arXiv subjects

Zheng Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Zheng Ma.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Hyperuniformity of generalized random organization models

Studies of random organization models of monodisperse spherical particles have shown that a hyperuniform state is achievable when the system goes through an absorbing phase transition to a critical state. Here we investigate to what extent hyperuniformity is preserved when the model is generalized to particles with a size distribution and/or nonspherical shapes. We begin by examining binary disks in two dimensions and demonstrate that their critical states are hyperuniform as two-phase media, but not hyperuniform nor multihyperuniform as point patterns formed by the particle centroids. We further confirm the generality of our findings by studying particles with a continuous size distribution. Finally, to study the effect of rotational degrees of freedom, we extend our model to noncircular particles, namely, hard rectangles with various aspect ratios, including the hard-needle limit. Although these systems exhibit only short-range orientational order, hyperuniformity is still preserved. Our analysis reveals that the redistribution of the "mass" of the particles rather than the particle centroids is central to this dynamical process. The consideration of the "active volume fraction" of generalized random organization models may help to resolve which universality class they belong to and hence may lead to a deeper theoretical understanding of absorbing-state models. Our results suggest that general particle systems subject to random organization can be a robust way to fabricate a wide class of hyperuniform states of matter by tuning the structures via different particle-size and -shape distributions. This in turn potentially enables the creation of multifunctional hyperuniform materials with desirable optical, transport, and mechanical properties.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2019

Generating Text Sequence Images for Recognition

Recently, methods based on deep learning have dominated the field of text recognition. With a large number of training data, most of them can achieve the state-of-the-art performances. However, it is hard to harvest and label sufficient text sequence images from the real scenes. To mitigate this issue, several methods to synthesize text sequence images were proposed, yet they usually need complicated preceding or follow-up steps. In this work, we present a method which is able to generate infinite training data without any auxiliary pre/post-process. We tackle the generation task as an image-to-image translation one and utilize conditional adversarial networks to produce realistic text sequence images in the light of the semantic ones. Some evaluation metrics are involved to assess our method and the results demonstrate that the caliber of the data is satisfactory. The code and dataset will be publicly available soon.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Learning Generalizable and Identity-Discriminative Representations for Face Anti-Spoofing

Face anti-spoofing (a.k.a presentation attack detection) has drawn growing attention due to the high-security demand in face authentication systems. Existing CNN-based approaches usually well recognize the spoofing faces when training and testing spoofing samples display similar patterns, but their performance would drop drastically on testing spoofing faces of unseen scenes. In this paper, we try to boost the generalizability and applicability of these methods by designing a CNN model with two major novelties. First, we propose a simple yet effective Total Pairwise Confusion (TPC) loss for CNN training, which enhances the generalizability of the learned Presentation Attack (PA) representations. Secondly, we incorporate a Fast Domain Adaptation (FDA) component into the CNN model to alleviate negative effects brought by domain changes. Besides, our proposed model, which is named Generalizable Face Authentication CNN (GFA-CNN), works in a multi-task manner, performing face anti-spoofing and face recognition simultaneously. Experimental results show that GFA-CNN outperforms previous face anti-spoofing approaches and also well preserves the identity information of input face images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Enhance the Motion Cues for Face Anti-Spoofing using CNN-LSTM Architecture

Spatio-temporal information is very important to capture the discriminative cues between genuine and fake faces from video sequences. To explore such a temporal feature, the fine-grained motions (e.g., eye blinking, mouth movements and head swing) across video frames are very critical. In this paper, we propose a joint CNN-LSTM network for face anti-spoofing, focusing on the motion cues across video frames. We first extract the high discriminative features of video frames using the conventional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then we leverage Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with the extracted features as inputs to capture the temporal dynamics in videos. To ensure the fine-grained motions more easily to be perceived in the training process, the eulerian motion magnification is used as the preprocessing to enhance the facial expressions exhibited by individuals, and the attention mechanism is embedded in LSTM to ensure the model learn to focus selectively on the dynamic frames across the video clips. Experiments on Replay Attack and MSU-MFSD databases show that the proposed method yields state-of-the-art performance with better generalization ability compared with several other popular algorithms.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

NADPEx: An on-policy temporally consistent exploration method for deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that is inherently consistent through a period of time is in desire, especially for tasks with either sparse rewards or long term information. In this work, we introduce a novel on-policy temporally consistent exploration strategy - Neural Adaptive Dropout Policy Exploration (NADPEx) - for deep reinforcement learning agents. Modeled as a global random variable for conditional distribution, dropout is incorporated to reinforcement learning policies, equipping them with inherent temporal consistency, even when the reward signals are sparse. Two factors, gradients' alignment with the objective and KL constraint in policy space, are discussed to guarantee NADPEx policy's stable improvement. Our experiments demonstrate that NADPEx solves tasks with sparse reward while naive exploration and parameter noise fail. It yields as well or even faster convergence in the standard mujoco benchmark for continuous control.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Learning to Steer by Mimicking Features from Heterogeneous Auxiliary Networks

The training of many existing end-to-end steering angle prediction models heavily relies on steering angles as the supervisory signal. Without learning from much richer contexts, these methods are susceptible to the presence of sharp road curves, challenging traffic conditions, strong shadows, and severe lighting changes. In this paper, we considerably improve the accuracy and robustness of predictions through heterogeneous auxiliary networks feature mimicking, a new and effective training method that provides us with much richer contextual signals apart from steering direction. Specifically, we train our steering angle predictive model by distilling multi-layer knowledge from multiple heterogeneous auxiliary networks that perform related but different tasks, e.g., image segmentation or optical flow estimation. As opposed to multi-task learning, our method does not require expensive annotations of related tasks on the target set. This is made possible by applying contemporary off-the-shelf networks on the target set and mimicking their features in different layers after transformation. The auxiliary networks are discarded after training without affecting the runtime efficiency of our model. Our approach achieves a new state-of-the-art on Udacity and Comma.ai, outperforming the previous best by a large margin of 12.8% and 52.1%, respectively. Encouraging results are also shown on Berkeley Deep Drive (BDD) dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Precise algorithms to compute surface correlation functions of two-phase heterogeneous media and their applications

The quantitative characterization of the microstructure of random heterogeneous media in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$ via a variety of $n$-point correlation functions is of great importance, since the respective infinite set determines the effective physical properties of the media. In particular, surface-surface $F_{ss}$ and surface-void $F_{sv}$ correlation functions (obtainable from radiation scattering experiments) contain crucial interfacial information that enables one to estimate transport properties of the media (e.g., the mean survival time and fluid permeability) and complements the information content of the conventional two-point correlation function. However, the current technical difficulty involved in sampling surface correlation functions has been a stumbling block in their widespread use. We first present a concise derivation of the small-$r$ behaviors of these functions, which are linked to the \textit{mean curvature} of the system. Then we demonstrate that one can reduce the computational complexity of the problem by extracting the necessary interfacial information from a cut of the system with an infinitely long line. Accordingly, we devise algorithms based on this idea and test them for two-phase media in continuous and discrete spaces. Specifically for the exact benchmark model of overlapping spheres, we find excellent agreement between numerical and exact results. We compute surface correlation functions and corresponding local surface-area variances for a variety of other model microstructures, including hard spheres in equilibrium, decorated "stealthy" patterns, as well as snapshots of evolving pattern formation processes (e.g., spinodal decomposition). It is demonstrated that the precise determination of surface correlation functions provides a powerful means to characterize a wide class of complex multiphase microstructures.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2018

Beyond Counting: Comparisons of Density Maps for Crowd Analysis Tasks - Counting, Detection, and Tracking

For crowded scenes, the accuracy of object-based computer vision methods declines when the images are low-resolution and objects have severe occlusions. Taking counting methods for example, almost all the recent state-of-the-art counting methods bypass explicit detection and adopt regression-based methods to directly count the objects of interest. Among regression-based methods, density map estimation, where the number of objects inside a subregion is the integral of the density map over that subregion, is especially promising because it preserves spatial information, which makes it useful for both counting and localization (detection and tracking). With the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) the counting performance has improved steadily. The goal of this paper is to evaluate density maps generated by density estimation methods on a variety of crowd analysis tasks, including counting, detection, and tracking. Most existing CNN methods produce density maps with resolution that is smaller than the original images, due to the downsample strides in the convolution/pooling operations. To produce an original-resolution density map, we also evaluate a classical CNN that uses a sliding window regressor to predict the density for every pixel in the image. We also consider a fully convolutional (FCNN) adaptation, with skip connections from lower convolutional layers to compensate for loss in spatial information during upsampling. In our experiments, we found that the lower-resolution density maps sometimes have better counting performance. In contrast, the original-resolution density maps improved localization tasks, such as detection and tracking, compared to bilinear upsampling the lower-resolution density maps. Finally, we also propose several metrics for measuring the quality of a density map, and relate them to experiment results on counting and localization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Feedback Coding Schemes for the Broadcast Channel with Mutual Secrecy Requirement

Recently, the physical layer security (PLS) of the communication systems has been shown to be enhanced by using legal receiver's feedback. The present secret key based feedback scheme mainly focuses on producing key from the feedback and using this key to protect part of the transmitted message. However, this feedback scheme has been proved only optimal for several degraded cases. The broadcast channel with mutual secrecy requirement (BC-MSR) is important as it constitutes the essence of physical layer security (PLS) in the down-link of the wireless communication systems. In this paper, we investigate the feedback effects on the BC-MSR, and propose two inner bounds and one outer bound on the secrecy capacity region of the BC-MSR with noiseless feedback. One inner bound is constructed according to the already existing secret key based feedback coding scheme for the wiretap channel, and the other is constructed by a hybrid coding scheme using feedback to generate not only keys protecting the transmitted messages but also cooperative messages helping the receivers to improve their decoding performance. The performance of the proposed feedback schemes and the gap between the inner and outer bounds are further explained via two examples.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Finite State Multiple-Access Wiretap Channel with Delayed Feedback

Recently, it has been shown that the time-varying multiple-access channel (MAC) with perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver and delayed feedback CSI at the transmitters can be modeled as the finite state MAC (FS-MAC) with delayed state feedback, where the time variation of the channel is characterized by the statistics of the underlying state process. To study the fundamental limit of the secure transmission over multi-user wireless communication systems, we re-visit the FS-MAC with delayed state feedback by considering an external eavesdropper, which we call the finite state multiple-access wiretap channel (FS-MAC-WT) with delayed feedback. The main contribution of this paper is to show that taking full advantage of the delayed channel output feedback helps to increase the secrecy rate region of the FS-MAC-WT with delayed state feedback, and the results of this paper are further illustrated by a degraded Gaussian fading example.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Random Scalar Fields and Hyperuniformity

Disordered many-particle hyperuniform systems are exotic amorphous states of matter that lie between crystals and liquids. Hyperuniform systems have attracted recent attention because they are endowed with novel transport and optical properties. Recently, the hyperuniformity concept has been generalized to characterize scalar fields, two-phase media and random vector fields. In this paper, we devise methods to explicitly construct hyperuniform scalar fields. We investigate explicitly spatial patterns generated from Gaussian random fields, which have been used to model the microwave background radiation and heterogeneous materials, the Cahn-Hilliard equation for spinodal decomposition, and Swift-Hohenberg equations that have been used to model emergent pattern formation, including Rayleigh-B{\' e}nard convection. We show that the Gaussian random scalar fields can be constructed to be hyperuniform. We also numerically study the time evolution of spinodal decomposition patterns and demonstrate that these patterns are hyperuniform in the scaling regime. Moreover, we find that labyrinth-like patterns generated by the Swift-Hohenberg equation are effectively hyperuniform. We show that thresholding a hyperuniform Gaussian random field to produce a two-phase random medium tends to destroy the hyperuniformity of the progenitor scalar field. We then propose guidelines to achieve effectively hyperuniform two-phase media derived from thresholded non-Gaussian fields. Our investigation paves the way for new research directions to characterize the large-structure spatial patterns that arise in physics, chemistry, biology and ecology. Moreover, our theoretical results are expected to guide experimentalists to synthesize new classes of hyperuniform materials with novel physical properties via coarsening processes and using state-of-the-art techniques, such as stereolithography and 3D printing.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2017

Modeling and Analysis of Non-Orthogonal MBMS Transmission in Heterogeneous Networks

Broadcasting/multicasting is an efficient mechanism for multimedia communications due to its high spectrum efficiency, which achieves point-to-multipoint transmission on the same radio resources. To satisfy the increasing demands for multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS), we present a power domain non-orthogonal MBMS transmission scheme in a K-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet). Firstly, the system model, usage scenarios, and fundamentals of the presented scheme are discussed. Next, a tractable framework is developed to analyse the performance of non-orthogonal MBMS transmission, by using stochastic geometry. Based on this framework, the analytical expressions for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) coverage probability, average number of served users, and sum rate are derived. Furthermore, synchronous non-orthogonal MBMS transmission to further improving the system performance is also studied. The results demonstrate that non-orthogonal MBMS transmission can achieve better performance than the conventional one, in which non-orthogonal multirate one can fully utilize channel conditions to achieve a significant rate gain, while non-orthogonal multi-service one can efficiently use power resources to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) of high priority users, and also provide services for low priority users simultaneously.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Multiple Access Wiretap Channel with Noiseless Feedback

The physical layer security in the up-link of the wireless communication systems is often modeled as the multiple access wiretap channel (MAC-WT), and recently it has received a lot attention. In this paper, the MAC-WT has been re-visited by considering the situation that the legitimate receiver feeds his received channel output back to the transmitters via two noiseless channels, respectively. This model is called the MAC-WT with noiseless feedback. Inner and outer bounds on the secrecy capacity region of this feedback model are provided. To be specific, we first present a decode-and-forward (DF) inner bound on the secrecy capacity region of this feedback model, and this bound is constructed by allowing each transmitter to decode the other one's transmitted message from the feedback, and then each transmitter uses the decoded message to re-encode his own messages, i.e., this DF inner bound allows the independent transmitters to co-operate with each other. Then, we provide a hybrid inner bound which is strictly larger than the DF inner bound, and it is constructed by using the feedback as a tool not only to allow the independent transmitters to co-operate with each other, but also to generate two secret keys respectively shared between the legitimate receiver and the two transmitters. Finally, we give a sato-type outer bound on the secrecy capacity region of this feedback model. The results of this paper are further explained via a Gaussian example.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Finite State Markov Wiretap Channel with Delayed Feedback

The finite state Markov channel (FSMC), where the channel transition probability is controlled by a state undergoing a Markov process, is a useful model for the mobile wireless communication channel. In this paper, we investigate the security issue in the mobile wireless communication systems by considering the FSMC with an eavesdropper, which we call the finite state Markov wiretap channel (FSM-WC). We assume that the state is perfectly known by the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper, and through a noiseless feedback channel, the legitimate receiver sends his received channel output and the state back to the transmitter after some time delay. Inner and outer bounds on the capacity-equivocation regions of the FSM-WC with delayed state feedback and with or without delayed channel output feedback are provided in this paper, and we show that these bounds meet if the eavesdropper's received symbol is a degraded version of the legitimate receiver's. The above results are further explained via degraded Gaussian and Gaussian fading examples.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

The Discrete Stochastic Galerkin Method for Hyperbolic Equations with Non-smooth and Random Coefficients

We develop a general polynomial chaos (gPC) based stochastic Galerkin (SG) for hyperbolic equations with random and singular coefficients. Due to the singu- lar nature of the solution, the standard gPC-SG methods may suffer from a poor or even non convergence. Taking advantage of the fact that the discrete solution, by the central type finite difference or finite volume approximations in space and time for example, is smoother, we first discretize the equation by a smooth finite difference or finite volume scheme, and then use the gPC-SG approximation to the discrete system. The jump condition at the interface is treated using the immersed upwind methods introduced in [8, 12]. This yields a method that converges with the spectral accuracy for finite mesh size and time step. We use a linear hyperbolic equation with discontinuous and random coefficient, and the Liouville equation with discontinuous and random potential, to illustrate our idea, with both one and second order spatial discretizations. Spectral convergence is established for the first equation, and numerical examples for both equations show the desired accu- racy of the method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2016

Explicit and implicit TVD schemes for conservation laws with Caputo derivatives

In this paper, we investigate numerical approximations of the scalar conservation law with the Caputo derivative, which introduces the memory effect. We construct the first order and the second order explicit upwind schemes for such equations, which are shown to be conditionally $\ell^1$ contracting and TVD. However, the Caputo derivative leads to the modified CFL-type stability condition, $ (Δt)^α = O(Δx)$, where $α\in (0,1]$ is the fractional exponent in the derivative. When $α$ small, such strong constraint makes the numerical implementation extremely impractical. We have then proposed the implicit upwind scheme to overcome this issue, which is proved to be unconditionally $\ell^1$ contracting and TVD. Various numerical tests are presented to validate the properties of the methods and provide more numerical evidence in interpreting the memory effect in conservation laws.

math.NA↗

arXiv2015

Relay Broadcast Channel with Confidential Messages

We investigate the effects of an additional relay node on the secrecy of broadcast channels by considering the model of relay broadcast channels with confidential messages. We show that this additional relay node can increase the achievable secrecy rate region of the broadcast channels with confidential messages. More specifically, first, we investigate the discrete memoryless relay broadcast channels with two confidential messages and one common message. Three inner bounds (with respect to decode-forward, generalized noise-forward and compress-forward strategies) and an outer bound on the capacity-equivocation region are provided. Second, we investigate the discrete memoryless relay broadcast channels with two confidential messages. Inner and outer bounds on the capacity-equivocation region are provided. Finally, we investigate the discrete memoryless relay broadcast channels with one confidential message and one common message. Inner and outer bounds on the capacity-equivocation region are provided, and the results are further explained via a Gaussian example. Compared with Csiszar-Korner's work on broadcast channels with confidential messages (BCC), we find that with the help of the relay node, the secrecy capacity region of the Gaussian BCC is enhanced.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2015

Multiple-Access Relay Wiretap Channel

In this paper, we investigate the effects of an additional trusted relay node on the secrecy of multiple-access wiretap channel (MAC-WT) by considering the model of multiple-access relay wiretap channel (MARC-WT). More specifically, first, we investigate the discrete memoryless MARC-WT. Three inner bounds (with respect to decode-forward (DF), noise-forward (NF) and compress-forward (CF) strategies) on the secrecy capacity region are provided. Second, we investigate the degraded discrete memoryless MARC-WT, and present an outer bound on the secrecy capacity region of this degraded model. Finally, we investigate the Gaussian MARC-WT, and find that the NF and CF strategies help to enhance Tekin-Yener's achievable secrecy rate region of Gaussian MAC-WT. Moreover, we find that if the noise variance of the transmitters-relay channel is smaller than that of the transmitters-receiver channel, the DF strategy may also enhance Tekin-Yener's achievable secrecy rate region of Gaussian MAC-WT, and it may perform even better than the NF and CF strategies.

cs.IT↗