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Zihao Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Zihao Wang.

At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources

Realization of a quadrupole topological insulator phase in a gyromagnetic photonic crystal

The field of topological photonics was initiated with the realization of a Chern insulator phase in a gyromagnetic photonic crystal (PhC) with broken time-reversal symmetry (T), hosting chiral edge states that are topologically protected propagating modes. Recent advances in higher-order band topology have discovered another type of topological state, as manifested by those modes localized at the corners of a sample, which are known as corner states. Here we report the realization of a quadrupole higher-order topological insulator phase in a gyromagnetic PhC, induced by a topological phase transition from the previously demonstrated Chern insulator phase. The evolution of the boundary modes from propagating chiral edge states to localized corner states has been characterized by microwave measurements. We also demonstrate topological bound states in the continuum, when the gyromagnetic PhC is magnetically tuned. These results extend the quadrupole topological insulator phase into T-broken systems, and integrate topologically protected propagating and localized modes in the same platform.

physics.optics↗

Zero-shot-Learning Cross-Modality Data Translation Through Mutual Information Guided Stochastic Diffusion

Cross-modality data translation has attracted great interest in image computing. Deep generative models (\textit{e.g.}, GANs) show performance improvement in tackling those problems. Nevertheless, as a fundamental challenge in image translation, the problem of Zero-shot-Learning Cross-Modality Data Translation with fidelity remains unanswered. This paper proposes a new unsupervised zero-shot-learning method named Mutual Information guided Diffusion cross-modality data translation Model (MIDiffusion), which learns to translate the unseen source data to the target domain. The MIDiffusion leverages a score-matching-based generative model, which learns the prior knowledge in the target domain. We propose a differentiable local-wise-MI-Layer ($LMI$) for conditioning the iterative denoising sampling. The $LMI$ captures the identical cross-modality features in the statistical domain for the diffusion guidance; thus, our method does not require retraining when the source domain is changed, as it does not rely on any direct mapping between the source and target domains. This advantage is critical for applying cross-modality data translation methods in practice, as a reasonable amount of source domain dataset is not always available for supervised training. We empirically show the advanced performance of MIDiffusion in comparison with an influential group of generative models, including adversarial-based and other score-matching-based models.

cs.CV↗

The Double Regularization Method for Capacity Constrained Optimal Transport

Capacity constrained optimal transport is a variant of optimal transport, which adds extra constraints on the set of feasible couplings in the original optimal transport problem to limit the mass transported between each pair of source and sink. Based on this setting, constrained optimal transport has numerous applications, e.g., finance, network flow. However, due to the large number of constraints in this problem, existing algorithms are both time-consuming and space-consuming. In this paper, inspired by entropic regularization for the classical optimal transport problem, we introduce a novel regularization term for capacity constrained optimal transport. The regularized problem naturally satisfies the capacity constraints and consequently makes it possible to analyze the duality. Unlike the matrix-vector multiplication in the alternate iteration scheme for solving classical optimal transport, in our algorithm, each alternate iteration step is to solve several single-variable equations. Fortunately, we find that each of these equations corresponds to a single-variable monotonic function, and we convert solving these equations into finding the unique zero point of each single-variable monotonic function with Newton's method. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed method has a significant advantage in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and memory consumption compared with existing methods.

math.OC↗

Unified Multimodal Model with Unlikelihood Training for Visual Dialog

The task of visual dialog requires a multimodal chatbot to answer sequential questions from humans about image content. Prior work performs the standard likelihood training for answer generation on the positive instances (involving correct answers). However, the likelihood objective often leads to frequent and dull outputs and fails to exploit the useful knowledge from negative instances (involving incorrect answers). In this paper, we propose a Unified Multimodal Model with UnLikelihood Training, named UniMM-UL, to tackle this problem. First, to improve visual dialog understanding and generation by multi-task learning, our model extends ViLBERT from only supporting answer discrimination to holding both answer discrimination and answer generation seamlessly by different attention masks. Specifically, in order to make the original discriminative model compatible with answer generation, we design novel generative attention masks to implement the autoregressive Masked Language Modeling (autoregressive MLM) task. And to attenuate the adverse effects of the likelihood objective, we exploit unlikelihood training on negative instances to make the model less likely to generate incorrect answers. Then, to utilize dense annotations, we adopt different fine-tuning methods for both generating and discriminating answers, rather than just for discriminating answers as in the prior work. Finally, on the VisDial dataset, our model achieves the best generative results (69.23 NDCG score). And our model also yields comparable discriminative results with the state-of-the-art in both single-model and ensemble settings (75.92 and 76.17 NDCG scores).

cs.CL↗

Unsupervised Echocardiography Registration through Patch-based MLPs and Transformers

Image registration is an essential but challenging task in medical image computing, especially for echocardiography, where the anatomical structures are relatively noisy compared to other imaging modalities. Traditional (non-learning) registration approaches rely on the iterative optimization of a similarity metric which is usually costly in time complexity. In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN) based image registration methods have shown good effectiveness. In the meantime, recent studies show that the attention-based model (e.g., Transformer) can bring superior performance in pattern recognition tasks. In contrast, whether the superior performance of the Transformer comes from the long-winded architecture or is attributed to the use of patches for dividing the inputs is unclear yet. This work introduces three patch-based frameworks for image registration using MLPs and transformers. We provide experiments on 2D-echocardiography registration to answer the former question partially and provide a benchmark solution. Our results on a large public 2D echocardiography dataset show that the patch-based MLP/Transformer model can be effectively used for unsupervised echocardiography registration. They demonstrate comparable and even better registration performance than a popular CNN registration model. In particular, patch-based models better preserve volume changes in terms of Jacobian determinants, thus generating robust registration fields with less unrealistic deformation. Our results demonstrate that patch-based learning methods, whether with attention or not, can perform high-performance unsupervised registration tasks with adequate time and space complexity. Our codes are available https://gitlab.inria.fr/epione/mlp\_transformer\_registration

cs.CV↗

A Neural-Symbolic Approach to Natural Language Understanding

Deep neural networks, empowered by pre-trained language models, have achieved remarkable results in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. However, their performances can drastically deteriorate when logical reasoning is needed. This is because NLU in principle depends on not only analogical reasoning, which deep neural networks are good at, but also logical reasoning. According to the dual-process theory, analogical reasoning and logical reasoning are respectively carried out by System 1 and System 2 in the human brain. Inspired by the theory, we present a novel framework for NLU called Neural-Symbolic Processor (NSP), which performs analogical reasoning based on neural processing and logical reasoning based on both neural and symbolic processing. As a case study, we conduct experiments on two NLU tasks, question answering (QA) and natural language inference (NLI), when numerical reasoning (a type of logical reasoning) is necessary. The experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both tasks.

cs.CL↗

MICO: A Multi-alternative Contrastive Learning Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Representation

Commonsense reasoning tasks such as commonsense knowledge graph completion and commonsense question answering require powerful representation learning. In this paper, we propose to learn commonsense knowledge representation by MICO, a Multi-alternative contrastve learning framework on COmmonsense knowledge graphs (MICO). MICO generates the commonsense knowledge representation by contextual interaction between entity nodes and relations with multi-alternative contrastive learning. In MICO, the head and tail entities in an $(h,r,t)$ knowledge triple are converted to two relation-aware sequence pairs (a premise and an alternative) in the form of natural language. Semantic representations generated by MICO can benefit the following two tasks by simply comparing the distance score between the representations: 1) zero-shot commonsense question answering task; 2) inductive commonsense knowledge graph completion task. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CL↗

Posterior Collapse of a Linear Latent Variable Model

This work identifies the existence and cause of a type of posterior collapse that frequently occurs in the Bayesian deep learning practice. For a general linear latent variable model that includes linear variational autoencoders as a special case, we precisely identify the nature of posterior collapse to be the competition between the likelihood and the regularization of the mean due to the prior. Our result suggests that posterior collapse may be related to neural collapse and dimensional collapse and could be a subclass of a general problem of learning for deeper architectures.

cs.LG↗

SongDriver: Real-time Music Accompaniment Generation without Logical Latency nor Exposure Bias

Real-time music accompaniment generation has a wide range of applications in the music industry, such as music education and live performances. However, automatic real-time music accompaniment generation is still understudied and often faces a trade-off between logical latency and exposure bias. In this paper, we propose SongDriver, a real-time music accompaniment generation system without logical latency nor exposure bias. Specifically, SongDriver divides one accompaniment generation task into two phases: 1) The arrangement phase, where a Transformer model first arranges chords for input melodies in real-time, and caches the chords for the next phase instead of playing them out. 2) The prediction phase, where a CRF model generates playable multi-track accompaniments for the coming melodies based on previously cached chords. With this two-phase strategy, SongDriver directly generates the accompaniment for the upcoming melody, achieving zero logical latency. Furthermore, when predicting chords for a timestep, SongDriver refers to the cached chords from the first phase rather than its previous predictions, which avoids the exposure bias problem. Since the input length is often constrained under real-time conditions, another potential problem is the loss of long-term sequential information. To make up for this disadvantage, we extract four musical features from a long-term music piece before the current time step as global information. In the experiment, we train SongDriver on some open-source datasets and an original àiSong Dataset built from Chinese-style modern pop music scores. The results show that SongDriver outperforms existing SOTA (state-of-the-art) models on both objective and subjective metrics, meanwhile significantly reducing the physical latency.

cs.SD↗

Tackling Instance-Dependent Label Noise with Dynamic Distribution Calibration

Instance-dependent label noise is realistic but rather challenging, where the label-corruption process depends on instances directly. It causes a severe distribution shift between the distributions of training and test data, which impairs the generalization of trained models. Prior works put great effort into tackling the issue. Unfortunately, these works always highly rely on strong assumptions or remain heuristic without theoretical guarantees. In this paper, to address the distribution shift in learning with instance-dependent label noise, a dynamic distribution-calibration strategy is adopted. Specifically, we hypothesize that, before training data are corrupted by label noise, each class conforms to a multivariate Gaussian distribution at the feature level. Label noise produces outliers to shift the Gaussian distribution. During training, to calibrate the shifted distribution, we propose two methods based on the mean and covariance of multivariate Gaussian distribution respectively. The mean-based method works in a recursive dimension-reduction manner for robust mean estimation, which is theoretically guaranteed to train a high-quality model against label noise. The covariance-based method works in a distribution disturbance manner, which is experimentally verified to improve the model robustness. We demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of our methods on datasets with synthetic label noise and real-world unknown noise.

cs.LG↗

Unsupervised Sentence Textual Similarity with Compositional Phrase Semantics

Measuring Sentence Textual Similarity (STS) is a classic task that can be applied to many downstream NLP applications such as text generation and retrieval. In this paper, we focus on unsupervised STS that works on various domains but only requires minimal data and computational resources. Theoretically, we propose a light-weighted Expectation-Correction (EC) formulation for STS computation. EC formulation unifies unsupervised STS approaches including the cosine similarity of Additively Composed (AC) sentence embeddings, Optimal Transport (OT), and Tree Kernels (TK). Moreover, we propose the Recursive Optimal Transport Similarity (ROTS) algorithm to capture the compositional phrase semantics by composing multiple recursive EC formulations. ROTS finishes in linear time and is faster than its predecessors. ROTS is empirically more effective and scalable than previous approaches. Extensive experiments on 29 STS tasks under various settings show the clear advantage of ROTS over existing approaches. Detailed ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.

cs.CL↗

Upper Limb Movement Recognition utilising EEG and EMG Signals for Rehabilitative Robotics

Upper limb movement classification, which maps input signals to the target activities, is a key building block in the control of rehabilitative robotics. Classifiers are trained for the rehabilitative system to comprehend the desires of the patient whose upper limbs do not function properly. Electromyography (EMG) signals and Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are used widely for upper limb movement classification. By analysing the classification results of the real-time EEG and EMG signals, the system can understand the intention of the user and predict the events that one would like to carry out. Accordingly, it will provide external help to the user. However, the noise in the real-time EEG and EMG data collection process contaminates the effectiveness of the data, which undermines classification performance. Moreover, not all patients process strong EMG signals due to muscle damage and neuromuscular disorder. To address these issues, this paper explores different feature extraction techniques and machine learning and deep learning models for EEG and EMG signals classification and proposes a novel decision-level multisensor fusion technique to integrate EEG signals with EMG signals. This system retrieves effective information from both sources to understand and predict the desire of the user, and thus aid. By testing out the proposed technique on a publicly available WAY-EEG-GAL dataset, which contains EEG and EMG signals that were recorded simultaneously, we manage to conclude the feasibility and effectiveness of the novel system.

cs.LG↗

Large-scale full-programmable quantum walk and its applications

With photonics, the quantum computational advantage has been demonstrated on the task of boson sampling. Next, developing quantum-enhanced approaches for practical problems becomes one of the top priorities for photonic systems. Quantum walks are powerful kernels for developing new and useful quantum algorithms. Here we realize large-scale quantum walks using a fully programmable photonic quantum computing system. The system integrates a silicon quantum photonic chip, enabling the simulation of quantum walk dynamics on graphs with up to 400 vertices and possessing full programmability over quantum walk parameters, including the particle property, initial state, graph structure, and evolution time. In the 400-dimensional Hilbert space, the average fidelity of random entangled quantum states after the whole on-chip circuit evolution reaches as high as 94.29$\pm$1.28$\%$. With the system, we demonstrated exponentially faster hitting and quadratically faster mixing performance of quantum walks over classical random walks, achieving more than two orders of magnitude of enhancement in the experimental hitting efficiency and almost half of the reduction in the experimental evolution time for mixing. We utilize the system to implement a series of quantum applications, including measuring the centrality of scale-free networks, searching targets on Erdös-Rényi networks, distinguishing non-isomorphic graph pairs, and simulating the topological phase of higher-order topological insulators. Our work shows one feasible path for quantum photonics to address applications of practical interests in the near future.

quant-ph↗

Quasi-Balanced Self-Training on Noise-Aware Synthesis of Object Point Clouds for Closing Domain Gap

Semantic analyses of object point clouds are largely driven by releasing of benchmarking datasets, including synthetic ones whose instances are sampled from object CAD models. However, learning from synthetic data may not generalize to practical scenarios, where point clouds are typically incomplete, non-uniformly distributed, and noisy. Such a challenge of Simulation-to-Reality (Sim2Real) domain gap could be mitigated via learning algorithms of domain adaptation; however, we argue that generation of synthetic point clouds via more physically realistic rendering is a powerful alternative, as systematic non-uniform noise patterns can be captured. To this end, we propose an integrated scheme consisting of physically realistic synthesis of object point clouds via rendering stereo images via projection of speckle patterns onto CAD models and a novel quasi-balanced self-training designed for more balanced data distribution by sparsity-driven selection of pseudo labeled samples for long tailed classes. Experiment results can verify the effectiveness of our method as well as both of its modules for unsupervised domain adaptation on point cloud classification, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Source codes and the SpeckleNet synthetic dataset are available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/QS3.

cs.CV↗

Fast Sinkhorn II: Collinear Triangular Matrix and Linear Time Accurate Computation of Optimal Transport

In our previous work [arXiv:2202.10042], the complexity of Sinkhorn iteration is reduced from $O(N^2)$ to the optimal $O(N)$ by leveraging the special structure of the kernel matrix. In this paper, we explore the special structure of kernel matrices by defining and utilizing the properties of the Lower-ColLinear Triangular Matrix (L-CoLT matrix) and Upper-ColLinear Triangular Matrix (U-CoLT matrix). We prove that (1) L/U-CoLT matrix-vector multiplications can be carried out in $O(N)$ operations; (2) both families of matrices are closed under the Hadamard product and matrix scaling. These properties help to alleviate two key difficulties for reducing the complexity of the Inexact Proximal point method (IPOT), and allow us to significantly reduce the number of iterations to $O(N)$. This yields the Fast Sinkhorn II (FS-2) algorithm for accurate computation of optimal transport with low algorithm complexity and fast convergence. Numerical experiments are presented to show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

math.OC↗

OnePose: One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models

We propose a new method named OnePose for object pose estimation. Unlike existing instance-level or category-level methods, OnePose does not rely on CAD models and can handle objects in arbitrary categories without instance- or category-specific network training. OnePose draws the idea from visual localization and only requires a simple RGB video scan of the object to build a sparse SfM model of the object. Then, this model is registered to new query images with a generic feature matching network. To mitigate the slow runtime of existing visual localization methods, we propose a new graph attention network that directly matches 2D interest points in the query image with the 3D points in the SfM model, resulting in efficient and robust pose estimation. Combined with a feature-based pose tracker, OnePose is able to stably detect and track 6D poses of everyday household objects in real-time. We also collected a large-scale dataset that consists of 450 sequences of 150 objects.

cs.CV↗

Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds: A Survey and a Benchmark

Reconstruction of a continuous surface of two-dimensional manifold from its raw, discrete point cloud observation is a long-standing problem. The problem is technically ill-posed, and becomes more difficult considering that various sensing imperfections would appear in the point clouds obtained by practical depth scanning. In literature, a rich set of methods has been proposed, and reviews of existing methods are also provided. However, existing reviews are short of thorough investigations on a common benchmark. The present paper aims to review and benchmark existing methods in the new era of deep learning surface reconstruction. To this end, we contribute a large-scale benchmarking dataset consisting of both synthetic and real-scanned data; the benchmark includes object- and scene-level surfaces and takes into account various sensing imperfections that are commonly encountered in practical depth scanning. We conduct thorough empirical studies by comparing existing methods on the constructed benchmark, and pay special attention on robustness of existing methods against various scanning imperfections; we also study how different methods generalize in terms of reconstructing complex surface shapes. Our studies help identify the best conditions under which different methods work, and suggest some empirical findings. For example, while deep learning methods are increasingly popular, our systematic studies suggest that, surprisingly, a few classical methods perform even better in terms of both robustness and generalization; our studies also suggest that the practical challenges of misalignment of point sets from multi-view scanning, missing of surface points, and point outliers remain unsolved by all the existing surface reconstruction methods. We expect that the benchmark and our studies would be valuable both for practitioners and as a guidance for new innovations in future research.

cs.CV↗

Higher-order Dirac Semimetal in a Photonic Crystal

The recent discovery of higher-order topology has largely enriched the classification of topological materials. Theoretical and experimental studies have unveiled various higher-order topological insulators that exhibit topologically protected corner or hinge states. More recently, higher-order topology has been introduced to topological semimetals. Thus far, realistic models and experimental verifications on higher-order topological semimetals are still very limited. Here, we design and demonstrate a three-dimensional photonic crystal that realizes a higher-order Dirac semimetal phase. Numerical results on the band structure show that the designed three-dimensional photonic crystal is able to host two four-fold Dirac points, the momentum-space projections of which at an edge are connected by higher-order hinge states. The higher-order topology can be characterised with the calculation of the χ(6) topological invariant at different values of k_z. An experiment at microwave frequencies is also presented to measure the hinge state dispersion. Our work demonstrates the physical realization of a higher-order Dirac semimetal phase and paves the way to exploring higher-order topological semimetals phases in three-dimensional photonic systems.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗