arXiv subjects

Yu Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Zhu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Reconstructing Pristine Molecular Orbitals from Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Images via Artificial Intelligence Approaches

Molecular orbital (MO) is one of the most fundamental concepts for molecules, relating to all branches of chemistry, while scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has been widely recognized for its potential to measure the spatial distribution of MOs. However, the precise characterization of MO with high resolution in real space is a long-standing challenge owing to the inevitable interference of high-angular-momentum contributions from functionalized tips in STM. Here, leveraging advances in artificial intelligence for image recognition, we establish a physics-driven deep-learning network, named STM-Net, to reconstruct MOs from high-resolution STM images with a functionalized tip, taking advantage of the separable characteristics of different angular momentum contributions. We demonstrate that STM-Net can be directly applied to a variety of experimental observations, successfully reconstructing pristine MO features for molecules under diverse conditions. Moreover, STM-Net can adapt to various states of the functionalized tip and the substrate, illustrating the broad applicability of our physics-driven framework. These results pave the way for accurate characterization of MO with high resolution, potentially leading to new insights and applications for this fundamental concept in chemistry.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Multi-Modal Latent Variables for Cross-Individual Primary Visual Cortex Modeling and Analysis

Elucidating the functional mechanisms of the primary visual cortex (V1) remains a fundamental challenge in systems neuroscience. Current computational models face two critical limitations, namely the challenge of cross-modal integration between partial neural recordings and complex visual stimuli, and the inherent variability in neural characteristics across individuals, including differences in neuron populations and firing patterns. To address these challenges, we present a multi-modal identifiable variational autoencoder (miVAE) that employs a two-level disentanglement strategy to map neural activity and visual stimuli into a unified latent space. This framework enables robust identification of cross-modal correlations through refined latent space modeling. We complement this with a novel score-based attribution analysis that traces latent variables back to their origins in the source data space. Evaluation on a large-scale mouse V1 dataset demonstrates that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in cross-individual latent representation and alignment, without requiring subject-specific fine-tuning, and exhibits improved performance with increasing data size. Significantly, our attribution algorithm successfully identifies distinct neuronal subpopulations characterized by unique temporal patterns and stimulus discrimination properties, while simultaneously revealing stimulus regions that show specific sensitivity to edge features and luminance variations. This scalable framework offers promising applications not only for advancing V1 research but also for broader investigations in neuroscience.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Correlated Rydberg Electromagnetically Induced Transparencys

In the regime of Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency, we study the correlated behaviors between the transmission spectra of a pair of probe fields passing through respective parallel one-dimensional cold Rydberg ensembles. Due to the van der Waals (vdW) interactions between Rydberg atoms, each ensemble exhibits a local optical nonlinearity, where the output EIT spectra are sensitive to both the input probe intensity and the photonic statistics. More interestingly, a nonlocal optical nonlinearity emerges between two spatially separated ensembles, as the probe transmissivity and probe correlation at the exit of one Rydberg ensemble can be manipulated by the probe field at the input of the other Rydberg ensemble. Realizing correlated Rydberg EITs holds great potential for applications in quantum control, quantum network, quantum walk and so on.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

UIR-LoRA: Achieving Universal Image Restoration through Multiple Low-Rank Adaptation

Existing unified methods typically treat multi-degradation image restoration as a multi-task learning problem. Despite performing effectively compared to single degradation restoration methods, they overlook the utilization of commonalities and specificities within multi-task restoration, thereby impeding the model's performance. Inspired by the success of deep generative models and fine-tuning techniques, we proposed a universal image restoration framework based on multiple low-rank adapters (LoRA) from multi-domain transfer learning. Our framework leverages the pre-trained generative model as the shared component for multi-degradation restoration and transfers it to specific degradation image restoration tasks using low-rank adaptation. Additionally, we introduce a LoRA composing strategy based on the degradation similarity, which adaptively combines trained LoRAs and enables our model to be applicable for mixed degradation restoration. Extensive experiments on multiple and mixed degradations demonstrate that the proposed universal image restoration method not only achieves higher fidelity and perceptual image quality but also has better generalization ability than other unified image restoration models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Justones/UIR-LoRA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Efficient Tabular Data Preprocessing of ML Pipelines

Data preprocessing pipelines, which includes data decoding, cleaning, and transforming, are a crucial component of Machine Learning (ML) training. Thy are computationally intensive and often become a major bottleneck, due to the increasing performance gap between the CPUs used for preprocessing and the GPUs used for model training. Recent studies show that a significant number of CPUs across several machines are required to achieve sufficient throughput to saturate the GPUs, leading to increased resource and energy consumption. When the pipeline involves vocabulary generation, the preprocessing performance scales poorly due to significant row-wise synchronization overhead between different CPU cores and servers. To address this limitation, in this paper we present the design of Piper, a hardware accelerator for tabular data preprocessing, prototype it on FPGAs, and demonstrate its potential for training pipelines of commercial recommender systems. Piper achieves 4.7 $\sim$ 71.3$\times$ speedup in latency over a 128-core CPU server and outperforms a data-center GPU by 4.8$\sim$ 20.3$\times$ when using binary input. The impressive performance showcases Piper's potential to increase the efficiency of data preprocessing pipelines and significantly reduce their resource consumption.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

Anisotropic spin filtering by an altermagnetic barrier in magnetic tunnel junctions

The spin filtering effect, distinct decaying lengths experienced by oppositely spin-polarized electrons in a magnetic barrier, generally occurs in ferromagnetic (FM) insulators or semiconductors. With the rise of altermagnetic (ALM) materials which exhibit similar capability of spin-polarizing electrons with ferromagnets, it is a nature question whether the ALM insulators or semiconductors can also act as unique barriers for the spin splitting effect. Here, through first-principles calculations, we investigated the complex band structure of the ALM insulator FeF$_2$ and found that it possesses an anisotropic spin filtering effect: along the [001] direction of FeF$_2$, a current remains spin-neutral but has locally nonvanishing spin polarizations in the momentum space; moreover, along the [110] direction of FeF$_2$, a current will be globally spin-polarized by different attenuation lengths of oppositely spin-polarized electrons. Leveraging this anisotropic spin filtering effect, we designed two types of MTJs with the ALM barrier: ALM electrode/ALM insulator barrier/non-magnetic (NM) electrode and FM electrode/ALM insulator barrier/NM electrode, using RuO$_2$(001)/FeF$_2$/IrO$_2$ and CrO$_2$(110)/FeF$_2$/IrO$_2$ as the corresponding prototypes, respectively. We found that these two proposed MTJs exhibited the tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) ratios of 216\% and 3956\%, by matching the conduction channels of the electrodes and the spin-resolved lowest decay rate of the barrier in the momentum space. Our work deepens and generalizes understanding toward the spin filtering effect for the rising ALM insulators and semiconductors, and broadens applications of the AFM spintronics.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Beamforming for PIN Diode-Based IRS-Assisted Systems Under a Phase Shift-Dependent Power Consumption Model

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have been regarded as a promising enabler for future wireless communication systems. In the literature, IRSs have been considered power-free or assumed to have constant power consumption. However, recent experimental results have shown that for positive-intrinsic-negative (PIN) diode-based IRSs, the power consumption dynamically changes with the phase shift configuration. This phase shift-dependent power consumption (PS-DPC) introduces a challenging power allocation problem between base station (BS) and IRS. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we investigate a rate maximization problem for IRS-assisted systems under a practical PS-DPC model. For the single-user case, we propose a generalized Benders decomposition-based beamforming method to maximize the achievable rate while satisfying a total system power consumption constraint. Moreover, we propose a low-complexity beamforming design, where the powers allocated to BS and IRS are optimized offline based on statistical channel state information. Furthermore, for the multi-user case, we solve an equivalent weighted mean square error minimization problem with two different joint power allocation and phase shift optimization methods. Simulation results indicate that compared to baseline schemes, our proposed methods can flexibly optimize the power allocation between BS and IRS, thus achieving better performance. The optimized power allocation strategy strongly depends on the system power budget. When the system power budget is high, the PS-DPC is not the dominant factor in the system power consumption, allowing the IRS to turn on as many PIN diodes as needed to achieve high beamforming quality. When the system power budget is limited, however, more power tends to be allocated to the BS to enhance the transmit power, resulting in a lower beamforming quality at the IRS due to the reduced PS-DPC budget.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2024

Retrospective for the Dynamic Sensorium Competition for predicting large-scale mouse primary visual cortex activity from videos

Understanding how biological visual systems process information is challenging because of the nonlinear relationship between visual input and neuronal responses. Artificial neural networks allow computational neuroscientists to create predictive models that connect biological and machine vision. Machine learning has benefited tremendously from benchmarks that compare different model on the same task under standardized conditions. However, there was no standardized benchmark to identify state-of-the-art dynamic models of the mouse visual system. To address this gap, we established the Sensorium 2023 Benchmark Competition with dynamic input, featuring a new large-scale dataset from the primary visual cortex of ten mice. This dataset includes responses from 78,853 neurons to 2 hours of dynamic stimuli per neuron, together with the behavioral measurements such as running speed, pupil dilation, and eye movements. The competition ranked models in two tracks based on predictive performance for neuronal responses on a held-out test set: one focusing on predicting in-domain natural stimuli and another on out-of-distribution (OOD) stimuli to assess model generalization. As part of the NeurIPS 2023 competition track, we received more than 160 model submissions from 22 teams. Several new architectures for predictive models were proposed, and the winning teams improved the previous state-of-the-art model by 50%. Access to the dataset as well as the benchmarking infrastructure will remain online at www.sensorium-competition.net.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Data Caching for Enterprise-Grade Petabyte-Scale OLAP

With the exponential growth of data and evolving use cases, petabyte-scale OLAP data platforms are increasingly adopting a model that decouples compute from storage. This shift, evident in organizations like Uber and Meta, introduces operational challenges including massive, read-heavy I/O traffic with potential throttling, as well as skewed and fragmented data access patterns. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces the Alluxio local (edge) cache, a highly effective architectural optimization tailored for such environments. This embeddable cache, optimized for petabyte-scale data analytics, leverages local SSD resources to alleviate network I/O and API call pressures, significantly improving data transfer efficiency. Integrated with OLAP systems like Presto and storage services like HDFS, the Alluxio local cache has demonstrated its effectiveness in handling large-scale, enterprise-grade workloads over three years of deployment at Uber and Meta. We share insights and operational experiences in implementing these optimizations, providing valuable perspectives on managing modern, massive-scale OLAP workloads.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Reflected Flow Matching

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) learn an ordinary differential equation to transform prior samples into data. Flow matching (FM) has recently emerged as a simulation-free approach for training CNFs by regressing a velocity model towards the conditional velocity field. However, on constrained domains, the learned velocity model may lead to undesirable flows that result in highly unnatural samples, e.g., oversaturated images, due to both flow matching error and simulation error. To address this, we add a boundary constraint term to CNFs, which leads to reflected CNFs that keep trajectories within the constrained domains. We propose reflected flow matching (RFM) to train the velocity model in reflected CNFs by matching the conditional velocity fields in a simulation-free manner, similar to the vanilla FM. Moreover, the analytical form of conditional velocity fields in RFM avoids potentially biased approximations, making it superior to existing score-based generative models on constrained domains. We demonstrate that RFM achieves comparable or better results on standard image benchmarks and produces high-quality class-conditioned samples under high guidance weight.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

Active Learning Enabled Low-cost Cell Image Segmentation Using Bounding Box Annotation

Cell image segmentation is usually implemented using fully supervised deep learning methods, which heavily rely on extensive annotated training data. Yet, due to the complexity of cell morphology and the requirement for specialized knowledge, pixel-level annotation of cell images has become a highly labor-intensive task. To address the above problems, we propose an active learning framework for cell segmentation using bounding box annotations, which greatly reduces the data annotation cost of cell segmentation algorithms. First, we generate a box-supervised learning method (denoted as YOLO-SAM) by combining the YOLOv8 detector with the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which effectively reduces the complexity of data annotation. Furthermore, it is integrated into an active learning framework that employs the MC DropBlock method to train the segmentation model with fewer box-annotated samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model saves more than ninety percent of data annotation time compared to mask-supervised deep learning methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

The Third Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge

This paper discusses the results of the third edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC). The challenge focuses on zero-shot generalization to the challenging SYNS-Patches dataset, featuring complex scenes in natural and indoor settings. As with the previous edition, methods can use any form of supervision, i.e. supervised or self-supervised. The challenge received a total of 19 submissions outperforming the baseline on the test set: 10 among them submitted a report describing their approach, highlighting a diffused use of foundational models such as Depth Anything at the core of their method. The challenge winners drastically improved 3D F-Score performance, from 17.51% to 23.72%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Low Light Image Enhancement: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 low light image enhancement challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to discover an effective network design or solution capable of generating brighter, clearer, and visually appealing results when dealing with a variety of conditions, including ultra-high resolution (4K and beyond), non-uniform illumination, backlighting, extreme darkness, and night scenes. A notable total of 428 participants registered for the challenge, with 22 teams ultimately making valid submissions. This paper meticulously evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in enhancing low-light images, reflecting the significant progress and creativity in this field.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

GoMVS: Geometrically Consistent Cost Aggregation for Multi-View Stereo

Matching cost aggregation plays a fundamental role in learning-based multi-view stereo networks. However, directly aggregating adjacent costs can lead to suboptimal results due to local geometric inconsistency. Related methods either seek selective aggregation or improve aggregated depth in the 2D space, both are unable to handle geometric inconsistency in the cost volume effectively. In this paper, we propose GoMVS to aggregate geometrically consistent costs, yielding better utilization of adjacent geometries. More specifically, we correspond and propagate adjacent costs to the reference pixel by leveraging the local geometric smoothness in conjunction with surface normals. We achieve this by the geometric consistent propagation (GCP) module. It computes the correspondence from the adjacent depth hypothesis space to the reference depth space using surface normals, then uses the correspondence to propagate adjacent costs to the reference geometry, followed by a convolution for aggregation. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on DTU, Tanks & Temple, and ETH3D datasets. Notably, our method ranks 1st on the Tanks & Temple Advanced benchmark.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Time-Optimal Control for High-Order Chain-of-Integrators Systems with Full State Constraints and Arbitrary Terminal States (Extended Version)

Time-optimal control for high-order chain-of-integrators systems with full state constraints and arbitrarily given terminal states remains a challenging problem in the optimal control theory domain, yet to be resolved. To enhance further comprehension of the problem, this paper establishes a novel notation system and theoretical framework, providing the switching manifold for high-order problems in the form of switching laws. Through deriving properties of switching laws regarding signs and dimension, this paper proposes a definite condition for time-optimal control. Guided by the developed theory, a trajectory planning method named the manifold-intercept method (MIM) is developed. The proposed MIM can plan time-optimal jerk-limited trajectories with full state constraints, and can also plan near-optimal non-chattering higher-order trajectories with negligible extra motion time compared to optimal profiles. Numerical results indicate that the proposed MIM outperforms all baselines in computational time, computational accuracy, and trajectory quality by a large gap.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2024

Proxy-RLHF: Decoupling Generation and Alignment in Large Language Model with Proxy

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the prevailing approach to ensure Large Language Models (LLMs) align with human values. However, existing RLHF methods require a high computational cost, one main reason being that RLHF assigns both the generation and alignment tasks to the LLM simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce Proxy-RLHF, which decouples the generation and alignment processes of LLMs, achieving alignment with human values at a much lower computational cost. We start with a novel Markov Decision Process (MDP) designed for the alignment process and employ Reinforcement Learning (RL) to train a streamlined proxy model that oversees the token generation of the LLM, without altering the LLM itself. Experiments show that our method achieves a comparable level of alignment with only 1\% of the training parameters of other methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Treatment Effect Estimation Amidst Dynamic Network Interference in Online Gaming Experiments

The evolving landscape of online multiplayer gaming presents unique challenges in assessing the causal impacts of game features. Traditional A/B testing methodologies fall short due to complex player interactions, leading to violations of fundamental assumptions like the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA). Unlike traditional social networks with stable and long-term connections, networks in online games are often dynamic and short-lived. Players are temporarily teamed up for the duration of a game, forming transient networks that dissolve once the game ends. This fleeting nature of interactions presents a new challenge compared with running experiments in a stable social network. This study introduces a novel framework for treatment effect estimation in online gaming environments, considering the dynamic and ephemeral network interference that occurs among players. We propose an innovative estimator tailored for scenarios where a completely randomized experimental design is implemented without explicit knowledge of network structures. Notably, our method facilitates post-hoc interference adjustment on experimental data, significantly reducing the complexities and costs associated with intricate experimental designs and randomization strategies. The proposed framework stands out for its ability to accommodate varying levels of interference, thereby yielding more accurate and robust estimations. Through comprehensive simulations set against a variety of interference scenarios, along with empirical validation using real-world data from a mobile gaming environment, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. This study represents a pioneering effort in exploring causal inference in user-randomized experiments impacted by dynamic network effects.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2024

Boosting Multi-view Stereo with Late Cost Aggregation

Pairwise matching cost aggregation is a crucial step for modern learning-based Multi-view Stereo (MVS). Prior works adopt an early aggregation scheme, which adds up pairwise costs into an intermediate cost. However, we analyze that this process can degrade informative pairwise matchings, thereby blocking the depth network from fully utilizing the original geometric matching cues. To address this challenge, we present a late aggregation approach that allows for aggregating pairwise costs throughout the network feed-forward process, achieving accurate estimations with only minor changes of the plain CasMVSNet. Instead of building an intermediate cost by weighted sum, late aggregation preserves all pairwise costs along a distinct view channel. This enables the succeeding depth network to fully utilize the crucial geometric cues without loss of cost fidelity. Grounded in the new aggregation scheme, we propose further techniques addressing view order dependence inside the preserved cost, handling flexible testing views, and improving the depth filtering process. Despite its technical simplicity, our method improves significantly upon the baseline cascade-based approach, achieving comparable results with state-of-the-art methods with favorable computation overhead.

cs.CV↗