior monitoring and nudging. Finally, we describe a case study towards "leisure travelers" and several future areas to be studied in the ongoing project.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2019

Copula Density Estimation by Finite Mixture of Parametric Copula Densities

A Copula density estimation method that is based on a finite mixture of heterogeneous parametric copula densities is proposed here. More specifically, the mixture components are Clayton, Frank, Gumbel, T, and normal copula densities, which are capable of capturing lower tail,strong central, upper tail, heavy tail, and symmetrical elliptical dependence, respectively. The model parameters are estimated by an interior-point algorithm for the constrained maximum likelihood problem. The interior-point algorithm is compared with the commonly used EM algorithm. Simulation and real data application show that the proposed approach is effective to model complex dependencies for data in dimensions beyond two or three.

stat.CO↗
arXiv2019

Multi-Scale Dual-Branch Fully Convolutional Network for Hand Parsing

Recently, fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown significant performance in image parsing, including scene parsing and object parsing. Different from generic object parsing tasks, hand parsing is more challenging due to small size, complex structure, heavy self-occlusion and ambiguous texture problems. In this paper, we propose a novel parsing framework, Multi-Scale Dual-Branch Fully Convolutional Network (MSDB-FCN), for hand parsing tasks. Our network employs a Dual-Branch architecture to extract features of hand area, paying attention on the hand itself. These features are used to generate multi-scale features with pyramid pooling strategy. In order to better encode multi-scale features, we design a Deconvolution and Bilinear Interpolation Block (DB-Block) for upsampling and merging the features of different scales. To address data imbalance, which is a common problem in many computer vision tasks as well as hand parsing tasks, we propose a generalization of Focal Loss, namely Multi-Class Balanced Focal Loss, to tackle data imbalance in multi-class classification. Extensive experiments on RHD-PARSING dataset demonstrate that our MSDB-FCN has achieved the state-of-the-art performance for hand parsing.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2019

ProductNet: a Collection of High-Quality Datasets for Product Representation Learning

ProductNet is a collection of high-quality product datasets for better product understanding. Motivated by ImageNet, ProductNet aims at supporting product representation learning by curating product datasets of high quality with properly chosen taxonomy. In this paper, the two goals of building high-quality product datasets and learning product representation support each other in an iterative fashion: the product embedding is obtained via a multi-modal deep neural network (master model) designed to leverage product image and catalog information; and in return, the embedding is utilized via active learning (local model) to vastly accelerate the annotation process. For the labeled data, the proposed master model yields high categorization accuracy (94.7% top-1 accuracy for 1240 classes), which can be used as search indices, partition keys, and input features for machine learning models. The product embedding, as well as the fined-tuned master model for a specific business task, can also be used for various transfer learning tasks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Low-Power Computer Vision: Status, Challenges, Opportunities

Computer vision has achieved impressive progress in recent years. Meanwhile, mobile phones have become the primary computing platforms for millions of people. In addition to mobile phones, many autonomous systems rely on visual data for making decisions and some of these systems have limited energy (such as unmanned aerial vehicles also called drones and mobile robots). These systems rely on batteries and energy efficiency is critical. This article serves two main purposes: (1) Examine the state-of-the-art for low-power solutions to detect objects in images. Since 2015, the IEEE Annual International Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge (LPIRC) has been held to identify the most energy-efficient computer vision solutions. This article summarizes 2018 winners' solutions. (2) Suggest directions for research as well as opportunities for low-power computer vision.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2019

Optimal Number of Measurements in a Linear System with Quadratically Decreasing SNR

We consider the design of a linear sensing system with a fixed energy budget assuming that the sampling noise is the dominant noise source. The energy constraint implies that the signal energy per measurement decreases linearly with the number of measurements. When the maximum sampling rate of the sampling circuit is chosen to match the designed sampling rate, the assumption on the noise implies that its variance increases approximately linearly with the sampling rate (number of measurements). Therefore, the overall SNR per measurement decreases quadratically in the number of measurements. Our analysis shows that, in this setting there is an optimal number of measurements. This is in contrast to the standard case, where noise variance remains unchanged with sampling rate, in which case more measurements imply better performance. Our results are based on a state evolution technique of the well-known approximate message passing algorithm. We consider both the sparse (e.g. Bernoulli-Gaussian and least-favorable distributions) and the non-sparse (e.g. Gaussian distribution) settings in both the real and complex domains. Numerical results corroborate our analysis.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2019

Bayes Imbalance Impact Index: A Measure of Class Imbalanced Dataset for Classification Problem

Recent studies have shown that imbalance ratio is not the only cause of the performance loss of a classifier in imbalanced data classification. In fact, other data factors, such as small disjuncts, noises and overlapping, also play the roles in tandem with imbalance ratio, which makes the problem difficult. Thus far, the empirical studies have demonstrated the relationship between the imbalance ratio and other data factors only. To the best of our knowledge, there is no any measurement about the extent of influence of class imbalance on the classification performance of imbalanced data. Further, it is also unknown for a dataset which data factor is actually the main barrier for classification. In this paper, we focus on Bayes optimal classifier and study the influence of class imbalance from a theoretical perspective. Accordingly, we propose an instance measure called Individual Bayes Imbalance Impact Index ($IBI^3$) and a data measure called Bayes Imbalance Impact Index ($BI^3$). $IBI^3$ and $BI^3$ reflect the extent of influence purely by the factor of imbalance in terms of each minority class sample and the whole dataset, respectively. Therefore, $IBI^3$ can be used as an instance complexity measure of imbalance and $BI^3$ is a criterion to show the degree of how imbalance deteriorates the classification. As a result, we can therefore use $BI^3$ to judge whether it is worth using imbalance recovery methods like sampling or cost-sensitive methods to recover the performance loss of a classifier. The experiments show that $IBI^3$ is highly consistent with the increase of prediction score made by the imbalance recovery methods and $BI^3$ is highly consistent with the improvement of F1 score made by the imbalance recovery methods on both synthetic and real benchmark datasets.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Optimal Online Transmission Policy in Wireless Powered Networks with Urgency-aware Age of Information

This paper investigates the age of information (AoI) for a radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) enabled network, where a sensor first scavenges energy from a wireless power station and then transmits the collected status update to a sink node. To capture the thirst for the fresh update becoming more and more urgent as time elapsing, urgency-aware AoI (U-AoI) is defined, which increases exponentially with time between two received updates. Due to EH, some waiting time is required at the sensor before transmitting the status update. To find the optimal transmission policy, an optimization problem is formulated to minimize the long-term average U-AoI under constraint of energy causality. As the problem is non-convex and with no known solution, a two-layer algorithm is presented to solve it, where the outer loop is designed based on Dinklebach's method, and in the inner loop, a semi-closed-form expression of the optimal waiting time policy is derived based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions. Numerical results shows that our proposed optimal transmission policy outperforms the the zero time waiting policy and equal time waiting policy in terms of long-term average U-AoI, especially when the networks are non-congested. It is also observed that in order to achieve the lower U-AoI, the sensor should transmit the next update without waiting when the network is congested while should wait a moment before transmitting the next update when the network is non-congested. Additionally, it also shows that the system U-AoI first decreases and then keep unchanged with the increments of EH circuit's saturation level and the energy outage probability.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2019

Merging the Bernoulli-Gaussian and Symmetric Alpha-Stable Models for Impulsive Noises in Narrowband Power Line Channels

To model impulsive noise in power line channels, both the Bernoulli-Gaussian model and the symmetric alpha-stable model are usually applied. Towards a merge of existing noise measurement databases and a simplification of communication system design, the compatibility between the two models is of interest. In this paper, we show that they can be approximately converted to each other under certain constrains, although never generally unified. Based on this, we propose a fast model conversion.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2018

Large-Scale Object Detection of Images from Network Cameras in Variable Ambient Lighting Conditions

Computer vision relies on labeled datasets for training and evaluation in detecting and recognizing objects. The popular computer vision program, YOLO ("You Only Look Once"), has been shown to accurately detect objects in many major image datasets. However, the images found in those datasets, are independent of one another and cannot be used to test YOLO's consistency at detecting the same object as its environment (e.g. ambient lighting) changes. This paper describes a novel effort to evaluate YOLO's consistency for large-scale applications. It does so by working (a) at large scale and (b) by using consecutive images from a curated network of public video cameras deployed in a variety of real-world situations, including traffic intersections, national parks, shopping malls, university campuses, etc. We specifically examine YOLO's ability to detect objects in different scenarios (e.g., daytime vs. night), leveraging the cameras' ability to rapidly retrieve many successive images for evaluating detection consistency. Using our camera network and advanced computing resources (supercomputers), we analyzed more than 5 million images captured by 140 network cameras in 24 hours. Compared with labels marked by humans (considered as "ground truth"), YOLO struggles to consistently detect the same humans and cars as their positions change from one frame to the next; it also struggles to detect objects at night time. Our findings suggest that state-of-the art vision solutions should be trained by data from network camera with contextual information before they can be deployed in applications that demand high consistency on object detection.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2018

The Chemical Evolution from Prestellar to Protostellar Cores: A New Multiphase Model With Bulk Diffusion and Photon Penetration

We investigate the chemical evolution of a collapsing core that starts from a hydrostatic core and finally form a low-mass protostar. New multiphase gas-grain models that include bulk diffusion and photon penetration are simulated by the macroscopic Monte Carlo method in order to derive the chemical evolution. There are two types of species in the ice bulk in the new multiphase models. Interstitial species can diffuse and sublime at their own sublimation temperatures while normal species are locked in the ice bulk. Photodissociation rates of icy species are reduced by the exponential decay of UV flux within the ice mantle. Two-phase models and basic multiphase models without bulk diffusion and photon penetration are also simulated for comparison. Our physical model for the collapsing core is base on a one-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics model. Abundant icy radicals are produced at around 10 K in the new multiphase models. Interstitial radicals can diffuse inside ice mantles to form complex organic molecules (COMS) upon warming-up. Thus, COMs produced by radical recombination at higher temperatures in the new multiphase models are more than one order of magnitude higher than those in the two-phase and basic multiphase models. Moreover, COMs produced at around 10 K in the new multiphase models are about one order of magnitude higher than those in the two-phase model. Our model shows a reasonable agreement with observations toward low-mass protostars. Moreover, molecular oxygen abundances predicted by our new multiphase models agree reasonably well with that found in cometary materials.

astro-ph.SR↗
arXiv2018

Cooperative Training of Descriptor and Generator Networks

This paper studies the cooperative training of two generative models for image modeling and synthesis. Both models are parametrized by convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). The first model is a deep energy-based model, whose energy function is defined by a bottom-up ConvNet, which maps the observed image to the energy. We call it the descriptor network. The second model is a generator network, which is a non-linear version of factor analysis. It is defined by a top-down ConvNet, which maps the latent factors to the observed image. The maximum likelihood learning algorithms of both models involve MCMC sampling such as Langevin dynamics. We observe that the two learning algorithms can be seamlessly interwoven into a cooperative learning algorithm that can train both models simultaneously. Specifically, within each iteration of the cooperative learning algorithm, the generator model generates initial synthesized examples to initialize a finite-step MCMC that samples and trains the energy-based descriptor model. After that, the generator model learns from how the MCMC changes its synthesized examples. That is, the descriptor model teaches the generator model by MCMC, so that the generator model accumulates the MCMC transitions and reproduces them by direct ancestral sampling. We call this scheme MCMC teaching. We show that the cooperative algorithm can learn highly realistic generative models.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2018

2018 Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge

The Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge (LPIRC, https://rebootingcomputing.ieee.org/lpirc) is an annual competition started in 2015. The competition identifies the best technologies that can classify and detect objects in images efficiently (short execution time and low energy consumption) and accurately (high precision). Over the four years, the winners' scores have improved more than 24 times. As computer vision is widely used in many battery-powered systems (such as drones and mobile phones), the need for low-power computer vision will become increasingly important. This paper summarizes LPIRC 2018 by describing the three different tracks and the winners' solutions.

cs.CV↗