arXiv subjects

Ying Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Ying Sun.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Superconductivity of Light-Elements Doped H$ {}_{3} $S

Pressurized hydrogen-rich compounds, which could be viewed as precompressed metallic hydrogen, exhibit high superconductivity, thereby providing a viable route toward the discovery of high-temperature superconductors. Of particular interest is to search for high-temperature superconductors with low stable pressure in terms of pressure-stabilized hydrides. In this work, with the aim of obtaining high-temperature superconducting compounds at low pressure, we attempt to study the doping effects for high-temperature superconductive $ \mathrm{H_3S} $ with supercells up to 64 atoms using first principle electronic structure simulations. As a result of various doping, we found that Na doping for $ \mathrm{H_3S} $ could lower the dynamically stable pressure by 40 GPa. The results also indicate P doping could enhance the superconductivity of $ \mathrm{H_3S} $ system, which is in agreement with previous calculations. Moreover, our work proposed an approach that could reasonably estimate the superconducting critical temperature ($ T_{c} $) of a compound containing a large number of atoms, saving the computational cost significantly for large-scale elements-doping superconductivity simulations.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2021

Efficiency Assessment of Approximated Spatial Predictions for Large Datasets

Due to the well-known computational showstopper of the exact Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) for large geospatial observations, a variety of approximation methods have been proposed in the literature, which usually require tuning certain inputs. For example, the recently developed Tile Low-Rank approximation (TLR) method involves many tuning parameters, including numerical accuracy. To properly choose the tuning parameters, it is crucial to adopt a meaningful criterion for the assessment of the prediction efficiency with different inputs, which the most commonly-used Mean Square Prediction Error (MSPE) criterion and the Kullback-Leibler Divergence criterion cannot fully describe. In this paper, we present three other criteria, the Mean Loss of Efficiency (MLOE), Mean Misspecification of the Mean Square Error (MMOM), and Root mean square MOM (RMOM), and show numerically that, in comparison with the common MSPE criterion and the Kullback-Leibler Divergence criterion, our criteria are more informative, and thus more adequate to assess the loss of the prediction efficiency by using the approximated or misspecified covariance models. Hence, our suggested criteria are more useful for the determination of tuning parameters for sophisticated approximation methods of spatial model fitting. To illustrate this, we investigate the trade-off between the execution time, estimation accuracy, and prediction efficiency for the TLR method with extensive simulation studies and suggest proper settings of the TLR tuning parameters. We then apply the TLR method to a large spatial dataset of soil moisture in the area of the Mississippi River basin, and compare the TLR with the Gaussian predictive process and the composite likelihood method, showing that our suggested criteria can successfully be used to choose the tuning parameters that can keep the estimation or the prediction accuracy in applications.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2021

Superconductivity in Layered van der Waals Hydrogenated Germanene at High Pressure

Structural and superconducting transitions of layered van der Waals (vdW) hydrogenated germanene (GeH) were observed under high-pressure compression and decompression processes. GeH possesses a superconducting transition at critical temperature (Tc) of 5.41 K at 8.39 GPa. A crystalline to amorphous transition occurs at 16.80 GPa while superconductivity remains. An abnormally increased Tc up to 6.1 K has been observed in the decompression process while the GeH remained amorphous. Thorough in-situ high-pressure synchrotron X-ray diffraction and in-situ high-pressure Raman spectroscopy with the density functional theory simulations suggest that the superconductivity of GeH should be attributed to the increased density of states at the Fermi level as well as the enhanced electron-phonon coupling effect under high pressure. The decompression-driven superconductivity enhancement arises from pressure-induced phonon softening related to an in-plane Ge-Ge phonon mode. As an amorphous metal hydride superconductor, GeH provides a platform to study amorphous hydride superconductivity in layered vdW materials.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2021

Learning to Warm Up Cold Item Embeddings for Cold-start Recommendation with Meta Scaling and Shifting Networks

Recently, embedding techniques have achieved impressive success in recommender systems. However, the embedding techniques are data demanding and suffer from the cold-start problem. Especially, for the cold-start item which only has limited interactions, it is hard to train a reasonable item ID embedding, called cold ID embedding, which is a major challenge for the embedding techniques. The cold item ID embedding has two main problems: (1) A gap is existing between the cold ID embedding and the deep model. (2) Cold ID embedding would be seriously affected by noisy interaction. However, most existing methods do not consider both two issues in the cold-start problem, simultaneously. To address these problems, we adopt two key ideas: (1) Speed up the model fitting for the cold item ID embedding (fast adaptation). (2) Alleviate the influence of noise. Along this line, we propose Meta Scaling and Shifting Networks to generate scaling and shifting functions for each item, respectively. The scaling function can directly transform cold item ID embeddings into warm feature space which can fit the model better, and the shifting function is able to produce stable embeddings from the noisy embeddings. With the two meta networks, we propose Meta Warm Up Framework (MWUF) which learns to warm up cold ID embeddings. Moreover, MWUF is a general framework that can be applied upon various existing deep recommendation models. The proposed model is evaluated on three popular benchmarks, including both recommendation and advertising datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate its superior performance and compatibility.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

6D Pose Estimation with Correlation Fusion

6D object pose estimation is widely applied in robotic tasks such as grasping and manipulation. Prior methods using RGB-only images are vulnerable to heavy occlusion and poor illumination, so it is important to complement them with depth information. However, existing methods using RGB-D data cannot adequately exploit consistent and complementary information between RGB and depth modalities. In this paper, we present a novel method to effectively consider the correlation within and across both modalities with attention mechanism to learn discriminative and compact multi-modal features. Then, effective fusion strategies for intra- and inter-correlation modules are explored to ensure efficient information flow between RGB and depth. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to explore effective intra- and inter-modality fusion in 6D pose estimation. The experimental results show that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on LineMOD and YCB-Video dataset. We also demonstrate that the proposed method can benefit a real-world robot grasping task by providing accurate object pose estimation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

High Performance Multivariate Geospatial Statistics on Manycore Systems

Modeling and inferring spatial relationships and predicting missing values of environmental data are some of the main tasks of geospatial statisticians. These routine tasks are accomplished using multivariate geospatial models and the cokriging technique. The latter requires the evaluation of the expensive Gaussian log-likelihood function, which has impeded the adoption of multivariate geospatial models for large multivariate spatial datasets. However, this large-scale cokriging challenge provides a fertile ground for supercomputing implementations for the geospatial statistics community as it is paramount to scale computational capability to match the growth in environmental data coming from the widespread use of different data collection technologies. In this paper, we develop and deploy large-scale multivariate spatial modeling and inference on parallel hardware architectures. To tackle the increasing complexity in matrix operations and the massive concurrency in parallel systems, we leverage low-rank matrix approximation techniques with task-based programming models and schedule the asynchronous computational tasks using a dynamic runtime system. The proposed framework provides both the dense and the approximated computations of the Gaussian log-likelihood function. It demonstrates accuracy robustness and performance scalability on a variety of computer systems. Using both synthetic and real datasets, the low-rank matrix approximation shows better performance compared to exact computation, while preserving the application requirements in both parameter estimation and prediction accuracy. We also propose a novel algorithm to assess the prediction accuracy after the online parameter estimation. The algorithm quantifies prediction performance and provides a benchmark for measuring the efficiency and accuracy of several approximation techniques in multivariate spatial modeling.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Distributed Optimization Based on Gradient-tracking Revisited: Enhancing Convergence Rate via Surrogation

We study distributed multiagent optimization over (directed, time-varying) graphs. We consider the minimization of $F+G$ subject to convex constraints, where $F$ is the smooth strongly convex sum of the agent's losses and $G$ is a nonsmooth convex function. We build on the SONATA algorithm: the algorithm employs the use of surrogate objective functions in the agents' subproblems (going thus beyond linearization, such as proximal-gradient) coupled with a perturbed (push-sum) consensus mechanism that aims to track locally the gradient of $F$. SONATA achieves precision $ε>0$ on the objective value in $\mathcal{O}(κ_g \log(1/ε))$ gradient computations at each node and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(κ_g (1-ρ)^{-1/2} \log(1/ε)\big)$ communication steps, where $κ_g$ is the condition number of $F$ and $ρ$ characterizes the connectivity of the network. This is the first linear rate result for distributed composite optimization; it also improves on existing (non-accelerated) schemes just minimizing $F$, whose rate depends on much larger quantities than $κ_g$ (e.g., the worst-case condition number among the agents). When considering in particular empirical risk minimization problems with statistically similar data across the agents, SONATA employing high-order surrogates achieves precision $ε>0$ in $\mathcal{O}\big((β/μ) \log(1/ε)\big)$ iterations and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\big((β/μ) (1-ρ)^{-1/2} \log(1/ε)\big)$ communication steps, where $β$ measures the degree of similarity of the agents' losses and $μ$ is the strong convexity constant of $F$. Therefore, when $β/μ< κ_g$, the use of high-order surrogates yields provably faster rates than what achievable by first-order models; this is without exchanging any Hessian matrix over the network.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Clustering Brain Signals: A Robust Approach Using Functional Data Ranking

In this paper, we analyze electroencephalograms (EEG) which are recordings of brain electrical activity. We develop new clustering methods for identifying synchronized brain regions, where the EEGs show similar oscillations or waveforms according to their spectral densities. We treat the estimated spectral densities from many epochs or trials as functional data and develop clustering algorithms based on functional data ranking. The two proposed clustering algorithms use different dissimilarity measures: distance of the functional medians and the area of the central region. The performance of the proposed algorithms is examined by simulation studies. We show that, when contaminations are present, the proposed methods for clustering spectral densities are more robust than the mean-based methods. The developed methods are applied to two stages of resting state EEG data from a male college student, corresponding to early exploration of functional connectivity in the human brain.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

Collective Spectral Density Estimation and Clustering for Spatially-Correlated Data

In this paper, we develop a method for estimating and clustering two-dimensional spectral density functions (2D-SDFs) for spatial data from multiple subregions. We use a common set of adaptive basis functions to explain the similarities among the 2D-SDFs in a low-dimensional space and estimate the basis coefficients by maximizing the Whittle likelihood with two penalties. We apply these penalties to impose the smoothness of the estimated 2D-SDFs and the spatial dependence of the spatially-correlated subregions. The proposed technique provides a score matrix, that is comprised of the estimated coefficients associated with the common set of basis functions representing the 2D-SDFs. {Instead of clustering the estimated SDFs directly, we propose to employ the score matrix for clustering purposes, taking advantage of its low-dimensional property.} In a simulation study, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other competing estimation procedures used for clustering. Finally, to validate the described clustering method, we apply the procedure to soil moisture data from the Mississippi basin to produce homogeneous spatial clusters. We produce animations to dynamically show the estimation procedure, including the estimated 2D-SDFs and the score matrix, which provide an intuitive illustration of the proposed method.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

Robust and Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

In this paper, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are employed to enhance the physical layer security in a challenging radio environment. In particular, a multi-antenna access point (AP) has to serve multiple single-antenna legitimate users, which do not have line-of-sight communication links, in the presence of multiple multi-antenna potential eavesdroppers whose channel state information (CSI) is not perfectly known. Artificial noise (AN) is transmitted from the AP to deliberately impair the eavesdropping channels for security provisioning. We investigate the joint design of the beamformers and AN covariance matrix at the AP and the phase shifters at the IRSs for maximization of the system sum-rate while limiting the maximum information leakage to the potential eavesdroppers. To this end, we formulate a robust nonconvex optimization problem taking into account the impact of the imperfect CSI of the eavesdropping channels. To address the non-convexity of the optimization problem, an efficient algorithm is developed by capitalizing on alternating optimization, a penalty-based approach, successive convex approximation, and semidefinite relaxation. Simulation results show that IRSs can significantly improve the system secrecy performance compared to conventional architectures without IRS. Furthermore, our results unveil that, for physical layer security, uniformly distributing the reflecting elements among multiple IRSs is preferable over deploying them at a single IRS.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Functional Outlier Detection and Taxonomy by Sequential Transformations

Functional data analysis can be seriously impaired by abnormal observations, which can be classified as either magnitude or shape outliers based on their way of deviating from the bulk of data. Identifying magnitude outliers is relatively easy, while detecting shape outliers is much more challenging. We propose turning the shape outliers into magnitude outliers through data transformation and detecting them using the functional boxplot. Besides easing the detection procedure, applying several transformations sequentially provides a reasonable taxonomy for the flagged outliers. A joint functional ranking, which consists of several transformations, is also defined here. Simulation studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method using different functional depth notions. Interesting results are obtained in several practical applications.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

Distributed Algorithms for Composite Optimization: Unified Framework and Convergence Analysis

We study distributed composite optimization over networks: agents minimize a sum of smooth (strongly) convex functions, the agents' sum-utility, plus a nonsmooth (extended-valued) convex one. We propose a general unified algorithmic framework for such a class of problems and provide a unified convergence analysis leveraging the theory of operator splitting. Distinguishing features of our scheme are: (i) When the agents' functions are strongly convex, the algorithm converges at a linear rate, whose dependence on the agents' functions and network topology is decoupled, matching the typical rates of centralized optimization; the rate expression improves on existing results; (ii) When the objective function is convex (but not strongly convex), similar separation as in (i) is established for the coefficient of the proved sublinear rate; (iii) The algorithm can adjust the ratio between the number of communications and computations to achieve a rate (in terms of computations) independent on the network connectivity; and (iv) A by-product of our analysis is a tuning recommendation for several existing (non accelerated) distributed algorithms yielding the fastest provably (worst-case) convergence rate. This is the first time that a general distributed algorithmic framework applicable to composite optimization enjoys all such properties.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

A Multi-Site Stochastic Weather Generator for High-Frequency Precipitation Using Censored Skew-Symmetric Distribution

Stochastic weather generators (SWGs) are digital twins of complex weather processes and widely used in agriculture and urban design. Due to improved measuring instruments, an accurate SWG for high-frequency precipitation is now possible. However, high-frequency precipitation data are more zero-inflated, skewed, and heavy-tailed than common (hourly or daily) precipitation data. Therefore, classical methods that either model precipitation occurrence independently of their intensity or assume that the precipitation follows a censored meta-Gaussian process may not be appropriate. In this work, we propose a novel multi-site precipitation generator that drives both occurrence and intensity by a censored non-Gaussian vector autoregression model with skew-symmetric dynamics. The proposed SWG is advantageous in modeling skewed and heavy-tailed data with direct physical and statistical interpretations. We apply the proposed model to 30-second precipitation based on the data obtained from a dense gauge network in Lausanne, Switzerland. In addition to reproducing the high-frequency precipitation, the model can provide accurate predictions as the long short-term memory (LSTM) network but with uncertainties and more interpretable results.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2020

Accelerated Primal-Dual Algorithms for Distributed Smooth Convex Optimization over Networks

This paper proposes a novel family of primal-dual-based distributed algorithms for smooth, convex, multi-agent optimization over networks that uses only gradient information and gossip communications. The algorithms can also employ acceleration on the computation and communications. We provide a unified analysis of their convergence rate, measured in terms of the Bregman distance associated to the saddle point reformation of the distributed optimization problem. When acceleration is employed, the rate is shown to be optimal, in the sense that it matches (under the proposed metric) existing complexity lower bounds of distributed algorithms applicable to such a class of problem and using only gradient information and gossip communications. Preliminary numerical results on distributed least-square regression problems show that the proposed algorithm compares favorably on existing distributed schemes.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Asynchronous Decentralized Successive Convex Approximation

We study decentralized asynchronous multiagent optimization over networks, modeled as static (possibly directed) graphs. The optimization problem consists of minimizing a (possibly nonconvex) smooth function--the sum of the agents' local costs--plus a convex (possibly nonsmooth) regularizer, subject to convex constraints. Agents can perform their local computations as well as communicate with their immediate neighbors at any time, without any form of coordination or centralized scheduling; furthermore, when solving their local subproblems, they can use outdated information from their neighbors. We propose the first distributed asynchronous algorithm, termed ASY-DSCA, that converges at an R-linear rate to the optimal solution of convex problems whose objective function satisfies a general error bound condition; this condition is weaker than the more frequently used strong convexity, and it is satisfied by several empirical risk functions that are not strongly convex; examples include LASSO and logistic regression problems. When the objective function is nonconvex, ASY-DSCA converges to a stationary solution of the problem at a sublinear rate.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Geostatistical Modeling and Prediction Using Mixed-Precision Tile Cholesky Factorization

Geostatistics represents one of the most challenging classes of scientific applications due to the desire to incorporate an ever increasing number of geospatial locations to accurately model and predict environmental phenomena. For example, the evaluation of the Gaussian log-likelihood function, which constitutes the main computational phase, involves solving systems of linear equations with a large dense symmetric and positive definite covariance matrix. Cholesky, the standard algorithm, requires O(n^3) floating point operators and has an O(n^2) memory footprint, where n is the number of geographical locations. Here, we present a mixed-precision tile algorithm to accelerate the Cholesky factorization during the log-likelihood function evaluation. Under an appropriate ordering, it operates with double-precision arithmetic on tiles around the diagonal, while reducing to single-precision arithmetic for tiles sufficiently far off. This translates into an improvement of the performance without any deterioration of the numerical accuracy of the application. We rely on the StarPU dynamic runtime system to schedule the tasks and to overlap them with data movement. To assess the performance and the accuracy of the proposed mixed-precision algorithm, we use synthetic and real datasets on various shared and distributed-memory systems possibly equipped with hardware accelerators. We compare our mixed-precision Cholesky factorization against the double-precision reference implementation as well as an independent block approximation method. We obtain an average of 1.6X performance speedup on massively parallel architectures while maintaining the accuracy necessary for modeling and prediction.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2019

Estimation of Spatial Deformation for Nonstationary Processes via Variogram Alignment

In modeling spatial processes, a second-order stationarity assumption is often made. However, for spatial data observed on a vast domain, the covariance function often varies over space, leading to a heterogeneous spatial dependence structure, therefore requiring nonstationary modeling. Spatial deformation is one of the main methods for modeling nonstationary processes, assuming the nonstationary process has a stationary counterpart in the deformed space. The estimation of the deformation function poses severe challenges. Here, we introduce a novel approach for nonstationary geostatistical modeling, using space deformation, when a single realization of the spatial process is observed. Our method is based, at a fundamental level, on aligning regional variograms, where warping variability of the distance from each subregion explains the spatial nonstationarity. We propose to use multi-dimensional scaling to map the warped distances to spatial locations. We asses the performance of our new method using multiple simulation studies. Additionally, we illustrate our methodology on precipitation data to estimate the heterogeneous spatial dependence and to perform spatial predictions.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2019

Semiparametric Estimation of Cross-covariance Functions for Multivariate Random Fields

The prevalence of spatially referenced multivariate data has impelled researchers to develop a procedure for the joint modeling of multiple spatial processes. This ordinarily involves modeling marginal and cross-process dependence for any arbitrary pair of locations using a multivariate spatial covariance function. However, building a flexible multivariate spatial covariance function that is nonnegative definite is challenging. Here, we propose a semiparametric approach for multivariate spatial covariance function estimation with approximate Matérn marginals and highly flexible cross-covariance functions via their spectral representations. The flexibility in our cross-covariance function arises due to B-spline based specification of the underlying coherence functions, which in turn allows us to capture non-trivial cross-spectral features. We then develop a likelihood-based estimation procedure and perform multiple simulation studies to demonstrate the performance of our method, especially on the coherence function estimation. Finally, we analyze particulate matter concentrations ($\text{PM}_{2.5}$) and wind speed data over the North-Eastern region of the United States, where we illustrate that our proposed method outperforms the commonly used full bivariate Matérn model and the linear model of coregionalization for spatial prediction.

stat.ME↗